El Gato del Diablo

Middletown, Ohio

2008-10-07T09:30:00.001-07:00

there will never be another moment like this one so shut up and meditate on that for a minute.

2008-03-25T21:44:00.001-07:00

Tom Orr's comments about Elagabalus!

2008-02-01T16:25:00.000-08:00

Imagine if you will the history of theatre imploding upon itself in a fin de cycle sort of fashion, with ancient Roman comedy, Shakespearean tragedy, commedia dell'arte clowning, Grand Guignol and postmodern irony melding together into a single seamless story that is timely, timeless, provocative and, most of all, very very funny in a truly dark, macabre, grisly way.

Playwright Shawn Ferreyra and director-costumer Amy Louise Cole are friends & colleagues I respect and admire for their cleverness, sheer theatricality and expert sense of stagecraft.

Here they've found a little-known historical figure in Elagabolus, preening queeny teenage boy-emperor, and the decadent debauchery that led to his demise at the hand of his own men: treachery, lechery, animal and human sacrifice, phallic worship, assassinations etc., presented with ambitious small-scale pageantry that somehow has an underlying sweetness to it. It's like Caligula as performed by the cast of Pippin, and I mean that in a flattering way.

The ensemble is consistently wonderful as they take on a dizzying number of characters, from Roman senators to vestal virgins to gladiators and servants (Lily Balsen as the slave Gemina is particularly arresting, with a wild desperation in her eyes alternating with total resignation at her lowly lot in life, especially her mistress' nonchalant suicide pact orders).

The two standouts -- and only because they have the showiest roles -- are Norman Munoz as Elagabolus and Kathryn Wood as his grandmother, the lady Julia. Munoz has a feline quality that brings a sensuality to what could have been a one-note caricature, and though he is utterly despicable throughout, there is something playful and lovable to the monster.

Wood is in full battleaxe mode, with a character that is equal parts Lady Macbeth, Lady Bracknell, Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate and Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate: deliciously evil and patently amoral, she's like a vivacious, voracious Barbara Bush as she plots to keep the men in her family in power no matter what the ugly cost.

With Amy Louise Cole at the helm as both director and costumer, the pacing is calibrated and the costumes are phenomenal, especially all the trick pieces that reveal the carnage. Shawn Ferreyra has a great way with words -- blending a classical formality with modern vernacular -- and a clear understanding of dramatic structure and tragic inevitability. They make quite a team and their theatre company is one to watch. Catch this one if you can.

2008-01-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

January 3, 2008

Theater Team Makes an Ally of Random Circumstance

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Just about all of the publicity materials and even some of the reviews of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s production of “No Dice” — a theater work consisting of seven actors performing bizarre dances and reciting telephone conversations about mundane topics — mention that the show is a whittled-down 4-hour version of an 11-hour monster epic.

Sounds like a legendary day (and night) at the theater: 11 hours of people in odd costumes acting out, in melodramatic, amateur-dinner-theater style, discourses on office supplies and dieting strategies.

Sounds legendary because it is. There is no 11-hour version. There’s not even really a four-hour version. (The production is closer to three and a half hours.) But the creators, the husband-and-wife team Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, are doing little to combat the misinformation.

“It’s a myth,” Mr. Liska said proudly, as if the word “myth” justified itself.

But it’s still startling that such an unlikely show, at any length, is drawing raves from the critics and has sold out its run at the SoHo Rep (actually the production takes place at 66 White Street, a former indoor playground a few doors down from the SoHo Rep’s theater).

The show, which is closing Friday night, would have kept extending its run at the SoHo Rep if Nature Theater was not putting on another work at the Public Theater next week for the Under the Radar festival.

That show is called “Poetics: A Ballet Brut” and in some sense is the opposite of “No Dice.” Where “No Dice” is a verbal marathon, “Poetics” is wordless, more dance than theater. But “Poetics,” which was created first, is in many ways the forerunner of “No Dice.”

In an interview in the small, sunny East Village studio that they share with two cats, Mr. Liska and Ms. Copper are much more eager to talk art than biography.

A quick sketch: Mr. Liska, 34, the voluble, big-picture half of the couple, was born in Slovakia, went to Dartmouth and studied under Richard Foreman in New York. He has a tendency to interrupt Ms. Copper, 36, the quieter, detail-oriented one, who also went to Dartmouth and studied at La MaMa. In the mid-1990s they formed a company that they would later name Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which comes from the magical company that the hero of Kafka’s novel “Amerika” runs off to join.

But after a few years of doing theater Ms. Copper and Mr. Liska quit. They were tired of exhausting friends, going broke, making compromises, praying for reviews and when reviews came, managing the fallout.

“The work itself took up maybe 10 percent of the anxiety,” Mr. Liska said. “The rest was social dynamics.”

A few years went by, and they explored the less collaborative delights of photography and visual art. But in 2002 a friend asked Mr. Liska to come up with a play. He agreed, thinking it would be a one-time thing. They’ve been back in theater ever since.

Ms. Copper and Mr. Liska often divide their theater involvement into the period before the break and after; the second time around they were less anxious about success and thus more inclined to experiment. They began to gain a following for unconventional takes on classic plays, including Chekhov’s “Seagull” and “Three Sisters.”

And Sarah Benson, before she became artistic director of SoHo Rep, approached them in 2006 about developing a version of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” She had already arranged a production of “Poetics” at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Ms. Benson, who became artistic director last year. “I don’t really know what it is, but it’s fully amazing.”

The response to the “Twelfth Night” commission is one of the reasons for the title: “No Dice.” They were more interested in making new work, inspired by John Cage’s ideas about chance in art.

“Poetics,” for example, was choreographed using dice. Each face on the die represented one of six possible gestures, and each appendage — two arms, two legs and the head — got its own roll of the dice. Dice determined where the actors stand and for how long. There are four actors in “Poetics,” but, alas, no such thing as a four-sided die. So, to determine who did what, the directors used a dreidel.

The resulting script looks like some horrendous pre-algebra assignment, but in some ways it made for a much more enjoyable and interesting theater-making experience, Mr. Liska said. Instead of debates between directors and actors about motivation, the actors are forced to make sense of the choices imposed on them by the dice.

“Everybody is learning from it as opposed to everybody arguing,” Mr. Liska said. “You’re fighting with a force that’s outside of you.”

The weird gestures and movements in “No Dice” were put together using a deck of playing cards (not, ahem, dice), with each suit representing a different set of 13 movements. One set inspired by disco moves, another by the gestures made by Mr. Liska’s non-English-speaking mother as she was trying to tell a story to the non-Slovak-speaking cast.

The text of the play was culled from more than 100 hours of telephone conversations that Mr. Liska recorded over the course of several months. Even before “No Dice,” he had tried recording himself everywhere he went as a way of heightening awareness of what he was doing and saying. “Drove my parents nuts,” Ms. Copper said.

Mr. Liska and Ms. Copper spliced the phone conversations together in an order based loosely on the conventions of traditional drama: a stranger shows up at the end of Act I; a shocking development seems to have taken place just before Act II begins. In picking the words used, they tried to avoid what Ms. Copper calls “the Oprah moments,” preferring to let the audience form its own narratives out of trivial, meandering conversations.

Yes, it sounds weird. O.K., it is weird. But the result, as Claudia La Rocco put it in The New York Times, is “the language of the everyday — woefully insufficient yet so strangely beautiful — that we apply to constant, failed attempts at explaining this impossible world.” Oh, and there are free sandwiches.

The insufficiency and beauty of interpretation inspired the company’s next two works, which are scheduled to have their premieres in Europe this summer. For one, Mr. Liska called around 30 people and asked them to recite from memory the plot of “Romeo and Juliet.” Actors, in Elizabethan dress, recite nine of the answers, some of which introduce new characters or wander off on impromptu digressions. The show also involves a person in a chicken suit.

In the other work, “Rambo Solo,” one of the actors in “No Dice” was filmed in his studio apartment describing, enacting and discoursing upon one of his favorite movies, “First Blood.” He performs the monologue live while behind him three video screens depict his performing the monologue in his apartment.

Ms. Copper knows what you’re thinking, and she insisted: None of this is meant to be facetious. Despite the laughter that percolates in the audience throughout performances of “No Dice,” the mundane day-to-day melodramatized in the show is their own day-to-day.

“We are taking it as seriously as possible; it’s our life,” she said. “If it is a joke, it’s a serious joke.”

“No Dice” continues through Friday at the SoHo Rep, (212) 941-8632; sohorep.org. Performances take place at 66 White Street in TriBeCa (formerly Sydney’s Playground) between Broadway and Church Street, three blocks south of Canal. The run is sold out. “Poetics: A Ballet Brut” runs from Jan. 10 to Jan. 20 at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555; publictheater.org.

I will see you in HELL!

2007-12-13T09:24:00.001-08:00

1001 - NY Times review

2007-10-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

November 1, 2007

THEATER REVIEW | '1001'

Stories of Arabian Nights and a Dystopian New York

By CARYN JAMES

The mother of all storytellers, Scheherazade is the central character in “1001” but she doesn’t stay Scheherazade for long. In Jason Grote’s kaleidoscopic reinvention of the “1001 Nights” tales, she morphs into Dahna, a contemporary Palestinian graduate student in New York, just as Scheherazade’s husband, the wife-killing Shahriyar, becomes Dahna’s Jewish boyfriend, Alan, and her sister Dunyazade becomes Dahna’s sister, Lubna. Moving fluently back and forth from the “Arabian Nights” of legend (complete with jeweled turbans and scimitars) to New York in a dusty, apocalyptic near-future, these stories within stories come to include Flaubert during his wild-oats days in Egypt and even a cameo appearance by Jorge Luis Borges, the master of labyrinthine fictions.

Ethan McSweeny’s kinetic direction keeps the piece, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, moving in a quick and lucid way, as it ranges from Sinbad’s tale to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to Dahna and Alan on a visit to Gaza. There is not quite a Scheherazade-level command of narrative on display, but there is a sure sense of how to turn literary traditions into active, theatrical storytelling.

Dashing about in multiple roles, the actors are smooth, especially Roxanna Hope as Scheherazade/ Dahna, and the versatile Drew Cortese in roles from Flaubert to an angry Zionist college student.

If the play is often heavy-handed about how stories shape reality, this small production, with minimal props and clever use of lighting (designed by Tyler Micoleau) demonstrates how dynamic storytelling can spin us over the rough spots.

But there is no disguising that Mr. Grote’s writing is weakest where it had the greatest opportunity to be fresh: in its examination of the links between “The Arabian Nights” and today’s fraught images of the Middle East. When Shahriyar chillingly says that he kills a wife a day so they will not have a chance to sin in adultery, the line resonates with hints of holy wars and the repression of women now.

More often, the play is schematic; the pairing of Dahna and Alan, even the apocalyptic event with its echoes of 9/11, add little to the conversation about Islam and the West. It’s that flaw that makes “1001” no more than a graceful gloss on timeless but familiar ideas.

Compania Teatro Cinema GEMELOS

2007-09-30T21:37:00.001-07:00

Robert Wilson's FABLES DE LA FONTAINE

2007-09-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

September 5, 2007 SF Weekly

2007-09-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Rogue El Gato

Playwright Shawn Ferreyra tries his hand at writing for kids. He shoulda stuck to tales of half-naked nymphs.

By Nathaniel Eaton

Published: September 5, 2007

Last year playwright Shawn Ferreyra and his company, El Gato Del Diablo, produced a marvelous play called The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play. It was a night filled with wine, sex, and half-naked nymphs. It had an immensely creative set and a loud soundtrack pounding out Nine Inch Nails. This is not that play. The Rogue El Gato is a rustic children's play about a demon cat trying to protect its natural habitat from a wasteful and polluting village of humans. On many levels, it works. The costumes are soft and colorful. The actors are obviously skilled and expressive. There are even brief moments of juggling and acrobatics. Ferreyra is an excellent writer of dialogue, but Rogue could use some more creative staging to avoid its long sections of characters standing around talking. Though this play seems targeted to children five and up, it lacks a certain level of production that young audiences have come to expect. Ferreyra uses no special lighting, no music, and very little creative movement to tell this modernist tale of environmental neglect. Without those things, the forbidding forest and devil cat don't seem all that menacing, and Rogue, while still fun at moments, feels fairly one-dimensional.

And now I have proof! Older critics just don't get shit!

2007-07-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

Joke comprehension may decrease with age
By BETSY TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
ST. LOUIS - A new psychology study at Washington University was no laughing matter: It found that older adults may have a harder time getting jokes because of an age-related decline in certain memory and reasoning abilities.
The research suggested that because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humor comprehension.
Researchers tested about 40 healthy adults over age 65 and 40 undergraduate students with exercises in which they had to complete jokes and stories. Participants also had to choose the correct punch line for verbal jokes and select the funny ending to series of cartoon panels.
Findings were published earlier this month in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.
The research conducted by graduate student Wingyun Mak and psychology professor Brian Carpenter showed that the younger adults did 6 percent better on the verbal jokes and 14 percent better on the comic portion than did older participants, Mak said.
But who decides what's funny?
The researchers, citing past work in the field, wrote that humor research is "rooted in the philosophical notion that humor arises from a sense of incongruity, a conflict between the expected and the actual."
"Successful comprehension of humor occurs upon resolving something that is seemingly incongruous with a logical but less obvious explanation."
Researchers used a verbal joke test developed in 1983 and used in other humor studies. Mak added a new element, though, by showing participants cartoons from the Ferd'nand comic strip, and asking them to choose between four panels to locate the funny ending. Three of the choices for each cartoon were the wrong ones, created by an artist for the study.
Participants had to respond to jokes like this one:
A businessman is riding the subway after a hard day at the office. A young man sits down next to him and says, "Call me a doctor ... call me a doctor."
The businessman asks, "What's the matter, are you sick?"
Participants then had to choose the right ending. For this one, the correct answer was "I just graduated from medical school."
Wrong choices were straightforward answers or conclusions that did not follow from the premise. Among the wrong answers: "Yes, I feel a little weak. Please help me."
"This wasn't a study about what people find funny. It was a study about whether they get what's supposed to be funny," Carpenter said.
"There are basic cognitive mechanisms to understanding what's going on in a joke. Older adults, because they may have deficits in some of those cognitive areas, may have a harder time understanding what a joke is about."
Mak said humor comprehension merits further study because of the potential physical and psychological benefits of humor.
"I think it's really important to note this doesn't mean older adults aren't funny or don't understand humor," Mak, who is from Los Angeles, said.
She said humor comprehension and humor appreciation are tested in different ways. The Washington University study didn't delve into humor appreciation. In fact, Mak said, older study participants who may have picked the wrong answers may also have been laughing at their choices at the time.
Josephine Bertani, 73, of St. Louis, took part in the study. She has some memory issues, and thinks she probably didn't come up with all the right answers.
Even so, she leads tours of senior citizens as a volunteer through St. Ambrose Catholic Church.
"I'll entertain them with jokes," she said, adding that some tour participants bring her jokes that she can read aloud on bus trips. Any cases of the older people not laughing? "Not yet," she said.

August 2006 Bay Guardian

2006-09-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play
Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy;
1-800-838-3006, www.elgatotheatre.org.
$20. Fri/18-Sat/19, 8pm.

El Gato del Diablo Theatre Company’s second production is a marked improvement over last year’s quirky but uneven anti-Bush satire The Rise and Fall of the Monkey King. Again written by artistic director Shawn Ferreyra, The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play is far more concentrated and focused, while its subject matter remains at least as grand (being a retelling of the life and death of Jesus and all). But Ferreyra, who posits a modern-day savior as a Latina drag queen sheltering four sexual misfits, wisely makes it a small story for all its universal (and immediately political-topical) significance. Led by Norman Munoz’s sharp and charismatic performance as Jesus Esperanza (founder of the House of Esperanza, an alternative family of love and acceptance), the five-person cast folds a parable of redemption into a humorously fresh story about friendship, flirting, and fighting — much of it taking place at the nightclub where Jesus “diva-states” the competition. (Wendy Marinaccio’s buoyant choreography nicely leavens the dance-floor melodrama.) Director Amy Louise Cole, working with a solid cast, puts just the right touch on material that might have seemed tediously overbearing or maudlin in other hands but here, at its best, confidently approaches the divine.

Aug 2 2006 SF Weekly

2006-08-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play
As Messianic as a Mexican soap opera, and delivered with sass
By Chloe Veltman
Article Published Aug 2, 2006

In El Gato Del Diablo Theatre Company's playful reimagining of the Passion play (a dramatic representation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus popular in Medieval times), the disciples are a bunch of born-again queers, and the Son of God a transsexual. When four twentysomethings find themselves shunned by their friends and families for falling in love with the wrong people, they turn to Jesús Esperanza, a streetwise drag queen with a maternal streak and a serious migraine problem, for guidance. Featuring a disco-dancing competition (slickly choreographed by Wendy Marinaccio), a double gay wedding, and choruses from members of a sinister religious cult, Shawn Ferreyra's fluorescent comedy is as Messianic as a Mexican soap opera. Nevertheless, the show's message about marital equality is delivered with such sass by the cast of five that the violently tacky Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence-meets-John Travolta aesthetic works. Norman Muñoz makes for one of the most deliciously sensual transsexuals to have sashayed across San Francisco stages in recent years. And even though the dialogue is as thin as a communion wafer, you've got to give credit to actors who pull off lines like this conversation between two characters: "I believe in the boogie." "But does the boogie believe in you?"

July 27 2006 Bay Area Reporter

2006-07-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

Misunderstood Messiah
'The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play'
by Richard Dodds

Imagine a meeting of So You Think You Can Dance and Godspell. Then throw in some Queer Eye and maybe a bit of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. These are some of the ingredients conjured by the strange brew titled The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play.
Now at the Exit Theatre, it's the second offering by El Gato del Diablo Theatre Company, as well as the second world premiere by its artistic director Shawn Ferreyra. A program note reports that the play was inspired by the troupe's reaction to the fight against same-sex marriage, and its pleas for acceptance are clearly heartfelt if simplistic.
Despite the religious rituals that frame the production, and the earnest sermonizing, the play also has a sense of humor about its subject. But the line between the serious and the comic at times seems unintentionally blurry.
The central character is a drag queen named Jesus Esperanza, a name that is definitely relevant to the story. Cast out by her own mother, she now takes in other societal strays with a sassy confidence that can be undermined by what seem to be druggy deliriums. Jesus has a ward she has dubbed Sugarpie, a straight boy who has a yen for a haughty club chic with a thuggish boyfriend and a lesbian groupie.
In one of those is-this-meant-to-be-funny? moments, Sugarpie and the thug decide to fight it out — in a dance-off with vogueing choreography by Wendy Marinaccio in which the two contestants range from barely competent to ludicrously bad, despite the oohs and aahs of the spectators.
Though only about 70 minutes in length, the play can feel longer because of a pace slowed by portentous silences and energy-sapping scene changes in director Amy Louise Cole's production. As Jesus, Norman Munoz offers the strongest performance in a cast that includes Alex Hsu, Nancy Dobbs Owen, Christina Lowery, and Matt Socha.
Somehow, everyone ends up in same-sex couples, are then bashed by former friends and disowned by parents, and wind up under the wing of Jesus — who dies and is resurrected in a better dress and wig. There are angel choirs and a finale danced to Olivia Newton-John's "Xanadu." It sounds like a joke, but it's hard to tell.

July 20 2006 SF Bay Times

2006-07-27T10:43:00.000-07:00

The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play
By Linda Ayres-Frederick

El Gato del Diablo Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Shawn Ferreyra’s The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play at the EXIT Stage Left. Quite a worthy undertaking, that Passion Play.
So what is a Passion Play? A medieval Mystery play representing the agony of Jesus during the Crucifixion or during the period following the Last Supper. And a definition for “Fabulous”? Legendary, imaginary, devised, fictitious, given to the telling of fables or legends, beyond the limits of belief. And exceedingly great — the more commonly used meaning.
“Fabulous” and “legendary” (meaning the same thing) right there in the play’s title is a hint of things to come (i.e., redundancy). And sad to say, the play is painfully redundant. Our main character is Jesus of the “first house of Esperanza” which presumably has something to do with “Hope.” And this Jesus (Norman Munoz) as a holy messenger is a very beautifully dolled-up, bleach-blonde-wigged drag queen with the loveliest made-up eyes and slimmest, lithe, little body all cloaked at the start. And Jesus is very much in need of the TLC she espouses and hopes for as the remedy for the ills of the world.
Accompanying Jesus are four ecclesiastically-robed characters — two of the female gender and two of the male gender. Apostles, perhaps? No. One is Jesuss’ best friend and first follower, Sugarpie Esperanza (also very cute, played by Alex Hsu). The others that get named later by Jesus are Dakota DiSantos (Christina Lowery), Alessandra De La Croix (Nancy Dobbs Owen), and the very hunky Bang Bang Concepcion (Matt Socha).
This Passion Play begins with the four characters speaking as a chorus responsively to Jesus. Scene shift (the first of many): Jesus, getting ready to go out on a date with Sugarpie, tells us the story of her life — how she was rejected by her family early on for cross-dressing and suffered the sorrow of family strife and poverty — but all this gets interrupted by Jesus having a severe headache. Jesus’ headache includes hearing voices and talking to someone called Fiona. Exactly who Fiona is was never made quite clear, but Jesus does talk to her a lot throughout the play. Perhaps Fiona is the Drag Queen who left Jesus the wig. (Remember the wig, it comes back later.) And the headache comes back every time anything wonderful happens, such as disco dancing on the date; disco dancing contests when girl one (Nancy Dobbs Owen) gets attracted to a boy (Alex Hsu) other than her original date (Matt Socha); disco dancing when each boy dances to prove how much better he is than the other; lots and lots of disco dancing. Everybody gets to dance.
What is most tragic about this piece is that it fails to communicate its very important message that one of the basic human rights is to be free to love and be loved and marry whomever one wants, regardless of genders. Rather than showing us through the characters’ onstage experiences, the play lectures about past offstage events. Locations and times change without clear definition. It especially bogs down in the scenes depicting Jesus as a self-absorbed drag queen with a constantly recurring migraine who goes through the dying process (without crucifixion at least), talks to angels and Fiona (whoever she is), poses a la pieta, and gets resurrected. She returns in a fabulous (there’s that word again) sparkly, gold ball gown with shimmering scarf and new darker wig repeating all too many quasi-familiar lines of reinterpreted scripture.
With some serious cutting, clarifying, and sticking to the clever heartfelt voice that appears in so many wonderful one-liners, The Legendary and Fabulous Passion Play will be a worthwhile adventure. The talented cast is certainly committed fully to the endeavor, and they prove that even a bleached-blonde wig can be wept over.

Montezuma's revenge!

2006-05-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

2006-04-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

Jason Josef Buchanan

The Burrito

2006-04-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

This food I crave, there is little else to live for. And now it has its own website. And another.

The best burrito in the nation, where is it? What is its name? Who are its parents? More importantly, what does it dream of? Does it ponder the meaning of its own existence? Is it self aware? Does it contemplate its own role in theis cosmic game, this dance of the universe?

What would this burrito say to me at eighty? Did it live a good life? did it accomplish everything that it wanted? What would this burrito say to its younger self and does it throw tantrums and skip its morning pages? Does it suppress some childhood hurt by censoring thoughts and feelings? What is at its core? Does it hurt? Who does a burrito cry out to in the dark?

I swear I will find the best burrito in the nation. I have already found the best in the city. I have conquered one geographic challenge, the city and county of San Francisco. Next I will conquer the great state of California, the seventh greatest economic power in the world. And after California, I will find the best burrito in all of the greatest superpower nation to have ever risen and been crushed under the weight of its own stupidity and greed.

I will leave no stone unturned, no village uninsulted, and no little old woman without offense, until I find the best burrito that can be made and bought in this world of men. And once I have shook the hand of the man that can make such a thing, then I will rest.

best thing I've seen this morning

2006-03-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

Art by Bansky