Cool “Disco” Dan is a Washington, D.C., legend, a symbol of survival of the city’s most difficult years. It was a graffiti nickname, written in marker and spray paint throughout Washington, D.C., clear and legible, never fancy. Any resident of Washington, whether young or old, stick-up kid or congressman, couldn’t help but be intrigued by its omnipresence. Who was this Cool “Disco” Dan? Find out more here: http://cooldiscodan.net/

“Awful Mountain” the artwork of Richard Colman and Jim Houser
Opening Reception: Saturday November 1, 2008
7 PM-11 PM

White Walls Gallery
835 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA

I met Paul Reubens in L.A at the end of the ‘70s, as he was about to mount his first version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse onstage at the Groundling theater. He and I have been friends ever since, and have had many adventures in show business and in the business of bombarding a generation with useful cultural clues and artifacts. Paul is a genius on the order of Charlie Chaplin and Eddie Cantor, which is no small thing, and he makes a mean crank phone call.

How old were you when you got the acting bug?
I think it started for me when I was four or five. I watched a lot of TV when I was little—you know, Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse Club. It was a combination of those shows and a pageant at my elementary school that I saw. I just all of a sudden knew what I was destined for.

You thought, “I could do that.”
Yeah, I was thinking, “I’m going to do that, that’s what I’m doing.”

What was the first thing you actually acted in?
The first thing that I actually acted in was when I was in sixth grade. My mom came in one day and said there was an audition in the newspaper. And she didn’t tell me this until years later, but she and my dad had kind of decided that this was the way for me to get rid of the bug, that I would go and audition for the play and not get the part. But I did get the part. It was a play called “1,000 Clowns,” which has a really big kid role in it.

Was it a one-night performance?
Oh no, it went on for five or six years until I was in my 30s. No, I’m kidding. It went on for a couple of weekends.

Were you a popular kid or reviled?
I kind of worked both sides of the fence as far as popularity goes. I always identified with everybody. I just felt like I was popular when I wasn’t popular.

And then I was in drama, so I hung out with the actor-y, artist kids. I wasn’t super into sports, but I still knew a lot of the people that did that. And then my high school also had a circus. Sarasota was the headquarters for Ringling Brothers.

They wintered there?
Yes, but a lot of the families, royalty families of the circus, lived there. Their kids went to school there.

That’s what I was going to ask you next, if you really did grow up surrounded by circus folk.
Yes.

You had someone with a cannon shooting someone out of it?
Yup.

Really?
Yeah, all true. There was someone shooting, and we kept hearing the explosions at the first house that we had. One day, we were walking around the block and we saw this guy sailing through the air between these two houses. And these people were blasting each other out of a cannon behind their house.

Later on you went to art school. You went to Cal Arts. Was art school important to you? Or could you have gone to any school?
I think art school was very important. I went to Boston University right out of high school, to the acting school there. My first day, I got off the elevator and there was a bunch of the people, my fellow students, standing around a baby grand piano singing Broadway show tunes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that whatsoever, but I got so freaked out when I saw that and I was like, “This isn’t what I wanted at all!” I wanted to be like James Dean and Marlon Brando, like, “What are you rebelling against?” “What do ya got?” That kind of feeling. I wanted a real avant-garde sort of feeling about everything.

Did you get that at Boston?
No, no, it was a great program, but it wasn’t what I was looking for at all.

Did Cal Arts have it?
Yeah, I went the next year. I went to California and it was exactly what I was looking for. Everybody was way out.

Did you study with someone we would know?
Well, in my acting class, David Hasselhoff and Katey Segal are two people that went on to recognition and fame as actors. So the three of us, I guess.

A lot of people came out of Cal Arts and did things.
Yeah, the thing about art school that was so amazing to me is just that I always really approached what I wanted to do as having something to do with art. At that time that school was set up, it was Walt Disney’s brainchild and he wanted a school where the arts could commingle, intermingle, and where musicians would have filmmakers, actors and dancers at their disposal.

Seems like the school was a lot weirder than he was expecting it to be.
Yeah, I think it all sounds great on paper, but it wasn’t weirder than he expected. I think it was more naked than he expected.

OK, here’s a very important question. “Nerd” used to be a term of derision. And your Pee-wee character and Devo and Bill Gates changed that. Did you see that coming?
No, I don’t think I gave it any real thought whatsoever. But you were in the same boat. We’ve known each other a long time. So when you first saw Pee-wee Herman I know for a fact, because you’ve told me, you had kind of a reaction to it.

Absolutely. I was a nerd and I knew it and I really secretly thought the nerds were the smart guys.
Yeah, but you projected that too, I think.

Yeah, people used to call me Pee-wee and Devo and Elvis Costello on the street and throw things at me.
Yeah, well we’ve all had a thing or two thrown at us.

Thanks for getting people to throw stuff at me.
I don’t know. I never gave it any thought at all. I think that’s probably what put it over—I just always viewed Pee-wee Herman as somebody who was just like a real person, who was trying as hard as the next person.

All Photos Property of Herman World, Inc.
© 1986 - 1991 PAUL REUBENS. All rights reserved.

The Pee-wee show began as entertainment for an adult audience and then it incidentally got sold into a children’s market. So did you have to change it a bunch?
No. I mean, I would slightly argue that it started out as adult entertainment. I always viewed it as a real kids’ show, like an homage to kids’ shows. It was written to be performed originally at midnight.

There were some silly jokes, but it was all pretty innocent really.
Yeah, if you remember, we actually did matinees of that same stage show. That had all the “risqué” material in it. My theory was always that if a kid laughed at a dirty joke, they already knew something that I didn’t teach them. And if they didn’t know and they didn’t laugh and it went over their heads, then it was fine. It was not a problem. That would continue on to what became the real kids’ show. But I think it was almost the same thing either way.

Did burlesque have an influence in your work?
I think it did. I would say for sure it did in one really important way. This is a sort of once-removed answer to that in a certain way, but part of Pee-wee Herman came from that song “You Gotta Have a Gimmick” from Gypsy. Then I think I saw burlesque kind of stuff on Ed Sullivan and on early television.

People are always asking me about Pee-wee movies and so this is an opportunity to brag that you and I wrote a movie. We wrote the first version of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that didn’t get made.
That script, the one that you and me wrote, it has been re-written, and I actually think the movie is going to wind up getting made. I would love to think that there will be a deal in place by the time people are reading this in a magazine. So cross your fingers.

This movie was written after the stage show but before the CBS version. Just last night, I was really trying to visualize what some of this stuff was going to look like. I had this very secure feeling of, Wow, if somebody could sit in the movie theater and see this for 90 minutes, just 90 minutes of incredible beauty.

Pee-wee fans will go nuts. Are you still interested in an all-stage show of the Pee-wee show?
The stage show, just to be clear, is the one that you and I met during. That’s how we first started working together, and I might as well tell that story really quickly. I contacted you and asked you if you would design a poster for my show, and you said you wanted to come see my character. You came to the Groundlings and after the show you came backstage and you said, “Why don’t I design everything? It’s gonna have a set, right?”

I thought we were totally on the same page.
So you designed the whole thing and, yes, I’ve been talking to somebody about going to New York with that same show or some version of that show. There’s been all this flurry of talk about doing it both in New York and in Vegas. If that’s the case, and maybe Europe, then I would have to find at least two more Pee-wee’s.

Or you could clone yourself.
Or I could clone myself.

And do it 30 years from now.
That sounds perfect. That’s how the other Pee-wee movie ends, with a robot Pee-wee carrying on the Pee-wee tradition.

All Photos Property of Herman World, Inc.
© 1986 - 1991 PAUL REUBENS. All rights reserved.

You have met a lot of celebrities and public figures. Anyone completely blow your mind?
At the height of my success as Pee-wee Herman, I hardly went out. But when I would go to a party once in a while, it would be so fantastic to be me in that kind of situation. I would literally look around the room in a Hollywood party and every person that I wanted to talk to or meet would be doing a double take at me and running across to come over and shake my hand. It was great. I met everyone at their peak niceness.

What’s the coolest thing you almost got to make when you were making Pee-wee products?
Oh, I’m glad you asked me that. The one thing I didn’t get to make was scents.

Perfumes?
I wanted to make Pee-wee #5, Eau de Pee-wee, and then P was going to be my unisex scent. I was going to make it yellow. But I didn’t get to do any of that. The cereal was going to be Pee-wee Chow. I had Ralston Purina give me permission to let the checkerboard be on human food. It was going to be called Pee-wee Chow, just like Dog Chow, and had the checkerboard on it. The commercial was going to be a mom pouring a bowl of it and putting it on the floor and kids crawling up like dogs and eating it on all fours.

That could have changed history.
I thought that was going to be so great. And the cereal was really delicious, I thought. It tasted just like Trix. It was sweetened with fruit juice, no added sugar, had all these vitamins and minerals and was really good for you. Everything was going fantastic until, right at the last minute, they had to do a blind taste test with kids, and kids hated it.

Stupid jerks! I don’t trust market research.
Yeah. Oh well.

Are you the kind of guy that likes to ride a rollercoaster, or skydive, or bungee jump?
No, I’m the type of guy that likes to do everything totally, 100% safe.

Me too. I hate risk. But have you ever barfed on a rollercoaster?
No, I’ve practically never even been on a rollercoaster. I used to barf all the time. I would get carsick a lot. When we would take family trips, I would get carsick. So we would stop the car and I would get out. My dad would stick his finger down my throat, make me throw up, and I would be fine.

That’s kind of odd because most people throw up on their own.
Nope. I would have to have my dad help me.

Did you ever play a joke that was really successful?
I hate to give it away. One April Fool’s, I called almost everyone I knew and told them that I just got them a miniature pony that was the size of a house cat, and would use a litter box, and it ate people food—I forget what the rest was. But it was so far fetched and people were like, “Oh my God, I don’t have space for it. I mean, I can’t have animals in my apartment.” Practically everyone went for it—not everybody—but I was shocked.

Some people knew you too well.
Yeah, some people don’t take my calls on April 1. I didn’t use that one on you, did I?

Not me, but you’ve gotten me many times on April Fool’s.
Wait until you get home.

Have you ever fired a machine gun or bazooka?
No, I haven’t. I’d like to. You probably already know this, but for years and years, I’ve always wanted to make Death Wish Pee-wee.

That’s a great idea.
So that would involve lots of firearms, [but] I don’t really believe in that at all.

If you could only keep one possession and had to throw everything else away, what would you keep? Would it be your 3-D monkey? Your floral display? Your light fiber optic displays?
No, I think it might be a medal that my mother had duplicated. It was given to my father for his heroism and exploits in Israel, during the creation of the Israeli Air Force. He got this cool medal and my mother, a few years ago, had it copied for the kids in the family.

So it has serious emotional importance.
Yeah, it kind of represents both my mother and my father. So that’s what I probably would keep.

That’s a hard question because I know you have like a million toys and a million things.
I’m not tied to anything like that. I want to get rid of all my toys. I’m going to have an auction to end all auctions a couple years from now.

Wow, tell me. Well, I’ve got too much stuff.
Yeah, you can’t have any of it.

“Look, I don’t know what your point is,” says a boyish Rock Hudson doppelganger, trying to keep cool in front of the vixen who terrorized his girlfriend and stole his stopwatch. “The point is of no return, and you’ve reached it,” Varla retorts. Minutes later, the young man’s neck is broken and Varla is heartlessly speeding across the desert in a chic Porsche.

Tura Satana had no idea she would become a cult film demigoddess when she auditioned for Russ Meyer’s 1965 thriller Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill! “I went over to my interview in a pink dress with pink gloves, a pink pillbox and flowers,” remembers Satana, her docile outfit the antithesis of the tight black pants and boots she would wear while wreaking havoc in Meyer’s film. Meyer told her to read Varla’s lines. “Do you want her played soft, hard or what?” Satana asked. “He said, ‘Read it the way you would.’” She did, and a captivated Meyer wouldn’t let her leave until she’d accepted the part.

The daughter of a contortionist and an ex-silent film actor, Satana has had the brazenness of a performer coursing through her veins since infancy. Born in Japan, she spent her childhood first in a World War II internment camp and later in a bigoted, rough-and-tumble Chicago neighborhood. When a group of men gang-raped her at age 9, she was irrationally punished for her attackers’ behavior and sent to a detention center. Her father helped her escape. “He took me out to Los Angeles and dropped me off there,” Satana remembers. She moved in with one of her father’s friends. “But he was a bit of a lech,” she says. “I kept finding him crawling into my bed, so I got out of there real quick.”

Barely a teenager, Satana found herself living in a boarding house and working as a dancer. She kept to herself, not wanting anyone to discover her age. But her no-holds-barred, collaged approach to dance—bringing Polynesian and Spanish dances, acrobatics, contortion and a slew of other seemingly unrelated moves together into one striking routine—quickly launched her to burlesque stardom. By the time she reached her 20s, she was a nightclub celebrity who had caught the eye of Hollywood directors.

Before taking the lead in Faster, Pussycat, Satana played a sleekly brash prostitute in Irma La Douce, the cushy 1963 Billy Wilder romance, and made a few fleeting television appearances. Even in bit roles, her screen presence was always that of a dauntless non-conformist.

No role channeled Satana’s natural audacity better than Varla, who was foul as Divine in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos and agile as Angelina Jolie in Wanted. “She gave me an opportunity to let out a lot of anger that I had,” says Satana.

Satana and Meyer made a forceful team, precisely because they butted heads constantly. Meyer knew he needed Satana to make Faster, Pussycat a success, and Satana needed to call her own shots in order to feel at ease on the set. Before shooting began, Satana told Meyer that he’d have to change the script. “I said, ‘I don’t do nude scenes,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘But you’re a stripper.’ I said, ‘I do not do nude scenes on stage and I do not do nude scenes on screen.’” Her adamancy surprised Meyer, but he relented, settling for a shot of her bare back. It was a good move, since the absent nudity enhanced Varla’s invulnerability.

The headbutting continued off set. “Russ had this rule,” says Satana. “Under no circumstances are you allowed to have sex during filming. And I said, ‘Well, then I have to quit.’ He said ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘I cannot go one day without release.’ He said, ‘Where the hell are you gonna find release in the middle of the desert?’ I said, ‘That’s for me to know, you to find out. It won’t be with you.’” Meyer had to let her have her way. “He said, ‘Don’t you ever tell the other girls,’” Satana recalls. “But it didn’t make a difference. They all knew anyway.”

Faster, Pussycat was a filmic milestone in more ways than one: women were ruthless without being femmes fatales, violence was sexy without degenerating into an S&M extravaganza, and heroines had no need for heroes. But Varla’s exotic brutality, while liberating, cost Satana work—directors avoided her, fearing she would overpower costars.

She had two other leading roles—one in the now-infamous Attack of the Astro Zombies, in which her disinterested, almost irritated ruthlessness keeps the otherwise languid movie afloat, and another in the Charlie’s Angels forerunner Doll Squad—before calling it quits. She couldn’t make ends meet, and she left Hollywood in the 1970s, becoming a nurse and focusing on her family. “It was frustrating to me at first,” she says. “Then I said, ‘Whatever.’ You can’t fight fate.”

Now nearly 70, she has taken Faster, Pussycat’s growing cult following in stride, writing a memoir and making new film appearances. A figurine featured on her website embodies everything that makes Satana unforgettable: dressed in black leather with gloved fists clenched at her side, the figurine is intrepid, vigilant and ravishing, a woman who knows herself and knows when to pick a fight.

Few artists know their audience better than Ice Cube—and even fewer artists have an audience that has at various times comprised inner-city youth, suburban teens, wannabe gangstas, real gangstas, serious moviegoers, stoned moviegoers, rap nostalgists and pre-teens and their soccer moms. It’s hard to say what’s more remarkable: that Cube has found as much success in his movie career as he has in his music career; that he has written songs that have been taken deathly seriously (“Fuck the Police”) as well as movies that are considered classic comedies (the Friday series); or that he has been able to keep a finger on the pulse of the hood and another on the tastes of the suburbs for over 20 years now.

The roots of Ice Cube’s crossover appeal, and much of his worldview, started in high school, when he was bused from his home in Compton to Woodland Hills, an upper-middle-class, and predominantly white, suburb. As a participant in the widespread desegregation effort, Cube found the experience enlightening, though perhaps not in the way that the bureaucrats behind it had intended. “At times, you could tell we was worlds apart—people that couldn’t relate to each other,” he recalls. “At other times, it was educational on both ends. It didn’t matter what was going on in the neighborhood, we would learn how the other half lived not having to deal with these issues. Growin’ up in L.A., I was able to see the best and the worst of both worlds. I know what’s good in the hood; I definitely know what’s bad in the hood. I know what’s good in the suburbs and what’s bad in the suburbs.”

From his vantage point, he also saw a need to illustrate life in the hood for those who had never seen it, and to glorify it for those who were distressed by it. “It brought up a passion in me that I didn’t really recognize was underneath. Havin’ that perspective helped me out a lot.”

Of course, Cube was still a high school student, and he and his rapping partner, Sir Jinx, wrote rhymes about their favorite pastime: partying. The duo, calling themselves CIA, performed at parties hosted by a young DJ named Dr. Dre. Through Dre, Cube met a young drug dealer named Eric Wright, aka Eazy-E, who had turned some of his drug profits into a record label, Ruthless Records. Cube gave Eazy one of his rhymes, “Boyz-n-the Hood,” for one of Eazy’s groups, HBO. When HBO rejected it, Eazy took it for himself and started a group with Cube, Dre, DJ Yella, the D.O.C. and the Arabian Prince. Behind Ice Cube’s lyrical tenacity, Eazy-E’s slick braggadocio and Dr. Dre and DJ Yella’s alternately smooth and savage beats, N.W.A. went on to change rap history.

After the 1987 release of N.W.A.’s first record, N.W.A. and the Posse, Cube made a move that some might consider slightly un-gangsta, albeit befitting his idiosyncrasy: he enrolled in the Phoenix Institute of Technology to pursue a certificate in Architecture. He returned the following year to record the group’s second album, Straight Outta Compton.

Despite receiving virtually no airplay, the record went double platinum. With every song, the group seemed to say, “Here’s who we are, here’s how we live, and whether you like it or not you better get used to it,” and they said it loud enough to be heard by just about everyone, from the FBI to teenagers across America. Says Cube, “With N.W.A., we didn’t have a fan base when we started makin’ records. We just did ‘em, and people caught on.” And how could they not? It had something for everybody: rage and rebellion for the kids; misogyny, violence and drugs for the moral watchdogs who needed whipping boys to sneer at in their campaigns; and evidence of the chaos of urban blight for the sociopolitically minded.

Cube himself takes this last tack when looking back on the circumstances that bred the group’s mentality. “The policies of Reaganomics really led to the birth of N.W.A. It came from the total disarray of our neighborhoods, in a lot of ways. The lack of social programs, drugs—crack turned our neighborhoods upside down. Reaganomics definitely was the fuel to that fire. A lot of escapism came in at that time—drink, have fun, party, go get girls, jewelry, cars, forget about your troubles.”

The air of controversy from Straight Outta Compton followed Cube into his solo career after he left N.W.A. in 1989. His first solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, was simultaneously praised and criticized, with Cube receiving compliments for his rhyming ability and condemnation for his content. His second effort, Death Certificate, took things even further across the line, and was boycotted and trashed in magazines like The New Republic and The Economist. Death Certificate also became the first and only album ever explicitly condemned by the editorial staff of Billboard.

If, as Chuck D once proclaimed, rap music is the “Black CNN,” Ice Cube was more analyst than correspondent. With a sharp tongue, he lashed out at those he felt had wronged him, from N.W.A. manager Jerry Heller (who allegedly ripped off his clients and refused to meet Cube’s demands for a fair shake, leading to Cube’s exit from the group) to those in the general public who mistreated young black men.

Through his two N.W.A. albums, two records with Westside Connection (Cube’s group with L.A. rappers Mack 10 and WC), and nine solo albums and counting, Cube’s views have often been criticized for being violent, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic, but he claims it was always just his attempt to level the playing field, filtered through his rage. “A lot of my lyrics are harsh, no doubt—but nobody’s exempt. I talk about black people, I talk about white people; I talk about women, I talk about men; everybody get it. It’s not like I’m just one-sided in my views. I believe everybody is to blame for the situation that we all in. So with that, I think people can kinda take their licks and keep on ticking, because it’s not out of hatred. To me, it’s about developin’ a better understanding. There’s people in the world who have this kind of rage that I have in myself from time to time, but it’s better to hear it on a record than have it played out in the Virginia Tech shooting or somethin’.

“I’ve bitten my tongue a few times, though. When you attack someone, you gotta be careful that you ain’t bringin’ a shotgun to kill a fly.”

Yet even when Cube has gone over the top with his barbs, the controversy he’s attracted has only led to more album sales and more exposure, lending truth to the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity (as if telling teenagers something is too rebellious for them is a deterrent). To date, Cube has sold over 10 million albums.

The fire that he’s brought to the microphone has also lent itself to his career in film. Shortly after his departure from N.W.A., Cube was cast in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, a dramatic take on the lives of teenagers in South Central Los Angeles. Cube played Doughboy, a tough delinquent, fresh out of prison and back in with a bad crowd, who nevertheless shows a deep devotion to his good-kid half-brother and a desire to win the approval of their mother. For once, Cube was given a chance to display the emotions that made him notorious—rage, frustration, indignation—in a context where they seemed perfectly justified, even if Doughboy’s actions were not.

Boyz N the Hood grossed nearly $60 million, almost 10 times what it cost to make, and sparked a wave of films depicting life in inner-city L.A., including Menace II Society and South Central. The biggest impact of those films, says Cube, was not at the box office but on the minds of Americans. “Those movies, at one point, were enlightenin’ America to what was goin’ on in the hood, and that to me was special. Not just showin’ the hood what’s goin’ on in the hood, but givin’ people outside the hood a chance to see someone like Doughboy and figure out why he is the way he is. Just seein’ him on the news, no explanation about the bright youngster, you just see somebody who killed somebody and went to jail; you don’t see nothin’ about his life.”

By the mid-‘90s, however, Cube began to see that audiences were burning out on the horrors of the hood and wanted something more entertaining, so he and DJ Pooh teamed up to write Friday, which, like Boyz N the Hood, depicted life in South Central, but this time from a much lighter, comedic perspective. “When I did Friday,” Cube recalls, “I wanted to show how, growin’ up, we didn’t think the hood was all that bad. If you look at Friday, there’s a lot of bad shit happening, from drive-bys to dope smokin’, but the hood was our playground too. So we wanted to show that, and people responded to it, and that’s the wave I’ve been ridin’ for a while.”

It’s a wave that Cube has ridden through two sequels (Next Friday and Friday After Next, both of which were also written by Cube), and roles in Barbershop and Barbershop 2, all of which aim to show the lighter side of urban life, which Cube explains is the key to tapping into the black moviegoing audience. “Black people and poor people watch movies for a lot different reasons than rich people. If you poor, you don’t wanna see a movie about bein’ poor and bein’ fucked up in your neighborhood. People wanna have a little escapism. People wanna get away from their problems when they go to the movies. So I try to provide at least a few movies for people to be able to do that.”

Family-oriented comedy may once have seemed an unlikely arena for the self-described “Nigga Ya Love to Hate,” yet his roles in films like Are We There Yet? have shifted perceptions about his range as an actor—and as a human being who may not be the scourge of suburban parents after all. “I know the kids love me, so that’s gotta affect the parents in some kinda way, how they treat me and view me. It’s interesting for the soccer mom crowd to be down, when they used to break and run.”

by Shawna Kenney

Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols threatened “Anarchy in the U.K.” back in 1976, with the song later co-opted by Megadeth as “Anarchy in the USA.” As easy and obvious as the lyrical leap was, what is the reality of the concept? Can anarchy exist within our supposedly democratic, capitalistic borders? And if it exists at all within the given political parameters, is it really anarchy?

Historians say yes. Replacing the Webster’s definition of anarchy—chaos without government—with the definition from the Oxford Dictionary of Politics, the view that society “can and should be organized without a coercive state” makes it apparent that anarchism as a philosophy has always existed in the United States of America, perhaps even embodied in the very idea of rugged individualism and the do-it-yourself ethic.

In May of 1886, American labor unions went on strike in campaigning for an eight-hour workday. Six workers in Chicago were killed when police fired into the striking crowd. In response, local anarchists organized a protest rally in the busy Haymarket area, where bombs were eventually thrown and one policeman was killed in the uprising. The Haymarket Affair is considered a pivotal moment in the minds of anarchists and historians alike. It instigated the international celebration of May Day, and is memorialized by a stone marker located in Forest Park, Ill., which is listed as a National Historic Landmark. Turn-of-the-century activist and writer Emma Goldman founded anarchist magazine Mother Earth, and was jailed several times for inciting to riot and for distributing information about birth control. She and her partner Alexander Berkman were later deported to Russia for interfering with the WWI draft.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-American anarchists arrested in 1927 for robbery and murder, and executed despite worldwide protest. Anarchism re-emerged again in the 1960s as a multi-factioned ideology: anarcho-capitalists, individual anarchists and social anarchists are but a few of the controversial labels commonly used. The Beats, Abbie Hoffman, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess and Murray Bookchin are often associated with anarchism of this era.

American anarchists made headlines later in 1999 while protesting the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Wash., as the black-masked portion of the more than 40,000 demonstrators. Political scientist and author Dr. Shira Tarrant says it’s exactly such awareness today’s anarchists are responsible for, despite media’s depictions and misconceptions. “Anarchists have brought such important attention to global issues like the IMF and World Bank and how unelected people are making policies affecting workers around the world,” she says. “Mainstream media focuses on wild demonstrators who wear black and throw rocks at The Gap. But more important is how anarchist groups have drawn attention to the politics of global exploitation. This especially matters because media is so incredibly controlled by corporate consolidation.”

Much of modern American anarchy exists as civil disobedience, residing in ideas like co-ops and community effort. “Anarchist groups get the word out. They’re also great about organizing grassroots Free Stores and Food Not Bombs so that food, clothes and other necessities get straight to the people who need it,” states Tarrant. Numerous anarchist bookstores and publishers thrive here. AK Press, a San Francisco-based worker-run collective that publishes and distributes anarchist literature, states on its website that anarchism “doesn’t tell people what to do. It is about emancipation, empowerment and agency.” The statement goes on to encourage people to ask “what would your ideal transportation system, agricultural system, neighborhood, school, or workplace look like? Now ask yourself how much influence you and the people around you have over these issues? Can we afford to leave these decisions to the same people who have been screwing up our lives thus far?” Such questioning goes well beyond kids sporting patches with the anarchy symbol like a trendy corporate logo.

“There’s always the danger that a radical political philosophy will become co-opted by the mainstream status quo, that it will become just a watered down fashion statement,” says Tarrant, but she stresses the positive change that anarchism can bring “in the face of sexism, racism, unethical capitalist pressures, or even co-optation.”

In the recent documentary film Anarchism in America, Murray Bookchin agrees. “It’s illusory to think a food co-op can replace Grand Union or Peoples’ Bank could replace Chase Manhattan. It is basically impossible to live a thoroughly anarchist life within a capitalist system,” he says. “But I do believe this: One can try to maintain a high ethical standard. That is one of the beautiful things about anarchism—that it brings ethics into socialism instead of mere science. One can concern oneself personally with what is humane. One can protest and try to work with projects in which people learn how to take control of their lives.”

Check out tattooist Mitch O’Connell’s brand spankin’ new line of skateboard decks. Our personal fave is the one featuring Tura Satana, who you can also find in our 3rd annual icons issue.  

Too see more of the M.O’C line, visit Pop Art Skateboards.

A Colorado beauty queen of eclectic African-American, First-Nation, Philippine and European heritage, Pam Grier has more than 100 screen credits to her name—yet when she moved to Los Angeles in 1972, she was reluctant to become an actress. Her real dream was to be behind the camera, and she was working several jobs so she could save up money to go to UCLA’s film school. Then legendary movie man Roger Corman thrust a copy of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares in her hand. “That book taught me everything about being an actress,” says Grier, 59. Under Corman’s mentorship, she landed her first movie role—a bit part in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—and went on to become the reigning queen of 1970s blaxploitation film.

As feminism’s bras burned bright, Grier’s helming of Coffy (1973) marked the first time a woman had played the lead in a blaxploitation flick. In Coffy, as well as the subsequent Foxy Brown (1974) and Sheba, Baby (1975), Grier presented America with a revolutionary new female archetype: the badass. “My mom was Coffy, literally,” says Grier. “And my aunt—she was Foxy Brown. She rode a Harley, she bought her own Thunderbird convertible, she had children by different men, she loved her lover, she was wild and prolific and honest. I had all these strong women around me. This is how I was brought up.”

Grier’s first major foray beyond blaxploitation was in Paul Newman’s Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), for which she visited the grungy shooting galleries of New York’s Meatpacking District in order to research her part as a heroin-addicted prostitute. Some observers wondered if Grier’s career had gone off the boil after Fort Apache, but all the while she was active in theater, touring in Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love” and then “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” “People say, ‘You went away and you didn’t work any more,’ but I did work—I did theater,” says Grier. “Don’t negate my career just because I’m not doing movies!”

Despite her many lucky breaks and supreme physical blessings, life was never smooth sailing for Grier. In 1981, a racist cop tried to arrest her outside her home in West L.A., not believing she actually lived there, prompting Grier to move back to Colorado, where she still lives today. Grier had already lost her best friend, soul singer Minnie Riperton, to breast cancer when, in 1988, she found herself battling cancer as well. She was given 18 months to live, but pulled through. All the while Grier continued to act, but was primarily cast in bit parts and cameo appearences for the better part of the next deccade.

Her major big-screen comeback was the lead in Quentin Tarantino’s much-lauded Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch. Her performance as the title character, a sultry flight attendant, earned her Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild best actress nominations and an NAACP Image award. It also introduced Grier to a whole new generation of moviegoers.

Grier talked to SWINDLE for two hours over the phone from her hotel room in Vancouver, where she was shooting the sixth season of the groundbreaking lesbian TV drama The L Word.

On her childhood:
Life was exciting and exotic in the early days. My father worked on military bases, strategic air command bases that were sometimes secret. We couldn’t always live with him, and he couldn’t always talk about his work. So, being a military brat, I grew up in many different countries and cultures. We lived in Swindon, England, for two years, and the people there loved us. As black Americans, we were second-class citizens at home—but we felt equal in England, and highly regarded. They loved our music and our recipes, and we felt so great to be valued for our pride. Then we came back to America and hit the wall of segregation. Buses wouldn’t stop for me and my mom when we were walking home with groceries. I remember one day, a bus driver was at the end of his route and took a great chance in stopping for us. As a child I was taught who to talk to and not talk to, and what bathroom you can and can’t go in to.

On her heroes:
I always admired many of the figures from the black West. Like Mary Fields, the first black stagecoach driver and a woman. And my great grandmother—she owned a three-story boarding house for African Americans, Asians and First Nation people in Colorado. Back then they couldn’t stay in the white hotels. Also, I was inspired by Rosa Parks, and by entertainers like Lena Horne, Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith and Leontyne Price, who were well respected but who had to drive from show to show because, as blacks, they weren’t allowed to take trains or planes.

On the Watts Riots:
Back in Denver I joined a gospel group called Echoes of Youth. Some of the founding members of that group ended up in Earth, Wind and Fire. With all the money we raised from touring Colorado, we bought a vintage Greyhound bus and drove down to California. We were singing at the Reverend James Cleveland’s church in Watts, and the third day we were there, the Watts Riots broke out. The city was burning, bullets were flying and we were stranded. One church member took us into his apartment, so there were literally 30 kids and six adults in a one-bedroom apartment. After three days we got out, because we were running out of money and food. After that, the tour was over. It was scary, seeing a black community in absolute war. I was 12 or 13 at the time, and that was the beginning of reality for me. I realized America was at war.

On moving to L.A.:
I was working as a receptionist in Colorado when I entered the Miss Colorado Universe pageant to try and win money for college. That’s when I realized the effect of b eauty. It’s an aphrodisiac. How a man has power and a woman has beauty. A talent agent noticed me and suggested I move to Hollywood. The black film movement was happening, and they needed more actors. But it was a year and a half before I became an actor.

On being a session singer:
The first week I got to L.A. I got a job singing for Bobby Womack. He said he had a friend named Sylvester Stewart who needed a singer too. So I got to CBS studios and I see these three sisters, and they are Wonderlove, Stevie Wonder’s backup singers. I check in with the coordinator and I go over and meet Sylvester and I stop cold in my tracks—it’s Sly and the Family Stone! I remember he had a bass and a rhythm guitar and these teeth, this smile, and Buddy Miles was playing drums, and I was like, “Oh my god, I am numb!” They said, “Pam, maybe you could go on tour with Stevie Wonder?” and I said, “No, I have to go to school.” So we’re sitting there and it’s late and they are jamming, and then the elevator opens. I see these jeans and this silver belt and a black shirt and a vest and black hair and was like, “Holy moly, it’s Jimi Hendrix!” He went in and picked up an instrument and they started jamming, and we were all in heaven.

On music:
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, music was really bringing cultures and races and religions together. It was so ripe and sweet and had all these flavors—incense and patchouli oil and sitar, Ravi Shankar and Buddhism and chanting and Tolstoy and Keats and Homer, R&B and Fillmore East and West, and so much stuff happening. I wish we’d had a time machine to take all of the young ones—Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys and Smash Mouth and Nirvana and the White Stripes—take them back to that time of revolution and music. I can’t even come close to describing it. In 1975, I went home to Colorado, and I was skiing in Aspen with Jack Nicholson and Hunter S. Thompson and Ed Bradley, the late CBS correspondent who went up there and bought a home. At that time we were listening to “Hotel California,” Funkadelic, Philly soul and Motown. It was still acid and coke and weed and music and just a wonderful communion. And then the ‘80s came, with the business and the stock market, and that’s when it all changed.

On her audition for Paul Newman’s Fort Apache, The Bronx:
Before my audition I worked on the dialogue for three days. I cleared my room at the Wyndham of all furniture, and all I ate was two cherry pies, so the sugar would give me dark circles under my eyes. I started walking around in these serious fuck-me pumps, and I had to ask the desk clerk at the hotel, “Please don’t have me arrested. It’s for a part.” Carol Burnett was living there, and one time I stepped into the elevator looking like this blonde hooker junkie, and there she was. I said, “Please don’t be scared. I am going to an audition!” So I went to the audition at the Minskoff Theater and there I am, looking like a serious junkie hooker, with a note in my pocket from the production office saying I am an actress. I started walking down the Avenue of the Americas and people were hooting and howling and women were rolling their eyes at me and calling me a ho, and I said, “Thank you! I look like a ho!” Soon enough, the police pull up beside me and try to pick me up. I said, “I’m going to an audition!” and they said, “I bet you are.” I walked into the building and the receptionist looked at me and said, “You’re not Pam Grier,” and I just headed up to the door. They wanted to chat and I said, “No chattin’ muthafucker, let’s just do this damn muthafuckin’ job.” I didn’t want to break the level of focus I had been building for the last three days. We start the audition, and the guy who was reading dropped his line because I reached over and grabbed his crotch. That’s what Stanislavski told me to do. I was shooting up and passing out and sliding onto the floor and they were applauding and Paul Newman was so thrilled. They said, “Pam, you got the job.”

On relationships:
At an early age I was a self-proclaimed feminist, although I didn’t realize how to fully enjoy my femininity. If I enjoy my femininity, I can give it. With any relationship you learn how to be the best woman you can be for your man. Sometimes my boyfriend thinks I want too much sex, and I go, “OK… that’s my own naturalness.” I like everything about being a woman, and I like making men comfortable with being with a woman who is powerful. My boyfriend was having a really, really dark time in the corporate world. He was really feeling like he was losing his inner power and trying to hold on to his manhood. In order to give to him, I had to receive. So I asked him to read me poetry.

On cancer:
I was 36, I was running seven miles a day, I was 117 pounds and very energetic. No symptoms. My first operation, they thought they were getting something superficial. Then the pathologist calls and says ,“You need to talk to your doctor. You have a high stage 5 cancer,” and I was like, “Excuse me? Do you have the right file?” I went to the cancer center in Cedars Sinai and they said I may have 18 months to live. At the time I was living with a New York architect, and when I told him, he just broke down. He was supposed to come to the hospital. He never showed up. My doctor sat on the bed and said, “Pam, you have to think about living today. You cannot think about him.” Damn. You think you know your lover until there’s a crisis. I did the radiation and a lot of surgery. And I didn’t speak to the architect for five years until I went to do a movie for Spike Lee in New York. I walked out of my hotel and turned the corner, and there he was. He walked up to me and I said, “You better walk away because I think I am going to throw up on your shoes.” He said, “I guess I owe you an explanation.” In his hand was a manila envelope, and I said, “That looks like a ring box inside.” He said he had just picked it up for his fiancé. I said, “Well, I hope she doesn’t get sick,” and wished him good will.

On meeting Quentin Tarantino:
I was driving down the street with my lover at the time. We were in Hollywood, on Highland Avenue, and there is this young white man with long hair in a T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, leaning over talking to someone in a car. It was Quentin Tarantino. He had mentioned my name in Reservoir Dogs. Then he saw me and stood in front of my car and stopped us. I was driving and he said, “I am writing a movie for you!” And I said, “I don’t believe it.” And he says, “I’ll keep in touch. I’ll find you.” And I am going, “Oh my god.” So like maybe a year later, I get a call saying Quentin wants to send me something. I am in New York and we get a notice from the post office saying there’s a parcel waiting, and there’s 43 cents due. It’s the script from Tarantino—he had sent it regular mail and it had been sitting at the post office for two weeks. I called Quentin and said, “It’s really wonderful. So which role is mine?” He said, “I wrote it for you. You’re Jackie Brown.” And time stopped. The world stopped moving. What an honor that was to have someone write a movie for me. I thought, I can soar now.

In addition to her one of a kind sculptures she’ll have a limited edition metal figures.

www.michellevaligura.com

www.mmodern.com

www.vinylpulse.com

Graffiti has spread to the far corners of the earth and in the process has become the biggest art movement in history and every graffiti writer began his or her writing career with a tag. Developing an original, consistently written name is the primary act for a writer. The photos in Tag Town, dating back to the 60’s, introduce us to the origins of New York style graffiti. Tags and pieces share a common heritage and by understanding one, you can understand the other. For those who learn to read tags, a world of aesthetic expression and communication opens up. Tags are a universal language – the jazz of lettering. Tag Town also contains rare photos of work on the street by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, artists whose tag-inspired work helped found the rapidly growing street art movement. The accompanying text is based on interviews with New York graffiti pioneers Blade, Part 1 and Snake 1. Martha Cooper has specialized in photographing urban art and architecture in New York City for thirty years.

REVOK’s debut U.K. show, “Crime in the City,” will take place at the Grenade Gallery on October 15, 2008. There will be a total of 21 pieces comprised of mixed media canvases and one-off handmade screen prints. His work will be on show from the 10.16.08 – 11.20.08.

For more information, visit Grenade Gallery.

For more information, click here. 

Last weekend, SWINDLE took part in the Puma Tennis Table Tournament (PT3) in Los Angeles. Our team consisted of staff photographers Dan Monick and Greg Bojorquez, and sports editor Casper, who even brought his own paddle and bag. We lost to Stones Throw in the first round, but still had a fantastic time. We’ve already started training for the next event (and looking for interns with crazy ping pong skills). For more event images, click here. 

Jeff Soto’s second book, Storm Clouds, captures his concerns for the well being of his family, the fragile condition of politics, the changing forces of nature and moments for personal exploration and experimentation.

This hardcover volume is 154 pages, and features specialty printing techniques and more than 264 high-quality, full-color images. There is also a collector’s edition limited to 250 copies.

The book includes a hilarious introduction by David Choe, and commentary by Peter Frank (Senior Curator of Riverside Art Museum), Jeff Soto and Mark Murphy. The Riverside Art Museum and the James Irvine Foundation provided initial support, and they will be featuring Jeff in his first museum show in December of 2008.

For more on the book, click here.

Don’t miss “Apache: The Art of Douglas Miles.” The artist reception will take place at Artist Gallery (4214 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A., CA 90029) on October 10 from 7 to 11 p.m. For information and art work click here.

Zu Boutique is a new clothing line by AFI lead singer Davey Havok. Right now, the line only consists of T-shirts, “albeit fancy, fabulous ones,” Havok says. “The graphic designs are limited and visibly numbered (from 00-99) and act as my self-indulgent homage to pop culture, music, film, veganism and counterculture.  The references are subtle for the most part and thus have spawned our label’s battle cry ‘if you don’t know you weren’t meant to.’”

For more on Zu, go to www.zuboutique.com or check out their blogs.

The Luggage Store presents
ANDREW JEFFREY WRIGHT
Art For Corporations
sept. 12 - oct. 11

opening reception fri. sept. 12, 6pm - 8pm

1007 Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

tel. 415 255 5971

www.luggagestoregallery.org

Hand-launched drone spy planes. Video game-style optical interfaces. Needle-in-a-haystack satellite imaging. For all their TV commercials promoting these and the other high-tech gizmos soldiers get to use, the U.S. Army still has a huge need for soldiers to strongploy some very old tools too. When it comes to communicating with local populations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army often puts away the blinking and beeping devices and uses a war tactic hundreds of years old: distributing leaflets.

PSYOP, shorthand for Psychological Operations, refers to coercive wartime propaganda techniques. Experts believe that these good cop/bad cop warrior communications strategies have been around since at least the days of ancient Greece. These efforts—of which leaflet distribution is one part—were formerly called propaganda, until the Nazi association with the term made it time to find a new name. No matter what it is called, militaries around the world are still very much committed to using the power of the printed word, image, sound and other communicative tools to shape the minds of opposing forces and combat area civilians alike. The U.S. Army is so convinced of the effectiveness of PSYOP that they currently have 7,000 soldiers dedicated to it.

Historically, leaflets have been the centerpiece of PSYOP campaigns. Whether they have been dropped out of airplanes, shot in rockets and mortars, or handed out by soldiers, these persuasive paper sheets have been spread extensively across the scarred landscapes of every major conflict since World War I. While it is not surprising that armies would use any means necessary to storm the cognitive pathways of their opponents, it does amaze that as historical art objects, these leaflets show a complexity of detail and an aesthetic richness that rile the senses to this day. No-holds-barred PR with the highest stakes possible has spawned some of the most resonating images ever.

No one has done more to expose the brute force of military target marketing than PSYOP historian and collector Lee Richards. The Dublin, California, resident edits The Falling Leaf, a quarterly journal devoted to PSYOP history, and publishes psywar.org, the web’s go-to source for PSYOP leaflet images. Growing up in an England where the stories of World War II—including those from his Royal Engineer veteran grandfather—sestronged to reverberate directly from the times of blitzkriegs and rations, Richards had an interest in military history from an early age. At 13, he bought from an antique shop two PSYOP leaflets that had been dropped by the Royal Air Force over Germany in World War II. This initial curiosity touched off a lifelong obsession with all things PSYOP—from subversive pirate radio broadcasts to rumor planting to bureaucratic sabotage to postal skullduggery and on and on. Currently, Richards is working on three different books on the shadowy subject of PSYOP. If the books are anything like Richards’ collection of leaflets, dating to 1914, readers are in for some fascinating tales.

Comprised of anything from simple black characters on white sheets to full newspaper-style content, from bathroom-stall level artwork to deft and detailed illustration, from junior-high class campaign poster design to pop-up book-style mechanical paper contraptions, the leaflets displayed on psywar.org serve as a museum of the efforts of militaries to change minds without bullets. Though aerially delivered leaflets date back to balloon drops made by the French in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, airborne distribution wasn’t widespread until World War II. That development was largely because German Chancellor Adolf Hitler fixated on the idea that Germany had lost World War I because of British propaganda efforts. “At the end of the First World War,” Richards notes, “a lot of the German officers, even Hitler himself, blamed their defeat on propaganda. They literally said, ‘We lost because of British propaganda, because of the subversive leaflets dropped over our frontlines.’ It was just an excuse, a scapegoat really, for their military failure. But between the wars this legend kind of developed that propaganda and propaganda leaflets had won the First World War.” By the time the first real fighting of World War II started, tens of millions of leaflets had already been dropped by both sides. With improved printing techniques, plenty of planes to create snowfields of leaflets across Europe and burning notions that propaganda would be instrumental to ultimate victory, a vicious race of words and images was joined by both Axis and Allies.

Realizing that utilizing military personnel alone wasn’t getting thstrong ahead, armies on both sides enlisted the help of civilian media and marketing experts. Previous wars had seen the development of new PSYOP leaflet techniques, but World War II was a quantum leap forward in the sophistication of leaflet production. World War I, Richards explains, had seen the invention of the “Truthful News” technique in which enstrongy soldiers are rained upon with news updates featuring stories that, while truthful, were heavily slanted toward the publishing army’s side. Think of it as a fly-over Fox News. With the increased civilian talent at the disposal of the military minds in World War II, this technique was taken to a whole other level. German soldiers soon found spread across their territories mini-newspapers full of sports news, lists of awards handed out to German officers, beefcake shots of beautiful girls and juicy gossip. The Allies used whatever lowest common denominator tidbits and tricks it took to get German soldiers reading their propaganda sheets. When the folks who had developed these tabloids went back to their jobs in the media world, they used the techniques that had worked so well in the battlefield testing grounds. As Richards points out, it wasn’t long after World War II that tabloid newspapers started to pop up in the United Kingdom and United States. This back-and-forth brainstorming between civilians and military marketing teams didn’t stop there though. The years since World War II have seen a steady exchange between battlefield and boardroom, with armies often hiring civilian marketing firms to massage their messages. And the phrase “hearts and minds,” heard over and over in the marketing meetings, was coined by British High Commissioner Sir Gerald Tstrongpler in calling for PSYOP campaigns during the Malayan strongergency of the 1950s.

In addition to truthful news, which Richards says is still the best PSYOP tactic developed, World War II also saw the growth of a far darker kind of leaflet. If the propagandizers couldn’t reason the opponent into giving up, the next option was to scare the fight out of thstrong. One particularly disturbing Nazi leaflet ostensibly showed an American soldier whose face had been blown away from eyeball to chin and who, in a cruel pyrrhic victory, had survived the mutilation. For all the back-and-forth horrific images—both photographed and drawn—that began descending on the European theater, perhaps the most unnerving were simple but chilling reproductions of cartoon bombs. The message attached was just as simple: “This leaflet could have been a bomb.” When dropped as they were in various German cities following attacks like the British Royal Air Force’s firestorm devastations of Hamburg and Cologne in the early 1940s, these basic messages had an enormously intimidating and dstrongoralizing effect. But for the Nazi soldier scared stupid by these paper threats, all was not lost. The Allies had previously distributed detailed pamphlets on how to avoid dangers of the front by faking various kinds of illness. It sestrongs there was no possible out overlooked by the PSYOP masterminds of World War II.

With the preponderance of graphic, gory images found in PSYOP over the years—like the images of slain Communist leaders scattered by the British Army during the Malayan strongergency—it’s sometimes hard to believe that any fliers were held back out of a sense of decency. But Richards says there is an image that the 100 or so serious PSYOP collectors in the world may never be able to get their hands on because of decency standards. A picture of Hitler masturbating was judged to be over the line by the British chain of command and thus never distributed. With only one known copy in existence, this leaflet would far outreach the $5-300 price range most leaflets trade for, were it ever to become available.

Most times, PSYOP leaflets find their way into the hands of collectors via soldiers who keep a few as souvenirs and then bring thstrong home after their tour. The U.S. Army’s Iraq leaflets that have made it back show a PSYOP strategy focused on a difficult concept: creating a vision of a shared future in a fractured country. However, as omnipresent and multi-directional as PSYOP leaflets are in the modern world or war, don’t expect to see many of thstrong from either side in the near future in Iraq. First, it’s not like the “insurgents” are confined to a known geographical area that Coalition forces can pepper with paper. Second, according to Richards, the forces fighting against the Coalition have found a much more powerful psychological weapon: “The kidnappings and beheadings, it’s all PSYOP, because they know it’s going to frighten the domestic audiences back in the U.S. and the U.K.,” he says.

It may sestrong futile to fight brutality with paper, but the U.S. Army claims that PSYOP measures saved “tens of thousands of lives” during the Gulf War. With the Army looking for any way to reach out to Iraqis and Afghanis and help put an end to the violence, any method to that end is going to be used. As Richards puts it, “Even if a soldier stopped firing his gun two minutes early, you might have saved two people’s lives.”