UNITED STATES—Miller would be the first to penalize those who took away our feelgood by opposing virtues and rampant monetization. Numbers, numbers that measured as they tarnished—they could elevate you and they could devastate. Only then would we, could we call ourselves land of the free and home of the brave. Cars that crashed, and left debris scattered in all directions, were promptly seized and destroyed. Likewise, commercial properties that were left derelict and untenanted were confiscated by the people and for the people. The State was already investing in lunar power, and at the experimental farm research undertaken to grow grapefruit orchards, which required very little precipitation at all, as a source of water—the source of life.
In addition, niche sowing was promoted, a concept Miller discovered via windfall seeds from tomatoes left to rot under his solar clothes dryer (i.e. clothesline). Irrigated, during the interminable drought, solely by drip-drop from wet clothes, were thus produced, the ripest, roundest beefsteak tomatoes you ever saw, which furthered the urban agricultural trend.
The Millerist movement, as it came to be known, took root for from the City of Angeles, first in Sonoma County near the meandering jade ribbon of the Russian River, in communities of wealthy hippies, teens and musicians. The austerities that Miller proposed were embraced and championed as a matter of choice. Choice made all the difference. They were not imposed by the grueling hardships of a starving country, but as an option in the land of milk, honey and desert blossoms. They were receptive to Miller’s audacious proposal to legalize trans-species unions, for example, between dogs and their owners.
Miller knew it was ahead of its time, by about three hundred years and had no expectation that it would go through the legislature, meanwhile he was driven by more practical considerations: more revenue for the State, and for the people and the government by the people and for the people. Yessir…
When one has a national program to offer, is it nothing if not autobiographical –this is true for the most impartial of statesmen and women.
Miller got his first Che T-shirt when Ronald Reagan still resided in the White House. Bright blood red. At a Guatemalan shop with clothing, chock full of artesanias, fliers for community events in the Pico-Union neighborhood. Nobody knew who the hell Che Guevara was then. His first vogue had long passed, and Miller was clueless as most. But it was a striking image, taken in fact, from a group photo, taken in 1960 in La Habana at the burial for the victims of a sabotage ship explosion. All Havana shook that Thursday afternoon at 3 pm as the French freighter Le Coubre blew up in the harbor while unloading its cargo of grenade-launching Belgian FAL rifles and people, claiming some 101 lives. The inset of that photo would turn Che later into an logo –not in his lifetime– from a cropped picture, which is testimony to the power of having another person in the side of the frame, as revealed in the full picture. In attendance at the funeral, which defined radical chic, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Bouvoir.
The photo made Che Guevara into an icon. The intense gaze at a man who is staring off into space. The famous photo. Icon and icon smasher, Graydon Miller, became when Drug Mary told him about the roving revolutionary of the 1960, and many legends sprouted around him before he became within the framework of consumerism, a successful seller of T-shirts worn by rock gods.
It is not clear how they got a hold of it, but the photo appeared in influential magazine Paris Match in 1967 while Guevara was fighting for communism in Bolivia.
However, it was his execution in October of the same year which gave the photograph a life of its own. Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who once had a chance meeting with Guevara in Ireland, was moved by his death to create a work that featured Korda’s photograph on a red background. “I created this, now iconic, image in 1968 in a personal protest to the manner of his death and am proud of what it has become,” Fitzpatrick has written, also admitting to adding his own twist to Korda’s photograph – an ‘F’ on Guevara’s shoulder.
The same year, the photograph was reportedly used by French students in the historic 1968 protests, as well as by a Dutch anarchist group (who claimed they got it from Sartre) and by art forger Gerard Malanga. He sold a fake Warhol painting of the iconic Guevara image to a gallery in Rome (complete with Fitzpatrick’s ‘F’), which Warhol himself, no foe of money and producer of the Velvet Underground banana album, authenticated so he would get the money from its sale.
To be continued…
