Jessie Knight tattooing a client (1955). © Haywood Magee/Getty Images. All images courtesy of the Field Museum

This article originally appeared on VICE US

The history of tattooing spans over 5,000 years and across various continents, yet ink and tattoo culture haven't received the same academic and institutional treatment as other art forms with as rich a lineage. A new exhibition at The Field Museum in Chicago entitled Tattoo seeks to address that while also exploring both the complicated background to the practice as well as the contemporary aspects of it.

Curated by Alaka Wali, the museum's Curator of North American Anthropology, with help from tattoo anthropologist Dr. Lars Krutak of the Smithsonian and tattoo historian Dr. Anna Felicity Friedman, Tattoo offers a comprehensive look at how tattooing and its aesthetics have evolved over time and been influenced by globalization. The exhibit includes more than 150 artifacts, such as a 17th-century tattoo stamp Christian pilgrims received after making the trip to Jerusalem. Plus, the project is literally bringing tattooing into the museum world by setting up a live tattoo booth with some of Chicago's best artists participating, including Zach Stuka of Deluxe Tattoo, Stephanie Brown of Butterfat Studios, Joel Molina of the Chicago Tattoo Company, and others.

Prior to its stint at the Field Museum, Tattoo was on view at Paris's Musée du quai branly in 2014 and at the Royal Ontario Museum earlier this year. The current iteration, which is open through April 30, 2017, hopes to set itself apart by setting up the tattoo shop and also incorporating relevant artifacts from the Field Museum's permanent collection into the exhibition. To learn more about the background of the show, VICE spoke with Alaka Wali about the exhibit, how her training in anthropology contributed to the curatorial process, and the larger historical significance of tattoos in the US.

Apo Whang Od (also known as Fang-Od Odday) is one of the last master tattooists among the Kalinga people of the Philippines. © Jake Verzosa

VICE: How does the Tattoo exhibit differ from other exhibitions you've worked on at the Field Museum?

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

You're sitting in your room, phone in hand. Or maybe it's your laptop balanced on your thighs, or nestled on the duvet at an angle. Either way, you're on your porn site of choice, tapping in the search terms that you know are guaranteed to lead to the sort of mid-afternoon weekend climax you've come to know with a gentle familiarity. Later, when you think back to the cumshot you'd needed, or POV shot of a woman's bare bum, that orgasm will feel like the most natural thing in the world.

But it's not, according to French sexologist and psychiatrist Philippe Brenot. He's collaborated with illustrator Letitia Coryn on a new graphic novel – in every sense – that charts the entire history of sex and sexuality in the (mostly western) world, and comes to one simple conclusion: what we consider the "natural" way to understand sexuality isn't something we're innately born with. Really, we're learning all of this from each other.

"There's no such thing as sexual instinct," Philippe says, speaking over the phone in a mixture of French and slightly halting English. "I had to simplify a lot to fit it into the book, but by now we know that sexuality is learned – and that seems to be something women understand more than men."

Philippe's book was recently covered by The Guardian, running under a headline that hinged on this idea of sexuality as something we learn from the society around us. And the legion of commenters were having none of it. "Yes, after a few days I suddenly received dozens of tweets in English – 'Philippe says sexuality is learned, Philippe Brenot this, Philippe Brenot that'," he says, laughing. "Men reacted more to what I'd said because they're the ones who get erections and think, 'a-ha, that must be some sort of involuntary instinct. It then follows that I have to make love every day to use this erection.' But no, that isn't true. There isn't isn't necessarily a universal sexual need that we all have to fulfill. And that doesn't sit well with how men see themselves."

The idea that what gets us off – slow, sensual sex, giving or receiving cunnilingus, aggressive simulated rape – isn't just coded into our DNA clearly messes with a lot of people's minds. When you look back at your own YouPorn search history, there may be things on it that you accept are just a part of you scratching an itch, to release some tension. After spending more than 20 years working as a couples' therapist and academic, 68-year-old Philippe saw the reality as more complex. And now The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots traces the roots of how and why we fuck, starting with monotheistic creation tales, soaring past "egalitarian Egypt", ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages and Freud, before arriving at our present (and peering apprehensively into the future).

The book is a tome, its cover awash with the sweeping lines of naked illustrated bodies in various states of joyously going at it. You flick past Philippe's condensed accounts of how 13th-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle and an Etruscan-shunning Roman republic all set back years of sexual liberation by claiming that women were inferior to men, and shouldn't enjoy sexual pleasure of their own – and, obviously, that homosexuality wasn't meant to be a thing. You learn why repressed Victorian Brits considered the word "leg" too salacious for pleasant company.

Mostly, after going through such an exhaustive and dense look back at where sex intersects with power, religion and gender, you question just about everything you've come to think about why we believe in monogamy, why we accept the idea that men are "hardwired to cheat" and what the purpose and form of the family will be, once straight people marrying for life isn't the only model.

"The lessons the book transmits shows that there's never been equality between men and women in terms of sexual matters," says Will McMarron, a senior lecturer in French and comparative literature at Queen's Mary University in London, who translated the text into English. "It shows the social roots of all of that, the way it's built into those societies and compounded by the church." That wasn't necessarily what he was expecting, when the chance to work on the book landed in his lap.

"My initial reaction was sceptical when they told me about this. You know, a French middle-aged guy writing a history of sexuality left alarm bells ringing slightly – it could have been really bad," he says, with a chuckle. "But I was pleasantly surprised that this seemed a feminist text, asking questions about women's place in society. The stuff on Babylon – free love, but just for men – that kind of thing."

A lot of that perspective came from Philippe working closely with 32-year-old Laetitia Coryn, whose illustrations and speech bubble gags lend the book its winking humour. Creating it, she says, "was a responsibility – you have to understand where sex comes from, how it was built, to understand different elements of it. We were so immersed in the book that when we read it again we realised, 'this is about male domination over women'. And Philippe agreed. And we didn't do that on purpose – but it's the story. That wasn't our intention from the start, but was what we ended up with."

The book sometimes expresses an underlying anxiety. Both Laetitia and Philippe express concerns about how porn may be turning into the only form of sex ed for a generation otherwise starved of a healthy and comprehensive sexual syllabus in school. "And that isn't just learning about biology, physical anatomy and what our sexual organs are," Philippe says. Rather, we've got to grapple with the notion that our sexual habits – and this is regardless of sexual orientation, obviously – are fluid. What turns us on will depend on what we've seen and imitated, something Will mentions in our conversation.

"I remember one of my students saying that, when speaking with friends, they could all tell which of their boyfriends had watched a lot of porn, just by the way they behave in bed. So that's interesting, in terms of the gap between the real and the fantasy – like a modern equivalent of old fears that the novel would make people's morals loose, or the cinema would corrupt its audiences."

The model, and the fantasy it projects, can be manipulated to either help people live sexually healthy lives – with consenting adults doing what makes them happy – or the current system we have, which grips us in a chokehold and tries to set a rigid template. "I'd known all those ideas for so long that I felt compelled to set them down to paper," Philippe says. "In a book like this – a comic, almost, a novel – I had to decide. Whereas in scientific books we don't make decisions. We say: 'here's one hypothesis, here's another and here's a third.' I had to work extremely hard to look at all the angles here, distill them down, and make sure what I researched and found was fair. And it is."

The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots is available now via Penguin Random House imprint Particular Books

@tnm___

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Photo by Anthony Majanlahti

This article originally appeared on VICE US

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, newscasters peered across a map of how the United States' voted: its coastline fringed with blue, with much of the rest a bright pool of red. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shocked pollsters—and the rest of the world—by outperforming in rustbelt states and driving turnout among working class white voters. It felt like two very different nations were vying for control of the republic.

But that map couldn't possibly tell the entire story. Today, the demographic lines between conservative and liberal voters no longer neatly fall within red and blue borders. As The Atlantic reported after the 2012 election, this division now breaks down within states—between denser, increasingly diverse cities and surrounding rural countryside. In fact, it's been said that Republicans have abandoned the prospect of winning over our nation's cities. Mapping the county-by-county results of the 2016 election shows that Clinton swept major metro areas while Trump won most everywhere else, underscoring sharp differences between urban and rural voters.

Unsurprisingly, many complex factors—such as the dynamics of a post-industrial economy and the breakneck rate of social and cultural change over the past few decades—certainly influence this polarity. But don't mistake this as a mere difference in worldview. These political trends highlight the vast differences between urban and rural lived experience in America. And despite the populist tenor of this election season, what's become clear as this week's dust has settled is that the needs of rural minorities have been largely ignored by the news media and political establishment, as the media focused on angst among straight, cisgender working class whites.

Those voters have spoken, and they have installed politicians in our nation's capital who they believe will best cater to their needs. But for gender and sexual minorities who live in rural America, the Trump administration presents a unique set of challenges and threats to their freedoms and way of life.

Rural LGBTQ Americans can often feel like an invisible population, and there's a clear urban-rural disparity today within the US queer liberation movement. Particularly, LGBTQ rural youth often find themselves isolated with few role models and without a community of supportive peers—at greater risk of stigmatization and discrimination.

Limited research about queer rural youth makes it difficult to draw clear-cut conclusions, but one study, published this January in the journal Families in Society, seeks to identify the kinds of support they need.

For the study, researchers interviewed 34 LGBTQ youth, who report receiving little support from their community—saying the reason might be a lack of resources, not biases within the community itself. Many interviewees cite a sense of isolation, reporting that they were the only queer person they knew in their community.

"In my research and talking with rural LGBTQ youth, the biggest challenges they face are access to other LGBTQ youth and supportive resources," said the study's author, Megan Paceley, an assistant professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas.

Pacely concluded that rural youth need greater support in several key areas, both on the individual and community level. Seeing "other similarly identified youth and resources aimed to support their sexual or gender identity can reduce the impact of stigma and discrimination," she said. "These resources are often absent from small towns for a number of reasons."

This doesn't mean rural areas guarantee a hostile environment for LGBTQ people, or that urban areas necessarily ensure a greater degree of support. But it reinforces the notion that the center of the contemporary queer experience is undeniably urban, and privilege of a certain kind comes with living in a community that's often more tolerant, affirming and supportive.

"In urban areas there are typically better support networks, professional organizations, social services and other safety nets to help these young people succeed," said Ellen Kahn, director of the Human Rights Campaign's Children, Youth & Families Program. She emphasizes that queer youth face many of the same challenges—critical need for support from guardians and friends—regardless of where they live. "There is 'strength in numbers' for any minority group, so in rural and less populated areas, those youth who are 'out' as LGBTQ may not have a sense of community."

Certainly the Internet has changed the nature of queer lives across all demographics; that's no different for rural queer Americans. Online resources and virtual community building can decrease the sense of isolation rural youth experience. But Kahn says that those living in the dozens of states without basic non-discrimination protections may not feel safe to come out, instead moving away from such areas in order to live more openly.

Even with widespread opposition to discriminatory legislation, Tuesday's unfortunate plot twist in American politics may cement this disparity.

Today, as President-Elect Trump begins planning his transition with Obama's White House staff, and as protests erupt across the nation, queer America has legitimate reasons to worry. Depending on the policies of the incoming administration, the urban-rural gap for LGBTQ youth may emerge as a primary area of concern.

In North Carolina, where the bathroom-regulating House Bill 2 legally discriminates against transgender people, the director of one community center has concerns for what the next four years could hold.

"I am especially terrified that the example of Governor Pence we've seen in Indiana is what we'll see federally—defunding sexual health education, HIV/STI education, family planning, and so on—in order to funnel money into items like 'reparative therapy,' which is known to do severe harm to young people," said James Miller, the executive director of the LGBT Center of Raleigh. "In a conservative administration, federal and state dollars to do youth development work may not exist, so we must plan ahead to see what private and individual funding we can find to ensure our programming stays in place."

Take North Carolina, a state where many representative urban-rural dynamics play out. The large, relatively cosmopolitan city of Charlotte has, according to Gallup survey data, a sizable queer community, at 3.8 percent of the city's population, making it a center for LGBTQ life in the state. Other urban centers, such as the Raleigh metro area, are home to many of the state's community centers, legal support organizations and other resources. But the state's rural areas have far fewer resources and less diverse (read: tolerant) communities.

"In looking at the urban centers of the South, I have no worries about access to care or services," Miller said, "but it really will be the rural youth that are hit the hardest if the worst comes to pass." In other words, policies from a Trump-Pence administration might not only significantly reverse LGBTQ rights, but also exacerbate America's urban-rural divide.

Yet despite the torrent of negative headlines surrounding the election, Miller does see a glimmer of hope in his work. "I think that when we look at the next generation, we're looking at a group of young adults that are far smarter and more resilient than anyone gives them credit for," he said. "And while the rhetoric we've seen this election cycle has given them much to think about, in most cases it has only helped to cauterize their passion for queer leadership. It is one facet of our center that constantly gives me hope for the future."

Follow Jon Shadel on Twitter.

Photos courtesy of Arsenal Pulp Press

Editor's note: There's a reason why British Columbia press frequently question whether we're in the midst of a gang war. Too often battles over drug turf are fought with actual tools of war (hails of bullets, anyway) between shiny SUVs in residential neighbourhoods. For the last several years, Vancouver historian Aaron Chapman has been investigating the rise of BC gangs before they had guns, cars or money. In the early 70s, gangsters were mostly poor kids in dirty denim vests, and their antics more often ended in fisticuffs and foot chases. That's not to say they didn't cause a great deal of damage on occasion. This passage from Chapman's new book The Last Gang in Town (Arsenal Pulp Press) recounts the Clark Park gang's failed attempt to gatecrash a Rolling Stones show, and hints at their seething rivalry with other street-level groups.

In April 1972, the Rolling Stones would stun local rock music fans by announcing that their Exile on Main Street tour would begin in Vancouver with a concert at the Pacific Coliseum on June 3. By '72, with the Beatles disbanded, the Stones had the pinnacle of rock 'n' roll all to themselves—and they could live up to their designation as "the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band."

By 9 PM, when Stevie Wonder's opening set had ended, there were still some 2,000 people outside the Coliseum. A number of Clark Parkers, including Mouse Williamson, had not made it in either. "Usually at concerts, we'd get one guy to go in who had a ticket, he'd find an exit door to open, and fifty of us would rush in," he says. "Or we'd just rush the turnstiles and jump over them."

But Williamson and the other Clark Parkers were outnumbered by the fans crowding the doors, along with hundreds more would-be gate-crashers, curiosity seekers, those left out due to counterfeit tickets, and others who just wanted to get close enough to an open door to hear the music.

While Williamson had spent much of the afternoon drinking heavily, Kurt Langmann, an 18-year-old from Langley, had driven into town with friends to see if he could purchase a scalped ticket. He quickly realized that it was a lost cause when he saw the hundreds of people shut out of the arena. "It was starting to get ugly. Some were inciting us to just try to rush the gates and crash our way in."

As the mood of the crowd began to change, and with nightfall setting in, police moved uniformed officers to the nearby Pacific Showmart building behind the Coliseum where, unbeknownst to concertgoers, they'd set up a command centre with riot squad gear at the ready, including helmets, shields, and riot batons. What had been a low-key police presence overseeing basic crowd control earlier in the day, now quickly redeployed on the plaza in increased numbers—and full riot squad gear. The police had even invited members of the press to attend. It was almost as if they had been tipped off that a riot was going to happen from the beginning.

Two East Enders arrested in the riot, 1972

As fans who were legitimate ticket holders were still entering the Coliseum, someone on the plaza threw what appeared to be a homemade smoke-bomb, followed by a bottle that struck one of the glass entrance doors. "Suddenly there were rocks flying," wrote Kurt Langmann in a 2011 article for the Aldergrove Star newspaper. "This was our cue to get out of Dodge, or Vancouver to be more accurate ... We were all country kids, used to working on the farms, and considered ourselves 'jocks' who liked to work out at the boxing club ... We had teen bravado, were full of testosterone, and afraid of no one. However, this was no 'sport' unfolding before our eyes, this was pure insanity."

Eighteen-year-old Sandi Barr had also hoped to find scalped tickets. She and her boyfriend were on the plaza when the chaos began. "We saw two drunk guys pick up another guy who was loaded and start to use him to batter the glass door head-first," she says. "The guy was laughing as they rammed his head against it. I was shocked. I hadn't seen anything like this. Then I felt something whiz past my right ear. I looked to the ground and saw that it was a big boulder somebody had thrown. I said, 'That's it. Let's get out of here.'"

Constable Grant MacDonald, who had been involved in the "Operation Dustpan" cleanup of Gastown, was off-duty on the night of the Gastown riot, but found himself right in the middle of this one. (He told me that he didn't even like the Rolling Stones; Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett were more his musical cup of tea.) MacDonald had been on the scene since earlier in the day and noticed the mood of the crowd getting worse, especially as the sun went down. He was among the first officers in the riot line, as the crowd began to taunt police and the first bottles were thrown. "You could see our bosses going through this new manual about when we could engage," he says. "You have to understand that the department had just gone through the Gastown riot and in the wake of the inquiry afterwards, they laid out rules that measured the levels of progression of crowd violence that police could respond to. So we were held back for what seemed like an hour, even when the bottles started flying."

While the Stones launched into "Rocks Off" inside the Coliseum, the thumping rhythm could be heard outside, where Bradley Bennett—now locked out of the concert—found himself in a group of fifty or sixty people charging the doors in an attempt to break in. "I was running and everybody was yelling and screaming and charging against one of the doors, when all of a sudden some guy arm-barred me in the head and loosened up my teeth. I was flat on the ground seeing stars when somebody picked me up, walked me to the street corner, told me I was in rough shape and ought to head home."

Rioting East Enders threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at police, 1972

As Mick Jagger strutted like a rooster on the Coliseum stage, and Keith Richards and the band rocked behind him, some Clark Parkers were doing their best to storm the ramparts. Mac Ryan had been in another crowd running the gates and managed to break through successfully. "We went charging in, and a few of us made it through the doors. But what those guys from The Grape hadn't told us the night we met with them was that the Out to Lunch Bunch would be there that night."

A self-styled bunch of cowboy roustabouts from Kitsilano on the west side, the Out to Lunch Bunch had been a kind of gang unto themselves. They were comprised of a loose affiliation of would-be ranchers, and men who had worked as horse wranglers on local film and TV productions (such as Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, shot in Greater Vancouver two years earlier). Some of them picked up additional work as security guards for local concerts; the two-fisted crew could be depended on for their size and strength. Despite a strong appetite for marijuana and some alleged dealing of it, they disdained hippie fashions and looked more like they'd just come from an East Texas ranch than a Stanley Park Be-In. "They were huge guys. They just overwhelmed us and gave us a bit of a beating," Ryan says of the fight that broke out. "We started to run out of there and then the cops came in behind us with the riot squad, so we got caught between the Out to Lunch Bunch and the police. All hell broke loose," he recalls, shaking his head.

As Ryan found himself between the cops and a hard a place, out on the plaza Mouse Williamson, who had been drinking most of the day, now found himself in the middle of the crowd when the riot began. "That's when people started throwing the Molotov cocktails. It wasn't any of the Clark Park guys, and I don't know if those people were connected to The Grape. Just then, a cop came up on horseback, grabbed me by the hair, and lifted me off the ground."

Williamson broke free, but as he did, the bottle of wine he'd been drinking broke, cutting his fingers. Blood dripping from his hand, he saw a friend being chased by two older men. "He ran by yelling, 'Hey, Mouse! You gotta help me—these guys are going to kill me.' So when the two guys got close, I clotheslined the first one, hitting him so hard he smashed his cheek on the ground and was out cold, and I jumped on the second guy and had him on the ground ready to punch him in the face. In my stupor, I thought something wasn't right and a second later, the riot cops just jumped on me like crazy and pounded on me."

Up on Renfrew Street where Bradley Bennett was shaking off the hit to his head, he watched as the riot got more involved. "There were people starting to pull the rear view mirrors off cars parked along the street, and throw rocks and bottles. It was getting wild."

As the night set in, reinforcements from surrounding RCMP detachments in North Vancouver and Burnaby were dispatched. The sounds of screams, swearing, glass breaking, and police sirens echoed across the plaza. Molotov cocktails (rioters had filled empty wine bottles with gasoline from the gas station at the corner of Renfrew and Hastings) were now hurled at police vehicles. When one of the gasoline bombs hit a passing RCMP patrol car, it sent a sheet of flames high above the vehicle, while another exploded on the street. At one point, Bennett saw a young woman carrying a baby walk untouched through the no-man's land between police and the rioters and enter the Coliseum. Police feared the situation would worsen if the riot was not quelled by the end of the concert, when 17,000 fans would leave the Coliseum and potentially enter the fray. One officer told reporters on scene, "If we don't , we are all dead."

Follow Aaron Chapman on Twitter.

Members of Man United's Inter City Jibbers firm in 1982. Although there was no far-right element, the firm contained people with sectarian views (Photo courtesy of Colin Blaney)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Life doesn't always make sense. Patterns break, your mind briefly struggles and, yes, hotel owner and reality TV star Donald Trump is president-elect of the US. But while working on a piece about neo-Nazi group Combat 18, I learned that leading member Charlie Sergeant was, perhaps illogically, an Arsenal football hooligan. The main Arsenal firm at that time was multiracial and contained numerous black members – potentially odd common ground on which a committed racist and the club's hooligan element could align. In reality, this isn't as rare as you might think, though.

Before writing for VICE, I had a brief stint as a ghostwriter for football hooligan memoirs, and learnt that numerous gangs were comprised of both ethnic minorities and people with far-right views. Even Chelsea's notoriously racist Headhunters, whose skull crest bares resemblance to an SS Totenkopf, had prominent black members. The same applies to sectarianism; there are firms that contain a mix of Protestants and Catholics, both with relatively extreme views about religion. What would attract people to gangs that seem to openly dislike their ethnicity or religion?

"I think that the commitment to club amongst gangs has always been more important than any commitment to social views – racism, homophobia etc – so ethnic minority hooligans are becoming part of the club loyalty aspect of the football hooligan gang," says academic and author Professor Steve Redhead. He also says that common unit is seen as being of the utmost importance in the face of threats from "the outside".

This can take the form of foreign ownership of the club, media fabrications, and/or police infiltration. Presumably, this works in both directions: racists are willing to put aside their hatred of ethnic minorities to preserve the cohesion of the gang, and minorities are willing to overlook the fact that there may be racists in the firm for the same reason.

Some dispute whether far-right views vocalised by certain members of football firms are actually important to them at all. Pete, a former black Crystal Palace hooligan, feels that the "racists" are able to get along with black members of the firms because they aren't actually as prejudiced as they liked to make out. "They were all following fashion," he says. "They had those views, but they weren't hardcore with it."

He says that black guys in firms with far-right members didn't regard them as serious racists, as most of the so-called far-righters seemed to like the image of right-wing thugs but didn't actually subscribe to the ideologies. "The media look at firms like Chelsea and say: 'oh yeah, they're stigmatised with this right-wing National Front thing', but how many of them really did have that view if they allowed black guys to be their main geezers?" he asks.

I mention that the Chelsea Headhunters' logo was similar to a Nazi symbol, but Pete questions whether the majority of the firm actually knew what it meant. He points out how a member of Crystal Palace's firm had unknowingly printed out calling cards with a red hand of Ulster on them, and was later surprised when an Irish Catholic was offended.

BBC journalist Caroline Gall spent a significant amount of time with football hooligans while compiling social histories of three different firms. She echoes Pete's sentiments, highlighting the fact that the mob mentality is particularly prevalent in football firms. "That's true of most things in football firms. People just go along with it," she says.

Gall documented the Leeds Service Crew, who are regarded as one of the most racist football firms but also had a man of mixed heritage in its upper hierarchy. "It's his team, it's where he's from," she says, "and from what I could gather, he never faced any situations where he personally faced one-on-one animosity from the Leeds lads because of his race. He was accepted, so he carried on being part of it." Although a small minority of Leeds' firm probably were genuine racists, Gall says it seemed as though a lot of others got caught up in the moment and gave Hitler salutes at matches because they'd seen other people doing it.

The belief that people looking in from the outside perceive hooligans to be more racist than they actually are is also held by Paul*, a black Liverpool hooligan. He claims that the accusations of racism that were levelled at his firm stemmed from a conflation of political incorrectness with genuine prejudice. "There's a lot of lads who say 'nigger' but aren't actually racist," he says. "It's just something that they say." It's notable that hooligans in other multiracial firms have documented links to groups like Combat 18 and the National Front, so this can't be true in all cases.

Essentially, this seems to suggest that gang and club affiliation are seen as a higher priority than race and identity politics. A similar dynamic plays out in firms with a sectarian element. Take Manchester United's Red Army, for example, which contains a mix of Irish-Mancunian Catholics and Protestants. At least one of the Catholics I've met in the past has professed sympathy for the IRA.

John McKee, far right, and a couple of friends

According to Colin Blaney – a former member of a sub-group known as the InterCity Jibbers (ICJ) that focused on acquisitive crime – allegiance to the Red Army and ICJ brought together people who would otherwise have been at each other's throats. "Our school, which was Catholic, used to fight the Protestant school, but then people who'd fought each other came together for United," he says. He also says that despite being a Catholic, he attended an Orange March parade with ICJ member John "The Grid" McKee , which never would have happened if it wasn't for shared group membership.

A weird paradox has created tighter bonds in the part of football fandom that outsiders associate with violence. Identity is a complex thing, and membership to groups can sometimes mean shoving personal beliefs to one side when they conflict with those of other members. "At the end of the day," says Gall, "when you're facing your so-called opposition, you're not going to refuse to fight alongside a man of a certain background just because he is of that background."

Thanks to everyone who took the time to talk to me, and also to MC Flux for putting me in touch with Pete. You can read more about Crystal Palace hooligans in Flux's autobiography.

@nickchesterv

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This article originally appeared on VICE US

Though not a household name, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a.k.a. Bear, was an underground hippie legend who some say is largely responsible for the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture movement, thanks to the ultra-pure LSD he manufactured. Put it this way: If Bear wasn't on the scene, there would literally be no acid in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Bear manufactured millions of hits of "White Lightning," the cleanest LSD this side of Albert Hofmann, at a time when the drug was still legal. He's directly credited with expanding the minds of many of the most influential figures of the 60s, including John Lennon, who once tried to obtain a lifetime supply of Bear's potent product. The chemist even used the money he generated selling LSD to help fund the early days of the Grateful Dead when they resided in Haight-Ashbury. He also worked as the Dead's sound engineer, even creating their "Wall of Sound" and the notorious "Steal Your Face" logo, inspiring the dancing bear icons, and recording some of the band's best recordings, live and in the studio.

His influence was omnipresent, even if below-the-radar of the pop culture canon, and would have continued to affect and inspire lead figures of the era if he wasn't arrested by federal agents in late 1967. (LSD was made illegal by late 1966) Once he was released from prison, Bear never made LSD again, though he continued to be involved with the Grateful Dead and the counterculture scene until his death in 2011.

In the new book Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, out November 15, noted rock historian Robert Greenfield explores the life of the Grateful Dead insider who "helped to create the 60s" that lives on in our collective conscious. "Without his LSD, I don't think those times would have been as crazy as they were," explains the author. Greenfield had previously written about Bear in Rolling Stone for the magazine's issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, and he had so much unused interview material from his subject, as well as from key figures like Jerry Garcia, that he decided to expand his profile into a definitive biography of the man. VICE chatted with Greenfield by phone to find out why Bear was one of the most important forces within the counterculture community, why his incarceration "ended" the 60s for a lot of people, and if LSD actually paved the way for the internet.

John Perry Barlow, who founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is one of these people who crossed over from the world of the Grateful Dead into the world of the computer. He's living proof of the relationship between LSD and the digital universe. During the Summer of Love, there were many other acid chemists making acid, but if you understand the LSD experience and how powerful and overwhelming it can be, the question is if people weren't using the real stuff, the pure stuff, would they have gotten to the place they got to? The people I have written about—Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, and Augustus Owsley Stanley III—have influenced America in ways a lot of people would like to ignore or deny, but to a great degree they've shaped the culture that we're living in today.

Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III is out November 15 on Thomas Dunne Books. Pre-order it now.

Follow Seth on Twitter and visit Olivia Thomson's website to see more of her graphic design work.

(Photo by the author)

This article originally appeared on VICE France

It's 7.30PM on Saturday the 12th of November. As they do every weekend, the streets of the 11th arrondissement in Paris are buzzing with activity. But tonight, the party will unfold in a different atmosphere near the Bataclan. In front of the Apérock, the bar next to the venue, dozens of people are drinking their pints while police sirens wail in the background.

A big group of police officers monitors everyone entering the zone – the tone is set. In about an hour and a half, the Bataclan will open his doors to the public, one year after the Paris terror attacks. And it's Sting, who first performed there in 1979, who has been chosen to mark the occasion.

In a tense atmosphere, hundreds of people wait for the concert to start. Viviane, 23, is a graphic design student – but also a regular customer of the Apérock, which she considers as her "second home". With her elbows leaned on the bar counter, she seems reluctant to join the queue. She stares at the Boulevard Voltaire, which stands completely empty now the police have secured it. Her eyes betray the state of anxiety that precedes important moments like this. "It feels very weird to be waiting like this. On concert nights, most people are usually in a very festive mood. But now, it's so empty that I feel like I'm in a western film, during the scene where two guys are about to draw their guns."

Some of her friends are also regular customers of this bar, and didn't hesitate when the reopening of the Bataclan was announced: "It's not like I had a choice", Viviane says, "I said on national TV that I would be there." She lets out a nervous laugh, right before her smile fades and her hands begin to shake. "I've been telling myself for a week that this was going to be an awesome night, but now I don't even know if I'll make it inside the venue. I think I'm going to hold onto little details: I'll stare at the roof, study each bit of renovation work."

Her friend Cedric – who, like her, jokes that they could practically be the bar's managers given "the time and the money they spent there" – is on the same page. "I don't feel apprehension, I'm just try not to think about anything before actually going inside", he says. "We have to stay pragmatic, and let things happen. We're all thinking the same thing: The show must go on."

Clusters of bouquets in remembrance outside the venue (Photo by the author)

In the queue, Didier, 48, stands out with his blue eyes, as worn out as his leather jacket. Between the cities of Rennes, Paris, Annecy and Los Angeles, this old backpacker has always been animated by his love of music, he says – as well as by the Bataclan. "This venue represents my youth, another era filled with punks fighting at every concert. This spirit was also attacked on last November. That's what I've came to defend tonight". But Didier is also here to pay tribute to Caroline, a friend of his who was shot during the attack. Throughout the evening, he keeps talking to journalists, as if he needed to hide his anxiety. The concert is now about to begin, under the gaze of the police officers – including Jean, 58.

Jean is an old-school cop who has been doing this job for 35 years. He wears a Harley-Davidson wooly hat and skull rings. He watches over the crowd, looking calm, a walkie-talkie in his hand. During his career, he had to deal with three terrorist attacks: two in 1995, at the Saint-Michel RER station and the Musée d'Orsay, before helping the injured people at the Stade de France in November 2015.

"There's no emotion involved for me tonight," he says. If Jean is as professional as one can be, he's not fully deprived of empathy. "I've seen horrific things at the Stade de France – a ripped arm, vertebrae lying on the ground. But I've never been traumatised. I can't explain why; some of my colleagues never got over it, but it didn't immobilise me. But I can of course understand why people feel very emotional tonight", he says, watching two girls holding flowers cry.

For Viviane, Cédric and their friends, it's also time to go into the venue. A few regulars shout "Welcome home", while bartenders pour drinks. In the audience, several people are wearing a CUMP badge – the social body that provides moral and psychological help to the survivors and the relatives and friends of the victims from the Bataclan attacks.

Among them, Claudine smiles faintly. Tonight, she's seen people that she's been helping for weeks, or even months. Most of the people have abandonned the therapy they started with her, but she's of course not holding that against them: "Therapy is supposed to be a very progressive thing," she says, "it doesn't work overnight. And some people don't like this, which is perfectly normal – it can be extremely frustrating. But it's more than necessary when people have been confronted with such physical and moral violence."

Sting playing inside Bataclan (Photo courtesy of the Bataclan)

The lights go down, people quieten. Sting appears on stage and starts the show with a moment of silence. The venue has a capacity of 1,500 people and is completely booked. In the audience, there are members of the governments – Minister of culture Audrey Azoulay, spokesperson of the French Socialist party Juliette Méadel, but also Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, and Valérie Pécresse, president of the regional council of Île-de-France. The French president François Hollande came a few hours before the concert to show his support.

From "Message in a Bottle" to "Roxanne", Sting's concert feels like a plain commemoration and a festive party at the same time – an ambivalence the British artist seems to be deliberately maintaining, helped by Ibrahim Maalouf who came on stage to play on "Fragile" and "Inch Allah". In the venue, people are clapping and showing their willingness to enjoy themselves. And finally, the music takes over this unusual context. Party-goers put their hands up in the air, dance, laugh until the final song – "The Empty Chair", which was written to pay tribute to American photojournalist Jim Foley, killed by the Islamic state in Syria in 2014.

After an hour and a half, the concert ends, and the crowd starts to leave the venue they were once so afraid to set foot in again. Most of the people seem to be stunned by their meeting with the "new" Bataclan, which eventually managed to stay the same. Didier is one of the first to leave. He seems almost relieved. "I'm proud to have paid this beautiful tribute to Caroline. And proud not to have dreaded for something awful to happen tonight." Moments later, it's Viviane's turn to come out. "It was pure joy! It doesn't resolve everything, but it feels great. For a year, I felt like I was the shadow of myself, I felt a huge pain each time I went near the Bataclan. Now, I've reached a turning point. I can't wait to go back."

@barthgaillard

Thank you to everyone who spoke to us. Those we interviewed politely declined to have their photos taken outside, and photographs weren't allowed inside the venue for security reasons.

All photos by Conor Mcdonald

Easterhouse is one of the most notorious – and notoriously misunderstood – of Glasgow's many estates. Partially, this stems from its physical isolation. It lies six miles east of the city centre, and the sense of being an area apart from the city proper is exacerbated by creaking, expensive transport links and the M8 motorway that runs along its periphery.

Built in the 1950s as part of the ambitious post-war slum clearances that so radically transformed the social and physical character of the city, it has experienced many of the problems that took root in similar developments across Glasgow. Poverty, poor infrastructure, shoddily built and maintained housing and a lack of local investment and employment opportunities have all contributed towards its ill repute.

In the council ward that contains Easterhouse, over 40 percent of children live in poverty. The UK-wide figure is 28 percent. Health inequality (a key component of the so-called "Glasgow Effect") is also stark. The average life expectancy for men in Easterhouse is 69.9. In the more affluent west of the city, it's 80.1. Around 27 percent of Easterhouse residents are registered as having a disability.

Easterhouse came to national prominence as the site of Iain Duncan Smith's cringingly dubbed "poverty epiphany" in 2002. Duncan Smith visited the estate during his time as Conservative leader.

His visit was supposed to inaugurate the beginning of "compassionate Conservatism", long before his rebirth as the scourge of the welfare "scrounger". There are, famously, stark photographs of Duncan Smith close to tears standing outside a dilapidated block of flats, apparently experiencing a conversion to modern conservatism. But in fairness, he wasn't even the first. Tony Blair, Princess Diana and the former French President Jacques Chirac have all visited for fleeting, hand-wringing looks at how the destitute subsist on this most notorious of "sink-estates".

On the surface, there have been several eye-catching physical changes to Easterhouse in the years since Duncan Smith's heavily publicised Road to Damascus moment. A visitor to the area now, who came armed only with poverty statistics, would be surprised to discover an ordinary looking suburb, full of neat new build houses, a pristine college building and a busy, well stocked local community hub called The Bridge, which contains a swimming pool, computer facilities, exhibition spaces and a bustling library. These buildings are the physical manifestation of a regeneration scheme drawn up by the last Labour government that began in 2002.

It's no simple tale of rebirth. Critics have referred to the changes as a sticking plaster, masking deep rooted problems with superficial sheen and gloss. One elderly man I spoke to outside the centre, who tells me he's lived on the estate since he was 11, says that his new build has problems with heat retention and sound proofing. In an area that has seen poverty levels remain stagnant despite investment, it is a crucial point: many people here, despite their new homes, suffer from issues such as fuel poverty. Though the council run an "affordable fuel dividend" initiative, this is only available to those 80 and over, leaving younger families adrift.

One of the ironies attached to Duncan Smith's "Easterhouse Epiphany" is the fact that his decimation of the welfare system has made life considerably harder for those living, working and merely getting by in the area. The surrealist brutality of the sanctions system has left many materially worse off. The combined difficulties of travel and the harsher assessments have left those working low-paid and precarious jobs in a difficult, perhaps impossible position. Earning just enough – or not being quite disabled enough in the eyes of the DWP – has meant that those who previously relied on the state to top-up their earnings (the median wage in Easterhouse is lower than that in the rest of Scotland and the UK) have lost out. And while new badminton courts and the like are obviously positive things, they do little to redress the underlying income imbalance.

It's not just the brutal sanctions and surreal fit for work tests that have hit so many on the estate. There's little general evidence to support the idea that the fabric of people's lives has improved in the years that regeneration money has poured into the area, and the statistical indicators also show little improvement over those 13 years.

The 2016 figures collated for the SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation) still have Easterhouse firmly in the most deprived 15 percent for every indicator apart from geographic access – including education, income and employment. So there is a valid question to be asked: is systemic change glacial, or is it happening at all?

This is why the recently announced "transformation" of Easterhouse is a much more complicated issue than reports have generally acknowledged. Last month it was announced that over £400 million of both public and private sector investment is to be funnelled into the area over the next 20 years. The bulk of it is to be spent on 6,000 new homes and "improved infrastructure and public spaces" as part of a report approved by Glasgow City Council.

The announcement has been accompanied by little official fanfare, bar council leader Frank McAveety being quoted in the local Glasgow press describing the plans as "thrilling" and saying they are a chance to "build on the successes of recent years to complete the regeneration of Easterhouse, to deliver an area of Glasgow that is attractive as a place to live, work, invest and visit".

Yet, many local people I spoke to expressed their reservations about the proposed developments, and reservations about how widespread those "successes" had been. The theme that ran throughout wasn't of opposition to the plans, but rather a scepticism that they would be as far reaching and as comprehensive as promised. There is a sense that it's all been heard before. Natalie McGarry, the SNP MP for Glasgow East, has expressed this succinctly in the past, saying, "It's all window dressing. You can put people in new homes but you can still see the deprivation in their faces."

Yasin – who runs a shop in the town centre plaza – expressed his ambivalence to me. Having lived in the area for several years, he tells me he's recently relocated to the southside of the city, despite keeping the business in Easterhouse. Having heard about the incoming investment, he signed for another ten years at the same location, but he says he's not holding his breath.

"We've heard the centre is getting a boost for the last ten years, but nothing has happened," he said. "It's been talked about for a long time." I asked him where he'd ideally like to see the money go in the area. "Well, the college could do with a wee upgrade. I was there doing Social Studies and it looks nice, and the teaching is no bad, but it could do with more equipment and that, really."

Walking back up to The Bridge, past the college building, a few young boys were loitering, kicking a football against a wall. Back in the warmth of the library, we heard a slightly more cheery prognosis for the proposed investment. Guiding me around a photo exhibition that details the physical changes in the area over the past 50 years was David, an employee at The Bridge, who believes the improvements since the first onset of regeneration money in the early 2000s have provided a lasting benefit.

"You notice things are getting more cosmopolitan – there are people coming in that would never have come before; artists running workshops, the facilities here, all that sort of thing," he said. "That's a surprise for people, you know. I'd like to see it become known as an ordinary, average part of east-end Glasgow. I think it's on its way, which is smashing. I love working here – it's got a bit of everything, and that's because of the money coming in."

Most people I spoke to didn't necessarily share David's optimism about the plans. One youth worker, who didn't want to be named, was highly skeptical.

"It's the same old. I'm in my forties; I've heard it all before. There might be a few photos for some politicians, but it's the same old east end. We get nothing. There's some pubs, some bookies and that's it."

Rather than just more housing development, she told me she'd like to see more money poured into properly funded youth services and community projects that have suffered heavily over the past six years under both the coalition and the Tories. But funding is scarce, she said: "I'd like to see more money to the Youth Access Fund – they'd do better things than the council anyway."

Despite the physical improvements, she was clear on the fundamental issue: "There just isn't enough to do. We need somewhere for young people to feel safe, somewhere for older people to go so they aren't isolated." It's not enough, she says, for better transport links alone, as many don't feel confident leaving the area, or simply don't have the money to experience all of the opportunities in the city centre.

Her colleague, Marie, told me that "there's a lot of talent in Easterhouse. I work with a few local music groups and the issue is a lack of funding. We're living in a digital age and you have to progress with the times. So much has changed in the last 100 years, but it sometimes feels that education is the only place where we've stagnated. If we could invest in that sort of education, kids would be much more engaged."

If anything is obvious, it's that the challenges facing Easterhouse and similar estates around the country have no easy, miracle solutions. Decades of neglect; the absence of real, sustained political will; isolation; and the PR-hungry machinations of some politicians has led to a climate of justified scepticism. As we've seen across the country, regeneration can mean little more than prettification and, in some cases, aggressive displacement. From Elephant and Castle to the east end of Glasgow, there is a familiar pattern to be discerned. Without the active engagement and consultation of the communities that the investment is supposed to benefit, and without any real evidence of improvement in the daily fabric of people's lives, the question has to be asked: who is it all for?

That's not to say that Easterhouse is the next area in danger of yuppy-fication: that would be absurd. The gains that have been made are welcome, but they are small. There is still much to be done, as those who live and work in the community will tell you. Improved housing and marquee building projects clearly have not been enough. A gleaming college is little use without adequate facilities; improved transport links to the economic and social benefits of the city centre are little use if you can't afford the train fare.

Easterhouse has been promised many new dawns. It remains to be seen if this one lasts longer than the others.

@FranDGarcia1

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Back in August, when Presidential candidate Donald Trump took a pledge to help clamp down on pornography, smut-lovers across the land laughed it off. But now that he is headed for the White House, it makes you wonder if folks should start stockpiling stag mags the way gun lovers hoarded rifles before Obama came into office.

One thought is that Trump, someone who likes to grab women "by the pussy" and has appeared in Playboy videos, might take one big sweeping action against erotica. Another thought is that he might kill it with a thousand cuts. We can already see the battle over the freedom of speech and obscenity is happening on many fronts. One of the most unlikely is in fast-food restaurants.

For years, fast-food chains have long provided an unfiltered gateway to the internet. But the days of having free reign on the web while sipping lattes might be coming to an end. Companies like Panera Bread, Subway, and Chick-fil-A are filtering content on their wi-fi networks. They are all part of the growing "National Porn Free Wi-Fi" campaign, which was started in 2014 and has since garnered 50,000 petitions and more than 75 partner organizations. The movement to block pornographic content over free wi-fi is led by advocacy groups Enough Is Enough (EIE) and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), and boasts supporters like Pamela Anderson, Oprah Winfrey, and President-elect Donald Trump.

EIE and NCOSE have been incredibly instrumental in making an issue out of the idea that there are lots of perverted degenerates looking at porn in restaurants. "Before we started our outreach, places like McDonald's didn't even know there was a problem with public displays of pornographic content at their stores," says EIE President Donna Rice Hughes. McDonald's admits as such. In a recent statement, the corporation said, "We had not heard from our customers that this was an issue, but we saw an opportunity that is consistent with our goal of providing an enjoyable experience for families."

No reliable statistics exist on how often public wi-fi networks have actually been used to view pornography. But Hughes points to one case where a registered sex offender downloaded kiddie porn at a Starbucks in Hillsboro, Oregon as a harrowing example of what can happen when people have unrestrained access to the web in a public place. "This isn't just about being a good corporate citizen," she says. "It's about so much more."

As horrible as that instance in Hillsboro, Oregon is, we do know that the vast majority of people aren't looking at kiddie porn when they use an online network at a restaurant. The folks who really rely on these free wi-fi networks are the poor in rural and urban environments, who use them to do everything from check their email to finish their art history homework after the public library closes. The tricky thing with the proposed filters of the "National Porn Free Wi-Fi" movement is blocking pornographic content without obstructing everyday people from having access to legitimate stuff on the web. Some filters on the market block important service sites like Planned Parenthood, social media sites like Facebook, and even articles like the one you're reading right now, which might have "porn" in the headline, but do not actually contain explicit content.

On VICE Talks Film: Interview with Rashida Jones on Her Porn Documentary 'Hot Girls Wanted'

Publicity material from FATE

Right now, in a conference room in Tunisia, an organization called FATE is trying to work out how to prevent the radicalization of young Muslims. FATE—Families Against Terrorism and Extremism—is not a military operation, nor an arm of the intelligence service, but a collection of small activist groups, made up mostly of the mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers of young people who have been radicalized by ISIS.

With an estimated 30,000 foreign fighters having traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS since 2011, there is a sense of desperate urgency among proceedings.

Alongside the families of radicalized people coming together to both share their grief and try to figure out a way to fight back against recruiters, the conference's networking events and workshops host academics, figures from NGOs, and even those who've lost loved ones in terror attacks. Instead of laying blame on the families of radicalized young people, these groups want to enter a dialogue with them, to figure out what signs of extremism could have been picked up earlier. The aim is not justice, but preventing young people from running off to Syria by getting to them before recruiters do.

Karolina Dam is one of the moms who will be attending the conference. After losing her son, Lukas, to ISIS recruitment in 2014, she has rededicated her life to helping parents going through the same ordeal. When I call her at her home in Copenhagen, her passion for what FATE does is tinged with desperation. "Every time I hear another parent's story, I cry," she says. "We don't want our kids to blow up. We want them home, sleeping in their own beds. But this is our lives, this is what happened to us, this is what we're going through, and no parent should have to go through it alone."

Growing up in Denmark with Karolina, Lukas converted to Islam at 13 after making friends with some Muslim guys at work. He was autistic, Karolina says, and was diagnosed with ADD and Asperger syndrome. Islam seemed like a good fit for him: "It was structured. It gave him the same things to do every day."

Karolina says Islam showed Lukas how to be empathetic, but it also provided him with a community away from his family. Over time, Lukas fell in with more extreme organizations, joining one group with links to terrorism. When he was 18, he told her he was going to the Turkish border. Karolina didn't know exactly where he was, but she'd send him pictures of the cat in a bid to tempt him home.

In December 2014, a friend of Lukas's sent Karolina a link to a private Facebook message. "It was a link to an ISIS supporters' Facebook group," she says. It was then that she realized her son wasn't in Turkey, but in Syria, fighting with ISIS. There was a photo of Lukas with an AK-47, and the comments suggested he was dead. "I didn't know my son was radicalized until after he was dead," she explains. She still doesn't know the full story: Authorities will not release any files on his radicalization until he has an official death certificate, which is difficult to organize.

After she lost her son, a grief-stricken Karolina started Sons and Daughters of the World, an organization that aims to raise awareness about counteracting extremism, to create a secure forum where families affected by radicalization can talk without being watched. "It provides other parents with everything I would have needed when my son ran off," says Karolina. They have even helped other mothers with missing sons by searching for their boys in ISIS videos and photos in an attempt to try to identify them.

Sons and Daughters sits under FATE, which is essentially a hub for organizations like Karolina's—42 of them, to be precise, from across Africa and North Europe. I ask Karolina what FATE actually do. "We make campaign videos," she says, "to get a message out to young kids that we are tomorrow and Daesh is the past."

I've watched the videos—they're low budget and quite heavily stylized. I'm not sure they're quite rhetorical enough to counter extremist messaging, but Karolina firmly believes in them: "These campaigns are literally going to save our kids' lives," she says. "If we didn't think this, we wouldn't do it. It's very important."

The whole point of FATE, really, she says, is to pick up where authorities are failing. She tells me about another woman in Denmark who got in touch with her through the organization, with concerns from her son's behavior that he was becoming radicalized. "She reached out to the authorities and they pushed her away and said there's no problem," says Karolina. "You don't talk to a mother like that! It was very brave of her to call at all. Families are usually afraid of the authorities—afraid that they'll take their kids away. She might not call again. This is what smaller organizations and NGOs can help with."

When I ask what kind of solutions there are for kids who are becoming radicalized, Karolina suggests calling on Muslim teachings. "Most of these kids haven't even read the Quran; they don't know what's good and bad," she says. "The only thing they know is what they have been told. There are lots of things in the Qur'an I could have used for my kid—without trashing him, but to use his religion to keep him on track."

The aim is not just to help individuals dealing with extremism, but change the culture of blame that paints vulnerable young people as evil. She says it's time to stop treating them simply as terrorists, but recognize that they're sick and that they need treatment. Mothers too have been demonized for aiding ISIS—but "mothers do not send money for guns and bullets," says Karolina when I bring this up. "They send money for their kids to have something to eat."

Of course these people should be punished, she says, but she'd like to see a focus of resources shift onto capturing recruiters: "We know who they are. They help these kids cross over to Syria, and they're still walking the streets. They have our kids' blood on their hands."

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter.

Donald Trump in the White House (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

When I saw the election, I saw Trump winning /
And after that my head got to spinning.
Trump is bad / Trump is sad too
Trump look like Hitler from World War Two.
He won the election because he cheated /
It's the only reason he didn't get beated.
–Jaylon, fifth grade

At the Spanish-language immersion school where I currently teach kids to write rap songs, most of my students are black or Latino. The school's staff is made up almost exclusively of immigrants from Mexico, Spain, Honduras, and other Spanish-speaking countries. And so I felt extra nauseous on Wednesday, the day after Election Day, going into work. They all must have been wondering who in their American midst could have possibly voted for that racist monster. I, the only white man, would be the only real possible suspect.

But instead of calling off work and sautéing myself in red wine and white tears, I got in my car. New Orleans's unusually silent, lonely streets felt a lot like Ash Wednesday, the day after every Mardi Gras: like a bomb went off. Like the party was clearly over.

At school I was still greeted warmly. And after taking roll and passing out snacks and joking with the fifth-graders about their very real election frustrations, I slowly began to realize... no other day would be better for writing raps. America's Reagan years had worked like steroids on both hip-hop and punk rock. Rap was first forged specifically as a tool to express the kinds of feelings so many of us shared. Hip-hop was made for today.

As we sat down with our drum machine, paper, and pencils, I made a point not to tell the kids my own political opinions. I wanted the thoughts and words in their couplets to be wholly their own. But since not a lot of Trump voters send their kids to Spanish immersion schools, my students' opinions weren't very surprising or dynamic. Kids like Evin were as mad and let down and worried as any of us:

Tuesday was Election Day / On that day, I lost my way.
He dislikes the way I look / Sometimes I think he is a crook.
Donald Trump is a clown / I hope he doesn't let us down.
Clinton is a great lady / We all know that Trump is shady.

Hillary Clinton should have won / After that election, I think I'm done.
I feel bad for my country / I thought this was the home of the free.

I'd been equally careful about involving my own seven-year-old daughter in this nasty election, but she still peripherally absorbed enough of Trump to dislike him tremendously. She couldn't exactly tell you why, but each time she saw his face somewhere, she would literally growl his name. Luckily, I'd provided enough of a buffer that she didn't melt down on Wednesday morning (like all of my adult friends did) upon hearing the bad news. She only snarled, "You better buy me a punching bag," and then got over it on the car ride to school.

My own students, though, were older, and so they knew a few more specifics about their own fears and worries. My student Jayden told me, "Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both are bad, but Hillary Clinton is better. Now the Purge is coming." I saw scrawled on Jayden's paper: Sit tight, stay white.

As the beat rolled, every few minutes a student would ask me how to spell a word, and I would write it on the board: racist, inappropriate, sin, Donald. De'jah asked me to spell awful, and then expressed her nuanced concerns in a well-composed 16 bars:

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton / both of them are worth billions.
What do I think about my new president? / I wish that we could sell him for rent.
I was so surprised that Donald Trump won / he is just a an awful person.
He does awful nasty things / and we all know he doesn't have feelings.
I don't know how he was raised / I can't believe some people praised.
My mom told me to stop trying / and I had to bust out crying.
He may not be my color / but he could stand to be a lot nicer.
Hillary Clinton was not very bad / and now all of us are a little bit sad.

In general, the kids were downright Trump-like in their criticism of our new president's appearance. It was very hard to pry students like Zoe off the superficial subject:

I wish Donald Trump didn't win / because he looks like a pigpen.
I know a lot of people like him / but he smells like a men's gym.
He shouldn't have done what he done, in that video /
And now they talk about it on every show.

"One of the things people don't like about this guy is that he reduces everyone down to their appearance, and whether they are attractive," I pointed out to my students, letting my own views slip out. "That's boring as well as mean. Don't let your raps be boring. Let's limit ourselves to just one insult about his hair per song."

Jayden, for one, did not obey:

I think Donald Trumps' breath smells like onions
He probably ate for breakfast a bunch of Funyuns.
Trump's wife copied a speech from Michelle
And her breath smells like kelp.

My more woke fifth-graders remained distraught yet poised, like Sasha:

I was really surprised, when trump won/ I cried all night and it wasn't fun.
He said he's going to build a wall / Over it, you couldn't throw a ball.
Now that Donald Trump has won / I'm going to turn into a Canadian.

While others, like my man Jimmie, were too upset to even make his worries rhyme:

I feel mad about the election. I don't like Donald Trump. He did something inappropriate and he talks about women and he's racist. Hillary Clinton would have made a great president. She is not racist or inappropriate. Donald Trump is going to start a World War Three. I think all the African Americans are in danger because Donald Trump hates all the African Americans and he is going to try to kill us.

In a postscript either hopeful or sarcastic, Jimmie added, America is a great country.

Follow Michael Patrick Welch on Twitter.

"So, we're in hell," Marina Abramović begins, leaning across the table, "and the devil is sitting around, being bored."

It's a pleasant October afternoon in New York, and the most well-known, controversial, and influential performance artist of our time is sharing her favorite joke, which, she tells me, is always the last one she's heard. The joke—fittingly international, considering her birthplace of Serbia, former residences across Europe, and current base in Hudson, New York—goes like this: Former president-dictators Nicolai Ceaușescu, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milošević want to phone their former countries, to check in, see how their people are doing. The devil charges them accordingly: One million for two minutes to Romania, 2 million for two minutes to Iraq. When it comes to Milošević's two minutes to Serbia, however, the cost is surprisingly nothing.

"This is local call," Abramović explains, as an Eastern –accented Satan. "Hell to hell."

Though her English isn't flawless, her delivery is—she dispatches the joke with a wry, deadpan tone at a focused, speedy clip, challenging you to keep up, never stuttering or missing a beat, and she lands the punch line perfectly. The effect is instantaneous: We both laugh out loud.

We're in a large meeting room in the Penguin Random House building in Midtown Manhattan, where she's in the midst of weeks of interviews for her new memoir, Walk Through Walls, with print, radio, and TV journalists from all over the world. For the past three hours, Abramović and her cheerful publicity manager, Allison, have been holed up doing an interview for German television. Now, Abramović is clearly relieved to be speaking off-camera, away from the crew and lights.

I ask where she heard the joke, and she says a friend in London. "You know, this country is politically overly correct—it's so boring," she confides, leaning in again, her face unconventionally beautiful and seemingly ageless (she is two weeks shy of 70, but looks decades younger). "And I really need to have my dose of humor, and I really need to laugh, because the black humor is based on truth and is also the way to survive."

She mentions removing a section from the book "because of all the problems I have recently." I understand this as a reference to a controversial passage, since removed, from an early version of the book in which Abramović describes her first meeting aboriginal Australians in the Outback, with whom she lived for a year learning, meditating, and generating new ideas for her work. "Nothing prepares Westerners—even Westerners used to extreme experiences—for meeting Australia's first inhabitants," she wrote in the deleted section, taken from a 1979 diary entry, alternating between lamentations over their poor treatment by the Australian government and Western civilization in general ("they should be treated as living treasures. Yet they are not") and uncomfortable descriptions of their appearance ("they look like dinosaurs") and smell ("to a Westerner... unbearable"). The passage sparked outrage and a hashtag movement called "#theracistispresent." Abramović apologized twice.

Yet here she is, in her publisher's office, opening herself up to an interviewer she's only met 15 minutes before. It's both thrilling and a bit shocking. Marina Abramović, I am beginning to suspect, kind of doesn't give a fuck. Not about her publisher, who would surely prefer her to avoid hairy topics. Not about the detractors, who have called her works " cheesy" (Roberta Smith in the New York Times), "exploitative" (performance artist Yvonne Rainer), and " Satanic" (right-wing misinformation site Infowars, in reference to a dinner party she threw). Not about the blow-ups, including criticism for having had three abortions because " would be a disaster for my work." And not about her former partner, Ulay, with whom she collaborated on a series of extreme and unforgettable works in the 70s and early 80s only to later be sued for a larger cut of the sales (he won).

And yet, whether she's withstanding razorblades to the stomach ( Lips of Thomas, 1975), a bed of fire ( Rhythm 5, 1974), a cross of ice (also Lips of Thomas), or the public in a kind of Stanford Prison Experiment scenario ( Rhythm 0, 1974)—or, most famously, sitting silent and motionless across from visitors for eight hours a day over three months ( The Artist Is Present , 2010), a performance that drew 750,000 attendees, a MoMA record for performance—Marina Abramović endures, outlasting everyone else through a singular combination of will and—depending on who you ask—openness, fearlessness, and/or recklessness.

Marina Abramović on 'Rhythm 10' for VICE:

"It's really important, the title of my book," she tells me. "There's so many people they will come in the front of the wall and that will be the end of the journey. For me, it's just the beginning. I always say that my main motto , If you say no to me, it's just the beginning. And you have to go to the end, and when finally you can't do anymore, you have to let it go. You have to really give—100 percent is not enough anymore these days. Hundred and twenty is just enough. That 20 percent more over the hundred is what makes the warrior. Nothing else."

She continues: "You have to risk and then be not afraid to fail. Failure is very important. But that's the warrior, he never gives up, you know." She quotes the artist Bruce Nauman, whom she admires: "Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true."

"This book is absence of anger. I am not angry anymore. I am seeing big picture," Abramović says of her uncommonly candid, engaging, and at times quite funny memoir, which illuminates her path as the daughter of partisan war heroes in Communist Yugoslavia to the pinnacle of the international art world.

This lack of anger, she tells me, is why she chose to dedicate the book to both friends and enemies. "In the process of my life," she explains, "so many friends become jealous, become intolerant, actually because of success kind of hated me." Conversely, "So many enemies who was just so superficial in my work without knowing me and then started knowing me become actually my best friend."

Walk Through Walls was borne out of Abramović's awareness of her 70th birthday and a dinner conversation with the publicist David Kohn. The memoir was written, over the course of almost two years, with the assistance of Jerry Lee Lewis and Frank Sinatra biographer James Kaplan, who was chosen for his ability to listen, ask the right questions, and allow her, ever the rule-flouter, the freedom to relate her life story out of chronological order.

"I think in circles. I think about something I see on the table, and then I see something different and that will bring me to past to future to present," she tells me, which perhaps explains how, over the course of our time together, she will reference Elon Musk, the United Nations, Kafka's executor Max Brod, the Dalai Lama (whom she's met), and Dracula, to whom she jokingly compares her vaguely gothic black-and-white outfit.

"I am very much for the great Slavic suffering, for the cosmos, for the soul, for the universe."

Walk Through Walls begins in early childhood and hews to the general format of a hero's journey, or perhaps a Portrait of the Performance Artist as a Young Woman and a No Longer Young Woman . Tonally, it's a bit like Patti Smith's Just Kids narrated in the style of Werner Herzog, with a bit of Slavoj Žižek—or at least his jokes—tossed in.

In the memoir, as she is in person, Abramović is a natural and perpetually engaging storyteller. The book begins with her earliest recollections of her childhood in postwar Communist Yugoslavia, "a dark place," "as though the leaders had looked through the lens of someone else's Communism and built something less good and less functional and more fucked up." Despite her family's privileges (her father was a member of President Tito's elite guard and her mother was an art director for the state), it was an emotionally and physically abusive time for the adolescent artist.

" young person, I could not even talk to anybody," Abramović confides. "I was so shy. I was so self-conscious—I could not even walk. And then I think when I find performance, that was the way to get into step, to dissemble reality. And then it start going away, it become free. Just be who you are. It's kind of intoxicating." Not that performance art was without its stresses, in the gallery space or even at home. In a memorable scene, Abramović relates arriving at her parents' house—in time for her strict 10 PM curfew—from a photo show to find her mother, Danica, waiting silently in the dark for her. Apparently someone had said that her daughter "was hanging naked in the museum." "I gave you life," screamed Danica, "and now I will take it away!" tossing a heavy glass ashtray directly at Abramović's head. She was 28 at the time.

Equally dramatic is her deeply romantic period with the German performance artist Ulay, 12 years in which the lover-collaborators crisscrossed Europe, living out of a black Citroën van with their dog, creating some of their most iconic and lasting works. There's AAA AAA (1978), where they screamed into one another's mouths for 15 minutes; The Other: Rest Energy (1980), where the two balanced a drawn bow and arrow pointed at Abramović's heart; and then the epic final performance, 1988's The Lovers, which spanned 90 days and more than a thousand miles as they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China to embrace in the middle and say goodbye.

VICE Meets Marina Abramović:

Throughout Walk Through Walls are numerous jokes "from Communist times." Her favorite, she tells me, is the first one, about a man who retires. Because he was such an exceptional worker, he is awarded, instead of a watch, a new car, to be delivered on such and such date, 20 years later. "Morning or afternoon," the man asks. "What do you care?" says the official. "I have the plumber coming the same day," says the man.

"Finally I can be funny!" she says, when I bring up the humor of the book, which is far less evident in her work. "I'm always funny, but people don't know." Still, much of the humor in Walk Through Walls, and when speaking to Abramović in person, arises from pain, of difficulties that have been transcended, bulled through, or simply allowed to become such old news as to be seen more objectively, such as her lifelong battles with her mother whom, after death, she would learn had been her most devoted fan, keeping a meticulous list of every mention of her work (sans nude photos, which she had carefully removed). I ask, near the end of our first interview, how suffering has informed Abramović's art, as so much of her work has involved extreme physical endurance and the occasional David Blaine-like trial— whipping herself until she bled, living for 12 days within three open-sided cubes at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, carving up 25,000 cow bones in a fetid basement for a performance that captured the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale.

"You know, the suffering has so many different levels," she says. "I am very much for the great Slavic suffering, for the cosmos, for the soul, for the universe, you know?" She says it's very important to project one's own suffering so that it can also be the suffering of others, not just their own. "That's why the great writers, the great moviemakers, the great theater—if they talk to that kind of thing, then they become universal."

"Suffering as a kind of empathy," I offer.

"We all have the same thing: are afraid of mortality, afraid of pain, afraid of suffering. Three things. Everything about our culture is based on dealing with this in different ways."

Before completing her answer, she detects something in my eyes and suddenly shifts course—asking permission to shuffle my papers and have me pick our next (and final) question, blind and at random, to which I naturally consent. It's the first of three times she will introduce spontaneity into our conversations (and shift the power dynamic from interviewer to interviewee).

"Did we answer this one? OK, then fine," she says, undeterred. "Next." We reshuffle and try again.

Two weeks later, I'm giving Abramović a tour of VICE headquarters in Brooklyn, as part of the video interview we are producing. For verité, I suggest a stroll through the rooftop garden, which appeals to her. Nature and spirituality are significant interests and influences for her—the recent Vimeo documentary The Space in Between: Marina Abramović in Brazil follows her travels in the 2010s to meet spiritual healers and sages from the Brazilian countryside.

Outside is cool and threatening rain. I look over at the two VICE cameramen and ask whether they'd prefer us to walk around the garden or through the middle.

"Just don't tell them. We do whatever we want," she says, smiling and taking my arm. She gestures to our floral setting—wildflowers and various tall grasses and vegetables amid ceaseless urban development—waterfront condos, Whole Foods, an Apple store. "My generation, just buildings so cruel, without any need for this stuff."

I ask if she saw much of this, green space, growing up in the former Yugoslavia.

"I grew up on main street of Belgrade across from the political newspaper," she says as we continue to tread deliberately for the cameras. "I did not even know how the chicken have eggs. I just didn't know anything about nature. I remember going to the farm and trying to milk male goats. The goats scream and run away from me and kick me. I was 14. I have to learn everything from experience."

"Elon Musk is preparing the trip. And I'm thinking, How can I create Abramović Method on the ship?"

We come upon an uneven section of the path. "Ach, give me the hand," she requests. "I love walking with the hand. Look at this." She excitedly directs my attention to a small grassy hill that's off the path. "That looks so good. Is this wet? Let's lie down." She directs me to look up at the sky, and we sit, gazing up for a few moments, taking it in.

"So," she exhales contentedly, spreading her arms wide, eyes closed, smile on her face, "ask me anything." I look over from my perspective about a foot away from her on the grass and take a mental snapshot: Marina's striking, angular face in profile, the suddenly pristine light blue sky, wisps of cloud behind her. I ask her a question I had been planning to use in the video interview, and she immediately disapproves.

"No," she says. "Question right now. Not the one you prepare. The question you want to ask in this minute."

"How often do you... lie down like this?

"Who cares? Think about, What if we would go to Mars and start a colony there ?"

I laugh. "Would you go?"

"Absolutely," she says. "Elon Musk is preparing the trip. And I'm thinking, How can I create Abramović Method on the ship? Because it's a long way, you know. Maybe counting rice would be not bad," she laughs.

"It's good to lie down like that," I say, afterward, unexpectedly impressed—I do indeed feel better, more relaxed, more present.

"It's also good to do unpredictable things. Just to break the patterns," she says. When it comes to spending time with Abramović, pattern-breaking swerves like this are common, veering from the playful to the profound, the personal to the universal and back again.

Back in the office, we conduct the on-camera interview, and I again see her desire to disrupt conventions and the everyday when she goads me into asking "a question you've never asked anyone, something you haven't planned." I mention something about interviewers often wishing to become friends with their subjects, asking, "How do you think this is going so far?" Which, of course, is simply a more roundabout way of asking: "Are we friends yet?"

"I think we're doing well, because you give me this book of these jokes," she says, referencing my gift of an obscure Norwegian edition of Žižek's Jokes, which I'd seen her mention in a previous interview. She smiles lightly in approval. "This is a good kind of opening."

The next morning, it occurs to me that my desire to forge a meaningful personal connection with Abramović is a not insignificant part of my interest in her. It's an obvious desire, of course—so obvious I have managed to forget it, during the course of my research and our time together. I recall, during her performance of The Artist Is Present , seeing images of countless audience members deeply moved from simply gazing into her eyes. An earlyish Tumblr page, Marina Abramović Made Me Cry, was created to show these images—57 women and men of diverse ages, races, and ethnicities in varying stages of weepiness. At the Marina Abramović Institute—her namesake project dedicated to furthering performance art in Hudson—and in pop-up residencies across the world, young artists and even the occasional celebrity pop singer (Lady Gaga) have flocked to undergo, at the direction of Abramović, strenuous ordeals and physical depravation—fasting, lying still on the ground, moving naked and blindfolded through the woods, hugging a giant crystal—to learn what she has called the "Abramović Method." What is it that Abramović possesses that draws these people to her, as worshippers might seek a guru?

"Since the very beginning, the focus of so much of her work has been about this really strong emotional response and presence," explains Nat Trotman, curator of performance and media at the Guggenheim Museum, which presented her 2005 performance Seven Easy Pieces and will host the private celebration for her 70th birthday at the end of the month. "Her body becomes a sort of vessel for this emotional response, for the audience." Works like The Artist Is Present are "really about creating this individualized, physical experience with the audience."

"She's got a very idiosyncratic way of being, the way she engages with people," artnet News editor-in-chief Rozalia Jovanovic tells me over the phone. She describes Abramović as "very authoritative." "Her artwork and her life seem very intertwined. The boundaries between the artist and the person are lost, and that's frustrating to some people."

Trotman charts Abramović's rise in popularity and visibility in the late 2000s to the proliferation of YouTube and social media, along with the rise of performance art, including major exhibitions like Tino Sehgal's 2010 This Progress . "It's interesting to me that Marina started pushing her work more into these situations that were about the audience becoming a more active participant," he said, citing The Artist Is Present, 2014's 512 Hours, and 2014's Generator. "It's still about her and her endurance, but it's more like her becoming a leader, or educator, or even a yogi that's guiding the audience into this situation where they are themselves becoming the performers."

He added, "As we all become performers and we all become agents in this new way, there's also a desire to look for role models or leaders who can become idols of this movement, because we all do feel like we're performing for the camera now, all the time. And someone like Marina, who's such an iconic and important figure, and has this incredible long history of having engaged these issues, and has such a presence about her—she literally embodies this. She's not hiding that, in the way that some artists do."

Marina Abramović on Preparation for VICE:

Back in August of this year, this openness caused a backlash, when the aforementioned section about aboriginals from an uncorrected proof of Walk Through Walls was leaked and widely criticized. "When she says that she loves and respects Aboriginal people and culture, that she 'owes everything' to us, I believe she is totally sincere," wrote Sarah-Jane Norman, an aboriginal Australian artist who participated in a two-week program at the Kaldor Public Arts Project in Sydney with Abramović in the summer of 2015. "The problem is, she is totally sincere within an oppressive framework of fetishistic essentialism," which Norman described as a white person "skimming our culture for the parts that are useful or interesting to her, whilst failing completely to engage with the muck and pain of dispossession and coloniality and her own complicit position as its beneficiary."

"She said a bunch of indefensibly racist shit," the 32-year-old Norman puts it bluntly, over Skype, from the Byron Bay hinterland in Bundjalung country. "What needs to be talked about is Marina Abramović as a symptom for a problem that is complex and systemic. And when we engage in this kind of culture of controversy around whoever the kind of 'racist of the week is,' it reduces the complexity of the problem, and it just becomes a lot of white people arguing on the internet for about five seconds about Marina Abramović on the internet. I was just feeling like, this stuff is my life, and part of all our lives as non-white people in a white-dominated society."

Christian Thompson, a 38-year-old Bidjara Australian artist who also first met Abramović at the Kaldor residency, sees it differently. When the controversy arose, he wrote a public message in defense of her.

"To be honest, is it an unfortunate kind of phrasing? Yes," Thompson tells me, over Skype from London. "But are her intentions bad? No. I felt that it was important to respond, because it turned into such a storm. It seemed like people were just cherry-picking parts of the paragraph that served their purpose, instead of remembering that it was a diary entry that was written 40 years ago. I just felt like I needed to defend the character of someone who I consider to be a friend and who has also been very generous to me, as an indigenous person, and a mentor. I mean, I grew up in Queensland in the mid 1990s during Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, which is our version of Sarah Palin—or actually Donald Trump. That's just a poorly written paragraph. That's not racism."

My own take lies somewhere in between. Norman's point about Abramović's essentialism here is convincing to me, although I understand it to be part of the way Abramović views the world, herself included. I recall her categorizing her own unhappiness as "Slavic suffering," or her strange view of Haruki Murakami's work as possessing " surreal Japanese mysticism." Calling your own suffering Slavic is your right, but defining someone else's suffering according to their background isn't, particularly if that background has been historically attacked and marginalized. She's not a bigot, but neither is she exactly "woke." Perhaps it could be said that she's a flawed ally from a much earlier generation, who is trying—whether that's enough, depends on your own point of view.

"All this criticism on me, about the work, or about, whatever, my life—it's fine," Abramović says, when I bring it up. " that controversy really hurts me. I was hurt absolutely profoundly because the entire living with the aborigines one year in the Australian desert, that changed my life and influenced my work, changed my perspective. And if you read 50 pages, you see the respect I'm giving these people. That statement from the 70s diary, that I think that aborigines look like dinosaurs, I meant in a sense of the extinguished race. They are the oldest race on the planet, but taken out of the context it becomes racial, which has never been my intent."

"Marina was the one who actually pushed for indigenous inclusion in the residency," Thompson says of the Kaldor project. "That's what I was trying to get out of statement—actually, she has been very supportive of indigenous people. Without that push, we probably wouldn't even have been involved."

In Walk Through Walls, Abramović writes of the idea of three Marinas: "There is the warrior one. The spiritual one. And then there is the bullshit one," which she " to keep hidden. The poor little Marina who thinks everything she does is wrong, the Marina who's fat, ugly, and unwanted. The one who, when she's sad, consoles herself with watching bad movies, eating whole boxes of chocolates, and putting her head under the pillow to pretend her troubles don't exist."

Later that week, I'm at a sold-out event for the book at the New York Public Library, featuring Abramović and Blondie's Debbie Harry. As Abramović effortlessly holds court with Harry onstage, before 500 enthusiastic (and audible) admirers, I witness many more Marinas: Marina the guru, Marina the interviewer, Marina the therapist, Marina the raconteur, the guide, the stand-up, the teacher. With Harry somewhat laconic and checked-out, Abramović slides into the role of affable and inquisitive conversationalist, hands folded across her lap as she leans forward with an attentive and lightly smiling expression: "Did it finish tragically?" she asks a reclining Harry at one point, and then later: "Did you suffer from broken heart?" And then: "Tell me something that the rational mind cannot explain, something that you do."

"And don't laugh too much—just light smiling with no changing facial expression."

Because an event with Marina Abramović without an interaction with the public is no event with Marina Abramović at all, about 35 minutes into the program, the floor is opened up to question-askers—"Under 30," Abramović requests, ever interested in the youth—and a line of devotees forms, 20 or so of them, skewing female and white, but there a couple men and perhaps four or five people of color. The first woman has no question; she just wants to give Abramović a rather mysterious note. Do you know so-and-so, the woman asks. "Of course," Abramović replies. "But do you think this is the place?" Again she has created a situation blurring the lines between private and public.

The second question-asker inquires about work. She says she's making difficult, unlikeable music that she herself doesn't enjoy, but feels compelled to keep making it. "OK, what you have to do," Abramović says, authoritatively, to laughs from the audience. "You have to go home, and really take hot bath. Then, sit on the chair and look out of the window. Switch your cellphone, switch your computer, switch everything you have. And sit at least three or four or five hours and reflect. One thing that is wrong is that you don't like what you're doing. This is the main problem—you have to love what you're doing because it's useless , from my point of view."

Another attendee, who says she's trying not to cry, asks for advice for her 15-year-old daughter. "Don't overprotect her," Abramović offers. "Send her to travel around the world, send her to see poverty, to know how difficult it is, so she doesn't take anything for granted. Don't overprotect—leave her free. The free spirit is so important. It's so easy to break the spirit. So put this is mind, that's all."

"You have validated everything I have taught, thank you so much," says the mother.

I recall having seen a similar side of Marina the teacher, and veteran star performer, earlier that week at VICE headquarters. Our cameraman Jonny had been filming additional verité after the interview, when she launched into an impromptu master class on how to appear before a camera.

"Slowly, going down the steps—it's going to be very glamorous," she said in her characteristically rapid, deadpan tone, this time whispered, since, I'm assuming, what's important isn't what's being said here, but that it appears flattering yet natural. "You know Sunset Boulevard? This is the scene, and then she say, 'I'm ready for my close-up.'" I again complimented Abramović on her preternatural ability to perform, and she continued giving tips as we descended the stairs and then moved toward the exit: "And don't look the camera, it's very important: Just passing by. And chin always down. And don't laugh too much—just light smiling with no changing facial expression."

Carl Swanson's enviably well-written profile of Abramović for New York locates her drive in a deep-seated need to be adored and accepted, a rather Yungian view: Abramović has spent her life trying to obtain the attention and adulation she never received as a child. It makes a certain amount of sense from the memoir, and from the way she suddenly lights up during moments like these, her relish to perform filling her and the room with a kind of uplifted aura. To me, however, her mission seems less psychological, more teacherly, even—daresay— maternal. For all her unconventional decisions—to become a performance artist, to have abortions for the sake of her art, to pursue spirituality to the literal ends of the earth—I feel it's actually unexpectedly traditional, an idea of inheritance. She found her purpose through performance, which transformed her and everything she knew and experienced in the world, and now she wants to pass it on to the next generation.

"I should be the guide," she chuckled, before ducking into a black SUV, off to the next interview, the next performance of her many versions of self. "And then when you get really self-conscious, just check your breathing."

Follow James Yeh on Twitter.

All photos by Elizabeth Renstrom.

Flowers by Marisa Competello.

Photo via Flickr user Day Donaldson

The KKK wasn't the only extremist group to praise Donald Trump's victory last week. News outlets associated with ISIS, like the al Minbar Jihadi Media network, came out in support of the decision, calling it "the imminent demise of America," USA Today reports, and top ISIS and Taliban commanders now say Trump's presidency will be a powerful recruitment tool.

"This guy is a complete maniac. His utter hate towards Muslims will make our job much easier because we can recruit thousands," Abu Omar Khorasani, a top ISIS commander in Afghanistan, told Reuters.

Reuters also spoke with an unnamed Taliban militant leader, who said, "If he does what he warned in his election campaign, I am sure it will provoke Muslim Ummah (community) across the world and jihadi organizations can exploit it."

Trump famously called for a total ban on Muslim immigration into the US during his campaign in response to the wave of terrorist attacks in America. While that call mysteriously disappeared then reappeared on the president-elect's campaign website last week—suggesting it may be another promise Trump could revise—analysts say those comments alone are enough ammo for jihadist propagandists.

Islamists sympathizers seem to agree. "Congratulations to the Muslim nation over the infidel Trump's victory. His stupid statements alone serve us," one Algerian ISIS supporter claimed on Twitter.

Watch: The Islamic State's Propaganda Fail

Illustrations by Deshi Deng

This story appeared in the November issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

I didn't know why I had been arrested, and no one would tell me, but the really scary part happened when I was in the elevator with the guard on the way up to cell 5C. I was in my oranges and blue rubber flip-flops. I had my mattress under my arm. It was about 10 AM. I had been arrested in my apartment at dawn.

"What did you do?" the guard asked me. He looked at me with a mixture of skepticism and cautious respect. He was probably in his 50s, a bit pudgy, handsome, with closely cropped gray and brown hair.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I think it might have something to do with my old jewelry store."

A cop had been calling me from Arlington, Texas, where I had owned some jewelry stores with my two brothers. We had declared bankruptcy in one of the shops, and there were customers whose consignment pieces—in this case, a gaudy diamond engagement ring owned by an Arlington criminal defense attorney—were caught up in the chapter 11. I didn't know this at the time, but the angry criminal defense attorney had convinced a buddy of his in the police force and the DA to file theft charges against me and, subsequently, a fugitive warrant for my arrest. But standing in the elevator with the guard, all I knew was that some cop had been calling me from Arlington and leaving messages asking me to return his calls, which I hadn't returned—hoping, as I so often hoped back then, in my late 20s and early 30s, that somehow it would all just go away—and which, I could only suppose, led to the fact that two men pretending to be "checking on a gas leak" had pushed past my girlfriend¹ at our front door, charged into our bedroom, pulled me out of bed, thrown me to the floor, and handcuffed me, while I asked if I could please put on my glasses and my girlfriend demanded to see the undercover cops' badges.

"Well, whatever you did, it must have been bad. I'm taking you to 5C. You won't last one night in 5C."

He was looking down at his clipboard as he said it. Then he looked up and gave me the odd, suppressed smile that people will give you when they are delivering news that is very bad for you but not for them. I wouldn't say it was a shitty smile, because I could tell he truly did feel worried for me. He wasn't reveling in my predicament. But he couldn't help himself. I've been there. I've smiled that smile at people many times.

"Then don't take me to 5C. Take me somewhere else. Please."

This was only my third time in jail—I had previously been in jail in Austin (age 22) and Dallas (age 29)—but I already knew that it was pointless to argue with a guard. "A prisoner... discovers the impossibility of his escape, as well when he considers the obstinacy of the gaoler, as the walls and bars with which he is surrounded," David Hume wrote in 1748, "and, in all attempts for his freedom, chooses rather to work upon the stone and iron of the one, than upon the inflexible nature of the other." Damn straight: I'd have better luck tunneling out of the New Hanover Correctional Center in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, than talking this guard into moving me.

"I don't make the rules, buddy," he said. "I'm just following orders. But I'll see what I can do."

He was a good guy, too: On my third day in 5C, he showed up at our cell with his clipboard in hand and said he had permission to move me to a cell down on the third floor.

"You'll be more comfortable there," he said. "It's for... a different kind of offender."

I lay on the bunk and counted the tiny cockroaches that scrambled all over the walls. That was the filthiest jail cell I would ever occupy.

But by then I had already made friends on 5C, I was under the protection of a man named "Eel," and we had good windows and a good view in the cell—I could see my girlfriend out in the street, when she came to visit, if I climbed up the bars—so I didn't want to leave.

"You're telling me you want to stay in 5C? I'm not going to be able to do this twice. You'll have a bed in the new cell."

He frowned gently, as though I was under some kind of duress. He looked past me to see if anyone was listening in on our conversation.

"I'm sorry," I told him. "I appreciate it. I don't mind sleeping on the floor. I think I'm better off in here."

"OK then," he said, and knocked on the guard's window to be let out of the mantrap that opened into our cell. "I take no further responsibility."

But before I relate the interesting facts of my experience in 5C, and about the four times I was in jail after my lockup in North Carolina, I should tell the stories of my first times in jail, where I started the slow process of learning jail etiquette.

Jail is where you don't want to be. I have spoken with many former and current prisoners, and they uniformly insist that jail (with exception for the most horrible prison experiences) is worse than prison. In general, in prison you get out of your cell; in jail you do not. In prison you can exercise; in jail you cannot. In prison you can get time outdoors—even work-release time—in jail, of course, you do not. In prison you will occasionally find some privacy; in jail you live and breathe the stink of one another. The only privacy you get in jail is if you're in a solitary cell, which is hell, or if you're showering, which, if you're a 160-pound weakling like me, you do swiftly in the morning before everyone else wakes up.

In prison everyone knows when he's getting out; assuming that you are going to be released (I met people in 5C who will never be released from prison), you have been given a date by which you will be free. Jail is different. Many of the people in jail don't expect to be there long, but, excruciatingly, they don't know quite when, or sometimes if, they are getting out. This expectation of being released is constantly disappointed—every time they call a name up to the mantrap, it's not your name, but it could have been.

***

Austin, Texas, 1990. I was walking home from Sixth Street, drunk, balancing on the curb with my arms extended as I made my way up a hill. A cop car pulled up. The window rolled down.

"Son, would you like a ride home?"

Only in Austin, I figured, would the cops pull over to take you safely back to your apartment. I had two miles to go, and I gratefully hopped in the back.

They drove straight to 500 West Tenth Street, Travis County Jail. A four-minute drive. I was shouting and complaining about my rights in the long line as they booked me—it was one of their monthly roundups, when they go through midtown and arrest everyone who looks drunk, in the hope of catching lots of outstanding warrants—and then shouting and complaining about my rights as they moved us into our cells, and then shouting and complaining about my rights as they moved me into a five-foot-by-ten-foot windowless solitary cell, and then shouting and complaining about my rights as they handcuffed me and footcuffed me, and then shouting and complaining about my rights as they threw me off the concrete bench onto the ground and cuffed my hands and feet together behind my back and then cuffed me to the piss grate on the floor. They hadn't given me a phone call, they hadn't explained what the charges were, they wouldn't tell me anything. I kept on shouting. I was 23 years old, drunk, and didn't understand my situation. Then two cops came in with their badges off, and told me if I didn't shut up, I'd get to shout in the hospital.

One of the cops stomped on my hands, and the other one kicked me in the stomach a few times. Another cop came in and threatened to duct-tape my mouth. All through this I kept shouting empty threats, and when I ran out of those, I shouted out The Waste Land, which I had memorized at that time, many shorter poems, and long stretches of Macbeth. Finally there was a shift-change, and before the new guys came on, they uncuffed me from the piss grate and lifted me onto the concrete bench. "Some people in here want to sleep, you know," they told me, and I realized I hadn't considered my shouting from that angle.

When they lined us up in the morning to go in front of the judge, each of us cuffed to the other, I came shuffling out in my leg irons. The guards were complaining about me, and one of them mentioned my name.

"You're Clancy Martin?" the man I was cuffed to asked me. He was about twice my size.

"Yes," I said, worried that he was one of the guys who had been trying to sleep.

"Right on," he said, and gave me a thumb's up, lifting my own hand with his.

Then we all went back to trying not to look at one another—an important jailhouse skill—and in an hour or so the judge ordered me released, without any charges. They gave me my phone call and moved me to a two-man cell with another fellow in it, who explained to me with undisguised happiness that "if you pissed them off, they just move your paperwork to the bottom of the pile every time it comes up." He wasn't getting out that day, and I wasn't released until late that afternoon. I lay on the bunk and counted the tiny cockroaches that scrambled all over the walls. That was the filthiest jail cell I would ever occupy. It was also the only time I was physically attacked by a cop or a guard while in jail, and of course, it could easily have been avoided. I learned the first rule of jailhouse etiquette: Never argue with the cops or the guards. You aren't holding any cards.

***

Six years passed before I would be back in jail. My girlfriend and I had a big fight. I was living in a loft in Dallas, and I went down to Elm Street to get back at her by getting drunk. (Yes, there is a discernible trend: Four of my seven times in jail were the direct result of my drinking. I am a recovering alcoholic.²) I remember trying to enter a bar, being turned away, and then finding a doorway to sleep in. I remember a cop asking me where I lived, and then explaining, just like in the Who song, that "you can go sleep at home tonight / If you can get up and walk away." I remember him helping me into the back of his prowler, and then I remember the drunk tank: It was about half the size of a high school gymnasium; there were at least 50 of us in there, and the men stayed close to the walls, with a wide space in the middle that nobody crossed. We were in groups: the Hispanic guys, the black guys, the white guys. Most of them were sleeping with their feet out toward no-man's-land. I took a blue vinyl mattress from the stack in the corner and went to lie down next to an old Hispanic man who was in the border territory between the Hispanic guys and the white guys.

"You should go somewhere else," he told me.

"I'm not afraid of anyone in here," I said, which was true, because I was still very drunk. To prove my point, I walked into the middle of the room and did a little shadowboxing. I had in my mind a short story by Charles Bukowski when he does this in jail, and it keeps him out of trouble.

Several men shouted in Spanish, and then a few guys shouted in English. "You like to fight? You want to fight? You want to box?"

"Lie down!" the old man said to me. I looked at the guys who were getting to their feet and took his advice.

One guy, younger than me, shorter than me, wiry, tattooed, in a tank top and paint-spattered work pants, came over to my mat and stood over me.

"Hey, Mr. Fight," he said. "Hey, Mr. Boxer? You want to fight?" He laughed. I rolled over on my mat and ignored him, and the old man beside me said something to him. He walked into the middle of the room and did a shuffle, imitating me, while calling out in Spanish. People laughed. He kept it up for a few minutes.

"What's he saying?" I asked the old man.

"You don't want to know," he said.

***

The third time I was in jail it was the notorious cell 5C, about which more shortly. The fourth time I was in jail was in the Dallas/Forth Worth International Airport. I had taken my family—my pregnant wife, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my two daughters—to Italy for a month, and we were on our way back to Kansas City, where I was now a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri.

"You are Clancy Martin?" the customs officer asked me.

"Uh, yes," I said. This fellow already had his guard up because my mother had had her passport pickpocketed when we were in Pisa, and her paperwork from the embassy was complicated.

I saw the headlights of my mom's little Volkswagen coming down the emergency road through the chain-link fences to save me.

This was in the summer of 2006: September 11 was not even five years old, I am not a US citizen (I'm Canadian), and US Customs was less friendly than they are today.

"You'll need to step over there," he said. He waved another customs officer over. They exchanged some words that I couldn't hear, and the second customs officer took me by the arm and escorted me—while my family watched in silent confusion—to a smaller room, where about 20 of us sat in rows of plastic and aluminum chairs. At the front of the room, two customs officers reviewed a stack of passports, calling us up one at a time. After an hour or so, they called me.

"Mr. Martin. Have you ever been arrested?"

I started to tell my stories.

"I'll need you to go with him."

Another customs officer took me through a second door that locked behind me, down a hallway, and into a very ordinary-looking room, about the size of a typical living room, with a folding table with two chairs on one side and one chair on the other. Windows with blinds. It must have been hastily built, I assumed, that they would hang the blinds on the inside of an interrogation room—cords hanging on the blinds, suitable for strangling yourself or someone else. I raised the blinds: I wanted them to know that I didn't have anything to hide. Then I thought that might look suspicious, so I lowered them again. One of them got stuck and hung sideways.

Two or three hours passed. Someone came and offered me a bottle of water and then left again. Finally a police officer arrived. She confirmed that I was Clancy Martin.

"You're under arrest," she said.

"Under arrest? What for?"

"Passing bad checks."

"I've never passed bad checks."

"That's not what I'm told."

She handcuffed me and took me through the airport and out front where her prowler was waiting at the curb. I will always remember the fearful, awed, and angry looks people gave me as I walked through that airport in handcuffs: Normally, when you are cuffed and in public, people look at you with either pity or disdain.

The officer put me in the back of her patrol car, and we drove the short distance through yellow, sunburned fields to the small DFW airport jail, which looks a bit like an unsuccessful strip mall, or a particularly nondescript library in a new suburb. She parked and went inside.

I was still sitting in the back of the car on the hard plastic bench, with my hands cuffed behind my back. I moved my cuffs in front. I waited. The car was turned off, and the windows were closed. It was getting hot. It was about 3 PM, and within a few minutes, I'd breathed through all of the formerly air-conditioned air in the car. Soon it was at least 90 degrees in there. I couldn't see anyone for miles. I tried shouting. Useless. I couldn't lie on my back—there was a plastic ridge separating the two seats—but I tried my best to get leverage and began kicking the windows. I was starting to panic. The hot air was closing around me like a dry-cleaning bag. I kicked harder. I tried to get both my heels through that damn window: no luck. I shouted more. Then I lay there, panting. I realized: This is how it happens. I am going to die in the back of this police car.

Then she came back out. I stopped shouting. She opened the door on my side.

"It was a little hot in there," I said, climbing out. I was dripping in sweat.

"Huh," she said. "I thought I left it running."

There were three cells that I could see inside the jail, and because of my time in that solitary cell in Austin, I asked if I could have a cell with bars.

"It helps if I can see outside the cell," I said.

"We don't care what makes you more comfortable," one of the cops at the station said. "You'll go in whatever cell we put you in. You're staying where we put you until they can ship you down to Austin."

"Ship me down to Austin?"

"Travis County. That's where you bounced the checks. That's where your warrant is. If you're genuinely claustrophobic, we could put you in the bigger cell," the cop who arrested me said. I could see that she felt bad about leaving me in her car. "Are you claustrophobic?"

For some reason I hesitated to lie. "Um, I was never diagnosed. But I freak out in small spaces."

After some debate, they put me in the bigger cell with the bars.

Cells with bars often have a phone you can use. I made my phone call. By now it was late, and my wife and children had skipped the flight back to Kansas City, stayed over with family in Fort Worth, and they were now tracking down the right bail bondsman. More helpfully still, I was able to listen to the conversation among the police about my situation. When there was a shift-change—thank God for the shift-change, I thought—the on-duty cops had to explain to the folks joining the party what the situation was with each prisoner.

"Bounced checks? That's a misdemeanor. We can't hold him on that."

"I don't know. They sent him over from the airport. They got him entering the country."

"They're supposed to be sending him down to Travis County. We're supposed to keep him here until the bus comes from Dallas County."

"We don't transport people for bounced checks. We don't arrest them for that. Hey, Clancy Martin. Did you do anything other than bounce a check? Was there a problem at the airport? Where do you live?"

"No! I mean, I didn't even know—I live in Kansas City."

"We aren't holding this guy. We need to release him. Hey, Martin. Do you have someone who can come pick you up?"

"Yeah! My wife! She'll be right out! She's close!"

"OK, well let's get your wife on the phone, and you can just wait in the cell until she comes. Unless you'd rather wait outside."

"I'll wait outside."

They released me, and I sat outside the police station on the dried grass in the hot starry Texas night, until I saw the headlights of my mom's little Volkswagen coming down the emergency road through the chain-link fences to save me.

***

The fifth and six times I was in jail were both in Kansas, which is a much more pleasant place to be in jail than Texas.

Number five was the most frightening time inside, though, because the last thing I remembered was my favorite bartender at Mike's on Troost (a good local bar in Kansas City about half a mile from school) pouring me a straight scotch about the size of a small iced tea, but without the ice. Next thing I was waking up, but I could hear the noises around me, and like that, I understood where I was. So I didn't open my eyes. I could feel the hangover coming already, and I understood in a vague way what must have happened, but I searched my memory and there was nothing. Just that drink and the busy bar full of friends. I knew my wife was going to be very, very angry—I wasn't supposed to be drinking anymore. I opened my eyes. I was lying on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. I looked around: The cell opened into a large common area, and the door was open. I walked out and saw two floors of cells ringed around the large space in the middle, which had picnic tables bolted to the floor and was about the size of a basketball court. There were maybe two dozen cells, and 30 or so prisoners. A guard sat at a desk in front of the mantrap, and there were a few phones on the wall near him. The desk was elevated on a stage about three feet from the floor, so when you tried to talk to the guard, your chin was at about the same level as the top of the desk.

I approached him. I remember him very well, because of what happened next. He had blue eyes, was in his 40s, had brown hair brushed back behind his ears, and his face looked a bit mushy and layered, like a stack of pancakes. He had thick purplish lips. He was an unattractive man, but I still believed he might help me.

"My name is Clancy Martin," I said.

"Uh huh."

"Can you tell me what I'm here for?"

"What did you say your name was? When did you get here? This isn't an information desk."

We rehearsed this together several times. Eventually he found me in his computer.

"It says you're a DUI."

"Does it say anything else? Does it say if there was a wreck? Does it say if I hurt anyone?"

"It was bad. It says that," he said. "It doesn't say anything else, but I can see that it was bad."

"How do you know that? What does it say?"

"I can't tell you anything else. You can ask your lawyer."

I tried to remember anything about the car or people I had hit. I tried to keep myself from crying. It's a strange fact about experiences like these: Normally you won't start crying until you talk to someone you love on the phone. The worry in their voice makes you feel sorry for yourself, and then the tears come. I have seen men crying in jail without being mocked. But I recommend you follow movie advice on this one and choke back the tears, that's what I have always done, with one or two exceptions when the phone was in a corner and I could hide my face and keep my shoulders as still as possible.

Here's another important thing to know: Memorize your important numbers. For a time, jail phones didn't let you call cellphones, and fortunately, my wife always insisted on a landline. Now that's changed, and so long as the cellphone you are calling can accept a collect call—it costs about $1 a minute to receive a call from jail, plus a $4 or $5 surcharge—you can call any kind of phone. But that doesn't do you any good if you only know your contact names and can't remember the number. Plus you tend to be in a hurry in these situations, because you do not have unlimited access to a phone.

I remembered the number, and my wife answered the phone.

"What happened? Where are you? You're in jail?"

"You have to find out what happened. I don't know if I've hurt someone. Call the Kansas City jail. What if I've killed someone?" I started to cry. I pulled myself together before anyone could notice.

It turned out that the cop at the desk had lied to me. When I was in my lawyer's office in Lawrence, a few days later, he told me that I had bumped into the back of someone but not even dented their car, in slow, heavy traffic on the highway, then pulled off the side of the road—blowing both tires on the right side of the car in the process—and tried to make my getaway. When the car dragged to a stop, I jumped out and made a run for it.

"They recorded most of it," my lawyer said. He was about

my age, bearded, handsome, athletic. He had kids about the same age as my daughters. My wife was in law school in Lawrence, so we had lots to chat about. "I have the videotape right here. Do you want to watch it? It's actually pretty funny. It might help you see the lighter side of all this."

"No, thank you."

"I don't blame you," he said.

The same lawyer represented me when, about a year later, I got drunk after a lecture I was giving at a university in northern Missouri and I got lost driving home. That time I woke up in the cop car, and I tearfully begged them not to take me to jail. When they found me, I was 80 miles south of where I lived, just outside Emporia, Kansas.

I made a project of learning the murder story of everyone. This was a ticklish thing, because not everyone likes to confess to his crime.

"Buddy, you almost died. You were parked on the side of the highway in a snowstorm. We have to arrest you."

"But I wasn't driving. I was just tired."

"You're still drunk. How'd you get there if you weren't driving?"

My last time in jail was five years ago. The kids were running late for school, and my youngest was refusing to get in her car seat, so I told her big sister, who was in front, to grab her and put her under her belt. (Yes, I know, I was being a very bad parent. It had taken 20 minutes just to get her shoes on her feet.) I was in such a hurry that I did a rolling stop at our corner and the blue-and-reds started sparkling behind me. It was a big white undercover police van. Why they were pulling someone over for a rolling stop, I'll never know. I'm a cop magnet.

The big cop was appalled at the chaotic situation inside my car. Three children, aged 17, seven, and five, none of them really seated and buckled appropriately. I don't remember, but I probably hadn't buckled up myself yet.

"Mr. Martin, I'll have to ask you to step out of the car."

"I am trying to get my children to school. I'll put her in her car seat now. I'm sorry. I was in a hurry."

"I'm sorry, sir. Not having a child in a car seat and having her in the front like that is very dangerous. That's a serious offense. Girls, you always make sure to buckle up, OK? You have to be in your car seats. Mr. Martin. Please get out of the car."

I realized that they were going to arrest me. I was still denying it all the way into the back of the van. My 17-year-old daughter walked back down to the house with her youngest sister in her arms. The seven-year-old followed her. Thank God we were only half a block from the house.

That time, the last time, I spent most of the afternoon handcuffed to a bench in the very busy hallway of the police-and-suspect-only entrance to the enormous detention center in downtown Kansas City. Then I was briefly in a lockup with three or four other guys, where I called my wife—"I can't do this again," she said, "this has to be the last time I get you out of jail"—and then I was in a concrete transfer cell with two guys in their early 20s, one of whom was acting crazy. He stood up on the bench and then sat back down, he closed his eyes and shook his head, he jumped around with his hands on his ears, he got in both of our faces. He was shouting at us, and I said to the other guy in the cell, "Bad medicine, I guess." Finally, during one of his lean-into-your-face-while-shouting sessions, the guy with me punched him hard in the nose. He fell back, then sat in a corner with his bloody nose in his hands. "I didn't see anything, did you?" the puncher asked me. "No," I said. We were there for several hours, and then I posted bond and I was out again. That time I turned in my wedding ring when I checked in (they take your jewelry and your wallet when they arrest you, and it's a good sign if they don't take your clothes), and the wedding ring had disappeared when I checked out again, which was a sign of things to come.

***

Almost every time I've been arrested, the charges have been dropped or greatly reduced, usually without the help of a lawyer. Which brings us back to 5C, when there were four lawyers involved: the two lawyers who had me arrested; my incompetent lawyer in Wilmington, who told me that I was likely going to spend a month or more in jail, "not to mention what will happen to you in the small-town jails on the way from here to Texas" (I was arrested on a fugitive warrant); and my friend and former jewelry customer, Irene, a criminal attorney in Arlington, who called the Arlington chief of police and told him that she was going to sue him unless they released me immediately without charges and with an apology, which happened... but not until after I'd spent a week in 5C.

When I walked through the mantrap into the cell, it looked empty, except for one guy who was sitting in a blanket sling tied to the bars about six feet off the ground. There was one long narrow window beyond the bars in 5C, but it was just for light, so the inmates would climb the bars and tie a seat with a blanket and look out the window, and that's what this guy was doing.

He stared at me from his perch. I looked back at him.

"One guess," he said. "Computer fraud."

I soon learned 5C was the jail cell in Wilmington, where they kept the murderers before they went to prison, or when they were being transferred from prison to prison. I never learned the logic of keeping all of the murderers in the same cell, or why they thought that a little white guy on a fugitive warrant from Texas should join the team of murderers' row.

I made a project of learning the murder story of everyone in 5C. This was a ticklish thing, because not everyone likes to confess to his crime while in a jail cell. But I eventually got most of them. T had shot his wife in an argument. "I didn't mean to kill her. I was just trying to slow her down. She was attacking me. It was self-defense. People don't normally die from one bullet." Another guy, whose name I don't remember, had beaten his girlfriend and her two children to death with a vacuum cleaner. He bragged about it. This was a guy who sat next to me on my mattress—very unfortunately for me, my mattress on the floor became a kind of gathering place for the lower rungs of the social ladder at 5C, especially for playing cards—and once accused me of cheating at hearts when in fact I had just missed a card in my hand that I was supposed to lay down. All of these smelly unwashed guys were sitting, sweating, and farting into my mattress all day long, and that was where I had to sleep at night. Not to mention the implicit humiliation. But I made myself easy to get along with in 5C, and I needed all of the friends I could get. I was the only white guy in there.

The one who fascinated me most was Mirror. He was named Mirror because he spent a long time very meticulously brushing his teeth while inspecting his handiwork in the stainless-steel mirror. My first day in the cell I kept to myself, and Mirror left me alone. He was watching me. The second day I found the courage to sit at a picnic table during lunch—I ate very quickly and got out of the way—and then played a few games of chess with different guys. Then, after dinner on my second day, Mirror approached me. I knew something was up, as three or four of his main guys were with him. I was sitting at the picnic table about to move a piece.

"What the fuck are you doing here, man?" he asked me. "Stand up! Stand up when I'm talking to you!"

The banter and insults continued. His buddies were joining in. There was shouting and finger pointing. All of this happened very quickly. He was backing me toward the bars of the cell. I realized I didn't have a lot of options. So I took the only one that seemed like it had any hope of success: I bumped chests with him. He bumped me back. I bumped him again. I don't remember what he was saying, or what I was saying. I remember thinking that I'd never actually bumped chests with someone before, and wondering if I would be able to get him into a headlock. This man had at least 50 pounds on me, was much, much stronger than I was, and was not afraid of me. I was pissing my pants and desperately trying not to let everyone see that.

And then it was over. "I'm not wasting my time on you," he said, and he and his group wandered back over to their half of the cell: the prestige half, where the phone, the shower, and the meal window were. I went back to my mattress. A couple of people patted me on the back. The next day, when I was playing chess before lunch, Mirror sat down, pushed the guy I was playing out of the way, and reset the pieces.

"I guess you're playing white," he said, and laughed. After I beat him a few games in a row—a reason to join chess club young—he said, nice and loud: "Shit. We're going to call you Chessmaster." That same day, about half of the guys in the cell introduced themselves to me, and I was never scared again in 5C.

¹ She is not the woman Clancy would later have children with.

² Because most of the author's arrests were for intoxication-related offenses, and in some cases occurred years or even decades ago, some of the details and conversations in this story are based on those hazy memories and therefore couldn't be independently verified. The names and identifying details of some characters have been changed.

This story appeared in the November issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Photo by John P. Johnson/courtesy of HBO

HBO's brutal, dark, and endlessly watchable new hit Westworld has been picked up for a second season, according to the Hollywood Reporter, not that anyone was particularly expecting otherwise.

HBO has been needing a tentpole show to fill the massive vacuum Game of Thrones will leave when it wraps up after its eighth season, and it seems like Westworld is gearing up to be just that. The show's only seven episodes into its first season, and it has already inspired more podcasts and Reddit threads than is humanly possible to read between episodes.

Unfortunately, viewers might be in for a long wait for the season two premiere. "With Westworld, because the production is such a big endeavor, I don't exactly know when yet," HBO's president of programming, Casey Bloys, told the Reporter. "I can't speculate other than to say it'll either be '17 or '18. Probably more like '18."

Along with Westworld, the cable channel has renewed Divorce and Issa Rae's Insecure for sophomore seasons.

Watch: Inside the Japanese Hotel Staffed by Robots

Devin Morningstar. Photo via Facebook

Nearly a year after the brutal murder of an 18-year-old Moncton teenager sparked a nationwide manhunt, one of the three suspects in the case has been found guilty of first-degree murder by a New Brunswick jury.

Image via Flickr users Gage Skidmore and Shane Adams

President-elect Donald Trump allegedly didn't expect his candidacy to make it past the GOP primary debates, according to Unprecedented, CNN's upcoming book on the 2016 election.

During the primaries, Trump and Chris Christie—who was also vying for the Republican nomination at the time—reportedly had a Survivor-esque agreement to team up against Rubio and the other potential nominees. When one of the two would inevitably drop out, the loser would throw an endorsement behind the candidate still running.

"I think they always had an understanding that the first one out would probably endorse the other," a source inside the Christie camp told CNN.

The source said that Trump told Christie he expected to be out of the running by October 2015 and planned on endorsing the New Jersey governor. Things didn't work out that way, obviously—Christie ended his presidential bid in February 2016 and endorsed Trump that same month. He's been involved with the Trump campaign ever since.

Christie was initially leading Trump's White House transition team, but Trump abruptly replaced him with vice president-elect Mike Pence at the end of last week, days after two of Christie's former aides were found guilty for their involvement in the Bridgegate scandal.

Watch: What Happened with the 2016 Election?

Pamela Isaac and one of her three cats, Lucy, inside their apartment at a shelter for victims of domestic violence, Tuesday March 18, 2014 in New York. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

By the time Cee-Cee left her abusive ex-boyfriend for good this July, she'd been trapped in the dark for almost ten years.

"We weren't allowed to keep the windows open, we had to keep the shades and the blinds closed at all times," recalled the 37-year-old mother of three, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear the muscle-bound ironworker she said kept her a virtual prisoner for close to a decade might track her down. "We're so used to it that I get anxiety when the curtains are open, because for nine years that's the way it always had to be."

That level of control is as extreme as it is commonplace for survivors of domestic violence, which is now the leading force—ahead of drugs and mental illness, surging rents and rampant evictions—driving almost 17,000 people into New York City's roughly 60,000-strong homeless shelter system. But in one key way, Cee-Cee's story is different: when she fled, she took not just her three boys, but her two cats with her.

"The kids were very attached to them—we've had them since they were babies," she said of Buttons, an aging grey tomcat with a white neck and button nose, and Boots, a frisky two-year-old tabby her eldest son, now 16, bottle-fed from the time the kitten was just two weeks old. "They're a part of the family. Those are like my other two sons."

It's a sentiment that will be familiar to the owners of America's estimated 86 million pet cats, or its 78 million pet dogs for that matter. But the Brooklyn facility Cee-Cee and her family currently call home is one of precious few in New York City and just a few dozen nationwide that shelter humans and their furry family members together, despite the fact that pets often keep women leashed to their abusers.

"It's an impossible choice," said Nathaniel Fields, president and CEO of the Urban Resource Institute (URI), which runs shelters serving an estimated 1,600 people annually, among them the pet-friendly domestic violence refuge where Cee-Cee and her family live. "People aren't going to leave their pets —we know this from Katrina, we know this from Sandy."

Instead, research suggests the animal becomes another weapon of control. According to one study cited by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, more than 70 percent of survivors with pets their animal was threatened, hurt or killed by their abuser. URI staff recalled a woman's ex calling to say he had her cat tied up in the microwave and would irradiate it if she didn't come home.

"Everyone is shocked to hear the statistic, but not surprised that if there's no shelters that take pets, this would be happening," said Jen Rice, 31, a microbiologist who manages business development at Harvard's school of public health by day and her cat Kyle's social media empire by night. Though Rice and her husband first fell in love with the same Ron Swanson-style mustache that made Kyle an Instagram star, it's his tragic backstory that transformed the cat-lebrity from a rescue-turned-meme into a feline financier of co-shelters like URI.

"When we went to pick him up , they were like, 'isn't he crazy, and by the way, he witnessed a murder,'" Rice recalled, though she said she and her husband initially thought little of the revelation or the evidence sheet they found in his adoption folder. "We laughed it off because it sounded so crazy. The way it was presented to us, it kind of sounded not real."

Nevertheless, the detail made its way into Kyle's Instagram profile after his pictures blew up on Reddit, and as his celebrity grew, followers began to ask about it.

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"It sunk in that this is a serious thing. It's not funny," Rice said of the murder, which was suspected of being a domestic violence fatality. "I started thinking about poor Kyle, who had been in this domestic violence household and it got me thinking about pets in general in domestic violence situations," which led her to the Urban Resource Institute.

Fans of the feline and his comical poses can now catnap on Kyle pillows and cuddle his white-whiskered likeness in plush, outfit their own furry friends in Kyle neckerchiefs, sip coffee from mugs emblazoned with his face or rep the cat-leberity on t-shirts. (Pet lovers can also send URIPALS families like Cee-Cee's a Kyle plush doll to cuddle for Christmas.) Kyle poses with pet products in sponsored posts that fund the shelters, as well as a national non-profit for pets called Red Rover.

"I didn't want to exploit my cat for monetary purposes," Rice said. "I don't need to keep the money, but I could donate it to this cause," in hopes of helping the as many as 48 percent of survivors who report staying with an abuser because of a pet, as well as the untold others like Cee-Cee who flee, only to come back for their animals.

"We would cry every time we would go visit," because Buttons was filthy and starving, Cee-Cee told me of her initial attempt to leave two years earlier. "Eventually, we just went back home. Things got worse."

Cee-Cee was never married to her abuser, had no children with him and no claim on the apartment they shared. After he forced her to give up her job—something experts now call economic abuse—she said the man violently enforced rules that kept her trapped alone in the apartment and even forbade her to call building maintenance when their bathtub stopped up, forcing the family to shower in bursts, or not wash a all. When the refrigerator broke last year, they survived on packs of Ramen noodles from Family Dollar, often the only thing CeeCee could afford when her tormenter disappeared—sometimes for days at a time—leaving just a few grubby bills to tide the family over.

"If I had three dollars or even five dollars, I had to make that last a few days because I didn't know when he would come home—or if he would come home," she said. "I think that was just it for me. We don't even have food and you want to put your hands on me?"

Cee-Cee hopes to move her family out of the shelter and into a cat-friendly apartment some time early next year. In the meantime, she's teaching her sons to cook for the holidays, just one more thing they weren't allowed to do when they lived in the dark.

"I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving," she said. "I'm looking forward to making a nice big dinner for the boys—and no fighting."

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Marine Le Pen (Photo: Rémi Noyon, via)

In France, it's perfectly fine to describe Marine Le Pen as a fascist. Usually when you write this kind of thing about someone it stirs a little flurry of editorial anxiety: the f-word marks a pretty serious accusation. Can you really say this? Is it really justified?

Le Pen certainly doesn't think so: the Front National leader tried to sue both the left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the comedian Nicolas Bedos for libel after they described her as a fascist (Bedos as a "fascist bitch"), and both times she lost: the French courts decided that, actually, the epithet was entirely reasonable.

The political party she leads fits the bill – founded by an anti-Semite and Holocaust dismisser, it has said it opposes all migration into France, regularly wets its collective pants at the mere existence of ordinary Muslims and has been instrumental in a growing movement in which local French school authorities eliminate the "no pork" meal option for both Muslim and Jewish students – "it's pork or nothing", they are told.

Her views should be, in any minimally reasonable discourse, entirely unacceptable. So what was she doing on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday?

There's a line on this kind of thing: the best way to beat fascism is to engage with it openly so that people can see how ridiculous it really is. But this is stupid: you can say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but try hauling a big slab of rotting meat outside on a hot summer day and see what happens. It's as if the BBC has learned nothing from the travesty of Trump's rise to power: all that ceaseless mockery, the laughter of smug liberals 24 hours a day on every channel coast to coast – and somehow, by some strange and mysterious mechanism, giving slavish attention to Donald Trump didn't make him go away.

Marr explained his interview by saying that it was important to inform viewers on the nature and policies of a person who could be France's next president, but there's no shortage of academics and experts to do the same. You don't gain any special insight on an ideology by letting ideologues take the floor; all you do is allow it to reproduce itself.

Fascism exists in its own communication: it's the weaponisation of dumb common sense, the politics of the easy answer, something that doesn't work according to the rules of open debate. Liberals like to point to Nick Griffin's disastrous 2009 Question Time appearance and the BNP's subsequent collapse as an example of this process, but Griffin was always a poor communicator: all it did was open up a wider space for Nigel Farage, who – for all his faults – is not. And Marine Le Pen is the same.

Say we accept, provisionally, the idea that you can beat fascism by giving it airtime. Even on that level, the BBC interview was a monumental dereliction of duty. Andrew Marr did not hold Marine Le Pen to account during his interview; he did not challenge her views; he did not grill her. If anything, she grilled him.

Start with the basic optics of the interview. Most of these dialogues take place in the studied neutrality of a TV studio; this one did not. Marine Le Pen was sat in what looked more like the interviewer's seat, dignified against a generic background: rich, blank, depthless blue, with a trio of French flags – very stateswomanlike, very restrained and legitimate – just out of focus behind her. She was in the placeless everywhere of television, a scene that could reproduce itself anywhere and everywhere.

Andrew Marr, meanwhile, had sat himself down in front of some tatty-looking blinds with trees wobbling vaguely outside, and a National Front propaganda poster reading "Brexit et maintenant la France" – "Brexit and now France". He was in a space that belonged entirely to her. Marr didn't look like a tough interviewer challenging an insurgent right-wing; he looked like an overgrown schoolboy, with his suit and his lolling bubble-head, his rosy apple cheeks and his smart little side parting, sat obediently in front of Mme. Le Pen and eager to learn from what she had to say.

Take one of their earliest exchanges. For Marine Le Pen, the choice facing France is clear, and she lays it out: "Do we want a multicultural society, following the example of the English-speaking world, where fundamentalist Islam is progressing, where we see major religious claims? Or do we want an independent nation, with people able to control their own destiny?"

This is a fantastic piece of rhetorical trickery: without ever really explaining how this opposition is created, Le Pen manages to make it appear as if the rights of some people to freely express their religious beliefs are in contradiction to the ability of everyone to control their own destiny, rather than an integral part of that ability. Suddenly, Muslim people and the European superstate and the blank repression of a "society" are united into one faceless bloc, with an unspecified principle of "being able to control your own destiny" (what does that mean, exactly?) on the other side of the equation. It's an incredibly dishonest line. Does Andrew Marr challenge it? Does he fuck. His jelly eyes wobble, he sticks out his grisly little row of teeth and says, "Let me turn to culture..."

On it goes. Marr points to the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism of Le Pen's father and predecessor, and she's shocked. "I cannot let you say something so insulting." She's in the big chair here, roundly condemning Marr for saying that she might have anything in common with her father just because she leads the same party and taps into the same political energies, and challenging him to explain himself. "I would like you to tell me what sentence, what proposal in the National Front's programme is a racist proposal?"

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Of course, the racism of the FN doesn't really lie on the level of their outwardly stated policies, but even there it's visible – take, for instance, their proposal to ban dual nationality, but only for non-Europeans: white French people can have as many allegiances as they like, but the loyalties of people from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa are suspect.

Then there's her own racism – her suggestion in 2012, for instance, that refugees would "steal your wallet and brutalise your wife". Marr doesn't mention this. He asks how the National Front would approach French Muslims – can they "be good French citizens and be welcome in Marine Le Pen's France?" Le Pen doesn't really answer the question; she says that migration into France must end and that she only cares about whether people comply with "our codes, our values, our French lifestyles". Whose lifestyles specifically? It doesn't matter – the question has already vanished; it was just an opportunity for Marine Le Pen to talk about herself.

The Marr interview was a travesty, but what it demonstrates is even more terrifying. An office full of BBC executives came together to create something so craven and so spineless: a shameful display of cringe in the face of a hateful ideology.

They did try to challenge her, a little, but there was something structural that prevented them from doing it properly. It's not, as some on the left have argued, that Le Pen's opinions put her so far outside the mainstream that she shouldn't be allowed on TV; it's far worse than that. Her politics are just an intensification of what's there already. There was nothing in what she said about Muslims or migrants that hadn't been circulating through the British media for years; she just draws together and systematises the hatred, pettiness and suspicion of a political mainstream that's already profoundly reactionary and violent.

The BBC couldn't really challenge her because it had nothing to challenge her with. As the interview quite blatantly dramatised, we're all on her turf now. The insistence that Le Pen and people like her shouldn't be allowed on our screens is a good one; we need to fight for whatever small victories we can get. But it doesn't end there. The far bigger task is to collect and systematise something that opposes her ideology, so that the next time someone like her invades a million homes through their TV sets, we'll have better questions to ask them.

@sam_kriss

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