Sunday, November 15, 2009
McDonald's advertises for staff to work at Guanta'namo Bay
The burger chain is looking to hire an assistant manager for its outlet at the military base on Cuba where the US holds foreign terrorist suspects.
The sole McDonald's branch on the communist island has featured in news reports about the controversial prison, with interrogators allegedly buying Big Macs and fries in an attempt to make captives more amenable.
The restaurant is located within the perimeter of the naval base on the southern coast of Cuba and caters for the 6,000 people – sailors, guards and their families – who call it home.
Despite the sensitive work carried out at the camp the advert does not demand that applicants have security clearance. In fact it does not mention Guantánamo Bay by name at all.
"We are searching for an Assistant Manager for our McDonald's restaurant located on the United Stated Naval base in Cuba," reads the posting on one of the chain's job websites.
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'A life that reads like a grand 20th century novel'
From: The man who brought the '60s to town: As owner of hippie hot spot The Barn, Leon Tabory planted a flag for the counterculture in SV
Despite its reputation as a natural wildlife preserve for 1960s-style hippies and similarly free-spirited lifestyle rebels, Santa Cruz County was once, in fact, a quiet, conservative, decidedly un-hip place.
reputation as a natural wildlife preserve for 1960s-style hippies and similarly free-spirited lifestyle rebels, Santa Cruz County was once, in fact, a quiet, conservative, decidedly un-hip place.
If anyone were ever to draw up a list of those most responsible for turning Santa Cruz from the latter to the former, among the top five names would certainly be Leon Tabory.
Tabory, who died in September a week before turning 84, will be remembered at a memorial service on Sunday for a life that reads like a grand 20th century novel. But in the cultural history of the county, Tabory stands, for good or ill, as a pioneer in establishing the '60s counterculture in this area. He brought in the DayGlo colors where once had been only red, white and blue.
For a few crucial years in the mid-1960s, Tabory was the owner/operator of The Barn, a landmark off Highway 17 in Scotts Valley that, for a brief moment, was the local epicenter of the flower-power movement. In the middle of tranquil, bucolic Scotts Valley, Tabory attracted droves of young longhairs where few had been seen before. A psychologist by training, Tabory presided over a vibrant weekend scene that featured some of the earliest rock light shows as well as live musical acts including such iconic figures as Janis Joplin and Country Joe & the Fish.
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Coincidentally, the city of Scotts Valley was first incorporated the same year Tabory took control of The Barn — 1966. The Barn wasn't the first outpost of the counterculture in the area — the Hip Pocket Bookstore and the old Catalyst in downtown Santa Cruz had opened earlier, providing a welcoming atmosphere for the politically conscious beat-generation vibe that had flourished in San Francisco in the 1950s. He wasn't even the first to bring a new cultural scene to The Barn. Fabled beat figure Eric “Big Daddy” Nord opened a coffee shop in The Barn in 1964.
But it was Tabory who first brought the full-blown hippie aesthetic to the county, and it was Tabory who found himself in a long, draining battle with the newly established city. The Scotts Valley Planning Commission approved Tabory's first application to open The Barn as a community center, but warned him with a “no beatniks” rule.
The Barn opened with its light shows, its live concerts, its colorful crowds and its eye-popping guest list, which often featured not only Janis Joplin and Country Joe McDonald, but beat generation luminaries Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey, both Tabory friends.
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Misremembering Jack Kerouac
Forty years ago today, Jack Kerouac died. Not for him the glorious blaze that's the proverbial price of a life lived too fast. At the age of 47, he may have died relatively young, but he didn't leave a good-looking corpse. Kerouac had retreated into the philosophical if not actual loneliness of the writer's life, and died in hospital after vomiting much of his vitality out into the toilet of the home he shared with his wife and mother in Florida, America's sunshine retirement capital.
Bloated, reactionary and guileless, his was a painful and undignified death, brought on my too much drink and dissolute living, played out in the presence of the mother whose apron strings he couldn't seem to cut, and the wife who didn't understand him. Venerated by his fans and dismissed by many critics (Truman Capote was probably the most memorably sniffy about his spontaneous prose-poetry and the work of the Beat writers at large: 'None of these people have anything interesting to say,' he said, 'and none of them can write, not even Mr Kerouac.' It 'isn't writing at all - it's typing.' But he did not want for detractors), Kerouac has divided opinion as to his literary merit since his ungainly demise. But has his time finally come round again?
The evidence against Kerouac is, on the face of it, overwhelming. As joyful as his lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose could be, it wasn't, we are reminded, proper writing. For a counterculture legend, he could come across like a grumpy old man from a US sitcom; while his foil and pal Neal Cassady moved seamlessly from the 1950s Beat Generation to the hippy revolution of the 60s, Kerouac couldn't or wouldn't understand this brave new world. When Cassady, by now running with the new generation epitomised by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, visited him in 1964, Jack doubtfully took LSD and ended up silently beating himself up over the perceived failings which saw him kicked out of the Merchant Navy.
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