Throughout the 1980s, as Guatemala was experiencing the worst years of its long and ghastly civil war, few foreign photographers, writers or journalists chose to make this country their home. And with good reason. The nation was terrorized by an ongoing conflict and a brutal, repressive regime that unleashed upon its citizenry some of the… »

When I first started working in the New York City Public Education system, my father gave me a bit of advice. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t end up on the cover of the New York Post.” Sound advice for anyone, really. Particularly if you are going to be working with minors. And the vast… »

Back when I was a teenager one of my favorite words was “cosmic.” It’s kind of embarrassing now, but I’m sure you had your own silly colloquialisms, so no harm done. I remember many “cosmic” moments in the adolescent years: like when Craig and I wandered up to Grand Boulevard and were hammered to the… »

A few decades back, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great pragmatic philosophers of the 20th Century, wrote an essay entitled “The Hedgehog and The Fox.” The title comes from a poem by Archilochus, written in the 7th Century, B.C.E. in which the ancient fabler noted, “The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one… »

There is something haunting in the intonation of light and color in the work of César Barrios, something of an unearthed memory that the viewer recognizes both as their own and yet fully apart from their experiences. We recognize the faces, and the way the colors fall within them, as if they are our ancestors,… »

My grandmother died in late January of 2005, at 93 years of age. The day before she ended this dance, she and I were planning her 94th birthday party and joking about the hospital food. Sometime in the evening a nurse came in and said the doctors wanted to start her on a… »

Regular readers know that the Surly Bartender does not suffer fools gladly, from patchouli stinkin’ hippies spreading bubblegum Buddhism and sexually transmitted diseases across the gringo trail to yacht-masted, Right Wing rogues who feel entitled (by their inheritance and their investment portfolios) to bitch about poorer people collecting “entitlements.” But… »

Earlier this morning, my mother sent me a note through the interwebs. She said that the East Coast was in a deep freeze and that New York City was bracing for a monster snowstorm that might drop up to two feet around the Metro Area. I was telling a friend about the email and the… »

The Surly Bartender has a question: If one group of people spent 20 years of their lives sticking bits of soap up their noses and giggling as they harvested lint from their navels for a midday snack, while another group of people spent the same 20 years studying, say, global climate change, might you understand… »

While speaking recently with Daniel Chauche I was reminded of the short poem, Antigonish, written by William Hughes Mearns in the early 20th Century:

Yesterday, upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / He wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d go away…

Only with Daniel, of course, I wish,… »

This story is only very loosely connected to the holiday season. It takes place in the middle of the summer, and there’s only one phrase in the piece that tangentially connects subject to theme. There’s neither eggnog nor mulled wine, and the only pines in sight were standing dead by the millions in the beetle-killed… »

Julio Zadik’s story is equally as intriguing and complex as are his photographs. Zadik (1916 – 2002), a recently rediscovered genius of Guatemalan art was – in the first half of the last century – considered to be one of the most promising talents in Central America. In 1949 he was invited to exhibit at… »

I graduated from Syracuse University in 1988. The following year a bunch of us made our way back to visit, and get very drunk with, friends who were still tangled in those ivied halls. I don’t recall much of the weekend which was sort of the plan. But I recall Sunday afternoon clearly.

There were seven… »

If you were in Guatemala on June 28th of this year, you likely heard a rather loud bump in the night coming from our South Eastern border. That evening the Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was rousted from his bedchambers, still in his jammies, and hustled off to Costa Rica on a one-way flight, courtesy of… »

Fucking And Wank – Sister Cities!

I’ll admit it. I still giggle when someone farts. If someone farts at a funeral, I lose my mind completely in paroxysms of laughter that are completely inappropriate and tend to piss of the surviving relatives. I don’t know what it is. In many ways, I’m a mature, thoughtful guy… »

A few years ago the cemetery lost my grandfather.

He’d been buried almost a quarter century before and I’d be surprised if anyone had visited his grave in twenty of those years.  We all loved Grandpa Ray, it wasn’t that we were glad to be rid of him or cursed his memory.  Rather, it just isn’t… »

There a difference between a town with great music and a town with a great music scene. This might be overstating it a bit, and I’m no musicologist, but it seems that the difference is that a “music scene” is more than just half a dozen great bands with options on where to dance and… »

What a Summer! Nuclear threats from the infamous North Korean dictator with the world’s funniest head of hair, Kim Don King. Revolutionary hot chicks on the streets of Tehran twittering themselves into the pages of history! Political murder and public demonstrations in Guatemala City! A semi-dressed, cowboy hat wearing President in Honduras being whisked off… »

What’s in a Name?

Recently residents of Conisbrough, South Yorkshire, petitioned to have the name of Butt Hole Road changed to Archer’s Way. A denizen of Butt Hole Road, Peter Sutton, who moved into the neighborhood several years ago, at first thought that living on such an unfortunately named lane would be fun, but after half… »

In September of 1995 one of my heroes, the Civil Rights attorney, William Kunstler, died. Over the course of 50 year career Kunstler had defended, amongst others, Lenny Bruce, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, the American Indian Movement, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the rest of the Chicago 7, as well as “The Blind Sheik,”… »

Regular readers will know that the Surly Bartender has a long list of triggers. He can be set off by just about anything said in his bar that smacks of stupid or smells of bullshit. Generally, this column grows from some particularly festering nugget of dumb that got pushed into his brain by customer or… »

We met Joe Bageant the way we meet many of our best friends, through a mutual acquaintance that may have stepped on the wrong side of the law a few times. The brother in question, Earl Fish, did a couple of stints in the pen for safe cracking, and a couple more for trying to… »

Ricardo Castillo’s “Allegories of a Bad Conscience,” currently on display at La Antigua Galería del Arte, is a minimalist exploration of the power of line in classic works of Western Art. Through its grace and power, Castillo’s work resurrects the intensity of images that have become iconic – and as such, denuded of their initial… »

The Misfits’ Club

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he… »

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, with the talent of an old master and the raw, intellectual wit of his millennial generation, challenges his viewers to consider the interrelationships between our mass-media driven culture and the longer traditions of the Western… »

The Surly Bartender has long had a very clear sense of the hereafter. In his mind, Heaven is a bar in which, during his off hours, he can always find a seat, the cigarettes don’t give you cancer, the music is the all roots rock and angry, while the booze flows freely from the hands… »

The past month brought singer songwriter, Adam Stokes, back to Antigua for a few days – and he brought with him a long awaited present: his new album, October Sky. Adam hails from Texas, but lived here a few years back with his wife, Jess, an incredibly hot archeologist who spent most of her time… »

We keep hearing, verbatim, the same line, over and over again, from our advertising staff. They say the most common reason new clients give for declining to take an ad is because they believe, “…only locals read La Cuadra.” This has been happening with a regularity that makes us wonder if one of our competitors… »

A survey of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international industry standards are too large for the majority of Indian… »

The Surly Bartender voted for Barack Hussein Obama and wishes him well, but he’s not much accustomed to running his engines on hope. Rage. Bitterness. Righteous indignation. Beer. Any of these elixirs give his 12 cylinder spleen the fuel it craves and he turns over like a raging Lamborghini, but hope tends to gum up… »

James Rodriguez, a Mexican – U.S. independent photo-documentarian has lived and worked in Mexico, the United States, Japan, Brazil and Guatemala. Based in Guatemala since 2004 he has been documenting several post-war processes in addition to current human rights and social justice struggles in the region.
The photos selected here provide only a small window into… »

Your way of life is threatened.
When most people say this they are talking both out of their own asses and in their own interests, but we mean it this time.
We remember hearing this line shouted from every television for months after September 2001. We lived in New York City then and took the thickest part… »

In Doniel Espinoza’s series, Escaleras al Sueño the artist combines great technical skill with a perfect measure of surrealist absurdity to visually tell his audience small, but beautiful, magical realist stories.

The objects in Espinoza’s paintings are, in a sense, overly familiar. We live with them daily, we interact with them casually, but those things -… »

When I was a kid my family didn’t take many vacations. We never did the Disney thing. We never made it to the Grand Canyon. Unlike Carol and Mike Brady (or Fred and Wilma Flintstone for that matter) my folks didn’t see much value in schlepping off to Hawaii in the middle of the winter…. »

A few months ago we ran a joke about a talking dog. People loved it. It was cute, had a funny lead-in, a bunch of cursing in the body paragraphs, booze references were sprinkled liberally throughout the page and it finished with an unexpected, roundhouse-to-the-balls, punch-line. Since then we’ve been getting requests to again run… »

Unhappy Meal:
In December of 2008, McDonalds Corporation unintentionally stepped into the middle of an international border conflict when its Moroccan franchises included, as a Happy Meal prize, a map of North Western Africa which indicated a national border separating Morocco and the disputed territory of Western Sahara.
The Moroccan government claims sovereignty over Western Sahara, yet… »

Being self-fashioned iconoclasts, it is rare that we find ourselves engrossed by . . . well, icons, but the image of Muntadar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who launched a couple of size 10’s at President Bush’s yawping maw has done it for us. Apparently the little fella pictured above has been smitten by Mr. al-Zeidi,… »

Missionary Position:

Richard Anthony Smith, 25 years old and completely bonkers, was discovered dangling by a rope inside the main air conditioning duct of the Knoxville Museum of Art by local police, said department spokesman, Darrell DeBusk. Police received a phone call from Mr. Smith once he became trapped in the… »

Over the past few years, as the planet has fallen further into the shitpile, La Cuadra has featured the good works of many not for profit, non-governmental organizations which struggle to humanize our host country, make life better for the poorest and most at risk Guatemalans, and foster development in Central America. While we remain… »

Dear Santa, I only want one thing for Christmas this year, but it’s really important.
I need a new Savior.
I’m not complaining about the old savior. He’s cool, but his story has been totally co-opted over the past few thousand years by the starched and polished set, and…well… that’s just not my bag. I know this… »

In a recent interview, Lucía Morán Giracca opened up about some of her latest work. She said that recently she has been strongly drawn towards examining couples by exploring the nature of partnership. The paintings are, she said, “visual metaphors on the relation between two people and their environment.” Through these images, she investigates the… »

New Discoveries!

Medical staff in a Brazilian hospital brought the effects of a bite from the Wandering Spider (Phoneutria nigriventer) to the attention of researchers in the United States. If a male mammal is bitten by the spider he will experience an increase in blood pressure, overall body aches and a painful erection lasting several hours.

Hospital… »

… »

Byrant Hand, 33, professional educator and entrepreneur, came to Guatemala four years ago and founded the Oxford Language Schools which currently train Spanish speakers in 28 languages ranging from Korean and Mandarin to Portuguese and English. The schools are a successful business, catering largely to adults and corporate clients, but Bryant, who had seen… »

Though this may surprise regular readers, Red Dawn, the cheese factory hit of 1984 that traces the effects of a full scale Soviet land invasion of the United States on school spirit, is one of the Surly Bartender’s favorite movies. Piece of shit though it is, it has some hilarious scenes – and, as a… »

Juan Pablo Canale Banus, founding member and leading force of Itinerantes, believes the artist, particularly the Guatemala artist, has a healing role to play in the nation and the world.

While maintaining a provocative stance, Juan Pablo and his artistic partners feel that in a world of violence, war, degradation, tragedy and want – the thoughtful… »

Recently a New Mexico man was denied his petition to legally change his name to “Fuck Censorship.” The three judge panel ruled that they were not interfering with his freedom of speech, noting that he could call himself whatever he liked, but that the state had a compelling reason to deny the change because… »

As Midsummer’s Night is near in the rearview mirror it might be appropriate to quote the Bard’s best farce. “If we offend it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, but with good will, to show our simple skill. That is the true beginning of our… »

Do you know the old joke, “What’s the definition of Irish foreplay?”
It’s when the stern husband looks at his guilt ridden wife and says, “Brace yer self, Bridget, this might get a bit rough.”
Now the Surly Bartender can attest – and, if necessary, provide medical records to prove – that this provincial, view of Celtic… »

Ricky Lopez Bruni is a fortunate artist in that his great talents are amplified by the beauty of his closest muse and model, Guatemala.

Mr. Lopez is best known for his photographic books documenting the visual power of his homeland. His work is famous throughout Latin America, and beyond, for the skill with which he captures… »

Sure, we hoped La Cuadra would be a success… but we must admit we were a bit taken aback when high powered Hollywood producers started expressing an interest in our story.  But, some men are born to greatness while others have it thrust upon them.  We will do our best to live up to our… »

My High School Friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.

“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”

“Because there is a war.”

“Did you witness some of the fighting?”

“Everyone in the country did.”

“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“Cool.”

I smile a little.

“You… »

Holy Leg Humpin’ Jesus, there’s just no pleasing some people! The staff of La Cuadra work our livers out for our readers’ edification, hoping also to bring some laughter to our ever darkening world. It’s a difficult balance to strike – whether we should enlighten or entertain – and sometimes we have to… »

A few months back the progressive political organization, MoveOn, got fed a raft of well deserved shit for calling General David Petreaus, “General Betrayus” in a New York Times advertisement on the eve of his first round of Congressional Testimony – the one in which he called for “The Surge.” Which, by the way,… »

A short time ago Barack Obama, aspiring Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America, ran into some problems with the nuts on the “Fair and Balanced” right wing of American cable news. It seems that the preacher at Obama’s house of worship, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, has… »

There’s a bit of Proust in the young man, that much is certain. Christian Kummerfeldt, the 21 year old Guatemalan photographer whose work is featured in these pages, is quite purposefully in search of beauty – and consciously fighting to hold on to its memory.

In his words, “…by photographing you can fight forgetting… Looking… »

While visiting with the photographer, Daniel Chauche, recently I was struck by a comment. We were viewing some of his most recent work. Many of the photographs were of hairdressers and their clients at the Centro Capitol in Guatemala City. Others were of cantinas and their customers. Chauche said, “People don’t… »

Back in the early 1980s Robert Klein had this bit. He’d recently been to Germany and was amazed that he couldn’t find anyone who actually admitted to having supported the Nazis during World War II. Klein noted that everyone he talked to claimed to be as innocent as lambs. His line to… »

To regular readers of our magazine it will come as no surprise that the editorial board of La Cuadra thinks that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is as irresponsible as a junkie, as reflective as woolly mammoth filled tar pit and as dangerous as a drunken baby with a flamethrower.

We hate him. … »

I have certain friends who, when they say, “Hey, man I’ve got a really great idea,” my mind turns to memories of wayyyy too much booze, blurry images of table dancers, the police, a killer hangover, three rounds of increasingly stronger antibiotics and finally a lawyer.

Now, I’m not saying (on the strict counsel of that… »

We were once nice Catholics boys. But somewhere early on (we think their names were Laura and Stacy) our Catholicism began to lapse. Our descent continued until completion with our transition from New York City to Guatemala. Here we’ve accepted our fate as F.C.C.’s: Fully Collapsed… »

The cute little bugger above is Diego Efrain Garcia Aguilar. He’s the two month old miracle of our bartender, Robin.  Somehow Robin convinced his honey, Wendy – a woman whose radiant beauty is only magnified by her seeming lack of concern for the appearance of her partner – that he was the man for her. … »

My guess is you are already familiar with the metaphorical frog dropped into the metaphorically boiling water.  But in case you are not, here it is:  If you toss a frog into boiling water, he will jump right back out, but if you put him in a pot of comfortably temperate water and slowly turn… »

The Christmas Season is upon us, and even the Surly Bartender is getting in the Spirit.  The lights are up in the Parque Central, an adorable new collection of Dutch Girls are visiting Antigua on their winter holidays, and I’m not living in a New York City where, global warming or not, the weather is… »

Twenty some years ago, when a young, self taught artist named Alfredo Garcia Gil started shopping his paintings of some of the less reputable citizens of Antigua, including whores, johns and drunks around the  town’s conservative gallery culture he couldn’t even get in the door.  The galleries wanted unprovocative, easily digestible paintings that could be… »

It has been a while since the last issue of La Cuadra hit the streets. Some may have presumed that we folded, or went dormant, or – those who know us better – may have assumed we’d just passed out after a very long night and not yet banished the hangover to wherever it is… »

Much has been made of the radical right’s “hijacking of the Republican Party” since the election of George W. Bush in 2000, but according to Professor Greg Grandin of New York University, the hijackers have been plotting the take over the plane for 25 years.

Like many of us in the age of “Everything Changed on… »

A few nights ago I met a sparkling, lovely couple from some septic backwater of the Great Neighbor to the North.  They were overflowing with hope.  They had the confidence of youth.  They knew that through their activism and energy that their generation would make the difference.  Theirs was the cohort that would properly monkey… »

Ever since my days teaching history in Brooklyn I’ve had certain passions.    Three are relevant today.   First, I passionately love bars.  Real bars.  Dive bars.  Old man bars.  Gin joints.  Roadhouses.  Bars.  Second, I passionately love railing against idiot hippies who wander into my bar; and third, I passionately love slinging a bit of historical… »

Renato Osoy told me that his subjects are always an accident and a marvelous coincidence.  I can’t say that I really believe him.  It strikes me more that these are the words of a very talented and humble man.

Certainly a photographer needs to be the beneficiary of grace more so than artists in other media,… »