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A campaign rally during the 2009 Iranian presidential election. (Image via)

In a couple of weeks, Iranians will go to the polls to choose a replacement for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who's held power since 2005. Although “choose” might not be the right word. Of the hundreds of candidates who applied to run for the top job, just eight have been selected by the “Guardian Council”, a crusty cabal of senile theocrats, who make sure Iranians never really have a choice each time the election party rolls around.

Even between the eight – each of which has been approved for his piety and dedication to the “Supreme Leader”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – it’s unlikely to be a fair fight. Following the last election back in 2009, millions of protesters accused the ruling elite of vote rigging, censorship and suppression of reformist candidates. The government cracked down – hard. On one occasion that would be totally unbelievable if it wasn't happening in the world's least democratic democracy, a candidate's real-time vote count actually fell on live TV.

There’s no reason to think this election will be any more transparent. Last week, Facebook and Twitter and were blocked, probably to head off a 2009-style youth protest movement. The press is on lock more than ever – Iran has the sixth least free media globally, according to Reporters Without Borders – and while the country falls apart, the eight candidates are locked in a complex and Westerosian power struggle.

To get an insider’s view of the race, I called Hooshang Amirahmadi, one of the candidates who failed to make the Guardian Council’s cut last week. A joint US-Iranian citizen and academic, he campaigned on a platform of reform, engagement with the US, human rights and nuclear non-proliferation. We discussed his campaign, nukes, press freedom and gay people.

VICE: Hi Hooshang. Why did you decide to run?
Hooshang Amirahmadi: Iran is going in the wrong direction. The country’s problems are accelerating every day – it’s very factional, has a terrible relationship with the US and major economic issues. People are suffering tremendously and they need and want change. Iranians are very nervous.

What about?
The options at the moment are a continuation of the status quo, or more sanctions, or even the possibility of war. Iranians don’t want any of these outcomes, and each is terrible for the international community. That’s why people inside and outside the country have been pushing me to run for president – they don’t want the status quo to continue and they certainly don’t like the other options.

And you were pressured to withdraw from the race?
Yes, I was forced to withdraw. I was told by the authorities that my campaign was too popular and that I was becoming controversial – people were saying that I was the only hope for Iran. The government is very concerned and doesn’t want to face another controversial, unpopular election. So they suggested that I stay away and preserve myself for running in the future.

Were you threatened?
Not really, but I was told I wouldn’t be welcomed by the government and that I would be disqualified. They told me it would be better to stay away. They never really threatened me – they were respectful.

What do you think of the Guardian Council?
[Laughs] I think they are too old! They belong in 19th century Iran, not in the 21st century. I think the whole institution is a major obstacle to free and fair elections and that the time has come for it to disappear. It’s my goal, at some point, to get rid of it. It’s the job of the Iranian people, not the Guardian Council, to decide who gets to be president. We’ll get rid of it at some point.

So you plan to run again?
Yes. The purpose of my candidacy was to create a better Iran and better domestic politics, so I will run again. We have to realise that the future of Iran is extremely important, not just for the Iranian people, but for the region and for the world. I want the future to be better than what we have now.

A burning bus in Tehran during the 2009 presidential election. (Image via)

Do you think Iran should be secular?
I’d prefer to follow China's example. Deng Xiaoping kept the communist system there but started massive change, so although the Party still exists, the foreign and domestic policies have all changed. In Iran, the old, secular dictatorship of the Shah was overthrown by millions, so the urgent choice isn't between secular or non-secular, it’s about change. There has to be freedom and there has to be a political process in which everyone has a say. I’m not a regime changer.

Could there be a Persian Spring?
I hope not. Iran is in a mess and full of factional fighting, so any weakening of the central government could easily turn to civil war, dragging in others outside the country. Iran needs major change, but not another revolution. An Arab Spring-type movement, unfortunately, couldn’t be contained at this point. It would be messy.

But do you think we'll see more protests, like in 2009?
It depends. I don't think so, but we’ll see in the coming weeks. The press is under heavy control right now and the people who could have created trouble aren't really in that mindset. We could see millions out on the streets, but I think that's unlikely.

If you ever get in, how will you change things for women in Iran?
Iranian women have come a long way, but are still subjected to tremendous controls. I’d like to bring them into social and political life – making sure they’re represented in politics for starters. I would promote entrepreneurship among Iranian women and girls, and bring a lot of women into my administration. Within the current theocracy there are certain things that can't be changed, but these restrictions will loosen over time.  Women deserve freedom, including over the clothing they wear.

(Image via)

What about press freedom?
The Islamic Republic claims press is free, but only if it runs within the “Islamic system”, which is highly restrictive. So freedom of the press is fundamental, but the press should also regulate itself, kind of like the New York Times and the Washington Post, who know what to say and what not to say. At the moment, Iranian journalists don’t know how to be journalists. I’d like to send them for training in Europe and the US at the government's expense so that they know what the press is like in a democracy.

And gay people?
Gay people have been free in Iran forever. As long as Iran has existed it’s had gay people, and I’ve never heard of a gay person being persecuted here. It’s natural – they are human beings just like you and me. They are citizens and have the same rights as anyone else. We shouldn't discriminate.

Actually, people have been sentenced to death for being gay in Iran before. 
I don't think that’s true, and I haven’t heard about that. But if it’s being done outside the law then it shouldn’t be the case. Gay people are free in Iran.

Right. Who will win the election?
I don’t know. Maybe Saeed Jalili or Ali Akbar Velayati. I just hope it’s conducted fairly, unlike in previous years. It’s not a fair process, but I hope it’s at least fair between the eight.

Should Iran give up its nuclear program?
Iran has every right to a civilian nuclear program, but also every obligation to nuclear non-proliferation. The problem is one of trust with the US, and I would have got over that pretty quickly. That said, I think nuclear technology is a technology of the past and we need to move beyond it. But they have the right to use it.

How will you treat Israel, if you ever get in?
Nicely. I don't see why Iran and Israel should be enemies; they have no territorial dispute or major religious differences, and there’s no historical animosity between the two. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution it’s been in the constitution that Iran must support oppressed people. From their perspective, the Palestinians are an oppressed group, and because they’re oppressed Iran has a revolutionary duty to support them. So when the Palestinian problem is solved, let’s say through a two-state solution, then the animosity will stop.

Thanks Hooshang. Better luck next time. 

Follow Alex on Twitter: @alexchitty

More from Iran:

Inside Iranian Cinema

Is the Media Coaxing Us Into Accepting War with Iran?

What Are Iran Trying to Hide with Their Space Monkey?

At some point in the 90s, queercore band Pansy Division were interviewed by Kerrang! magazine. In that interview, they compared major pop punk bands like NOFX and Pennywise to 80s party metal scumbags Mötley Crüe – asserting that they appealed to roughly the same type of person (scumbag party bros), behaved in a similar way (were scumbags at parties), etc. They were lamenting punk's descent into apolitical bro-ishness via the Warped Tour and MTV, and while they were right that the focus had shifted a little from fighting the power to fighting back the puke, they could never have predicted Ronnie Radke. No one could, or would ever want to.

Ronnie Radke is the lead singer of Las Vegas metalcore pricks, Falling In Reverse. Last week, Ronnie fired his entire band in a shit-fit about ticket sales. But not before he dropped the kind of music video that reminds us why the terrorists hate us/that punk is dead/how to be a fucking rock star:

That's right: Someone out there thought it was a good idea to have a bunch of emo dickheads do choreographed dance routines to metalcore breakdowns, get the most annoying one to rap, then slather a bunch of sub-Skrillex trance synths over the top of it. The synths sound like gangrenous piss. I don't know if it makes it better or worse that Radke claims to have been sober and drug free for nearly five years. (Coincidentally enough, he’s spent the same five years on probation for his role in an altercation that resulted in a shooting death, with two of those spent in prison for skipping out on his parole officer – yep, he’s that kinda guy.)

Disappointingly, for those of us who enjoy watching prima donnas with face tattoos talk shit about people they believe have wronged them, Radke had a tantrum on Twitter, then deleted all his tweets and Instagram photos. In light of such cowardly backtracking, we’ll have to make do with piecing together the psyche of a full-blown fucking rock star by taking a closer look at the video for "Alone".

We open to the sound of synths and a helicopter dropping off a few emo bros who seem to have been plucked from some "make a band" PC game from the 90s. While considering the helicopter, note that these guys are signed to Epitaph Records, the pop punk Motown founded by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz. That’s right: the same man who wrote "We're Only Gonna Die (From Our Own Arrogance)" signed off on a helicopter and white suit rental to turn the stinkiest turd lurking in the toilet of Ronnie Radke’s ego a reality. I’m no punk purist, but it seems that Mr Gurewitz might want to take a long hard look at himself.

Ronnie arrives a moment after his bandmates, like the big swingin' dick he is. The star of the show emerges from a Ferrari to engage in some well-executed ghost riding of said whip. That’s right: rap stuff’s happening. If you do enough coke, it always does. Hell, the track even sounds kinda like a godforsaken Fall Out Boy/2 Chainz collab that's probably already stewing in some garish LA studio.

Then he points at his shoes and says:

"White boy on the beat / rockin' Gucci sneaks."

Which is a weird thing to say. Or maybe I just think it is because the only people I've ever seen wearing Gucci trainers are middle-aged tourist mums from Holland. Can you tell me please where is the Piccadilly Circle?

After dropping some hardcore fucking truth about Charlie Sheen (even Justin Lee Collins would balk at trying to score LOLs off the "winning" trope in 2013), Ronnie pulls this face. Those of you familiar with metalcore will recognise it as what happens when a man cuts through some clean, emo choirboy vocals with a Cookie Monster/Raging Speedhorn “Rrrrrwooooooargh!”

Pro tip: out of context, this face always looks like blowjobs.

After the screaming, the band and some hot, jumpsuited sluts follow their fearless leader into a Nevada aircraft hangar to attend to some business. But what kind of business?

ROCK BUSINESS!

Trying to screengrab Ronnie dropping his biggest "Rick Ross's Instagram" swag proved really tricky, unfortunately, but allow this knowledge (via the lyrics of "Alone") to be dropped on you:

"I've got a lot of people talking nothing but chatter / Why'd you switch your style up and that I don't matter / Man, I've been in rap since I was shitting in Pampers / Climb the ladder to the top and now I'm shitting on rappers."

Pow! Take that, motherfuckers! Pampers!

Without wishing to sound butthurt and old, the story supposedly goes that in 1997 Dennis Lyxzen of Refused fame got into Levis and jazz and made this record/video, and that is why we now have heavily tattooed alleged wife-beaters in nasty suits and girls’ jeans rapping over trance synths. A bit of hardcore history for you. That one's a freebie. This is the kind of transition that makes Larry Levan to Flux Pavilion look seamless and respectful by comparison.

Sunglasses indoors, obviously, the Coca-Cola of things that immediately mark people out as wankers. Weirdly, though, I feel like the sunglasses are actually kind of comforting in this context. There is so much fresh hell being wrought from this video that it's nice to have a reminder of the way shitty things used to be. Because compared to Falling In Reverse, the past was a golden age for shit.

Seriously? Why are people still doing this? Even my mum flips the bird occasionally if somebody cuts her up. The middle finger is no longer the fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy that it was in 1999. We have the internet now. This gesture will never be offensive to anyone ever again. Stop it.

I'm not sure if this a glimpse into a rare moment of self-doubt from Ronnie, but in this screengrab he is doing that loser forehead thing (© Wheatus, 2000) backwards. So he's doing it at himself. In the words of Richard Littlejohn, You Couldn’t Make It Up.

Signing off by blowing a kiss to all the ladies/haters/lady haters out there; keeping it resolutely classy. Over and out, Ronnie, you deluded little man.

Previously by Robert Foster: How to Be Young, Happy and Jobless

Read about better music:

The Soul of UK Garage, As Photographed by Ewen Spencer

Rave and Hardcore YouTube Comments Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity

Watch – Noisey's Parquet Courts Documentary

We're finally pushing full steam ahead with a Canadian summer and we literally could not be happier about it. It's time to ruin all your jeans forever and turn them into cut-offs and start thinking about which music festivals you are going to get sun burnt at. To make things easier for you, our friends at Bear Flag wine are giving away some passes to this August's Grove Festival in Toronto. All you need to do is take a photo of a Bear Flag ad (on the street, on our website, or in our cool magazine) and submit it to the Bear Flag website. Easy, right?

But, in case you’re super unlucky when it comes to contests, or not around the Toronto area, we put together a list of our must-see acts for this spring and summer’s season of music festivals across Canada.

GROVE FESTIVAL – EARL SWEATSHIRT
How can you not be curious about the young boy turned rap star who disappeared to Samoa for over a year to learn about life on a maturation retreat? Odd Future has been through Toronto and Canada at large a few times—but never with Earl. We’re not really sure how good his live set is going to be at this point but that’s what makes him a must see. It’s the curiosity that’s driving this forward. Plus, with his new, debut album just around the corner hopefully there will be some exciting new material.

NXNE – MAJICAL CLOUDZ
Not only do they have a great name with a very clever misspelling to already suck us into their world, Majical Cloudz has been making waves from within their hometown of Montreal that have been reverberating out to the rest of the country and the world at large, thanks to the power of the internet. If you haven’t heard the band before you can either just stop reading this and poke around their Soundcloud or take our word for it when we say that it’s some really moody, deep dark singing over a sea of pretty electronic synth patterns. We’re sure they’re going to be playing like, 1000 showcases to keep feeding their buzz, so it probably won’t be hard to catch them.

OSHEAGA – DEATH GRIPS
Osheaga was a tough call but really it’s hard to ignore Death Grips. Their music is basically a wall of noise constantly assaulting your ears and face at all times, born from some kind of weird mix of punk and hardcore gangsta rap that really just fits together into this messy noisy package. It works. Anyone who has seen their live show knows how captivatingly awesome they are live—and given their recent controversies of canceling entire tours and messing with their record labels, there’s always the chance a story will erupt when Death Grips are around.

SLED ISLAND – BADBADNOTGOOD
Maybe we’re a little biased since these guys showed us such a good time we got pho and beers with them but we literally didn’t think hip-hop inspired jazz would ever be interesting until these guys came around. These lovably awkward internet nerds make some of the most fun live music around—and yet it’s inspired by classical jazz. Citing influences like Lil B and Gucci Mane will infuse your music with wonderful based energy, we suppose. Make sure you check these guys out and show Ryan Hemsworth some love too. He’ll be DJing at the festival and also provides an excellent example, for any crowd he’s playing to, on how to have a good time.

OBEY CONVENTION – PISSED JEANS
Pissed Jeans sort of sound like telling everybody to go to hell, in a really gratifying way; the kind of way that feels like one of those hardly-ever-happen moments where you think of a great comeback at just the right time, or simply flip two birds at once in the face of a challenging situation, without any care for repercussion or reprimand. That’s probably why Pissed Jeans are so much fun. Also, seeing them live takes the band to a whole new level. Brad, the singer, is funny as hell and the entire band exudes the type of consistent energy pretty rare in live bands, let alone touring bands, of the hardcore genre. Have you ever seen their interviews? They have bruises and cuts all over their faces most of the time. Don’t miss them.

It’s no secret Montrealers love to protest. Amidst a string of corruption scandals, anti-GMO sentiment, and tuition hikes that led to last year’s student strike, the site of a angry people marching through the streets holding banners and screaming half-rhyming slogans is familiar to most citizens. However public dissent has a new adversary in the form of bylaw P6. The bylaw was amended last year during the so-called Quebec Maple Spring. The purpose of P6 was to regulate demonstrations and force protestors to disclose their protest route in advance, while also prohibiting protestors to wear masks under any circumstance. Under the P-6 bylaw, Montreal police can declare any protest, assembly or gathering illegal, arrest people, and give them tickets of $637 up to several thousand dollars just for being there. We joined Montreal’s annual May Day protest to see the bylaw in action.

On the night of May 27, bulldozers and backhoes rolled into Gezi Park, a tiny island of trees and grass at the center of Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, and started ripping it apart. This was part of a government project to “pedestrianize” the historic square—what that meant in this case, according to many blogs, was turning one of the last open green spaces in the city into a shopping mall. No community organizations or local people were asked what they thought about the plans for the park devised by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which included rebuilding a historical barracks that was demolished in the 1940s and adding sidewalks to make the square more friendly to pedestrians.

Four days later, after nonviolent protesters occupied the park and survived attacks by the police that included tear gas and water cannons, they've won at least a temporary victory thanks to a court decision. In fact, Instanbul's mayor, Kadir Topbaş, just announced that there was never any plan to build a mall. It's an amazing eleventh-hour turnaround, but it didn't happen without a battle.  

Protesters began gathering in the park as early as Monday, May 27, and word spread through social media as more pro-park, anti-government Turks showed up to sit in front of the bulldozers. By Wednesday, the police were involved, and they responded to the nonviolent protests with aggressive tactics—what really got everyone’s attention was a photo from Reuters showing a young, apparently peaceful environmentalist in a red dress getting pepper-sprayed by a gas-masked cop. That image became a symbol of the “occupation” of Gezi Park, as well as the cops’ terrorization of the protesters.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the AKP wasn't interested in starting a dialogue with the occupation and gave a speech on Wednesday that made it clear that a decision on the park’s fate had already been made. By then, many protesters had set up camp at the park and were sleeping in their tents. At dawn on Thursday, May 30, the police entered the park, firing tear gas and burning tents. The bulldozers were stopped, however, when opposition politicians Sırrı Sureyya Önder and  Gülseren Onanç stood in front of them and demanded to see proper permits.

Even with the police using pepper spray as if it were bug repellent, the occupation continued, and even grew. On Thursday, photos of protesters reading to the police spread around the internet, and those who are involved in the occupation say they are committed to nonviolence.

“[The protests are] just a peaceful, environmentalist gathering with no leader and no agenda but to protect a public space,” said Utku Dorduncu a financier who recently moved back to Istanbul after eight years in New York. “I won’t say the majority of the protesters are the general public because the 10,000 gathered there on Thursday night were mostly college students, recent grads, and independent workers. Not really the breadwinners of their families. But those who have the time and opportunity to protect the public’s rights ought to.”

Last night a live feed from the park showed an almost festival-like air, as drum circles formed and rock bands performed. On FourSquare, 960 people had checked into Gezi Park and the hashtags #DirenGeziParki (Resist Gezi Park) and the account for Ayaga  Kalk Taksim (Stand Up Taksim) were all over Turkish Twitter. Mehmet Ali Alabora, a Turkish actor and the host of a half-hour political satire show (a rarity for Turkish television), tweeted (in Turkish), “It’s not just about Gezi Park friend, haven’t you understood? Come over,” and received thousands of retweets.  

“It’s such a diverse gathering,” said Aysegul Yildirim, a student. “There’s even a group called ‘Anticapitalist Muslims’ who describe themselves as Islamist.”

As new tents replaced the burned ones, topics of discussion among the occupiers included the controversial plans to build a third bridge over the Bosporus Strait, the laws restricting alcohol consumption laws that passed last week, and the recent demolition of the historic Emek Theater. Posters in the park had slogans like “Shoulder to Shoulder Against Fascism,” “Taksim Is Ours, Gezi Park Is Ours,” “Government Resign,” and “The People Will Not Bow Down to You,” with a drawing of PM Erdogan in a sultan’s hat.

By the time the actor, TV personality and satirist Okan Bayulgen took his place in the park that night to read The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, the number of protesters had reached 30,000 by some estimates. Then it went to hell.

Elif Cerrahoglu, a 20-year-old university student, described the scene:  “Everything was peaceful, people had gathered in a very calm protest. At around 5 AM I started to notice that people were getting up and trying to escape, then I noticed the police, and it all turned into turmoil. We weren’t in the center so we were able to get away, but thousands of people were hit by stones and beaten up. A girl standing in front of me started yelling, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And they beat her up in front of me.”

Yigit Guneli, a 26-year-old computer coder, said that the protesters who managed to stay in the park until 7 AM were sprayed with water. "I don't think it was just water though,” he added. “Those sprayed felt as if their skin was burning up." On Friday morning, however, Yigit was defiant: "We are going to resist with an even bigger crowd tonight,” he said. “If the police had not reacted in such a way, I think the crowd would have remained smaller."

At least five were taken into the ICU for head injuries after the attack by the police, and protesters reported that bystanders who were simply trying to commute to work were also subjected to the pepper spray and tear gas. On every street corner there were clusters of cops, but there were also calls on Twitter for the occupiers to regroup. The police have brought in gates to block entrances to the park, but the the protest has spread into the neighboring streets. “What is there left to do but not leaving the square unoccupied, and continuing to resist?” said protester Utku Dorduncu on Friday morning.

Midway through the fourth day of protests, a crowd gathered in Taksim Square despite three more violent attempts by police to disperse protesters. According to the occupiers, the cops were attacking everyone who wanders through the area with pepper spray, including pedestrians who are getting off the subway. "They are attacking women, children, the elderly, everyone,” said Utku. “And in reaction to that we remain peaceful, sharing gas masks and waters. This is not even unbalanced force, it's brutal."

On Friday, more protests near the square were being planned—though it was uncertain where and how they will convene in the face of police aggression—as well as a demonstration in the capital city of Ankara to support the burgeoning Occupy Gezi movement. But apparently, the authorities had have enough of the conflict, despite Erdogan’s harsh rhetoric earlier in the week. Today a court ruled (link in Turkish) that the planned construction projects needed to be halted until they are reviewed, and mayor Topbaş claimed that the park was never going to be demolished. It remains unclear why he couldn't have announced that four days ago, before the violence.

More of Nazim's photography can be found here.

NORWAY. Vesterålen. Burning barrack.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a pretty grueling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

Unlike almost all of the other photographers we have spoken to in the VICE Loves Magnum series, Jonas Bendiksen’s work isn't focused on war zones or conflict. Having worked his way through Magnum, starting as an intern and going on to become a full member, his view on how photography can engage with the world around us is pretty informed. From examining life in marginal post-Soviet states to exploring humanity’s ever-quickening transition from country to city life and its impacts, we talked to him about his work and why people should stop seeing slums as aberrations.

VICE: I’m sure you’ve been asked this lots of times: As someone who's worked his way up through the ranks at Magnum, you must have an interesting perspective on the agency as a whole. If you were asked to sum it up, what makes Magnum so important in the photography world?
Jonas Bendiksen: Well, I think what makes Magnum interesting and still relevant is that you have this incredibly diverse range of photographers, who in their own ways create photography that’s a commentary on what they see around them. And I think Magnum has become even more interesting in recent years because it’s become more diverse.

NORWAY. Vesterålen. Schoolyard with ice floes.

As you said, it’s a very diverse group of photographers. But would you ever say that there was a kind of "mission"?
Magnum has a common goal: to use photography to be part of a conversation about the world around us. Within that, each photographer might be interested in different things, but that goal is the common denominator.

How would you describe the idea behind your book, Satellites? It was about examining a somewhat forgotten region, right?
Yeah, the book is a journey through the fringes of the former Soviet Union. I stopped in all these places that you could say, on paper, don’t really exist. I mean there are these breakaway republics such as Transnistria and Abkhazia, that exist physically—they have their own borders and governments—but which are unrecognized. You could say these places represent some of the unfinished business of the Soviet breakup. So, that became a journey for me.

NORWAY. Vesterålen. Myre harbour.

What were your experiences of these places and of the people who live there? Did you notice any unifying characteristics?
You could say these were all people living under quite a bit of pressure, in the sense that life in these places is economically hard. To this day they are somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. It’s hard to travel from there and it's hard to make a living while there. At the same time, these places are all quite different, and have their own unique character.

Places We Live was your next book after Satellites. It dealt with the idea that for the first time ever, more people live in cities than outside of them. Did you treat it as an environmental issue or a social one?
I think my point is that both notions are completely inseparable. It's one of the things that working on that project made me think about. I mean, I’m not trying to say whether living in cities is a bad or good thing. What I'm saying is that it’s a phenomenon and we have to deal with it. More than 1 billion people live in slums and that number is forever increasing. We need to accept that these are how modern cities function and engage with the problem.

RUSSIA. Near Sergeyev Posad. 2011. Palina (6), plays in the foliage next to the dacha where she spends her summer.

Were you at all surprised by those slums’ ability to function?
I think that’s what surprised me throughout the entire project, and also why I made the project. I had read all these statistics and felt it was an issue that needed to be explored. But what really made me want to expand the scope of it was that I was overwhelmed by the normalcy of these places. You see the huge amounts of garbage and among them, you see normal people living pretty normal lives, dealing with the same issues as people everywhere else. They’re helping their kids do homework, trying to make a living, keeping their families together. You know, that project was an exploration of how people create normalcy in these kind of extreme settings.

RUSSIA. Vyalki, near Bykovo. 2011. Girls bathe their horses in a swimming pond next to an upscale dacha community.

I think you’re the first photographer in this series who hasn’t spent a part of his career in a war zone. Is that something you’ve just never been interested in?
You could say it’s not the type of thing that has really worked in my life. I became a father at the age of 24. So through much of my career I have been a father, and it’s just never made any sense to me to be the guy who flies off to where they’re dropping bombs. And I think that there are so many interesting issues to look at around the world. There are so many other forces and pressures working on human beings around the world that create so many fascinating and complex situations.

There is certainly room for someone who is not going to conflict zones to do interesting work. So, it’s never really been on my agenda. I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve always taken the most satisfaction when I do stories where I feel somewhat left alone, stories that everyone’s not chasing after. Which has led me to working on projects that are a little bit outside of the big headlines; smaller stories. Maybe they aren’t as dramatic and sexy as some of these other things, but to me that’s always been the most satisfying way to work. I feel like I’m bringing something to the table by engaging in a story that might not have gotten so much play otherwise.

Click through to see more photography by Jonas Bendiksen.

BANGLADESH. Asulia. 2010. This type of brick kiln is ubiquitous in Bangladesh, but is a heavy polluter (as it's both coal-fired and ineffective), in terms of CO2 and air quality. As Jonas was shooting, a storm came in with heavy winds and rainfall. The workers are digging up submerged bricks and throwing them onto land to be collected and taken to a waiting boat.

BANGLADESH. Padmapukur. 2009. On the char ("silt island") of Padmapukur, in the Ganges delta. Hurricane Aila destroyed the dikes, causing daily flooding of the communities.

ICELAND. Reydarfjordur. 2007. Thirty-year-old Aalheiur Vilbergsdottir, plays with her two young sons at the Reydarfjordur beach right across from their house, with the town in the background. She is a lifetime Reydarfjordur resident, along with her whole family.

RUSSIA. Altai Territory. 2000. Villagers collect scrap from a crashed spacecraft, surrounded by thousands of white butterflies. Environmentalists fear for the region's future due to the toxic rocket fuel.

MOLDOVA. Transdniester. 2004. The population of Transdniester is mainly ethnic Russians, and the main religion is Russian Orthodox Christianity. Here a priest gives his blessings before a christening in the icy waters.

GEORGIA. Abkhazia. Sukhum. 2005. Although Abkhazia is isolated, half-abandoned and still suffering war wounds due to its unrecognized status, both locals and Russian tourists are drawn to the warm waters of the Black Sea. This unrecognized country, on a lush stretch of Black Sea coast, won its independence from the former Soviet republic of Georgia after a fierce war in 1993.

INDIA. Mumbai. 2006. A little girl plays in Laxmi Chawl, a neighborhood of Dharavi. The lightbulbs are put out for an upcoming neighborhood wedding.

Previously – Peter Van Agtmael Won't Deny the Strange Allure of War

More from Magnum:

Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

Thomas Dworzak Has Photos of Sad Marines and Taliban Posers

Steve McCurry Photographs the Human Condition

Image via

There are times in everyone’s life when something profound occurs to us—events that should change us by teaching a valuable life lesson. I’d venture that I experienced countless lessons while in the ol’ clink-clink, but time and time again, I think back to a time when I was up on the Canadian border in the early winter of 2007 at a relatively bonerable “labor camp.” Unfortunately, these minimum-security camps are now all closed, but they allowed inmates to go out into the real world and work in the community. Granted, we got paid 15 cents an hour, but in hindsight, it was a pretty great place, as prisons go.

I’ve always enjoyed physical jobs like landscaping and such. Most of my labors at the camp reminded me of my upbringing in suburban Connecticut—I shoveled snow, raked leaves, and mowed lawns with an enthusiasm that made our boss (a.k.a. the CO) happy to have me as part of his five-man crew. In appreciation for our hard work he bought us eggs and bacon for breakfast, which we cooked up at our off-site shack that came equipped with an electric stove. His wife even used to cook us barbecued chicken every once in a while, and he would bring us venison occasionally—either ground up or made into sausages. He was a good man at the end of his career who admitted severely mistreating inmates in the past after he saw one of his co-workers get murdered by an inmate at Great Meadows in the 80s. It took him a long time to realize that not all inmates were scum and it was important to let his anger go and deal with inmates on an individual basis, just as you would any human. Many COs don’t treat inmates as real people, so just having a normal employee-to-boss relationship with him was nicer than you can imagine. Little things like this made incarceration more bearable.

I worked with that crew for about six months before I got shipped out to another facility. It sounds crazy but I got comfortable at this camp and was a little sad when I packed up. The next spot I went to was awful. I started working there in January, and almost immediately some guys who had been working the grounds for a couple years, started joking about the bodies piling up in a shack by the prison cemetery that we would be burying as soon as the ground thawed. I honestly thought they were fuckin’ with me.

Nope.

It turned out that part of our 15-cent-an-hour job was burying inmates who perished at Clinton Max and had no one who could claim the bodies, or else didn’t have anyone who gave a shit to arrange a proper funeral. The sadness of that situation is really unfathomable to me, and all the inmate workers considered it silently as we prepared to bury these bodies—I’m sure we all thought that we would never allow ourselves to become old men who died alone after life spent in and out of prison.

A backhoe basically did the hole for us, but we had to hop in with shovels to better chop out coffin-like shapes. As we dug the four holes that first day on the job, an eerie feeling washed over us. We found what appeared to be a human jawbone and a rib, which was a little confusing since these were supposed to be fresh graves. But maybe they reused them without telling us, or these were bones left over from the Indian days. I don’t know.

The coffins were shoddily made pine boxes with broomstick pieces that served as handles. We carried them out of the shack and placed them next to their holes, then, with two men on each side, lifted them into their graves. I wish I could say we were cracking jokes and taking it lightly, but really a funny thing was that the only person who showed up to perform the last rites for the dead (a Muslim, a Jew, and two Christians) was an imam. One alpha-dog inmate thought it necessary to chime in with his inane two cents and said, basically, “Bless these men in the next life,” like that really meant anything.

After the bodies were deposited, the backhoe dropped the earth onto the caskets and we heard each one pop as they caved in. We put the finishing touches on the graves and left behind pretty little mounds to await the plaques that would simply list the inmates’ names and birth and death dates.

Of the five guys on our crew we all returned to jail, so I guess this shit didn’t scare any of us straight. But it was scary. I guess it doesn’t really mater where I get buried, or who’s there when I’m dead, but dying in prison—then getting thrown in a hole by some criminals you’ve never met seems like a serious disrespectful way to end to one’s life. It’s one of my worst fears. And that job is the scariest item on my resume.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Previously: HardWhite and Harry Potter

Under the heavy influence of alcohol I’ve done some pretty irrational and amazing shit. You get to the point where you feel invincible, but it’s usually at the cost of your night’s memory. The fortunate thing is that I’ve always had friends and loved ones to tell me about it the next morning. However, when you booze hard with a partner, fueling each other’s bad habits, you’ll never know the cost of your drinking. Maybe you do way cooler shit, but who cares if you don’t remember it? Those are also the sorts of events that lead you to vow to never drink again—a vow you'll never keep. Those glories and pitfalls of boozing are the focus of Jordan Vogt-Roberts's 25-minute short film, Successful Alcoholics, which structures a young couple’s weekend meltdown into a strangely poignant, yet perfectly timed dark comedy.

The couple, played by Lizzy Caplan and T. J. Miller, manages to excel at work, get out of tickets, and live without a care in the world, despite or because of the fact that they’re permanently shit-faced. Lead actor T. J. Miller, who also wrote the script, plays wonderfully as the slovenly provocateur in love with, and enabling the hell out of, a charming Lizzy Caplan. The two drink, break shit, vomit, undress, curse, and still do better than everyone else. They manage to please everyone in the face of pretty ridiculous altercations, but when just for a night they lose their buzz, they start to question their own happiness. With a premise that keeps the couple out of trouble, successful, and out of the humdrum of the everyday, Vogt-Roberts gives himself room to explore the real emotions regarding alcoholism. In the drama and nastiness of alcoholism there are a lot of potential setups for comedy, and the whole cast and crew nail it. Successful Alcoholics is a really successful short film. Funny, gross, tender, and honest. You can watch the film below, but remember to drink responsibly.

Jordan Vogt-Roberts started out making shorts and working on FunnyOrDie.com, but his first feature The Kings of Summer opens today. It’s a modern coming-of-age comedy where three teens decide to build a utopia, free from parents, out in the woods for the summer. It was one of the best reviewed films at Sundance and stars teens, but also Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally as parents. You can check more of his work out on his site.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Photo via Flickr user Bradley Buhro

Watching a long, slow, poorly played baseball game that doesn't end how you wanted it to is analogous, in several ways, to drinking pitchers of lousy beer outdoors on a very hot day. For one, it is both demonstrably not good for you and progressively less fun as time spins on and the beer gets warmer, flatter and fartier. For another, it's still significantly better than most other things, and good enough to do again tomorrow. The low buzz of it runs not so much concurrently as concentrically with the hangover—everything happens at once, slowly, and somehow the next day's wedge of behind-the-eyes headache arrives before the bottom of the glass even comes into view. It's the sort of self-administered poisoning that our bodies and minds are built to process, even if they don’t do it happily.

Human psyches are pretty resilient machines, thankfully, and ones that can withstand a lot of garbage. If all the toxins and idiocies and little cynical mini-miseries we poured through ourselves stayed there—if we carried with us every glimpsed TMZ headline about Courtney Stodden and defective MS Painted Redditorial decoding of Joss Whedon's oeuvre and 41 Otters with a Case of the Mondays—we would be immobilized and miserable, obese and heartsick from accumulated empty-calorie triviality. Instead, these things pass through us and we wake up the next day with all those crummy thinkpieces on the first three episodes of the new season of Arrested Development and memories of last night's Mets loss filtered, processed, and already on their way to being gone.

The hangover is made of what's left. What's left—in the Mets' case, the memory of some sad-faced relief pitcher's break-less breaking ball hanging over the plate like a balloon until someone on the (fucking) Braves drives it into a gap—is annoying, but less so than it could be. We'll live, which is good, while probably not learning a sufficiently painful lesson to keep us from coming back the next night, pouring bad baseball down our throats with abandon, chugging strikeouts and chasing them with narcotized baserunning mistakes and inning-ending double plays.

With a long summer of conspicuous bad baseball consumption ahead for a great number of us—your author included and my inert, migraine-y Mets' strange, brief winning streak notwithstanding—it's worth wondering how healthy all this could be. It's not exactly bad for you, watching a bad baseball team play baseball badly, although it's also sufficiently un-fun to provide plenty of fleeting moments of clarity. During these, a series of uneasy questions all open onto the realization that you are watching unhappy looking men scowl and spit and flail at pitches in the dirt with all the coiled forcefulness of a grinning cardigan-clad elderly person riding a stair-chair in an underlit TV commercial. You also realize, as time wears on, that you are watching all this by choice, and that you will continue to do so as the weather gets cold and fall sets in and your team is looking towards the draft and free agency while the others compete for a World Series title.

People who don't like baseball are not easily converted. Baseball is slow and full of empty space. The sudden eruptions of grace and force are surrounded by long periods of squinting and standing around. If baseball works for you, all that negative space is more than fine—it's summer itself, performed nightly and at its own pace, and sometimes your team even wins. Watch a lousy team on a losing streak, though, and you'll eventually see what baseball skeptics see whenever they watch: a game that’s aimless and dull and stilted and long, and which isn't even quick about it. To read about a lousy team that's actively getting worse is even less fun—it's one continuous carping feed of squabbling mediocrities panicking officiously, huffy mayo-faced owners signaling their disappointment in vain country club code, and various front office goofs defending various indefensible things ineffectively before finally just giving up and firing the hitting coach. This is not a pastime, really, so much as it's a stirrup-socked pantomime of the United States Congress. Not good.

Truly bad teams don't just lose, they actively hollow the enjoyment out of an idle hour of tuned-out television watching. And yet, even knowing all this, even facing the prospect of several hopeless, fitfully enraging but mostly enervating months of it, we come back, shake off the never-quite-absent hangover, and pour another round. No one makes us watch or care about our team but ourselves, really. There's a stubborn knot of habit at the core of what makes fans of bad teams watch games we know won't make us happy, but there's also the choice not to cut that knot and do something else. Bad baseball doesn't exactly feel good to watch, or taste that great going down; it's bad baseball, after all. But it’s still refreshing—the buzz is enough even when the beer is flat and stale. A whole bottomless summer of this doesn't sound good, admittedly. But I keep coming back, helplessly but not really sadly, to how thirsty I'd be without it.

@david_j_roth

Previously: Hearing the Spurs

Photo by Nate Miller

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. With the assistance of my friends at the @YesYoureRacist Twitter account, I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

-The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s online purveyor of gossip and conservative news—maybe it's like a right-wing Gawker for dads?—recently posted an innocuous article about a rapper who goes by the alias “Rhymes Priebus,” a play on Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus's name. Fascinating, right? You better believe that I read that hot news take! Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to point out a charming pun, and whoever runs the Caller’s Twitter had to take it to the next level. The following tweet appeared briefly before being taken down:

You might be wondering what “HNIC” stands for. I'll save you some time: it means “Head N*gger in Charge” and you probably shouldn’t say it in public spaces. It’s vaguely problematic that a website run mostly by white males would refer to any black person as a “n*gger.” RACIST

Photo via Flickr sser WisPolitics

-A school-board member in Richmond, Virginia, has been asked to resign from his post over emails sent to colleagues that painted First Lady Michelle Obama in a less than flattering light. Some of the hilarious zingers in his emails included a photo of bare-breasted African women next to the caption “Michelle Obama’s high school reunion” and another image that implied that Mrs. Obama was paid a paltry $50 sum for posing in National Geographic. If she was only paid $50, she seriously got ripped off. Have you seen that bod? Damn, y’all. That booty is priceless. Also, I'd love to go to a high school where no one wore shirts. 9

-Last week, Louisiana Republican senator and sex-trade enthusiast David Vitter introduced an amendment to a farm bill that would ban anyone who’s ever been convicted of a violent crime, regardless of whether they’ve paid their debt to society and repented, from receiving SNAP food stamp benefits for the rest of their lives. This would mean fewer benefits for their family, essentially punishing children for the sins of their parents. Given the racial aspects of that amendment (minorities make up two-thirds of SNAP recipients and nearly three-quarters of the prison population, according to the most recent census data) it’s hard to argue that Vitter’s measure isn’t unfairly targeting nonwhites. Sure, there’s no way the amendment will become law, right? Right? 7

Photo via Flickr user GageSkidmore

-Fashion icon and famous Freemason Ann Coulter receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for yet again claiming that immigration is destroying the United States. This time, her brilliant theory is that people without “Western values” are streaming into the country. She points to the Boston bombings and the London machete attack as signs that only crazy, violent people are making their way to the West. It gets really good when she starts siding with the English Defence League, a xenophobic nationalist group that seeks to keep England "free from Islam." She claims they aren't bigoted because they love Jewish people. If you love Jewish people, you can't be racist. That's a new law. 8

@YesYoureRacist’s 10 Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @chelseleann: I'm not racist but I'm pretty sure god said keep colors apart and stay with your own kind

9. @HaiVikk_23: I'm not racist, but I do stereotype people, lol. I stereotype only because people have been proving them to be correct!

8. @keevinnk: I'm not racist , but ALL Indian men smell like complete shit.

7. @madden7494: I'm no racist but I cringe when two black women sit down next to us in the movies..

6. @noland_34: Being black doesn't make you a ni**er. You can be white and be a ni**er. You're just called white trash. #notracist

5. @matthewmaxey13: I'm not racist, but black people are only good for music

4. @abbeylynnxo: There are too many Mexicans and too many ghetto black people here. I'm not racist but good gracious.

3. @saiddzafic: I'm not racist but sometimes I think there should be a pro basketball league just for white dudes and one for black dudes

2. @bige0524: You can take this how you want I'm not racist but interracial relationships are gross to me

1. @wilsonstar14: i'm not racist. but chinese people can't f*cking eat quietly. none of them.

Last Week in Racism: Sergio Garcia Can't Wait to Serve Tiger Woods Fried Chicken

@dave_schilling

In the waiting room of Little Vinnie’s Tattoos, bikers and punks sit side by side with church-going grandmas and soccer moms. Customers fly in from as far as Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Brazil, to an unassuming strip mall just outside of Baltimore complete with tanning salon, liquor store, and adult DVDs. Anxiously, they enter Vinnie Myers' shop, the final destination for many breast cancer survivors attempting to recover what mastectomies have stolen away.

Breast cancer rates have risen in recent decades, and that increase has been especially pronounced in the United States. Currently, one in eight American women will confront the disease in their lifetime. Over the same period of time mortality rates from the disease have declined. For many, treatment will necessitate breast and areola removal. Patients survive the mauling with flat chests bound in dark scars. Most opt for reconstructive surgery. Breast implants can provide the shape of what was lost, but making a realistic-looking areola is a greater challenge.

For all of medicine’s advances, the best option for areola reconstruction is tattooing, and in the field of cosmetic tattooing, Vinnie’s trompe-l’oeil “areola portraits,” as he calls them, are widely regarded as the best that money can buy. 

“We’ve tricked doctors,” Vinnie’s jocose assistant Richie chimed in. “There’s been ladies that have called us all giddy and giggly, ‘You’ll never believe what happened!’ they say. ‘I went to my follow-up appointment with my surgeon and I disrobe and he’s looking through my chart and he’s looking at me real confused and he finally says, ‘I think we made a mistake. This chart says you were operated on.’"

“What’s your secret?” I asked.

“It’s just Art 101,” Vinnie replied, leaning up against the parlor’s pool table. “Light and shadow. It’s hard for me to believe that nobody else ever thought about this before. You know a lot of the other cosmetic tattoo artists, they just hold up a circle template and color it in. They’ve got three colors. They’ve got chocolate brown, bubble gum pink, and salmon. Whichever one you’re closest to, that’s what you get. Most of the white women get salmon.”

“So they don’t draw in the Montgomery Glands?” I asked referring to the little bumps of the areola.

“They don’t even draw in the nipple most of the time,” Vinnie exclaimed. “They’ll do a circle and then they’ll maybe do a darker colored circle. Maybe. You’ll get a chocolate colored circle inside of a salmon circle.”

“And most of the time they can’t even get the nipples in the right spot,” Richie lamented. “You almost wonder if they just close their eyes and point…”

“Exactly,” confirmed Vinnie. “To me, that’s absolutely criminal.”

Another aspect that Vinnie finds criminal is the typical doctor’s fee for cosmetic tattoo work. “It’s easily a couple thousand bucks,” he notes, “and insurance doesn’t cover it. Here, we charge the same amount for an areola as we charge for any other tattoo of the same size. Why should we charge more just because it’s a nipple?” At Little Vinnie’s, the price is $400 for one breast or $600 for both.

I sat in on several of Vinnie’s sessions that day. With his quiet confidence, his medical terminology, his clipboard, and his collared shirt, it was easy to see why so many of his clients called him doctor. He took such thorough medical histories that I half expected him to pull out a stethoscope. If he had, I doubt anybody would have even raised an eyebrow.

The last client of the day was a woman in her early 50s—a former head cheerleader, her husband proudly boasted. Her battle with cancer had lasted two years and had left her with a thick purple line where her left breast used to be.

She was nervous. Vinnie offered to fetch her a beer. “It’s OK,” he joked, “we’re all drunk over here!”

“What does it mean to you to have this procedure?” I asked the woman.

She thought for a moment, composing her words. “I’m hoping it will eliminate the constant reminder. For a while you’re just in survival mode. You just take it one procedure at a time, one diagnosis at time. And then after it’s all over, you have the sense that everything’s great—until you’re by yourself, and that’s the hardest part. Sometimes I’m great, and then when I get out of the shower, it all comes back—kinda like a kick in the gut. Hopefully this’ll just help erase some of the memories.”

“The good thing,” said Vinnie gesturing towards the surgical site, “is that when you look at this now, you only see the scars. There’s no other features to look at. But when you have the nipple there, you don’t notice the scars as much. You focus your attention on the nipple itself.”

“The way you describe it,” I posed to the woman, “It seems almost like a spiritual procedure—changing the body to change the mind…”

“You feel like it takes your feminine side away,” the woman elaborated, “And it’s odd because all the time women try to hide their nipples, and then when it disappears, you think, ‘Why did I hide it? Why did I work so hard to hide it?’

“It’s strange,” began Vinnie as he mixed the pigments, “how almost every woman I’ve talked to has that same feeling of not being complete, not really being whole. You felt whole before and now you’re not. What I’ve heard more than anything else when I finish this procedure is: ‘I feel whole again.’”

Vinnie donned his black latex gloves.

“Like a biker man!” the woman laughed.

“We gotta be edgy!” Vinnie riffed.

The tattoo machine buzzed and shook in his hand like something alive and spiteful. The woman winced and her lips disappeared as the needle bit in.

When it was over, 20 minutes later, Vinnie slowly spun the woman in her chair to face a full-length mirror.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Her face tightened and she dabbed at her eye. The answer took a moment to work its way out. “I don’t see the scar anymore,” she stammered. “It really just disappeared.”

(Photos by Roc Morin)

Roc’s new book, And, was released last year. You can find more information on his website.

More tattooing:

Life with Shisei - Horiyoshi III

Taji's Mahal - Clayton Patterson and the History of Tattooing in NYC

Photo courtesy of Echela Cabeza

Beats fill the lofty space inside the Latina Power club on a Friday night in the Chapinero neighborhood of Colombia’s capital. A kaleidoscope of images project onto a screen as Bogotá’s partyers stream in from out of the cold rain.

A towering, six-foot-high photo of a young woman stepping out of a doorway with a beckoning and intrepid look hangs by one end of the bar.  Printed alongside her on the heavy plastic poster: “Come out of the psychoactive closet.”

That catchy phrase—concocted by a drug safety advocacy group called Echele Cabeza—encourages users of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs to open up about their party habits and to investigate the safety of the drugs they are taking, something the group hopes will make partying in Bogotá a more enlightened and less dangerous activity.

Colombia has long been a world leader in the production of drugs—namely cocaine. But only recently has it had to confront that it has become a country of increasing drug consumption as well. And that, drug experts say, isn’t particular to Colombia. Drug consumption across the globe is on the rise, said Daniel Mejía, Director of the Center for Research on Security and Drugs at Bogotá’s University of the Andes.

Following that trend, a new drug bill, put forth by the Ministry of Justice, proposes to regulate (not ban) the personal consumption of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs. The possibility pleases drug users, satisfies many drug experts, and alarms some politicians here.

“That would send the wrong signal to our youth,” Efraín Cepeda, a senator and head of Colombia’s Conservative party told me. Earlier, he said to local reporters that for Colombia to allow for synthetic drug use would be a “leap in the dark.”

But Colombia already has some experience with the decriminalization of drugs.

For years, a 1994 law allowed for personal amounts of marijuana and cocaine. In the 2000s, under the administration of hardline ex-president Alvaro Uribe, Colombia started to take a more repressive approach to drug use and, in 2009, penalized the possession and use of cocaine and marijuana.

But last June, the country’s Constitutional Court reverted to decriminalize their personal use—and this time, extended the ruling to also include synthetic drugs.

Which ones? That’s exactly what the government bill is trying to define and put into law. If the law passes, it would allow for a personal dose of ecstasy (200 mg or 3 pills) and other amphetamines, but it excludes methamphetamines and LSD.

The government says it’s modernizing its drug policies to take into account what drugs are being used today.

Few know better than Echele Cabeza—to the milligram, actually. From party to concert to rave, Echele Cabeza  brings a mobile laboratory that can tell drug consumers if the sample of the substance of their choice actually contains what it’s been sold to them as. Users can break off a sample of, for example, ecstasy and the lab can detect if they’ve bought a fake pill or not. “If it has MDMA [the principal amphetamine in ecstasy], what am I going to tell you? Don’t consume it with alcohol,” said Sergio Daniel, 28, a sociologist and volunteer with Echele Cabeza. “If it doesn’t, what do I say to you? I’m sorry but I don’t know what it has  - take it responsibly.”

The collective is part of Acción Técnica Social, the only non-profit in the country dedicated to reducing the risks of consuming psychoactive drugs. One of their slogans says it all: More Pleasure, Less Bad Trips. Most of its members were party kids when the electronic music scene and its associated drugs surged here in the mid-1990s.

Its president, Julian Quintero, 35, with a mop of curly hair and a tattoo running down his arm that reads “Nice people take drugs,” remembers how before it became popularized, ecstasy was considered an exclusive drug—only the elite could afford its price tag (about $15 a pop at the time, which was expensive in this still-developing country) or access it via friends who brought it back from their travels in the US or Europe.

By the mid-2000s, the quality of ecstasy pills had dropped and so too had its popularity. LSD started filling the void. By the end of the decade, both LSD and ecstasy climbed lock-and-step in popularity

“Then what happened last year?” Quintero said. “LSD sucked.”  Not only that, the quality of ecstasy jumped back. “The good quality of ecstasy in last year replaced the drop in quality of LSD,” he said. So much so that the high quality of today’s ecstasy has drawn him, and others his age to use it again.

Echele Cabeza’s lab has been recording extraordinarily high concentrations of MDMA in ecstasy pills – some pills they’re coming across have the content of essentially two ecstasy pills in one. “It’s way too good,” said Quintero. “It has double the sensation, but it also can produce double the crisis [of coming-down].”

Quintero has observed that ecstasy’s high quality over the last year has bumped its consumption somewhat. But some politicians fear that its consumption will surge if Colombia passes into law a personal dose of ecstasy.

“It will increase consumption,” feared Gilma Jiménez, a senator [conservative? Naming the party is confusing here]. How about if we just say “ a senator” ?? Because her party isn’t actually conservative, but she is, a bit of an anomaly on certain issues within her own party. who opposes the bill. “It will hand over our kids into the underworld so that they become addicts and drug-traffickers.”

But Augusto Pérez, a psychologist who works with drug addicts and the director of the Nuevos Rumbos Corporation, an NGO that studies and consults on drug policy, says such an attitude is alarmist and unfounded. Ecstasy itself doesn’t have addictive qualities and he says Colombians shouldn’t expect consumption of a drug to spike if its decriminalized -  there was no long-lasting surge in cocaine and marijuana use following its decriminalization here, said Perez.

Essentially, ecstasy is only one of many drugs (often in a comparable price range) on offer in Bogotá. “Here, you have a party scene that few other cities in Latin America have,” Quintero pointed out. “Here you can consume the drugs you want at a low cost and high quality.”

The government expects to send its bill to Congress for a vote in July. A recent poll by a radio station found that 67 percent of those surveyed were against the depenalization of ecstasy and other synthetics.

“Why are they [politicians against it] pulling their hair out… and creating such a scandal because of depenalizing a substance like ecstasy?” said Perez. Especially, he noted, when personal use of cocaine, a far more dangerous and addictive substance in his view, has already been decriminalized—and to no significant effect on consumption levels.

It’s not as though Colombia has an ecstasy consumption crisis on its hands: a study of university students last year found that under one percent of students had used it last year, and its popularity lagged behind that of marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and inhalants.

So why are some politicians rattling about adding ecstasy to the basket of drugs permitted at a personal dose?  

“Because it’s new,” said one ecstasy user who wanted to remain anonymous. “People don’t understand the reality.” Though ecstasy has been around for years, its use is not widespread and the scene itself is relatively small, associated with electronic parties, skaters, the arts scene and those who can afford it at $12 – $17 a pop.  Furthermore, people tend to seek it out not for regular use, but a particular experience at weekend dance parties, pointed out Joana Arevalo, an activist and defender of the rights of psychoactive drug users (and one herself).

Most politicians opposed to the ecstasy allowance aren’t alarmed by the regulation of synthetic drugs per se, but are against allowing for a personal consumption of drugs in general.

“The key is to focus on policies that address the harms of problematic consumption,”—the kind related to addiction, criminal acts, and disease—said Mejía, who sits on a commission formed by the government to make proposals on how to advance the country’s drug policies

The proposed government bill’s tough stance on drug-trafficking while at the same time calling for less repressive approaches to consumption reflects a major shift in perspective towards looking at drug consumption as an issue of public health, and not a criminal one. Drug experts hail the approach of focusing on prevention and treatment, rather than sending consumers to jail.

With the bill, “We are drawing the line between the criminal and the consumer,” Minister of Justice Ruth Stella Correa announced.

No matter what, there are always going to be people who party with drugs, so there should be a focus on reducing the risks they might encounter while doing so, says Echele Cabeza.

“Now, there are a lot more substances, more pirated ones, more people in search of them, but more than anything, there’s a lot more sellers of everything,” said Daniel. So, informing the polyconsumer which drugs are bad to combine with each other is part of Echele Cabeza’s strategy. The mobile lab is vital too, says Daniel, in that it can warn users if they’ve been sold substances different than from what they were told by a dealer. And if they notice a pattern that in a certain part of town, or a certain dealer, is selling false drugs, they can send out an alert of sorts to users.

It’s not about stopping the party, said Daniel. They just want to make the party safe.

More ecstasy news:

The Dutch Love Ecstasy So Much Their Dirt Is Toxic

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Dear Comic Lovers,



My name is Nicholas Gazin, and I love comics. Approximately once a week I write a column in which I cover comics, art, illustration, and nerd interest and review some books. My last two columns for VICE were photo blogs about art shows. Sorry. This one's about comics again. Here are some things of interest.




Vasili Zorin 




Check out this hilarious series of Tweets between Johnny Ryan and Sir Mix-A-Lot.





Check out this Batman carseat that hugs your kids.


This Wild Grape candy packaging is so beautiful to me.






Check out this old illustration about urban loneliness.




Look at this cool old kinescope thing.






Think about this great sketchbook drawing by Garrett Young.





Look at this pretty Jack Kirby button.







Look at these great old press cards from San Diego Comic Con.




Gary Panter drew a great multi-page comic for Red Bull about his own life and activities. Check it out.


I have a poster in this charity art show that Nike is putting on. I am kinda surprised, but it's happening. 

Anyway here are the reviews.

Strip Show

Wartella

Burger Records Books

Burger Records has entered the world of book publishing with this 12"-by-12" hardcover that celebrates the career of M. Wartella. There's a photo I took in the back of the book of King Tuff, so I got a free copy. If you're a punky comics guy, it's hard not to appreciate. Here's a little Q n' A I did with Wartella. 

VICE: What are the things that you've done that Vice's readers might know you from?
M. Wartella: Well, back in the early days of VICE we did that scratch-off cover. When the issue came out, VICE threw a party with Ol Dirty Bastard and it was pretty trippy to look around and see all these freaks sitting around with pocket change scratching off the covers. I think if you have an un-scratched copy it's worth some dough.

How'd you get involved with Burger Records?
My friend Bobby Harlow, he's a record producer from Detroit, we go way back and he's the official "Burger Guru". We just started doing t-shirts and stuff and it built from there. They are amazing guys. Totally smart and totally cool. I'm currently designing a 7" sleeve for them for the upcoming BURGER Singles Club™.

Is Wartella your real name?
Of course! Pen names are for pussies. Real names are punk!

Why is your book so expensive? That's not punk.
It's pricey because it's a limited edition first pressing, but don't worry, those copies all sold out in an hour, and we're printing up a cheaper version for stores!

What comics did you love at various points in your life? Do you remember the first comic book you ever saw and/or owned?
Well, MAD was my first love. Then one fateful day at a B.Dalton or some other mall-crap bookstore, I stumbled onto a copy of Crumb's HEAD COMIX and Groening's SCHOOL IS HELL. My life and psyche have never been the same!

What are your favorite things to draw?
Mindscapes

Tell me about your Village Voice strips. I liked how lively those were. They seemed very Will Elder influenced.
Well, Elder is the master. But the VOICE strips were also inspired by M.C.Escher and the old Puck artists. Ya gotta plan 'em out like a puzzle so that all the characters fit together seamlessly.

How old are you?
Shit... I can't remember anymore! I'm 30-something... If you read my STRIP SHOW book I think you can piece it together.

Get it here. 

Lose #5

Deforge

Koyama

Man, Michael Deforge has one hell of a work ethic. The new Lose is mostly taken up with a story about a young boy who has a crush on a girl he doesn't know very well while taking for granted a girl that clearly likes him. We see him regurgitate information he's fed by the girl he's friends with to cool kids and by the time it seems like he might have realized that he was a jerk it's too late. There are also talking animals and bizarre fake science and body horror because it's a Deforge comic and he is all about things being gross. 

Get it here. 

Very Casual 

Michael Deforge

Koyama

This is another Michael Deforge book. The other comic I reviewed was his most recent work and this book is a collection of his least recent work. This book  collects his Spotting Deer comic and other stuff most of which was published in anthology and mini comics. Two were originally published on the Vice site. Did I get a mention? No. Fuck Michael Deforge. 

The comics in this book range in quality but they are all slathered in in heaping doses of shame, regret, self loathing and heavy stealing from David Cronenberg movies, From Beyond and other body horror films, like most of his work. Not Deforge's best stuff but better than most people's early work collection books. If you dig behing disgusted this is where it's at. 

Get it here. 

Mere

CF

Picturebox

This is a collection of CF's zines from 2012 which collect crudely beautiful drawings of stuff, comics that are artsy and some photos. Everything is printed in black ink on differently colored paper. It's great. Everything CF has made up to this point is great. I have yet to dislike a singly thing I have seen from CF. A respected comics guy who I thought was trying too hard made fun of CF claiming that CF was trying too hard "with that haircut." I guess that's the world of art though, a bunch of disconnected assholes accusing each other of being phoneys. I don't care what CF is like as a person. His drawings are beautiful and they hit me on an immediate level. I assume most artists are awful people. 

Get it here.

Larry Clark Stuff

Editedby Larry Clark and Johan Kugelberg

Boo-Hooray

This is a catalog of the Larry Clark Stuff show at the Boo-Hooray Gallery in Lower Manhattan. It's a llittle digest sized book that was limited to 330 copies. It turns out that Larry Clark's stuff is mostly T-shirts made by FUCT and other skateboard companies as well as some actual skateboards. Not bad. 

Get it here. 

Everything Takes Forever

Jesse Reklaw

Koyama Press

Jesse draws in a way that's informed and pleasant. His pen and ink wash style kind of feels like the soft shapes of Travis Millard and the loose lines and watercolor of  Barry Blitt mixed together.

Although his drawings are nice his comics aren't all that much. One has a guy with a big taco for a head try to order a taco at a restaurant and gets indignant when the taco vendor seems confused. Then he eats the taco. Most of the comics in this book are kinda like that as far as story development goes.

I see Jesse doing what a lot of young cartoonists do which is coming up with ideas but not stories. People will present what is more of a first act than a story and then they think they are done.

Get it here. 

See you next time!

@NicholasGazin

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Love-In #88

On the sixth day of the biggest civil uprising Turkey has seen in a decade, police forces retreated from Taksim Square in central Istanbul following a 36-hour battle.

Tens of thousands of protesters spent the whole night resisting an unregulated and brutal assault of tear gas, water cannons, and plastic bullets, which left scores of people injured, traumatised, and hospitalized.

While people were being beaten by police, mainstream media have caused outrage among Turks by neglecting to comment and refusing to broadcast from the streets. Residents who couldn't leave their houses banged saucepans and pots against each other to create a symphony of protest noise.

By and large, people have united in opposition to the way Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party have been treating protesters. Unexpected alliances have formed between people from wildly disparate groups, such as "Devrimci Muslumanlar" (anti-capitalist Muslims), LGBT groups, secularists, right wingers, and the hooligan firms of major football teams. Doctors have volunteered their time and effort to help the injured on the streets and lawyers have come to the aid of those who have been detained.

This afternoon, there were reports that many ISPs have been disconnected, so people have resorted to alternative DNS systems and VPNs to access the internet. At the Besiktas ferry stop, 15 minutes from Taksim Square, police are blocking protesters as they disembark from boats, attacking them with batons and tear gas.

Now that the police have left Taksim Square (tear gassing people as they went), thousands of people remain in Gezi Park waving Turkish flags and chanting "Tayyip Istifa"—meaning "Tayyip Resign"—while #tayyipistifa is trending on Twitter. There are reports that tensions are rising between protesters and pro-government Islamist groups in the nearby neighbourhood of Tophane, where Islamists are said to be attacking people with knives.

Meanwhile, the fighting has spread to the city of Ankara, where protesters in Kizilay Square have been tear gassed from police helicopters. Police violence shows no sign of letting up and there are many injured.

Previously – Istanbul's Taksim Square Has Become a Warzone

Rembrandt's "The Syndics of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild," 1662, via Wikimedia Commons

When I was 15, a weed mentor of mine told me over a shwag blunt that there are people in this world who refuse to smoke weed that’s below a certain grade. “If you pass them a blunt, they’ll ask you what kind of weed is in it, and sometimes they even refuse to hit a blunt at all.” I couldn’t believe my ears. To me, the weed you smoked was simply the weed you could get your hands on—whatever availability and budget allowed. I never turned down a hit, and I certainly didn’t have a problem with blunts. I had no idea that I would become precisely the type of snob for which I felt so much scorn.

At some point shwag started to give me a headache, or rather, it always gave me a headache but then I started to mind it. To the disappointment of Malik, the neighborhood shwagman, I switched to the product carried by a nearby hippy, who consistently had tasty weed that I wouldn’t taint with the flavor of a blunt. There, I said it. Blunts are only good to mask the flavor of shitty weed and give it a little nicotine kick. The only other benefit, and thereby the only reason to use blunts for good nugs, is if there are a bunch of people smoking and you want the weed to get around. Blunts are famously slow burning. At the peak of my blunt days, I belonged to a crew of stoner outcasts that managed to consume hordes of blunts in and out of our dorm on the corner of Broad and Diamond in Philly.

We lived in virtual prison cells on the 7th floor of a building on the edge of campus, with a steady flow of zombie-like bums and crackheads rattling at the partial fence around it. Adding to the post-apocalyptic vibe was our elevator, a haunted iron maiden that scared us onto the stairs, which then scared us right back into our rooms. With our weed coming from a floormate, the only reason to emerge from the building was to grab a dutch from the gas station across the street, where at least three shootings occurred in our first semester. This hugely undesirable task required only one quester, a role that was decided by nose goes until a new member of the crew entered our midst.

Egon was a fucking lunkhead. We first encountered his doofy ass because fate and the housing board paired him with our integral homeboy Dave. In that first few weeks of freshman year, when everybody exchanged numbers with everybody, casting a wide net and then narrowing it down, clumping up into little unranked cliques, our pristine crew congealed with a dust particle in the mix, and that was Egon. He ignored all the natural cues and forced himself into our circle. None of us, not even the most dickish among us, could shake this kid. And so, during those cold winter days, over the ghoulish murmur of the elevator lurking just feet away, we decided to nominate Egon as the permanent blunt getter. For the first few weeks he obliged us, until one day when I was breaking up weed on my djembe (yeah, college) and I casually gestured for him to exit the room and do his job. He spoke up in his garbled, goony voice, “What do I get out of it?”

It was a valid question, as we had all equally contributed to the weed pile for this blunt, and he had gotten the last several dozen dutches, but nevertheless it infuriated me. None of us even liked Egon, and we had done him the solid of finding him a place in our crew, and now he was questioning that contribution as if he didn’t now how god-awful he was. The nerve! That first time, we avoided a confrontation and sent someone else to get the dutch. And the next time someone else, until suddenly we were back to the pre-Egon method. What didn’t change was Egon’s lameness, bringing down the quotient of our whole crew. A couple of the softies in our group humored him, pitying his lack of other friends and continuing to feed this stray cat with obligatory games of Super Smash Bros. He was still there for every blunt session, and the next time I was hunched over the djembe asking him to go grab the dutch, he opened his fat mouth and uttered those seven words in a half-retarded, garbled whine: “What do I get out of it?”

This time, I couldn’t take it. Egon had thrown off the balance, refusing to comprehend the burden that placed on us, and completely disregarding what we had given him—a purpose. In front of all of us, he spat on that purpose in defense of whatever brittle confidence he had in himself. It all bubbled up inside me and came spewing out all over Egon’s face. “What do you get out of it? What do you get out of it, you fuck? You get to have friends, you worthless sack of shit. You get to pretend that we all fucking like you, and all you have to do is work your dumb ass down to the store and get the blunt right now!”

Yes, I am a monster, but you know what? So are you. There’s a monster inside all of us, and it takes an Egon to make it come out. It takes that pebble in your shoe that jams itself into your heel and your big toe alternatingly, and no matter how many times you take off the shoe, smack it against a wall, inspect your sock, you pop your shoe back on and start walking, and suddenly there it is again—a seemingly minor annoyance that’s somehow fucking your life up so much that you want to scream! AAAAHHHHH FUCK YOU EGON!

I'd love to tell you that after that, Egon took the hint, went down to buy the dutch, and resumed his role, returning order to the system. I wouldn't even mind telling you that he punched me in the face and ran out of the room. No. Egon sat there staring at me blankly while I raged for a few minutes. I finally ran out of steam, I may even have knocked over the djembe, and he was still sitting there just looking at me with some vague expression of fear or anger or maybe nothing at all, just the void of his intellect echoing my wrath back at me. I stared back silently for a minute and then someone else in the room said, "Uhhh... Fuck it. I'll go get the dutch." It wasn't the last time Egon tangled with his position in the crew, but things pretty much went back to nose goes, and I think that means that Egon won. 

Speaking of blunts, check out a rolling contest between me and a rapper called OG Dutchmaster, presented by Taji of Mahal fame. Who do you think won?

@ImYourKid

Previously - Getting Busted in New York

Photo courtesy of Life Ball

There's something about the classical uniformity of Vienna (or any European city) that makes large groups of people in evening dresses seem perfectly natural. That's why the Life Ball, an annual fundraising spectacle that hopes to eradicate HIV/AIDS by amusing European nobility (and homosexuals) with whatever is hip and cool in the New York gay club scene, doesn't seem so out of the ordinary. Tuxes, gowns, and even the more outlandish costumes fit right in with the landscape of the city.

This isn't your common gala, however. It is, essentially, the world's gayest party. We're talking gayer than Bradley Cooper's underwear drawer. In fact, every year, the Life Ball packs a plane full of singers, drag queens, dancers, club promoters, press, DJs, and various hangers-on from New York nightlife's queerer corners and ships them over to the home of Mozart for the amusement of the Austrians. So that’s where I found myself last weekend.

Before the party, everyone gathered in Vienna's City Hall Square along the "magenta carpet," the world's longest red carpet where patrons paid thousands of Euro to have images of them projected on giant screens all around the square. That it’s a "magenta carpet," is particularly endearing, because it serves both as a nod to an old-school Key West-style campy gayness and as a way of differentiating this from other events and galas. The “magenta carpet” is queering itself.

Photo by Brian Moylan

This year, the theme was “Arabian Nights,” and as you can imagine, there were plenty of costume-store Jasmines and Aladdins, but there were even more people in stunningly rendered original costumes—people with wigs turned into bird cages or wearing giant genie lamps that actually produce smoke when rubbed. There was one man painted blue like a Hindu god (not really Arabian, but whatever) showing off not only his sculpted body, but the genius of whatever makeup artist sprayed him down and then installed a galaxy of crystals on his rippling muscles.

The program began out in the square like the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Dancers swirled around a stage and a giant ark bearing a black ballet dancer playing the sultan was pulled up by about 100 men in costumes right out of a Broadway spectacular. A full orchestra in the pit and opera singers dangling off the pulled conveyance sang at full belt. American Idol loser Adam Lambert emerged dressed as Ali Baba to to perform this year's Life Ball theme and 40 shirtless thieves with fake tattoos scrawled across their bodies served as his backup dancers. There were actually 40. I counted.

After more artistic renderings of a lost Arabia, two hosts took the stage and started speaking in German. They say something about stopping AIDS around the world and then Hilary Swank gave out some awards (speaking in English). Next, Olympic diver Greg Louganis summoned the original “I Dream of Jeannie” actress Barbara Eden out of a genie bottle. For someone in her 70s, she looked damn good in her genie costume. Gary Keszler, the event’s founder, asked Barbara for three wishes and those wishes produced Bill Clinton, Elton John, and Fergie. Behold this crowd on stage, a hodge-podge of nostalgic camp and genuine star wattage. It's sort of like your gay uncle Leon's fever dream. This was capped off with a fashion show by Roberto Cavalli, a man who makes clothes that look like the Technicolor yawn a drunk teen spewed out in front of a Miami bottle-service club. I skipped it and headed inside to the party.


Photo by Brian Moylan

The inside of City Hall looked like every amazing cathedral they force you to visit on high school trips to Europe, but exceptionally festooned in a damask regalia rarely produced at this scale. At the center there was a dance floor built atop a cobblestone-paved courtyard with Red Bull-sponsored bar right in the middle. On the outer rim of the courtyard were two stages of women dressed as Scheherazade frolicking in swings.

Off of this room there was one for the hits of the 70s and 80s and another for "butch and bears." This might have been the the only explicitly gay room.

The VIP section was upstairs, and there was a crush to get up the huge marble staircase. The people running up and down in gowns looked like a deleted scene out of Amadeus. There were a dozen more rooms upstairs each boasting its own set of DJs and performers, each an architectural marvel where, for the night, several thousands Austrians would drink and smoke as much as they like. On Monday morning, I'm sure half of the rooms return to hosting nothing but filing cabinets and a few desks, robbed entirely of the fairy dust that seems to have been sprinkled over the entire building this evening.

In one room famous transsexual Amanda Lepore sang some of her songs. In another, gay porn star Pierre Fitch (who showed everyone his cock and asshole on the plane ride over) was DJing. In yet another perpetual club kid Susanne Bartsch hosted drag chanteuse Joey Arias.

In the main VIP room, after the sit-down dinner was cleared a group of 40 or so voguers (I didn't actually count them) took to the main stage for one of their balls, a scene familiar to anyone who has seen documentary Paris Is Burning. Except this ball was judged by Fergie, Adam Lambert, Kelly Osbourne, choreographer Fatima Robinson, and gay twin fashion designers Dean and Dan Caten. Each voguer took his or her turn on stage, pirouetting and working their arms with the jerky fluidity that is the signature of the genre. They spin and spiral, drop and shoot back up into the air, and one even did a hand stand on the judges table, much to their amusement.

Through each of the categories (they weren't just competing in vogue but "butch queen face" and "sex siren") everyone on stage was enraptured, but the Austrians in the audience stared on with an aloof confusion. They know they are supposed to be attuned to the spectacle, but there is no way for them to understand it. It is foreign even to me, a fellow New York homosexual, so how can these straight, blond Europeans understand black and Latino drag culture?

Photo courtest of Life Ball

I don't know if they can, and a sinking feeling about the whole event consume me. Is this some sort of minstrel show? Have all the gay New Yorkers been brought here for our otherness, to put on acts and perform for the rich white people who are buying tickets to the event. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the vogue ball where the dancers weren't being judged by their peers, but literally by a bunch of wealthy Caucasians (Ms. Robinson excluded).

That's when I finally realized how strange it was that the crowd at the party was overwhelmingly mixed with the majority of patrons leaning to bland heterosexuality. I don't know if that is how it was 21 years ago when Life Ball started, but, like everything else cool and gay, this seems to have been totally taken over by the straights, just as Madonna did to vogueing in the 90s.

These people weren't just watching the drag queens and gay boys (and, don't get me wrong, there were still plenty of circuit queens in attendance) but they had become them. The costumes were over the top and the women painted to look garish like their drag sisters. Most of the men were in the standard issue West Hollywood Halloween costumes, some sort of slutty shirtlessness to show off their gym-bodies and their ingenuity. They weren't trying to exploit us, they were trying to be us and their imitation was truly the highest form of flattery.

Photo courtesy of Life Ball

Feeling bold (and looking dapper in my tux) I approached several of these men on the dance floor, getting up close and trying to make some magic happen, and in every instance a biological female quickly appeared to whisk her man away with a smile. At the end of the night, exhausted after dancing with new friends until nearly 5 AM, I sidled up to a gorgeous blond man wearing nothing but a pair of harem pants and a turban. Boldly I rubbed my hand along a taut bicep. He leaned in for what I thought was going to be a kiss, but instead, he talked into my ear over the dance music. "Sorry," he said in accented English. "I'm not gay, but I really like gay people." He smiled and we kept dancing with me.

That was sort of the ethos of the party, a bunch of straight people who really like gays. And what is so wrong with that? We don't need them all to make out with us; we just need them to accept us. The Life Ball seemed to go a step beyond acceptance into full-on celebration. It was a night for everyone to be gay, for everyone to enjoy the campy and the crazy, for everyone to spend way too much on an outfit, dance to all hours, and be sexually adventurous like gays have been doing better and for longer than any other group. This party was held in a government building. It was a sanctioned practice that has the backing of every part of society without any moaning or groaning from the right. Imagine what would happen if a gay circuit party happened in a government building here? It would lead every show on Fox News for the next 17 years.

The party raised tons of cash to fight AIDS, and did it by throwing the best party any of these people have ever been to, by making it the gayest party in the world. Even without the money, the city's transformation into a gay paradise seems like another kind of victory.

@BrianJMoylan

More Great Gay Stuff:

Gay-Proofing the Bible

I Went to the Last Gay Catholic Mass at the UK's Church of Our Lady of Assumption

Posing as a Gay Republican Will Get You Laid

Pussy Willy - Part 1

Image via

Jamen Shively is high on cannabis legalization.

For someone who only lit up for the first time ever last year, Shively, a former Microsoft manager, sure has mastered all the heady pro-pot talking points. He likens the growth of green legalization, recently spurred by Washington State and Colorado voting to legalize small amounts of cannabis for recreational use, to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. When the Seattle Times asked him if he's at all worried about the Feds shuttering his plans to open up a national chain of pot shops, he waxed Jedi: "Darth," Shively began, cribbing Obi-Wan Kenobi, "if you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." 

You might be cringing. But there's no way around it: when you're a business person looking to capture a massive slice of a potentially massive pie, you have to talk the talk, winking and nodding as if you've been there all along. You have to siddle up, in this case, to a crowd that is maybe quite wary of some of the ripples starting to emanate from proverbial Big Pot. Medical pot users and stoners alike just loOooOve Star Wars, or something. Right? So does Jamen. He is one of you! And together—you, the affluent baby-boomer user to whom Shively's proposed chain would expressly target and cater—you'll forever change the arc of history, bong in hand. 

This is the reality of the "get rich or high trying" phenomenon. But here's the thing. Not only have OG NorCal growers and strain connoisseurs long foretold (however sketchily) the coming age of a Starbucks of Pot, wherein deep-pocketed suits and squares swoop in, wiping out a rich history of mom 'n pop bud shops in the name of shilling mediocre product masked as the real deal. (Think Marlboro Greens.) Shively's plan, if he can pull it off (see: unlikely), stands to do far more harm than good to America's number-one cash crop.

Why? Shively's brand, called Diego Pellicer, would broker some sort of transnational trade arrangement with Mexico—where, presumably, cultivation of some of the No. 1 Trusted Brand of American Pot would be outsourced. Indeed, Vicente Fox, Mexico's former President, recently appeared next to Shively at a press conference.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.VICE.com.

Blachman's male panel judging a naked woman's body. (Image via)

Last month saw the premiere of Blachman, a new Danish TV show where a panel of men judge the bodies of naked women. That's literally the show – no big statements about trying to challenge the notion of objectifying women by openly objectifying women (or however a fine art graduate would justify a project of the same nature), just some men saying what they like and don't like about the bodies of naked women.

Weirdly, lots of people think the show is sexist, so I had a walk around London to see if the strangers I ran into agreed.   

Clavey from Brazil, 37, trainee manager: It's exciting, but sexist. Women should already like their bodies – they shouldn’t wait for men to like their bodies. As a woman, I don’t feel comfortable with the idea.

Why not?
Well, if I was to go on the show, I feel like it would be showing too many of my intimate parts. And I don’t have a very big ego.

Would it be okay if the roles were reversed and women critiqued naked men on TV?
No, I think it's the same.

You're from Brazil – would the show be popular there?
No, I don't think so. We have women in bikinis on TV all day long. It's completely normal for us to see a lot of bums and bodies.

Hannes from Germany, 23, student: It's not okay. It's sexist.

What do you think the limit of nudity on TV should be?
Everything but the genitalia for men. It's OK for women to be in bikinis.

So would the show be OK if the women were in bikinis?
Yeah, as long as it doesn’t run during the day, when kids watch TV.

The director claimed that women "thirst for men’s opinions". What do you think of that?
I don't agree with that. If I met a girl, I’d like to know more about her mind than her body. I think the women who go on the show are anomalies.

Would the show would be a hit in Germany?
Yes, because a lot of people enjoy seeing nude women.

But not nude men?
No.

Alright then.

Tony, 41, works with young offenders: It's an utterly pointless show.

Could you imagine the show being a hit in the UK?
I hope it wouldn’t be. I would have no reason to watch a show like that – it sounds horrific.

The director claims that the women ”thirst for men’s opinions” about their bodies. Do you agree?
Of course that's not true. It's a director trying to make money and put on a show for himself. He’s not interested in the value of these women. He's not looking to move people or make statements – they’re just standing there. It's almost like a stagnant porn movie, isn't it? How long could you watch that for? A naked woman is a naked woman.

One of the contestants claimed that she got something out of the show, like fan mail and marriage proposals.
Well, you could get fans and proposals in the street, you know? You don’t have to take your clothes off.

True.

Juliette, 26, event manager: I think it’s really bad, basically. And it objectifies women, which so much media and TV does already. So I’m against it.

Would you be interested in seeing the roles reversed on TV?
Yeah, actually. I think it would be interesting to see the reverse side. And if there are women doing it now on TV, then I think the same thing needs to be done with men.

Do you agree with the show’s director, who claims that women "thirst" for men’s approval?
I do, but only because society has made some women feel like they need men's approval. There are women who don’t, but unfortunately I still think there are a lot of women who do. Only because men controlling the media have encouraged that.

Do you think men "thirst" for women’s approval?
I guess they do, in a way. But not to the same degree.

Felix, 20, model: I think it's retarded – completely sexist and degrading.

One of the contestants claimed that she got fan mail and marriage proposals. Do you think anything good can come out of the show?
No. It's a business, and people will do anything to make money. But the government has to stop these kind of shows because they’re stupid.

If the roles were reversed, would the show OK?
It wouldn’t be better, no. But it would probably be more accepted because sexism is mostly about women.

Would you watch it either way?
No.

The director claims that women "thirst" for men’s approval of their bodies. Do you agree?
In general, women don’t have the best self-esteem. Maybe that’s why they’d like to be on this show – to be complimented.

So you don't think there will be any hot girls on the show?
No, there definitely would be. But even hot girls don’t have the best self-esteem.

Do good-looking guys suffer from self-esteem issues, too?
Oh yeah, definitely. And not just because of the media – it could be anything that dents their self-esteem.

Previously - Which Would Be the Most Embarrassing Animal to Get Killed By?