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How to Dress Well's New Album Is All About Pleasure

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Portraits by Chuck Grant

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Running late for our interview and photo shoot, Tom Krell texted me: "What should I wear LOL." An artist called How to Dress Well should have known—but I texted back, "Follow ur heart." A short time later, he showed up to Echo Park Lake wearing a powder-pink shirt bearing a Saiman Chow drawing of a person and a dog engaging in mouth-to-mouth.

Krell—raised in Boulder, Colorado, and schooled in Chicago—moved to Los Angeles in January, and the cheerful August day served as a better argument in favor of the relocation than any other. Palm trees foregrounded a faraway view of Downtown LA, and dogs and children, both of which constantly distracted Krell from our conversation, populated the sidewalks. "Oh my God," he remarked at the sight of a newborn baby, "it's like watching Planet Earth." For someone who's become notorious for dropping bleak aphorisms in the middle of interviews—"Everything is terrible," he told Noisey in 2014, while promoting his third studio album, What Is This Heart?—Krell was a far more cheerful conversationalist than such sound bites might suggest. "I want one," he told me, still observing the baby. "But not, like, really. It's just too much work. But I definitely want one. They smell so goddamn good."

Krell spoke like he was only half-aware he had an audience, with a kind of stream of consciousness that produces language bewildering to the listener and taken for granted by the speaker. "I'm definitely, like, a very thought-oriented person," he said. "I like to talk and think. I talk constantly. I don't really know how to not talk. I don't really have a rich inner life."

How to Dress Well's recently released fourth studio album, Care, reveals a singer and producer who has moved away from the atmospheric moodiness that characterized his previous music. The first single, "Lost Youth/Lost You," an energetic pop song produced by Jack Antonoff, lyrically maintains some of the darkness that has long characterized his work but is animated by an exuberance that was previously absent. "I say I think I know what love is now / I think I got it figured out," sings Krell in the hook. "But then the second that I open my mouth / I want to change my heart again." The song defers to the conventions of glossy pop music without entirely surrendering Krell's compulsive tendency toward somberness, as does the rest of the album. He sings about a happiness that is constantly fleeting and a safety that is under constant threat.

"Care is a truly joyous record—I hope that hearing it brings you pleasure above all else :)," Krell wrote on his site a few months before the release, teasing the album to his fans. "Joyous" was never a qualifier one could use to describe Krell's music. But on Care, there's a lot less obfuscation than his previous albums, which were praised by critics for his elaborate arrangements of sound. "Maybe I felt like I needed to make it a little harder on people before," he told me. "Almost like, if you want to like this, you have to pass through this gauntlet of challenges. On , I was just like, Fuck it, let's just go for pleasure." Pleasure was decidedly not a priority for Love Remains, his first studio album, with its muddy vocals and heavy instrumentals—he told Pitchfork that he wanted to make an album that sounded as "depressed as I felt." "When I was first making the songs from Love Remains, if I started making something beautiful, I couldn't stop because I was afraid it was going to disappear."

He followed that up with Total Loss in 2012, which he wrote after the deaths of his best friend and his uncle. During that time, Krell was also working on a PhD in philosophy at DePaul University, writing a dissertation on nihilism, a fact that became a fixation for music journalists interested in emphasizing the "cerebral" aspects of his music (but which Krell downplays.) "I'm like, 'Yeah, I read all the unpublished letters in German that Jacobi wrote to, I don't know, the pupils of Mendelssohn,'" he said. "You'd be like, 'I don't give a fuck.' That's so lame. It's just not that cool." His academic history becomes evident in the way he talks, spontaneously flinging himself into a brief overview of neoliberalism in the middle of a conversation about pleasure in art. "The American logic is so dark," he said, in between bites of a squash blossom breakfast burrito. "We are the generation that is the first real lab test of this mode of political-economic reality. It's like, 40 years old, neoliberalism." He sings about this logic, the accumulation of debt, and "normalized anti-sympathy" on the 11th track of the album, "They'll Take Everything You Have."

"He's very academic-minded, but then he has this ability to distill or synthesize everything in this really childlike, naïve, innocent way," said his Care collaborator Kara-Lis Coverdale, a Montreal-based artist. It was important, Krell told me, for him to have women on the album. "I've had the luxury of working with a lot of dope women over the last few years, and then you're just like, Oh, why doesn't anybody know Kara-Lis's music?" he said. Coverdale, a composer and church organist whose haunting arrangements have earned her the praise of—at least—the Guardian, worked with Krell on "What's Up?," the second single off the album. "When my body's gone, tell 'em what made me sing / Say it was you," sings Krell, in lyrics that, again, demonstrate his refusal to abandon darkness.

"If I started making something beautiful, I couldn't stop because I was afraid it was going to disappear." —Tom Krell

On Care, optimism is generated despite the sorrow of existence, and not in opposition to it. He sings these lyrics to "Anxious" against frenetic pop instrumentals: "Why am I addicted to such attention? / When all I want is that love and affection. / Had a nightmare about my Twitter mentions— / Wonder why I feel so vacant, / And wake up so anxious?" (Coverdale called Krell an "internet wizard," adding that he originally reached out to her via Twitter direct messages.) Capitalism, he said, has produced a generation overwrought with anxiety and mental illness, and constantly on guard because "life is dangerous." But counter to this argument, he also insisted that "life is lit." How does one stay "lit" under capitalism? I asked. "Antidepressants. Coffee. My friends. My art. And then also, like, privilege," he answered.

When What Is This Heart? was released in 2014, it represented a more conscious shift toward a pop sound, with a more deliberate focus on lyricism; still, it remained persistently melancholic. Back then, he told a journalist that he wanted to make music that was pop but not populist. "I just meant something that has a value that's not counterfeit, but that's not, like, elitist, and not for a select subset of listeners who are like, 'Yeah, reminds me of Suicide and, like, Japanese noise from whatever,'" he explained to me now. "I'm not into that kind of elitism anymore." His musical tastes are wide-ranging, from Carly Rae Jepsen to Young Thug to Sheryl Crow—recently, he posted a video to his Instagram singing lines from Crow's "Strong Enough" in his signature falsetto. Later in the day, he played a few songs from the new Rae Sremmurd album. He told me he thinks Rihanna made one of the best albums of the year with Anti.

Krell strives to make songs that bridge the gaps between these musical tastes, and that is how he approached the production of Care. "I'll be like, 'You know what would be sick?' If there was a song that started in a folky register and went so that I could put Joni Mitchell on one side of it and Deafheaven on the other side of it," he said. "What's the transitional song?" He contacted producers like Grammy-nominated composer CFCF, dancehall producer Dre Skull, recording engineer Laura Sisk, and Coverdale. He aspired to an "aesthetic beserkness" and an "aesthetic courage," he said, defining these concepts as "the confidence and freedom to just play with elements and try out things." They lent themselves to an album that is sonically frenzied but tightly crafted.

"I'm way more playful and experimental ," Krell said. "When I finished making this record, I was like, Oh yeah, there's so much defensiveness and control and fearfulness and shit in those records," he said of his last three releases. Which is not to say he doesn't love those albums, but Care exhibits a clear evolution of skill. And what he had on this album that he didn't have on other albums was time. "I just went more slowly this time, really thought a lot about what I want art to be," he said.

So, I asked: "How do you want art to be?"

He answered, "That's not a one-liner. You literally can't ask that question." And then, because he couldn't help himself: "I don't know, joyous and liberating."

This article appeared in the October issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.


Nice Job!: What It's Like to Save Lives as a 25-Year-Old Paramedic

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An unidentified person is moved to an ambulance after four people were shot, resulting in one fatality in Chicago's South Side (November, 2013). Photo by Brian Jackson/Chicago Tribune via Getty Images

Not long before I spoke to Nate Boyce, he had just tried to save a man who had fallen 60 feet while rock climbing and was "the definition of broken." The guy was in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, where Boyce works as a paramedic, and it was the job of him and his team to give the patient pain meds through an IV, wrap him in a blanket, carry him to their all-terrain vehicle, and drive to someplace where a helicopter could pick him up.

That's far more dramatic than most days the 25-year-old has, but Boyce's job carries with it the possibility of life-and-death moments that most of us just see on TV. He's worked as an emergency medical technician (EMT)—an entry-level position that requires the completion of a certification course—since 2013, and cut his teeth driving an ambulance in Boston, where he's from. Last month, he officially became a paramedic, a more advanced position that carries with it the responsibility of interpreting a patient's vitals, putting them on a heart monitor or giving them breathing tubes, and administering powerful medications.

I recently spoke to Boyce, who now works in a rural area near Colorado Springs where the staff is limited, about how he handles the most gut-wrenching parts of the job and the common misconceptions people have about paramedics.

VICE: Does it scare you seeing someone who is as badly hurt as that guy who fell? How do you respond to something like that emotionally?
Nate Boyce: I just look at what happened and I try to put together a plan. And as soon as I have a plan for how I want to treat the patient, that's just what I do. We were fortunate with this guy that I actually got to talk to him for a while cause it took us so long to get him out. I had a much longer conversation than I do with most patients. He was a Colorado College student who just moved here from New York, which is kind of ironic because that's where I went to school.

Honestly, it was the most personal connection I've ever had with any of my patients. I've definitely crossed the line from empathy to sympathy in the past. But obviously our goal is to never have emotions affect the way you do things. That's like a tenant of medicine: You treat everyone the same way regardless of your connection to them. We talk about that and we try to stress its importance, but obviously we can't guarantee that.

When you were starting as an EMT what was the first serious situation you had to deal with?
I remember starting and not running any good calls for six months probably. You know, calls where we could do anything. The very first serious call I went on was a guy who shot himself in the head. He was so dead that we didn't even go inside. The cops were already there. They were like, "You can just leave." I was pretty freaked out at the time because I didn't know what to do next. There was a hysterical family and I was just totally underprepared to deal with them. And I just kind of stood there awkwardly and looked, and I didn't know what to say to them. It takes years to learn to tell someone that someone they love is dead. That is a true statement for sure.

It takes 140 hours to get your EMT license. That's really minimal, and it doesn't teach you that much. I think that was the most surprising part for me—how unprepared I was to be dealing with all of these things, and yet everybody I worked with was totally fine with all of it. If you work in finance and you have a business degree, you probably show up on your first day with some amount of knowledge of what your job is going to be like. That just totally isn't the case here.

Were you often afraid at the start of your career?
When you're new, you're staring at the patient afraid and you're not really sure what to do, or even what you're afraid of. Mostly, you're afraid of being awkward, you're afraid that they know you're new. When you're really new you're afraid that everyone in the ambulance is gonna die, or take a turn for the worst. And that's just totally not gonna happen. You know, it's just not how it works. Most people are not that sick. But when you first start you're feeling is that, like, I'm on an ambulance—this is life and death stuff . It could be any second that this person who just called me for leg pain just drops dead! Over time you get over that because it just doesn't happen like that very often, and you realize that it's just two people in the back of the truck by happenstance. Why not take advantage of that and talk to them?

Paramedics treat a man inside an ambulance in California (August, 1989). Photo via Chuck Nacke/Getty

Do you feel personal satisfaction about giving back in this way?
Yeah, but I would never do this for free. It's very much a job. It's my job, and it's a job I happen to really enjoy. But if tomorrow they said, "It's gonna be on a volunteer basis," I would be out of there. I can't emphasize how terrible the pay is. I mean, I live a very comfortable life because I'm a non-married, mid-twenties male. But I also work, on average, 70 hours a week to do that. It's a problem, and it's not sustainable. My solution of picking up overtime or having other jobs for different ambulance services could totally fall apart if I wanted to have a family. And we just haven't been able to figure out how to change the pay. And that's a problem as well because we have so many people leave the industry who are good at their jobs. They interact with the rest of healthcare professionals who are well-compensated, and they're like, "Shit. Why shouldn't I just go to nursing school and make twice as much money for significantly less responsibility?"

"The surefire way to get someone in my industry riled up is to call him or her an ambulance driver."

So a lot of people quit these jobs?
According to the federal government, the national average length for a paramedic's career is three and a half years to five. Not an EMT—a paramedic who went through an associate's degree program to get there. Even after all that investment into themselves, the average paramedic works for less than four years before doing something else.

I can count on one hand the number of paramedics that are over the age of 50. It just doesn't happen. People have to move on because they work really hard. They run 12 calls in 12 hours; they're stuck in the ambulance all day. It breaks most people after a while, and I'm fortunate that my full-time job is at a place that doesn't run so many calls, has a station, and has a boss that try to take care of us as people. It's extremely rare to see people retire from this job, though.

Are there any misconceptions about your job and industry that you'd like to address?
People who are paramedics are true healthcare professionals and I think a lot of times that's kind of lost. The surefire way to get someone in my industry riled up is to call him or her an ambulance driver. Yeah, I drive the ambulance, but I do a whole lot more than that. That's a small part of my job. We provide surprisingly advanced care. Not only do we have the ability to treat really life-threatening illnesses, but we make people feel better. Treating people's pain is awesome, you know? Also, chances are you're not gonna die in front of me. You just feel like shit. And I'm here, so let me help you. Most all of the time we are able to make things better, and that's where most of my satisfaction comes from.

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter

Inside New Zealand's Reclusive, Anti-Technology Christian Community

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Nestled deep in the mountains on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, Gloriavale is a Christian group styled along the lines of America's Amish community. Residents of Gloriavale wear clothes resembling those found in the 19th century. They also use little technology or electricity.

Since its establishment in 1969, founder Neville Cooper (who now goes by Hopeful Christian) has kept the community cut-off from the outside world. With the number of residents totaling close to 600, Gloriavale is entirely self-sufficient with no individual allowed anything of his or her own. It's also common for the number of children in each family to hit double digits, most becoming parents in their teens.

Gloriavale has long been a subject of public fascination. Allegations of sexual abuse, tax evasion, education deficits, and deaths have made the Christian community a permanent fixture in the New Zealand media—and yet its inner workings remain largely a mystery.

This means, for the most part, the public has relied on accounts of ex-Gloriavale members to understand daily life within the community. However, photographer Cam McLaren was invited into the community and gave VICE an exclusive preview of what he saw.

VICE: Tell me a little bit about how your Gloriavale project came to fruition. They're notoriously reclusive, how did you get access?
Cam McLaren: I heard about the community around four years ago and found it really intriguing, but it wasn't until 2015 when when I decided to get in touch with them to discuss the idea of visiting. We basically went through a pretty big process of back-and-forth conversations, although it felt more like they were interviewing me. Eventually they welcomed me in, but it was only decided that I could take pictures when I had arrived and met with Gloriavale's leader, Hopeful Christian.

What was Hopeful Christian like in person? Did he lay out what was expected of you?
He's quite a proud man. People don't treat him like a god, but they respect him like an inventor, a leader, and a source of inspiration. Although I did wonder if this sense of respect was grown through Chinese whispers over time.

Gloriavale has been embroiled in multiple scandals. Having seen their lifestyle firsthand, do you think they're misunderstood?
I understand that there are huge social concerns around the community, especially around the safety of children, but the whole time I was a guest they treated me with total respect. I found that the children were really adored, and they were treated very much like they were the future of the community. I'm sure that Gloriavale has its problems and people with problems... but that's the same as everywhere else. Who doesn't have issues?

Was there anything you found particularly surprising about the way they live?
I was very surprised by the extent of the community's self sufficiency. At the time of my visit, there were around 600 residents. That's a lot of mouths to feed. I was told due to their diets and lifestyles that the residents rarely need to leave the community to get medical treatment. Outside doctors regularly visit as well as dentists and other specialties that the community don't have within their ranks.

Gloriavale has assets of $30 million. Were there obvious displays of wealth in the community?
The land the community sits on is vast and would be worth a small fortune itself, but most of the buildings were pretty old and in need of upgrading. There certainly were not any displays of wealth. Everyone presents themselves very humbly.

Where did you sleep?
I was shown to this room that was filled with flowers, and there was a pink dress lying on the bed. There was an overwhelming sense of celebration. It turned out that it was in preparation for a new family who would be moving in shortly after I left, and the dress was going to be worn by the new bride.

Were there any restrictions on who you could talk to?
I was allowed to speak with anyone, but for much of the time, I was moving around the community alone. It's like any place: Some people want to discuss the world, some don't, but the people of Gloriavale come from a massively diverse background. Many were highly educated and had been really successful outside the community before they entered.

Did going make you reevaluate the way you live in the outside world? Is there anything you've changed since?
Yeah. After I left, I started really considering my place in society and how I was going to progress. Did I want to start my own family? Everything just became more clear after my visit. The simplicity of life in the community would make anyone think about their own lifestyle.

McLaren's book Gloriavale will be released by Etcht on November 1. It'll be available directly from his website and select book retailers internationally.

How ‘Black Mirror’ Went from Being a Clever Show to a Televised Thinkpiece

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A still from 'Black Mirror' series three episode, "Nosedive" (Photo by David Dettmann/Netflix)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In a year that's felt like a slow-burning trash pile, Black Mirror has shown up right on time. The Charlie Brooker series fittingly migrated from Channel 4 to Netflix's digital TV service, where it gained an American following. Its third season, which premiered on Friday—Netflix company bought the rights for a reported $40 million—continues the show's principal fascinations: man, machine, and the questions of who controls what.

It's a nifty premise. Horror has, for decades now, been the genre most well-suited to tell us about ourselves. Nothing gets to the heart of human behaviour more than vulnerability, fear, irrational paranoia. Across cultures, broad readings of horror tropes feel like anthropology. But what does Black Mirror tell us about us now?

Not much, it would seem. You don't need horror and science fiction to dabble in allegory, but it goes without saying that they're at their most potent when they do. The degree to which can vary —Japan's much-lauded canon of horror films are remarkably effective and self-contained, but if you're looking to understand, say, the country's patriarchy, the genre's fascination with female rage will do you well.

Black Mirror, on the other hand, is entirely devoid of allegory. It is, instead, robustly about the thing itself. Technology is a stand-in largely for, I guess, technology? And our slavish devotion to its convenience is meant to embody the way that we are, well, slaves to its convenience.

The biggest change to this season comes from Netflix, where the show is now featured under its "original series" banner. We leave the strictly English confines of the first two seasons, and enter the US (as well as other countries), under the eye of select American filmmakers. As a result, textures of the new season feel uneven, with pace and style varying wildly. The washed out and saturated tones you'd recognize from English TV persist, except in Joe Wright's season opener, which more closely resembles a video game cutscene.

The granular pace of British drama is swapped at times for the fevered pitch of American editing. The Dan Trachtenberg-helmed "Playtest" episode moves at the speed of a paranoid thriller, while James Watkin's "Shut Up and Dance" is a repetitive slog. It's an odd change. From my view across the pond, English television is an often more insular experience, something America's "golden age" has since adopted—the key is to hold a lot both within the frame and below the surface.

Black Mirror is most often held up against The Twilight Zone, another pretty nihilistic anthology series. Technology factored heavily there too, but it was awash instead in Cold War paranoia. Cyclicality was central to Rod Serling's program. Atomic anxiety, the perils of McCarthyism, the stringent dread of the Other; paranoia was everywhere in The Twilight Zone, but the fear of the moment was framed as repeating psychosis. A period piece, a modern setting, an elaborate dystopian future; these weren't storytelling choices, they were meant to signify the ways in which we are doomed to repeat the same conflicts, with the decades and scapegoats mere details, in a tragic unending story.

Black Mirror has less to say about where we've been and who we are in the 21st century, because we are, basically, figuring it out all over again. It's less about fear than behaviour. Whereas Twilight Zone felt like a Rorschach test, Black Mirror is a thinkpiece.

Brooker's show is outraged, but to what end? Serling was almost entirely preoccupied with morality, and the irony of the show's many nihilistic endings felt akin to finger wagging, a perennial "I told you so." The show has less to say, largely because of the vagaries of the moment it's responding to. Not too long ago, technology was saddled with the baggage of utopia: a tool meant to guide us into a new age full of promise. Shows like Star Trek boldly took us to a time when our ills were assuaged by technology, not enabled by it. In that sense, Black Mirror is truly a grim fairy tale for our time, where our sneaking suspicion that machines don't entirely have our back has become real. Just this past month, a New York Magazine essay on the perils of technological addiction became the de facto postcard from the edge.

But this is a one-dimensional attempt to manifest three-dimensional fears. Some episodes have proven strangely prophetic: The second season finale, "The Waldo Moment," shows a TV entertainer bafflingly manage to dupe the public and climb the political ranks, an eerie echo of things to come in the US; the series' pilot features the British Prime Minister having sex with a pig.

The newest season features an episode that serves as a potent metaphor for immigration, tapping into what is undoubtedly the defining political issue on the two continents that Black Mirror now belongs to. These are absurd times, in which talk of walls, verifying refugees' ages, and denigrating human rights lawyers is commonplace. So much of what makes sci-fi powerful is the way in which it asks us to confront who we are. Black Mirror makes for an occasionally enjoyable ride, but its interest is in telling us who we could be. It's a warning in the eye of a hurricane, too goofy in its aesthetics to register as art, and too on-the-nose in its storytelling to land as a metaphor. Black Mirror asks us to look at our own reflection, but it doesn't entirely care who is looking back.

Black Mirror is available to stream on Netflix as of Friday the 21st of October

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Damian Marley Told Us About the Massive Weed Operation He’s Starting in a Former Prison

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All photos by Chase Hall

When asked about the significance of converting a prison that once housed people locked up for possessing, selling, and growing marijuana into the headquarters of a legal cannabis empire, Bob Marley's youngest son, Damian, simply says, "It speaks for itself."

"Many people who got locked up have sacrificed so much for the herb over the years," Marley said. "If this helps people and it's used for medicinal purposes and inspires people, it's a success."

Along with his partnering company Ocean Grown Extracts (OGE), Marley plans to bring 100 new jobs and an annual tax revenue of over $1 million to the city of Coalinga, California in the grow house's first two years of operation—on par with the revenue and jobs lost when the prison Claremont Custody Center was shut down in 2011. Starting in January, the former Coalinga prison will be used for growing, extracting, and packaging cannabis, with a focus on concentrates like wax and oil. The team will also grow Speak Life, a flower strain Marley developed with OGE (and also the name of a vape he's branded).

As California attempts to reign in its previously unregulated medical marijuana market, which claimed just under 600 million in taxable revenue last year, and move toward legalizing recreational use with a likely-to-pass ballot-referendum in November, some activists worry that the green rush might leave those who created the market behind.

"We think the Marley project is a good symbolic step toward restorative justice in the cannabis industry," said Tsion "Sunshine" Lencho, lawyer and co-founder of Supernova, a non-profit dedicated to representing people of color in the cannabis industry. "But we're worried that it might be just that. Symbolic. We want to see people of color and people with criminal records, in other words, people who were directly impacted by the drug wars and created the market, not just hired as employees but also represented on the executive level. We want to put the ownership in the hands of people who created market."

The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that less than 1 percent of legal cannabis grows are owned by people of color.

"I hadn't really been thinking about it," Marley said when asked about the racial makeup of his legal herb business partners. "But now that you mentioned it, yes. A lot of the people I'm dealing with are white."

Ocean Grown Extracts partner Casey Dalton mentioned that the contract negotiated with the City of Coalinga allows the company to hire former felons.

"We absolutely believe in redemption," Dalton said. Though the company has no specific plans to encourage people with criminal records to apply, both Dalton and Marley admitted they were open to the idea.

I sat down with Damian Marley in a New York hotel to get the reggae star's thoughts on business and equity in America's budding legal herb business, and how his involvement could shape its evolution.

VICE: Where are you based out of?
Damian Marley: Jamaica and Miami.

When was the first time you smoked?
I can't even remember the first time... I've been smoking since I was quite young still. For us as Rastas, it's a religious sacrament. And even in Jamaica it's always been a big part of our culture, our music. I'm still going to make a statement, say, for young people who don't smoke and want to experiment; I would encourage them to eat it. Smoking is not the healthiest choice, regardless of what you're smoking. If you're not a smoker, it's always better to eat it.

Do you find smoking spiritual? Is it attached to your creative process?
It's a big part of my life. It's hard to put it any which way. Basically, I smoke every day regularly. I can't say I've really done much recording without smoking.

How did the Ocean Grow Extracts partnership come about?
I became aware of them through Dan, my manager. His brother and sister run the business. It came about by trying some their herbs, which I liked a lot actually. That was the original interest in terms of wanting to be involved. While getting involved with them, the opportunity came up to purchase the prison.

What's the significance to you of having a legal pot grow in a converted prison?
I think it speaks for itself in terms of the statement. A place that perhaps housed individuals who were locked out for herb is now a grow, y'know what I'm saying? Of course herb is a big part of our culture for Rastas and Jamaicans and all of that, and we've always advocated for it to be legal. For us to be partners in this venture...what was a prison is now a grow? Again, the statement speaks for itself.

The plan is also to help revitalize the economy of the town of Coalinga, which lost one of its revenue streams when the prison closed in 2011.
That's one of the benefits of herb being decriminalized and legalized in various states like California. For us to help that city, Coalinga, is a given benefit.

Does OGE have any plans to hire or encourage people with former marijuana convictions to apply for jobs with the company?
To tell you the truth, that is not an active thing happening at this moment. That would definitely be great and that is something that is very important to me, at least. That is something I've been thinking about recently. One of my main concerns as marijuana becomes legal in more places and accepted in more places is that the people who originally sacrificed and were able to feed their families from growing the herb or selling the herb will still have the opportunity to do so. Because now it's an American corporate system where you need permits and such, and if you're not careful you can muscle the smaller man out, which would be sad to see happen. It would be very sad to see the small person muscled out of this game because of the profit situation. Even to go about obtaining those permits is not something that is common knowledge. We're not lawyers. We're farmers and growers. is a very corporate structure.

Some activists have suggested corporate and/or tax revenue from this growing $6.7 billion industry should be funneled back into communities directly impacted by the drug war. Do you think the cannabis industry has any responsibility to pay reparations for the drug wars?
That's great. That's a positive. Overall, it's less great. I think it's up to somebody's will if you want to donate money. People need to earn for themselves. That's how it was in the beginning and that's still the best way. Being able to involve these people without moral spirit remains there is really the issue.

As legalization moves forward in the state and marijuana becomes more mainstream, are you concerned about corporatization with weed? Are you worried weed will become like tobacco or big pharma?
This is exactly what I'm saying. It's very concerning. Even in my dealings with people now involved in the herb industry, they don't even smoke. But they're seeing it's going to become profitable. People from the original culture of it don't really operate the business or understand business in that way. Yeah, I am concerned. As we get more involved, we'll definitely try to come up with our own ways in the nature of what you're saying—in making sure it goes far with the original community.

Have you ever been hassled by the cops for marijuana?
In Jamaica, I've been pulled over and they found herb in the car. And they wanted to carry us to jail. Luckily, my stepfather is a real popular criminal lawyer and he had a relationship with some of the officers, so I was able to not have to spend time in jail that night.

It not being illegal is one of the greatest issues, though. Besides all this business we were speaking about before. Just being able to have a joint and know that I'm not going have to spend time in a jail cell is the greatest feeling of all. Being a part of the industry as a user and knowing you don't have that headache anymore.

Moving forward, as legalization gathers steam across the states, do you think the president should pardon people with criminal records for non-violent drug convictions?
It's a case-by-case basis. To be locked up or have a criminal record for something that is now legal—how fair is that? That's not really fair. You still have to look at cases individually, though. Someone who was moving tons and tons of herbs across the country, versus someone who was just selling a few ounces. There's a difference there.

You have a new album coming out named Stony Hill. It's also the name of a dispensary you run in Colorado.
Yeah, it had the name of the album for a while. Stony is a place in Jamaica where I grew up. Tends to be one of the nicer parts of town. It's been the name of the album for a while. When we had the opportunity to become involved in the herb business, to me it made perfect sense. The name lends well to an herb brand. Stony Hill... you know?

Ocean Grown Extracts plans for the Coalinga facility to be fully operational by January. The partnership with Ocean Grown Extracts isn't the reggae star's only venture into legal herb. Marley also sponsors Stony Hill, a Colorado dispensary named after his forthcoming album.

Follow Julia on Twitter and visit Chase's website to see more of his photo work.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A UK Politician Talked for So Long That Parliament Couldn't Vote on the 'Turing Bill'

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Alan Turing, photographed here aged 16, was pardoned of a 1952 "offence" in 2013 and the subject of film 'The Imitation Game' (Photo via)

The Tory Justice Minister effectively blocked a vote on a proposed bill that would have automatically pardoned thousands of living men criminalized under now-defunct anti-homosexuality laws. In a process that's known as "filibustering," minister Sam Gyimah basically addressed the House of Commons until there wasn't time left for a vote on Friday afternoon, meaning the Private Member's Bill proposed by SNP MP John Nicolson couldn't move forward in Parliament.

As it stands, the deceased men who were considered guilty of offences before gay sex was decriminalized in 1967, and the age of same-gender consent lowered to 16 in 2001, will still be pardoned. That was the crux of the news reported on Thursday, and hailed as a the cornerstone of "momentous day" by Lib Dem Lord Sharkey.

The government seemed to agree. "It is hugely important that we pardon people convicted of historical sexual offences who would be innocent of any crime today," Gyimah said, when announcing the Tory party's plan to use an amendment to an existing bill, rather than the new bill laid out by the SNP. "Through pardons and the existing disregard process we will meet our manifesto commitment to put right these wrongs."

To critics of Gyimah's filibuster, that translates as the Tory party opting to take the lead on a change to the law rather than having the SNP take credit for a more widespread pardon. Nicolson's bill hoped for a blanket pardon for all convictions that are no longer illegal – namely, consensual sex between male adults above the age of 16.

"The meaning of that is patently obvious," Nicolson said, as reported by the Guardian. "If the crime for which you were convicted is still a crime, by definition you are not pardoned. So let nobody be confused about that. The aim of this simple measure is, I hope, obvious. The pardon confers no immediate advantage except this: it will, I hope, bring closure to those men who have had those monstrous, unfair criminal convictions for decades."

That's not quite how Gyimah saw the issue. He, and thus the Ministry of Justice, have said that there's a risk that people would be automatically pardoned for crimes that fall into a grey area: ones that are still illegal today, but wouldn't have been properly catalogued when they fell under the vague "gross indecency" remit of past anti-gay restrictions and laws. About 15,000 living men would thus have to apply for a pardon from the Home Office, as Nicolson noted, under the current system supported by Gyimah, rather than have the crimes automatically struck from their record.

"A blanket pardon, without the detailed investigations carried out by the Home Office under the disregard process, could see people guilty of an offence which is still a crime today claiming to be pardoned," Gyimah said in a statement. "This would cause an extraordinary and unnecessary amount of distress to victims and for this reason the government cannot support the Private Member's Bill. Our way forward will be both faster and fairer."

Nicolson's bill is due to be debated again on the 14th of December.

More on VICE:

Herstory Is Instagram's Finest Lesbian Account

Here Are a Few Simple Reasons Why We Still Need UK Black Pride

'Queer: A Graphic History' Could Totally Change the Way You Think About Sex and Gender

This Inuk Man Is Prepared to Die In Opposition of a Massive Dam in Labrador

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Hunger striker Billy Gauthier with Muskrat Falls protesters. Photo by Ossie Michelin

Billy Gauthier feels like he could go on a long run after consuming only water for eight days.

At five-foot-five and 140 pounds, he's not a big guy, and in the first three days of his hunger strike, he says he lost seven pounds. He's likely lost several more since then.

"I try and conserve my energy, but sometimes I have to be energized," Gauthier, 38, tells VICE News. "I can't just sit down or lay down and hope things work out."

Gauthier's phone keeps cutting out due to bad reception in the remote area 40 to 50 kilometres northwest of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. This is where a small but determined group of protesters have built an encampment in a parking lot across from the entrance of the worksite of a giant hydroelectric dam, which they have also blockaded for more than a week, attempting to stop workers from going in and out. On Friday, another group of protesters in Goose Bay occupied a helipad in an attempt to stop the company from flying workers in by helicopter.

Any day now, the company behind the Muskrat Falls dam project could start to flood a 41-square-kilometre area of land—but Indigenous locals, including Gauthier, fear the flooding will increase methylmercury levels downstream, causing it to bioaccumulate in the fish and seals they rely on for food.

Willing to die, Gauthier will only end his hunger strike if the company promises not to flood, and guarantees they will conduct proper research before going any further, "to know for sure whether or not it's going to release unacceptable amounts of methylmercury."

Read More: This $11 Billion 'Clean' Energy Dam Could Poison Locals with Methylmercury, Scientists Say

Smoke wafts over the protest camp from a communal fire and large oil drums with burning wood inside. The young men in the camp take regular trips into the woods to chop logs for the fire. Posters of Gauthier hang around the encampment. The Labrador artist, who is recognized worldwide for his carvings of delicate figures from stone and organic materials including walrus ivory, has become a symbol of resistance within the camp, and outside of it, due to growing media attention.

Gauthier is staying warm in a camper, while outside, people gather in a communal tent, chatting, planning future action, and sharing bannock, moose soup, partridge soup and red berry jam.

Gauthier isn't offended by it. "It's been very, very few times in the last eight days that I've actually thought about food," he says.

Two other hunger strikers, Delilah Saunders and Jerry Kohlmeister, have joined Gauthier, and are both on day five, while a fourth hunger striker who joined them has since quit the protest. While Gauthier is drinking only water, he has encouraged the other two hunger strikers to drink broth or juice.

Delilah Saunders, another Muskrat Falls hunger striker. Photo by Ossie Michelin

"I've encouraged them to do this because, if in the end we're not heard by Nalcor, or our provincial government, or our federal government, if we're not heard then we can't all die at once. And this would ensure it would be one at a time."

Gauthier and the others know they have embarked on a dangerous strike. Despite mounting protests and a growing number of headlines, the Newfoundland government is not backing down, and the company still intends to flood.

Nalcor and the province hope that when the dam is completed, together with the Gull Island phase of the project, it will provide a wealth of non-fossil fuel energy for the province, Nova Scotia and New England. The project is already way over budget, and has racked up a total cost of $11 billion, with multiple loans from the federal government.

Since beginning his hunger strike, Gauthier has conversed with Nalcor's executive vice president Gilbert Bennett, who he says he has "very little faith in," and provincial environment minister Perry Trimper. He won't call Trimper by his ministerial title. "He's not qualified for his job, so he's Perry Trimper to me."

"Even if it's only potential, why would you play Russian roulette with the people who live off that land?" he asks.

That's why he's now calling on the federal government and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene.

"Growing up I've been told, and believed, that Canada is one of the safest most beautiful and free countries in the world, where you can express your opinion and you can be protected," he says.

"If provinces don't do what's right for the people, a federal government that oversees the country is supposed to intervene and make things right. If not, my previous views of this country will be tainted."

13-year-old Allyson Gear, of Postville, Nunatsiavut, drum dancing at the encampment. Photo by Ossie Michelin

The day before he stopped eating food, Gauthier called his 15-year-old daughter to tell her what he was planning. She lives in New Brunswick with her mother, but when she visits he takes her ice fishing.

"It was the hardest phone call I ever had to make in my life," he said.

He told her: "I'm not going to eat until someone out here does what's right for our people." That's when she started to cry, he said.

"I'm scared," he told VICE News, "But that's what bravery is, when you're scared but you do it anyway, because it's right."

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.


I Saw the Future of Sex Dolls and Butt Plugs at Germany's Largest Sex Convention

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With more than 20,000 visitors and 400 exhibitions, shops, and fetish performances, Berlin's VENUS International Erotic Trade Fair is one of the biggest events of its kind. Since 1997, the annual expo has been presenting trends and innovations from the erotic sector, and last weekend marked VENUS's 20th anniversary.

Producers and wholesalers presented their latest products—including a multitude of silicone sex dolls and latex fashion pieces—while the public was invited to participate in workshops and virtual-reality sex demos, as well as interact with a multitude of porn stars signing autographs and taking photos with fans. Passersby even had the opportunity to join in on the various strip shows and erotic performances going on in what felt like every corner of the space.

Prostitution has been legal in Germany since 2002, and the sex industry is a noticeable aspect of people's lives, whether it's business or not. I explored the VENUS community in this context, taking portraits of visitors, models, actors, performers, and exhibitors.

Some of the below photos are very NSFW. You have been warned.

All photographs by Martina Cirese. You can follow her work here.


The First Fentanyl Addict

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If the opiate crisis has taught us anything, it's that addiction affects everyone. An unprecedented surge in fentanyl-implicated death—across all incomes and backgrounds, obviously—has sparked public health emergencies across the country. With each fentanyl overdose reported, from British Columbia's rural suburbs to the streets of Calgary and Toronto, we're seeing ignorant assumptions about who uses drugs and why finally put to rest.

But there was a time when fentanyl was almost exclusively used by a very small group, and it had nothing to do with Margaret Wente's idea of a "typical drug addict" or poverty or organized crime. What the general public is oblivious to—but the medical community knows—is how fentanyl addiction took its roots in anesthesiology before it made its way into the mainstream.

Dr. Ethan Bryson, associate professor in the anesthesia and psychiatry departments at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, believes it was anesthesiologists who, familiar with fentanyl's pharmacology and abuse potential, first began misusing the opioid.

"If you look at the history of morphine, cocaine, and heroin, these were all drugs which were initially developed for legitimate medical purposes, but subsequently became recreational pharmaceuticals," Bryson told VICE. "They were all experimented on by people with that access. That's well documented in history."

While relatively new as an illicit drug on the streets of Canada, fentanyl's origins date back to 1959, when it was synthesized by Belgian chemist Paul Janssen. Fentanyl was developed for palliative care, but was soon adopted as an anesthetic agent.

In the 1990s, transdermal drug delivery for fentanyl was introduced, and patients were prescribed patches that release fentanyl through the skin into the bloodstream over a couple of days.

Through the 90s and early 2000s, physicians and health workers were the only people with easy access to fentanyl. Addiction experts say during this period they encountered fentanyl dependence in anesthesiologists and nowhere else in the community—not even among other physicians.

Roughly 10 to 14 per cent of all physicians will be substance-dependent over their lifetime, and the incidence in anesthesia providers is 2.5 times higher than other physicians, according to a five-year outcome study from 16 physician health programs in the US.

The substances available to anesthesia providers in their workplace can become a deadly occupational hazard. No other medical specialty has easier access to potent opioids and equipment (needles, syringes), as well as a greater expertise of IV insertion.

Bryson has written extensively on the subject of the addicted health care provider, and even published his book, Addicted Healers, in 2012. He was inspired to write about opioid addiction because someone close to him was affected, and has since met and interviewed hundreds of opioid-dependent healthcare professionals.

During his residency in 2002, Bryson attended a mandatory meeting where he and his peers heard from anesthesiologists recovering from fentanyl addiction. They talked about the desperate actions their addiction drove them to take.

"They spoke of diverting medications intended for their patients, injecting these medications into themselves instead, rummaging around in sharps containers looking for a drop of the liquid drug, and not caring if it was tainted with hepatitis or HIV," Bryson said. "And then, having found something in a discarded syringe, injecting the contents into their veins in a desperate attempt to get high... even if it was not the fentanyl they were looking for."

The actions of substance-dependent anesthesia providers can have potentially life-threatening consequences for patients, too. If an anesthesiologist siphons off painkillers meant for a patient, it would appear the patient has developed a tolerance to the drugs.

"If subsequent doses are then increased because of suspected tolerance, and the patient actually receives the medication this time, it can cause an unintentional overdose," Bryson said. Patients under anesthesia could also wake up in extreme pain after surgery, if some of their medication was diverted.

Fentanyl's move to the mainstream began 20 years ago, when physicians began prescribing opioids to manage all kinds of pain, an idea promoted by pharmaceutical companies. "This led to a lot of addiction, and a great deal of diversion," Dr. Andrew Clarke, executive director of the Physician Health Program of BC, told VICE.

When the risk of addiction was discovered and over-prescription practices were tightened, diversion went down, but it opened the door for illicitly manufactured drugs to fill the void.

Although fentanyl addiction in the general population is growing, the incidence among anesthesiologists remains unchanged, according to Dr. Clarke. "Yes, it's a problem, but it always has been," he said. "We think we have it under reasonable control so that it doesn't constitute a danger to the public."

A 2015 report on substance abuse in Canadian residency programs published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia states that despite attempts to tighten practices around liability and disposal of controlled substances in the OR, opioids continue to be the drugs most often abused by anesthesia providers.

Fentanyl in particular is suited to the needs of the high-functioning user. It delivers an intense but short-acting effect in a patient. It provides analgesia and euphoria for about an hour, and is then quickly eliminated from the body. This allows the user a short period of euphoria without hours of impairment, unlike morphine, heroin, methadone, and other longer-acting opiates. However, the short half-life of the drug also results in the rapid experience of withdrawal, and the drive to continually use more of the drug.

Anesthesiologists are particularly stigmatized for opioid addiction because stealing or diverting drugs meant for patients is considered unethical and unlawful. They face overwhelming psychological and spiritual turmoil, which results in further substance use, continuing the downward cycle.

Clarke believes stigma around mental health and substance use is what holds physicians back from seeking help. It also makes it difficult for researchers to measure how many physicians are addicted. Canadian health authorities rely mainly on data from the United States, although studies show the incidence of substance abuse among Canadian anesthesiologists appears to be consistent with anesthesiologists south of the border.

Physician health programs in provinces across Canada offer support to healthcare providers dealing with substance abuse disorder and/or mental illness, and manage and monitor them after treatment. Research shows early recognition and treatment of substance use disorder among anesthesiologists remains largely flawed. When anesthesia providers do seek help for opioid addiction, it's often too late.

"You don't want to be only asking for help at the time when you might be a danger to your patients or to yourself," Clarke said. "You want to be asking for help long before that."

Follow Rumana on Twitter.

Behind the Scenes of the Legal Group That Could Change America's Definition of Sexual Consent

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Illustration by Taylor Lewis

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Next week, on October 24th, some of America's finest legal minds will gather in New York to debate the draft of a law defining sexual assault and determining how severely it should be punished. The debate has taken place almost entirely out of the public eye, and though this group—who are all members of an organization called the American Law Institute (ALI)—are not working for any government, the law they produce could serve as a model for courts and state legislatures for decades.

Not many people have heard of the American Law Institute. But for over half a century, it has been one of the most influential forces shaping US law. In 1962 it produced the Model Penal Code, a comprehensive system of laws that was meant to reflect the view of the nation's best legal thinking on what an ideal criminal code should look like. Since its appearance, nearly every state has used its provisions as guides in reforming at least some aspects of its criminal law, and the code has been cited in thousands of court decisions.

The Code has generally aged well—with one notable exception. In Article 213, the Code defines rape as a crime involving a man having intercourse with a woman other than his wife, either through the use of force or of "the threat of imminent death, serious bodily harm, extreme pain or kidnapping."

No one in the legal community now thinks this captures all cases of sexual assault, and for the past four years the Institute has been working to produce a new model law, one that would criminalize non-consensual sex in cases where neither force nor explicit threats were used. As a distinguished attorney who has been involved with the ALI for many years told me: "The Model Penal Code was enormously influential in its day; a lot of states adopted it. Now everybody's looking to the Institute to provide the framework for treating conduct that is newly regarded as criminal." (Like several others interviewed for this story, the attorney asked to remain anonymous out of respect for the integrity of the ongoing ALI process, which few people want to be seen as publicly criticizing.)

But so far, ALI members have been unable to agree on the precise form the new law should take, and debates that have ensued have been among the most heated in the ALI's history—disagreements that cut to the heart of our society's ongoing dialogue about what it means to consent to sex.

The ALI gave two law professors, Stephen Schulhofer and Erin Murphy, both from New York University, the task of drafting the new model law. As is standard ALI practice, their drafts have been subject to repeated scrutiny both by a committee of experts and by the ALI's membership as a whole, which is made up of several thousand judges, lawyers and academics. Both Schulhofer and Murphy are distinguished scholars with extensive publication records, and both are well-liked among the wider legal community. But the two "reporters", as the ALI calls its drafters, have been accused by an influential group of ALI members of pushing too far, too fast in trying to change the way America views non-consensual sex.

Members have clashed over three aspects of the model law: first, how consent should be defined; second, what counts as sexual penetration; and third, how seriously non-consensual sex (in the absence of force or threats) should be punished.

Debate thus far has focused on the definition of consent. Schulhofer and Murphy initially proposed that the model law establish an "affirmative consent" standard: if the non-initiating partner did not actually say yes, then the initiator could be charged with assault. This standard was rejected by a vote at the ALI's annual meeting this past May. After a lively debate, members were convinced by those who argued that an affirmative consent standard gave prosecutors too much power, and risked criminalizing behavior the public does not see as deserving of prison.

A new formulation, proposed by a group of seven dissenters, was adopted. Named the Love Amendment after one of its authors, Margaret Love, it replaced affirmative consent with "contextual consent"—a phrase that is entirely new in legal contexts, and one whose exact meaning is vague. In essence, it says that to determine if consent was given, one needs to look at the total circumstances of the encounter in question, including nonverbal behavior and the partners' shared history.

When the ALI publishes a model law, it also includes commentary by the reporters explaining what the terms of the proposed law mean. This becomes particularly important when the model law uses entirely novel legal terms such as "contextual consent." Following the vote in May, the reporters have incorporated the contextual consent standard into the "black letter" of the model law itself. However, members of the dissenting group told me they believe that the reporters have, in the commentary they have prepared since the May meeting, defined contextual consent in such a way as to leave it indistinguishable from the reporters' own preferred standard, affirmative consent.

These critics allege that this is only the latest case of the reporters trying to re-introduce a stricter standard of consent than the ALI membership is prepared to accept. "ALI critics of the sexual assault proposal could not be faulted for feeling as if they are in a game of Whack-a-Mole," wrote Kevin Cole, a law professor at the University of California, San Diego, in a paper earlier this year. He was referencing the fact that each time ALI members have voted to remove the affirmative consent standard from the model law, the reporters have allegedly tried to re-introduce it through some other channel. Cole's comment was cited in an open letter sent to ALI's membership in advance of this past May's meeting, and was signed by nearly a hundred high-profile dissenting ALI members, including former Solicitor General Charles Fried. The letter suggests that the reporters have failed to follow "the method of deliberative advancement of the law on which the ALI prides itself and upon which the ALI built its reputation."

While discussion at next week's meeting will center around the reporters' commentary on the definition of consent, other battles are looming: The dissenting group feels that the reporters have also crafted an overly-strict definition of penetration, one that would, as the open letter says, criminalize "wedgies" and other behavior that many people consider not to be sexual. The reporters also want all non-consensual sex punished as a felony, whereas dissenters want at least some cases graded as a misdemeanour.

The dissenting group are motivated by general concerns about over-criminalization—the feeling that our country places too many people in prison, gives too much power to prosecutors, and imposes too many collateral consequences, such as lifetime registration and the loss of voting rights, on convicted felons, and sex offenders in particular. Professor Murphy said in an interview she is sympathetic to these concerns, but points out that conviction rates for sexual assault are in fact incredibly low, and so it is hard to blame sexual assault prosecutions for our overflowing prisons.

But dissenters also feel that the reporters are trying to use the model law to, as the open letter puts it, "impose new social norms", rather than work to make our existing laws more coherent and fair, which they see as the ALI's core mission. Professor Schulhofer has made no secret of his view that society does not take sexual assault seriously enough, and that reform of the laws can help drive a shift in attitudes. He wrote in a 2005 paper that reforming rape laws can become a potential tool for "changing the ways that men treat women and the ways that men view sex in our society."

At stake in the dispute are two fundamentally different visions of the role law should play in society. The case of gay rights, where court victories helped drive a profound shift in public opinion, shows that the law can indeed have a profound effect on social values. But many feel it should not be the job of lawyers and judges to drive social change—that they should instead take a more deferential attitude towards public opinion, restricting themselves to, in the words of the open letter, "punish violations of existing norms." However, our current, lax attitudes towards non-consensual sex, though they are evolving quickly, leave women vulnerable by making assault convictions difficult to obtain. The reporters might argue, as Professor Schulhofer has in his published work, that people's basic rights to autonomy and personal security are threatened by the current state of affairs. And there is no value more fundamental to American culture, or to the work of its laws, than the protection of such basic rights.

This dispute will not be resolved next week. The issue will be taken up again at the ALI general meeting next May, and the work of revising article 213 will very likely continue for several years. The outcome of this process will shape America's sexual assault laws for decades to come.

Neil McArthur is the director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at University of Manitoba, where his work focuses on sexual ethics and the philosophy of sexuality. Follow him on Twitter.

Action Bronson Drops the Video for New Song 'Durag vs. Headband'

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He's back out here: Action Bronson dropped a new song and video for "Durag vs. Headband" featuring Big Body Bes. The Knxwledge-produced track is the newest offering from Bam Bam, and the video debuted this week as part of his critically-acclaimed VICELAND TV show F*CK, THAT'S DELICIOUS.

Watch Bes handle a gleaming white horse as he proclaims his usual sound statements like "When I die, make sure you spread my blood on a BMW," while Bronson does the raps and the rest of the F*CK, THAT's DELICIOUS crew appears throughout.

Stream the track on Spotify and purchase it here. And for more on F*CK, THAT'S DELICIOUS, head over to VICELAND.

Wuvable Oaf: 'Disastra Rebranded,' Today's Comic by Ed Luce

Ink Spots: 'Headmaster' Is a Magazine for Men Who Love Men and Art

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All photos courtesy of 'Headmaster'

For men who love men, Headmaster may be the most interesting publication devoted to art, culture, and what it's like to take a bottle of vodka on a day trip to Brighton Beach. If you think dick pics are ugly, it means you haven't seen this magazine's tasteful nudes or aesthetic photos of the body in nature.

Started by four Providence transplants in 2010, the magazine "for man lovers" is now distributed internationally and sold in over 18 different cities. It's almost stubborn in its insistence on being exclusive and unique—it's only available in print runs of 1,000 copies, and rather than accepting submissions it assigns "homework" to contributors. For the most recent issue, which was "field trip" themed, editors sent writers and photographers on journeys to everywhere from a whaling museum to a wastewater treatment plant in Van Nuys, California. No one is placed on a pedestal, and all the work is made specifically for the magazine, creating a unified feel.

VICE sat down with Headmaster editors and founders Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence, longtime friends and collaborators, to discuss the homework, how selling out the first issue felt like sending a kid off to college, and the story of the magazine developing after a weekly show-and-tell party.

Photo by Jaanus Sama

VICE: Can you tell me about how the magazine came to be?

Jason Tranchida: At the beginning there were four of us, all designers and artists. Matthew is a writer, another friend of ours is a photographer, and one is a professor. We were all book and magazine lovers, and our one friend was basically like, "Hey would you guys be interested in starting a magazine?" but he didn't really have a concept; he just knew he wanted to do something, and we wanted to do something that was exclusively print. So we committed to meeting every night with some beer and wine at one of our homes and having show and tell with our favorite books and magazines.

Matthew Lawrence: It was every Monday night. We kept talking about , and we knew we wanted it to be on the arty side, and a little bit on the dirty side. Then the name Headmaster came about at the same time we had the idea of giving out assignments to contributors—it was one of those aha moments. From there, we started giving assignments to each other to generate content and decided that was going to be the concept of our magazine.

Is this the only thing that the two of you do?
Jason: I also own a graphic design firm called LLAMA Product, and I am an artist as well. Matthew does writing and editing, runs an arts and culture newsletter in Providence, and throws crazy events here all the time.

Photo by Margo Ovcharenko

What's the process like when deciding what goes into each issue?
Matthew: We have a mix of stuff. For the first issue, we had to go out and ask people to contribute to us and we didn't have anything to show them, so that issue was mostly about people living in Providence, including Jason, who did his own project for that issue. And then once we had something to show, we started getting people who were interested in contributing. For the last couple of issues, we've had people who we knew , people who we didn't know but liked, and people who found us.

Jason: We try and maintain a mixture of different types of people in each issue, the youngest person that we have had was actually about 18 and living in Russia. She sent us a lot of pictures of naked boys. We have had a lot of really established artists like Ross Bleckner and Alex Chee in the magazine, so we like to go about this in three different ways: types of work that they do, the medium they work in, where they are geographically. There are some people right out of school, and then some really established artists, and it makes for a really nice contrast of content.

Image by Cassandra Complex

How do you feel when people say that print is dying, especially because all of your issues are published in limited runs?
Matthew: We've been sold out of our first issue for a while, and when we were packing for the Independent Art Book Fair, we broke into the last box of our second issue, so those probably won't be around for too much longer. It's funny because when we were selling out of our first issue I was really happy and Jason was really sad.

Jason: It's like sending your last kid off to college.

Photo by Matias Uris

That must be so exciting when you realize that you only have one issue left.
Matthew: With print it becomes a storage issue after a certain point. People have been saying that print has been dying since we started, and certain types of print are dying, but I think people still appreciate smaller niche art magazines. We are very careful about paper selection, and making sure it's something people will love to read.

Jason:Headmaster is somewhere between a magazine and a small art book, so people are really into collecting it and making sure that they have all of the issues. We were just talking to a friend the other day and he was like, "I keep all of my Headmasters in with my cookbooks."

How do you think your magazine has changed since you first started it?
Jason: It's changed in terms of how many of us were working on it. It's a completely different dynamic with two people, especially two people who know each other so well. For the last two issues and our issue coming up, we changed our approach. Two issues ago we sent everyone non-written assignments. We sent Alexander Chee the Patrick Cowley score to an early-80s porn movie called School Daze and asked him to do something with it. Our last issue was our field trip issue, so we sent everyone on a field trip close to where they live. For example, we sent someone a bottle of vodka and they had to take it to Brighton Beach. We had to do a lot of research for that issue, so I think that has sort of evolved. I don't necessarily think that we have changed the types of projects in each issue, but it has definitely changed how we shape it.

Photo by Krys Fox

If you could describe your magazine to somebody who had not ever seen it before how would you describe it?
Jason: We sort of have a tagline mantra. It's a "smart and sexy art publication for man lovers."

Matthew: Depending on how formally we are describing it, we always say we are a project-based contemporary print publication. We have nine or ten original projects for each issue that have a mix of photo, writing, and other visual projects. We've done stuff with textiles, video, and sculpture, so it's not just photo and illustration or stuff that you automatically associate with print.

Jason: We can also stress that we write these assignments for people, and then we never know what we are going to get back. Sometimes it's sort of what we expected and sometimes we are just like, "Whoa, we did not even see that one coming." For instance, in our last issue we thought that J.R. Uretsky, one of our contributors who does a lot of performance, would send us something really performative, but she sent us photographs of a project that she did with her family. We asked her to write us an email explaining what she did so we could contextualize it. She sent back this amazing piece of writing, and the writing became the crux of the piece, and it changed in this really wonderful way. There are definitely great moments like that, and as editors it has been really fun to take all of this stuff, and figure out how to put it into the magazine.

The newest issue of Headmaster will be out at the beginning of next year. For more information on the publication, you can check out their website and view the seventh issue with sound effects.

How to Stay Kinky After You Have Kids

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Having children changes your life, plain and simple. The newfound responsibility of caring for an infant will bleed into all aspects of your existence, from your career and social life, to your home and personal life. It probably goes without saying that your sex life will be as affected as your sleep schedule during the first few years of being a parent.

As they grow older, you'll hopefully regain some semblance of your former lifestyle, but what if aspects of your identity are at odds with what people tend to consider a "child-friendly environment"? For parents who embrace kink and consider BDSM a core aspect of their identity and sexuality, how far should you go, if at all, to hide your adult interests from your mini-yous?

"Sex is for consenting adults, sex toys are for consenting adults—that doesn't need to be around kids. Kinky stuff or non-kinky stuff, it doesn't matter," says New York City-based kink-friendly therapist Dulcinea Pitagora.

Parents who embrace sex-positive, kinky relationships may create a more open and healthy environment for children to grow up in. BDSM requires a certain level of openness and honesty, and practicing that behavior could even help parents teach their children about the importance of topics such as consent or keeping an open mind to non-normative taste and not being ashamed of what you're into. "Not that need to be privy to the specifics of what you are negotiating or consenting to, but the kind of relationship that kinky parents might have could be a great model for communication and setting boundaries," says Pitagora.

VICE spoke to several parents who embrace kink and BDSM. Though they had various takes on the limits of privacy, the most consistent attitude was that maintaining happy, true-to-themselves sex lives keeps them happy parents, which makes for happier families.

James from Wisconsin
31-Years-Old
Two Kids, Ages 2 and 7 Months Old

VICE: Will you introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your sexuality and kinks?
James: I identify as straight, but truthfully I'm heteroflexible. I like people who are feminine with little regard to what genitals they have. I'm a dominant male, with some sadistic undertones, but I spend 99 percent of my time as just a vanilla dad and husband.

Do you have any stories about the two worlds intersecting?
The older boy is in his explorative stage. Once he found my spouse's steel butt plug, and couldn't wait to show it off to our vanilla guest. My spouse didn't skip a beat, and with a gleam in her eye explained that was mommy's toy and to give it back. Our guest got red in the cheeks and was obviously interested in the idea of the plug, but was quick to state she had never tried one.

We spend a lot of time in front of our kids nude. Our son has seen marks on his momma, and points to them and says, "Owie!" We nod and say, "Yeah kiddo; that's momma's owie." That's the end of it. I'm sure once he reaches school age, we would be more discreet with our bodies, but honestly, that'd be more to let him know he can't just run around naked in front of guests. We want our children to be comfortable in their skin and to know they are beautiful and not to be hidden in some weird standard placed by Puritans hundreds of years ago who would stone us for enjoying sex if they had their way.

How do you explain things to the kids when they find toys?
Our son is of an age where he finds things even if we try desperately to hide them. As such, he often finds things that aren't his, but he knows when we tell him something is Dad's or Mom's to leave it alone. My spouse and I have always said we will be in a sex-positive home. Even as our kids learn what a vibrator is and that those Velcro straps on our bed are for momma. We never had the intention of hiding them, but rather wanted to keep them out of sight at a responsible level without inconveniencing or acting like such toys are shameful.

What advice would you give to other kinky parents?
Be true to yourself. Your (legal) kink isn't something to be ashamed of, and your kids will respect honesty more than a person who is afraid of themselves and their needs.

J. from Texas
45-Years-Old
Four Kids: Ages 13, 16, 19, and 21

VICE: Tell me a little bit about your kinks. You're a dominant-switch, correct?
Jay: I didn't start out as a switch, but that happens a lot to people in the kink world: you start out as one thing and then keep evolving. . As far as fetishes, we play with temperature, texture, and do food play. When I had kids, we started incorporating adult nursing in the bedroom. I'm up for trying anything. It's worked for the 23 years we've been together.

Do you have to worry about keeping sex toys hidden from your kids?
We are into spanking, but with belts and stuff that is part of our household. I don't wear a collar, never have. I have hair that's down to my waist. My husband doesn't need a leash; my hair is my leash. I have a toy chest that's filled with silk restraints, blindfolds, candles, and other BDSM toys. Our kids have been aware for a long time that mom and dad have a sex life. I always wanted my kids to see a good physical relationship. That's something we don't hide from our children. You get the sense they are slightly embarrassed but like it too. You have families who are in crisis, and, to my kids, I'm like: "This is for you too so you can see that everything is OK." I think our openness with our children really developed from that. I'm the crazy mom that goes out and buys my 16-year-old condoms, cock rings, and lube. If they're going to explore this, I want them to do it safely, with some forethought to what they're doing.

Have you talked to them about kink?
My oldest one, who's 21, is definitely into kink. But she didn't express so until she went to college and got into a situation where somebody took her boundaries past the level of consent, so we started having those conversations then. I think if we had talked maybe she wouldn't have been in that relationship, but when my daughter needed support she felt like she could talk to us because she knew that we were into kink. She didn't know specifically what we did, but there was enough evidence that she knew.

What happened after you spoke? Do you talk to your other children about kink?
I learned she was very much into choking, which for me, is not a hard limit because we do it some, but it is a soft limit. My therapist was into kink, and she died in a scene because her trachea was crushed. The more you do it frequently, the softer the trachea becomes. Hers collapsed, and her partner couldn't bring her back. So we talked about that and choking and the different kinds of holds.

My 16-year-old and I are very close, and he is a submissive male and into bigger girls. I'm like, "Do your friends make fun of you?" And he's like, "No mom, I make fun of them for the skinny girls they date!" We've also talked about male submission and doing it in a healthy way.

Our 19-year-old daughter is more conservative in her views of sex. We are perfectly fine with that. In my household, your kinks are your kinks and your non-kinks and your non-kinks. As long as you're not hiding from yourself who you are.

Chris from New Jersey
35 Years Old
Two Kids: Ages 3 and 19 Months

VICE: You and your wife were high school sweethearts. Did you discover your kinks together?
Chris: I am kinky by nature. I had these urges before I knew what they were. The process of me coming to grips with them took a very long time because I grew up in a rather conservative household. By my 20s, I had accepted who I was, but only now recently have I truly become proud of it. My wife, ironically, is from a household that has the motto of letting your freak flag fly, but she didn't know much of anything about kink until she met me.

What are some of your kinks?
I'm bisexual, but I haven't actually had sex with another man. I'd love to do it. I am a sexual bottom and the best term I use to describe my sexuality is "sensation slut." I like being on the receiving end of things and not able to control it. I like pushing myself to the limits of the sensations I receive, good or bad.

What's your at-home kink setup like?
We live in a three-floor Victorian house. At the moment, all of our kink activities occur in our bedroom. We have a large plastic foot locker in our bedroom closet that we keep all of our toys in. I recently got over $200 in electrical eStem equipment, which has been a joy. I finally got an actual gag after all this time because I'm very noisy. I picked up a new hood, a pair of latex briefs with a built-in anal plug, a spreader bar, and a couple different whips.

Have your kids ever seen your toys?
My son had a dentist appointment on Wednesday and the dentist gave him a toy, one of the infamous latex gloves blown up into a balloon. He thought it was the greatest thing in the whole wide world. Unfortunately, he ripped it open after coming home and was crushed. I went upstairs, and he followed me to said footlocker of things that shall not be mentioned. I grabbed another latex glove, since we have those. I came back down, and he happily had another glove to play with. My wife looked at me and was like, "You did not show him what was in there... Our Rain Man son is going to remember that that item came from that location, and in three months we're going to be in that room, and he'll be asking for a glove balloon."

Would you be open with them about your kinks if they asked?
Jesus, they're three and one and a half. In another ten years, I'm going to have to have a conversation with them that's a little more serious. I hope to be as honest as I can without providing specific details.

Any words of advice for someone kinky considering having kids?
Just because you have kids doesn't mean kink is over. You may have to slow down for a minute; you may have to put in on the side, but you're not going to forget it. Sometimes innocuous black luggage is the best place to hide things with a little lock because no one ever thinks to look there.

Follow Sophie Saint Thomas on Twitter

Visit Heather's website for more of her illustration work.

The Surprising Sexiness of Plastic Watering Cans

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All photos courtesy of Ken Lavey

I landed on the subject of watering can cavities by accident in the studio one day, and it grew into a spinoff series of some previous work. My previous images took into consideration the erotic potential of household objects; the transformation of a utilitarian object into a fetishized one.

The curves of injection in molded plastic have such a variety of surfaces and texture; some are pebbled and topographic, while others are smooth and have a glossy sheen. The envelopment, compression, and infusion of this manufacturing process are sensuous in a way. Molding and casting is such a tactile process and the mechanics of it are easily personified and supplanted by the sexualized body. There are creases and pockets of different shapes and configurations. They look anatomical and somatic, like colorful paint-dipped orifices.

The parting line of the mold runs up and down cast plastic like the seams you can find along your perineum, or the roof of your mouth. I like the idea of these images evoking an ambiguous kinship with the body, that people might relate to in different ways, and consider their own physicality and fascination with the human body.

Ken Lavey is a photographer based in NYC. You can follow his work here.


All The Weird Shit People Say to You Based on Your Dating App Photo

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We've all swiped through Tinder. Don't lie, you too. Even if you just downloaded it "out of curiosity" or grabbed your friend's phone out of their hand to "have a go", you've seen the bios listing stuff that literally everyone likes as unique traits. You've looked into the void, and the void said "Hey ;)"

Dating apps today are obviously looks-based. Your carefully curated profile with a choice of pictures and a few words are all that's going to define whether or not someone will want to engage in inane conversation and perhaps average sex with you. That picture will also define what kind of conversation people will engage in, according to what they've perceived you to be into.

In my case, the imagined appropriate first line seemed to have a lot to do with them wanting to be stepped on. And I mean, kudos for putting yourself out there, but what does that tell me about the first impression I give off, in a kind of sexy way? How do who you are IRL and what people see on dating apps compare? Let's find out.

JO, 25

VICE: Hey Jo, do you have a type?
Jo: Badass femmes.

What kind of people usually strike up conversations with you though?
I get a lot of straight men saying, "Hi I know you said not to message you but I'm actually kinky and a feminist, so I'm not like those other men who don't respect your boundaries." I'm pretty sad that I don't get more attention from cute queers and less attention from men who think they're Nice Guys.

What are their opening lines?
Usually comments about my hair.

If you were just starting out in the online dating world, what type of people would you guess you'd attract?
I'm a massive weirdo magnet in real life – I can't sit through a night bus journey without some super strange person coming up and talking to me about the Illuminati or something, so I assumed I'd get more of that. And more dick pics. But I've been pretty fortunate and avoided both because unlike in real life, I can try to hide myself from men on dating apps.

What's the weirdest thing you've been told on the app?
I've been asked by some dude if he could be my servant while I have sex with other people, if he could bring the condoms and stuff. I also had someone ask me, "when did they become queer?", who never clarified what that meant. I'm assumed to be super kinky because I have a fun hair colour and a piercing.

How do you feel you portray yourself on online dating platforms?
I think on most dating apps I just try to scare off straight men – that's pretty truthful to what I'm like in real life. I pretty much have hairy armpits to make gross men not hit on me.

KERR, 24

VICE: So Kerr, you've clearly put a lot of thought into how you present yourself. Why?
Kerr: I think that the way we present ourselves on Tinder will determine the type of people who'll interact with us. By using an image of myself in a wedding dress, I'm getting more messages and matches than ever before, as people make the assumption that I am an open-minded artist who isn't judgmental. I'm able to wear a dress without looking like a lad on a stag-do.

OK, what about opening lines?
Basically, no one cared who I was until I put on the wedding dress. From the moment I changed my picture, people started making the first move. They'd make comments about how I'd have to wear it on our wedding date if we end up working out. Or about how they love a man in a dress.

I tend to attract people who seem somewhat shy to start with, so it's understandable that they wouldn't make the first move until they see a man in a wedding dress.

MILLY*, 22

VICE: Hey Milly, Do you think you have a "type"?
Milly: Yeah, I definitely do. It's either lanky nerdy sad boys, young alternative women and genderqueer people. I think I see the sad boys as endearing, the women as attractive and the latter seem to come my way.

Is there a pattern of people that message you on the app?
I'm not sure if there is a real pattern – I find that a lot of older men, say mid-thirties, who are basically overgrown children in men's bodies try to talk to me, and it's a turn off. It'd be different if they were genuine but they aren't. I tend to match with a lot of women who never respond back to me, or I end up getting intimidated. Girls are so pretty they are also scary!

What are their usual opening lines and chat?
This is the typical one but the amount of times it starts off with someone saying "Hey bb wanna bite my lip" are just NUMEROUS and tedious. No, I don't want to bite your lip. I don't want anything to do with you now.

There's also those that go like "Wow, so cool ... wanna step on me? / live in my closet? / I bet you love older men – do you want a daddy," and it's like, no thanks. They definitely assume that I'm a lot more adventurous and "out there" than I really am.

What's the weirdest thing you've been told on the app?
I got asked to do heroin with a guy, as a "leisure" activity. It was 2AM, and his girlfriend had just dumped him...and he wanted to do heroin with someone. Maybe he found someone, but it wasn't me.

WILL, 25

Hey Will, you're a dude with a guitar in his photo. Do you think you have a "type"?
Absolutely, and I think Tinder has actually helped with working out what it is. I tend to swipe right on girls I find attractive, and who also look like people I'd get along with – you can tell quite a lot about someone's personality and how much common ground you share by the pictures they choose for their profiles.

What kind of people usually strike up conversations with you on the app?
It actually usually ends up being the matches I'm the least interested in! My type is quite a wide range, and I'm not all that picky when swiping, so 90 percent of the girls who start the conversation are the ones I'm not really keen to talk to. Also spam bots. They're fun.

What's their usual opening chat?
Openers are almost always along the lines of "hey, how are you?" – I very rarely get anything more adventurous, which is fine! I think there's a lot of pressure to be witty from the get go, but it's actually quite nice to have a normal conversation. Sometimes my matches will ask about my music, but that's as far as anyone goes.

How do you feel you present yourself on the app?
I've got my music front and centre, I'm happy in all my pictures, and I don't take myself too seriously so there's a couple of silly pictures too. I've switched to contact lenses this year but most of my pictures are still with glasses, which is honestly the most misleading thing about them!

What's the weirdest thing you've been told?
I honestly have no idea! Nothing sticks out in my memory, so either I have a high weirdness threshold or I only attract normal people! Either way is fine by me!

HANNAH, 18

Hey Hannah, how do you try to come across on dating apps?
Hannah: I try to portray myself as smart, and not overtly sexual – so as to avoid people who are just after sex. I'll be honest and say that I prefer to come across as very blasé on the internet. I'm quite conscious about not displaying my tits too much in my photos – I do regularly get asked for threesomes, however.

Do you have a "type"?
Unfortunately, yes. Tall, super-skinny, tattooed, long haired, feminine dudes and guitarist douchebags. I don't like macho men. As far as girls go, my type is about 90 percent of them. I like someone who's interesting to draw. Someone with crooked bottom teeth or an unusual face.

What kind of people usually strike up conversations with you?
Living in Brighton, the vast majority of men who talk to me are also musicians, and most of them have a black-and-white photo of them onstage. They mostly have long hair and dress like it's a 90s throwback party.

If you were just starting out in the app, what type of people would you guess you'd attract?
I'd have to guess musicians, which I do, weird-looking people, which I do, and vegans, which I also do.

What's the weirdest thing you've been told on the app?
"Haha, I'll be blunt, I want to shnuffle you through a brick wall. Like pigs do when they search for truffles."

Do people reach out to you on other social media?
I've met a bunch of people on Tinder who are regulars in the shop I work at, and often they come and say hi to me in the shop. On Facebook I get tonnes more strange messages. I dyed my armpit hair green for a little while 2 years ago, and I still get messages asking what colour my pubes are, or if I can send sexy armpit selfies.

DANIEL*, 22

Hey Daniel, you were telling me you're on Grindr. What do people say to you on the app?
Daniel:It's hard to determine a pattern, in my case it can be quite random. But there is definitely the group of "older guys who want to fuck" that message me with abrupt sentences like "sexy" or "top or bottom". In most cases like that, I just feel turned off.

There is the random chat here and there, but it seems that a lot of the time if I want to "connect" with someone I pretty much have to make the first step. It's either a sex request or nothing really, and not a lot in between. Maybe that's because I'm speaking about Grindr, but it felt similar in other apps with swiping features.

How do you feel you come across?
I try to portray myself pretty close to who I am in real life. I think behaving differently on apps won't attract the right people, just like putting on a certain mask would attract other people behind a similar facade. I guess I am quite naive and honest in that regard, as much as I love to dress up every now and then.

Finally, what's the weirdest thing you've been told?
There have definitely been some detailed expressions of unique fetishes. So unique that you wouldn't believe me if I told you.

Do try.
It was something to do with storing bodily fluids in jars and reusing of them.

Oh, OK. Thanks!

@bijubelinky

More on VICE:

I Changed My Tinder Song Every Day to See Which Genre Gets You the Most Matches

We Asked a Load of Women to Tell Us What They Find Attractive

We Also Asked a Load of Men to Tell Us What They Find Attractive

We Talked to Christian Slater About Gay Porn, Man-Crushes, and 'King Cobra'

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Christian Slater in 'King Cobra.' Images courtesy of IFC Films

The true story of Sean Paul Lockhart has all the subtlety of a Jack Chick tract. Lockhart, better known by his porn name, Brent Corrigan, was a suburban 17-year-old who started making porn in 2004 with the company Cobra Video. During this time, he also began sleeping with the director and owner of the company, Bryan Kocis, a middle-aged man who produced bareback twink porn from his home in Dallas Township, Pennsylvania.

After doing eight films with Cobra Video, Corrigan realized that he was making vastly less money than Kocis was raking in, and threatened to reveal that he was underage when he made his first film unless Kocis released him from his contract and gave him the rights to his nom d'porn so that he could make films with other companies—in particular, BoyBatter.com, a low-fi porn company run by Harlow Cuadra and Joseph Kerekes.

Cuadra and Kerekes, in desperate need for money and convinced that a film with Corrigan would be their million-dollar-ticket, decided to take matters into their own hands and murdered Kocis, a plan Lockhart knew nothing about—in fact, Kocis had already agreed to release Lockhart from his contract when the killing occurred. Convicted of second-degree murder, Cuadra and Kerekes are still in jail today.

Despite what some early buzz suggested, director Justin Kelly avoided representing Kocis (Christian Slater) as a one-note sexual predator, and Slater's depiction of him is by far the best part of the film. And Clayton is a serviceable Corrigan, melding his boyish Nickelodeon charm with a hint of more adult mischievousness. Unfortunately, the rest lacks much in the way of nuance, particularly in the scenes between Kerekes (James Franco) and Cuadra (Keegan Allen), which are wooden and a bit boring. It probably isn't a coincidence that in a film featuring no out gay actors, there is an almost palpable lack of passion or sensuality.

We recently sat down with Kelly and Slater to discuss the trickiness of trying to be nonjudgmental while making a film about underage porn stars, intergenerational relationships, and murder.

VICE: How'd you prepare for the role?
Christian Slater: James Franco presented me with this script, and I thought, Wow, this is definitely intriguing and different. I was excited and nervous. I was thrilled that he actually thought of me for the role, and I was thrilled with the role. It wasn't stereotypical. I felt that I was getting the opportunity to convey an actual human being. Then I met with Justin, and he put me at ease and I felt like he was going to handle everything with dignity and grace.

Then he said that James would be doing the "heavy lifting." So I got competitive and I was like, "Well, I don't want him to do everything." Then I met Garrett and developed an immediate man-crush on him. Everything came naturally after that.

How would you describe your character before Corrigan comes along?
Certainly mysterious. This guy is living with a lot of secrets, a lot of frustration, a lot of disappointment. He is one of those classic characters—there's a lot more going on beneath the surface than he ever lets on. He's living in a particular time when there's so much judgment around this subject and the world of porn. There's so much hypocrisy. Clearly everybody in some form or another has watched a porno. If you've checked into any hotel in the world, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. The fact that there's any hypocrisy around this stuff is so insane.

I was curious because I've been reading a bunch of write-ups that describe your character as a sexual predator. That wasn't my read in watching the film, and I was curious if that feels accurate to you.
People project and see what they want to see. You could set this story against any backdrop in any kind of business, you know? A guy is in a particular industry, he finds a diamond in the rough and all of a sudden people becomes obsessed with that. You could certainly set it in the Hollywood movie industry. It's a story about obsession and control and egos. There were so many human and relatable subject matters to this story. There were times in my life where I could have looked at a story like this and had a totally different point of view. But I think, fortunately, I have grown and matured as the world and other people's points of view have grown and matured. I just want to keep things moving in that direction.
Justin Kelly: I think if the character were out at clubs where 18-year-olds hang out, and luring them into this world that would be one thing, that would be a bit more him being a predator.
Slater: People will base their opinions on a trailer, a tiny glimpse into what this story is and who these characters are. It's a minute and a half long, and you're only going to .
Slater: They want to be stars! Which everyone taps into a little bit. I mean, we live in a culture where people will take any lengths to become famous. The Kardashians were just getting started around this time. Reality TV. God, people go to insane lengths to become famous.

Do you worry that people will automatically avoid or pre-judge the film because the main character is underage and having sex on film? This isn't a simple morality play.
Slater: You're dealing with a naïve character. I think everyone can identify with going down certain paths at a particular time in their life. You are young, you feel invincible, you take chances, and what ends up happening for Brent is it becomes a learning experience that he barely survives.

A quote I have in the back of my mind is that the fastest way to learn who you are is to know who you're not. And that's what we do, we test all these limits and boundaries and find out what we're comfortable with, eventually, and we streamline our lives and find our comfort zones. And that gives us the opportunity to take risks in a different way.

For me, getting the opportunity to even consider a role like this, there's a point in my life and maybe in my career where this wouldn't have even been an option. Not even a thought in my mind. That would have been based on ego and fear and insecurity and concern of what other people might think. that's a waste of time.

I don't see a lot of films these days that deal with edgy LGBTQ material, but don't have any out gay actors in them. Was that a conscious choice, or how did that evolve?
Kelly: It wasn't a conscious choice at all. I was reaching out to people who I thought would be great for these roles. I don't know who all the stars in the movie sleep with.

I'm not talking about in terms of their actual sexual orientation, but in terms of their publicly presented orientation. Especially in this moment where we're so cognizant about representation. Did you think about that?
Kelly: It was sort of just this is who it is, we had people in mind. James had recently worked with Keegan, and he was so perfect for this.
Slater: And I had recently worked with James.
Kelly: Honestly, it came together in what felt like a very organic kind of way. But definitely no intent. I would never seek to purposefully cast all straight actors, it just happened.
Slater: There's even the line in this movie where I say, "It's fun to play with who we are." That's what it is to be an actor. That's what it is to have an opportunity like this. That's our responsibility and our job as artists to take on different roles and put on other people's shoes and see what it feels like to live in that world. That's the gift of what we get the opportunity to do.

Corrigan was not involved in the film. Did you talk to any sex workers or porn stars or escorts? You don't see a lot of films about gay sex workers, so I'm curious what—
Kelly: I didn't feel the need to, because it's more so about these characters we all talked about and created. Again, we could take these characters and drop them in any kind of world. What you would need to know about porn or sex work was inherently built into the script and how we talked about these characters. I lived in San Francisco for eight years, and I had a bunch of friends who were sex workers and worked in porn. If I gathered anything from that, it was wanting to be very nonjudgmental in the film and this idea that people who do porn are dirty.
Slater: But it was hilarious to recreate some of the actual porn scenes. It's a particular style of acting that certainly Garrett had to achieve.
Kelly: Garrett and Keegan watched all the real ones.
Slater: I feel like it is an artist's responsibility to delve into all kinds of nooks and crannies and areas and arenas of our world and our culture and what it means to be human. This is certainly an untapped resource, and I was glad to get the opportunity to be a part of it.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

King Cobra is out in theaters on Friday, October 21.

How the Rise of Pixar Animation Killed Family-Friendly Horror

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RIP live action horror for kids, 1982-1998. Still via The Goonies

Halloween was always my favourite time of year growing up. It wasn't the candy or the costumes that I loved, but the excuse to watch horror marathons with my family. Back in the pre-Netflix 80s and 90s, you either had to test your luck at Blockbuster's horror section, or tune into TV stations for your dose of Are You Afraid of the Dark? reruns and movies like The Witches, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and (if you were lucky) Poltergeist. It used to be you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting something that starred kids dealing with the supernatural.

Despite being raised on "family horror," the genre seems to all but have disappeared since the beginning of the new millennium. A quick google search of "Kids movies 2000s" yields results of mostly animated films with animals acting like humans, while searching the same for the 1980s brings a list of live action films with heavy genre influences. So what happened? Are the kind of movies and TV shows that so many of us grew up on really dead? Are younger generations left without new nightmares to grow up on? To figure out what killed family-friendly horror movies and TV, I dug into the history and called up some horror movie creators.

It's important to note family horror is defined by its appeal to both children and adults, not just one or the other. This is what differentiates it from classic horror—namely, a lack of overtly sexual content and less gory violence. As such, the filmmakers rely on other tactics, like the tendency to mix in sight gags and dad jokes—an essential part of the family appeal. "If you're going to watch a movie with your kids, being willing to break tension with laughter is really important," Michael Dougherty, director of Trick 'r Treat and Krampus, told VICE. "This isn't to say you have to shy away from scares though. You need enough so that you force families to huddle closer together."

Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante were the masters of this delicate balance and the godfathers of the genre with movies like Gremlins, The Burbs, and Jurassic Park. Brad Miska, co-owner of Bloody-Disgusting and producer of V/H/S, recalls how Spielberg and Dante "had fingers on the pulse of suburbia. Those neighbourhoods were a big thing in America at the time and consisted of the main moviegoers." Exploring the suburban family in a narrative offered a perfect way for filmmakers and studios to appeal to their demographic. "The kids like genre stuff, adults like the family drama, and mixing those together was a perfect family experience," Miska said.

This "perfect" concoction took over the blockbuster scene of the 80s with movies like E.T., Ghostbusters, and The Goonies. It was a proven style that birthed a slew of Spielberg ripoffs, that often went direct to video, like the disaster that is Xtro, The Willies, and The Stuff, all of which miss the mark of the genre despite attempts to capitalize on its success. Although the market became inundated with family friendly genre films, there was still a demand for it continuing into the 90s.

The popularity of horror anthology TV from the 80s gave birth to kid friendly versions of the same format in the 90s, and we were gifted with shows like Goosebumps, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and the weird Canadian one with the maggot and the cockroach that nobody remembers, Freaky Stories. It was a booming time for kids exploring haunted houses and possessed ventriloquist dummies, spanning across mediums with book series and video games. As the last decade of the century neared its end, however, Spielberg and Dante "grew up" as artists and largely stopped directing films in the genre, turning toward more adult oriented stories like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan.

Live action movies starring kids left genre influence behind, and with advances in technology computer-animation was taking off thanks to Pixar's Toy Story and A Bug's Life. This came with the realization that live action was expensive to make compared to animation, which still had family appeal. "It's just more expensive to work with children," Rick Drew, screenwriter on the Goosebumps TV series, told VICE, "because they can only work limited hours, and horror is mostly shot at night, so that costs even more." Spielberg, who had a history of working in animation, embraced the shift. He launched the Dreamworks Animation branch of his production company, which went on to make Antz and Shrek around the turn of the century. This marked an important turn in the industry.

When the 2000s hit, the family horror genre seemed to have died altogether. There have been a handful of computer-animated films that fit the mold like Coraline, Paranorman, and Monster House in the past decade. But as far as live action goes there have only been a few successes, including Dougherty's Krampus, R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour, and the 2015 Goosebumps film, the latter two both based on pre-existing properties from the same writer who had already proven his popularity among children. Even Joe Dante's last family horror effort, The Hole, only saw a very limited theatrical release.

Video games also reached new heights of popularity in the 90s, resulting in growing concerns of exposing children to violence and gore at a young age. The same fears likely led to a decline in parents wanting to expose their kids to movies that would scare the shit out of them. Dougherty sees it differently: "Exposing kids to scary stories helps them deal with fear. It's like a fear vaccine. There's the chemical rush that runs through your body when you're scared, and horror movies are good practice in learning how to deal with this feeling."

Dougherty also explained that scary stories for children are ingrained in our culture, "It goes back to fairy tales, which were written for kids to teach them about the world using fantastical elements and boogeymen, like witches and the big bad wolf." And if you've read anything by The Brothers Grimm, you know these stories were incredibly morbid and dark, despite what Disney modernizations would have you believe. "These classic stories that we still find value in today set the table for kids in terms of learning from scary situations," Dougherty said.

"Kids challenge themselves in safe ways," adds Drew. "Like with amusement park rides, it allows them to experience the rush, and that's what you hear all the time in playgrounds, it's that mix of laughs and screams. And as long as they feel safe in the end, that's the fun of it all."

You're probably thinking, "What about Stranger Things?" It's certainly inspired by exactly the type of movies in question, but is it of the same ilk? Stranger Things and films like this year's Midnight Special are made for and by people like me who grew up loving Spielberg and Dante. It has all the strokes of family horror, however, Miska explains, "Maybe my generation of adults in their 30s might watch it with their kids, but it's mostly the nostalgia factor and mostly an adult audience. I don't think it's an organic version of what was popular in the 80s."

Regardless of whether it fits directly into the same genre category, it is likely that the massive success Stranger Things will open the door for more kid-versus-monster TV battles, and hopefully for the entire family. This shouldn't come as a surprise though, says Dougherty. "Film is cyclical, especially horror, in roughly 30 year cycles. Everyone thinks there's a hard rule for what works and what doesn't, then a film comes and breaks that rule, then everyone wants to make that. The same thing happened with superhero films, it was a dead genre for a while, and now look at it."

The biggest question is: do kids still want to get freaked out by glowing dog eyes and talking diner cockroaches? Maybe today's kids are simply too cool for this shit. Personally, I would find it hard to believe that there aren't kids out there who need horror in their life, whether to help them cope with anxiety, or just for a good Halloween scare.

As Dougherty puts it, "Kids are starving for it. I think we all are."

Follow Lonnie Nadler on Twitter.

Cracking the Cranial Vault: What It Feels Like to Perform Brain Surgery

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It felt medieval when I put her in pins. This wasn't a maneuver that could work with gradual pressure like tightening a vice. It needed a quick, crushing force. I used a "head holder" with pins to secure the skull to the operating table, so if she started to move while I was working in her brain, my surgical canvas (so to speak) would remain perfectly still.

The cold metal head holder's three spear-shaped steel pins needed to "purchase" her skull after puncturing her scalp—one pin in her forehead and two pins in the back of the head, all connected to a C-shaped clamp. The clamp closes through a ratcheting mechanism so I had to get the maneuver started with my own strength. While my assistant held the patient's head up from the neck, I explosively closed the clamp onto her skull. The noise from the metal gears made the students, nurses, and doctors in the operating room take pause and take notice.

That was the first of several hundred steps that needed to go smoothly, quickly, and perfectly.

So began my first time peeling down the scalp and opening the skull of a living human. Before getting to supple and delicate neurosurgical techniques, first I had to get past the formidable skull. The floor was covered with long brown hair that I had shaved from her head. The cold pins in her warm flesh were a reminder of how invasive things were going to get. Under anesthesia, she would feel nothing and remember nothing.

I, on the other hand, was completely sentient and completely in the moment—both excited and afraid, a unique mix of emotions that I'm now used to but make every complex brain surgery a thrill to this day.

Be quick but don't hurry, I thought. After this step, the scalp was ready to peel back.

Before arriving in the operating room, the woman couldn't move her left arm and her primary care doctors and ER docs found a "mass" on her brain imaging. I ordered more exquisite imaging (functional MRI), which revealed it was a little ball of abnormal brain tissue that no longer followed the rules and grew without respecting the brain's natural and elegant architecture. It was a tumor. Fortunately, it wasn't cancer. But it was in a very critical part of the brain.

People are surprised when I say some parts of the brain are not as critical as others. We can remove those certain parts after a blood clot and people do well. On the other hand, some areas of the brain are so delicate that if you bump into any of them with a fine instrument, they can be permanently injured. This tumor was in the motor strip of the right parietal lobe (a half-inch-wide and seven-inch-long ribbon of brain tissue that sends the signals down to your left arm to move). This was a tricky spot to remove a tumor: You have to get the tumor tissue out and not bother the normal tissue that keeps her moving. She was left-handed, so the epicenter of my work was also the epicenter of her dominant hand function.

Dr. Rahul Jandial performing brain surgery. Photo by Michael Becker.

The incision was drawn with a purple pen. I curved it behind her hairline so that when her hair grew back, no one could see the breach. I used a number ten scalpel (a large, rounded blade for skin) to cut the scalp with quick slice. The scalp is filled with blood vessels, but I made quick work of them with long cauterizing tweezers in my right hand and a delicate, angled suction in my left—the first tool singed the blood vessels closed, the other let me see where I was moving. Be quick but don't hurry, I thought. After this step, the scalp was ready to peel back.

Her skull was glistening beige. It looked like what you think about when you think about a skull. While planning where I was going to first penetrate the bone, I remembered the ancient skulls I had seen in museums, holes ritualistically drilled into into them. Those holes were never near the midline, an imaginary line where a thin Mohawk would run. Ancient societies must have learned what I know well: The midline is a dangerous place on the human skull because under it lies a giant vein that drains blood from the brain, and if violated, can cause catastrophic bleeding. It even has an ominous name: Superior Sagital Sinus (SSS). Nevertheless, that's where I had to breach the skull with my air-pressurized hand drill, in order to get to where her tumor was.

The drill bit chattered as it turned bone into dust, which then started to char and blacken, so I asked my assistant to irrigate some water where I was drilling, both to cool things down and to improve my visibility. I had to make a circular hole, but I had to leave a little "eggshell" of bone intact over the SSS that could be chipped off with a delicate instrument. Drilling too deep would tear the vein, forcing me to implement some backup maneuvers, maneuvers that I'd be ready to make but would prefer to avoid. Not because it would add more time to the operation, but because it could hurt my patient.

I made three more holes and then freed the skull from the brain's sheath, the dura mater. Now it was time to cut the bone between the four holes I had made with a jigsaw, allowing me to lift up a piece of bone off her skull that was about three by three inches. This is called turning the flap. At this point, my hands were a little tight from the work already completed, but I was in such a deep focus because it was almost time for what I call "feather-flow"—the soft touch one has to have to slide around the fine crevices in the brain.

Photo by Michael Becker.

I incised the dura with an number 11, a scalpel that has a long handle with triangular tip, one side of which is the sharpest surgical steel on the market. If you hold it softly and train with it enough, the tip of a delicate knife can feel like it's your own fingertip, even with a glove on. The dura is thin like cloth, so I scored and lifted it, but didn't cut the surface of the brain underneath, which is floating in a thin layer of brain fluid. Amazingly our brains never touch anything but this fluid; they're floating inside our heads, as if in an anatomical aquarium.

After working on flesh and bone for 30 minutes, the real summit presented itself: the human brain, the most delicate, complex, and beautiful thing the universe. The tumor was readily visible, embedded within with the surrounding normal brain. It had slowly knuckled into the brain, meaning the organ itself wasn't actually violated. A meningioma grows from the lining of the brain, but since the skull can't stretch, the tumor will gradually make a physical impression on the brain until it interferes with the electrical signals, leading to weakness or a seizure. It was on me to remove the threat without harming its host, meaning her weak arm would be fine and function or forever damaged, depending on what I did next.

To minimally disrupt the brain, I first entered the center of the tumor. I cored out its yolk and made it hollow. Now I could work its shell away from the brain and collapse it onto itself. The boundary between tumor and brain has these delicate wisps of clear tissue, called arachnoid. They're not unlike silk webs. I softly cut these with a long curved microscissor, and the tumor fell into the space I made inside it. After two hours of these maneuvers under magnification and illumination, the tumor was out. I bathed the brain's surface with sterile water to check for any active tiny bleeders—oozing or dripping blood vessels. It was time to close through reverse maneuvers. Bone flap was secured to the skull with little plates and little screws. Stitches on the inside of scalp. Nylon stitches on the skin. Pins off.

Ten years and over a thousand operations later, and it's all still a thrill unlike any other. Not so much the technical aspects of the operation, but the satisfaction of mastering a craft, a craft that serves others. These days, I no longer shave the entire head, favoring absorbable stitches for the skin instead. When they wake up after surgery, no one can tell they had their skull opened. No one except my patients and me.

Rahul Jandial, M.D., Ph.D. is a dual-trained brain surgeon and scientist. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram, and visit his website here.

Visit Corey Brickley's website for more of his illustration work.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: Snapchat Is Putting Your Human Rights at Risk, According to Amnesty International

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Image via Flickr user Maurizio Pesce

It goes without saying that what happens on Snapchat, stays on Snapchat. Messaging apps are a hotbed of gossip, shade throwing, crush confessing, and meme sharing—your drunk, emoji-heavy musings should never make it out into the real world. But unfortunately, a new report from Amnesty International says that most of your favourite messaging apps are failing to adopt even the most basic privacy and encryption protections. In fact, the lack of privacy offered by popular messenger services is enough to constitute a human rights risk.

Assessing the 11 companies behind the apps found on almost anyone's smartphone, Amnesty ranked them by their ability to protect your privacy. The bare minimum was that they imposed was end-to-end encryption, which makes message data unreadable to everyone but the sender and their recipient. Only Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, Facetime, Line, Google Duo and Viber used end-to-end encryption as a default setting.

Meanwhile, services like Snapchat, Skype, Google Hangouts, WeChat, and Blackberry Messenger don't offer end-to-end encryption at all. Facebook Messenger and Google Allo both offer end-to-end encryption as an option, but it isn't set as a default.

As Amnesty International points out, many of these companies have stated a public commitment to maintaining the privacy of their users, but they're not upholding the basic values they espouse.

"If you think instant messaging services are private, you are in for a big surprise. The reality is that our communications are under constant threat from cyber criminals and spying by state authorities. Young people, the most prolific sharers of personal details and photos over apps like Snapchat, are especially at risk," said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Head of Amnesty International's Technology and Human Rights Team, in a statement released alongside the report.

So why would a human rights organisation care about Snapchat in the first place? Well, Amnesty International says it is particularly concerned about human rights defenders and journalists who use messenger services on their phones and computers. It says that the right to privacy and freedom of expression is an increasingly crucial issue on the global stage, and highlights the fact that use of messaging apps is on the increase all over the world, including in emerging and developing countries.

"Encryption stops cyber criminals from stealing our personal information, and helps prevent unlawful government surveillance of our communications," the report reads.

"It is particularly important for human rights defenders and journalists around the world—whether they are dissidents in China, Bahraini activists in exile abroad, or investigative journalists in Europe. A breach of their data security undermines their vital work, and could result in arrest and detention."

But the findings are cause for concern even if you're not a hardcore political dissident. "Private communications on instant messaging services are under real threat from cyber criminals, malicious hackers, and unlawful interception by state authorities," the report says.

Interestingly, companies like Apple have come under fire for enabling end-to-end encryption. Governments and law enforcement agencies like the FBI argue that encryption means police cannot access the messenger data that would help them nab suspected criminals.

Apple has argued that creating a "backdoor" for government agencies to access these communications would be an extremely dangerous breach of privacy that would make the same data vulnerable to hackers.

Amnesty International—alongside other human rights groups—agrees.

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