All photos of the January 17 rally against changes to New Orleans's noise ordinance by Chet Overall.

In the past few years, even as the Louisiana state tourism board has adopted the slogan, “No America, We Will Not ‘Turn That Music Down,” the New Orleans City Council and Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration have been waging a quiet war on the city’s music scene. A minority of residents believe themselves entitled to watch television in their homes without hearing even the faint sound of a brass band blocks away, and this small but vocal (read: wealthy) group has convinced some lawmakers that the perfectly reasonable noise ordinances in the music capital of the world are not strict enough. City authorities have spent the last couple years hassling bars and other music venues for disobeying previously unenforced laws—including one that even prohibits musicians from advertising via fliers. Clubs have closed while they acquired the necessary permits, and musicians, soundmen, bartenders, and others in the live entertainment industry have lost jobs and income as a result.

So, at the end of 2012, the council commissioned a report by musician and sound scientist Dave Woolworth. Released in August 2013, the report cost taxpayers a reported $15,000 and suggested that in the French Quarter and Bourbon Street in particular, noise be capped somewhere between 90 and 100 decibels, measured at the open doors and windows of venues. Otherwise, Woolworth said that the real problem was inconsistent, improper enforcement of existing laws.

“The Woolworth report has a lot of merit and credibility,” said Hannah Kreiger-Benson, the spokesperson for the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MACCNO), a group of musicians, venue owners, and activists who have been fighting back against the movement to turn New Orleans’s music down. “It's not perfect, but it brings the science, and also talks in a nuanced and respectful way about complicated issues that directly affect real parts of the community.”

But in early December, the Vieux Carre Property Owners Residents and Associates (VCPORA), an advocacy group involved with French Quarter issues, put out their own report, titled, “Seven Essential Items to Make our Noise Ordinance work for New Orleans.” The VCPORA document was informed not by science or the input of musicians, but by the narrow interests of a minority that wants to quiet the world’s most famous music scene. VCPORA’s report suggested a bunch of incredibly strict new rules—for instance, the group wants daytime noise in the quarter to be capped at 70 decibels (down from the current limit of 80), which is about the volume of conversation in a restaurant.

In the end, the City Council chose to mostly ignore the Woolworth report it had paid for and schedule a vote on VCPORA’s recommendations for January 17. This prompted pro-music council candidate Drew Ward to post a video online of Councilperson Susan Guidry breaking VCPORA’s proposed music ordinances with one of her campaign parties—perhaps shamed, Guidry eventually came out against the VCPORA report.

MACCNO acted by announcing that it was organizing a rally at City Hall the day of the proposed vote. The rally’s thousands of Facebook RSVPs, plus attacks from the New Orleans press, scared the council into postponing the vote and announcing that the ordinances would be revised to focus mainly on obnoxiously loud Bourbon Street. While a vote has been tabled, the issue will rear its head again today, January 27, when the council will hear a presentation from the Health Department that will suggest ways to deal with music as a health hazard (the City Council has already decided that, going forth, the Health Department, rather than police, will deal with music complaints).

More importantly, there’s an election on February 1, and if New Orleans really wants to maintain its unique status as a city where music and musicians of all stripes are encouraged rather than oppressed, the citizenry needs to replace the current crop of politicians with people who represent musical interests. In that spirit, I contacted many of the incumbents’ challengers to ask them pointed questions (some of them fed to me by MACCNO) about how they’d protect and nurture New Orleans’s music culture once elected.

The first step to making New Orleans more friendly to music is unseating Mayor Landrieu. His most viable opponent is Judge Michael Bagneris, who I spoke with just before the City Hall rally on January 17.

VICE: Do you believe New Orleans’s sound ordinances have to be updated?
Michael Bagneris: Anything that is going to impede or restrict or prohibit the New Orleans musicians, I would be opposed to. At the same time, people gotta be able to sleep and get up and go to work in the morning. The noise ordinance definitely needs to be overhauled. But not all sections of the city require the same treatment—one person’s noise is another person’s music. So I don’t know if there ought to be any citywide ordinance.

As mayor of the world’s music capital, how would you treat musicians differently?
I am the only candidate who is talking about building a music industry. [New Orleans] has lots of great raw talent, but we never really take that talent and create the infrastructure of business around it. I am talking about publishing, distribution, marketing, the digital component of music. The noise ordinance might be of less importance when we start dealing with the real business of music—putting our folks into studios, and having our people doing soundtracks for movies. We have never really helped to catapult our music to the rest of the world—everyone else comes here and grabs New Orleans music. But Wynton Marsalis is not here, Harry Connick is not here, and pretty soon Trombone Shorty won’t be here. All of those great musicians ought to be actually feeding into the music industry here.

How would you encourage people to open more music clubs? Maybe tax credits for club owners, like Louisiana gives the movie industry?
We should view the music [industry] the same way we view the film industry. But we’d want to make sure that our musicians are being paid properly and things of that nature before you can get a tax credit. And your music better be more than just playing CDs.

What would you say to people who have lived near Frenchmen Street before it was a music district and don’t like how it’s changed?
I would find out if those residents would be interested in having their properties purchased at a fair value. Do what everybody else does and get a consortium and buy out for fair value and make it a music district. They do that with any other enterprise, like if you have a big Walmart coming in and some properties are in the way, they buy them out. When they are expanding the airport and properties are in the way, you buy them out. If you have a music district that’s expanding, buy them out.

Of the City Council races, the most important is in District C, which encompasses both the French Quarter and Frenchman Street, the two musical areas at the heart of these recent noisy controversies.

District C candidate Eloise Williams, has been a community activist and “crime fighter” since 1983, when her oldest son was murdered. That tragedy was followed by her nine-year-old grandson’s murder in 1994, then that of her youngest son after he came home from the military in 2005. But the main reason the 73-year-old entered the race was to unseat current Councilperson Jackie Clarkson, one of the politicians who has pushed the hardest for VCPORA’s initiatives. Williams is one of the least polished, most assertive candidates in any race—at the anti–music ordinance rally, she stood at the podium and shouted, “If I am elected, you all will play music 24/7!” That might not a particularly realistic promise, but her heart’s in the right place.

VICE: I am writing a story documenting how each candidate feels about recently proposed music ordinances and—
Eloise Williams: I will make your story short: I stand with the musicians. I love to dance! People should be more careful about moving into a loud area.

What about those who’ve say they lived on Frenchmen Street since before it was an entertainment district?
That’s not true. New Orleans itself has been an entertainment industry for centuries. I am 73 and I remember when people would make their own instruments and go play music on the corner of Canal Street, or Bourbon. So people know there is a history of music here. The French Quarter is the world’s most recognized community of music.

Are you saying that if certain residents don’t like the music, they should move?
If you want to keep music low-key, it’s only gonna be for a chosen few, not the majority of the people. You wanna turn everybody’s life around just to benefit yourself. People are coming here to enjoy New Orleans’s style; they won’t come here if you stop people from playing music. You being selfish. Let all these musicians do what they do best.

Another candidate in District C, Lourdes Moran, has served three terms on the historically inept Orleans Parish School Board—her opinions, as you might expect, are a bit more in line with those of the current council.

VICE: If elected, what’s your plan to solve these types of musical disputes?
Lourdes Moran: I’d ask, why aren’t the property owners aren’t required to soundproof their buildings if they are going to lease them out to music venues? The burden currently doesn’t lie on the business owner to keep the noise within the establishment.

There’s already decibel limit, so if you are not breaking that law, why should you spend money on soundproofing?
But how are you going to measure that?

With a decibel meter. And a wristwatch to see if it’s too late to be playing so loud.
Right. [laughs] The biggest problem has been inconsistent code enforcement. If there was consistent enforcement, the residents wouldn’t be as adamant about creating new laws. You can continue to change the laws, but if there is no code enforcement… Yet I do understand the argument, “Why did you move next to a bar?”

I’ll take it a step further and say, “Why do you live in New Orleans?” It’s like living in a bird sanctuary and being really uptight about getting a little bird poo on you from time to time.
[laughs] That’s not true. The Quarter was not always like this. It was a residential area, and over the course of time it started changing. Bourbon Street was not known for bars and clubs. It was known for strip joints.

Burlesque shows. With live bands!
That’s correct. But even so, you didn’t have the amplification that exists today. You have to look at this issue in the spirit of how all of this came about. You really have to find common ground on both sides. And without proper code enforcement, residents aren’t going to be happy, and then when you make only a periodic check, you’re going to irritate the musicians.

Also running in District C is Carlos Williams, Jr.,a former Orleans Parish sheriff who now runs the Fairmont Hotel. He’s also a member of the Krewe of Zulu, New Orleans’s most prestigious African-American carnival club.

VICE: So what is your relationship to New Orleans's music scene?
Carols Williams, Jr: Well, I’m a Zulu member, and as Zulu members we parade our fallen ones. We parade all over the city playing jazz, especially in District C. There are a lot of musicians in that district, and I can’t speak for all of them, but the ones I know aren’t happy with [the crackdown on music]. So it would be hypocritical of me, as a Zulu member, to support [these new ordinances]. I think they should scrap them.

How can New Orleans prioritize the needs of our musicians and music lovers?
From Bourbon Street to Congo Square, District C was meant for music. It was meant to be live all the time. What draws people to New Orleans is that vitality. I love the liveliness. I’m not saying we shouldn’t respect other people, but if I’m looking for peace and quiet, well, I wouldn’t be downtown, man. I’m not being negative. If I want the birds chirping, downtown is not the ideal spot. We have to make a compromise but you can’t expect to have solitude in downtown New Orleans.

What would you say to the people who’ve lived on Frenchmen Street and don’t like its metamorphosis into a music hub?
This area has always been like this. I remember coming down here for over 30 years and it was more lively then than it is now. It never slept back then. You had Bob French and them going from one gig to another, starting gigs at three in the morning. When I was a little boy I’d go with my grandfather to throw the newspapers, and they were still out playing sometimes at seven. Have you ever been by one of these public schools when the band starts playing? I can hear Edna Karr [High School’s band] from five blocks away, and I don’t feel like I’m being violated. They gotta practice!

The candidate with the best chance of beating Jackie Clarkson for the District C seat is Judge Nadine Ramsey, and, like a true politician, she kept it bland.

VICE: They keep calling this a noise ordinance, or a sound ordinance, but it’s specifically a music ordinance—it exempts construction noise and every other loud sound. Why is construction more important than music?
Nadine Ramsey: [laughs] The movement from the term “noise ordinance” to “sound ordinance” was because some people were offended. The difference with the construction would be it’s a specific length of time, whereas if you are talking about music in a nightclub, that’s a day-to-day activity.

What would we have to do to scrap this whole deal and just use the existing sound laws, which are already pretty strict?
Realistically, that horse has left the barn, and people are going to want a new noise ordinance. The best we can hope for is to get input from everyone.

Ernest “Freddie” Charbonnet, who’s running for an at-large seat on the council, has been an attorney for 30 years and served an interim term on the council already, so he’s got some experience. He’s also a saxophonist who's played with some legendary New Orleans groups.

VICE: Tell me about your relationship with New Orleans music.
Ernest Charbonnet: I’ve played tenor saxophone since sixth grade, and I was a member of St. Aug High School’s “Marching 100.” I played with David Batiste and the Gladiators and I was one of the original members of Stop Inc.—we were damned good. Our drummer then was Jonathan Moffett, who went on to play with Michael Jackson and Madonna. Our trumpet player went on tour with Quincy Jones, Al Jarreau. I thought I was going to be a professional musician. We played on Bourbon Street and dances and everything else in the 70s. And it was the age of the big horn section so we played a lot of Chicago, a lot of Blood, Sweat & Tears. Every now and again I pick my horn up.

You can have a block with a music club on which 50 people live, and if even one or two residents complain, the club might end up getting hassled and losing money. How can we avoid sound laws that cater to the minority?
We always start out with the basic premise that democracy rules. So yes, I do agree with you. Even in that, I believe we can come up with something that everybody lives with. If we can’t, it’s going to always be confrontational. If you move into the French Quarter and you live there, certain expectations have to be lowered because you know where you are. If you want a pristine quiet neighborhood then you shouldn’t live in the French Quarter. What you like about the place is also what you have to endure. People forget that.

The same has become true of Frenchmen Street.
I used to live on Frenchmen Street. I was maybe 15 years old and I was playing music myself... I would go home [from band practice] and my ears would be ringing for three days after because we were blasting Chicago as loud as we possibly could! We played everywhere. And there were no discos or DJs back in the 70s—just us. And it was cool.

Did you ever get hassled by the man for playing your horn?
Yeah, the cops would come in and stop it. Then ten minutes later we’d be right back up to the volume. And we really were hot. This was in the neighborhood clubs, which were much more prevalent than they are now. The cops would come round Paris Avenue in our residential neighborhood and say turn it down, then we’d end up playing till four in the morning.

Also running for an at-large council seat is Jason Williams, a lawyer who has focused for years on New Orleans’s music issues.

VICE: What is your depth of experience with the New Orleans music scene?
Jason Williams: I have represented everyone from Kermit Ruffins to Glen Andrews to Glen David Andrews, and all the brass bands: the Hot 8, the ReBirth, members of Troy Andrews Band as well. And I’ve done it on a pro-bono basis, because I love these guys. I’m a fan. I know that a lot of these guys don’t make the amount of money folks think they make. But I know as a music lover what they provide to this city is invaluable. And we have not honored and cherished our musicians, dating back to Louis Armstrong. As far as the sound ordinance, I stand with the musicians and the music lovers.

How do you feel when people say they want to “look to other cities” to draft our music laws?
There is no other city that anyone in the world looks to for music other than New Orleans—there is no other city to compare it to. So the concept that our sound ordinances should be like Charlotte’s or Atlanta’s is ludicrous. We have to value our uniqueness.

Do we even need new sound laws?
The sound laws have not been addressed in a very long time. I think it’s good to have sound laws—they can also protect music and music-lovers. That’s more the concept we need to have. It seems right now a lot of the ordinances are not designed to protect musicians but to infringe on their rights.

For more candidate interviews and expanded versions of these interviews, go here.

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Michael Shaeffer

Izvoarele is a small village of 300 homes in southern Romania that had a problem late last year: There was constantly an earthquake happening. Tremors that measured up to a four on the Richter scale struck the town every day from September 23 to October 15, and Romania’s National Institute for Earth Physics logged over 250 quakes during that period.

The Romanian press has covered this made-for-the-tabloids story extensively, but no one knows exactly why so many quakes hit Izvoarele. Theories include an old fault line being reawakened by nearby oil drilling or shale gas exploration to the wrath of God. The latter rumor got some traction when a painting of an archbishop belonging to a local priest was broken during one of the quakes, but scientists say that it wasn’t oil companies or the man upstairs.

“It’s clear that there were natural causes there. The area had seen massive rains before and the soil is very sandy there [which can amplify the ground-shaking effects of earthquakes],” Gheorghe Ma˘rmureanu, a Romanian seismologist familiar with the quakes, reassured me. “It has nothing to do with the oil rigs.”

The National Institute for Earth Physics released a preliminary report on the earthquakes on October 15 that admitted the seismic activity was “unusual” and didn’t completely rule out man-made causes. Largely, scientists think that the “earthquakes occurred were not caused by other factors such as floods or oil exploitations,” according to an article on NewsRomania.com.

I reached out to Ion Neculau, the mayor of Slobozia Conachi, the commune that includes Izvoarele, who told me that the quakes were dying down and the story wasn’t a story anymore. “The machines installed here still show constant small earthquakes,” he said, but they weren’t anything to worry about. “It’s close to stabilizing. Life is back to normal.”

When I called Gheorghe Casian, the only villager with a listed phone number, he sang a slightly different tune. “We’ve been scared every night. We couldn’t sleep because of the bumps,” he told me. “We can still hear them every night, but now they’re different, they’re not like explosions in the ground anymore. Even though the authorities say these were natural, I still think it’s the oil rigs. And we still live in fear that our homes will crumble.”

It seems that no one is sure exactly why earthquakes suddenly started happening, or why they stopped. At press time, Izvoarele remained at the mercy of God.
 

Drawing by Molly Crabapple

When I was 24, a curator I hoped to work with told me: “When you're 30, you'll be really ugly, and your boyfriend will leave you. But I'd still fuck you.”

I turned 30 in September.  

Despite feminism, or logic, I dreaded it—though none of the curator's predications came true.

Age is a weapon society uses against women. Each year that you gain comfort in your own flesh, your flesh is seen as worth less. Thirty, like 40 or 50, is a demarcation line, but a particularly loaded one. Cross it, says the world, and you leave the trifling-but-addictive privileges of girlhood behind. Invisibility this way, ma'am. 

I was still 24 when the same curator refused to put me in a show with female artists in their early 20s. They painted girls of a dewy frailty the curator imagined the artists themselves possessed. “You're not a young artist,” he told me, when I asked to be included.  “Not like them.”  

As an American woman, you may be a girl-gone-wild, or a biologically-ticking-40. But except perhaps for six months after your 21st birthday, your age is like Goldilocks's porridge. Too young, too old. Never just right.

A man's age, on the other hand, is always right. In Letters to a Young Contrarian, a 52-year-old Christopher Hitchens wondered when he would no longer be called an angry young man. Men like Hitchens go from bad boy to elder statesman.

For me, many of the privileges of getting older have been bound up with getting cash. As an artist, I've done better than most.  Each year I've managed to hack together more opportunities, and paint with more mastery, until one day, I realized I was no longer flailing just to stay afloat. Being 30 is sweet. Saying I was 30 I pointlessly despised.  

Thirty is supposed to be the beginning of the end of hot girlhood. Sexual attractiveness is too red-raw basic to deny. It's the one power the world grudgingly grants to women. The half-true caveat is that you're on borrowed time. With care, beauty fades slowly. Youth's juicy smoothness fades fast. As you age you gain clarity. You lose what fucks you had to give. For a woman to have experience, but to not be, as writer Chelsea G. Summers describes it, “a shadow woman, gliding gray and ghostly into that good night,” is dangerous. 

Better to tell women that youth is their best quality—that when their ass starts sagging and their face starts cracking, everything they love will fade away.  

I'd tell myself I'm glad I'm turning 30. “I'm fucking terrified,” I'd confide to friends. They were mostly women older than me, gorgeously continuing to take up space. “Ha!” they'd snort. “Just you wait.”  

Weeks later, I'd be reassuring a friend that her life wasn't over cause she'd just turned 26.

By 30 you're no longer a child. What's often admired in femininity is, as the abstinence speakers say, being as fresh as an un-licked ringpop. White girls particularly (I'm half-white, but aspirin-pale), are imagined to posses innocence. Innocence is supposed to be preserved. 

Innocence is not doing. Not running off to New York. Not drinking whiskey till 4 AM. Not fucking that boy or girl because they make your heart scream electric, then waking up unpunished the next day. Not hacking a system rigged against you. Innocence is a relic of a time when women had the same legal status as children. Innocence is beneficial to your owner. It benefits you not at all. 

I hated being a child. My happiest day was when I left school and started an adult life where I could travel the world, or at least go to the bathroom without a teacher signing off on it. My early 20s, for all their excitement, were a procession of broke-ness and sexual harassment.  But being a grown woman is damn fine.  

“I wish I were a woman of 36, dressed in black satin with a string of pearls!” the nameless second Mrs. de Winter told her fiance Maxim, in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. Maxim threw a fit. She'd reminded him of his dead wife, the book's namesake. Rebecca, in her 30s when she died, was all posh arrogance, sex and bravery. The second Mrs. de Winter crept through her home like a ghost.  

Maxim loved the second Mrs. de Winter because she was naive, young, and powerless. Unlike Rebecca, she couldn't see through his line. At any sign that her innocence might crack- a dress, a smile—Maxim turned to sleet. The book plays this as romantic, but even at 13, I got the real message. To be innocent was to be a victim. A woman of 30 no longer innocent. Thank god for that.

At 18, I had the same dopey attraction as the second Mrs. de Winter.  I'd sit at the Barnes and Noble cafe reading books I couldn't afford. Men would ask to sit with me. I was too polite to tell them no.  They'd get angry if I wouldn't talk to them. They'd get angry if I did. After conversation, I declined one guy's offer of drinks. He screamed at me: “Why the fuck did you waste my time?”  

No one screams at me any more.  In November, I walked around Beirut at 3 AM and besides one guy jerking off towards the stars, no one bothered me. Men tell you you'll miss street harassment when its gone. I don't. 

As a broke 21-year-old, I posed for a music video shoot where my job was to writhe around in a bikini while live crickets fell on me. We agreed for the crickets to be poured on my stomach. The grip instead poured them on my face. The band laughed as I screamed. To them, I was a young, sexy girl, and thus disposable. I forced the booker to pay me extra before I would sign a release.  

In most fields, men have the power. Drinking the countless cocktails with which I solidified professional relationships, I got used to dreading propositions. When I stopped getting them, the delight of being equal, rather than just fuckable, hit me like a kiss.   

The only real thing 30 took from me was the sense of limitless time. I can reasonably expect 30 more years of good health.  With luck, there will be 9,000 sunsets to get the great work done, before one starts fearing cancer and death.

More and more I hate the men and women who cling to youth's helplessness. Clinging to youth is understandable. Shooting your forehead with botulism can look lovely, or at least help maintain your place in ageist capitalism. But why hang on to that know-nothing, white-girl vulnerability? Staying alive has power. The years should give you competence and toughness along with the battle scars. You've survived. Fuck anyone who would keep life's beauty from your grasp. 

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the last century's great writers. But at 26, poverty and institutional racism had kept her from getting an education. She chopped ten years off her age and enrolled in a Baltimore high school. Hurston went to Barnard and then on to fame in the Harlem Renaissance. She never added those ten years back.  

Hurston subverted many things, among them the system that turns time against women. She had the razor eyes of experience, saying “I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” She also took an extra decade of youth.  

Like many thrilling things women do—fucking or hitchhiking, being demoniacally ambitious or telling an asshole to stick a chainsaw in his eye—society tells us that growing up leads to ruin. Yes, you get older, but you can also grow tougher, kinder, braver. You can claw out the life you wanted. But as you age, the world will tell you you're less worthy, even if you know that's a lie. If there's one thing society won't stand for, it's for a woman to be content.

@Mollycrabapple

The 427-foot tall Aqaba flagpole in Jordan

Marc Summers and David Chambers have a pretty unusual job. Together, through their company Trident Support Corporation, they build the world's tallest flagpoles for the authoritarian regimes of Central Asia and the Middle East.

The pair came along at the right time; over the past decade, a largely unnoticed arms race has played out across that part of the world. And not over anything so prosaic as tanks, heat-seeking missiles, or armed drones, but rather massive fucking flagpoles. Currently the world's tallest flagpole stands at 541 feet in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. The previous record was held by by Baku, Azerbaijan at 531 feet, and, before that, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan at a paltry 436 feet. Trident built all three of them.

I first heard about the company while in Tajikistan, where an NGO worker described this bizarre competition for Earth's biggest flagpole as a "dictators' dick-waving contest." But locals in Dushanbe seemed genuinely effusive about their record-breaking structure, and I was fascinated as to how an American start-up had managed to carve themselves such a weird niche—capitalizing on this odd wave of global flagpole envy. So I gave them a call to talk about it.

Marc (left) and David meeting King Abdullah of Jordan

VICE: Hey, guys. So how did Trident start? I can't imagine it was easy to spot a gap in the market for giant flagpoles.
Marc: If you'd told me 15 years ago that we were going to be building flagpoles as our primary business, I would have said you were crazy. We started out 18 years ago, working in defense logistics, and we were working in Abu Dhabi when our business sponsor—a fairly influential person in the UAE—came to us and said they wanted to build a flagpole. He'd been to Mexico, seen some big flagpoles there, and thought one would look great in Abu Dhabi as a monument to the ruler. They trusted us and asked if we could do it. So we said, "Well, we haven't built flagpoles, but how hard can it be? How big do you want it, sir?" And he said he wanted the tallest in the world.

And the business of making huge flagpoles was born.
Yeah. After that, we started getting calls from around the region. One came in from the Royal Hashemite Court in Jordan, saying King Abdullah wanted us to build a world record flagpole in Amman. It was just after 9/11. I’d been recalled to active duty as a US naval officer, and Dave calls and says, "Hey, we've got this opportunity in Amman—what do you think we ought to do?" We decided to take it on, got out of defense logistics, and have focused only on poles since then.
David: One thing to add is that we didn't identify a gap in the market; there was no market. We fell into the first pole and, all of a sudden, boom—we created a market. We created our own demand.

Do you normally seek out clients or do they come to you?
Nowadays people are knocking down our doors for flagpoles. Typically, to propose a world record flagpole, you need a connection that can go all the way to the top. No one's going to build the world's tallest flagpole in any country without the highest levels of approval. We've had tons of people who claim to be able to represent us and say they have connections and can get approvals at the top, but these middlemen never deliver.

David with President Ilham Aliyev at the Azerbaijani flagpole opening ceremony

Are there any other big players in the huge flagpole industry other than Trident?
Here's the thing—there are a lot of big contracting companies out there who look at these projects and say, "If these guys can do it, so can we." Sometimes on the smaller ones—160 to 200 feet—they’ll win the bid and they'll build one flagpole, then that's it—they never build another. We build more flagpoles over 330 feet than every other flagpole company in the world combined. No one’s built a world-record flagpole in the last 12 years but us.

Who had the record before you?
Marc: We tried to figure out what the tallest flagpole was when we began working on the Abu Dhabi pole, but there was a lot of conflicting information as to what the definition of a "flagpole" is. Guinness World Records said it was in North Korea, but we looked at it and it's actually just a radio tower with a flag on top. So Dave got in touch with Guinness, and they ended up creating a new category of “unsupported” flagpoles, which is what most people consider a normal flagpole. 

Dushanbe, Tajikistan's record-breaking flagpole (Photo by Rob Price)

What's the strangest thing you've had to do as a result of your work?
Marc: Some of the places we've worked... you always end up having to wing it, despite the best planning. In Amman they brought in a crane barely tall enough to do the job. They built a 16-foot compacted mound to balance the crane on top of so it could reach the top of the pole. We're lifting the last section when we find we're about four inches short of getting it up, and there isn’t a taller crane in the entire country.
David: We ended up fashioning a makeshift extension to the man-basket with a counter-levered arm on it. It was wild to go 415 feet up and just try to wiggle this thing on top of the flagpole. But I think one of the craziest things we've done is build a world-record flagpole in Baku, Azerbaijan—one of the windiest cities in the world. The previous record was 436 feet, and we agreed to do 530 feet, which is a huge leap in height—we normally only go up about five feet at a time. It took us months, simply due to delays with the wind. You'd get one section up, then a windstorm would hit and last for two weeks and we couldn't do anything.

What do you think drives people to want the world's tallest of something?
David: You get a lot of very patriotic people in this part of the world. I thought Americans were patriotic, but when it comes to the biggest and the highest, you cannot beat the natural pride of people in this part of the world.

David and others at the top of Tajikistan's world-record flagpole

So you'd say these are more symbols of national pride than vanity projects?
Marc: Absolutely.
David: I wouldn't call it vanity—these people are simply proud of their achievements. Forty years ago, these guys had nothing. Now these countries are built up to world-class standards, and people are flocking to visit. They're proud of that and it translates into national pride.

Have you been approached by any Western governments looking to build flagpoles?
Marc: We’ve been approached, but the problem in a lot of places is zoning laws and where you get the funding from. We've had conversations with a variety of groups in the US and other Western countries, but nothing's come to fruition yet.

Do you have any record-breaking projects currently in the works?
There are a couple of irons in the fire, but we’d prefer not to say which. There are some in the Middle East and Central Asia that may come to fruition within the next couple of months. They're in the region of 600 feet.

What do you do if you have multiple countries that all want the record? They can't all have it.
David: It's never really happened where two countries sign at the exact same time, but it is a quandary. The guy who signs up first should be rewarded, but it's the second guy who gets the more lasting record.

Thanks, guys.

Follow Rob on Twitter: @robaeprice

The official "Elliot" trailer.

Former karate champion and Nova Scotian Elliot Scott wants to be Canada's first action movie star, which, when you think about it, is ambitious, bizarre and hilarious for a bunch of reasons. Not least of which is the fact that the moppy-haired actor/director looks more like the guy you sat next to in biology class than Chuck Norris. But this underdog fight against the odds is why New Brunswick filmmakers Jaret Belliveau and Matthew Bauckman decided to make a documentary about his quest. Elliot follows the making of the martial artist’s next indie action movie Bloodfight, But as the film delves deeper into Elliot’s personal life that he shares with his girlfriend Linda, it becomes difficult to find the line between reality and dreamworld, as Elliot transforms from an quirky antihero underdog to a something darker and more complicated. It's Fubar meets Cheaters with a little bit of American Movie, except all of what you’re watching is real. Elliot is as entertaining as reality television, but with a sensitivity and thoughtfulness that provokes meditation on the nature of truth, and the desire for fame.

Set in Nova Scotia, the film had its world premiere in Park City, Utah at the Slamdance film festival this past week, where it won best feature documentary. For those of you who aren't familiar, Slamdance provides a platform for emerging artists (Lena Dunham and Christopher Nolan featured early work there) and scrappy cinema, filling the holes left by the increasingly commercial Sundance film festival, which runs it concurrently, and where “independent” movies tend to have million-plus budgets and Oscar-winning cast members.

Anyway, I caught up with Belliveau and Bauckman in Utah to hear more about the making of Elliot.

VICE: What were you first expecting when you first started making Elliott?
Jaret: From the start Matt and I knew that Elliot was exaggerating to some degree just because of the difference between the [fairly positive] newspaper articles we were reading and the quality of the trailers of his films that we were seeing. But we thought mostly he was a lovable guy who was trying to do anything to get known and to get his movies out there. We thought it was pretty innocent.

Did you relate to him at the beginning?
Jaret: I related to him just from the passion and the drive that it takes to make films, so for us he just seemed like a lovable dreamer who had a great group of people around him.
Matthew: And what he was doing with Bloodfight was great. We came to love all these people playing the characters in his movies like Blake and Linda and Blair. In Nova Scotia, where they’re living, there’s no real platform to get what they were getting from Elliot. They got to be stars in their own way. Elliot really provided that. No matter what was true and what wasn't, even though there were inconsistencies, that's what made it seem like a positive thing for everyone around him at first.
Jaret: The key to the film was when [his girlfriend] Linda started opening up to us, because that was the other side of the story. Elliot could only carry the film so much. He has no self-dialog. He can't analyze his actions in a way that would translate to the viewer, so we needed other people to show his world and how he operates within that.

You included your own voice a bit in there as well. Was that also a reality check to balance what Elliot was saying?
Matthew: I think in a way Jaret's voice is like an audience surrogate, because we wanted to take the audience on the journey we went on. The more Elliot delves into this fantasy world, the more fed up we got because we had someone who was not being honest with us for two years and that is really difficult.
Jaret: It was somewhat difficult but more difficult to see how that is affecting other people, because we get to leave. We show up for a couple of days, we might be a little annoyed, but we leave and we know that this man is concocting huge fantasies and bringing all these other people into it. That was nagging us, the way that he was hurting them. We included the audio of my voice sometimes because we wanted people to see the kinds of questions we were asking. We were actively trying to get them to think more about what Elliot was doing, what role he was playing in their lives.

He’s an unreliable narrator, but what’s hurtful isn’t necessarily that he’s delusional, but that he’s unreliable to the people in his life. Do you think he could be delusional and not be hurtful?
Matthew: We are all delusional to varying degrees. There's always a big gap there between how we perceive ourselves and how other people perceive us. It's just at that level of [delusion Elliott reached] I don't think you can get away from hurting people. When you’re lying to people, people are going to get hurt.
Jaret: He started blending his movies and reality. Like in the documentary when Elliot starts talking about a stalker. He had a movie called The Stalker And The Hero, and he's the hero, and he's protecting Linda; so he started taking these fantasies from his movies and starts making them part of the documentary—
Matthew: And part of his life.

"Elliot" poster courtesy of Jaret Belliveau and Matthew Bauckman.

There are obvious similarities between your film and American Movie, but yours is Canadian. To you, what about it is Canadian and particularly east coast, maritime Canadian?
Matthew: Where we are from, specifically in the Maritimes, there seems to be an abundance of characters. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's because everyone is spread out more, but there a lot of unique interesting characters that are around, like Elliot. We had another documentary subject that we followed around for several months before we decided to do Elliot, this French Canadian rapper called JBB or Godfather Big Boss.
Jaret: Or Boner Bill. He gave himself around 16 different nicknames.
Matthew: All of his nicknames are involved with the mafia or his penis. There seems to be a lot of characters in the Maritimes and there seems to be a lack of pretension that we really respond to. We joke about it in interviews. When people ask what do people back home think of what you are doing, I say, "Well they love what we’re doing but they’re not impressed."
Jaret: In a sense, what is different is that Elliot wants to be recognized in America. In Canada, the way that he is going to feel good is to get that notoriety not in Canada really, but from Hollywood or these other big stars. He wants to be Canada's first action hero, he says that, but I think that's just a tool to be famous in America.
Matthew: It's funny because that's such a Canadian thing. In Canada, we are always getting this Canadian culture and media and we feel this inferiority. Elliot almost exemplifies what it is to be Canadian in a negative way.

If someone brings up Pamela Anderson, I just can't help myself, I have to say: "Oh you, know she's Canadian eh."
Jaret: We totally have a complex.
Matthew: But when people ask us about being Canadian filmmakers, I don't know what to say because I feel so part of American media.

There's an earnestness to this film that feels very Canadian to me.
Matthew: People always talk about these really esoteric, hard to pin down themes to their movies but if we could sum it up it would be: Don't lie and be nice to your loved ones and friends. That's pretty fricken Canadian eh, like, geez bud. I love New Brunswick though, I really do. If we could continue making movies there and set up a home base there, it would be great.
Jaret: And it also just gives us a space to exist. We are sort of alone. There's not a lot happening. There's not a lot of documentary people there. We can just do our own thing. We are not influenced. We don't know what is trending in New York as a hot doc topic. In a way, that's a liberty.
Matthew: But there really isn't much money. There isn't much support. It can be very disheartening.
Jaret: Of course, but who would fund Elliot? Maybe we’re being hard on Canada but it's like we are making a movie, this guy might be a pathological liar. We are going to China and he's going to embarrass the shit out of Canada. He's going to pretend he's Jackie Chan. We might complain but we aren't making a movie that's a typical Canadian doc. We can't expect to get funding because we aren't staying within what Canada is comfortable with. 

@whitneymallett

The Enbridge tower in downtown Edmonton. Photo via.

Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline has thousands of “crack-like features” as the company euphemism goes. In the coming months, hundreds of sections of the pipe will be dug up for inspection in Ontario and Quebec in a massive sweep of Enbridge “integrity digs.” If Enbridge deems it necessary, these stretches of pipe will be repaired or replaced. But hundreds of other pipe sections, with thousands of defects known to the company, will be left in the ground untouched. Worse still, Enbridge is guided through this process by General Electric’s experimental “smart-pig” technology, which according to their own reports has consistently underestimated the severity of cracks along Line 9 while missing hundreds of them altogether.

An Enbridge spokesperson argued to the CBC, days after their Alberta Clipper pipeline spill, that this massive Line 9 inspection operation reflects the company’s “prudent” approach to pipeline safety. While this certainly sounds reassuring, the company’s digs are only targeting the very weakest portions of the line—of which there are apparently hundreds. According to Enbridge’s engineering assessment of Line 9, for a section of pipe to be excavated it must have cracks that are at least 50% as deep as the pipeline’s surprisingly thin carbon-steel walls—most of the pipe is 6.35mm thick.

“Frankly, with the number of integrity digs going on, landowners are wondering how poor the condition of Line 9 actually is,” John Goudy told the National Energy Board in a speech given on behalf of the Ontario Pipeline Landowners Association.

Enbridge searches for “crack-like” or “notch-like” features, “crack-field” clusters, “dents,” and “metal loss” in their pipeline walls. In the nearly decade old data that Enbridge presented to the NEB, the company found a total of 12,961 features along Line 9—including “4,738 crack related features” and “8,223 metal loss features.” Many of these have since been repaired, but the majority of them, the company has determined, “do not pose an immediate threat to the integrity of the pipeline” and therefore will not be fixed ahead of the pipeline’s reversal.

Considering Enbridge’s operating record—an average of over 73 spills per year—it’s difficult to be blasé about this. Similar defects were found throughout Enbridge’s Line 6B, the nearly identical pipeline that ruptured in 2010 in Michigan and still hasn’t been cleaned up. The 2010 rupture could have been avoided, a US federal agency found, because “Enbridge knew for years that this section of the pipeline was vulnerable yet they didn’t act on that information.” Enbridge discovered the Kalamazoo crack in 2005, but underestimated its impact—they assessed it using the same experimental technology that they are using to monitor Line 9.

The company’s tool of choice is GE’s previously mentioned “smart-pig” or inline inspection technology, which pipeline expert Richard Kuprewicz wrote is “a new, still developing technological approach that has yet to be sufficiently field demonstrated to be highly accurate or reliable.” The “pig” travels through the pipeline, mapping out its features with ultrasound or electromagnetic sensors and reporting which areas of the pipeline are structurally compromised.

So far, in Line 9, smart-pigs have had a dismal record of finding and assessing cracks. The company has found many defects within the pipe that are visible to the human eye but were missed by these “state-of-the-art inspection tools.” According to Enbridge’s own assessment, between 12% and 26% of all defects found on excavated pieces of Line 9 were unreported by their smart-pigs. Cracks that are smaller than 1mm x 60mm cannot be detected by this tool at all, though many cracks that are larger than this threshold have evaded Enbridge’s detection too. Those cracks that were detected were usually underestimated by the tool. Additionally, Enbridge told the Ontario Pipeline Landowners Association that “there are no ILI tools available that can accurately detect pinhole corrosion,” even though this type of defect has historically lead to large spills.

With all this in mind, it’s not surprising that when Enbridge digs for defects they often find leaks or spills. This was the experience of one landowner who discovered through an Enbridge dig that their farm was contaminated with toxins like toluene and naphthalene. They wrote to the NEB that “this contamination now explains why, in 2007, my cows aborted their calves and I had to sell all my herd. They had all pastured and drank water from areas where the contamination was found.”

Line 9’s maintenance digs were not part of the Line 9 reversal hearings, an exclusion which John Goudy of the Ontario Pipeline Landowners Association argued allows Enbridge to downplay the scale of their proposed reversal project and its immediate environmental impact. Though Enbridge publicizes that these digs take between two days and two weeks, and barely disturb the land, multiple letters delivered by Goudy to the NEB told a very different story. Landowners wrote that their properties were transformed into construction sites and rendered unusable for months or even years. Their businesses suffered and construction began without their knowledge or permission. “There seems to be a constant turnover of Enbridge’s personnel. So it’s like constantly having strangers on your property, which is unsettling and intrusive,” one landowner complained.

When some landowners learned from an integrity dig that their land was poisoned, Enbridge blamed the contamination on pesticide use and other pipeline spills along the right of way—even though no pesticides were used in that area and no spills were ever reported. Their neighbours, whose land was also contaminated, “notified the Ontario Spills Action Centre… who in turn notified the NEB, who had not been notified of anything.” Ultimately, these landowners found themselves arguing for months with Enbridge and Trans-Canada, with each corporation refusing to take responsibility for the leaked toxins. They hired a lawyer and now the three parties have agreed on a clean-up plan—but the letter concludes by saying, “the contamination has significantly devalued our properties… we are held liable for contamination left behind by multi-million dollar companies beyond reproach, obviously even from the NEB.”

The presence of this contamination attests to the limited capabilities of Enbridge’s monitoring technology. But according to Richard Kuprewicz, the smart-pig method suffers from a slew of other problems as well. It “does not accurately measure pipe wall thickness” and does not account for different forms of wear-and-tear combining at one site—a problem that is prevalent along Line 9 and according to him constitutes its greatest threat. If a crack occurs along a part of the pipeline where the wall is worn thin, no additional red flags are raised; it is simply treated as a crack.

Kuprewicz also warned that human error is not uncommon in interpreting the test results. He argues that Enbridge has dramatically underestimated the rate at which cracks grow in their line and that “changing crude slates, especially [tar sands] dilbit, will substantially increase crack growth rates.” But to Kuprewicz, not all of this is Enbridge’s fault—there are no clear federal guidelines telling companies how quickly they need to address their cracks. This too should raise some alarms, seeing as after the Kalamazoo rupture the US National Transportation Safety Board warned that weak regulations contributed to the spill and that “for the regulator to delegate too much authority to the regulated to assess their own system risks is tantamount to the fox guarding the hen house.”

A number of conclusions can be drawn from all of this, but none more important than those Kuprewicz offered to the NEB. He warned that Enbridge’s assessment of Line 9 shows that they have “failed to heed some important” lessons from the Kalamazoo rupture. “The crack in the Marshall, MI pipeline used the same ILI tool technology, the same biased software algorithm, underrepresenting [stress corrosion colony] depths,” he wrote. Enbridge has not shown that their approach to maintenance is cautious enough that the “massive and pervasive [stress corrosion cracking] threats on Line 9 can be remediated before they reach rupture limits.” In other words, Enbridge’s over-dependence on smart-pig technology, and their disinterest in considering other options, means that “there is a high risk the pipeline will rupture in the early years following the Project’s implementation.”

Kuprewicz came to these conclusions by reading the same engineering assessment that Enbridge submitted to the National Energy Board and that I have referenced throughout this article—it is the only such report on Line 9 that the NEB will look at. What remains to be seen is which interpretation they believe. The final ruling on Line 9 is expected within weeks.

Enbridge did not respond to VICE's questions about the state of Line 9 in time for publication.

@M_Tol

Mossless in America is a new column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009 as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days, and since 2012 Mossless magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Their forthcoming third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years titled The United States (2003-2013), will be published this spring.

Kathya Landeros is a young American artist who photographs her family and Latino populations around the country. Her series Verdant Land alludes to the long history of agricultural work that has led Mexicans to the United States in search of a better life.

Mossless: Where did you grow up? 
Kathya Landeros: I grew up in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California, surrounded by farmland. There was a period where I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother in central Mexico. My parents sent my older sister and I to a parochial school that sat on top of a very steep hill in the central highlands of Mexico. 

Does your family appear in your photos? 
There is a portrait of my grandmother in my series Verdant Land. She worked as a farm laborer when she was younger and first came to this country. I am also photographing my family for a separate, ongoing body of work in California.

You mention in your artist statement that a lot of the settlements you photograph would be ghost towns if it weren’t for their Latino populations. What are these towns like?
The part of California where I am from is some of the most fertile land in our country, making the people who tend to it (a majority being Latino) quite productive. The land is very flat, and yet there is always evidence of rolling foothills and mountains never too far away. The sun also seems to produce the most intense heat and light here—really beautiful California light. This is especially true in the summer when the sun is high and its light is drawn out late into the evening. The land is usually laid out in a similar rectilinear fashion: a main business drag with homes surrounding it. The homes are enveloped by expansive farmland, which is the most defining feature that can be seen from the highway. When I think of these towns the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn and some of the other Bay Area Figurative Movement painters come to mind. Although their work is not specific to the towns I am photographing in, their rendition of light and geometry very much describes the West I know. Such a quiet view of the land also offers an interesting foil to the mythos of the rugged American West of cowboys. 

Are there a lot of ghost towns in the United States?
I would say so. In California, it appears that these farm towns are small and empty. To some they may seem insignificant because they are not heavily populated. And yet they are responsible for growing much of our food. 

There are other sorts of ghost towns. I am thinking of places with a great deal of history. I imagine the traces of this past can be seen as ghosts too. 

What is something you wish every American knew?
That kindness is not weakness.  

Kathya Landeros is a photographer who splits her time between New London, Connecticut, and Sacramento, California. She studied English and Hispanic Studies at Vassar before getting her masters in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Last year, she was selected to do a coveted artist residency at the Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY. 

Follow Mossless magazine on Twitter.

Photos by Alice Martins

About 2,500 people marched through the streets to the center of São Paulo, Brazil on Saturday to protest against the cost of hosting the World Cup. The sun was beating down and the temperature was hitting 29 degrees as people gathered on Avenida Paulista with flags, drums and, in many cases, black bloc gear. The march was billed as the first action against the World Cup in São Paulo in 2014, on the day that the city celebrated its 460th anniversary.

People have been irritated by the idea of hosting the World Cup for some time. I guess the thought of tens of thousands of football fans crowding the streets, pissing the official tournament beer up against the wall of your house for a month isn't an appealing one, but the main complaint is the huge expense of building the infrastructure to accommodate them when local social projects are in such dire need of investment. To try to cool things down, the government set up three websites where citizens could track their spending. Unfortunately, this attempt at transparency was let down by a site that is difficult to use and which frequently gives contradictory, wrong or misleading information.

And so, on Saturday, the anarchists advanced, arms linked, chanting an animalistic "Uh, uh, uh, uh" as they went. It was kind of scary. Shopkeepers and bar owners shuttered their premises and police were everywhere. The Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, was the target of one chant. "Hey, Dilma, can you hear me?" screamed protesters. "There will be fighting in the World Cup!" Unsurprisingly, the country's riot cops are said to be as well rehearsed as the Samba dancers ahead of the opening ceremony on the 12th of June.

As darkness fell, the anarchists paraded along Rua Augusta, occupying a bus, smashing the windows of a shop and vandalizing several banks. The cops brought the teargas out in less than five minutes flat. There was a stampede. I tried to protect myself in the doorway of a hotel. A kid of about 13, accompanied by his mother, had a panic attack right next to me. After inhaling a certain amount of tear gas, everyone kind of loses their mind. Minutes after I'd left the scene, protesters and journalists hanging out there were arrested.

Those who weren't being cuffed by the police were running through the streets of downtown and Bela Vista, one of the city's big Italian districts In Consolação, torching cars on the way. 

On Saturday, the Military Police's Twitter announced that 128 people were detained for questioning. A call to the Department of Public Safety yesterday revealed that, in total, 135 people were arrested, among them 12 minors.

Follow Débora Lopes on Twitter and Alice Martins on Instagram.

Darby and I were born and raised in a haunted mansion in Victoria, BC and we spent our childhood playing in the surrounding overgrown gardens. We played make believe. A lot. Darby was really into creating elaborate games with dolls and playmobil about runaway orphans surviving on their own, and always in danger. She used to have all the sisters squeeze onto the shelves of the linen closet, to hide from a make-believe evil that was coming for us. We often talk about how making art is a part of our childhood, and as long as we do it we'll never have to really grow up.

I picture my sister Darby listening to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (the dinosaur scene in Disney's Fantasia) and making these dark, child-like drawings. Trained in dance and not in visual art, usually her drawings depict movement and physicality in a naive, unguided way. Her latest are loose, scary, and colorful. I think she's amused by the challenge of putting her imaginings onto paper. We grew up watching Disney movies, and honestly I think we're both a little haunted by that nightmarish, childish, representation of reality. 

Darby now lives in Toronto where she works as a witch doctor, an artist, and the editor of my magazine.

The second decade of the 21st century might be remembered as a golden age for the city of Los Angeles. In the past five years, America's second largest metropolis has seen record-low crime rates, a slow-and-steady expansion of mass transit options, a rapidly gentrifying urban center that some are calling the "next great American city," and two NBA championships for our beloved Lakers. Yet a large portion of the city is still totally depressed like it's 1992 all over again. All those pretty winter landscapes you see on Instagram are actually a sign that 2013 was California's driest year in recorded history, and that we'll all be brushing our teeth with toilet water if it doesn't rain soon. Sure, crime is down and downtown has a bunch of fancy new hotels, but a few blocks from those hotels is the biggest homeless encampment in the nation—Skid Row. 

A private, independent commission endorsed by former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called LA2020 recently released a controversial report claiming that almost 40 percent of citizens in Los Angeles currently live in “misery.” What qualifies as misery? The report says that poverty and lack of access to necessary services does the trick. It takes only a cursory glance around in any direction, on any street in this city to see the truth of that statistic. Forty percent is a major chunk of a city that boasts a population of over 4 million people—plus neverending suburban sprawl—but the number of people who live in misery in LA is probably even greater than that.

What the folks behind the LA2020 study didn’t take into account is that plenty of LA residents are miserable for less tangible, more existential reasons. Getting passed over for a promotion, not nailing an audition, and not being able to find a place to get a goddamn alcoholic beverage past 2 AM are all legitimate reasons to be unhappy if you reside in the City of Angels.

In honor of this beautiful, sadsack town and its perennially self-conscious, downtrodden population, we’ve put together a series that delves into what makes Angelinos of all classes, races, and backgrounds miserable and/or consider moving to San Francisco. 

Today, we've got an in-depth look at the drought emergency and how the Department of Water & Power is planning to deal with the crisis, plus interviews with locals on what makes them miserable. Tuesday will see the release of a feature story on the polution harming the residents of Los Angeles's largest public housing project.

The rest of the week, we're going to be talking to the owners of a KISS-themed football team that calls LA home, taking a photographic trip down the notorious 6th Street (which cuts through some of the richest and poorest neighborhoods in the city), and trying to find out why people here hate public transit so much.

It's rough in LA, but I think I'm staying. At least we don't have the Google Bus.

@dave_schilling

The LA2020 Commission report infamously claimed that almost 40 percent of the population of Los Angeles lives in "misery." They point to high poverty rates, long commute times, and local government’s slowness in fixing the city’s vital infrastructure.

Looking to put a face to the drudgery, I decide to put on my cub reporter press hat and gumshoes to find out what's making people in Los Angeles miserable:

Photos by Nate Miller

Tatsuo, 45, street preacher: The fundamental reason is they’re alienated from God and trying to find happiness in love, sex, money, anything here on Earth—alcohol, whatever. That can provide temporary happiness but it fades away quick. When you know God through the Lord Jesus Christ, there’s a joy unspeakable. Nothing can alter that, there’s an absolute confidence in that. Nothing can separate or impact that—the economy or cancer, nothing. In Christ Jesus, knowing God, walking with him, once this body dies, having eternal life. That’s what matters.

Are you happy?
I know what I’m doing. The Lord called me to do this. And in fulfilling that call, that’s where my happiness is at. Is it easy? No. You get ridiculed, spit on. It’s not a popular job. People think you’re crazy, from the world’s perspective. I know I look like a nutcase, but I know God. And if you know God, nothing else really matters. You’re not moved by popular sentiments or mood trends. When you know Jesus, you’re not affected by that.

Jerry, 70, peace activist: It’s hard being an activist and feeling happy when there’s so many injustices in the world. That’s why I started the activist support circle. "Happy" is a nebulous word. Is happiness the absence of extreme sadness? Is peace the absence of war? I think it’s more than that we get part of our soul robbed from us all the time when we have to stand up to all these injustices, when it seems like they shouldn’t be happening. There shouldn’t be starvation, there shouldn’t be war—killing people and justifying it or trying to. As an activist, it's very difficult to feel happiness because that’s what you do all day. You’re organizing and demonstrating and protesting. People say, "well, why protest? Isn’t that a negative thing?" The word “protest” is derived from “pro” and “testifying," so it’s not a really negative word. But other activists can sometimes feel negative when they’re speaking out against injustices. It’s very difficult to smile. I used to be able to smile more graciously, more freely. Now, my brow is constantly furrowed. I feel like something is missing from me.

Michael, 32, lawyer: Life in LA for anyone who’s got big goals, there comes competitiveness… and people have unrealistic expectations on how easy it is to achieve those goals. As I’ve met entrepreneurs or actors, they have too many ideas or goals or whatever and people fall into a trap of not being able to focus on one thing. In a town like LA, that is difficult for people, because you need to be able to be fully focused on one thing.

How are you? You seem pretty relaxed.
I’m happy. A town doesn’t make you happy in and of itself.  It’s the relationships you have with people that gives you happiness. I think reliability from relationships you build would make anyone happier, where that’s LA or anywhere. There’s a lot of smart and talented people here, but once you accept that it’s going to be tough and challenging, you know… I’ve lived in New York, London, Sydney, and Los Angeles. I think if you’re a good and honest and genuine person you can have meaningful relationships anywhere. LA, sometimes it just depends what you actually want from a relationship. 

Brooke, 34, account executive: I think it’s the culture. Most people here are aspiring to be their dreams and they’ll be willing to step on anybody to get there. It’s just different.

Would you say you’re happy?
I’m happy. I have a dog, I go out with friends. I think living close to where you work and your friends helps with happiness. I’m in Culver City, so I’m in-between a lot of things but I wish people were closer. I’d be happier if I had more friends in my neighborhood. In LA, people stay in their neighborhoods because it’s an easier life.

Nancy, age not given, retired special education administrator: I’m trying to get out of LA as much as I can. The city has changed. LA doesn’t promote community and it doesn’t promote friendship. Everything is blocked, whether its blocked walls or schlepping from the Northwest Valley to Commerce to go to work. It’s not a good place. I don’t know if it was when I moved here. I moved and found great friends and I don’t want to leave them but at the same time I want to get out of the city.

To where?
We like Naples, Florida. I like Asheville, North Carolina—beautiful, very friendly, very welcoming.

Tammy, 20, special education tutor: I’m happy! I love living in LA. Yeah, there is stuff that’s wrong but its just your perspective. There’s two sides to it. Sure there’s homeless people and like, there’s murders, but if you’re doing your own thing and spending time with people you enjoy spending time with you can be happy in miserable LA. I’m pretty satisfied.

What makes you satisfied?
My friends. My family makes me happy. I don't know. I like the beach, marijuana. I like clubbing. Vanguard, Avalon, Rage. Bar Sinister on Saturdays. The Viper Room. I’m into 80s and 90s punk. I haven’t been to a show in a while. I look for crowds. If the crowd doesn’t have a good vibe, if I walk in and I’m like, "ehhhh?" And people think they know the music but they don’t? Not into it. I guess I’m more on the positive side? Some people are too miserable. I don’t know why they’re miserable though. You should look up at the stars at night.

You can’t see the stars in LA.
Yeah, once you get out of LA, you can see the stars. 

Ken, 47, floral designer: It took me a long time but now after 25 years I feel happy. My days are up, down, up, down. I worked today, so that was good. Happiness can be a lot of things; basically being comfortable. For me, I grew up very poor so being in LA, there’s everything here. I get to be around celebrities and rich people every day of my life. People respect me. You have to have something going on or else you will fail. LA can be tough but any city is tough. I lived in Chicago, Miami, you know. This is the longest place I’ve been which is a testament, I guess.

Jessica, 26, location scout: Well, it’s because half of the people come to LA to pursue their career and half of them end up waitressing. It’s talent—half the people out here don’t have it, in my opinion.

Do you have friends that are like that?
Some of my friends are those people. They think they can come here and wait around for something to come, and it doesn’t.  Most people in my world are miserable, but that’s because most of my friend base works at a specific location that doesn’t give them any sort of future growth and so they’re just stuck there.

Ashley, 26, student: I think people are unhappy because of the air quality and the food choices. Especially in my neighborhood, like, within a square mile, there’s [nothing but fast food], another fried chicken place, a taco place where I fucking find metal in my food, and I’m trying to be vegetarian, vegan. It’s fucked up. It’s a food desert. When they chop down the 14 acre—off of 41st & Alameda—it didn’t allow our air to be cleansed, and a lot of the industrial stuff happens down there. So that’s why I’m unhappy.  I don't know about everybody else. We need a big-ass air purifier. What was that movie from the 90s with Pauly Shore?

BioDome?
Yeah. We need to figure that shit out. Like, I take the bus and when I get off the train, I walk past a lot of car shops doing shit they have no business doing. The air is nasty.

Matt, 28, puppeteer/writer/retail clerk: 40 percent sounds high, but is that 60 percent who don’t think they’re miserable? But it’s a daily grind. Getting out there every day—having to work retail jobs and waitressing—you can do that to any part of the country, but you moved out here to do what you want to do. I was miserable before LA. I moved out here to be with someone and that fell apart recently so right now I have higher misery. Before that I was in Pennsylvania, in just a shitty town, not doing much, especially with writing and puppeteering—so moving out here made sense when I was with someone. And now I’m still working toward those goals, but it was better a few months ago when I was still with someone. So now, I’m more miserable, and I guess LA helped contribute to that. On the other hand, I am happier, career-wise. I’m moving forward; slowly, but moving forward.

@grantpa

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of “1984,” the Orwellian commercial that introduced the Mac computer to the world. It was a new level of bombast not just for tech advertising, but the whole damn ad industry. And with a production cost of $900,000, it started the grand American tradition of spending staggering amounts of money on Super Bowl ads, a custom that will be carried on this Sunday by approximately 50 vastly inferior commercials.

The Ridley Scott-directed spot doesn’t seem like a huge deal when watched today, but those of us who saw it when it first aired during Super Bowl XVIII responded with a collective: “What the FUCK did I just see?” The internet wasn’t a thing yet, so you couldn’t replay it immediately, but we did see it again (and again) later, on news programs.

We didn’t see the little details everybody knows about now, like the line drawing of the Mac computer logo on the tank top of the hammer-throwing heroine (played by actress Anya Major, an experienced discus thrower). And we didn’t know all the weird facts about it, like how many of the bald minion extras were, ironically, London skinheads.

The ad market-tested terribly, but the Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—loved the spot, presumably because of its comparison between IBM and Big Brother. Apple’s board of directors, on the other hand, hated it and wanted to fire Chiat/Day, the ad agency responsible. Luckily Jobs’ reputation as a control freak was already true 30 years ago, and the commercial led to the sales of over $150 million worth of Macs by the end of April 1984. (It should be noted that the follow-up 1985 Super Bowl Mac ad, “Lemmings,” was a flop.)

THINK DIFFERENT

Jump to 1997: Apple launched their inspiring (albeit grammatically incorrect) “Think Different” campaign. This was the advertising that put Apple on the path to becoming the tech leader it is today.

Two versions of the campaign’s anchor TV commercial, “The Crazy Ones,” were produced: one narrated by Steve Jobs (which never aired), and another by Richard Dreyfuss. The basic text of the commercials was stolen from Jack Kerouac’s writings. But that’s what good ad people do: “borrow” from other disciplines. The campaign ran for five years and included posters depicting a variety of "different thinkers" like Alfred Hitchcock, Amelia Earhart, and Nelson Mandela.

Some of the many poster ads from the “Think Different” campaign

GET A MAC

Jump to 2006: The next noteworthy Apple campaign was the “Get a Mac” TV ads featuring Justin Long as a Mac and John Hodgman as a PC. Sixty-six commercials were produced in the three-plus year campaign. (Aside from the actors’ fees, they were almost comically cheap to make.)

While the ads were panned by some critics as mean-spirited and off-putting, the campaign was another success and increased sales dramatically. Love them or hate them, viewers looked forward to each new ad. That is the phenomenon a good Big Idea creates.

And that is the last Big Idea Apple has had.

"Your Verse" 2014

This is the latest Apple ad, “Your Verse,” for the iPad Air. Critics more reputable than me like it. I do not. It’s not a terrible ad (especially compared to last year’s commercials—see below), but it’s not a good one, either.

It’s one of Robin Williams’ speeches from Dead Poets Society. There are Walt Whitman quotes read over quick cuts of a bunch of people using an iPad in ways you and I never will. Here’s a funny but very true infographic that perfectly illustrates this commercial.

What it comes off as is an ad by Apple, for Apple. Plus, it’s wholly unoriginal.

Levi’s already did the epic Walt Whitman thing backin 2009, and it used Walt Whitman’s actual voice. You can bet that TBWA (Apple’s ad agency) was very aware of this industry-famous spot while shooting.

Besides being unoriginal and not having anything near a Big Idea, Apple appears caught between doing product ads and image ads, so they’re trying to do both with one ad, and that all adds up to bad ads, one right after another.

Speaking of which...

"Our Signature" 2013

There are so many perplexing copy lines in this God-awful, depressing 2013 spot, starting from the ominous opening, “This is it” (WHAT is it? And what is IT?). But this one: “every idea we touch enhances each life it touches” is a humdinger. Really, you hubristic fucking assholes? And the somber voiceover/music combo piped into elevators would sell a shit-ton of Effexor.

"Intention" 2013

This was a companion ad to “Our Signature.” Astonishingly it is even more arrogant, confusing, depressing, and just plain awful. You’ll notice they double down on the go-fuck-yourself-consumer “every idea we touch enhances each life it touches” mantra. But also note some of the other copy lines:

• “…then we begin to craft around our intention…” What about, you know, your customers’ intentions?

• “…only then, do we sign our work.” Good for you, Francis fucking Bacon.

• Lastly, if you—or anybody—ever confuse “convenience” with “joy,” then you are a goddamn joyless automaton.

All cursing aside, these feel like ads made for Apple’s C-level muckamucks, not for you and me. Apple is currently a brand with no voice, no look, no Big Idea—just a bunch of one-off ads. If I had to sum them up in one word—a popular thing marketing consultants do when making those bullshit PowerPoint decks they charge big money for—it would be: UNCERTAINTY (like so, in Apple’s Myriad typeface).

Rumor has it Apple may be running an ad in this Sunday’s game, probably to somehow commemorate the “1984” ad (my guess). If they do I’d be willing to bet it will be nothing iconic or creative or even original.

I know you’re happy with your stock price, Mr. Tim Cook, but if I were you, I’d strongly consider taking a look at some other people’s advertising pitches. I’ve got some ideas, Tim, and I’ll go against that has-been hippie Lee Clow any fucking day of the week.

Image via

In LA, we know our region cycles between El Niño years and drought years, but we don't have many bone-dry years. Right now is the driest the region has been in 163 years of formal record keeping. It's also probably the driest it's been in 500 years, and a sign of LA's bleak future. The word "drought" has lost all meaning to us though. Our utilities have done a brilliant job of keeping us comfortable, with plentiful running water, while every part of our region without plumbing wilts to a crisp.

Talk to older Southern Californians and they'll throw up finger quotes when they use the word "drought." They'll blame politicians and environmentalists for droughts as though they control the weather. In Sacramento, there's so much finger-pointing and leftover bitterness from the last drought, or the one before, or the one before that, that we forget to notice that our hills are on fire, bears are wandering into our cities, our air is toxic, and some of our unique flora and fauna face extinction in months, not years.

Screencap via

When Governor Jerry Brown declared a statewide drought emergency, he told us all we need to use 20 percent less water. Local news reports about the drought are idiotic, and basically tell you what products to buy. Reporters tend to parrot the talking points provided to them. Debbie Arrington of the Sacramento Bee urges you to conserve in the well-intentioned article, "Drought makes water saving a household necessity." It features advice like, "A 20 percent cut represents 76 gallons. Think of it as two loads of laundry or seven short showers."

Great. Saving water and putting less strain on the water districts is a good thing to do. However, my toilet is already so low-flow it just asks my turds nicely to go down the drain. My showerhead is like standing under a sleeping baby.

Granted, local news is just supposed to be a comforting slurry of news-flavored distraction, and I really don't believe it needs to shake viewers into some kind of environmentalist hysteria. Still, there's a point at which telling people to plant native flowers available at your local Lowe's goes from mawkish and bland to Orwellian. I've been hearing the conservation message since I was in kindergarten and it all runs together. Conservation is a small part of the story this year.

So what's the "story," smart guy?

The story is that LA is California’s drain hole. The imperative to keep our megalopolis going comes with zero regard for what that costs the surrounding region. LA is piped into the rest of the state's water supply via the Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct—named after our current governor's father. The state is a tangle of water conveyance channels and pipes, with farmers, politicians, and environmentalists fighting the same water war William Mulholland fought almost a hundred years ago. Driving up the I-5 freeway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you'll pass huge banners on fallow fields reading, "End the Congress Created Dust Bowl," and "Food Grows Where Water Flows." The farmers get furious about losing water rights to other farmers, or worst of all, endangered species.

The Los Angeles water supply hangs from a gossamer thread, but for all we know, we're flush with water. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), says we're prepared. Here in Los Angeles, we hardly care about local rainfall. While explaining his job to me, a former Southern California water district official confided that the people who manage water utilities in Southern California are so focused on the buying and selling of water that a rainy year is something of an irritation. Despite their valiant attempts to capture the rain, most of it gets channeled into the sea, which is a frustrating waste that they lament as they return to buying from a wholesaler.

To try and understand the situation, I talked to LADWP spokesperson Jane Galbraith about this. "The Los Angeles Aqueduct is providing 20 percent of our water this year,” she told me, referring to the Mulholland-designed aqueduct that conveys water from an area just north of our city. “It provides 75 percent in a wet year," she went on. As for the rest? "We're buying water from Metropolitan Water District," she explained. "They're the wholesaler. We'll be buying 80 percent from Met." Buying from a wholesaler is more expensive than using the water that just flows in from the Owens Valley that supplies The Los Angeles Aqueduct, so prices will go up, but at the moment, there's no real danger of running out. In theory.

But where does this mysterious Metropolitan Water District get its seemingly limitless supply of water? Partly it's from the California Aqueduct, which flows down from NorCal. But what really keeps our fountains pointlessly flowing here in Southern California is the Colorado River Aqueduct.

The decline of the Colorado River via

"On [offshoots of] the Colorado River, they're built huge reservoirs: Lake Mathews, Lake Skinner, Diamond Valley Lake." These popular recreation lakes are big enough to surf in, but they're really just some of the world's largest water storage facilities. So Metropolitan Water District has water for Los Angeles, and every other county in Southern California. "They've never reported a shortage for Los Angeles," Galbraith told me, without adding the word "yet."

Despite recent flooding in Colorado, the Colorado River is in a drought of its own. That is especially terrifying, when you realize that the Colorado River has already been in decline for decades. But you'd never know it by looking at the huge lakes we call revervoirs. We're legally entitled, along with smaller cities like San Diego and Phoenix, to drink a set amount of the Colorado River each year, which lets us feel blameless, even as we read stories about the Mighty Colorado becoming a creek, and Lake Mead disappearing by 2017 over our morning coffee made of water that's piped in from those very places.

Screencap via CBS

Wait. Why does LA get to drain the Colorado River?

For almost a hundred years, we’ve been preparing for a dire water apocalypse, and this is it. We're draining our vast reservoirs to stay alive for the time being, but we're not acknowledging that our city got here through feats of engineering combined with chicanery, fraud, and hubris in the first place.

If you learned everything you know about the history of LA’s water from Chinatown, you've had a taste, but you don't know much. Pre-Columbian Los Angeles had enough water for a fishing settlement where the not-so-mighty Los Angeles River trickled into the sea. Later, western settlers turned it into a bunch of connected commercial areas, and then a big, sprawling town, but there wasn't, and isn't, and never will be enough naturally occurring water here to sustain a world-class metropolis. Then an Irish huckster named William Mulholland moved in.

Mulholland was a self-taught engineer overseeing the flow of water into LA via a makeshift ditch put in place by the Spanish. Managing LA's water meant Mulholland combated drought every few years. He and his boss, Frederick Eaton, the 24th mayor of LA, saw bigger things for the City of Angels, and were willing to lie, cheat and steal to make them happen. All Mulholland and Eaton had to do was trick the farmers of the Owens Valley, north of LA, into giving up the rights to their own water.

Eventually, the farmers got wise, and waged economic warfare via price hikes, which Mulholland resisted. They waged a bloodless resistance campaign against Mulholland that newspapers called "California's Little Civil War." In response, Mulholland sent a small army, and gave them shoot-to-kill orders. Later, Mulholland pulled a similar prank on communities to LA's northwest by building the St. Francis Dam. That time, however, the war wasn't bloodless. The dam failed immediately following an inspection by Mulholland, and as many as 600 people died.

Still, Los Angeles, with its now plentiful water, expanded and became the way-too-spread-out city it is today, all because the 20th Century was a wet century. The 21st Century is looking dry.

Image via

So we should do what? Give the water back?

The environmentalist in me can't justify diverting more water from the Sacramento River Delta, like in Jerry Brown's contentious twin tunnel plan, but as a human, my fellow humans need water. Similarly, the Colorado River once fed a brackish ecosystem near the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. That's all ancient history now, and that delta is barely a trickle. We're doing the same for every source of water in the Southwest. We need every drop for ourselves. To accommodate the perverse placement of our human settlements, we're second-guessing the knowledge of erosion and remaking our state's waterways in the manner of our choosing.

In short, we've been flipping off Mother Nature for a century, but we're still losing. Maybe we can't have a city here after all. Time to pack up and go, everyone. We gave it our best shot.

Of course, my proposal to dismantle and relocate Los Angeles probably won't be popular.

What now?

California's natural beauty is going to shrivel up sooner than humanity here will. An ecologist named Craig Allen told National Geographic a few years ago, "The projections are that Joshua trees may not survive in Joshua Tree National Park. Sequoias may not survive in Sequoia National Park." We may have to start weighing the idea of irrigating our national parks.

LA's air quality, something that was improving my whole life, is now taking a nosedive. It had been nice finding out that Los Angeles had a skyline, but forest fires and low humidity are bringing back smog in a big way. The Inland Empire, the area of the LA suburbs where I'm from, is starting to get dust storms. We're being told not to have fires in our fireplaces. Clinics are starting to treat people for pollution-related breathing problems, potentially leading to greater numbers of smog-related deaths.

Never fear, though. Thanks to snow machines, we can ski. Our fake lawns will remain green. Saveh20.org has fun garden ideas. We can be prepared for this drought, Los Angeles.

@MikeLeePearl

Elisabeth Moss and Jason Schwartzman in Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip.

Jason Schwartzman, who is, in fact, an absolutely lovely man, stars as the titular, cantankerous young writer in Alex Ross Perry’s third directorial effort, Listen Up Philip. In the opening narration, Philip—set to release his sure-to-succeed second novel—is given license to speak his mind and, boy, does he ever. From the onset, Philip's narcissism and pettiness bloom under a much-desired need to be right. The city, his girlfriend, and the publishers he once loved now seem like they're closing in on him, asking too much, and swallowing him whole. With each passing complaint, Philip grows stronger and more assured in his spite, until he finally takes up his mentor's advice and moves to the country to try and focus his anger into another novel.

Listen Up Philip works as a triptych and reads like a novel. The opening introduces Philip, a man with great potential to succeed and even greater potential to lose it. The middle examines the life of his girlfriend, Ashley—Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men—who has everything but love. The final third of the film centers around Philip's idol, Ike Zimmerman, a 70-year-old writer played perfectly by Jonathan Pryce [Brazil].

The witty, fast-paced dialogue that fueled Alex's previous feature, The Color Wheel, is even more heightened here. The quiet moments seem out of place—if Philip were to stop talking, he might as well give up.

The day after Listen Up Philip premiered at Sundance this year, I interviewed Alex and Jason about the film. The interview was set up in an abandoned building, furnished only by a fold-out table crammed with too many chairs and a vase of scraggly flowers. It would have been the ideal place for Philip’s character to write—simple, clean, quiet, and away from the hubbub of celebrities and adoring fans.

Before I started asking questions Jason peeked at Alex’s phone and asked what he was looking at. Alex quickly said, "Reviews of the movie." Then he turned to me and apologized (something Philip would never do).

"Eight point nine on film.com," Alex said. "My livelihood depends on this." 

"All of our livelihood’s do," Jason replied.

VICE: Alex, why did you think anyone would be interested in a biopic about yourself?
Alex Ross Perry: That’s a very humorous first question. There are so many aspects of people’s personalites or things they do where I think, What is it that makes these people tick? The actions, behavior, and the peculiarities of what everyone does in the movie are things I see around me. I wonder, How does this guy get away with this? What allows him to live a life where he’s basically unpunished and unchanged for never learning a single lesson and everything is fine despite that? It’s not really me, hopefully. But I think by putting everything in the movie, I’ll avoid doing half of these things, should the threat ever arise.

Did you see Jason as that character, or just someone who is a good actor?
Philip is a miserable, mean-spirited guy on paper. If we wanted the character like that on screen, we would have gotten someone like Joaquin Phoenix, who's an intense, dangerous-seeming person. But then people would be like, "Jesus, I don’t know about this guy. I don’t know if I can watch this movie. This guy seems like he’s crazy." There's no way for the movie to work unless Philip is likeable. He’s not likable on the page, so he has to be likable on the screen. How can we do that without changing the character? Jason could do that.

Jason Schwartzman: I remember we were having dinner and I said we should make this movie. Alex was like, "Really? You’re one of two people who could do this." I’ve always wondered who that other guy was. I don’t know if I want to know. 

Alex: I acted in my last movie, and I was aware of my—I wouldn’t even say limitations—but my lack of possibilities as a performer. People assumed I was going to act in this, but it was too stressful. It makes me a bad director, and it wouldn’t have worked for the character. I’m too negative. We needed a character with a soft disposition, or to be likable in some way. When I sent the script to Jason, I felt like a B-minus student applying to Harvard, thinking, Maybe they’ll accidentally put my application in the right pile.

Jason: Aw, that’s so nice.

Alex: We never knew how big this movie was going to be. My last movie was made for $30,000. We didn’t know if we’d make this one for $100,000 or what. Also, I didn't know anything about how one begins a conversation with actors like this. I didn't cast anyone in my other films unless I could personally send them a text and take advantage of their time. But this clearly was the most central part of the film—what pulse does Philip put out, what energy does he have? Jason was the first person to agree to do the movie. At that point, other actors read the script knowing that he would be reading the lines. They knew exactly what type of film this was going to be. Elisabeth Moss came on next.

Elisabeth’s character, Ashley, is odd compared to Philip. Everything is going great for her, except for Philip, who’s struggling with many conflicts (albeit self-generated) throughout the film. What about him is so irresistible to her?
I’m consistently surprised by the level of shitheadery women look past in favor of talent and charisma. Philip isn't having an identity crisis—he’s just completely miserable. He knows who he is, he knows what he wants to do, and he knows that he’s good at it. That’s something that women seem to be attracted to. It’s so weird how you can have five or six women in the movie who all seem to be interested in him in one way or another. But I’m like, That’s crazy, he’s a mean guy, he’s not nice. But Philip is talented, he’s funny, and he’s not some mean schlub—he tucks in his shirt and puts on a jacket. You can look past the fact that he’s going to yell at you because there’s something about the brain of people who are talented and respected that people find very attractive. That’s a big question that I wanted to work through with this film.

Jason: I’m not the greatest person to ask about this. I sit there with my wife on the couch on a Sunday afternoon asking her, "Do girls like it when...?" and she’s like, "I don’t speak for all women!" I've definitely seen terrible relationships, but I have all kinds—some good, some more confused. When we were doing this movie, we had to get to this point where Philip could just do some of these terrible things. Because I would always be like, "God, I can’t believe he would do this."  We would both think, "I can’t believe he would say that to her." I’d ask Alex how Philip should react when someone says this or that... "Does he feel a little bit?" Alex would just say, "No." Philip is an extreme character. One thing that’s interesting in the movie, in the opening narration it explains that this is new for Philip—he usually bottles things up. This is the first time in his life when he’s speaking his mind.

Alex: Yeah, I said we needed to look at it like someone trying drugs for the first time. Philip is a guy who was on the straight and narrow and it was not really working for him. Then someone said, "Just try it," and by the end of the movie, he’s coked out of his mind and asleep in an opium den like in Once Upon a Time in America because he got so completely lost in the haze of abuse.  

Jason: He’s disconnected. It sneaks up on you. Philip was going to experiment with being cold, but before he knew it, he was already there. You always hear about how bodybuilders were puny growing up, getting bullied, and then they got big. Philip is a body builder in a different sense.

An emotionally-abusive builder. He always does the wrong thing, but he lets people know why he’s doing it. The film uses narration instead of expositional dialogue, but Philip’s assholism is also a form of exposition. 
Alex: I think it’d be hard for people to accept some of that behavior on its own terms, unless you knew beyond any doubt that the character was fully aware of what he’s doing. Philip knows he’s being an asshole.

Listen audience, we know this character’s a shitty guy. He knows he’s a shitty guy. But look at how happy he is to know that. He’s smiling. Don’t point out that this character is really mean to people. We know that. Clearly, the film is aware of that. Please do not think that that is something that you’re not supposed to connect with.

Do you think a woman could ever play this character?
Alex: At one point, years ago, before any producer was ever attached to this script, I had an idea that I should just flip the gender of every character. I wondered what that would be like—what a weird movie that would be. I don’t understand anything about women. I don’t know if women have this sort of relationship. Philip’s relationship with Ike, played by Jonathan Pryce, is so masculine. There’s so much male ego in it. I don't know if that relationship exists between women. Maybe just because I don’t know anything about women and I’ve never seen that in a movie before. The biggest question for Jason, Elisabeth and me before we shot was, "Why are these people together?" Within two days of filming, after seeing what Elisabeth was bringing, I realized they’re together because they’re the same person. Separated, she acts exactly the same as Philip, but when they’re together it’s like two ends of a battery. They don’t connect, because they have the same charge. 

Are you guys similar to Philip in the sense that you hide away in your room after a bad review?
Jason: I am.

Alex: You just saw me looking for the reviews people put out. 

Jason: Maybe that means you don’t give a shit? 

Alex: I’m so aware of what people have disliked about other things I’ve made that I’m curious about what people will not like about this one. It’s not going to bum me out. My last movie was certainly despised by many and beloved by several. You can make a movie where some people say it misses the mark, but if it’s a piece of work that’s clearly going to be canon to someone, then nothing else matters. 

Jason: I get really bummed out. Obviously, no one can like everything you do, but I always think, Aren’t there things that come out that everyone loves? I wonder what that feels like. 

Not everyone is going to love it.
It’s true. But I will take it personally. I don’t like it when it feels personal. I’ve read reviews where it feels like an attack, and I’m like, "I thought we were talking about my movie, but now you’re talking about my face. I can’t do anything about my face."

Well, you can…
And then they’d write about that! Someone said to me, "You play a real jerk in this movie. What was that like?" But I’ve been in movies before where people have said the same thing and I wasn’t trying to play an asshole. It’s funny—whatever thing you give off, like listening to your voice on an answering machine and realizing it sounds high and getting embarrassed. Or you read a review of yourself and you think Gosh, I didn’t realize that I did that to people—that I offended people in that way.

Alex: I’m at a point that Philip isn't at yet. I know what I made and I don't care whether you like it or not. This is exactly what I wanted to do.

Great job.

Photo via Flickr user mardi_grass_2010

In a New Yorker profile published this month, President Obama admitted that marijuana was not that bad and the enforcement of anti-weed laws was skewed against minorities. Similarly, on Thursday Texas Governor Rick Perry voiced his support for decriminalizing marijuana and letting states craft drug laws free of federal intervention. On January 16, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he had changed his mind and that medical marijuana was a fine thing after all. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who was trying to drown his state’s medical marijuana program in the bathtub not three months ago, spent part of his inaugural address delivered on January 21 promising to end the war on drugs. New York Senator Chuck Schumer just said on MSNBC that states should be allowed to “experiment” with legalization. What the hell is happening? How did the war on drugs go from a fringe issue five or six years ago to this current race to out-chill your political competitors when it comes to weed policy? It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems like Americans as a whole have decided that marijuana should be legal (or at least partially legal), while our leaders’ views have lagged behind. Now we’ve reached a tipping point where it’s safe for elected officials to embrace an end to prohibition—politicians’ minds aren’t changing, but poll numbers are.

Remember how Obama’s views on gay marriage “evolved” from wanting to legalize gay marriage, to changing his mind once he decided to run for president, then changing his mind again once he realized how many Americans were fine with gay marriage? His views on weed are an echo of that—young “choom gang” Barack would have favored legalization, but his older, more electable self would have thrown Barack the teen in prison. Clearly, Obama knows it’s wrong that marijuana is illegal, but his excruciatingly slow journey toward not being an asshole hypocrite on drugs is a little bit less than honest—when the White House issued a post–New Yorker clarification that the president had no interest in changing the laws, only fine-tuning them, it was obvious that his rhetoric is about testing the political safety of being anti-prohibition, not actual reform.

Well, the reformers are winning even without Obama on their side, and someday other drug laws may be liberalized as well. But when that happens,we’ll still have a few hundred thousand prisoners who are casualties of this idiotic war. And when they’re finally freed, the same politicians who helped put them there will be fighting over credit for who wanted to let them out most.

Here are this week’s bad cops:

-Las Vegas police officer Jesus Arevalo was fired nearly two years after he shot an unarmed Gulf War veteran who was suffering from PTSD, but the cop can now collect disability checks for life, so we can stop worrying about him. Stanley Gibson, the veteran, who suffered from anxiety and paranoia and was off his meds, died on December 12, 2011, after driving to an apartment complex where he didn’t live and residents called the cops. The responding officers pinned his vehicle between two police cruisers, and one officer fired beanbag rounds at Gibson—then Arevalo, mistaking that for life ammunition, fired his semiautomatic weapon, hitting Gibson four times and killing him. Eighteen months after the shooting, Arevalo filed for disability status due to “stress” and soon began receiving 31 percent of his former paycheck from the state Public Employees’ Retirement System. The exact amount he gets is not public, but based on previous wages, the Las Vegas Review-Journal estimates that Arevalo will be paid around $28,000 a year for the rest of his life. He also collected something like $183,000 for his 22 months of paid suspension during the investigation into the shooting. Arevalo, who in February was charged with harassment and disturbing the peace over an incident with his ex-wife, is not barred from working elsewhere either.

-The November arrest of Norman Gurley taught us all that having an empty secret compartment in your vehicle is illegal in the state of Ohio. Gurley was pulled over for speeding, at which point the police saw “wires” leading to the compartment and smelled, but could not find, marijuana. A brand new state law prohibited hidden compartments that are used or intended to be used to transport drugs, so if prosecutors have their way Gurley, who was the first person ever arrested of this crime in Ohio, will be indicted by a grand jury, though Gurley plans to challenge the law under Fourth Amendment grounds. In the meantime, according to John Ross, a researcher for the libertarian law firm the Institute for Justice, Virginia is considering a similarly bizarre law. If it passes, “knowingly” possessing a vehicle with a secret compartment will be a Class Six felony that could send offenders to prison for up to five years. Ross also notes that Virginia has especially lax asset forfeiture laws that allow police to keep seized cash or other items with only the most tenuous connection to a (sometimes not even proven) crime.

-Last week’s baffling acquittal of the Fullerton, California, police officers in the Kelly Thomas murder trial was one hint that even when prosecutors attempt to hold law enforcement accountable, the people may not be up to the task. Here’s another hint: on Tuesday, a grand jury refused to indict former Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, police officer Randall Kerrick for voluntary manslaughter. The trial was over events that occurred early in the morning of September 14, when former college football player Jonathan A. Ferrell got into a car accident and knocked on a stranger’s door in order to ask for help. The homeowner didn’t recognize him, so she called the police. Three officers arrived, thinking they were responding to a break-in. Though dashcam footage of the incident has never been released (and may not have been part of the evidence presented to the grand jury), cops said that Ferrell refused requests to put his hands up and continued to advance on the officers. On the other hand, Kerrick was the only one of the three cops who fired his weapon—a total of 12 shots, ten of which hit Farrell, who died. The grand jury requested that prosecutors submit evidence to try for a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.

-On Tuesday, a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) detective was shot by his colleagues during a raid on a robbery suspect’s apartment in Dublin, California, and thee shooting does not seem to have been captured on any police body cameras. Five plainclothes detectives, two uniformed officers, and a sheriff’s deputy went to 20-year-old John Henry Lee’s apartment on suspicion that he had violated his probation. It turned out Lee had been arrested the week before, but in the course of the raid BART Detective Sergeant Tommy Smith was fatally shot in the chest by fellow detective Michael Maes. It has not yet been confirmed whether Maes thought Smith was Lee, or whether the discharge of the weapon was entirely accidental, but either way it should have been filmed by the cameras the officers are required to have on their persons at all times.

- Our Good Cop of the Week award goes to Rogersville, Tennessee, police officer Chris Price, who responded to reports of a suicidal 18-year-old woman on Wednesday night. According to the Kingsport Times-News, Price got to the address in two minutes, which was just in time to cut the unconscious woman down from the scarves she had attempted to hang herself with in the carport. That’s the kind of officer we like to see, someone who turns up just in time to stop a temporary state of mind from becoming a permanent tragedy.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

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

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

Read an interview with Natalia and Alexandra from the December issue of VICE, here.