The stories of California’s indigenous populations have included very few happy endings in the last few hundred years. I learned about one such inspirational story in an L.A. Times article by Ian James.

The Yurok Tribe in northwest California recently regained some 73 square miles of habitat in a deal that took 23 years to complete. It may be the largest “LandBack” deal in California history.

The Yurok reservation was established in 1855 on a small fraction of the Yurok tribe’s ancestral lands around the Klamath River and the Pacific Coast.

Not long after, white settlers and speculators encroached by buying, bribing, and fraudulently acquiring additional lands to harvest timber, according to the Times article.

Bribery and fraud also were among the ways local Chumash lands came to be held by European immigrants.

In 1840, for example, the Chumash band living at Cieneguitas (roughly Modoc Road and Encore Avenue) was the largest remaining Chumash group.

About that time, two Chumash women were able to confirm the village’s traditional land rights through a judge. A document recording their statement was signed by the county district attorney and filed in the recorder’s office.

Legal documents did not prove sufficient.

A century later, a young UCSB historian named Gregory L. Schaaf uncovered the sordid story of Hope Ranch. Schaaf interviewed secondary sources and perused thousands of documents in Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, and at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

G. Pascal Zachary reported Schaaf’s research in a 1981 Santa Barbara News-Press article.

Schaaf found that in 1854 Thomas Hope, an Irish immigrant, was granted an unpaid position as “special” Indian agent to protect the rights of the indigenous living in the Cieneguitas area.

Hope acted in various capacities, including discouraging the practice of hiring Indians for a week of work while paying them only in “Indian rum.”

That same year, at the request of his supervisor, Hope sent a map and certificate of ownership to the federal Indian Affairs Office confirming the Chumash right to Cieneguitas. As late as 1856 more than 800 Chumash families lived in the village.
 
So far, so good. Yet, white settlers were already encroaching. One man had claimed the northern part of Cieneguitas and stolen about 900 head of cattle. A scant three years after the 1856 population count, a U.S. cavalry officer estimated only 40 Chumash remained.

Despite his position as protector, by the 1870s Hope acquired nearly all the Chumash land in the Hope Ranch area. Evidence shows he purchased some land at extremely low prices.

He paid a couple $30 for their property, for example, leasing it back to them for $20 per year. Soon, more than 100 indigenous were servants for 34 Hope Ranch families, including Hope’s.

The Yurok LandBack was accomplished by a Portland-based nonprofit called the Western Rivers Conservancy.

They cobbled together funds from foundations, corporations and philanthropists. Combined with tax credits, public grants, carbon credit sales, and state funding and efforts from California’s Wildlife Conservation Board and State Coastal Conservancy, the pool came to over $56 million.

Nelson Mathews, president of the Western Rivers Conservancy, noted, “This is the result of commitment, persistence and tenacity.”

Tribal lawyer Amy Bowers Cordalis observed that the return of the lands allows the tribe “to start rebuilding and to start taking care of our land and our resources.” She said they are committed to living in a balance with the natural world.

It would be more than courageous to picture Hope Ranch reverting to its Chumash owners any time soon.

The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, however, has taken its own baby step. NOAA’s website for the new sanctuary created in December 2024 states:

“With intention and respect, a key priority for this sanctuary is to provide meaningful opportunities for interested Tribes and Indigenous community members, including individuals with knowledge of Indigenous culture, history, and environment, to participate in collaborative co-stewardship of this special place.”

Marine Sanctuary Leadership is just one of several LandBack visions of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council (NCTC), described in Anthropic’s AI, Claude. These include Diablo Canyon Land Return, land restoration projects in sustainable farming and ecosystem protection, and funding support from groups like the Coastal Conservancy.

LandBacks and sustainable earth management: there could be more happy endings in the future.

The post Karen Telleen-Lawton: LandBack Deals appeared first on Noozhawk.

In the fall, of 2024, I spent a day with the Kyvonos Detachment in the Donbas. This is a volunteer military unit made up entirely of Ukrainian troops who went over to the other side and are now fighting for Russia. Many Westerners would be surprised to learn of the existence of such a military […]

The post As Conflict in Ukraine Reaches End, Big Question Must Be Answered: What Will Happen to Ukrainian Soldiers Who Chose to Switch Sides? first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.

Some time after the events of VVVVVV, Viridian and the crew explore the depths of an unknown planet. But watch out… it might not be what you expect. – [Author’s Description]

It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these posts, but recently I played through a cool level, and thought it might be of interest to some of you still reading this blog? So here we go!

The Depths is a total conversion mod for VVVVVV that makes it all about fishing on an alien planet. It clearly started out as a joke game, and was designed to be posted on the VVVVVV discord on April 1st – which makes it all the more impressive that it’s so much better than it has to be, funny and beautiful and just bursting with charm. Highly recommended.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
— from “A Musical Instrument,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anyone who spent time watching American television in off-peak hours for stretches of the 1980s and ‘90s likely has a handful of commercials burned forever in their memory. Few made impressions as deep as those for music collections that offered a few tantalizing seconds of songs as a rolling tracklist for the full collection rolled in the background. Most were for familiar names. But one commercial more or less introduced a name to viewers in the United States: Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute.

Zamfir, viewers were told, had “sold more than 20 million records around the world” and now they, too, could enjoy his work via the two-disc collection Zamfir Plays the World’s Most Beautiful Melodies. The spots alternated between dreamy stock footage and images of Zamfir in performance with his pan flute, “that magical instrument with the unforgettable sound.” “Relax,” the ad commands, “as Zamfir sweeps you away to a world of haunting, tranquil beauty.” Said world, we were to conclude, could best be accessed by way of pan flute-driven, easy listening music in which compositions by Mozart, Chopin played side-by-side with “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and “The Rose.”

The collection sold well — the ads ran forever and spawned a sequel — but they’re not fully representative of Zamfir’s larger contribution to the world of music and, especially for our purposes, film.

Consider this: If you’re watching a movie and Zamfir pops up on the soundtrack, you’re probably watching a pretty great movie, most likely a masterpiece of one kind or another, even if the films to which Zamfir made contributions have little in common. Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Karate Kid, Once Upon a Time in America, and Kill Bill, Vol. 1 would not be the movies we know without Zamfir and his pan flute. And it’s through a series of quirks of history that we even know about Zamfir at all.

Gheorghe Zamfir was born near Bucharest, Romania in 1941. His father enrolled him in a music school at the age of 14 where Zamfir planned to study the accordion. Unfortunately, the accordion class was canceled before Zamfir could begin his studies. Fortunately, he caught the attention of the Romani-Romanian Fănică Luca, Romania’s foremost nai, or pan flute, virtuoso.

It’s impossible to tell the rest of Zamfir’s story without a digression about the pan flute. One of the world’s oldest instruments, it shows up in the art and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome (hence the association with Pan). But the pan flute’s origins go back further still, so far it’s hard to talk about a single origin. Variations on the pan flute, or panpipe, can be found across the globe (Zamfir was sometimes mistakenly referred to as Andean because of that region’s panpipe music) and seem to have developed independently of one another. The instrument’s simplicity helps explain this. In its most basic form, a pan flute is a series of pipes that play a single note bound together. Many cultures developed varieties of pan flutes and European pan flutes can be traced to Greece. These include the Romanian variation, the nai. The nai has had a centuries-old place in Romanian music, but waned in popularity in the 19th century.

It was the self-taught Luca who helped turn that around in the 20th century, first by taking pan flute music to the rest of Europe, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, China, Russia, and elsewhere. Luca also trained a new generation of pan flutists of which Gheorghe Zamfir became the most famous. Zamfir would become an even more high-profile ambassador via a series of concerts in Paris in 1970 that brought him to the attention of a much wider audience. Paris was also home to Vladimir Cosma, a prolific Romanian composer who’d been based in Paris since 1963. Sensing a chance to infuse his latest assignment, the Yves Robert-directed/Francis Veber co-scripted spy comedy Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe), with an unusual sound, Cosma recruited Zamfir for the project, beginning the pan flutist’s work in film.

I wanted to know more about Zamfir’s film work, so I reached out to his office. Zamfir, now 84, agreed to answer a series of questions via email. You’ll find that conversation below, accompanied by a history of Zamfir’s soundtrack contributions.

A big European hit in the 1970s (albeit one whose charms have not weathered the years well), later remade as the Tom Hanks-starring 1985 film The Man with One Red Shoe, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe further raised Zamfir’s profile. He’d again collaborate with Cosma on the 1974 sequel, The Return of the Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe. Cosma’s score makes good use of Zamfir as a quirky element in a bouncy score perfectly suited to a low-stakes comedy about a hapless violinist who’s unwittingly swept up in a tale of international intrigue. But it was Zamfir’s next high-profile assignment that would more fully explore the otherworldly qualities of the pan flute.

How did you first come to work with composer Vladimir Cosma? Did you come to his attention via the Paris concerts of 1970?

My collaboration with composer Vladimir Cosma began in 1972, when Cosma invited me to perform as the soloist for the film Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire. Before this, I had gained recognition in Romania and internationally, notably through my association with Swiss ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier, who introduced me to Western audiences.

The 1970 Paris concerts were significant in my early exposure to Western audiences, but they were not the direct catalyst for my collaboration with Cosma. Instead, it was Cosma's specific interest in incorporating the pan flute into his film scores that led to our partnership.

The pan flute was not a standard element of a film score in the 1970s. How did your collaboration with Cosma work on The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe come about?

Indeed, the pan flute was not a standard element of a film score in the 1970s. The instrument set a significant milestone in both mine and Cosma's careers, introducing the Romanian pan flute (nai) to a broader Western audience.

Cosma sought to create a distinctive sound for the film, avoiding the typical spy-movie style. He chose to feature the pan flute, played by me, alongside an Eastern European cymbalum, to evoke a sense of Romanian musical heritage. Director Yves Robert and producer Alain Poiré supported Cosma's vision.

My contributions included playing traditional Romanian themes, such as the sârba and doina, which became integral to the film's score. The unique blend of instruments and melodies ultimately contributed to the film's charm and success.

My performance, my interpretation style in particular, showcased the expressive potential of the pan flute in cinematic music, leading to further opportunities in film scoring and concert performances worldwide.

Zamfir isn’t solely responsible for the soundtrack of Picnic at Hanging Rock, but his two contributions to Peter Weir’s 1975 film help set the film’s haunting, unclassifiable tone. Both “Doina: Sus Pe Culmea Dealului” and “Doina Lui Petru Unc” adapt traditional Romanian folk melodies as duets for the pan flute and organ. What does this have to do with the story of a group of turn-of-the-century Australian schoolgirls disappearing during a school outing? On the face of it, nothing. But Weir’s film brilliantly recontextualizes music that had been largely confined to Romania just a few years later to serve a story in which time and space seem to bend in disorienting, disturbing ways. Though maybe “recontextualize” isn’t exactly the right word. Zamfir’s tracks have their origins in a particular tradition but here they sound like they might be melodies as old as Pangea, The sound of Zamfir helps sweep the girls away. Whether they enter a world of haunting, tranquil beauty, remains unanswered.

Did your work with Cosma lead to your contributions to Picnic at Hanging Rock?

Director Peter Weir chose existing recordings of my performances, particularly my renditions of traditional Romanian pieces and classical adaptations, especially “Doina: Sus Pe Culmea Dealului” and “Doina Lui Petru Unc” – traditional Romanian sorrow songs, played on the pan flute, which became the film’s signature musical motif. The pan flute, with its breathy and ancient tone, evokes a sense of timelessness and natural mysticism that aligns perfectly with Weir’s themes of nature, repression, and the unknown. Picnic at Hanging Rock became a classic of Australian cinema, and my music was often credited as a key part of my pan flute's hypnotic effect.

The music's success in the film led to its release on various albums, including A Theme from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), which featured the same compositions and instrumentation. This piece was originally released on recordings made in collaboration with Swiss ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier, and has nothing in common with Cosma.

If I understand correctly, Picnic at Hanging Rock uses your versions of traditional Romanian folk songs paired with just an organ. It's haunting and one of my favorite uses of music in any movie. How did that arrangement come about?

The organ's sustained chords provided a grounding counterpoint to the pan flute's melodic lines, enhancing the film's dreamlike quality. This pairing of instruments, though not originally composed for the film, became iconic in its association with Picnic at Hanging Rock. These recordings have since become cherished examples of how traditional music can transcend cultural boundaries to evoke universal emotions .

Did you know what context your music would be used for?

Absolutely. Though there was no direct collaboration between Weir and me during production, this approach helped establish a new kind of sound in film scoring—sparse, non-orchestral, and globally reaching.

I hoped that the acceptance of using my music would help define the film’s signature emotional atmosphere, and my pan flute music would be exposed to a new and [broader] public.

A collaboration with German composer and bandleader James Last, best known for his work in the easy listening sphere, “The Lonely Shepherd” became a considerable hit in much of the world before being repurposed as theme music for several TV series. The song undoubtedly didn’t sound out of place on the softer ends of the radio dial in ‘70s Europe. It also sounds like it might have been written specifically for the scene in 2003’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 scene in which The Bride (Uma Thurman) commissions then later receives a sword from master wordsmith (Hattori Hanzō), where it underscores the sense of shared hurt and the inevitability of their interaction. These two were always going to have this moment. “The Lonely Shepherd” gives it an understated grandeur.

You had an international hit with "The Lonely Shepherd." Did its second life in film and television surprise you? Did you like the way it was used in Kill Bill?

“The Lonely Shepherd” represents the aesthetic that I became known for: evocative, haunting, and spiritual music that transcends genres and cultures. It was not a surprise for me that Quentin Tarantino used “The Lonely Shepherd” in a powerful, atmospheric sequence near the end of Kill Bill, Vo1. 1. The song is a blend of Eastern European folk, classical, and cinematic ambient music, melancholic, mystical, reflective — with a sense of solitude and timelessness. Because of that, it became a cross-cultural anthem of introspection and power. It’s a perfect example of how music, especially pan flute music’s transcendent sound, can elevate a cinematic moment into something unforgettable.

By the early 1980s, Zamfir enjoyed tremendous success as a concert and recording artist almost everywhere except the U.S., despite having a strong following just to the north in Canada, where he purchased a home. That didn’t apparently diminish his appeal to the American film industry. Zamfir worked on the score of Robert Duvall’s now impossible-to-find Angelo, My Love and his playing can be heard throughout Bill Conti’s score for The Karate Kid (and its sequels), usually in scenes concerning Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita).

1984 was a big year for your movie work. How did you come to work with Bill Conti on The Karate Kid score?

In The Karate Kid, I recorded new material specifically for the film with Conti. Conti's orchestral writing and my minimalist, expressive style created a deeply resonant and emotional score. The pan flute has ancient and cross-cultural connotations — it feels both Eastern and Western, ancient yet timeless.

Our collaboration stands as a beautiful example of how film scoring can merge classical orchestration with world music traditions to enhance storytelling.

Did Conti talk about why he wanted to use a pan flute?

Conti's decision to incorporate the pan flute was driven by his appreciation for the instrument's unique timbre, aiming to evoke an 'ethereal quality' that aligns with the film's themes of wisdom and mentorship.

Zamfir’s film work included a remarkable contribution to Ennio Morricone’s score to Sergio Leone’s swan song, Once Upon a Time in America, also released in 1984. Morricone experimented with new sounds and textures throughout his career. It seems a fortunate coincidence that his work on Leone’s mournful gangster epic coincided with the peak of Zamfir’s work on movie scores. Leone had composed the music years earlier in the 1970s as Leone struggled to get the film made. The elegiac “Cockeye’s Theme” would undoubtedly work with another instrument at the fore, yet Zamfir’s almost seems to have been summoned by the sense of loss at the heart of the film. Zamfir’s film contributions would become less frequent in the years that followed, even as his name became more familiar to American viewers.

Once Upon a Time in America was also released that year. What was your collaboration with Ennio Morricone like?

In 1983 ,I was invited by Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone to contribute to the film's score. Reflecting on this experience in my autobiography, Binecuvântare și blestem [Blessing and Curses —ed.], I described it as "unique," noting that the pan flute's inclusion had a significant impact on the film's emotional depth. My distinctive pan flute performance added a haunting and evocative quality to the film's music, particularly in the tracks “Cockeye's Song,” one of the most famous pieces in the score, and “Childhood Memories.”

I believe Morricone wrote the score for the film years earlier. Did he always have you and the pan flute in mind or did you come in later?

The pan flute wasn't Morricone’s choice. The script writer wanted to have someone play that instrument... Morricone called me because he knew that I was a good performer on the instrument. One of the most famous pieces in the score, my version of “Amapola” that was featured on my 1985 album Atlantis, also gained audience through its inclusion in the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America, directed by Sergio Leone, where it was arranged by Ennio Morricone.

You’ve contributed less often to films after the 1980s. Was that a conscious choice? Did your recording and performing career limit your time?

After 1980, I toured extensively around the world and was heavily involved in recording new albums. I dedicated myself to developing the instrument andintroducing it to new musical styles, because its potential was not being fully exploited.

Beyond my performance, I have contributed to music education through my instructional book Traité Du Naï Roumain: méthode de flûte de pan, fostering a new generation of pan flute musicians which are spread all over the world.

Are there any movie scores with pan flutes you like other than those to which you contributed?

I have not come into contact with the music of another composer who uses the pan flute in movies apart from Elia Cmiral [whose work includes scores for Ronin and Wrong Turn, among many other films. —ed.], a Hollywood composer, with whom I have had a very beautiful collaboration since 2018. With Elia, I recorded the soundtrack for the short film “Lacrimosa,” very awarded, and he composed, especially for me, a masterpiece for the pan flute, named Two Suites for Pan flute and Orchestra (Six Stories from an Enchanted Garden and Sinfonia Concertante for Pan Flute and Orchestra), available now on digital platforms and as a physical CD.

What would your advice be to filmmakers who wanted to use the pan flute in their movies?

I recommend that filmmakers use the divine sound of the Pan Flute to highlight the depth of landscapes, evoke positive emotions, and convey deep feelings. Feelings like love, passion, admiration, contemplation, and introspection can be easily evoked with a Pan Flute sound background. There is not a drop of negativity in the Pan Flute sound.

Israel’s rampant use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza and the West Bank is well documented. Reportedly known as the “mosquito protocol,” Israeli soldiers force Palestinians to inspect buildings, tunnels, and other sites. Israel has denied this practice, despite a growing body of evidence—including quotes from Israeli soldiers themselves, who say the practice is used, in part, to spare combat dogs from injury and death. In Gaza, Israel’s use of human shields has become ubiquitous.

Yahya Al-Qassas risked his life to write the story you are about to read, entering a displacement zone in Khan Younis to interview Jameel al-Masri, a 63-year-old Palestinian man who was forced to be a human shield for three months. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.

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Story by Yahya Al-Qassas

KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA—In October of 2024, 63-year-old Jameel Al-Masri, a Palestinian man from Beit Hanoun, was working on the staff of Indonesian Hospital while the Israeli military was carrying out what was known as “the Generals’ Plan,” an effort to depopulate major swaths of Gaza. His job was to help move patients and families through the hospital as safely as possible, a task that went from difficult to impossible as Israel began attacking the area around the hospital in mid-October. Jameel fled with his family to El-Fawka school, seeking refuge.

But it didn’t matter. Israeli troops came days later, besieged the school, and ordered everyone south.

“I am a hospital employee that gets his salary from the Palestinian Authority and don’t even work for the government in Gaza. Previously I worked for decades in Israel and spoke Hebrew. I have nothing to do with politics.”

Near the UN supply center, Israeli soldiers set up a checkpoint and began rounding up all the men in fives. Jameel was among them. While waiting near a detention center, a soldier shouted: “Who knows Hebrew?” Jameel noticed two women had also been abducted and assumed they needed a translator. He stepped forward.

“I do.”

That moment changed everything. Soldiers with Israel’s Givati Brigade pulled him aside and interrogated him about his Hebrew. He told them he’d worked in Israel for over 30 years. They blindfolded him and threw him into an armored personnel carrier, an APC. No charges. No explanation.

When the blindfold came off, he got his first glimpse of a man he had been lying on top of, held like cargo on the floor. They stayed like that for a full day. Jameel still remembers his name: Wael AbdelLatif Abo Amsha.

The next day, soldiers told them:

“You’re going to help us get people out of the schools. It’s a two-day job, then you’ll go home. You don’t have anything on you in our system.”

They dressed him in a vest. He complied, as he did not have any other choice. The soldiers had lied to him: months of torment were ahead.

A week passed. No release. Only beatings, shouting, humiliation, and filth thrown at them.

“We need to empty all the schools,” they said. “You will stay here and then go home.”

The first school Jameel was forced to clear out was in Beit Hanoun. He was ordered to head to the school, put the displaced civilians in lines and move them out. Then came something else. Soldiers would force him to enter destroyed and burned-out homes – alone. The APC door would open and he would be told to get out—dressed in an IDF uniform—and search inside. A drone hovered over him, emitting a voice that directed him where to go.

Once he cleared the home, the drone filmed everything. Then soldiers stormed in, planted explosives on the support pillars, and later blew up the house. That was the cycle. Again and again. House after house.

The military unit changed every month, but Jameel stayed. Three different units. He was their tool. Every week or two, he was dragged back into the field.

Jameel was sick. He had heart problems, had undergone stent placement, and was often short of breath. Eventually, they realized he couldn’t keep up, and used him less and less over the three months of his abduction.

One night, when a unit was preparing to leave, they shouted at him as he lay on the stairs, weapons drawn. They ordered him to clean their kitchen. He thought he was finally going home.

Instead, they sat him down and resumed their game, asking about his Hebrew. One of them loaded his weapon behind him, pointing it at his head, playing around, laughing.

“I didn’t care. I don’t know what’s on their mind. I was waiting every day for the ceasefire to go home.”

Every few days they repeated the same promise:

“Don’t worry. One week or ten days and you’ll go home.”

Meanwhile, he was fed one piece of bread and a single can of tuna per day. During the first week, they gave him nothing.

I asked Jameel about his conditions. He didn’t hesitate:

“Sleep was very, very hard. You sleep on the stairs and floor.”

Weapons pointed at his face, constantly. Orders barked. Sent into dangerous ruins, alone, following a drone. No protection. No dignity. No choice.

Did the army give him anything for protection?

“They would dress me in a vest and give me a military uniform.”

He asked them why.

“Because we don’t want the drone above you to shoot you.”

The soldiers were young. Barely in their twenties. They spoke broken Arabic. Names he remembers: Sion, Dany, Ido, Benjamin.

Jameel recounts another night: he was lying down when a soldier jumped on him, weapon aimed.

“You have 2 minutes to get ready.”

Jameel was sent to scan homes in Jabaliya. If he took too long, hesitated, or moved too slowly from sheer exhaustion, the soldiers cursed him, kicked him, and beat him without warning.

“Son of a bitch.”

“What a dog.”

He saw corpses on the streets.

Another time, soldiers ordered him to clean the kitchen. One pointed a machine gun at him while the other filmed. They threatened him, saying:

“Now it’s your time.”

Then they laughed and said it was a joke. It wasn’t the first time. Another unit had done the same thing.

“But at least I thought they won’t kill me inside the room. Maybe outside. They don’t want blood where they sleep. They’re afraid of blood and bodies.”

Jameel had to ask for permission to use the bathroom. The humiliation was constant. And the accusations too.

“You did October 7, you handed out candies.”

Jameel answered:

“What do I have to do with that? Nothing. I go every day to work and back.”

But the soldier replied:

“No! It’s all of you. You were all silent. They told me. They didn’t care. They weren’t asking. They were provoking.”

Even among themselves, they were violent. Jameel heard them shouting, mocking, bragging. Talking casually about killing.

“I sniped this guy.”

“I shot like that.”

He heard soldiers talk about their post-service trips to Thailand, to the UK, about Trump, about a ceasefire so they could go home. He remembers soldiers speaking about an incident in which one of their colleagues died after playing with a grenade in Jabaliya.

“I am very psychologically impacted.”

His family lived in agony.

“They thought I was killed. They didn’t inform them of where I was. If it wasn’t for a guy I evacuated from a school during my mission to tell my family I was okay, they would have thought I was dead.”

Jameel Al-Masri was released on January 20, 2025, the first day of the ceasefire after being abducted on October 18, 2024 from Jabaliya Refugee Camp. Even when he returned to his family, he couldn’t believe it.

“It took me an entire month to forget what I just went through. I would wake up and still think I was abducted.”

He suffers from a prolapsed disc due to the beatings by soldiers. He was deprived of his medication for high blood pressure. After release, doctors found narrowed arteries. He’s on meds now, and physically better. But his mind is still in captivity.

Following his release, Al-Masri remained in Khan Younis despite orders to leave. His family did not find another place to stay and cannot afford a tent. There are now sheltering in a school.

Younis Tirawi and Maira Pinheiro contributed reporting.

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How a short documentary from 1986 destroys everything we know about time itself

By: Toxicka Shock | ToxickaShock@gmail.com

It’s been close to 15 years since I last watched Heavy Metal Parking Lot, so imagine my surprise when I could almost recite the short film line by line roughly a decade and a half later. Like the best episodes of The Simpsons, the movie’s “dialogue” just sort of bores into your marrow and becomes an ineffaceable core memory whether you want it to or not. There’s a lot of stuff in this film that’s utterly unforgettable, and some of the absolute funniest shit I’ve ever heard in my life even if it wasn’t exactly intended to come off as “proper” comedy. All these years later, it’s still one of the best holistic portraits of heavy metal fandom culture — which is actually quite astonishing, considering how brief the entire “film” itself is.

There’s a certain sense of envy I feel watching the movie today. For one thing, it’s not even 17 minutes long but it’s obviously a greater cultural text than anything I’ll ever create in my life. The two people who “directed” the movie pretty much stumbled ass over head into creating an immortal cult classic, and literally all they did was amble around a parking lot with camcorder and getting sound bites from degenerates, nerds and total skanks. It’s so low effort and so brilliant that you kinda wonder why the gimmick hasn’t been stolen and adapted for modern times — I’m sure a “Juggalo Parking Lot” or a “MAGA Parking Lot” would be just as interesting and unintentionally hilarious as this one. 

Over the course of 16 minutes and some change, we’re introduced to a gaggle of knuckleheads, reprobates and drug addicts waiting impatiently for a Judas Priest concert to begin. The first major “character” we’re introduced to is a literal child predator who proceeds to commit technical sexual battery on a 13-year-old live on camera. From there, we meet a guy named Graham who suggest you spell it “like a gram of dope and shit,” who then goes on to detail his plans for a Hands Across America type publicity stunt, where a giant doobie is rolled across the entire continent and people can just take a hit of it whenever they want. The logistics and basic engineering of this (crack) pipe dream are never explored — I guess sometimes, fantasies are better off just being fantasies.

Perhaps the most famous subject of the film is some kid wearing zebra-striped everything, who sums up his life philosophy as “it sucks shit, heavy metal rules” before declaring that punk rock likewise sucks and “belongs on Mars” before describing Madonna as “a dick,” although his personal grievances with the Material Girl are never plainly elucidated.

I had forgotten some aspects of the movie, though. Like, there’s an entire subplot about a whole bunch of local kids getting backstage passes after one of their friends was killed in a car wreck, and you have to love the part where some huge-haired harpy who makes it publicly known just how much she wants to fuck Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford … who, a decade later, came out of the closet as the world’s most obvious homosexual. 

Watching the nearly 40-year-old movie today, you obviously want to write it off as an undying testament to the banality and idiocy of the suburban white teenager. Except not everybody in the film is white, most of the people featured aren’t teenagers and I’m not totally sure you can chalk up the majority of the interviewees as suburbanites in the classical sense. There are Black people in line, there’s a (comparatively) long segment featuring a family of Asian Judas Priest fanatics and although it’s hard to tell, I’m guessing the bulk of the mullet-heads on display here are pushing way north of 20. So it becomes an imperfect indictment of something you almost want to indict out of sheer principle. The reality, though, is something a bit more intricate and harder to decipher. You’re conditioned to just assume all of these people are future prison inmates and deadbeat dads and total layabouts with awful taste in music, but thanks to the power of the internet groupthink and outright autism, the digital masses have actually been able to follow up on some of the people depicted in the film. Which, naturally, puts the entire context of the original ‘86 film in a different light.

In 2006 a “where are they now” video popped up on the net, indicating that the presumed chi-mo mentioned earlier is still playing terrible rock and roll music and brags about cleaning carpet for the last 20 years (at one point, stating that he went to college for four years as part of the job, which sounds … suspicious.) He also claims the 13 year old he ravaged with his mouth back in the day wasn’t really his girlfriend and the whole time he’s talking to the film crew he has this nervous look in his eyes like “oh shit,” and I think that facial giveaway tells us everything we need to know about the motherfucker in the abstract. That same video catches up with the infamous “Zebraman” two decades down the line and yeah, he seems utterly mortified by everything he said in that now iconic soliloquy. Then, a very painful thought hit me: this 2006 retrospective is almost as old now as the actual Heavy Metal Parking Lot movie was when it hit the digital cosmos.

You can watch any number of “unofficial” copies of Heavy Metal Parking Lot on YouTube today, and the comment section becomes a smorgasbord of additional lore. We get more details on the kid who died in ‘86 that became the catalyst for all of those backstage passes, and apparently someone did the sleuthing to figure out that “Graham of dope and shit” died for real sometime in 2020. At that point, I realized the YouTubification of the film had actually transformed the text into something altogether different. Heavy Metal Parking Lot was no longer “just” a sliver of ephemera, it became a trans-media rallying point for a group project that, realistically speaking, could keep growing indefinitely until literally everybody involved with the ‘86 movie kicks the bucket. 

Without getting too deep into the philosophy of Derrida, the YouTube message board version of Heavy Metal Parking Lot more or less becomes the perfect example of “hauntology” in mass media. Except it actually expands upon the thesis and takes it into an entirely new dimension, adding a future state to the push-pull dynamic between past and present.

Classical hauntology is essentially the notion that modernity is shaped and still informed by a totally immaterial past — this world that no longer exists, at least in a physical sense. Heavy Metal Parking Lot exemplifies the concept to a T, showing us a world that literally no longer exists on a corporeal plane. The titular parking lot was bulldozed years ago, but the space it occupied hasn’t actually gone away. So it becomes this trend line of the past being destroyed and rebuilt for modern sensibilities — until that, too, becomes too antiquated and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. 

Watching the documentary today, it’s pretty hard to not find a torrent of comments lamenting the loss of “simpler times,” when dumbass kids could simply do dumbass things like drink copious amounts of alcohol and listen to terrible music at ear-damaging levels and commit sex crimes against minors sans fear of punishment of any kind. So the hauntology there tends to haunt itself, as the notion of an “idealized” past is more or less murdered by the harsh reality of our lax social standards and it begins to creep in just how horrific those “good times” actually were.

The variable in this, however, is the element of the internet. Up until the late 2000s — when online multimedia archiving became economically feasible on a truly global scale — it was more or less impossible to share the “lost past” with others. Individuals may have possessed individual markers of the bygone era — Polaroids and yearbooks and home movies and other trinkets of ephemera — but those were self contained and only accessible to the people who physically held them. Now, however, you can more or less upload any piece of “forgotten” ephemera to the World Wide Web for eternal storage and memorialization. It completely upends the original notion of hauntology, in the sense that it ensure that the non-existent past never truly vanishes, at least in terms of a digital footprint. Which, in turn, means that the lost past not only shapes and informs the present, but can (and does) play a role in shaping our futures as well. 

Rewatching Heavy Metal Parking Lot, I kind of found myself disoriented. I was looking at the past, while looking at the present, while looking at the future at the same time. The lost past and the fleeting present and the undefined future all merged into a glob of miscellaneous data points, which at once, tells an incredibly complex overarching story but says nothing of specific significance whatsoever. 

And I suppose more and more media like that is going to fall under the umbrella of neo-hauntology as the years progress (and our abilities to both locate and archive “lost” media advances.) As evident by all of those comments on YouTube, it doesn’t seem like the past is as distant and untouchable as it seemed in the 1990s and early 2000s. And that perpetual everythingness of past, present and future just feels like it’s going to have major consequences on how we curate and interpret the digital landscape around us, behind us and ahead of us. 

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if that brave new world of atemporal memorialization sucks shit and/or belongs on Mars, though.