Read: Lessons in Manliness from Bass Reeves

Bass Reeves is one of my favorite historical characters from the Old West so it’s essential that I pass this on.

According to the Art of Manliness:

Who was the greatest Deputy U.S. Marshal of the Old West? Wyatt Earp? Wild Bill Hickok? How about Bass Reeves? Bass who?

Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was arguably the greatest lawman and gunfighter of the West, a man who served as a marshal for 32 years in the most dangerous district in the country, captured 3,000 felons, (once bringing in 17 men at one time), and shot 14 men in the line of duty, all without ever being shot himself.

He was also a black dude.

Read the full article here

Warning: You’ll probably feel like a wuss by the end.

Read: Rolling Stones Magazine’s “The Kill Team”

According to Mark Boal of Rolling Stone:

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: an exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon.

Excerpt:

The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,” one soldier explained to investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.” One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.

In many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But it is a violation of Army standards to take such photos of the dead, let alone share them with others. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.

Read the full article here (warning: the photos and video are graphic)

On the flipside: Former U.S. soldier turned embedded blogger Michael Yon has seen some of the same material, and disagrees strongly with Boal’s conclusions, calling the story “bullshit.”

Read: “Backbone” – A New Short Story by David Foster Wallace

A new story from author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, appears in the March 7 issue of the New Yorker.

Titled “Backbone,” the story is online now and totally free to read. It begins:

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

Read the full story here

If haven’t already we highly suggest reading Wallace’s massive, heavily footnoted and undeniably witty 1996 novel Infinite Jest. It’s the book that turned Wallace into a literary superstar.

(via Jacket Copy)

Read: Truths For Mature Humans

via ChloeSomeone

Read: Led Zepplin, Jimmy Page and Rock Magic by William S. Burroughs

In 1975, William S. Burroughs attended a Led Zeppelin concert and interviewed guitarist Jimmy Page. He wrote about the experience for pioneering rock ‘zine Crawdaddy. As you might guess the two touch upon some off-beat and esoteric topics like: trance music, magic (at least their definition of it), infra-sounds, something called a orgone accumulator, lasers and occultist Aleister Crowley.

When I was first asked to write an article on the Led Zeppelin group, to be based on attending a concert and talking with Jimmy Page, I was not sure I could do it, not being sufficiently knowledgeable about music to attempt anything in the way of musical criticism or even evaluation. I decided simply to attend the concert and talk with Jimmy Page and let the article develop. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

My first impression was of the audience. As we streamed through one security line after another–a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middle-class kid. The security guards seemed to be cool and well-trained, ushering gate-crashers out with a minimum of fuss. We were channeled smoothly into our seats in the thirteenth row. Over a relaxed dinner before the concert, a Crawdaddy companion had said he had a feeling that something bad could happen at this concert. I pointed out that it always can when you get that many people together–like bullfights where you buy a straw hat at the door to protect you from bottles and other missiles. I was displacing possible danger to a Mexican border town where the matador barely escaped with his life and several spectators were killed. It’s known as “clearing the path.”

Read the rest of Burroughs’ piece via Arthur Magazine.