Catholicism indelibly shaped much of the history of the San Luis Valley — it even informed the actions of the Valley’s first mythic villain. Few know that America’s first serial killer came from the San Luis Valley. Even fewer know that he was inspired by probably the only apparition of the Virgin Mary who besought her witness to carve the still-beating hearts out of as many white people as possible (or so the witness claimed). No doubt, these two dozen grisly murders were products of a supremely unhinged mind, but they were also a twisted articulation of mounting racial tension in the Valley, a tension that persists today — and it’s worth taking a quick survey of the atmosphere in which Espinosa committed his crimes.

The lack of precipitation in the Valley (it gets seven inches annually, tops) would render agriculture impossible were it not for a combination of artesian wells and canals diverting Rio Grande water to farmland. And in fact, despite being classified as a desert, the Valley is an important agricultural hub: enough alfalfa grows there to give bunnies the world over heart palpitations of joy. But if land isn’t adjacent to a water source, it’s dust. Back when the area was still part of Spain, the imperial government doled out huge land grants to Hispanic settlers. By the time the Americans came, the best land had long been part of multi-generation family plots.


So when Americans “annexed” the Valley and surrounding environs, they discovered that Hispanic settlers had the vast majority of arable land. What miffed the Americans most was that the Hispanic settlers still primarily practiced subsistence farming, and exchanged commodities mostly through barter. Americans saw the situation as another “white man’s burden” kind of scene, with their burden being to bring these anachronistic folk into the nineteenth century.

One of the first things the new territorial government needed to do was to survey existing plots of land and legally register them in accord with American property laws. This process of surveying and deeding turned out to be a prime opportunity for Americans to dispossess the Hispanic settlers of their best land.

Here’s how it happened: An American surveyor would visit a Hispanic landowner and inform him of good news: the landowner’s property was now part of the United States. And in order to be a legal American landowner the exact boundaries of his property would need to be surveyed. Unfortunately, the surveyor would inform the landowner, surveying isn’t cheap. The landowner would be informed that he had to pay the surveyor for his services.

Typically the landowner would inform the surveyor that he had no legal tender currency. The surveyor often responded with an idea: the landowner could pay the surveyor using his own land. To pay for the surveyor’s exorbitant fees, the landowner would have to cede the most valuable parts of his land, those parts with access to irrigation. It seems almost incredible today, but through this process, Hispanics in the Valley lost more than two-thirds of their land in a few short years. This led to astonishing poverty, cultural isolation, and no small amount of churning rage.

Even before he himself faced this surveying tomfoolery, Felipe Espinosa seethed about the treatment of Hispanics in the area by the Americans. He was intensely proud of his Spanish Catholic heritage and was infuriated by the influx of Protestants who saw his faith as barbaric. In his youth, during the American invasion of Mexico (euphemistically known here as “The First American Intervention” and “The Mexican-American War”), Espinosa saw six civilians killed by American shelling off his town in what became New Mexico.

In 1863, Espinosa (with the help of others) began murdering Americans. His killings are unclassifiable: they demonstrate aspects of spree killings (committed in a relatively short period of time), serial killings (ritualistic treatment of the bodies of victims), and political insurgency (motivated by fury at occupation of his homeland). Perhaps these taxonomical difficulties are what render Espinosa a historical unknown — H.H. Holmes of Chicago World Fair infamy gets credit for being the first serial killer in America.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the case is that Espinosa claimed to have been inspired by an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Given the racial tension that catalyzed these killings, her appearance seems important to note. The Virgin of Guadalupe had historically been used as a mediator between native and colonial religions in post-conquest Latin America. La Virgen de Guadalupe has been seen paradoxically as both a symbol of native empowerment as well as a tool for colonial powers to force Catholicism on native populations. Because the hero of her legend is the peasant Juan Diego, and the story employs traditional native symbolism and imagery, she represents the power of native tradition. On the other hand, some interpret this same use of native semiotics as a cynical veneer of sympathy by a Church bent on snuffing out those very traditions.

When she appeared to Espinosa, the Virgin certainly did not bear a message of love. He claimed she demanded that he cut the hearts of six hundred white people (one hundred for each of the six civilians killed by Americans that he saw). He began his murders in the San Luis Valley, and the first victim was found in May, the body hideously mutilated and the heart cut out.

Espinosa killed at least 23 more people (no mean feat in this sparsely populated area) before trackers shot and killed him. Residents and travelers through the area had no information about the author of these crimes or the intent of their macabre symbolism until late in the spree. An educated man, he wrote the territorial governor to demand a land grant from the government and complete immunity for himself and his accomplices; if denied, he insisted that he would kill another five hundred and seventy gringos. Terror gripped the region, and the already taxing passage through these harsh mountains and valleys became sinister journeys of abject terror. No one knew anything beyond the fact that bodies were being found sans hearts throughout the region.

Espinosa and his coterie finally slipped up when a particularly gruesome robbery went awry; the victim survived and described his attackers. A short time later, a team of trackers found Espinosa et alia and killed them. Despite Espinosa’s letter describing the wrongs perpetrated by the Americans and the clearly targeted nature of the killings, the incident led to no particular soul-searching among elites of the area. To many, it was another senseless apparition of the violence that seemed to haunt the American West at the time. To others, the incident was the product of a man unhinged by a loss in a just war. The absorption of the San Luis Valley into the vast folds of America continued unabated, though it was never fully completed — a fact one can see easily upon visiting this strange place.

Photo by Tony Poole

A couple years after the UFO convention, I returned to the San Luis Valley to do research on the Penitentes, Catholic groups scattered across the various villages and towns. These groups are fully Roman Catholic but also hold their own separate meetings in buildings called moradas.

I pulled into one town late in the afternoon, just ahead of a thunderstorm. The town was tucked away at the end of a dirt road, and was mostly abandoned. The town was only a few stucco buildings with tin roofs, surrounded on all sides by alfalfa fields and dust. I quickly spotted a beautiful Penitente morada, and asked the adjacent property owner if it would be alright if I took some pictures, as I tried to have photos of the moradas in each town I visited. He didn’t say anything but made a gesture indicating yes.

As I crawled under the barbed wire to take a pictures, a couple more people came out and stood at the edge of their properties and stared at me. Then a couple more. There were never more than a handful, and nobody said anything, but the whole thing got disconcerting real fast. Between the impending thunderstorm and the discomfort between me and the neighbors, the air was getting tense. I left.

It’s not like the people in the town were being creepy — I was. It takes a bit of impropriety just to show up in a town not used to visitors and ask to take pictures of a religious dwelling there. I noticed this vague tension in other towns in the Valley, so I set out to the New Mexico state archives in Santa Fe to get a handle on why these situations were so uncomfortable. It all starts on the East Coast.

Let’s pretend you’re an aristocratic man living on the East Coast around 1835. You’re doing various aristocratic things and generally yukking it up when you come down with a frightful case of the pleurisy. You go to the doctor for the treatment du jour for your lungs, which are beginning to worry you.

Unfortunately, contemporary wisdom is that the cure for a devastating lung infection and its attendant physical weakness is to plop you into a covered wagon and send you at a brisk pace of ten miles per day across one of the vastest, emptiest, harshest expanses of land in the world, through several nations and the shattered remains of the Spanish Empire. The dry air is good for your lungs.

You’re pretty tense going through the Indian nations, given that your mere presence is an affront to their sovereignty. So it comes as a relief when the leader of your phalanx tells you that you’ll shortly be passing into Christian territory (that is, the newly formed state of Mexico, soon to be the even newer-formed state of New Mexico). You pull into the next town but are a bit alarmed at the noise level.

There’s a procession happening. It features people with large wooden carvings of Catholic saints. They’re doing strange things, putting the carvings in fields and yelling at them for not bringing rain. Some people are flagellating themselves. Given that you’re a 19th century Protestant aristocrat, you’re generally of the opinion that Catholics are barely a step removed from dirt-worshippers to begin with. And seeing this seals the deal. All you wanted was some good God-fearing hospitality.

So what do you do? Write an exaggerated account of what you saw, pepper it with some jingoism and racism, and sell it to adventure-hungry people on the East Coast. And in the process, sow the seeds of years of tense discord between whites and Hispanics in an isolated valley in Colorado.

The name of this 19th century aristocrat is Josiah Gregg. He really did write an account of his pleurisy-induced travels through the Southwest, and it was a huge success. As one of the first Americans to write about the culture of the area, he set the tone for future writing on the topic.

To be fair, the procession he saw would have scared the pants off anyone who didn’t know what was going on. He had stumbled upon a group of lay Catholics known as Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (an unwieldy name that gets shortened to “The Penitentes” in regional parlance). The ceremony he witnessed was the pinnacle of the liturgical year, commemorating Good Friday.

In addition to the flagellants, one person has the great honor of portraying Christ in the procession, which involves dragging around a huge, heavy wooden cross. Others sing prayers and play flutes. The procession ends with Christ being bound to the cross by rope while those around him pray.

What Gregg didn’t mention is that rituals like these were just a small part of the activities of the Penitentes. Here’s some context: In 1821, Mexico won its war for independence against Spain. They promptly purged themselves of all things Spanish, which included many of their priests. This, in turn, led to a shortage of priests that was felt most acutely at the hinterlands of the empire, or in today’s geography, New Mexico and Colorado.

In the absence of reliable visits from priests, the devoutly Catholic people in the villages of this area organized themselves into groups like the Penitentes to address the holes in civic life. They cared for the poor and sick, provided loans (there were no banks in the area), held funerals and prayer services, and organized huge ornate public ceremonies with roles for many townspeople. Far from the sinister jamborees the media made them out to be, notes from Penitente meetings are disappointingly banal: lists of collections for a poor family, discussion of community topics, and so on.

The Penitentes are a bit of a legend in Colorado and New Mexico. They still exist today, though their numbers have dwindled. To this day, most discussion focuses primarily on their Good Friday rites. That’s what makes Gregg’s account of the Penitentes so unfortunate — it strips their rituals of context, which makes it pretty hard to see them as anything other than crazy. Even with context, it can be tough to empathize with flagellation as part of a healthy spiritual regimen these days, but it’s old news and the Penitentes didn’t invent it. Corporeal mortification has been a part of Christianity since the desert-dwelling monks of third-century Egypt (and compared to these monks’ asceticism, Penitente rituals look like a day at the beach), and roving bands of flagellants haunted the European countryside as early as the eleventh century.

By focusing on the flagellation, many writers gloss over what to me is a much more interesting part of the Penitente story: the ways in which community members came together in the absence of institutional authority to create an organization tailored to the many idiosyncrasies and anachronisms of living in a remote area — one that was quickly becoming a crossroads for very different cultures. As I looked at how the media covered the Penitentes in the past, I felt that I had found a big part of why people were so nonplussed when I would roll into town to try to take pictures.

Starting around 1870, a trickle of articles building on Josiah Gregg’s account of the Penitentes became a deluge. Eventually, magazines and newspapers all over the country began to carry more and more over-the-top stories about Penitentes. Harper’s, Time, and The New York Times all joined the zeitgeist.

“Penitente-hunting” became a buzzword. Hordes of white people would drive around the Valley during Holy Week, shining their headlights on Penitente moradas in hopes of getting prurient glimpses of a foreign faith. In the end, all the bigoted articles and Penitente-hunting shed more light on the culture that birthed them than on the Penitentes themselves. And even though this fad died out long ago, aspects of it were malicious enough that perhaps the scars that remain take the form of extreme suspicion of outsiders.

Dozens of articles about the Penitentes written between 1875 and 1925 are remarkably similar in structure and content. They often borrow facts from each other, but each article tries to be a bit more extravagant than the last. Examined chronologically, they read like a game of telephone: the accusation in 1875 that the Penitentes crucify a man each year becomes by 1884 the accusation that they crucify babies. These articles make cable news look like amateur hour in terms of fear-mongering and xenophobia.

I began to wonder what was behind this slew of widespread national coverage that appeared suddenly and disappeared just as suddenly. And I can only offer two hypotheses: The first is that this coverage started just as Colorado was becoming a state, reached its apex during the debate over New Mexico’s potential statehood, and petered out thereafter. Perhaps, then, the idea behind the coverage was to discredit the inhabitants of the area as potential American voters (more on that in just a bit). The only other guess I can hazard is simply that we have an abiding prurient interest in the grotesque and bizarre, and the Penitentes’ Good Friday rituals captivated the media for that reason alone.

Almost every piece starts with a description of the landscape itself as wholly other and even a bit sinister. Inter Ocean magazine in 1895 writes, “I am glad I have seen [this] country but don’t care to see it again. Such drought, desolation, and sandy barrenness I had never dreamed of before.” A reporter for Harper’s takes a more poetic spin on the land in 1876: “Rugged, weird, depressing… in [the Valley], Nature becomes a polyglot… a region of fantasies that set at naught the common laws of heaven and earth. I was a lost mortal in a goblin land where the grotesque and preternatural are blended.”

Imbuing the land with this much potency is important in these articles, because nearly all go on to describe the Penitentes as wrought from and possessed by this alien landscape. The authors imply that the land itself drives the people into religious frenzies by virtue of its sheer weirdness. “This is a land where distance is lost and the eye is a liar; a land of ineffable lights and sudden shadows,” writes Charles Lummis in 1923, connecting the strange land to its people, “of polytheism and superstition, where the rattlesnake is a demigod and the cigarette a means of grace, where Christians mangle and crucify themselves — the heart of Africa beating against the ribs of the Rockies.”

Less exaggerated articles portray the Penitentes as the result of a lack of civilizing influence. These pieces simply set up the old civilization/barbarism trope and let loose. The Penitentes are “simple, ignorant folk… shut off from the railroads by thirty-five miles of mesas and the awful canyon of the Rio Grande… [the area] is not of the 19th century,” says the Sunday Oregonian in 1893. A book called Land of Poco Tiempo uses technology as a point of comparison as the author stands with a camera taking pictures of a crucified Penitente: “The crucified and I… stood facing each other… one playing with the most wonderful toy of modern progress, the other racked by the most barbarous device of twenty centuries ago.”

The final and most telling aspect of this media coverage is the claim that the citizens of New Mexico and Southern Colorado (that is, the Penitentes) threaten long-fostered American democratic ideals. One piece published just before Colorado was admitted to the Union describes the Penitente rituals as “the most disgusting crimes the mind can conceive of,” adding “this in Colorado, that bright Centennial star that aspires to rank by the side of New York and Massachusetts.” One popular claim is that Penitentes exercised complete political control of New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Harper’s writes: “There are 20,000 Penitentes, mutually sworn to protect each other to the point of perjury… [Authorities] face a formidable hydra.” The Sunday Oregonian article asks, “How many people know that American voters, who help to choose the President of the United States, are crucified, bound by biting thongs, yes, nailed to crosses, and suffer to death?” Yet another Harper’s article declares “This society, until it is crushed, will remain a barrier to the progress of morality… in New Mexico.”

So that’s the gist of the Penitente media coverage of circa 1875-1925. I should note that almost nothing I quoted from these articles is factual with respect to the Penitentes. That’s what made the similarities in the articles jump out — it’s remarkable not so much that they’re full of bullshit but that they’re full of the same bullshit organized in the same way. It could just be lazy reporting in the interest of a juicy story, but it seems to me that these articles often have a distinct political purpose.

And yet a couple dozen articles written long ago by people far removed from life in the Valley contributed to a tension that lingers today. It wasn’t just the articles; more obnoxious still were probably the Penitente-hunters who clamored for a lurid glimpse of a kind of faith long unavailable to them. Add to that the large American interests who used their knowledge of property law to secure the best water rights in the Valley after annexation, and the various other little bureaucratic shifts that occur when a region passes from the hands of one nation to another.

The Penitentes still boast quite a few members in chapters scattered around the area, but their ranks aren’t exactly teeming with youngsters. As a former Penitente I talked to said, “Any young person with a head on their shoulders is going to want to get out of here fast, where there are jobs and schools.” And he’s probably right: several of the counties that comprise the San Luis Valley are among the poorest in the nation. I considered these two things as I thought again about that strange day when I tried to take the picture of the morada in that dusty town. The families that remain today have been there often for generations. They’re certainly aware of what a vital role in a lively community the Penitentes played and how nasty the period around the American annexation was. I have no doubt that showing up to take photos of these aging, self-made religious dwellings carried with it more than a tiny echo of the days of Penitente hunters and yellow journalism.

At -33 degrees Fahrenheit, you’re as likely to vomit as you are shiver upon taking your first breath outside. This kind of cold makes interacting with rural eccentrics in a warm small town bar attractive, even if it’s not your kind of scene. Even if it’s at a reception for a conference of “UFOlogists.”

I’m in Colorado’s remote San Luis Valley with a couple of friends, and we’ve come here to meet these UFO aficionados. Like many here, we’ve been drawn after reading Christopher O’Brien’s poorly researched and written, but nonetheless compelling, accounts of paranormal activity in the San Luis Valley. We all grew up in Colorado, but none of us has been to this area since childhood.

While the alcohol doesn’t make these UFOlogists any stranger than they usually are, it certainly makes them more gregarious. One of the recurring topics of discussions this evening has been the Valley’s recurring problem with unexplainable livestock mutilations. We’re talking to a local cattle rancher about the grisly fate that has befallen several of his herd.

“What people don’t know about mutes [local parlance for inexplicably mutilated animals] is that they’re not gory, and that’s what’s so damn scary about them. I mean sure, you’ve got your amateur copy-cat-type mutes, which are grislier’n a combine accident, but the true mutes are bloodless. They’re cut with laser precision. They’re always found with identical wounds: the area around the eyes and mouth removed with surgical skill; same for the genitals; and often sometimes the flesh and gristle’ll be peeled way back near the organs, and of course those are gone as well.”

He doesn’t exaggerate. These are textbook traits of classic San Luis Valley livestock mutilations, which are a matter of concern not only to paranormal people, but also to ranchers in the Valley. Though few ranchers have lost more than one animal to these mutilations, cattle are shockingly expensive. Not to mention, they just creep out all parties involved. Despite the UFOlogists’ certainty, there are other purported explanations, usually involving black magic or high school students.

He continues, clearly relishing his arrival at the most disturbing aspect of these mutilations: “The damndest thing, though, is you can’t find fuck-all in the way of tracks, animal, human, or otherwise, leading to or from the carcass.”

“Now another thing even fewer folks know is that often when you touch or hold the mute, lotsa people get this strange electric sensation in their body.” He reaches into his bag, a one-shoulder briefcase-type thing. I have one of those awful protracted internal moments where you’re trying to convince yourself that what’s about to happen isn’t about to happen, but deep down I know that he’s reaching for a chunk of mutilated cow.

He pulls out a mason jar that contains a desiccated cube of cow, and shakes the jar like a kid would if there were bugs in it.

“Hold out your hand,” he says.

This falls firmly into my no-fucking-way category, but my good friend David “Cowcatcher” Gilbert is all about this kind of thing, so he holds out his open palm, and the cow-chunk slides smoothly into his hand like some communion wafer from an extraterrestrial Black Mass.

Meanwhile, word has gotten around the bar that we’re from the City, and we become attractions in our own right. Most of the paranormal people seem to regard us with an almost parental pride, saying with a sigh that they wish more folks from our generation would realize the significance of things like the Taos hum, a bowel-shakingly deep hum only audible to an unlucky few that pervades the Valley at night. We get cornered by a woman who says she’s on the Chamber of Commerce for the area, a man who claims that the contrails of jet airliners are actually “chemtrails” spewing mind-control chemicals, and a whole host of other such things that make Ancient Aliens seem like a Ken Burns documentary.

The last thing we see as we finally edge our way to the door is someone emphatically saying, “…unheard of in the annals of probing abductions,” without even cracking a smirk.

We end up staying at a thirteen-dollar-a-night motel that’s not without its charm, but is on the whole one of the more disgusting places I’ve ever been or seen. Not even the Gideon’s Bible people have crossed the threshold of this forsaken place. The heater has fallen out of the wall, and it’s still 33 below outside. The beds are like some horrifying expressionist Pollock painting, spattered with marks recognizable and unrecognizable as well as enough hair to make a third-rate toupee. Of course, a turd lays mockingly in the toilet, and the soap and toilet paper are stolen from a Super 8 motel. We all end up sleeping on the floor mummy-wrapped in sleeping bags to keep out the cold and squalor.

To keep our minds from all the microbial friends we’re making, we discuss an unidentifiable weird feeling we get from the Valley itself, a strangeness wholly other from that of these UFO people, a strangeness more fundamental and yet more alluring. It’s as if all your senses become more alert, more aware of the influence of the landscape on your mind. A strangely spiritual-type feeling, we all agree, that some folk would call “numinous.”

This was a few years ago now, but it marked the beginning of a recurring relationship between me and the San Luis Valley. I found as I talked to other people about the place, they all described a similarly uncategorizable but vaguely unsettling feeling induced by the place. Since that first visit, I’ve returned many times, both as a lover of Weird America and as a student of religion in the American Southwest. I’ve never been to an area with such a unified feeling of place. I came for the alien abductions and cattle mutilations, but stayed for the people and history (and alien abductions).

Now that that’s out of the way, I want you to boycott Xiu Xiu. Even if you like his music and his lyrics, you should boycott Xiu Xiu. Here’s why:

This is the cover art of Xiu Xiu’s A Promise.

In an interview with a popular indie music website, Jamie Stewart said that he took the picture himself on a trip to Asia. The man in the picture is a prostitute. Stewart solicited him for sex. When they got to his hotel room, Stewart took the pictures, tossed the man a couple bucks, and sent him on his (not so) merry way. But look closer. The man’s body, according to Stewart, shows evidence of years of physical abuse and violence. Stewart claims, “[The cover] is about what that person has been through and what his life is like.”

No, it isn’t. Stewart is being provocative just to be provocative, and he does so at the expense of a man forced to live an unimaginably terrible life. If the cover really was about “what that person has been through,” Stewart could have included the back story in the press junket and asked his listeners to donate money to some charity whose aim is to help abused prostitutes in Southeast Asia.

Did any of the proceeds from the record go to this guy?

Did Jamie Stewart sympathize with this guy because he was forced by circumstance into being a prostitute? Clearly not, if Stewart was soliciting prostitutes in a poverty-ravaged country. So then, in the best-case scenario, the album cover is basically making this statement: “It sucks that my prostitute regularly gets the shit kicked out of him.”

Would you pay your best friend to go to a foreign country and take a snapshot of a discarded human before discarding that human again? Then why would you give Jamie Stewart money to do the same?

Further, the cover art’s mindless provocation also underpins much of the musical and lyrical content on Xiu Xiu’s albums.

One reviewer wrote that Xiu Xiu “set[s] out to disturb their audience in pursuit of higher artistic goals.” But what are those higher artistic goals? Does Stewart obliterate the boundaries of pop music by whisper-singing half-assed melodies about sexual deviance against beds of alternating pretty pop and noisy shards? If so, a thousand bands have done that since the Velvet Underground (and I guarantee that it was much more disturbing in the ’60s to have Lou Reed tell you to “kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather” than to hear Jamie Stewart’s affectation-laden whine ask you to “come on [his] lips.”)

Come to think of it, Stewarts lyrics themselves sound like something culled from episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. For example, “I can’t wait to tell you your grandpa made your mom play stripper while your uncle watched.” Disturbing? Sure. Pursuit of some lofty artistic goal? I think not. If Ice-T is on the case, it’s not pushing the boundaries of pop music.

Xiu Xiu fans claim that Stewart’s music is “experimental.” Is it experimental to distill the influences of twenty years’ worth of indie rock into a single band? When I think of music that is successfully experimental, I think of bands that explode genre boundaries, or probe new lyrical territory in meaningful ways. Xiu Xiu does neither of those things. Their music is indie rock. It doesn’t do anything new.

Consider a quote from the venerable Marquis de Sade. To all those who think that Xiu Xiu’s cavalier lyrics open up some forbidden realm of existence heretofore never put into writing, keep in mind that the following was written more than 200 years ago: “Vernuil makes someone shit, he eats the shit, and then he demands that someone eat his. The one who eats his shit vomits; he devours her puke.”

It turns out that the great dysfunctional history of humanity has given us more of the disturbing, macabre, and sexually deviant than we could ever hope to digest in a lifetime. So, you don’t have to punish your ears by listening to a singing voice that sounds like a sex offender is trying to give you a wet willy. Also, you don’t have to listen to music that sounds like the out-takes from a teenage Joy Division cover band that smokes too much weed.

Just listen to Joy Division while reading the Marquis de Sade if you really need to feel uncomfortable.

In addition to my work at The Bygone Bureau, I attempted to pick up some extra cash (by which I mean “any”) as a freelance Halloween costume designer but to no avail. At first, I thought that my ideas were too forward thinking for conservative Halloween stores. In retrospect, however, I think my ideas were just bad. Here are a few that were rejected.

Juggalo

If there’s one group of people that are dressed for Halloween 365 days a year, it’s the Juggalos. Taking my inspiration from them, I decided to design the “L’il Juggalo” costume. Included in this costume kit are: one (1) pair of plastic Doc Martens shoes; one (1) pair of extremely baggy, black pants with a patch of the Juggalo Hatchet Man logo; one (1) extremely baggy Juggalo football jersey with the number “69″ on the back beneath the name “Psychopathic Records”; two (2) temporary rub-on tattoos featuring the Juggalo Hatchet Man logo; and the crowning jewel of the costume, one (1) real hatchet.

While the “L’il Juggalo” costume idea was superficially brilliant, it had a number of problems. First of all, if there’s one group of people that do not take kindly to light-hearted irony at their expense, it’s the Juggalos. Focus group research indicated that if this costume were sold, the amount of Juggalo-on-small-child violence would increase fivefold nationwide. Furthermore, most companies I tried to sell the costume to said that it was inappropriate to put the number “69″ on the back of a children’s costume. And finally, the real hatchet was a sticking point as well. So, there will be no mass marketing of the “L’il Juggalo” costume this year.

R. Kelly

I thought I had struck gold when I came up with this magnificent costume idea. The R. Kelly costume kit comes complete with a cornrow wig, and a gaudy red suit. Of course, many hip-hop artists wear cornrows and gaudy suits, so what makes this costume so distinctively “Robert Kelly” is the below-the-belt accoutrements. Included in each costume is a specially designed CamelBak water bottle, that comes filled with yellow Gatorade. The owner of the costume simply feeds the pressurized CamelBak tube through his or her pants, and with a simple push of a button, can expel fake urine at a desired target, just like the real R. Kelly!

Unfortunately, the costume vendors did not share my enthusiasm for this idea. The general consensus was that the costume was too tasteless for sale anywhere in America.

White Trash

I actually tried out a prototype of this costume one Halloween, when I was in 5th grade. The “White Trash” costume kit comes replete with one (1) pair of stained, worn sweatpants; one (1) white garbage bag; and one (1) sack of trash. The only assembly required for this gem of a costume is to put on the sweatpants, place the trash bag over one’s head (being very careful to use included breathing holes), and fill it with included trash. In this way, the owner of this delightful costume gets to be white trash for a day!

Sadly, this idea never got off the ground; it was a bit over many people’s heads. The most frequent comment the costume got was: “Why are you wearing a trash bag?” Also, the health hazards of giving plastic bags to children were deemed an unsuitable risk for the product to be marketed.

While none of these costumes made it to market this year, I will be more than glad to manufacture any of them on demand for anyone. Please send $50 per costume to JeffCorp Corporations, Incorporated Corporate Headquarters located in Tacoma, Washington, and allow four to six weeks for delivery of the best Halloween ever!

I just read Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel. In lieu of lengthy psychological profiles of major characters, he lists each character’s favorite band, movie, and TV show. In the book, the technique is part of a broader critique of our obsession with, and reliance on, pop culture. But that doesn’t make the information any less revealing.

Courtesy of the American Memory Project

In some ways, Goebel’s method of characterization is hyper-efficient; We can judge characters in a split second based on their pop culture preferences. Goebel also uses the technique to show which characters we should empathize with and which we should see as purveyors of mainstream dreck.

The technique works well in the book and made me wonder if it could be applied to everyday life. I asked the three questions to some of my best friends, and saw if their responses were congruent with how I would characterize them.

Unfortunately, life is never as cut and dry as art. The first response I got from one of my closest friends was:

1. Gattica
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. Depeche Mode

As he listed these, he said, “Oh God, I’m a fucking dweeb.” And if I hadn’t known him, I’d have thought the same. So much for my first trial.

I moved on to another friend, who responded:

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2. Fraggle Rock
3. Sigur Ros

Again, if I were to see just this information, I would think to myself, “This person might by psychotic.” Far from it! This person is actually a wonderful, entirely sane human.

Similarly surprising results came out of everyone I asked. Most of the responses were not particularly congruent with how I would characterize my friends. I concluded that a person’s pop culture preferences are not accurate mirrors of his or her personality. For example, my list would lead one to believe that I am a sad bastard. But if I had listed the Unicorns as my favorite band, I’d appear whimsical and prone to flights of fancy.

My little experiment unsettled me in two ways. First, it made me realize what a judgmental bastard I am. Second, I was struck by how prophetic Goebel’s book was. Though it was written before the explosion of Facebook, it prefigures one of the main utilities of online social networks: the ability to judge peers based on their pop culture preferences. Who among us is not guilty of a scoff emitted while reading another’s Facebook profile?

Certainly judging people for cultural preferences is as old as art itself; but perhaps the primacy that pop culture has gained over our lives, thanks to the internet, has made our generation worse. Maybe instead of the Millennials, our generation should be called the Elitists.

I was online researching some scenes from the movie to use as evidence towards my thesis of Stephane as super-creepy stalker when I stumbled upon a website called ScreenIt. The site is for parents who want to monitor the content of films their children watch. For every movie that comes out, the site catalogs (quite extensively) a list of all the moments that could possibly be considered offensive.

Courtesy of the American Memory Project

On the surface, this is a good idea; parents should have some manner of deciding whether a film is appropriate for their children. Of course, such a system already exists: the MPAA stamps pictures with ratings from G to NC-17. But parents frequently complain that too much variance exists within the same MPAA rating – a PG-13 movie can still be fairly offensive. So, I suppose, this is where the fine folks at ScreenIt come in.

At the top of each movie listing the site displays a handy grid listing types of objectionable content and their frequency in the movie. For example, ScreenIt tells us that The Science of Sleep contains an “extreme” amount of sex and/or nudity (not true). This matrix is more than sufficient for any parents who wish to shield their child from a certain type of content.

However, the site continues with a play-by-play of each instance of objectionable material, spoiling the entire plot. Plus, many of the details given by ScreenIt are decidedly inoffensive. Under the “blood and gore” category for The Science of Sleep, the site lists the following incident: “Guy farts.” Unless that was a truly exceptional instance of flatulence, we can rest assured that it was neither bloody nor gory. Do we really have to shield our children from farts?

The site abounds with such examples, most bafflingly for children’s movies. For the movie WALL-E (the pinnacle of human achievement, by the way), the site lists this as bad behavior children might want to imitate: “Waalllleee (said in a drawn out way.)” So what if there is a sarcastic line in the movie? Sarcasm is a fundamental mode of communication in our culture, and children are capable of contextualizing sarcasm in their own minds.

But besides irritating me with its prudishness, the site also irks me because it is a shining exemplar of a weird, singularly American, head-in-the-sand sense of social correctness that pervades mainstream culture. It is often said that entertainment is a mirror of culture. If this is the case, then our media is a frosted mirror that allows the vague shapes of reality through, but not the banal blemishes of quotidian life. This frosted mirror of culture could be caused by wishful thinking or by a tremulous respect for political correctness.

Courtesy of the American Memory Project

To see how skewed the depiction of quotidian life is in the media, we can examine the treatment of sex on television and in movies. We have fashioned an idol out of political correctness, and the idol dictates that, out of respect for young viewers, we not show graphic sexuality on television or movies watched by children. Unfortunately, biology dictates that we are a sex-obsessed race! So that we may satiate our lust to see lust on television and in movies, we create a twisted sexuality almost entirely unreflective of the real world.

Sex is treated (especially on TV, but also in many movies) as a consequence-free romp. To discuss the negative emotional and physical effects of sex with any sort of seriousness would violate our sense of taste. Can you imagine what would happen if there were an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry realizes he’s contracted a potpourri of STD’s because he’s been having one night stands every week for ten years? So, we put our heads in the sand. We deliver to our children some bizarre ideas about sex and relationships because it is easier than violating our sense of political correctness.

Perhaps the astronomical rates of teen STD infection and pregnancy are so high can be partially attributed to the fact that such a poor facsimile of true human sexuality is given to children via the media.

Though I won’t go into it any further, the same holds true for violence in the media.

My point is that by pandering to our concept of political correctness, we have created an unrealistic and damaging depiction of life. If every instance of movie violence was like the curb-stomp in American History X, and every treatment of teen sex was like Juno, how would our culture change? If we socialized our children into the world of WALL-E (Earth destroyed by vapid rampant consumerism) instead of Kung Fu Panda (a panda bear does kung fu), would they turn out any better than us?

And that is why ScreenIt bothers me; it advances a stupid, dangerous, head-in-the-sand attitude towards the reflection of life in mainstream media. Here’s where the danger lies: trying to shield their children from the harsh realities of life, adults socialize their kids into a television and movie world free of the unfortunate banal truths of existence. The kids, upon maturity, learn (often the hard way) that there is a discrepancy between the media world and the real world. And so the cycle continues, catalyzed by more sites like ScreenIt that make offerings to our golden cow idol of political correctness.

Whenever I drive from Colorado to California, I am struck by the vastness of the wasteland that stretches between the two locales. Perhaps wasteland is too strong of a word, but considering that I come from a place in which every single sunset looks like this, it makes sense when I say that Wyoming is a terrible place from which nothing good can ever come.

On the first day of my trip, I drove from Denver to Rock Springs, Wyoming. To get there, I had to cross southern Wyoming–a giant, empty desert bereft of everything but scrub brush and the occasional giant oil refinery. One of the first towns I passed through in Wyoming was Sinclair, which owes its name to the oil company. A sign at the outskirts of town bragged that it was home to the West’s most advanced oil refinery. All I saw were smokestacks and refineries belching flame into the sky like some demonic lighthouse.

From Wyoming, it was on to Reno, Nevada. In between was one of the highlights of my drive, a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 80 without a single turn that runs flat across the surface of the Salt Lake Desert. These salt flats are where all the world’s speed records have been set. Mostly, I was curious as to whether or not the salt flats were actually salty. I got out of the car, licked the earth, and can now verify that the salt flats are both delicious and beautiful.

Finally, the centerpiece of the trip: Reno, Nevada, home to a Journey cover band, a Chicago cover band, and a Foreigner cover band, as well as a magician with a tiger, whose name was, I believe, Hürneberger Von Schümpenheimer. All this got me thinking about possible slogans for Reno to rival Vegas’s “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” campaign. Reno’s current slogan is “The biggest little city in the world.”

• If you’re in Reno, you’re probably at rock bottom already, and it doesn’t really matter if what happens in Reno stays in Reno.
• Reno: the biggest little mistake you’ll ever make.
• Reno: Dean Martin once had a bowel movement here.

After Reno came the promised land of California, weighty beneath its own legend, muse for countless pop songs, devourer of the Joads and of Brian Wilson. A beautiful siren.

However, as with any great artist, Mr. Kelly’s works are often cast aside by scholars due to his impenetrable, post-post-post-modernist lyrics and deconstructionist themes. My aim today is to prepare the public for the art of Mr. Kelly, as one prepares for a scalding bath by setting a timorous foot in the water.

It looks something like that; courtesy of New York Magazine

Mr. Kelly has come under fire recently for the explicitly erotic nature of his music (that, and peeing on a 14-year-old). Indeed, were he an avatar of Eros, I would not be surprised; he has certainly captured, in great detail, all the facets of the human sexual experience. Perhaps the controversy surrounding Mr. Kelly’s art is due to a misunderstanding of his artistic devices.

Take, for example, the song “Sex Planet.” Let’s examine how Mr. Kelly uses double entendres to heighten the erotic nature of the track. Ostensibly a song about a romantic trip to outer space, the song can also be seen as a prolonged metaphor for sex! For example:

Don’t trip, I gotta giant rocket / Glidin’ through, just hittin’ yo pocket.

In the above lyric, Mr. Kelly refers literally to the rocket that he and his mate use to travel into outer space. However, the line also slyly references Mr. Kelly’s penis. Upon close examination, many of his songs unfold to reveal rich layers of innuendo and wordplay. Here is another salient example of R.’s genius in “Sex Planet”:

Girl, this is gonna be painless / now we gonna take a trip to planet Uranus.

Here, Mr. Kelly demonstrates his mastery of the homonym; he’s a punner of utmost skill. (And, if I may be so frank, far surpassing the skill of his antecedents; in comparison, the wordplay of Nabakov makes one vomit on a turtle.) The above line is again a double entendre. On the surface, the song is about making a sexy journey to the seventh planet of our solar system, but at the same time is a reference to the most taboo form of sexual congress–the elusive anal congress.

So much for “Sex Planet.” Let us now move on to another of Kelly’s magnum opuses, “Sex in the Kitchen.” After a few tactful verses elucidating the sensual nature of his partner’s cooking, Kelly interjects:

Girl I’m gonna / toss your salad.

Like a multifoliate rose, Kelly’s innuendo unfolds to expose three layers of artistic beauty. First, the abruptness of the interjection represents the often sudden kindling of human sexual desire. In addition to its musical expressiveness, the phrase is again a double entendre. Upon a cursory glance, the lyric is simply a case of Mr. Kelly offering to help his partner cook a meal. But peel back one more layer of the magnificent Rose of Art and there lies hidden the gem of the song: the lyric actually references that most intimate act of analingus. Kelly’s metonymic prowess nearly conceals a highly expressive innuendo!

Examples such as these could go on for days; Kelly is irrefutably a master of coy literary devices in which to couch the charged sexuality of his songs. However, like a good diamond, there are many facets to Mr. Kelly’s flawless genius.

By bringing the seemingly mundane aspects of human sexuality into an artistic and delicate light, R. Kelly advances the art of R&B. Take, for example, the song “Trapped in the Closet (Chapters 1-800),” in which Kelly sings at length about an awkward incident during sexual intercourse. In the song, R. Kelly’s partner is nearing the apogee of her sexual experience; however, Mr. Kelly enjoys the experience less, as he has a cramp in his leg. While he at first selflessly tries to stay the course, he finally can take no more and says:

Bitch, get off my leg!

Clearly, Kelly contextualizes the mundane and places it within an exciting setting, thereby encouraging listeners to find interest in all aspects of life, like getting a cramp that ruins sex.

Let us conclude by turning once again to “Sex Planet” and examining one of Mr. Kelly’s most obscure innuendos. We find Kelly still a conquistador of outer space romance in the last verse of the song, and he exclaims:

Girl, I’m gonna give you / meteor showers.

What could this mean? Could it be a veiled reference to his trial, in which he was accused of urinating on a minor during an act of sexual congress? Or is it simply a reference to the sensual journey in which R. Kelly ventured past the asteroid belt, encountering space rocks? Perhaps we will never know. And that, right there, that beautiful, obscure, opaque unknowability of Kelly’s art is why he is the greatest artist to have ever lived in the history of the human race.

Last week, the Denver independent weekly Westword printed an article about local juggalo culture that was a bit more open-minded than mine. The article separated the idiotic music of the band (I’ll never stop deriding the music of ICP) from the subculture that has congealed around the band. Perhaps most salient among the article’s claims was that juggalo culture provides a caring, supportive network for kids who “are having a fucked-up time.” This claim was supported by various angry emails that I got after The Bygone Bureau published my last juggalo article, all of which said that I focused on juggalo violence at the expense of the beneficial aspects of juggalo culture.

Before I reconsider my stance on juggalo culture, I would like to look at mainstream suburban culture. Jordan’s recent article and books such as Bowling Alone touch on the lack of community and large support networks that pervades suburbia. Sprawling, auto-centric suburbs limit interaction in communities. In fact, the six-foot fence that surrounds most yards demonstrates that privacy and isolation, not community, are sacrosanct in suburbia. For the “fucked-up kids” that become juggalos, suburban desolation is even more severe. Perhaps that is why the all-enveloping community of the juggalos has occurred with such force (at least in vast, sprawling Denver).

The Westword article highlighted many of the beneficial aspects of juggalo culture. A store called Primos gives out Faygo (a dearly-loved juggalo soda brand) to juggalos who get good grades. The Primos store is the nexus of the Denver juggalo universe, and its owners profess a desire to help steer juggalos away from the violent mistakes that they made as youngsters.

Of course, such a tightly-knit community can easily be as suffocating and limiting as it can be nurturing. For example, recalling a recent brawl between juggalos and Crips, one witness said, “One [juggalo] won’t do much for you, but forty of them, they get the mob mentality. There’s like four Crips and forty [juggalos] just beating the fuck out of these guys.” However, the dangers of mob mentality are innate to humanity and are not unique to the juggalos. I’ve seen similar fights break out at hockey games between Red Wings and Avalanche fans.

The Westword article is also peppered with the more familiar anecdotes about juggalos slinging drugs, robbing stores, and wreaking havoc. The author glosses over these accounts, obliquely arguing that those juggalos in lower socio-economic circles have no other choice than to turn to crime. That is an issue of social stratification and mobility to me and doesn’t sway my opinion of the juggalos one way or another.

For me, the question ends up being whether the beneficial aspects of juggalo culture outweigh the negative facets. That doesn’t have an easy answer. If you ask a juggalo sympathizer, he or she will claim that they are a big family amid a cultural wasteland that has ignored them, and that their hostility to mainstream culture is a response to the unbridled disdain shown to them by everyone else. If you ask a juggalo detractor, he or she will say that juggalos choose to remain mired in a stifling subculture of drugs and violence and senselessly lash out at non-juggalos.

Do juggalos have a greater statistical incidence of violence and mischief than other cohesive cultural communities? My experience would say yes, but all my evidence is purely anecdotal. Fraternities are rife with date rape, and I know hipsters that sling drugs. I spend far less time decrying these injustices than I do complaining about juggalos. Perhaps the juggalos are so vocally derided because they are an extremely outspoken countercultural group as opposed to subcultures like fraternities and hipster circles. Or maybe they are decried because they are actually just a gang of thugs, adhered together and made stronger by the idiotic music of a couple fat white guys from Detroit.

Lately, though, I’ve been leaning more towards the former. I’ve had positive experiences with friendly juggalos. Denver has at least 20,000 juggalos (they filled Red Rocks Amphitheatre and the 700-person Gothic venue just last week). If every juggalo were as much of a terror as they are popularly portrayed, the city would be in ruins.

Maybe the juggalo tree has just as many bad apples as any other tree, only the bad juggalo apples are especially noticeable. Or maybe there really are more bad apples in the juggalo circle than in other groups. Regardless, they aren’t all a scourge of terrors, and I regret making such unfair claims in my last article.

I sure don’t love juggalos (I caught one breaking into my house a few weeks ago), but after reconsidering, I can’t write off the whole lot of them anymore.