January isn’t even half over, but consumers worldwide have already been assaulted by a cavalcade of commercials, magazine ads, and tweets that assume they are all a bunch of halfwits. This is nothing new, of course. And while the argument over the reason for this dearth of creativity—is it a lack of effort on the side of the ad men, or are these companies actually striking their intended chords with their target audiences—is up for debate, these spots are painful to watch no matter the reasoning behind them.

I’ve picked out the most despicable examples from January below.

Asshole #1 - The Insecure Male Asshole

The “war on men” is being bandied about a lot these days. Men just ain’t as manly as they used to be, according to many media outlets (just use your Google fingers and search “war on men” if you want to read some real bullshit). One muscular man—the raging douchebag in this Summer’s Eve commercial—is willing to go full William Wallace to get his testes back after his wife tells him that he is in fact vigorously scrubbing his hard body with her pussy soap (manly men cannot read, I guess). He then goes on a testosterone tear, thus earning back his Man Card.

While not as prevalent as casual sexism against women in ads, the Male as Moron Movement remains a go-to linchpin for lazy creatives.

I have no idea how this commercial sells Summer’s Eve soap. It would make a much better ad for Old Spice or any other “manly” cleaning product. What I do know is that it is pathetic that we still can't say the word “vagina” in American commercials in 2014. The USA is still in 3rd grade. Vagina vagina vagina. Vagina.

Asshole #2 - John McEnroe

Protect Your Bubble is an online UK company that provides insurance for all your fancy little devices. The animated mouse, “Squeak,” is the company mascot. Those are not McEnroe’s kids or wife. Poor Johnny Mac has become Bart in the “Bart Gets Famous” Simpsons episode, walking on screen, saying his catchphrase, and collecting his endorsement money. At least he was funny in a 2006 Seat Altea spot. This commercial is just so very sad.

Asshole #3 - Rikki Kasso, creative director, Meso Creative

The above assburger magazine ad by GoodTime Burgers, which features a woman’s ass cheeks as a bun with the fixings jammed up her poop shoot and I guess her pussy too, was banned by Australia’s Advertising Standards Board for being “degrading” to women.

The creative director of GoodTime’s ad agency, Rikki Kasso, who is apparently a man, defended the assburger thusly:

“The image encompassed our entire vocabulary and communication strategy for the GoodTime brand. Sun, Fun, and Buns. The extra large, fresh baked buns being the GoodTime Burgers distinct point of difference, coupled with the Bondi location where bikini’s seem to be a uniform.

“The point was to speak to our audience exclusively, and that we have achieved. The image itself has some people feeling violated and even led them to conclusions beyond our original intent. If the advertisement invoked any emotion hopefully it was a pleasant one, and above all it’s OK to smile and have a laugh once in a while.”

Do you think the tomatoes are supposed to be swollen hemorrhoids?

If it's any consolation Auburn fans, there are 47 chances to win on the way home. #BCSChampionship #BCS pic.twitter.com/2HZbH3kpsY

— Denny's (@DennysDiner) January 7, 2014

Asshole #4 - Denny’s Twitter Manager

Denny’s tweeted the above soon after Auburn lost the college football BCS title game to Florida State. If you know anything about football culture in the state of Alabama, then you know that losing to a Florida team is the worst thing that can happen short of maybe losing a loved one, and subsequently eating at a Denny’s would not be a “win.” I’m surprised that at least one of these 47 restaurants wasn’t firebombed.

@copyranter

Russian romance. Photos courtesy of Damian Siqueiros.

As you’ve probably already gathered from being an informed human being—and from our brand new documentary “Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia”—the LGBT community in Russia is currently the victim of governmentally institutionalized discrimination. Russian parliament recently took its disregard for human rights and Amnesty International to a whole new level by passing and proposing a number of homophobic federal laws. These bills have sparked further violence and international uproar in an already chaotic Russian social climate.

Damian Siqueros, a Montreal-based artist and self-proclaimed ‘photopainter’ is taking a more visual, subtle approach to the issue. In a project titled To Russia with Love, Damian depicts the love between gay historic Russian icons and their partners in a series of controversial and stylized photographs. The portraits capture the historical figures in moments of vulnerability and affection in front of a backdrop of traditional Russian artifacts and symbols. Rather than fighting hate with hate, Damian is using his art to raise awareness and trying to inspire discussion about LGBT rights in Russia.

With the 2014 Olympics in Sochi approaching, I wanted to know more about Damian’s project and his thoughts on Russia. I reached out to him recently over the phone to talk about his art, gay athletes, and the struggle of LGBT people around the world.

VICE: Describe To Russia with Love as a project, in your own words
Damian: I wanted to approach the situation in Russia through art. I portrayed famous gay Russian icons and the very real love they had for each other. I chose famous icons partly because the project had to be approachable and emotionally accessible to the public. I also focused not on the negative but the positive—on the love between these couples. Despite their fame, I’ve captured their humanity. It’s not Tchaikovsky the genius but the loving, gay man. That gayness in some ways informed his work and enriched his work, and it’s not something that should be ignored.

What was the project’s main inspiration?
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the fact that Russian parliament wanted to pass the law where they take away the children of gay couples. When you’re oppressing children it’s unfair because they’re not able to protect themselves. The events in Russia are a warning, an alarm. Despite our progress, we shouldn’t get too comfortable. We’re living in a time now where the progress we have made is being contested.

What is the project’s connection to the upcoming Olympics?
Russia will be in the centre of attention for a few days and its pertinent to talk about these issues around this time. The question right now: what will happen with openly gay Olympic athletes? The best thing competing athletes can do is what Jesse Owens did, which is to silence critics with his success. He defied Hitler’s regime with that. If the gay athletes do the same in Russia, I think it’s the best way they can protest.

Tell me about the tableau with the Putin and Stalin masks.
The two of them have been the most repressive in recent history in terms of gay rights. There’s a parallel between the two with regards to their approach to gay rights and the way they present themselves to the public. The tableau represents a paradox by representing a loving gay couple in distress under the new laws, portraying the two Russian rulers that have been the most abrasive towards the LGBT community.

How do you expect the project to be received?
It's going to be polarizing. The choir will be happy, and homophobes will condemn it. The Putin and Stalin portrait will be the most controversial but I don’t know how the public will react. Hopefully it will do well, but I don’t think there will be a huge backlash to the photos.

How do you think this project will be received, both here and abroad?
For much of the audience I will be preaching to the choir. The LGBT community will probably see these pictures and like them. But hopefully a few homophobes or people in the balance will see some beauty—recognize some part of themselves in the couples. Hopefully they see that they don’t have to hate gay people.

Do you think projects like yours will help break the cycle of violence and hate in Russia?
If I see it from a naive point of view, yes. I wish that I could contribute in any way to that goal. I don’t think I can change everything but if I can provoke some controversy and some conversation then it’s a start. Visible change would be even better. For me, fighting hate with hate doesn’t make sense. If I show in my pictures that love is the same for all people, maybe homophobic people in Russia will actually change their minds.

For more information (and to see more photographs from the series), visit Damian's website.
 

Above, Toronto's Chinatown's off-the-menu tea and Chinese food. Photo by the author.

In a previous lifetime, I was a line cook in Toronto. I had just moved there from Austin, Texas to work in a popular downtown restaurant. Toronto is the place where one must learn the art of chugging, because alcoholic beverages can’t be legally served after 2 AM. On my first night out drinking with the kitchen staff, last call came too early. It always does for cooks in Toronto who clock out around 1 AM. That night, the front-of-house staff—who made more money than us shithead cooks—headed out to get wrecked at some bougie booze can—an illegal late-night club. Cooks can’t afford the $20 cover charge, the $10 beers, or the $40 baggies of blow that make the experience bearable. Ravi, our sous-chef, soberly suggested that the kitchen crew head out for a pot of cold (and affordable) tea in Chinatown before turning in for the night. I didn’t know what he meant. I figured he wasn’t a big imbiber, or was trying to politely put a cap on our bad drinking habits. We all hopped in the cab and headed downtown.

When we arrived on the corner of Spadina and Dundas, we walked into a bustling Chinese restaurant* with a large dining room—the kind that was buzzing with offensive fluorescent lighting, magnifying people’s tired, drunken appearances. White plastic cloths covered the tables like safety nets surrounded by baby pink-colored walls. A row of manufactured, gold, glittery cats motioned towards the cash register. As we stood in the waiting area for a table, I noticed that—even though I had downed a few cocktails at this point in the evening—it seemed like all of the patrons were shitfaced, cheers-ing one another with porcelain white teacups. Was this how people sobered up around here? I wondered. 

When we were seated at a round table large enough to fit six hungry cooks, Ravi waved down a server to place an order for a pot of cold tea and a plate of chow mein. When it arrived, I slowly took my first sip, anticipating the waft of earthy green tea. It wasn’t there. What the fuck? I thought. It was cold, alright, but there was that familiar yeasty fizz on my tongue—the Canadian taste synonymous with hockey games and field parties, camping trips, and music festivals. When I registered the taste of Labatt 50 beer to my lips, I learned that cold tea is just ice-cold beer in Toronto's Chinatown. 

I’ve since retired from a life on the (kitchen) line, but I continue to work in the food industry. Last weekend, I found myself in a long night of bourbon drinking with a large group of local chefs when last call at the bar cracked down on our social session far too soon. We turned to Chinatown for the obvious solution. It’s not the cheap, dirty thrill of the booze can where you’ll end up snorting shitty coke and making out with some busboy(s) from Bar Isabel, but drinking cold tea feels like an innocently illicit act of life’s adolescent era.

Heather Mordue, pastry chef-turned pizza-maker at L’Unita, Nick Liu, the man famous for his big mac steamed bun at GwaiLo Invasion, and Steve Gonzalez of Valdez, Toronto’s popular Latino street food restaurant, took me to their favorite late-night Chinese restaurant* known for serving cold tea. Our server quickly brought over an ice-cold pot of beer, slightly watery, insipid, and absolutely perfect. One does not get artisan craft brews in this situation. We splashed back glugs of Labatt 50 as we slurred out our order for crispy squid, razor clams with XO sauce, and black bean beef over crispy noodles. As we drained the teapot, we ordered a three-course Peking duck dinner.

Chef Steve Gonzalez, left, and chef Nick Liu, right. Photo by the author.

The streets were dark and dirty. I looked out the window and spotted a fumbling junkie stumbling on a nearby street corner. He knocked over an overloaded trash can. It was 2:30 AM, so we ordered another pot of tea. A group of drunkards noisily barged their way into the restaurant. After they managed to sit and flag down a sober waiter, I overheard their demands, which sounded like almost every dish on the menu and several pots of “cold tea.” A local restaurateur at a nearby table—and acquaintance of Nick’s—was swaying in his seat. Jabbing his chopsticks in the air, he yelled over at us, “Try the Singapore noodles! They’re fucking great! Woohoo!” spraying masticated bits of MSG-soaked noodle shrapnel into the air. 

I wasn’t surprised to see fellow food industry people in the swath of our blurry tea rendezvous, because this is a shared sacrament of Toronto chefs, line cooks, and after-hours imbibers. Tyler Shedden, the executive chef at Café Boulud Toronto, swears by cold tea as a well-rehearsed practice. According to Shedden, cold tea also exists in Vancouver and Manhattan, where he first discovered the off-the-menu Chinatown beverage.

In Vancouver, bar patrons can buy six-packs of beer from the bar at closing time. In NYC, last call is at 4 AM, when you can easily grab a six-pack of cold ones from the closest bodega. But despite living in the fourth largest city in North America, Toronto's drinking laws feel downright stingy, where bars are forced to close at 2 AM sharp. 

Chinatown street items in the daylight hours. Photo by the author.

After a blurry evening coated in beer and black bean sauce, I hailed a cab home to stumble into bed. The next day, I woke up with a pounding headache, and sadistically opted to head back to the scene of the crime. Chinatown giveth one’s nasty hangover and taketh away. In the daylight hours, one must deal with the aggressive push of neighboring strangers on the crowded sidewalks near Spadina and Dundas, where merchants crouch along the concrete, selling bundles of herbs, jewelry, jade plants, plastic Buddhas, and cheap scarves. Hungover, the scents from the seemingly beautiful fruit stands selling fruits and vegetables like lychees, gai lan, and mangosteens turned hellish with a whiff of the barf-y funk scent of durian fruit. 

Above, chef John Lee in Chinatown. Photo by author.

But this torturous daylight journey had a purpose: I was to meet up with John Lee, the Korean chef and owner of Chippy’s, a fried fish restaurant, for a Chinatown lunch. This is John’s hood, the place where he still remembers what it was like trying to get shitty in the 80s. According to John, “Growing up in Chinatown, we knew the best places to get cold tea after the bars shut down. That was when last call was 1 AM and you couldn’t drink on Sundays. If you wanted to keep drinking, you either went to a booze can or ended up in a Chinese restaurant. These spaces transformed into hangouts for bar people and restaurant people. Anyone who worked late at night could get liquored up until 5:30 AM.” John's mention of beer made me nauseated. 

Above, King Noodle restaurant, located in Toronto's Chinatown neighborhood. Photo by author.

The only way to cure a cold tea hangover is to eat at King’s Noodle—or “King Noodle” by true devotees—the most popular restaurant in Chinatown. Thankfully, John is a King Noodle regular, which helped the orders to appear very quickly. We started picking at a large plate of pea shoots with garlic sauce, a dish of crispy pork, and Cantonese-style soy sauce chicken. John noticed my temporary ineptitude with the chopsticks. “Use a fork, sheesh,” he said, as he handed me the metal utensil from the plate of pea shoots. 

Above, crispy pork and a plate of pea shoots with garlic sauce at King Noodle. Photo by the author.

Bottomless pours of hot tea—the real herbal stuff this time—were sent over, and that awful hangover vanished. 

Editors Note: The restaurants without names have not been included to protect their identities. You can tweet @IvyKnight to find out where to go in Toronto’s Chinatown, and visit SwallowDaily.com for more from Ivy Knight.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin banned gay "propaganda" last June, Russia's LGBT community went from being a stigmatized fringe group to full-blown enemies of the state. Homophobia becoming legislation means it’s now not only accepted in Russia but actively encouraged, which has led to a depressing rise in homophobic attacks and murders.

The main aim of the law, which essentially bans any public display of homosexuality, is to prevent minors from getting the impression that being gay is normal. Which means that, if you’re young and gay in Putin’s Russia, you’re ostracized and cut off from any kind of legal support network.

We traveled to Russia ahead of February's Sochi Winter Olympics to investigate the effects of the country's state-sanctioned homophobia.

For further information on some of the issues raised, please visit www.stonewall.org.uk/international.

We'd been driving for nearly an hour before we finally stopped. The off-road journey was rough, but it helped to put the surroundings in perspective. Magzhan Tursinbayev, an ecologist and my ride for the day, stepped out of the 4x4 and pointed toward the horizon as he lit his cigarette. “Everywhere here was once the sea. Now look what is left: nothing,” he said, as he pointed to the vast expanse of empty space in front of us.

Magzhan had grown up in the nearby city of Aralsk, Kazakhstan and spent the better part of his life working on projects related to the vanishing Aral Sea. Despite all the time that has passed, Magzhan is still taken aback by the dried up sea. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? It looks like another planet here,” he said.

This area used to be a lake

The Aral Sea is actually a saltwater lake that once covered an area of 26,300 square miles between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, having split into northern and southern halves in 1986. The sea first began to shrink in the 1960s when the Soviet Union decided to divert the rivers that feed into the sea to irrigate cotton fields further south. Cotton was one of the main economic industries in Soviet times, and Moscow’s planners clearly prioritized economic growth over any environmental concerns. The aftermath of this lack of foresight is that the Aral Sea remains one of the world’s worst ecological disasters, existing as a semi-apocalyptic wasteland of dust and lost opportunity.

As the water continued to recede, the sea eventually became so salinated that native freshwater fish were unable to survive. Most local industry was related to the water, and with the water and the fish gone, so too were the jobs. Many families from the surrounding villages left for other cities. For those who stayed, the years since have been hard. Not only have they faced economic hardship, but also a range of health issues stemming from pesticide and fertilizer residues left on the bottom of the sea and spread by the wind. Life in a rural area that is dependent upon the sea can be difficult anywhere in the world, but in one where the fish and water have nearly vanished, it's been a struggle to survive.

Zhalanash

Zhalanash is one village that has managed to keep itself together amid the hardship. A community of a few hundred people, Zhalanash was once a coastal fishing village, but now neighbors the famous ship graveyard (which isn't much of a graveyard nowadays, as most of the ships have been salvaged by locals and sold for scrap metal).

There isn’t a lot to Zhalanash besides some aging houses, sand and a few telephone poles. But people here are survivors, and when the fishing industry collapsed, many locals managed to survive by herding livestock. It’s quite common to see herds of horses and sheep wandering the dried up seabed, but the most popular choice of livestock is camels. Naturally, there isn’t much to do in Zhalanash, but most villagers say their options are to tend to livestock, leave town for seasonal work or simply get pissed.

But over the last few years, one of the world’s worst ecological disasters, oddly enough, has been shrouded in some long overdue optimism. In 2003, the Kazakhstani government, along with the World Bank, began work on the joint $85.5 million Northern Aral Sea restoration project. The hallmark of the project was the Kok-Aral dam, which was completed in 2005. The dam allows water to accumulate in the northern half of the Aral Sea in an attempt to increase agriculture and fish production in the area. So far, the results have been encouraging. A small fraction of the fishing industry has been revived and water is even starting to creep back towards the old harbour of Aralsk.

A fisherman's mudhut

At the shoreline of the Northern Aral, there are some signs of life once again. Though small fishing boats dot the water and makeshift mud huts are scattered along the coast, most fishermen come from the local villages and a crew will typically work three or four days straight before selling their catch and returning home. The mud huts are for crews to rest in between stints on the water. While admiring the sea, I was invited inside to escape the cold by Nurlan, the captain of a fishing crew.

Nurlan (pictured left) and crew

It’s obvious that the years have not been particularly kind to him. Only in his late thirties, Nurlan looks about 50. After some small talk, a few cups of tea and the prospect of vodka soon on its way, Nurlan talked to me about what life is like here. "The 1990s were a very difficult time for all of Kazakhstan, but particularly around the sea," he said.

"Not only did the Soviet Union collapse, but also the sea was drying up and becoming too salty. Most people left to find work, and those who stayed did whatever they could to survive," he said, while finishing off the last of a grilled rabbit that he and his crew had shared for lunch. “Even ten years ago it was difficult to make a living as a fisherman.”

However, despite the hardships of life by the Aral Sea, the positive effects of the restoration projects can already be felt. “Conditions have improved and now our catches are large enough to support our families and give them a better life,” said Nurlan, referring to the desalinisation of the water and growth of the fish population since the dam was built. “Life is still hard, but the fish coming back makes life easier than before,” he added.

In Aralsk, the water is a long way off, but out of sight isn’t out of mind. Statues of fisherman are still scattered throughout the city, and a few ships even remain propped up by the old harbour as a testament to what used to be. Moreover, despite the progress made by the restoration project, things are a long way off from returning to how they were. During Soviet times, Aralsk was a regional economic hub for industry and trade. Today, all that remains of that legacy is some abandoned factories and some rusting cranes. The Aral Sea region has the highest unemployment figures in all of Kazakhstan, and more and more people leave looking for work every year.

A second dam to help filter water was scheduled through another joint project with the World Bank and the Kazakhstani government to further revitalise the region. However, the project has been postponed and is waiting in limbo for financing to be arranged. Meanwhile, as the dam helps the North Aral Sea to grow, it also limits the water flowing into the South Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, causing it to shrink. In addition to this, the Uzbekistani government seems to have little concern for the state of the South Aral Sea and even continues to drain water for its cotton industry. The Aral Sea might be in the process of a rebirth, but for the northern half to live, the southern half must die. 

The mural at Aralsk station

Water and fish have played a historic role here; even the train station still showcases an old Soviet mural where the people of Aralsk are providing fish for Russia during a time of famine. Speaking to locals, everyone seems fixated on the day when the water will finally return to the area. Estimates tend to vary about when that will be, but most say sometime around 2020. However, the government is constantly pushing these dates back, and it’s hard to predict. In the meantime, the residents of the Aral Sea region will do what they have been doing since this mess began±finding a way to survive. 

@ReidStan

Blake Bailey’s autobiography, The Splendid Things We Planned, will be published by W. W. Norton & Company in March. We suspect it is the book he has been writing for three decades. Just as the subjects of his award-winning biographies—Richard Yates, John Cheever, and Charles Jackson—were always writing about themselves, we’re pretty sure that in telling their stories he was also telling his own. Now the veil is off: behold!

The author, left, and his brother Scott, circa 1994

When my older brother, Scott, got out of rehab that fall, my father, Burck, decided to give him another chance, this time on the condition that he see a psychiatrist of Burck’s choosing. Scott consented. The psychiatrist was a man of some renown in Oklahoma City, a pudgy-faced Frans Hals figure named Dr. Hauber, who used to have giggly chats in German with my mother.

Dr. Hauber told my father that Scott was under the impression he’d been cruelly beaten as a child. Burck, I suppose, endeavored to disabuse the man, and ultimately Dr. Hauber declared—wrongly, I think—that Scott was a paranoid schizophrenic. Dr. Hauber’s verdict, along with certain other events, helped validate my father’s previous opinion that Scott was hopeless, and by the following summer he was back in the outer darkness again.

“When a child is young,” Burck explained one night (perhaps he was relating Dr. Hauber’s analogy), “you can catch him if he falls. Then he gets a little older and falls from a higher place. Maybe you can still catch him. But finally he’s a full-grown adult and falls off the top of a building—then you have to decide: either get out of the way or be crushed.”

I thought of Scott dangling from the flagpole at the top of 50 Penn Place, the highest building in our upscale part of the city, and no wonder he seemed unimpressed by my high jinks at Tulane. For him there were no fraternity mixers, no larky days at the Bali Hai Club on Lake Pontchartrain. Though his apartment was tidier than mine, Scott’s life belonged to a different, far grimmer plane of reality, as I was reminded during a summer lunch at that restaurant where he still worked, though demoted to a busboy. It was our first meeting in almost a year; my mother had insisted I see Scott and pave the way, if possible, to reconciliation between him and Burck. Also I confess to a certain morbid curiosity.

Something about the waiter’s manner, when he told me Scott was in the downstairs dining room, let me know I was in for a bad time; the man seemed pained by a stomachache he didn’t care to discuss. “Scott—” he began, then grimaced and pointed downstairs. He disappeared into the kitchen. I went downstairs. I was halfway there when I spotted Scott from the landing. He was sitting at a corner table, writing a letter with an emphatic, wounded look, his face flushed with beer and what appeared to be incipient tears. I considered bolting, but finally went over and said hello.

He didn’t look up. He kept writing until he came to a stop, then capped his gold-plated fountain pen—a gift from Burck—and put the letter aside.

“Who’re you writing?”

“Ma,” he said. “I was just telling her that if you didn’t show up—”

“Why wouldn’t I show up?”

“You’re late.”

I looked at my watch. “Five minutes?”

“We said noon.”

“No, Scott, I’m pretty sure we said 12:30.”

“Noon.”

For a moment I thought he’d pursue the matter, nastily, but he just sat there shaking his head and looking depressed. With two fingers he picked up his bottle and waggled it at a passing waiter, who asked, “This your brother, Scott?”

He nodded. I ordered a beer, too, and the waiter went away.

“So tell me about yourself,” Scott sighed.

I tried, doing my best to stress the sordid aspects of my life—the drunken blackouts, the verminous duplex in New Orleans, the mossy glasses, the colorful day in the Denton, Texas, jail, and so on, but my brother didn’t cheer up or laugh because it wasn’t funny. The fact remained that I was a student at a decent college (as my mother was keen to remind Scott) having the time of my life, and doubtless I struck my brother as the kind of simpering twit who found his own life so amusing, all the more so in light of his (that is, my) basic contentment. However, another topic of conversation (Mom tells me you’re a busboy again; how’ d that happen?) was slow to recommend itself, so I kept prattling until Scott interrupted.

Scott, left, and the author, circa ages nine and six, respectively

“How’s Pa?”

I said that our father seemed fine. “In fact,” I added, “never better.”

“How so?”

“Oh, you know, just in good fettle. Fewer worries, I guess.”

My brother abruptly reared in his seat, raking his eyes over the room until they fell on our waiter. “How’re those beers coming, Phil?”

The waiter paused with a laden tray. “In a moment, big guy,” he said, with a faint edge to his voice, that of a waiter addressing a busboy. My brother kept his eye on the man until he was certain some positive action was being taken; then he turned back to me.

“Well, isn’t that nice?” he said.

“Isn’t what nice?”

“That Pa’s so cheerful. That he’s so—so peachy keen.”

“Yes,” I said, “it certainly is.”

We sat there glaring at each other. The beers arrived.

“Will you guys be ordering?” the waiter asked. He clapped his hands, once, twice, at his waist. “Or d’you need a few minutes?” Clap. “Or—”

“We need a few minutes,” my brother said flatly. The man departed with a worried glance over his shoulder.

“What’s good here?” I asked Scott.

“Nothing. Order a hamburger. So does he ever mention me?”

“Papa? Not much... Or no, wait, come to think of it, I seem to recall something he said about how you like to tell people you were beaten as a child.”

There was a pause. A vague look of shame, or something, fluttered around Scott’s face like a skittish bird, then flew away. “He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“And what, he denied it?”

“It’s not a question of denying it, Scott. He knows what happened. I know what happened. You were spanked a few times. If you want to blame your whole fucked-up life on that, fine, but don’t—”

“When I was a little boy,” he said, loading the words with poignancy, “he’d make me drop my pants and lie on the bed. Then he’d take off his belt and start lashing the bed with it, just to scare me. To scare the shit out of me. When I was four or five years old...”

He went on like that, building to the climax of the actual spanking (or “beating” or “lashing”). His eyes peered at some vision over my left shoulder. I didn’t bother to interrupt.

“Bravo,” I said when he’d finished, limply clapping my hands.

Scott swallowed and gave a quick angry laugh. “You better watch your ass, man.”

“Or what?”

He gave me a look of loony menace, as in You’ll see.

“Fuck you,” I said. “Listen: I have the same father, and I got the same spankings. The reason he whipped the bed was because half the time he had no intention of whipping us, and it sure as hell didn’t traumatize me. So fuck you if you can’t take a joke. How dare you. You practically ruin the man’s life—”

“Oh yeah, his life is so—”

“You ruin both our parents’ lives, and now you—”

Our waiter was back. “Guys, guys,” he said, frantically patting the air, “keep it down or you’re gonna have to—”

“Tell him to be quiet,” said Scott with elaborate calm. He crossed his legs and shrugged. “He just went apeshit on me.”

“OK, Scott. Just—” The waiter shook his head and walked away.

Scott watched him go, then leaned as far across the table as possible without leaving his seat. “You better not get me fired, man,” he said.

I sat there looking at him, my eyelids drooping, as if to suggest that getting fired from his little busboy job was about the best thing that could happen to him, short of dropping dead. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

Appearing to calm down for both of us, Scott crossed his legs again and leaned back, steepling his fingers; then he remarked in a measured tone that I’d never really “gotten” our father. “He’s the Wizard of Oz,” said Scott. “You know?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Smoke and mirrors, Zwieb. The whole persona. The great man in public, you know, the whole facade of wisdom and benevolence. But underneath the whole—the whole illusion—”

“You mutt,” I said. “You’re a mutt.” Mutt? I don’t know why the word occurred to me, but at any rate I let it sink in. “Mutt. Tell you what, mutt, unless you apologize for what you just said, I’m leaving.”

My brother said nothing.

“So long, mutt.”

I was halfway up the stairs when I heard a mumbled “Sorry.” I paused to look down at my brother: he was glaring at the table as though in furious pain, as though the word sorry had been gouged out of him with a toothpick. I kept going. I was out the door and striding into the parking lot when I heard a rush of footfalls—too late. The impact caused my last swallow of beer to gush out of my stomach; then I was on the asphalt with a sour taste in my mouth.

Above me I heard a rapid whisper, “Sorry, man, I just...”

“Get away from me.”

The author, left, and Scott in 1988, sitting on their mother’s couch in Norman, Oklahoma

I stumbled in the direction of my car. At first Scott plucked at me from behind—my elbow, a belt loop, a pocket—saying “please” a lot and “Blake,” but when I kept going he grabbed my shirt collar and yanked. I fell backward out of my polo shirt and landed on the pavement again, absurdly barebacked. I groped for my shirt, but Scott held it out of my reach.

“You can have it when you—”

“Keep it.”

I got to my feet and resumed walking to my car with what I hoped was a kind of dignity, despite my skinny, scuffed-up bare torso. I was conscious of a huddle of witnesses gathering around the exit. For their benefit, no doubt, Scott hugged me almost gently from behind and planted his feet.

“Blake, stop. Goddamn it...”

I waited for him to let go; finally he released me from the bear hug but kept hold of my wrist, deftly transferring my wadded shirt to his left hand as he did so. Once I had an arm free, I gave him a glancing blow to the forehead. He glared at me, blinking, but held on. I punched him in the mouth and flailed wildly out of his grasp. He caught up with me a few feet from my car and tackled me to the pavement again. This time he stayed on top and didn’t speak when I told him to get off. I began to yell for help. All my brother’s strength went into holding me there; every few moments he’d let out a wet little pant or a snuffle.

“Let him up, Scott.”

“C’mon man, you can’t do this shit here...”

Two big guys in aprons were peeling him off me; our waiter looked on. All three spoke to Scott in low, soothing voices, as if to a hurting child.

“Just cool it, man. It’s over. Calm down now.”

“You OK?” one of them asked me.

On his feet again, my brother was bouncing on his toes with a pathetic swagger. He was trying not to cry, but his nasal voice had a quaver. “I didn’t do anything to him, Phil,” he told our waiter. “You saw! I was just sitting there talking to him, man, and he starts—”

Phil, the waiter, was shaking his head and patting the air. “You don’t have to explain to me, Scott. This is between you and your brother. I just think—”

“Then he gets up and just leaves me there—”

Scott’s voice broke and he buried his face in his hands. One of the big guys put an arm around him and gave him a consoling jostle. All three were glancing at me with a curious mixture of sympathy and reproach.

“He needs to get out of here now,” the waiter told me, “before the manager comes out. Can you give him a ride?”

I sighed, said sure, and picked my shirt off the pavement where Scott had dropped it. It was ripped at the collar and drooped loosely around my neck, exposing one nipple. My brother wouldn’t uncover his face, so I touched his arm and guided him around to the passenger side of my car. The others were saying “Later, Scott” and “See you tomorrow, man,” in kind voices, waving, before hurrying back to the restaurant.

Inside the car, my brother gathered his breath with a long sizzling hiss and held it, grimacing, then all at once he doubled over sobbing. I drove. I couldn’t bear it. Even now I can’t bear it—the immensity of those minutes.

At some point I ventured to touch the back of his neck and ask where he lived. He confided the usual terrible address. I parked in an alley behind the place—the worst place yet—and we sat in silence punctuated by his sniffles. Finally I asked if he was going to be all right.

“I don’t know,” he said in a hollow whisper. “I don’t know, man.” He sat there. Sometimes he’d let out a deep sigh, an exhausted whew. “You want to come up?” he asked finally, staring out the window.

“I’d like to,” I said, “but I can’t. I just don’t have time. Sorry.”

Scott seemed to accept the lie without bitterness, as if he were grateful I’d spared him the truth—namely that every second in his company was misery.

“Mind if I just sit here another minute?”

“Of course not.”

He looked too tired to cry, but every few seconds the tears would come anyway and he’d grimace with an effort to hold them back. He coughed a number of times and said, “Do you think Papa—” He coughed again. “Do you think Papa will ever want to see me again?”

I decided to be honest. I said something to this effect: our father would always forgive him in the end, and that was a pity, because it spared Scott the effort of earning his forgiveness. I told Scott that his life was repulsive (“Sorry, but there it is”), that he’d brought nothing but heartache to anyone who’d ever made the mistake of caring for him. I told him that if he couldn’t change he should just keep away. From all of us.

Somewhere in there Scott began to sob again. He spoke in mournful heaves, barely able to catch his breath: “How can you s-say that?... I’m your brother. I luh-love you. I’m your fucking brother...”

I stared out the window at the dreary littered lawns, the rusted monkey bars and scattered backyard crap of that awful neighborhood. All the while my brother was forcing words through his sobs:
“Look at me... my only friends are n-niggers... I can barely pay my shit—my shitty rent... I’m a fuck—fucking 23-year-old b-busboy... I can’t get rid of these fucking pimples...”

I was about to say, as gently as possible, “Scott, whose fault is that?”—when he mentioned the pimples, something I could hardly blame him for. Finally I sighed and said I was sorry, but I had to go. I said I’d call him.

Scott nodded wearily, dragging a hand over his face. A string of snot stuck to his palm and he flung it out the window. “Promise?” he said.

“Promise.”

It was the last I saw of him for a long time.

Excerpted from The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey.

You can buy a copy of Blake's book here.

Copyright © 2014 by Blake Bailey. With the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Auxiliary officers, as volunteer NYPD cops are known, have some of the responsibilities of law enforcement officers but none of the pay.Photo via Flickr user André Gustavo Stumpf

In Oakland, California, the housing authority is looking for officers who can patrol its properties and “perform all the duties of a police officer,” including “drug elimination” and the serving of “evictions and other legal notices.” Applicants with experience in “the safe utilization of firearms” are encouraged to apply.

In Miramar, Florida, the local police are likewise searching for “reserve officers” to perform “the same uniform patrol duties as a full-time officer.” Like their full-time colleagues, these part-time cops will have “the same law enforcement power of arrest.”

In Wichita, Kansas, they are looking for someone to not only make arrests, but to take prisoners to jail as well as conduct “specialized investigations and raids.” The position “involves an element of personal danger,” so applications should have the “ability to accurately and effectively discharge a rifle, shotgun, and handgun with both left and right hands” and should also be able “to react quickly and calmly in emergencies; to record details about names, faces, and incidents quickly, clearly, and accurately.”

All these jobs are dangerous and involve carrying a deadly weapon. They entail giving a human being the power to detain another human being, and the benefit of the doubt if they should shoot one. And all the positions are unpaid.

In some cases, these unpaid officers are true volunteers: retired cops with some extra time on their hands. But half of police reserves, as these positions are called, are filled by people under 40 years old, and a quarter are under 30, according to a study reported in Police Chief magazine. So why would they work for free?

“People are looking to join the police department, and given our hiring freeze right now, they can’t,” Jose Hernandez, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal when the department launched a reserve police officer program last March. In essence, these are unpaid interns who are expected to fetch perps, not coffee. Though the officers receive much the same training as their paid colleagues, Hernandez told the paper that, because they only work two shifts a month, they don't have the same experience and thus are limited to patrolling with a full-time partner.

That's not always the case in other jurisdictions. In Valley Mills, Texas, unpaid reserve officers are expected to be in patrol cars alone. In Whitney, Texas, “Non-Paid Police Officer” is a full-time job, and those officers “shall be expected to complete the same duties as full-time officers.”

It's up to each department to decide how it uses reserves, or if they use them at all. In 2011, more than 2,100 departments chose to use volunteers, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and that number has likely grown in the present age of austerity, as local police departments have tanks courtesy of grants from the federal government but don't have the means or desire to pay entry-level officers.

“During the past several years, departments have been faced with serious budget cuts and there is legitimate concern among full-time professional officers that budget cutters may turn to volunteers to reduce their public safety costs,” Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, told me. “This would be a disservice to the dedicated officers as well as to the public.”

Departments will never admit they are replacing paid employees with unpaid “volunteers,” but when these volunteers are performing the same tasks as full-time staff, it’s pretty obvious that, yes, they’re replacing paid employees. Maybe these towns don't have the budget to pay another cop at the moment, but when volunteers are willing to do what once was compensated work for free, getting the money to hire more paid employees tends not to be an employer's top priority.

And there are plenty of people desperate enough to work for free these days, whether the field is journalism or law enforcement.

“The downturned economy's increasing number of unemployed could potentially be a fruitful target group for a source of volunteers,” according to an article published in Police Chief magazine. “A number of events occur when one is unemployed,” the article says:

“An individual can experience the sense of losing direction because of the structure that a job brings to life. Lower self-esteem occurs because the individual is not being productive on a daily basis and, therefore, sees her- or himself as being less valuable. Much of social life occurs on the job or flows out of it. This changes drastically when the job is no longer there. Volunteering with the police can overcome this and prove beneficial to a police department.”

While some departments have only a handful of unemployed-turned-unpaid officers, others have dozens, or even more. The Oakland County Sheriff's Office has a 100-member reserve unit. Los Angeles has around 700 reserve officers. The New York Police Department has about 4,500, meaning around one in eight NYPD cops are unpaid. (NYPD auxiliary officers, unlike some departments’ volunteer cops, don’t carry firearms.)

Though individual departments may be underfunded, the problem isn’t that the US as a whole isn’t spending money on law enforcement. Despite the collapse of traditional morality and the rise of Nancy Grace, crime across the United States has been falling for decades. Between 1993 and 2010, the gun homicide rate dropped 49 percent, according to government data analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Overall, violent crime dropped 72 percent during that period.

In 2013, Detroit's homicide rate dropped 14 percent to the lowest point it's been in almost 20 years. Homicides in Los Angeles are at their lowest level since 1966. Last year, Chicago had the fewest murders it’s recorded since 1965.

Less crime should mean fewer cops and less money budgeted for fancy crime-fighting tools. However, spending on law enforcement has instead increased dramatically over the last two decades—that money has just been going toward military-grade equipment, not salaries for those using it.

While cops working for donuts might bring a smile to the face of your friendly neighborhood anarchist, the thought of a potentially embittered and inexperienced volunteer with a badge and a gun patrolling the streets and kicking poor tenants out of their homes is not terribly comforting. Police budgets should be slashed—this means slowing down the war on drugs, not compromising public safety—but slashing those budgets is only a victory if it means fewer people on the streets empowered to carry guns and kill people with impunity, whether they’re paid law enforcement or unpaid interns or George Zimmerman. We should work toward less cops, yes—but fewer assholes with badges too.

Charles Davis is a writer and producer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by outlets including Al Jazeera, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

Christmas is the only day of the year when London is silent. Everything is closed and there's no public transport. Other than a bunch of tourists gawking around Big Ben, the streets are basically deserted.

This past Christmas, I figured I'd take my camera for a stroll around the old ghost town. These photos are only a small part of what I saw, or didn't.

View more of Corrado's work here.

I have a very special Chinese banknote. It’s only worth ten Yuan, but it might be the most precious object I own. The front of the note shows a drawing of the former leader of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Rumor has it, he spent every night with the young, virginal daughters of different farmers, because he believed popping cherries was the key to eternal youth. But that little factoid is not what makes this banknote so special. What’s special about my banknote is that in China—a country where everything is about money, money, and more money—nobody accepts the damn thing. It’s practically worthless. And I now understand why.

During a recent reporting trip to China, I found myself with a group of journalists and Chinese fixers sitting in the biggest mall in Shanghai eating shitty pizza at a fake Pizza Hut. When it was time to pay for the food, we all pulled out our cash. Amy, a Chinese student who showed us around, took the stack of bills and handed it to the waitress. Not long after that she came back with one piece of legal tender in her hand, stammering that the restaurant didn’t accept the cash because it was a “bad note.” I asked why, but she wouldn’t say. “Later, later,” she told me. When she offered up the bad banknote to my group, I snatched it up.

At first sight, it was just an ordinary 10 Yuan. Mao, a small rose, and the official logo of the Communist Party were on the front, while a charming Chinese mountain scene with rivers was on the back. But if you look closer, you’ll see the stamps. Amy pointed them out to me a few days after the incident. There were Chinese characters on the bill that didn’t belong there. “This is anti-Communist Party,” she said. “The note says you have to abandon the Party in order to be free.”

In China, protesting against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is dangerous—especially if you disrupt the public peace. And in China this is a pretty broad concept. Just take Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, for instance. If you are retweeted more than 500 times on Weibo with a message that the CCP deems inappropriate, you’ll end up spending years in prison. Every form of protest is suppressed and severely punished. And still, there I was with this banknote of ten Yuan in my hand telling me to leave the Party. How was this possible? In China, it was impossible to answer the question. Nobody wanted to discuss the bill with me. But the more people turned me down to talk about it, the more I wanted to solve the mystery of my strange banknote.

After my trip in China, I traveled to the Netherlands. Although, I was finally beyond the reach of the CCP, I didn’t even know where to start in terms getting to the bottom of the banknote. So, I brought it with me to Amsterdam’s Chinatown to ask some Chinese-Dutch folks exactly what it means, hoping they’d spill the beans or point me in the right direction.

On a rainy day, after cowardly passing by ten times or so, I stepped into a Chinese acupuncturist’s office. Behind the counter, I found a man who was about 40 years old, sporting a white coat. I told him my story—that a restaurant in China wouldn’t accept my banknote and that I had no idea why. The man grabbed the note from me and analyzed its front and back. Then he glared at me and threw the bill in my face. “This is not good,” he said. “This is a bad movement against the Chinese Communist Party. This is Falun Gong. This is not good at all.” That’s the only thing he would to say about it. Before it got too awkward, I quickly thanked him and ran out of the store.

To make sure he wasn’t pulling my leg, I walked into a Chinese restaurant down the street. A middle aged Chinese man welcomed me. He took his reading glasses off and stared at the banknote for a while. Then he looked at me and said, “This? This is nothing. These are just rules. Communist Party rules. This is just what you are supposed to do in China.” He passed the bill back and started an extensive conversation about his holidays to China and the fact that he didn’t have many customers during Christmas. He clearly didn’t feel comfortable talking about  Falun Gong, whoever that was.

I finally found someone willing to openly discuss my strange Chinese currency—sinologist Stefan Landsberger from Leiden University translated the stamp on the bill in the following way:

How many prophets have warned
Humanity knows great decay
Retreat from the ranks and levels of the Chinese Communist Party
And wait for the moment till the Great Law will guard peace

That Great Law is another name for the Fa, the theoretical arm of Falun Gong. The movement was introduced in China in 1993 as a spiritual discipline. By 1999, tens of millions of Chinese people were practicing Falun Gong. It became so immensely popular among the population that it frightened the powers that be. The Communist Party has gone to great lengths to supress the movement, even though the groups millions of followers contend that they only want recognition, not political power. Human rights groups attest that the CCP is responsible for imprisoning and executing thousands of Falun Gong practitioners. Also—according to China watchers—thousand of Falun Gong followers were sent to labor camps in order to convince them to abandon the spiritual discipline. A lot of these people were physically and psychologically tortured. At the same, the Chinese government started a propaganda campaign on radio, television, and in print to denigrate the movement.

Since 2006, there are vicious rumors that organs of Falun Gong-members are being traded on the Chinese organ market. And up until today, everything that has something to do with the movement is censored. Chinese embassies seem to be used to suppressing Falun Gong-tendencies among their people at home and abroad. That might explain the reaction of the two men in Chinatown.

The note that I intercepted was printed in 2005. It has, including the stamp, been able to circulate among the people of China for a maximum of nine years, without the CCP ever finding out about it. The most recent stamped bills were printed in 2011. I wonder if still, somewhere in a secret place in China, someone is stamping banknotes with Mao, a rose, a charming Chinese mountain scenery, and a bold protest slogan. 

Via Motherboard/the Simpsons.

On January 5^th, in a new episode of The Simpsons, everyone’s favourite yellow-skinned family tackled the issue of copyright extremism. Homer was dismayed because he was the last person in town to see the new Radioactive Man movie; Lenny and Carl ridiculed him at work with spoilers, and when he finally got a chance to see it at the movie theatre, he was grossed out by the overdone gimmicks of 3D, Hobbit framerate, and product placement in the film itself. So, Bart shows Homer how to use torrents.

In Simpsons land, The Pirate Bay is “The Bootleg Bay,” and just as Bart is about to show Homer, step-by-step, how to pirate the new Radioactive Man movie—the FOX logo flashes on screen: “The FOX Network forbids the broadcast of step by step instructions for illegally downloading copyrighted intellectual property. In the meantime, please enjoy this footage of NASCAR’s 2011 Martinsville Cup.” This is followed by actual footage of NASCAR and the viewer is brought back into the world of animation once Bart’s lesson is complete.

You’ll have to watch the episode to see how an overzealous FBI is depicted as caring more about movie piracy than serial killers, or how Homer eventually wins a lawsuit against Hollywood after he’s ratted out by a guilt-stricken Marge for running his own pirate movie theatre in the Simpsons’ own backyard, but there’s a telling clip at the very end of the episode where Bart and Lisa are sitting together trying to make sense of this very modern problem.

Bart asks Lisa: “Who are the good guys: the media companies or the internet freedom guys?” Lisa responds: “Both groups claim their intentions are noble, but at the end of the day, they’re both trying to steal as much money as they can.” So Bart concludes that everyone’s a pirate, and Lisa agrees, but says the worst one of all is—and she’s cut off before she can answer. We’re shown the 2011 NASCAR footage again, and the credits roll.

Ostensibly this episode is a tongue-in-cheek jab at FOX and other studios like it for their stranglehold over copyright, and for the FBI’s hyper-aggressive attitude towards copyright offenders like Kim Dotcom. In real life, Kim is far from the only person being brought to task for running online networks where piracy thrives.  In October, news quietly broke on Torrentfreak that FOX was suing a Canadian man who ran websites—such as “Watch the Simpsons Online” and “Watch Family Guy Online”—where people could find free, streaming links to episodes of FOX’s animated powerhouses. Then, earlier this month, it was confirmed that he had to pay out $10.5 million to the media giant, a legal predicament that has completely bankrupted him.

I got in touch with the 23 year-old site admin in question, who I can only identify as Nick, and we talked about this financially devastating situation he’s got himself into. Nick tells me he was “surprised” over FOX’s reaction: “I assumed I'd hear about a movie site in Canada being taken down first and then I would have voluntarily followed suit to avoid any issues… but obviously I never expected to be the guinea pig.”

As for why he started these sites in the first place, he says “I loved The Simpsons and so did many of my friends, but you couldn't buy the seasons on DVDs other than to season 10… and there was nothing on the web to help anyone out at the time—so I filled the gap. I was hoping FOX would eventually create their own service that I could link to or use in some way.”

Nick refers to FOX’s crusade against him as an “unneeded vendetta” and described at length how this trial has affected his life: “They are getting every penny from my house sale and that's really all I have for them… I was in significant debt with credit card companies and hardly able to keep on top of many of my bills, but they were trying to paint a picture as though I made half a million dollars per year with the thing.”

A framegrab from Nick's website.

While Nick says he did make a profit off of the sites, when I asked if he was living off of them he told me: “If you consider having large credit card debt and only being able to pay interest as a house payment living, then yes.”

This isn’t the first time Nick has got himself into legal trouble for running streaming sites. In 2010, he found himself at the wrong end of the MPAA’s fury for a site called www.watchxonline.com that he has since turned into a “legal streaming portal” with links to Netflix, Hulu, and the like. The MPAA only “harassed” Nick; there were no multi-million dollar threats. FOX went for blood.

Even after the MPAA conflict, Nick doesn’t consider his actions to be illegal: “It was only as illegal as using Google is. I found the episodes, I indexed them... if people ever complained about quality, I was always quick to tell them to buy the DVDs and support the show. I had links to Amazon so people could also purchase the Blu-ray’s and DVD’s as they came out. My goal was never to take money or viewership away from FOX, as US viewership on my site was fairly low due to there being other sources [like Hulu]. But for worldwide visitors, such as Canada, FOX just gives them the finger [because you can’t watch Hulu in Canada].”

Nick considers the movie and TV industry to be at a similar crossroads that the music industry found itself at, before services like Spotify found a healthy middle-ground that provided an abundant streaming platform that fell on the right side of copyright law. “If all the entertainment industries got together and made a worldwide Hulu of sorts, they could and would kill piracy even if it was a minimal fee similar to Netflix; but have the entire library open worldwide, rather than [the way Netflix works] where someone can't watch something like The Office unless they are located in the US.”

At this point, Nick is just hoping that his declaration of bankruptcy will fend off FOX’s lawyers so he won’t have to repay the full sum of what they insist he owes. To be fair, Nick’s sites were quite brazen in their approach of cataloging free streaming links to every episode The Simpsons and Family Guy; so it’s not a stretch to see why FOX’s lawyers were upset. But, as The Simpsons apparently argues in one of its most recent episodes, the aggressive litigation against copyright offenders in America is over the top.

Is bankrupting a young guy who’s profiting from exploiting digital space that has not been properly capitalized on by big media the best strategy? Or is FOX just playing a losing game of whack-a-mole? A quick Google search can find sites just like Nick’s still functioning online today, so what’s the point of ruining one guy’s life? Surely there’s a compromise to be made here, because at the very least, this situation reads as bad PR for the FOX Corporation.


@patrickmcguire
 

Our documentary Young and Gay in Putin's Russia premiered on VICE.com this week

Last June, the Russian government looked around for a new scapegoat and duly passed a law that banned the “promotion of homosexuality among minors.” It turned out that “promotion” was a catch-all term encompassing anything from public displays of affection to suggesting, in any public forum, that being gay is normal. While being gay remains legal in Russia, the bill amounts to nothing less than state-sanctioned homophobia and condemns the country's gay community to a life of shame and secrecy. “You could say that being gay in Russia is like living in the closet, a very big and comfortable closet,” Alexei Mukhin, a Russian political analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, told VICE in an interview for our new documentary, Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia, which investigates the ways the law is affecting Russia’s gay community.

The Winter Olympics, which begin in the Black Sea city of Sochi on February 7, have put Russia and its human rights issues in the spotlight. In a calculated attempt to divert attention from these issues, Putin has thrown some bones to the media and engaged in some relatively painless humanitarian PR work. In December, the parliament passed an amnesty law that aimed to free at least 20,000 prisoners including, crucially, some famous inmates—Putin sanctioned the early release from prison of Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, and formally dropped charges against Greenpeace’s Arctic 30. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian oligarch who became one of Putin’s most dangerous political opponents and was thrown into prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion, was also recently released. (Putin attributed this sudden show of kindness to Khodorkovsky’s ailing mother.) Khodorkovsky has since vowed not to seek power and will almost certainly settle abroad. It’s a win-win for Putin—he plays the benevolent leader who can put a son’s love for his mother above past crimes while also sending a political rival into exile.

Putin has been showing the world his forgiving side, and these gestures are worth it. The Olympics have cost Russia $51 billion, making them the most expensive Olympics in history (largely because of “waste and corruption,” according to many observers), and the Kremlin doesn’t want the games overshadowed by boycotts and protests. With that in mind, the authorities have generously picked out a designated protest zone for those wishing to express their dissatisfaction at Sochi. The thing is, the zone isn’t even in Sochi. It’s in a park in the town of Khosta, seven miles from the nearest arenas.

The protest zone and the releasing of prisoners are, needless to say, cosmetic moves designed to make life easier for the Kremlin, just as the anti-gay propaganda law turns gay people into an enemy to be hated by Russia's Orthodox majority. The creation of an enemy is a move beloved of governments the world over. During the Cold War, it was simple. The US had the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union had the US. Now an “independent” study commissioned by the Kremlin has fused the domestic and the international by suggesting, for example, that foreign-funded LGBT organizations could incite a gay revolution that would “plunge the country into a new period of chaos.”

“In Russia, homosexuality is not a norm,” Vitaly Milonov, the politician behind the law, said in Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia. “Situations when six- or seven-year-old kids get lured in by some kind of psychiatrist who tells them that one Santa Claus can live together with another Santa Claus are situations of hatred. It's a situation that in essence is Nazi.”

In the face of this kind of (tantalizingly erotic) Santa-on-Santa rhetoric, it’s perhaps understandable that a number of Western politicians and celebrities, from Francois Hollande to Lady Gaga to Stephen Fry, are boycotting—or calling for a boycott of—the Sochi Olympics. But, as Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia shows, the vast majority of gay people and gay activists in Russia do not support an international boycott.

“We oppose the boycott of the Olympics because it would hurt the athletes, who then wouldn't be able to participate, and also the Russian LGBT community, because they would blame us if anything goes wrong,” said activist Nikolay Alexeyev. Countless gay rights supporters in Russia echoed his views.

Last summer, when Stephen Fry wrote an open letter to David Cameron and the British and International Olympic Committees insisting that “an absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential,” he was widely applauded for falling into the classic white savior trap. He equated Putin’s Russia with Hitler’s Germany while referring to Cameron, Sebastian Coe and the IOC as the “good” people who would let “evil” triumph if they allowed the games to go ahead. Of course, dear old Stephen had good intentions and he was speaking out against a terrible law, but the overall impression given was of someone caught up in his own righteousness and not someone who had listened to the Russians living with the law on a daily basis.

Fry had gone to Russia as part of a BBC program called Out There, which looked at gay rights around the world. He stood up to the ridiculous Milonov and attacked the ban in an address to the Russian press which was, of course, well covered by the BBC. But if he had really listened to the people he met in Russia, he’d know that they don’t want a boycott of the Olympics. Elton John knows this, which is why he performed in Russia recently. Fry’s letter and other Western calls for a boycott of the Sochi games are suggestive of many Western attempts to “save” supposedly blighted parts of the world. The difference here is that Russians are white, something that normally saves them from the enlightened good intentions of Britain and America.

Ethiopia didn’t ask for Live Aid but they sure as hell got it. The world doesn’t want Bono to cure it, but that isn’t going to stop him and the good people at Louis Vuitton and hey, if you can sell some luxury handbags at the same time, where’s the harm? Kony 2012 was perhaps the nadir of this ongoing phenomenon, though this cover of the Rihanna song “We Found Love” by a violin-playing talent show contestant, filmed in Kenya with the support of an online retail site, is a pretty close second.

It’s worth remembering that Western countries have had anti-gay laws on the books. Britain's Section 28 stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" and was only repealed in 2003. Similarly, sodomy was illegal in many US states until a Supreme Court decision in 2003. “He that troubleth his own house, shall inherit the wind,” says Proverbs, but the governments and celebrities of Europe and the US like nothing more than intervening in other parts of the world.

I don’t say this to excuse the Kremlin. Homophobia in Russia is rife at the moment, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a problem in the West as well. More importantly, our politicians, athletes, and celebrities must listen to Russia’s gay community. They must go to Sochi and put Russia in the international spotlight in the hope that Putin and his cronies will reconsider their awful, divisive law. In Sochi, gay rights activists from Russia, supported by their friends around the world, have a chance to stand up and draw attention to a situation that needs to change—even if that means having to do it in a park seven miles from any Winter Olympians.

As the 17-year-old Muscovite Nikita Guryanov says in VICE's film, “No matter who you are—gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender—you are a human being... You should not be scared. You should not be shy.” When it comes to being gay in Russia, it's Nikita, not Barack Obama, David Cameron, or Stephen Fry, who we should be listening to.

@oscarrickettnow

Photo via the IMLS Digital Collections & Content Flickr account, image property of the Shoreline Historical Museum

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you sentence someone to death. Let’s put aside the sticky, obvious questions like what gives the state the moral authority to kill its citizens and whether we can trust any existing system of legislators, judges, and juries to the point where we would give them the power over life and death. Bottom line is, you’re gonna execute someone. The only question you should have is, What’s the cheapest way of killing this guy?

Assume that the system you operate under makes it so killing a convicted criminal involves so much red tape and appeals (not to mention the cost of housing someone who is waiting to die) that it’s cheaper to send him to prison for life than to kill him. Further assume that the quasi-sacred document your society bases all laws off of has a bit in it about “cruel and unusual punishment” that the authors probably intended something specific by, but that today is largely incomprehensible—so much so that the current agreed-upon method for executing someone is to pump him full of extraordinarily expensive chemicals until he expires. Which brings us to the question at hand: How are you going to execute this person?

If you’re Bruce Burns, a Republican lawmaker from Wyoming, the answer is “firing squad.” This week the state senator introduced a bill to make cartoonists’ favorite method of execution legal in his state.

The law in Wyoming says that if lethal injection isn’t acceptable for whatever reason (i.e. the Supreme Court decides it’s unconstitutional), a gas chamber is the preferred method of execution. Except Wyoming doesn’t have a gas chamber. So Burns, utilizing that common-sense spirit Republican policymakers are known for, is all, Hey, why don’t we just shoot them or whatever?

“The state of Wyoming doesn't have a gas chamber currently, an operating gas chamber, so the procedure and expense to build one would be impractical to me,” Burns told the Associated Press. “I consider frankly the gas chamber to be cruel and unusual, so I went with firing squad because they also have it in Utah.”

In the same AP story, Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital punishment group, speculates that if the bill becomes a law it will be challenged in court on the grounds that execution by firing squad is cruel and unusual. In a lot of discourse surrounding ways to punish criminals, that question comes up—is a particular method of punishment too vicious or strange to consider?

I have zero experience in navigating the legal definitions of “cruel” and “unusual,” but it seems like whether a punishment is either of those things is a fairly personal moral judgment. For instance, lethal injection seems pretty dang cruel and unusual to me. But so does killing someone, and so does putting someone in prison for their lifetime. Giving select criminals the option to get flogged rather than doing prison time, as sociologist Peter Moskos has suggested, makes some kind of moral sense to me. Heck, I think forcing the elected official who approves the execution to personally shoot the criminal in the head would make better moral sense than the impersonal killing procedures used in US death rows.

You might violently disagree with me on that stuff, and that’s OK. Arguing over the morally “right” way to execute criminals is a pretty fun pastime though. How do you judge the relative humaneness of hanging versus the electric chair (the method lethal injection has largely replaced in the US) versus a firing squad? Do you try to measure the pain they cause the executed man or woman, and how do you do that? Firing squads, which were only recently outlawed in Utah, involve some human interaction, as volunteer law enforcement officers are doing the firing—is that a point in its favor, or against it?

More importantly, who cares? Dead is dead, and talk of certain kinds of executions being cruel and unusual just means the speaker wants to avoid the squishy fact that the government is directly killing someone. Burns has the right idea in seeking a cheaper form of state-sanctioned murder; he’s just not creative enough. If we left the lily-livered equivocating pseudo-morality of “cruel and unusual punishments” out of the equation, we could behead people, a la Game of Thrones. If we could get past the totalitarian associations we might have with the method, we could start using a single bullet to the back of the head. And if we’re killing people using drugs, why not just pump people full of heroin until they expire?

All of those above options are cheaper than lethal injection, and probably cheaper than firing squads—as is not killing people. But Burns clearly just wants to make some fun headlines by proposing firing squads (there’s only one man on death row in Wyoming, and the state has only executed one person in the last half-century), and advocating for eliminating the death penalty in order to save a few bucks might give people the wrong idea. It might sound compassionate, and what politician would want that kind of reputation?

@HCheadle

A pro-Morsi protester is arrested outside the courthouse during his trial last week.

Over the past three Fridays, Egyptian police have arrested over 700 protesters and killed another 27, according to official figures. There was a time when these numbers would have led the news bulletins. Now, they're buried in half-hearted weekend round-ups. The news, it seems, is as tired with the situation in Egypt as the people who've retreated from politics in the years since the 2011 revolution.

According to Wiki Thawra, a website dedicated to documenting the Egyptian revolution, over 21,000 people have been arrested since July 3, the overwhelming majority of them during protests against the military ousting of Mohamed Morsi. The former president's Muslim Brotherhood—leaders of the nation just seven months ago—are now among its most despised criminals. On Christmas Day, the interim Egyptian government declared the organization a terrorist group, despite scant evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Since Morsi's ousting, Egypt's streets have become governed by a new set of laws. In November, interim President Adly Mansour passed a new protest law criminalizing the sort of mass demonstrations that marked Morsi’s final days in office. Unlicensed street gatherings of more than ten people are quickly shut down, particularly when they're held by the ragtag bunch of Morsi supporters still demonstrating week after week. Secular activists and journalists have also faced the state's ire. Critics argue that Egypt’s military-backed authorities are using new, sweeping arrest powers to target the minority who disagrees with their approach.

"Every Friday, no less than 500 to 600 get arrested," said Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim in a press conference last week. "At the beginning, we used to wait for the demonstration to turn violent, but now we confront them once they congregate. When we confront them, there are some that run. But whoever we can grab, we detain."

Students violently arrested at a protest outside Al Azhar University last month.

I spoke to one young man, Ahmad Nour el Din, who had been arrested after police spotted him filming clashes between demonstrators and police inside Cairo’s Al Azhar University. "My police cell was meant for five men, but I was surrounded by 20," he said. "[The police] target people who document what’s going on, then they put them in a cell with common criminals. Those men took money from us every day. They ran the cell, only letting us use the bathroom when they said so."

With so many arrests, Egypt's prisons are growing increasingly crowded. Some cells are filled to six times their capacity. Prisoners report sleeping in shifts.

Four Al Jazeera journalists are being held in a cell in Cairo's notorious Tora prison, along with leading activists and aides of the former president, accused of posing a threat to national security for meeting with Muslim Brotherhood members. Last week, the world was offered a rare glimpse of life inside the cell when a letter from one of the detainees being held there, April 6 co-founder Ahmed Maher, was smuggled out. One excerpt reads:

"Whoever is caught with pen or paper is tortured, along with all those with him. Those detained for crime have their freedom inside the prison regardless of their charges, whether murder or theft or drug dealing, but the political prisoners and those detained after June 30 are kept in solitary confinement."

His stories of collective punishment are echoed in the testimonies of many lawyers. Ayman, who usually acts on behalf of political detainees in Cairo’s Helwan district, told me of the horrors faced by several clients in incarceration. "One man was held with ten others inside a CSF [Central Security Forces, a paramilitary force responsible for assisting the Egyptian National Police] camp, where he watched prisoners from Kerdasa being tortured," he said. "They did it in full view. It sent shockwaves through the camp. My client has not been badly beaten himself but he is not the same. He cannot meet my eyes, and he shakes."

Ayman ran mechanically through a list of the cases he has worked on since July. We reached a dozen, before he stopped abruptly and lit a cigarette. Speaking through the long drags, he told me he was tired. "There are just so many arrests, so many cases," he said. "Sometimes I wake in the night because a cat has jumped on the bins—I think it's the police coming to get me."

Families of the detained speak of months of worry, especially for relatives who grow ill in custody. Mustafa is the brother of a middle-ranking Muslim Brotherhood member who was arrested outside his pharmacy in early October. He told me that his brother became sick after being badly beaten and then left in an overcrowded cell without medical treatment.

"I wouldn’t even raise chickens in that space," he told me. "And yet they left Salah in there, bleeding and sick. Every time he ate, he would vomit. He had hiccups. His body started to swell… There was no doctor on site, so the prison authorities let [his cellmates treat him]. If you don't have any way of keeping the people alive or to preserve their dignity, why hold them there in the first place?"

Egyptian police attacking a protest at Al Azhar University.

Salah eventually died in hospital. By the time he'd been transferred, his brother says it was too late to save him. "The police knew what they’d done," he told me. "They knew they’d messed up. But they didn’t want to admit it, and so they didn’t transfer him. Now, it’s his family that lives with the pain."

The number of arrests is likely to keep on rising over the next couple of weeks. Egyptians have been voting on a new draft constitution—the first of the post-Morsi era—for the past two days. Interior Minister Ibrahim has warned that "any attempt to disrupt the referendum or prevent citizens from voting will be confronted by a level of force and severity that has not been seen before." Day one of the vote saw 140 arrests. 

The constitution is expected to pass by a large margin of "yes" votes. Polling suggests that the majority of Egyptians crave the stability that they believe a move towards political normalcy will bring. But those who might choose to vote "no"—likely objecting to provisions in the new constitution that entrench the military’s political role or sanction military trials for civilians—face prosecution for campaigning in favour of their beliefs.

In the run-up to the referendum, seven activists from Strong Egypt, a centrist Islamist party, were arrested for campaigning against the new document. Now bailed, the men report being beaten in custody, interrogated under anti-terrorism laws and accused of "opposing the constitution." Four of the men will be charged with involvement in terrorism, punishable with life in prison.

If there is further trouble around the polls—or on January 25, the third anniversary of Egypt’s abortive revolution—the country’s cells will continue to swell.

@leloveluck

Andy Letcher looks like a pastiche of English folklore and history. Waxy-faced and cheery-eyed, Letcher sports broad-brimmed hats, clothes that look like they’ve been in mothballs for the better part of two centuries, and a long, twirled moustache above a pointy goatee. Such is his folk resonance that he was asked to pose as Guy Fawkes for the indie-occult graphic novel John Barleycorn Must Die. True to form as an English folk musician and neo-pagan, he spends a fair chunk of his life tromping across the moors of Devon, pondering the Anglo-Saxon deity Wotan, and playing his English border bagpipes. Unlike most in the neo-pagan world, however, he also spends a good deal of time thinking about psilocybin mushrooms, trance states, and how to expand the minds of others through folk music—perhaps without them even realizing it.

“In traditional European cultures that play the pipes, they’re a trance instrument, playing very simple, barbaric, repetitive tunes until everyone is in a frenzy and falling to the floor and frothing at the mouth,” says Letcher. Pulling on that tradition and attracted by the droning tambour of the pipes, he’s formed a bagpipe trio called Wod, an Anglo-Saxon word that means mad, furious, or possessed by a god. Rather than the short little rags and reels of modern Celtic music, though, Wod is a neo-pagan jam band, picking one tune and extemporizing around it for half an hour or more until, as he puts it, “that moment when the music is playing you and the dance is dancing the dancers. At that moment, it’s amazing.”

“I think this is the experience that people have found through rave culture, where the music is sublime. And the music is so good that you’re taken by it,” muses Letcher on the function of an hour-long three-pipe drone. “And I’m trying to do that in an organic way, through acoustic music, acoustic instruments, without amplification.”

Letcher is not talking out of his ass when he waxes poetic about the ties between rave culture, psychedelia, and his bagpipes. He actually wrote the book on magic mushrooms (or at least the first one based on more than layers of unconfirmed, questionable, and oft-repeated tales). It’s called, simply enough, Shroom. In the book and his other academic works, Letcher, who holds two PhDs in ecology and religious studies and just left a job as an instructor at Oxford Brookes University, explores the validity and value of psychedelic experiences and the human and natural history of psychedelic substances. In brief, he’s found no clear evidence for the intentional use of shrooms before the 1970s, nor any way of proving or sharing psychedelic experiences. But he has embraced the value of those experiences.

In that embrace, Letcher breaks sharply from your standard neo-pagan and folk musician trolling the English countryside. Many of them belong to one of the fractured groups of British Druids, Wicca, neo-Shamans, etc. that teach sets of spiritual technologies, practices, and paths to reach naturally altered states of mind—“naturally” being the key word. It can be threatening to such traditions, Letcher believes, for someone to pop by with a baggie of mushrooms and say, “Just take these and you’ll know.” Then there are the issues of illegality, the fear that they’ll make someone go insane or fall ill, and the lack of a social or spiritual framework (like that surrounding ayahuasca consumption in the Andes Mountains) to contextualize one’s difficult psychological experiences. All that makes Letcher’s position at the nexus of British psychedelia, folk music, and neo-paganism strange and lonely to begin with. And his willingness to speak out against the practices of his would-be peers—invoking goddesses and Earth mothers to explain what a dance or chant should mean—doesn’t win him many new friends.

Once upon a time, Letcher was like many other neo-pagan folk musicians: a practicing druid who believed the mythos that his faith and music were authentic recoveries from an idyllic pagan era. He got involved in direct democracy protests and wrote songs about the green man of the woods—pagan songs for pagan people—about identifying as something outside the mainstream, tied to the past. But in the mid-1990s, he encountered Ronald Hutton, a professor of pre-Christian British religion and neo-paganism, at a druid camp in Wiltshire. Over the course of 40 minutes, Hutton demolished all the mythos Letcher believed in and pushed him back into academia. In grappling with his shattered beliefs in a new university environment, Letcher decided to hold onto the mythology, magic, and music of his druid folk protestor days as images, tools, and vessels, set to a different purpose and speaking to a much wider audience than just fellow neo-pagans.

Now, on the days of certain festivals when he feels there’s the room and desire for something a little out of the ordinary, Letcher and his pipers descend into public spaces to, hopefully, whip people’s minds into a temporarily frenzied and altered state. Even if they don’t know that’s what’s going on. Letcher and company set up alongside other public performances and displays, don their costumes, and play, never announcing themselves as pagan, folk, or anything else.

“To the pagan people in the audience, it’s a pagan ritual,” says Letcher. “It’s very obvious that that’s what we’re doing. To the middle class burghers [regular folk] who come and jiggle about, it’s just something pleasant.”

By leaving the performances open-ended and non-didactic, Letcher hopes to draw people into his droning, repetitive songs until he feels something click. At that moment, he believes and hopes, “the music is playing us and the crowd will be dancing—a whole line of people doing a serpent dance through the crowd. And I think everyone feels it, even if not consciously.” Letcher sees this as a kind of magic in which he can transport people out of their minds through music and into a different reality. He thinks the audience may not be aware of what’s happening, but that they want it, even if they don’t know that’s the experience they’re craving—non-consensual enlightenment, if you will.

This isn’t just a process of trying to trip people into a parallel reality via bagpipes for the sake of trying to trip people into a parallel reality via bagpipes. For all his embrace of ambiguity, Letcher and his cohorts have a fairly mundane and clear goal. They’re all worried about climate change and the imbalance in the way humans relate to the non-human world. “My hope,” Letcher says, “is that through using paganism, music—even the judicious use of psychedelics where it’s appropriate—we can find a less one-sided relationship with the other-than-human world.” In other words, by altering individuals’ perceptions momentarily, he hopes they will see the world as enchanted, thereby inspiring them to treat their environment differently.

Although he’d be happy enough if others simply felt that the world were enchanted, Letcher believes the world is actually magical. Although, he admits, “I might be wrong. It might all be typhoons and parasites. But I don’t think so.” 

Everyone knows what charming places strip clubs can be, but perhaps there is no club so charming as one in Moriarty, New Mexico—a truck stop with taxidermy and the bras of former employees on the walls, a few poles, a shitload of black light, and plenty of titties. Never mind that The Ultimate Strip Club List website describes it as the place “where strippers go to die.”

Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo go Gonzo as they pose as strippers and experience something that can be best described as a Marina Abramovic performance crossed with a bizarro episode of Wife Swap directed by David Lynch's daughters, set in the type of place where a one eyed guy who shot himself in the head dispenses meditation advice to two naked women. 

Read an interview with Natalia and Alexandra from VICE's December 2013 issue here.