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What I Did When My Daughter Asked to Be Circumcised

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This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia

"Mom, I wanna join a mass circumcision!"

If this sentence came out of my five-year-old boy's mouth—whom I call Cah Ganteng (Handsome Kid)—I would've been indifferent. But this came from my daughter—a young girl who is barely ten years old. I was shocked, and at a loss for words.

I'm a single mother of two working to earn my college degree in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. My children live in Makassar with my parents. I told my parents to raise their grandchildren as they see fit, and, because of this, I was instantly curious as to why my daughter wanted to be circumcised. What the hell would prompt a nine-year-old girl to ask me this?

I quickly called my mom. Apparently the idea wasn't hers alone. The Islamic kindergarten my boy attends was holding a mass circumcision for girls. My mom thought it would be a good idea to listen to the advice of local Islamic preachers and have my daughter circumcised.

My mother and I were soon in an intense debate. Neither of us budged from our convictions. I told my mother about the negative effects of female genital mutilation (FGM), citing the World Health Organization (WHO) to back up my argument. My mom simply stuck to her religious convictions. Unfortunately, none of my arguments worked. My mother insisted that my daughter needed to be circumcised.

I didn't know what to do. I eventually just told her, "I don't know what else to say. I'll leave it up to you mom. But to be honest, as a mother myself, I wholeheartedly do not want my daughter to be circumcised." Something about this softened my mother's resolve. She refused to back down from her religious beliefs, but she agreed to delay the discussion until a later date.

My friend Irma Susanti Irsyadi, who works as a foreign language teacher, said that her daughter's circumcision left her traumatized. "I felt really sorry for my eldest daughter," she said. "I had just become a parent and I was inexperienced. There were a lot of people who told me that girls had to be circumcised and I just followed along.

"My husband and I went to a midwife and asked her to circumcise our first child. I had no idea what the exact process was, but when she came out of the room my daughter was sobbing. After that, I looked into the history of female circumcision and I immediately regretted our decision."

Irma and her husband agreed to never let another daughter get circumcised.

Worldwide, some 200 million female circumcisions were performed in 2015, according to WHO data. At least 60 million of those were here in Indonesia. The WHO considers FGM violence against women and calls for the global eradication of the practice.

The Indonesian government doesn't release official statistics on female circumcision, said Wiyarni Pambudi, a doctor and an expert on female circumcision. She explained that the practice in Indonesia was far less invasive than in other countries. Antiseptic is applied to the vagina and then a needle is used to scratch the skin of the clitoral hood. But even a minor procedure like this isn't exactly safe, Wiyarni explained.

"In Indonesia, health professionals aren't taught about female circumcision," she said. "The problem here is that the is lack of any actual information on the female circumcisions performed by traditional healers. Since there's so little information out there, there is no way to guarantee that it's safe. It could be safe, or it could not be safe at all."

Still, a lot of medical professionals in Indonesia perform female circumcisions in order to maintain a good relationship with their clients, Wiyarni said.

I decided to dig deeper. I went to see Tunggal Pawestri, an activist and mother from South Jakarta. When her daughter was born in 2006, the Ministry of Health had banned female circumcision in hospitals—arguing that the practice was unsafe. Tunggal was lying in her hospital bed shortly after giving birth when she heard the nurses decline to circumcise a woman's newborn girl.

"I was giving birth at a hospital in Jakarta, not in some rural area," she said. "I realized then that there are a lot of parents who want their children to be circumcised as soon as they're born."

Religion continues to be a strong motivator. When the Ministry of Health banned the practice, the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI) criticized the central government, arguing that Islamic practice recommended female circumcision for all Muslim girls. The ministry relented in 2010 and allowed certain medical professionals to perform female circumcision. In 2013, the ministry's ban on female circumcision was lifted entirely.

Tunggal researches female circumcision at the the center for the study of gender and sexuality at the University of Indonesia. Half of the mothers surveyed said their daughters were circumcised. They said their daughters circumcised because they wanted to follow religious teachings, conform to cultural traditions, or because boys were also circumcised.

Activists need to approach religious leaders at big Islamic organizations like Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah to discuss the matter, Tunggal said.

"Other than that, we have to hold a lot of workshops, campaigns, outreach, and public discussions to educate people about female rights," she said.

In Indonesia, the topic is a point of contention among several Islamic clerics. Some say the act is sunnah (rewarding) but others say it is mubah (not required). Mahbub Maafi, the steward of Pusat Lembaga Bahtsul Masail at Nahdlatul Ulama told me that, personally, he couldn't support a ban on the practice.

"The ban doesn't have a strong theological foundation," Mahbub said. "This restriction is not in accordance to Sharia Law unless it is seen as painful to the victims."

But Mahbub believes that something needs to be done to make the practice safer and less painful.

"What's important is to establish clarity regarding the practice of female circumcision," he said. "The medical experts would know this better. There needs to be a more humane practice."

I thought of my own daughter. All too often young girls undergo the procedure without having enough information to make the right decision. My mother might change her mind in the future, but I decided that this is my daughter's decision. I plan to tell her everything I learned, explaining all the data and dangers of female circumcision. When she's older, she can look over all the information and make a decision on her own. I'll support her regardless of her decision. Our bodies belong to us and us alone.

Indanavetta Putri is a single mother, a lover of short movies, and a freelance writer.


What I Learned About Sex from Watching a Load of Old Erotica

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A still from documentary The Showman, available on BFI Player in the Pleasure Principle collection

You're at a funfair, with all the usual bits. Kids scream on a ferris wheel in the distance. Tinny carnivalesque music plays from speakers hidden on a carousel. And two young women in wigs, wearing bikini tops and tiny skirts thrust their hips and wiggle about on a raised stage under a twinkling sign that reads "STRIPTEASE GOLDEN GARTER".

It's not quite the sort of fairground entertainment you'd find today, but sets the scene in a short 1970s documentary called The Showman. The titular character "really is one of the last showmen in England" according to his frequently knitting wife, and he spends his nights enticing passersby to his adults-only show in a fake American accent before throwing axes and flaming swords at a wall, inches from the faces, necks and boobs of those two young women. One of them starts off in her bikini and ends up completely naked bar the blond wig and a smearing of glittery eyeshadow. Again: not quite your regular local park funfair.

Another shot from The Showman

This is just one of many films from the BFI's Pleasure Principle collection. It's part of a five-year Britain on Film project, where 10,000 films are being digitised and put online by 2017 in collaboration with the UK's national and regional film archives. With a mix of short burlesque reels, documentaries and feature-length films from the 1980s to 1990s, this particular collection goes back and considers what used to be an accepted depiction of erotica onscreen, and how far filmmakers could push against the censorship of the time. When you look at the wide smiles and twinkling eyes of the young men in the audience – and the blank stare from one young woman near the front – you get a sense of what accounting for more than a century of sex in film teaches us about society. First, that nudity still makes some of us giggle like schoolkids.

"As a nation, we've always had a bit of a problem with how we think about and talk about sex," says Vic Pratt, a curator at the BFI who put together this selection. "The British way of life, perhaps, historically has been more about sniggering about sexual innuendos than being open and honest about sex and sexuality."

We've all been there: awkwardly laughing through sex ed lessons, chuckling when your biology teacher went into detail while describing the evolution of our reproductive organs. As a general litmus test, sit down and watch a long, graphic sex scene – say, from Nymphomaniac – with your dad and just really let the dynamic between you sink in. I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who grew up telling your parents about who you pulled at a house party the night before, but for the most part we still struggle to talk about sex without the masks of bravado, humour or a squeamish nervousness.

The way we used to watch erotic film lay down the groundwork for our attitudes today. "Originally, short 35mm films were the only ones you could really get," Vic says, "and they would've been shown in back rooms or halls. Nudity was not allowed on screen at all." The rules were so strict, once the British Board of Film Classification (formerly the British Board of Film Censors) was set up in 1912, that filmmakers had to get creative.

"One of the films in the collection is made for artists, from the 1940s, with a disclaimer in the beginning that, 'if anyone supplies this without it being strictly for artists, they're liable for prosecution'." Others got around the censors by sticking to the rule of only being able to show bums and boobs in a "naturist" setting, or one that resembled a nudist camp. It worked wonders for the filmmakers. "You could only really show breasts, and people's flabby bottoms, so it wasn't really an erotic experience – but no one had seen this before, so they were suddenly doing dynamite at the box office."

A still from 1961 short film Burlesque Queen

The public screenings were just one part of the erotica canon. "The others being sold were under-the-counter striptease reels, on 8mm home cinema reels that you'd run on your own projector in your back room," Vic says. "You'd buy it and be given it in a brown paper bag, maybe from the sex shop in town where you'd also buy your dirty books, then take the reel home. It would be someone taking their clothes off in sort of burlesque-style dance, stripping down in her bedroom – something you'd consider quite mild now, but was seen as very disgraceful then."

It's mostly hilarious to imagine a cutesy five-minute burlesque video being seen as the moral rot decaying civilised society. Nowadays, cam girls represent an interactive, specialised and more intimate version of those take-home 8mm reels. There's the old-fashioned strip club for anyone who can't be bothered to watch an erotic dance on film, and your average rom-com, fantasy drama or mumblecore TV show now depicts pseudo-realistic sex in high definition and with an unwavering eye.

An old 1890s film designed for titillation

"I think you can examine the way a society functions at its deepest levels by looking at what it censors, what it chooses not to show," says Barry Forshaw, journalist and author of Sex and Film: The Erotic in British, American and World Cinema. I ask where he thinks our sexual awareness stands today. "Everyone is influenced by the morals of the time and what's acceptable. So we are chuckling at the idea of censorship, but if you look back at Tchaikovsky's letters to his brother – after he'd had some encounter with a nobleman or young rent boy – they'd say: 'I am the most loathsome creature that ever walked the earth.' And he's full of self-loathing because he's gay.

You think if only Tchaikovsky had lived today, he wouldn't have needed that self-loathing. You think, well why didn't he say what later gay men have done, 'I don't care what society says'? I'm not sure any of us are that liberated. You and I are having this conversation and we are laughing about the absurdity of censorship but we are still slightly formed by the attitudes of society. Maybe our job is to liberalise and fight against that."

The government seems to have other ideas. We're living in a time when, since 2014, the state has considered female ejaculation and face-sitting too taboo to show in porn. And with last month's news of the Digital Economy Bill looking to create a database filled with personal information from everyone who has to verify their age to watch porn, we're entering a strange state of contrast.

On the one hand, there's more visual objectification of both women and men's bodies available, from billboards to music videos to Tumblr porn accounts. On the other, the government's trying to crack down on the types of porn starring consenting adults that people can watch. At the root of it all sits the sort of moral panic that arises from a lack of substantial sex education and the vocabulary with which to express thoughts of desire, lust and just wanting to get off. If we grew up with a healthier understanding of our bodies and selves, maybe the health secretary wouldn't be in a flap about trying to stop 17-year-olds sexting each other.

"It's easier than ever to find any kind of pornographic image that you'd want," Vic says. "But at the same time have we, as you say, developed a vocabulary with which to talk about this? Are we any further down the line? Are we now this incredibly liberal society? I don't think we are. If anything, you might suspect that in the general shift to the right, it's going to get harder to talk about these kinds of things in culture, to openly understand and expect our shared differences and beliefs. And maybe sex is one of the areas where, more than ever, we need to be open."

Click here to watch some of the films from the BFI's Pleasure Principle collection

@tnm___

More on VICE:

A Brief History of Actual Sex in Movies

An Illustrated Guide to Why We Fuck the Way We Do

Why I'm Making British Film Censors Watch Paint Dry

Witchsy Is Like Etsy for People Who Want to Sell Jars Full of Fingernails

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Kate Dwyer and Penelope Gazin, founders of Witchsy

Today, artists are increasingly supporting themselves not by selling a small amount of large pieces, but by selling a large amount of enamel pins, patches, and cheaply produced digital prints. It's a neat and proletariat thing that's the inverse of the way the art market has operated for a long time. In other ways, it seems to encourage creatively-minded folks to try to appeal to the lowest common denominator and produce "merch" instead of art. I'm not here to judge, though. Everybody's got to make a living.

For about a decade, the pre-eminent online craft fair has been Etsy. Whereas it may have started off as something sort of like eBay for crafts, it's become many artists' primary means of selling their art and supporting themselves. My sister, Penelope Gazin, is one of those people—an Etsy Queen, if you will.

My sister makes a lot of art that some people would consider offensive, and Etsy has regularly frozen her store when they found something for sale that they felt wasn't family-friendly. This becomes an issue because a corporation like Etsy needs to maintain a clean image, but sometimes art isn't pleasant or inoffensive. When anonymous website moderators can suddenly halt an artist's ability to make money, a fun cool thing becomes a restrictive and shitty thing that can hurt artists and influence them to move into bland ways of doing things.

In response to feeling unnecessarily restricted and stifled by Etsy's changing and controlling rules, my sister joined forces with her friend and bandmate Kate Dwyer to create a website called Witchsy. It's an online marketplace for artists, like Etsy. But unlike Etsy, any artist who sells work on the site have to meet the approval of Kate and Penelope, and they don't restrict what can be sold based on content. Once you're in, you can do whatever you want.

I've watched my sister and her friend who are neither coders or business school grads make an online business from scratch. I'm overwhelmingly proud of what my sister has accomplished, and interviewed her and Kate about their new endeavor. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: How'd you originally meet each other?
Penelope Gazin: We met because my band, Sadwich, played a show with Kate's band, Feeling Feelings. Kate then bullied me into being her friend and I'm very grateful she did.

Kate Dwyer: I call people, leave them voicemails, and call people back. I am truly a relentless bully. I'm also playing bass in Sadwich now and have another music project called Family Pet.

What inspired you to make this website?
Kate Dwyer: We were inspired because we heard Etsy was going to start kicking people off their site for selling "occult" items. Penelope had been selling her art and pins on Etsy for six years and had regular problems with their censorship.

Penelope Gazin: They would shut my shop down once a week each year. Art is my main source of income, and a week is a long time. One time Etsy shut my shop down and wouldn't tell me which of my listings they had a problem with, so I went through my shop and black-barred every painted nipple and curse word and inserted the word "MATURE" to any risque listings. After taking three days to respond to me, Etsy said that I didn't address the listing they had an issue with, which turned out to be a figure drawing where you could see pubic hair.

We thought it would be cool to have a site without censorship, where all the artists are handpicked by us so you don't have to trudge through a ton of crap. We initially thought this would be a really easy side project for us to do, but boy were we wrong.

How's the site doing so far?
Kate Dwyer: It's doing well. It's only a few months old. We're growing it as quickly as we can without compromising our vision. We're completely self-funded and we've almost recouped our development costs.

Penelope Gazin: We've grown a large Instagram following pretty quickly, so it's clearly resonating with people.

It seems goofy to acknowledge that the amount of Instagram followers you have is the truest way of judging someone's cultural currency.
Penelope Gazin: Fifty percent of my income comes from my Instagram following. Instagram is also my primary means of self-promotion. This interview is the first real press we've done for Witchsy. We've put no energy into the marketing of the business yet, so the success Witchsy is seeing is entirely based on our Instagram popularity.

People were messaging us for months asking when we were going to finally launch Witchsy. We were surprised at how excited people were for a thing that didn't exist yet, and it kept us motivated to keep going in the face of adversity. There were three events that caused us to consider throwing in the towel, but Kate just kept focused on the next step we had to take and here we are.

Have you faced any challenges entering the entrepreneurial world as young women?
Kate Dwyer: Being two women entering into the business world poses additional hurdles. There have been numerous times where there's been an undertone of "Are you sure you ladies are up for this? Do you really know what you want?" The frustrating part about being young is that people assume someone else is paying for what we're doing. I would love if we had a Daddy Warbucks footing the bills so we could do whatever we wanted to.

Penelope Gazin: We ended up creating a fake male employee named Keith Mann so we could avoid unsolicited advice on the best way to create our vision. He's still available to chat now about sports, his pregnant wife, or his two crazy lady bosses via keith@witchsy.com.

How many people have you dealt with in the guise of Keith Mann?
Penelope Gazin: Keith steps in anytime we need a little help communicating. We noticed one guy we worked with would use a very different tone when conversing with "Keith," and would start every email addressing Keith by name which he never did with Kate or me. We started to have fun with it, and would include dumb jokes in the emails. He has his own Twitter account, @keithmannjr. We decided he is a very nice, basic businessman in his mid-thirties.

Kate Dwyer: Keith is still on payroll as a consultant.

Besides the name of the site, are you into witch culture?
Penelope Gazin: I enjoy it, but I'm not that into it. Kate is more into it. I'm not Wiccan. Sometimes Kate will text me things like, "My creativity candle exploded today and the glass melted. I brought it into the witch store and they said they'd never seen anything like it and were afraid of me!" Kate's's pretty magical so if anyone has powers it would be her.

Kate Dwyer: Whatever can bring us luck, whether it's candle burning or a crystal altar, I want to believe.

You curate the artists who get to go on Witchsy. Who are your favorite artists on there currently?
Kate Dwyer: We select all of the artists on the site personally, so it's fair to say that we love all of them. Some recent pieces I liked were made by King Drippa, Ali White, NIN3 and Crystroll.

We're currently doing a special collaboration with Porous Walker for an exclusive piece which will be out next week. We're also in early discussions about making a Witchsy nail polish set.

Penelope Gazin: My favorites are Noah Harmon, Officialseanpenn, John F. Malta, Parker Day, and Wizard Skull. We did a collaboration pin with Gary Panter. We also did a collab with this awesome weirdo German artist named Robert Deutsch who I met on Facebook. I felt like I discovered a special little treasure.

What's the "Mystery Pit?"
Penelope: The Mystery Pit is my favorite part of Witchsy's website. It hasn't really caught on yet since I think it only has 50 listings, but I was inspired by Ebay's "Everything Else" page where people would go to sell their hair, socks, and abstract concepts. Ebay has tightened their restrictions on people trying to sell these types of things, so it's not what it once was.

When people ask what the Mystery Pit is, I usually say "nobody knows," but I created it in the hopes that artists would use it as an avant garde gallery, or post weird things for sale that aren't actually meant to be purchased. I'm selling a jar of my fingernails and Homerun Press is selling their baby blanket. Goblinko is selling vials of grave dirt. Matt Crabe is selling hand-written death threats. Kate's about to post her "ex-boyfriends haunted power strip."

I'm proud of you for making a place where people can sell dirt, threats, and fingernails on the internet. Thanks Kate and Penelope.

Everybody go and buy my sister's fingernails and other stuff on her website, Witchsy.

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram.

Comics: 'Fishtank,' Today's Comic by Berliac

Hanging Out With a Pro Video Game Speedrunner Defending a World Title

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Some game streamers become huge celebrities. My bro isn't one of those. Photos by Julia Llanos

My little brother, Lucas "Bawkbasoup" Thompson, is a professional video game streamer. That means he spends most his day repeating the same mistakes in an effort to achieve some small break in the randomness of a videogame.

Thirteen months ago Lucas made the move from professional chef to full-time streaming and now only relies on income from Twitch, the most popular platform of its kind. Although he categorizes himself as a competitive gamer, Lucas spends most of his time "speed running" video games. If you didn't know by now, that's a full time job and it's actually exhausting.

I spent an entire day with Lucas to get a full understanding of what it meant to play games as fast as possible for money. He's got a strict schedule where he streams Sunday to Friday from 12 PM to 7 PM with no dinner break. He gets up at 11:30, showers, grabs a quick breakfast and gets to work. Every Thursday he runs six games back-to-back with no breaks, for a total of eleven hours.

Twenty odd people sit in a chat room waiting for Bawkbasoup to go live, as he sits on the other side and obsessively picks the waiting room music to set the mood. Bawk has a few regulars who show up early and are watching almost every day. It's unclear whether or not that have jobs or just spend a lot of time on Twitch. Either way, these twenty regulars don't miss a stream.

These regulars are some of Bawkbasoup's subscribers. Lucas is a Twitch Partner which means his stream has been selected for monetization. Not everyone get's this privilege. You have to apply and the application process can be long and grueling. Lucas applied 10 times before his fan base was big enough to get accepted. All told, with a small subscriber base of 300-ish people, he makes roughly $2,000 USD a month.

We didn't spend any time in the chat room before jumping into world record attempts on Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Most viewers are there to watch Lucas beat a game as fast as possible without killing a single enemy. It's a strange and highly competitive subset of livestreaming that can be very lucrative for those trying to build a name.

Just a day at the office, really.

I was immediately stunned by Lucas' ability to carry on several conversations in chat and play a ridiculously complicated game. When I asked him how made it look so easy, he shrugged and said "it's just natural." As we were attempting to take the world record, Lucas told me the goal was to stay positive. If he creates a good mood in the chat and interacts with his viewers they'll cheer him on and encourage his success.

He said getting world records in speed running is difficult and incredibly stressful. There's an intense pressure to stay ahead that compels him to stream almost every day. "Let's say I wanted to get a certain record, but in the back of my mind I know that I can't stop playing that game because the guy behind me is going to try and take it," he told VICE. "It's always this struggle: will my audience and my ego be satisfied by being a few seconds behind?"

Over the course of three hours, we reset Resident Evil 3 over 15 times. During the multiple playthroughs there were many times Lucas would be on his personal best pace but would be undone by either by a small mistake or something known as RNG (a fancy speedrunning term for luck). The games Lucas' run all operate on random number generation to decide where enemies go and how many shots they take to kill.

It takes multiple playthroughs to figure out the finite number of permutations in the randomness of the game. Speedrunners achieve this process through separating the game into smaller chunks that they track with over/under times. These are called "splits" they give you a fair view on what sort of pace you're on and how good/bad you're getting fucked by RNG. You don't necessarily need splits but they let you know when you're on world record pace.

Over the fifteen playthroughs I can see that you can easily get bad luck with RNG twenty minutes into a game and have to start over. In Resident Evil 3, about five minutes into a playthrough you reach a room with a locker. If there is a magnum inside that locker you have to reset your run, if there's a grenade launcher you keep going. This is just one small example of a particular thing that you cause you to lose time and not be able to optimize your run.

Previous Resident Evil 3 world record holder, DudleyC_ said that over the last year, the Resident Evil 3 Knife Only (you only use the knife as a weapon) world record has changed hands seven times. Over the course of that time only a minute and thirty seconds have been shaved off the complete time.

Dudley said he didn't really care at all when Lucas took the record but he does try to mess with him whenever he gets the chance. Anytime Lucas fumbles on a run, Dudley and his subscribers use one of Dudley's specially-designed "lmao" emotes to taunt him. "I always call him shit at the game and tell him his strategies are garbage but his stream is one of my favourites and I catch him almost every time he broadcasts." Despite this, Dudley's priorities have shifted into other games.

About halfway through the day I ask why people like his stream to get the chat going and they respond by comparing Bawkbasoup to a chill ASMR-inducing Bob Ross figure. (One Redditor called him the best ASMR experience they ever had).

As Lucas continues to play, he's able to explain to me that movement is the most important part of playing games quickly. He did say that it completely depends on the game and If you generalize speedrunning there's he can say as a defining factor. However, in the games he plays if you skim a wall, or move in anything other than a straight line then you lose time. Time is everything in speedrunning.

As we get further in the day I realize that his viewers come to define the moments in stream more so than Lucas. They've collectively nicknamed certain chokepoints in the game and look forward to reaching them. There's Ron Jeremy's corner, the orgy room, and the sub to BawkBa basement. Every room has a learned behaviour from the crowd and they create a certain amount of cheering to get through the difficult moment.

Lucas streams from his bedroom with a powerful gaming PC hooked up to several different game consoles and two monitors (one for chat, and the other for the game). At any given time there is a sea of tangled cords on his floor. He doesn't feel the need to sort them out but assured me I caught him on a bad day. A collection of console controllers litters his desk for easy access as he switches between games. When I ask him about it he says, "I use a different controller for practically every game I play."

By the end of the stream we're speedrunning Silent Hill 3. Bawkbasoup is the current world record holder for the game with a time of 47 minutes and 41 seconds. (The game takes 12 hours to play through for a normal person.) Lucas has reset it 2,896 times for a total playtime of 73 hours (he keeps track), so he knows it a little differently. He tells me this is his favourite game to run.

"Everything has to be so perfect to get a good time. I know that doesn't sound fun but this game looks so good, sounds so good, and the movement is smooth," he said. 'If you don't do well here you have no one to blame but yourself." We completed a couple of playthroughs but finished about a minute off world-record pace.

The previous Silent Hill 3 world record holder, Shunpuk held the record from September 2015 until she lost it to Bawk in April of this year. "A lot of other runners and viewers at the time considered my run to be close to unbeatable, despite the slight bad luck the run had," she told VICE, adding there's a friendly rivalry between them. To her another runner taking her record was just another step in pushing Silent Hill 3 to its limits. She admitted that Lucas and her didn't exactly get along when they met because she didn't take his commitment seriously. Lucas tells me they had some philosophical disagreements on the rules of a speedrun. However, after seeing him run the game for eight hours at a time now even Shunpuk calls herself a fan of Bawk's stream.

After eight hours of gaming, I have to stop, I'm exhausted from sitting in a dark room for way too long without eating. For Lucas, it's all part of the experience. You can't take time for yourself when you're streaming or you lose viewers. In fact, there's never any time to relax. People believe it's easy but competitive streaming is a constant struggle to entertain and push yourself further. Lucas says, "If that seems easy, go pick up your favourite game and attempt to get a half decent time in under a week. Then talk to me."

Follow Zac on Twitter.

Grim Photos of Gang Life in Brooklyn from the Early 2000s

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All photos by Boogie from 'It's All Good,' published by powerHouse Books.

Warning: This article contains some graphic images.

The career of the photographer known as Boogie is as diverse as it comes. He's known for shooting athletes like Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt and soccer star Mario Balotelli for high-profile companies like Puma and Nike—but he's also published six monographs that focus on the harrowing street culture of cities such as São Paulo and Belgrade.

Boogie was born and raised in Belgrade, and grew up around cameras; his father and grandfather were both amateur photographers. He didn't take an interest in the art until his country descended into war-torn chaos in the 90s. At the time, photography helped him to distance himself from the living hell around him. Boogie credits witnessing the turmoil in Serbia as the catalyst that defined the subject matter he'd continue exploring throughout his career, which gained steamed once he started shooting in Brooklyn.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2004

In 1998, Boogie won the green card lottery and moved to New York. He worked all kinds of odd jobs to survive, while still shooting on the side. Through a chance encounter, some gang members in Bed-Stuy asked him to take photos of them holding guns, leading him down a rabbit hole into the underbelly of some of New York's roughest neighborhoods. It's All Good, his first monograph, published in 2006, was the result. The book features photos of members of the Latin Kings and other gangs, as well as drug dealers, drug users, and marginalized people stuck in destitution. But unlike the average street photographer who snaps away without getting to know his or her subjects, Boogie is a documentarian who actively enters the lives of the people he shoots, building trust and gaining access to their homes, their safe houses, their squats.

"People always say you shouldn't cross certain lines, but the deeper you go the better shots you take, and no one can tell you where those lines are," he told us. "Then, all of sudden, you're in the middle of madness and it becomes very interesting."

At the same time, he says, "I think my shots show there's nothing glamorous in any of that shit." powerHouse Books is publishing a tenth anniversary addition of It's All Good, featuring a variety of photos that never made the original edition. VICE talked to Boogie about his work, and he provided us with commentary on some of the more provocative images from the updated collection.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2004

This shotgun, nicknamed "The Terminator," is displayed with Blood members' bandannas covering it in the hallway of some projects. I think my shots show there's nothing glamorous in any of that shit. Even in movies they're trying to glamorize the whole gang thing. I think it's rough, it's hard, and it's shitty that people die over $20.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2006

After the first edition of It's All Good came out, I took it to the gangsters and they loved it. They took me to some safe house and showed me all kinds of other shit. When I said, "Dudes, I needed this for my book, what the fuck, why are you showing me this now?" they were like, "Man, you could have put us all in prison, man. Now you can see it all." I started shooting around 2003 and I finished around 2006, so some of these photos in this updated anniversary edition were taken after the first exposé was published.

When I was done with It's All Good, I kept going to the projects, and went to these gangsters to give them the book. They were really happy about it, but I saw that nothing is changing, and it seems like nothing will ever change.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2003

I remember the first time I went to Bed-Stuy, just walking around, a white guy with a camera and my photo bag. I'm walking around and these guys from across the street were like, Hey, man, come over here, and we started talking. I guess it was my accent—I don't sound like anyone they hate—and ten days later they're like, Hey, Boogie, would you like to take some photos of us with guns? I'm like, Man, this is not happening. What the fuck? That was pretty amazing.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2005

This is a warning sign from the Latin Kings to a snitch. I heard that they later killed the guy. When you go to these neighborhoods, you realize that probably at least 50 percent of the people who live there have something to do with drugs. They're dealers or junkies or ex-dealers and ex-junkies. A lot of ex-convicts.

Abandoned Parking Lot, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2003

I love pit bulls, but one of the worst things I saw while taking the photos that ended up in It's All Good was a pit bull killing a cat. Even now when I think about it, it makes me sick. I couldn't get it out of my head for years. I really don't know why, but I shoot a lot of dogs.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, 2006

Guns, money, and drugs—and plenty of them. You cannot really plan these things. I'm going to go to this ghetto and I'm gonna take photos of people with guns. It doesn't happen like that. It's impossible. One thing that surprised me was the amount of money people were actually making. They would probably make more money working at McDonald's than selling crack on the street. Only the top guys are making serious money. These kids are killing each other over $20.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2003

This was the first time invited me to take photos of them with guns. It was insane. We were running around the hallways with guns, loaded guns, pointed at my face. I couldn't sleep that night, but the next day I went back for more. It takes time to build the trust. For example, I have photos with the face and the gun in the same shot, but I didn't use those for the book. I never wanted to get anyone in trouble. I would never do that.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2004

I was babysitting while their mom went to buy drugs. They are now in foster care. These drug users live on welfare and they have kids and they feed shit to their kids and the rest of the money they spend on drugs. They steal, they shoplift, they sell shit, and they buy drugs. It's crazy, and I'm pretty sure it's not better now. With the kind of photography I do, thinking is the enemy. If you start thinking too much, you lose the shot. I just react and shoot. Usually the first one is the best.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2005

She's 23. I remember the first time I took photos of this girl shooting up I was like, Why the fuck do I need this in my life? I was standing on the bathtub as she was shooting up. While I was taking photos it was fine. I can disconnect. It's all good, and then later it's like, Wow, what the fuck? But I went back again and kept taking photos. Thank God this book happened.

See more photos from the anniversary edition of 'It's All Good' below, and pre-order the book through powerHouse here. Follow Boogie on Instagram.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter and buy his new comic 'Confessions of a College Kingpin,' out now on Stache Publishing.

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2005

Broadway between Williamsburg and Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2003

Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2004

How Activist Sally Hill Is Keeping Corporate Australia Accountable

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Corporate activist and founder of Wildwon Agency, Sally Hill. Image supplied.

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Sally Hill has a pretty simple goal in mind. Born in the semi-rural, working class stronghold of Maitland, west of Newcastle, her morals and values were set in stone from a young age. All she wants is for corporate Australia (and corporations everywhere) to get in line.

"There's very much been a skewing of power that's gone on in the last 100 years. In particular around companies and corporations getting incredibly large and powerful and, as we know, being geared around profit and nothing else," she begins.

"They (corporations) literally operate at the expense of everyone around at them, at the expense of the environment, at the expense of the community they operate in, and there's really no checks and balances on them like there is in government," she says.

Growing up a short drive away from one of the country's coal mining and exportation hubs, in Newcastle, the delicate balance of progressive ideals and working class needs were never far from her mind. Her father transcended Australia's class system by way of the Whitlam-era's free tertiary education scheme, moving up from his working class roots into a public servant role with the government. Her high school teaching mother, meanwhile, ensured critical thinking was always part of the menu during any family dinner. It's left Sally with an irrepressible sense of fairness and has led her to the work she performs today.

READ MORE: 'Mandatory evacuation' North Dakota governor issues executive order to clear out Standing Rock protest camp

"I always had a really strong sense of social justice running through my veins, which was influenced by my dad...He just instilled in me this idea that it's really important," she says.

After graduating from Sydney Uni, Sally found a home at GetUp, the online campaigning community. There, she was thrown in the deep end during an especially torrid yet successful campaign against the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. The experience pitted her and the rest of the GetUp team against one of Australia's most influential corporations—the ANZ Bank—not to mention the Federal government, led in this case by an unlikely adversary in former Midnight Oil frontman, Peter Garrett.

"We thought he of all people would stand up to this but he was kind of weaving it through saying this is the best practice in the world, it's an environmentally friendly pulp mill," she says.

Despite what Sally describes as "huge local community opposition" in the form of protests and rallies, as well as extensive lobbying by GetUp of local and Federal government, the project was pushed through.

As a last resort GetUp began targeting the project's key financial backer, the ANZ Bank. They organised the many conscientious shareholders and account holders within ANZ to go direct and complain at their local branch, or via emails. It worked. ANZ pulled the pin, the Pulp Mill was crushed, and GetUp took out a full page advertisement in the Australian Financial Review to celebrate it.

"What was really exciting I thought was looking at shareholders as a force. And looking at consumers as well and then thinking about the reputations of these companies and their corporate responsibility to do the right thing and not just completely fuck shit up for everyone," says Sally.

After GetUp Sally went to work for the other side, marketing corporate social responsibility. It was her idea to change the greed culture from the inside. Instead it turned into to a morale crushing episode.

"I just found it so frustrating working in big companies trying to get them to change their behaviour and get them to do the right thing," she says. "It's a constant battle to get them to change one tiny line in their policy and it's almost impossible because they're all geared the wrong way. They're geared to make money and nothing else".

So now she's gone it alone, founding her own creative agency, Wildwon, whose aim is to "get behind companies, government agencies, educational institutions, individuals and communities to rally around a social or environmental mission."

Prior to the election of Donald Trump, Sally had seen plenty of cause for optimism around the world. Companies like Nike and Patagonia for example, "are doing incredible things to add a higher purpose to what they do then just making a profit," she says.

WATCH: VICE Asks - Hate Speech in Australia

She also expressed excitement over teams of lawyers across the European Union who were banding together to create the legal framework (for corporations) to act more responsibly. "Right now company directors are legally bound to act in the interests of their shareholders and if they don't they can be sued and lose their job," she says.

Then there are the countless startups and B-Corps ("for-profit companies certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency") founded on the idea of succeeding in the business world while pushing the ethical framework at the core of their DNA.

"The most exciting companies I've seen in the last five to 10 years have emerged out of trying to solve problems with a business model," she says.

Then Trump got elected and the sky fell in.

"I wonder whether we've totally forgotten everything we've learned about race and equality and social justice? Have we forgotten we've lived through two World Wars? Have we forgotten all the stuff that has gotten us to this point?" she begins.

I ask whether she feels the world is moving closer to, or further away, from the goals we should be aspiring to. Sally isn't sure.

"I think we are in danger of not getting to where we need to get to fast enough," she says. "If it's climate change we've already passed the point of no return and it doesn't seem to have inspired any action and that makes me wonder what would it take to get people and companies to change what they're doing?"

And she also worries about the typical things: about people becoming more individualistic and more insular and focusing on themselves and being quite selfish.

But all in all, Sally still thinks humans are pretty amazing.

"We're capable of making things and we're pretty altruistic and community minded when it comes down to it," she says. "I think we're getting better all the time, I think we're getting close to achieving the right things. We've just gotta bring all the knowledge we've learned and keep moving forward rather than rehashing old ground."

Sally is the organiser of Purpose, a conference for purpose-driven businesses kicking off on Sydney on Monday, December 5.

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Why Are Prison Suicides in the UK Still Increasing?

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This is HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs, which isn't being discussed in this article but is a prison in the UK (Photo by Pert Brož via)

When Carl* tried to kill himself in prison, he says he was angling for a quick escape—he thought about spending years with a rock hammer digging a tunnel, Shawshank-style, but ultimately decided that he couldn't face the commitment. He waited for his 9 AM check, and knew from six years of prison experience that no one would be back again until 10 AM. His cellmate had an English class on a Wednesday morning, so he had an hour to himself.

At 9:15 AM, he took a mix of prescription pills that he'd been buying and trading with other inmates in the weeks before.

Carl tells his story now calmly and with humour. He didn't take enough of the medication to kill himself, but he did spend a night in healthcare where he woke up later that evening, knowing that he would be serving the remainder of his long sentence.

"I'd been to see the prison doctor a few times and told him how I'd been feeling," says Carl. "He'd give me a form to fill in—you know the kind, tick boxes, rate your own mental fragility on a scale of one to ten, that kind of thing—then he'd hand it back, and tell me I wasn't depressed or psychotic or anxious enough for medication. Even after the overdose, there was no counselling, no group therapy, no medication. No nothing. It takes a lot for a reasonable man to consider suicide a viable option."

Released in June, after serving 12 years for GBH, Carl says he's "not fucking surprised" by the findings of a report released on Monday by charity the Howard League for Penal Reform. The report claimed that the number of people dying by suicide in prison had reached an "epidemic proportion." With 102 deaths recorded by the charity in 2016 alone, the suicide rate in prisons is currently more than 10 times higher than that in the general population, the charity says, and is the highest it has ever been since recording began in 1978. Official figures in April also showed an annual rise in the number of suicides.

So in a system in which so many vulnerable adults are in state care, what more can be done to prevent mental health problems going undetected, and more importantly, to stop those in need of intervention from slipping through the cracks and possibly harming themselves? Josefien Breedvelt, a research manager at the Mental Health Foundation, says that support offered in prisons should be "of the same quality as that provided in the community," and that on top of increasing staff levels in prisons, the mental health of staff must become a priority for them to effectively work with inmates.

Training to be a prison officer takes 10 weeks, and while procedure for inmate suicides and self-harm is touched upon, a prison officer I speak to says trainees are offered little to no guidance on how to deal with some of the more severe, but nonetheless common, mental illnesses that inmates experience.

Lauren* qualified as a prison officer a few months ago and works at a Category B men's jail. She feels that more should be done during entry-level training to prepare officers for the mental health issues that inmates are living with. "You just have to use your common sense and stay alert to the little triggers," she says. "For instance, if a man on a life sentence starts giving out their possessions—their toiletries and personal items—you know that something is going on. But that's just your average Joe Bloggs stuff—as prison officers we should know more."

On Lauren's wing, she says two prisoners should be in a hospital for mental health-related illnesses, but there isn't the space or resource for them to be moved. And it's not just the prison staff that are feeling the side effects of having someone with such advanced psychological issues on the same ward as standard prisoners.

Josh*, 30, was released in April after serving five and a half years in seven different prisons. He says that the staff shortages, combined with the huge spike in the use of legal highs like Spice and Mamba, have made prisons "100 times more violent than they were a few years ago."

"You're sharing a wing with people who are deeply, deeply mentally ill," he continues. "I knew a bloke who used to cut himself and draw pictures of the devil all over his cell in his own blood, and he was in fucking prison. He was totally off the wall. But there were only two staff working on mental health—this is in a prison of around 650 people."

(Photo by Michael Coghlan via)

Alex* is another prison officer, working at HMP Rye Hill, who says they're all too familiar with the kind of inmate Josh describes. Like Josefien, Alex thinks that more needs to be done to protect the mental health of staff if a healthy and sustainable environment is to be achieved.

"I work in a sex offender's prison, where serious self-harm is particularly prevalent," Alex says. "Some prisoners press their cell call buzzer and then slice into their skin when you answer. I've cut down hanging prisoners. It's a cry for help, they want to prove their distress and pain is real."

When asked to respond to allegations of inmates engaging in self-harm at HMP Rye Hill, G4S—who manage the prison—said that there had not been a suicide at the facility during the period covered by the Howard League report. G4S directed us towards specific parts of a December 2015 report, written after an unannounced inspection of the facility in August of last year, pulling out quotes including:

"Those who were struggling to cope and those at risk of suicide and self-harm felt well supported and the management of complex cases was impressive; the weekly complex case review meeting was effective and focused on prisoners struggling to cope and those involved in violence and self-harm; with the change in population, levels of self-harm had increased, and were relatively high. The quality of assessment, care in custody and teamwork case management documents for prisoners at risk of suicide or self-harm was too variable but was good for the more complex cases and demonstrated high levels of care and support; and the prison had managed some extremely prolific self-harmers with high degrees of success."

"In terms of our support for staff," a spokesperson wrote, "we also have a team of counsellors on hand to support people in a whole range of circumstances."

A government spokesperson, speaking more broadly about the prison system, said: "Mental health in custody is taken extremely seriously and there are a range of measures already in place to help support prisoners. Providing the right intervention and treatment is vital to improving the outcomes for people who are suffering and all prisons have established procedures in place to identify, manage and support people with mental health issues.

But we recognize that more can be done. That is why have invested in specialist mental health training for prison officers, allocated more funding for prison safety and have launched a suicide and self-harm reduction project to address the increase in self-inflicted deaths and self-harm in our prisons."

Alex speaks of a different experience. "Those images will never leave my mind, but I still have to finish my shifts and come in the next day. No one asks if I'm OK. It's my job, I'm expected to cope and provide the same service again and again. But something has to change, and it has to come from the top. If we carry on the way we are, this astonishing suicide rate will just continue to rise."

*Names have been changed to protect people's identities.

If you or someone you know have been struggling with thoughts of self-harm or suicide, you can call Samaritans seven days a week, at any time on 116 123.

@SophieBrownHP

More on VICE:

Ex-Convicts Tell Us What They Noticed About the World After Leaving Prison

Mental Health Services in Britain's Women's Prisons Are Still a Mess

Former Inmates Tell Us About the Weirdest Things They Saw in Prison


We Asked People to Tell Us the Best Lies They've Put on Resumes

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Images by Ben Thomson and Ashley Goodall

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

To get a job, you need experience. But to get experience, you need a job. See the problem? So do a lot of other people. According to new research from Xref, 42 percent of young Australians deliberately lie to potential employers about their skills and previous work experience. And we can't really blame them. But just how creative do these lies need to be in order to work? VICE asked some successful resume con artists how they did it.

Andrea, 34
Chef (Sort Of)

VICE: Hey Andrea, have you ever lied to get a job?
Andrea: Yep, when I first got to Australia I needed money and saw an ad on Gumtree saying, "We're looking for a guy who can cook and manage a small kitchen." So I went to the interview saying I've always worked in a busy kitchen and I was a cook back in Italy. All bullshit.

And they hired you?
Yeah, they didn't even let me have a proper trial shift. They just trusted me. I could cook a bit because I learned how to make homemade pasta watching my mum. But, to be honest, for the first five months, I used an Italian website to find recipes. I had to study all the things you need to know in a kitchen like food temperatures, how to stock the food properly.

Did you ever feel bad?
No because I actually got my ass down and worked fucking hard and I really improved a lot. Okay, I lied in the interview, but after that I did some serious work there.

Did you get compliments?
Absolutely I had compliments! Especially for my pumpkin ravioli with sage and butter.

Savannah*, 25
Retail Assistant Manager

Hey Savannah, have you ever lied on your resume?
Okay, so I lie all the time on resumes. I remember one time I wanted a job as a front office person in a hotel. So I just put on my resume that I'd done it before but like in 2013, so two-three years earlier. I made it like I was getting back into it, I've done this lots. I can't say I've gotten the job every time, but I've got interviews—and we all know how much lying goes on there.

So I take it you have no qualms with lying?
My careers teacher said it just makes sense to lie because some jobs you can do regardless of experience, but saying you have it will get you in the door. Really it's only bad if it unravels and you're totally shit at your job. I've gotten jobs by exaggerating roles in past work places, lengths of time worked—the lot. If you know you can do it, are confident to do well in it, and aren't shooting yourself in the foot, then it could even end up being a white lie for the good. You get money, they fill a role.

I think when you break down the ethics of lying people automatically go shrill at the thought of a lie in general. Lying is bad, don't do it. But I'm sure every person who reads this would argue that there's such thing as a good lie, that white lies have been told to save feelings being hurt and jobs being attained. I guess the cliché saying here is, "what people don't know won't hurt them." Unless of course you're lying about what you do know, then that'll fuck you over soon enough.

Ashley*, 31
Retail Store Manager

Tell me about your life of lies, Ashley.
I lie in job interviews, I think most people do. I once applied to work at Virgin without knowing what the position was. Halfway through the interview I found out this was for an assistant manager position, so naturally they asked questions such as, "How many teams have you managed?" and "What was your success story in terms of coaching staff?" Now, as someone coming from Maccas as a low wage shit kicker, I said I was managing a special team at McDonald's to ensure the business was running smoothly whilst managers were busy. Apparently I was in charge of shift covers, customer complaints, and staff enquiries—when really I was flipping patties in the back on a $16 an hour wage.

Did you get the job?
I did. And I went on to become the most successful store manager of 2015. I also once coached a soccer team, which went on to be pretty successful. Mind you I barely made it into the under 14s local soccer club myself.

Juan*, 23
Market Relations Officer

Tell me of your deceitful ways, Juan.
Well there are many stories. I got a job at Supercheap Auto in which I made up fake emails for my references, which was great. Until they did an IP search and found out it was all from the same IP address. Then I had to get a police check. Still got the job.

How did you manage to get the job after all that?
I assume they were looking to see if I was ever charged with fraud, which I haven't been. So yeah they hired me. I once also worked as a server engineer by photo shopping my certificate, and got the job with absolutely no experience. They even sent me to America for a year. I also once worked a whole year at a corporate site with my brother's security license: Level 5 security, which is the highest.

This is some Catch Me If You Can shit.
Bro, I have templates of TAFE certificates, doctor certificates that I just edit at my whim.

Tim*, 38
Manager at an Oil Company

Hey Tim, ever lied on your resume to get a job?
Yeah, quite a big one. I did my degree in economics at a local uni in Kuala Lumpur. It was under the Petronas Scholarship—you know, the big Petronas twin tower buildings in KL... I flunked my second year, and didn't finish my degree. But a few years, and a few jobs, later I asked one of my ex-course mates to share his degree scroll with me. I made a copy, changed it to my name, and applied for a job as a senior executive at one of the companies in the twin towers. I got the job with RM8.5k salary pay.

If you flunk the scholarship you're not meant to be working in the fucking towers. They ban you as a rule. They have this warped prestige image thing, only the best are meant to be working here. So, yeah... faked my certificate, fake degree, with a few years' fake working experience, went for an interview, and I got the job.

How did you manage to do that?
I'm good at what I do. I do not need a degree that states this. No one knows this story. Not even my mum.

Do you feel bad at all about lying?
Not at all. After all, I know what I'm capable of. I am living proof of how paper qualification is not the most important thing to succeed in life... just like Bill Gates and many more.

*Name have been changed to protect career aspirations

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Learning How to Detect a Lie is Easier Than You Think

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Illustrations by Ben Thomson

This article is presented by V Energy as part of VICE Australia/New Zealand's Mad Skills series

The human race has many positive attributes (probably) but honesty is not one of them. As a species, we lie all the time. All day, every day, without a second thought. About our age, our vegetarianism, our sexual relations with that woman, you name it. We say we're fine when we're devastatingly sad, we call in sick when we want a three day weekend, we tell our partners that we'll love them "forever" when we actually just mean "until next summer". It's despicable, really.

Once you start contemplating how many lies people—especially your supposed friends and loved ones—are telling you every day, it's natural to wonder how to detect them. Luckily, there are experts who spend their lives unravelling the tangled webs that we weave.

VICE asked them for their best lie-detecting tips.

A BODY LANGUAGE EXPERT

David Alssema is a body language expert who I am glad to be speaking with over the phone. He's able to decipher the true meaning of someone's words simply by assessing their eye contact and hand gestures. He is basically a mind reader, and it is quite scary.

"When it comes to detecting a lie, speech is a big indicator," Alssema says. "Hesitation in the voice, pausing, that's a lie. If things come out quite quickly, that basically indicates truth, but if people are taking a while to put their thoughts together then that's a lie."

Yet it's eye contact that's the biggest giveaway. Alssema explains that you can actually train yourself to figure out a liar in a matter of minutes if you learn to watch where they're looking.

What you need to know is that people's eyes will flick left or right, depending on whether they're remembering something, or constructing a false scenario. "You can profile your friends and work out which side they use for what," Alssema says.

"As you get to know the person you'll realise which side they remember things on, and which side they construct things on. So if they're telling the truth, it will come out quickly and on the 'remember' side. If it's a lie, you'll see their eyes go to the 'constructive' side."

To figure out which side is which, simply ask your companion three easy questions: how their day was, if they've been busy, and what they're doing on the weekend. "The first two questions are things that happened in the past, so they'll remember, and the third is a future event. So watch their eyes—because two answers will be remembered, one will be constructed," Alssema explains.

"Over time we get to know our friends and we'll pick all this up subconsciously. But if you've known someone for 30 seconds and you really want to work out whether they're going to tell the truth or not, these three questions help."

While you're honing this more advanced technique, there are other easier indicators to watch out for. If a liar thinks you're onto them, they'll typically touch or scratch the back of their neck. "That indicates uncertainty," Alssema says.

If they cover their eyes or mouth while speaking that quite possibly demonstrates a lie. Also touching the very edge of their nose—it's called the Pinocchio effect—because the blood rushes to the extremities of the face when you lie.

We're not endorsing it, but the logical conclusion of all this is not only to become a human lie detector, but also become a better liar yourself.

Avoid the telltale signs mentioned above, and you're basically inscrutable. Another way to earn trust, Alssema says, is to show your palms and have them facing outwards to the other person. "Don't hide your hands behind your back or put them in your pockets—look people in the eye, and don't overcompensate for anything," he advises.

A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Former police detective Julia Robson is the director of Online Investigations, a private firm specialising in uncovering cheating spouses. While dishonest partners are a worst case scenario, they're also a depressingly common one. So we asked Robson, an expert in scumbags, to give us the warning signs.

Chatting to her, it becomes clear that uncovering a lying partner is actually extremely easy. Our gut instincts will alert us almost immediately if something has gone wrong in our relationship—but unfortunately, we'll do everything we can to ignore them.

"People don't come halfheartedly to an investigator," Robson says. "They essentially know that their partner is cheating, and more often than not they are. But both that person and their partner will continually deny that anything is going on." She says that even when confronted by photo and video evidence, both parties will be reluctant to admit the truth.

When you're in love, your first instinct is trust. You believe the best in your partner, because you have to. And even though other people will be less oblivious to your partner's indiscretions, they won't tell you anything—because they don't think it's their place.

"I had a client who, whenever she went to any work events with her husband, found the coworkers were always acting very strangely around her. Of course, as it transpired, it was well known amongst all the coworkers that he was having an affair with another staff member," Robson explains.

When it comes down to it, people in the honeymoon phase of an illicit relationship are extremely predictable, and Robson says all the cliches you hear about are true.

"They start buying new clothes, they join the gym, they're losing weight, brushing their hair more, making sure they're the best version of themselves," she says. "And sometimes that can mean that they have already met someone and they're wanting to improve their appearance, or perhaps they've just started looking."

Generally speaking, if you're dating or getting to know someone, of course you want to look like the best version of yourself. And that's no different if you're starting to cheat as well.

If your partner is acting weirdly, trust your gut. Something is probably wrong—Robson says that only one in fifty of her cases have a happy ending. And, honestly, I suspect she's just making this up so I feel better.

"Very, very rarely, you might find that the partner has actually been planning a surprise for the spouse. Say, a birthday party. And they've been sneaking off, making all these plans," she says. "But more often than not, we just confirm they are cheating. It's very rarely you'll have a positive story to relay back to a client."

Once you've ascertained that your partner probably is cheating on you, there's one final test. Confront them, and assess their response. "When confronted, a cheating partner will get very aggressive—that's a sign they're trying to hide something," Robson says.

"We always ask our clients to see what happens after. Does their behaviour change? Do they start spending a lot more time at home, stop going to the gym? These are the signs of guilt, that they're trying to cover their tracks and calm your suspicions."

The takeaway? If someone is acting like a cheater, they probably are one. People are awful.

A POLYGRAPHER

After training as a polygrapher with the FBI, the LA Police Department, and the US Secret Service, Victorian homicide consultant Steve van Aperen had a realisation: you don't need a machine to detect dishonesty. "One day, I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to have the skill set to work out when people were lying without the use of a polygraph?'," he explains. Having worked on over 77 homicide cases and two serial killer investigations, van Aperen now flies all over the world, teaching law enforcers how to detect lies without machines.

"Research shows that people are not very good or accurate at spotting lies: they only get it right around 49-53 percent of the time," he says. "The reason for this is that we're influenced by people and we often don't want to believe—especially with people who are close to us—that they would ever lie to us," he says.

But lie they do—and they easily get away with it, too. Working with polygraphs, van Aperen knows this first hand. "People don't 'beat' a lie detector test," he says. "The lie detector is just an instrument that records autonomic responses like heart rate, blood pressure, emotional sweating. What happens is that they instead beat the examiner, who doesn't recognise what's occurring or who doesn't formulate the questions correctly."

So in order to become human lie detectors, we have to watch our wording. "Your questions have to be very clear so it doesn't allow a deceptive person what I call 'wriggle room'," van Aperen explains. He gives an example—if you asked Bill Clinton whether he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, he could say no and still beat a lie detector. This is because "relationship" is difficult to define, and Clinton might very well believe that his activities did not constitute one. Ask Clinton a more specific question about what he and Ms Lewinsky did together in the Oval Office, and he'd have a harder time responding in the negative.

The next step is to carefully monitor the person's words and body language—are they communicating in a believable way? Are they breaking up their words with lots of pauses, "ums" and "ahs"? When it comes to catching out a skillful liar, a polygrapher will watch patterns of speech very carefully.

Typically, what deceptive people will do is sidestep the issue. What they don't say is more important than what they do say.

A liar won't use personal pronouns or take ownership of an anecdote: ask them what they did yesterday and they'll say "Went to the shops" rather than "I went to the shops". Van Aperen gives the example of parents whose children have been abducted—if they're guiltless, they'll speak about the child in a personal way ("my daughter" as opposed to "the girl) and they'll also behave as though the child is still alive, as opposed to possibly dead or in danger. "They would always talk in present tense,in anticipation and hope" van Aperen says.

"Truthful people will not only tell you what happened but also what they thought and what their emotions are of those feelings. Deceptive people often won't do that; they'll just give you the story and they can't implicate themselves by showing emotion."

If you suspect someone is telling you a lie, keep pressing them for detail. Make like a homicide detective: ask them heaps of questions in a row. Every time they answer, they'll have to come up with another lie that doesn't contradict what was previously said—that's difficult, and the stress will show. "It's a lot of cognitive processing," van Aperen says. "I don't care how well-prepared somebody is in trying to portray a lie: they cannot possibly anticipate every question that I'm likely to ask them. They're fabricating or embellishing, they're creating a false memory that never existed."

TAKEAWAYS

Humans are actually natural lie detectors. If you trust your gut instincts, you can pretty easily suss out untrustworthy types. But sometimes, you don't want to trust your gut—especially if it's telling you that a friend or lover isn't being totally honest about something. Which is where detective work, body language, and speech monitoring comes into it: watch closely, because every teeny tiny gesture speaks volumes.

V Energy has compiled a bunch of hacks around crucial life skills. You can check them out here.

Back Then with Ben Rayner: Looking Back at a Legendary UK Warehouse Party

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Ben Rayner is a British-born, New York-based photographer who's collaborated with VICE since the early days of his career. Today, Rayner's known for shooting covers of famous people for fancy magazines, though a good chunk of his subjects are just mates he's known since long before they hit it big.

In our photo column, Back Then with Ben Rayner, the artist goes back into his film archive and picks a series of snaps that are ten years old to the month. The following photos are from December, 2006.

I got into the habit of shooting everything a couple of years before 2006. At the time, some of these images looked like throw-away party photos, but today they feel significant to me. The youthful energy makes me happy every time I revisit them.

The majority of the photos from this month's column come from a pre-Christmas warehouse party organized by Real Gold, an art collective that promotes events, releases records, and puts out various ephemera by creative folks. The collective is celebrating its tenth anniversary this month, and I was fortunate enough to attend "A Large Party," which was Real Gold's first-ever event. It was held at the Wallis Gallery space in Hackney Wick, and featured music by the record label Young Turks, Merok Records, producer Martin Cole (RIP), Jack Penate, and NTS Radio founder Mr. Wonderful. Lots of grime and rap.

Real Gold's parties always had the best DJs and best people turning up. And they were organized without any sponsors. You'd see a who's who of music, fashion, and art at them, but they were pretty underground, pretty word of mouth. I remember that night vividly: People just letting loose in an abandoned warehouse.

The other photos below come from "The Klaxons Rave" a few weeks later at a venue called SE1 (or SeOne), which closed in 2010. The Klaxons were getting some serious traction, despite only having released a couple singles at the time. They had just returned from their first large tour, and this concert was almost like a pre-holiday homecoming show. There are some snaps of a young Kate Nash and Dev Hynes at the gig, too. I became friends with the band through other friends, and I ended up going on tour with them. The energy at this show was amazing. Everyone was just having a really great time. I hope that energy comes through in these photos.

Follow Ben Rayner on Instagram, and visit his website for more of his work.

Comics: 'Rafi,' Today's Comic by Jose Quinanar

Photos of Women Changing Canada’s Most Infamous Polygamist Colony from the Inside

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Miriam Chatwin and her youngest daughter collect the morning's eggs in Bountiful, BC. All photos by Jackie Dives

In many ways, the story of Bountiful has remained the same for decades.

A fundamentalist sect of Mormons settled in southeastern British Columbia during renowned ghost-consulter Mackenzie King's third stint as prime minister. Since then, the polygamist colony is known to have closed itself off from the world around it, arranged cross-border marriages for girls as young as 12, treated sisterwives like baby factories, and denied kids agency and education—all while refusing to update their personal style past the 19th century.

Canadian journalists have gone so far as to compare the group to the Taliban, and on Monday, Crown prosecutors will deliver closing arguments in a high-profile child trafficking case against one Bountiful leader and two parents. James Oler, Brandon James Blackmore, and Emily Blackmore are accused of taking 13- and 15-year-old girls to Nevada in 2004 to be married and exploited for sexual purposes. The trial marks the first time parents have been held criminally responsible for the group's alleged long-running "child bride pipeline."

No matter which way media attempt to tell this story, there is only one way we understand Bountiful women to be: quiet, obedient, uneducated, covered from head to toe in monochrome pioneer dresses, with hair laced in poofy French braids. Outsiders assume they submit to total brainwashing, control, and even abuse before they're old enough to drive.

This may be how many women and girls continue to live in Bountiful and across dozens of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) settlements across North America—but it isn't what caught the eye of photographer Jackie Dives. "I thought it would be more sombre, ritualistic, and dull," she told VICE. "But it was colourful and beautiful."

Miriam works as a nurse at Creston hospital, on Bountiful's land trust, and in the community's birthing house.

Visiting on assignment earlier this year, Dives was surprised to meet a group of women who were pushing into leadership positions in the colony's school and land trust, working in offices and hospitals in nearby towns, and unafraid to down a glass of wine or five wearing skinny jeans and oversized sweaters. They were outspoken and educated, and claimed to be bolstering education opportunities and preaching democratic principles within the deeply religious compound.

"There was a time when our school was not a certified school," Mary Jayne Blackmore, daughter of charged polygamist leader Winston Blackmore, told VICE over drinks. Bountiful's independent school, where Mary Jayne pushed for provincial accreditation, will receive over a half-million in government funding this year. "That was one thing that weighed heavily on me at least, because if kids aren't having education and an opportunity, that is limiting them."

The Bountiful women VICE spoke to were all excommunicated from the followers of now-convicted pedophile prophet Warren Jeffs more than a decade ago (a traumatic rift dubbed "the split"), and now follow a less fundamental path. In some cases that's meant divorcing their husbands and steering their own children away from the sect's marriage-centric culture. Though they married early, none of the half-dozen women VICE spoke to identify as victims.

Depending on your perspective, these women are either reforming the reclusive community from the inside, or mounting a public relations front to deflect heat from their leader (and close relative) Winston Blackmore.

With polygamists now on trial in Canada, Dives looked into the day-to-day lives of these Bountiful women who appear to defy stereotypes. But she's also careful not to excuse serious allegations. "Winston is charged with polygamy and there are three others charged with trafficking children," she told VICE. "That's in the courts right now."

"With this photo series, I'm not trying to say that's not a thing. This is just my take on what I experienced while I was up there. It's just a different part of what's happening up there—it's multifaceted, it's not just one thing happening."

Daughters of charged polygamist leader Winston Blackmore.

Each of Blackmore's 145 children owns a numbered hat with 'WB' embroidered on the front.

Mary Jane Blackmore and students sing pop songs at Bountiful's independent school.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Follow Jackie Dives on Instagram.

Please Kill Me: And You’re Making Me Feel Like I’ve Never Been Born: The Beatles' Second Acid Trip

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Lead image by Lili Emtiaz. All other illustrations by Alley Cat

It was while Gillian McCain and I were working on sixty-nine: An Oral History, our new book on the 60s music scene, that we got the idea to create chapters where we hadn't done any of the interviews ourselves. Rather, the material came from a variety of secondary sources that we edited together, such as interviews from magazines like Rolling Stone and books like Peter Fonda's Don't Tell Dad. Not many chapters were created this way—just two or three—and since LSD played a major role in the music scene, we chose for one of our "experimental" chapters in the book to use this bricolage style to detail the first time the Beatles willingly experimented with acid on their own. Some quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

The Beatles took their first acid trip by accident. In the spring of 1965, John Lennon and George Harrison, along with their wives Cynthia Lennon and Patti Boyd, were having dinner over their dentist's house when they were first "dosed" with LSD.

Dentist John Riley and his girlfriend, Cyndy Bury, had just served the group a great meal, and urged their distinguished guests to stay for coffee, which they reluctantly did...

Riley wanted to be the first person to turn on the Beatles to acid, so the couples finished their coffee, and then Riley told Lennon that the sugar cubes they used contained LSD, a powerful new drug with incredible hallucinogenic effects.

Lennon said, "How dare you fucking do this to us!"

As George remembered, "The dentist said something to John, and John turned to me and said, 'We've had LSD.' I just thought, 'Well, what's that? So what? Let's go!'"

Cynthia Lennon was much more sensitive. As she recalled the event, "It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film, the room seemed to get bigger and bigger...."

"This fella was still asking us to stay," George continued, "and it all became a bit seedy, it felt as if he was trying to get something happening in his house; that there was some reason he didn't want us to go. I think he thought that there was going to be a big gang bang, and that he was going to get to shag everybody. I really think that was his motive."

The two Beatles and their wives split from John Riley's flat and sought refuge at the Ad Lib Club, where the full effects of the drug came on. As Lennon remembered it, "We were just insane. We were just out of our heads. We all thought there was a fire in the lift, but it was just a little red light, and we were all screaming, all hot and hysterical!"

While John started freaking out, George had an entirely different experience. "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass," he said. "It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours."

The night ended at George's house in Esher, where John was beginning to reconsider his attitude toward acid. "God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic, George's house seemed to be just like a big submarine," he said. A few moths later, on the Beatles' second tour of the United States, John and George decided to take LSD again during time off in Los Angeles.

Join us now through the immediacy of the Narrative Oral History format, as we relive that day, August 24, 1965, at Zsa Zsa Gabor's house at 2850 Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, when popular music was changed forever. It was a day of tranquility and terror, of good vibes and death talk, of sex, swimming and songs, when the coolest of the cool hung out with the most famous band in the world, and provided John Lennon with the idea for a new tune....

George Harrison: John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid because we couldn't relate to them any more. Not just on the one level, we couldn't relate to them on any level because acid had changed us so much.

John Lennon: We just decided to take LSD again on tour in 1965, in one of those houses, like Doris Day's house, or wherever it was we used to stay...

George Harrison: It was a horseshoe-shaped house on a hill off Mulholland.

John Lennon: It was something out of Disneyland.

Peter Fonda: The Beatles stayed on Benedict Canyon in a stilt house. I was asked to come over and I went in my Jag. I had been instructed to give a password to the police who were guarding the house, but the reason for such protection only sank in when I came to a bend in the road, just before their rented house, and saw that the entire wall of the canyon was filled with screaming young people.

Roger McGuinn: We went in and David Crosby, John Lennon, George Harrison, and I took LSD to help get to know each other better.

John Lennon: We just took it, Ringo, George and I, and Neil Aspinall and a couple of the Byrds, what's his name? The one in the Stills and Nash thing? Crosby, and the other guy, who used to do the lead, McGuinn.

George Harrison: But Paul wouldn't have LSD; he didn't want it. So Ringo and Neil took it, while Mal stayed straight in order to take care of everything. Dave Crosby and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds had also come up, and I don't know how, but Peter Fonda was there.

Peter Fonda: As soon as I was in the house, David Crosby gave me my "dose" of LSD.

George Harrison: I had a concept of what had happened the first time I took LSD, but the concept is nowhere near as big as the reality when it actually happens. So as it kicked in again, I thought, "Jesus, I remember!" I was trying to play the guitar, and then I got in the swimming pool, and it was a great feeling; the water felt good.

John Lennon: We were in the garden, it was only our second time doing LSD, and we still didn't know anything about doing it in a nice place, and cool it, and all that... we just took it. And all of a sudden we saw the reporter, Don Short, and we're thinking, "How do we act normal?" Because we imagined we were acting extraordinary, which we weren't. We thought, "Surely somebody can see?"

George Harrison: I was swimming across the pool when I heard a noise, because it makes your senses so acute, you can almost see out of the back of your head. I felt this bad vibe, and I turned around and it was Don Short from The Daily Mirror. He'd been hounding us all through the tour, pretending in his phony-baloney way to be friendly, but was really trying to nail us.

John Lennon: We were terrified waiting for Don Short to go, and Neil Aspinall, who had never had acid either, had taken it, and still had to play road manager, so we said to him, "Go get rid of Don Short..."

George Harrison: We were in one spot, John and me and Roger McGuinn, and Don Short, who was probably only about 20 yards away, talking. But it was as though we were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. And Don seemed to be in the very far distance, and we were saying, "Oh fuck, there's that guy over there..." Neil had to take him to play pool, trying to keep him away.

Ringo Starr: Neil had to deal with Don Short while I was swimming in jelly in the pool.

Don Short: Neil Aspinall escorted me downstairs to the pool room, because I was the only journalist on the premises. His job was to divert my attention from the fact that everyone else was taking acid.

George Harrison: LSD's s definitely not the kind of drug you'd want to be playing pool with Don Short on.

John Lennon: Paul felt very out of it, cause we were all a bit cruel, like, "We're taking it and you're not!" But we couldn't eat our food; I just couldn't manage it. Picking it up with the hands, and there's all these people serving us in the house, and we're just knocking it on the floor.

Peter Fonda: David Crosby came and got me, I don't know why it was me, and said, "George is in trouble..." So I had to go over there and say, "Don't worry about it, George, this is what this drug does, it puts your mind, your brain, out of activity of the function you think it's in... It unlocks the doors of perception..."

George Harrison: Fonda kept saying, "I know what it's like to be dead, because I shot myself." He'd accidentally shot himself at some time, and he was showing us his bullet wound.

Peter Fonda: When I was ten years old, I'd accidentally shot myself in the stomach, and my heart stopped beating three times while I was on the operating table because I'd lost so much blood.

John Lennon: Peter Fonda kept sitting next to me, and whispering, "I know what it's like to be dead...." We were saying, "For chrissakes, shut up, we don't care! We don't want to know!"

George Harrison: Fonda was very uncool.

Peter Fonda: Lennon was just glaring at me and said, "You know what it's like to be dead? Who put all the shit in your head? You know you're making me feel like I've never been born..."

Roger McGuinn: Lennon couldn't take it and said, "Get this guy out of here!"

George Harrison: They brought several starlets in, and set up a movie for us to watch in the house. By the evening, there were all these strangers sitting around with their make-up on, and acid just cuts through all that bullshit.

The movie was put on, a drive-in print of Cat Ballou with the audience response already dubbed onto it for when you're all sitting in your cars, and don't hear everybody laugh. Instead, they tell you when to laugh and when not to. It was bizarre watching this on acid.

Roger McGuinn: We were watching Cat Ballou, and John didn't want anything to do with the Fondas.

George Harrison: I've always hated Lee Marvin, and listening on acid to that other little dwarf bloke with a bowler hat on... I thought it was the biggest load of baloney shite I'd ever seen in my life; it was too much to stand!

So I noticed that I'd go "out there"; I'd be gone somewhere, and then, bang! I'd land back in my body. I'd look around and see that John had just done the same thing. You go in tandem, you're out there for a while and then, BOING!

Like, "Whoa! What happened?"

Oh, it's still Cat Ballou...

Roger McGuinn: There was a large bathroom in the house, and we were all sitting on the edge of a shower passing around a guitar, taking turns playing our favorite songs. John and I agreed "Be-Bop-A-Lula" was our favorite 50s rock record.

Peter Fonda: McGuinn and Harrison played their electric twelve-string guitars with no amplification, but the hard surfaces of the bathroom acted as a booster for the sound. George played some Bach riffs that blew my mind.

Roger McGuinn: I showed George Harrison some Ravi Shankar sounds, which I'd heard because we shared the same record company. I told him about Ravi Shankar, and he said he had never heard Indian music before.

David Crosby: George told somebody that I'd turned him onto Ravi Shankar. I know I was carrying one of Ravi's albums around and turning people onto him whatever chance I got. I was saying, "You ain't heard nothing, try this..."

Peter Fonda: I went to the kitchen for something to drink, and ran into Peggy Lipton, who I knew, and was sitting in the living room, looking lost.

She said, "I don't know why I'm here...."

I went back to the boys and told them there was a pretty blond sitting in the living room. Someone asked if I was tripping, and I said, "No, I sniffed her crotch, and she was definitely a blond..."

So Paul went to be the host. And, as it turned out, he was the only one who wasn't on LSD.

Peggy Lipton: I was the only girl there, and John Lennon definitely didn't like that. He didn't like me being there at all. He was mean and sarcastic. At one point, they were handing around a scrapbook, looking at pictures of that first tour, and John made some snide comment like, "What is she doing here?"

I got the idea that John thought Paul was an idiot to take a girl so seriously he'd actually invite her to dinner, when all he needed to do was fuck her after dinner.

We ended up smoking a joint in the bathroom before other people arrived; Ringo, George, Paul—and Peggy. We were having fun. I'd been temporarily cowed by John's attack, but it wasn't until I got high that I got really paranoid.

Paul and I emerged from the bathroom and floated into the living room where he held my hand, and we had a few laughs in the dark.

But I was way too high.

A sinking feeling began to take over, Paul was tuning out.

For more drug stories, re-watch our old doc 'Monster Trucks... on Acid!'

Joan Baez: They'd sent their people out to bring in groupies so they could pick who they're gonna, you know, "hang out" with. And these poor girls were just sitting downstairs, waiting to see whether they're gonna be picked by somebody, they didn't talk, they didn't even knit.

Peggy Lipton: Paul became silent in bed. We made love, and for a while my anxieties receded, but as he drifted in and out of sleep, I knew I was losing him. I lay there for a while crying, without Paul knowing, and then got up, gathered my clothes, and silently slipped out the door.

Joan Baez: There weren't enough bedrooms for everybody, so John told me I could stay in his room. So I went to sleep and he came in during the middle of the night, and I think he felt compelled, and he started coming on to me, very unenthusiastically.

Peggy Lipton: Did Paul care the way I did? Would I be able to captivate him enough sexually? Would he ever want to be with me again?

Joan Baez: I said, "John, you know, I'm probably as tired as you are, and I don't want you to feel you have to perform on my behalf..."

And he said, "Oh, luvly! I mean, what a relief! Because you see, well, you might say I've already been fooked downstairs...."

So we had a good laugh and went to sleep.

Peggy Lipton: I knew that Paul didn't want me anymore, and that it was all over, my life was over.

Ringo Starr: It was a fabulous day. The night wasn't so great, because it felt like it was never going to wear off. 12 hours later, and it was, "Give us a break now, Lord..."

For more of Lili Emtiaz's illustration work, visit her website.

And for more batshit stories like this, check out the 20th Anniversary Edition of 'Please Kill Me' by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain.


What Does It Take to Get a Lifetime Ban from a Bar?

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Illustration by Alex Jenkins

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

The last time I got barred from a pub was a real doozy. I was seeing my friends in a countryside village, at a quaint pub called The Angel. So far, so Last of the Summer Wine. I'd had a few pints and was soaking up the good-natured rural atmosphere when I decided to really kick things into 12th gear by cracking open a gram of ketamine, laying it across a beer garden table, and cutting it out into lines.

The landlady came out to collect some glasses and obviously couldn't quite believe a wild-eyed goon (me) was doing lines of fluffy white stuff all over her lovely wooden benches. She promptly began to lose her shit, screaming about the police, the constitution of my morals, letting me know that I was never allowed back in the establishment and so on.

It wasn't the sweetest encounter, but I've not really been barred from too many places other than that. I've been kicked out of all manner of pubs, clubs, and bars, but to get barred for life feels like a true expression of the art of pissing people off.

Now that Fabric's due to is reopen with punitive measures for anything remotely narcotics-related—boo!—including lifetime bans for being caught just asking for drugs, we've entered the next stage of strict licensing laws and barrings.

But away from superclubs, there are a few staples reasons I've found that are common for barring punters. "Being a dick would be top of my list," says Terri, 33, bar manager at London pub The White Hart, "then dealing, being rude to staff and customers, grabbing bar staff—especially female—fighting, minesweeping, begging, and getting caught with drugs."

Fellow bar manager Caspar, 24, from The Kennington largely agrees on what sort of behavior warrants a full-on bar. "Fighting, stealing shit, being a general cunt. Drugs I haven't really cared about in most venues I've worked in, but the one thing I would always just love barring people for is harassing staff or other customers."

So it seems like most of the time if you are an asshole you will get barred. Which makes sense: assholes are generally bad for business. But there are some more creative ways to get barred too, beyond just being abrasive. Take Claire's story.

"I got caught peeing on the carpet in a club in Great Yarmouth while smoking a cigarette," she says. "It was funny, I just squatted over with my underwear round my ankles inside this place and—bam—in walks an ambulance lady and a bouncer. Everyone I was with hasn't been allowed back in since."

Speaking to a other punters, their barrings were sometimes a result of fairly unusual moments, perhaps when visiting friends in another town, or in a random club or bar they'd just stumbled upon in a stupor. Barrings can often be freak flashes of behavior mixed with a spot of overindulgence, making you perhaps wilder than usual.

Charles, 28, remembers such a time: "I got barred from this Jamaican bar in Oxford at my mate's university, for doing a Morrissey impression with some flowers I found. It enraged a woman working there who insisted I pay for them. I was pretty pissed so we had a big argument. She then called the police and the landlord, her husband, who told us all to leave before the police got there. Turned out people said he'd been in trouble earlier that year for attacking a student with a hacksaw, so we were glad we couldn't go back."

But although there were a few punters I talked to who were barred in faraway lands or random situations, I wanted to know about your meat-and-veg barrings. It can't all be pissed students and coke dealers. "Sports dudes," says Caspar. "Cricket guys are the worst. They get so smashed by like 3PM and then come in and are the rudest people and just leave a fucking wake of destruction."

It does seem like perhaps regulars got off more lightly than strangers with bar managers. "Your regulars will misbehave, so you bar them," Terry says, "but then eventually let them back in on good behavior." Caspar tells me that he'd "let them off for most stuff, because they are normally just be a bit weird, not wankers."

I got caught peeing on the carpet in a club in Great Yarmouth while smoking a cigarette. I just proper squatted over with my underwear around my ankles inside this place and—bam—in walks an ambulance lady and a bouncer — Claire, 20, now obviously barred

Once people are barred it's then the bouncer's job to keep them that way, but I found it disconcerting that staff would recognize my face afterwards when they might see anything from 200 to 3000 faces per night. Ben, 28, knows the feeling too.

"I was thrown out of a Wetherspoons for arguing with a bouncer over how drunk my friend was. I then was kicked out when attempting to re-enter half-an-hour later, sans coat and jacket. A week later I managed to go back again before the same bouncer spotted me a second time. My friends were thrown out the same night for being associated with me. Our ban is still in effect."

From speaking to Caspar and Terri I learn most pubs have pictures, CCTV stills, and polaroids on their office walls that they make the bouncers study to keep them informed of who they shouldn't be letting in and who bar staff shouldn't be serving. South London pub the Half Moon apparently has a list of barred people called things like "One Armed Keith," and "The Ginger Drunk Twat Called Angus." Handy to keep bouncers' memories fresh.

It's a bit of a Great British tradition to be barred from a pub. It's a social law that nearly everyone follows and respects, rarely needing police involvement once implemented. In our drinking spaces we behave like fucking clowns but simultaneously respect the amber-lit confines of our public houses.

Pubs and bars don't really need the draconian measures that Fabric are having to implement because there's still is a semblance of tradition attached to them. People still want to keep some things away from council, police and ultimately government concern, to retain some feeling of communal, societal law, however slight, in our own hands. And barring drunk twats like me from your pub is still a great way to exercise that feeling.

Follow Tom on Twitter and Alex on Instagram.



Why an Ottawa Theatre Pulled a Screening of a Men’s Rights Documentary

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Still courtesy 'The Red Pill'

A documentary about men's rights activism will be screening in Ottawa today, but not at the venue organizers originally intended. Ottawa's city hall has picked up the booking, but a theatre owner says that hasn't stopped an army of online trolls from insulting staff and declaring rights have been violated.

A men's rights group called the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) rented out the Mayfair Theatre to show The Red Pill this Sunday, December 4. Mayfair co-owner Lee Demarbre told VICE he first heard from women's advocates from Carleton University about the host group's history.

The documentary follows filmmaker Cassie Jaye as she listens to men inside the movement, some of whom compare feminism to white nationalism. MRA leaders tell her about health and domestic abuse issues from the perspective that men face greater discrimination than women, and are punished and ridiculed for voicing those concerns. The film's name is taken from a Reddit forum in which men vent rage against women and discuss strategies for pushing women into submission.

Jaye told CBC venues in Australia also canceled the film. "I've noticed that most of us are very quick to laugh and scoff at men's issues but if the genders were reversed that would be hateful, hate speech, sexist, misogynist," she said.

Demarbre said students accused CAFE of spreading hate and homophobia on campus. But from the group's online presence, he says he couldn't find evidence that hate was their primary motive. "I said if somebody can prove the organization is spreading hate, it would be worth taking it off the screen," he said. From there, theatre members and advertisers echoed complaints.

Women's advocate Julie Lalonde weighed in on Twitter Thursday. She pointed out the event was scheduled two days before the anniversary of the l'École Polytechnique de Montréal shooting that killed 14 women in 1989. The day has become a national day of remembrance and action on violence against women. She added that CAFE had received charitable status through what she called fraudulent means.

"All I did was send a couple of tweets," Lalonde told VICE. "I never told them to cancel it."

Read More: Inside the Group of Straight Men Who Are Swearing off Women

A few days before the screening, the Mayfair decided to pull the film from its Sunday lineup, and give the group a full refund.

Demarbre said he then got his proof in the form of a 48-hour avalanche of hateful insults. Both Lalonde and Demarbre both say they have received death threats from supporters of CAFE and the film, many claiming censorship. "All these women who said these guys spread hate and homophobia—now I've seen that it's true," Demarbre said.

"If there was an ounce of 'Oh, I'm sorry guys' before, that went away quickly," he told VICE. "I don't like it. I've lost sleep, I've felt unsafe at my place of business, and I've felt unsafe at home." VICE reached out to CAFE, but did not hear back.

Demarbre said he even felt physically intimidated when he returned the film to CAFE members. He stressed the film itself was not part of his reason for canceling the screening.

"This whole decision had nothing to do with the movie, and everything to do with the CAFE society,"he said. "I don't want those guys in my building."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Documenting 25 Years of Cuba's Overlooked Optimism

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'Comandante Ernesto "Che" Guevara.' (1993) Photo © Manuello Paganelli

The following is an excerpt from photographer Manuello Paganelli's new photo book 'Cuba: A Personal Journey 1989-2016' (out now through Daylight Books). The text features over 100 photos Paganelli took during 60-plus visits to Cuba he made over the past 25 years.

The project started in the late 80s when the photographer traveled to the country to find long-lost relatives, and continued through the restoration of US-Cuba diplomatic relations in 2015. With the recent death of Fidel Castro, the work has an added layer of complexity.

All photos Manuello Paganelli © 2016

When I was a boy, I asked my mom why we didn't keep in touch with our relatives in Cuba. She gave me one of those answers that, from time to time, we all give to children, hoping their questions will cease. I did stop questioning—for a while—but as I grew into adulthood, I realized I needed answers. Answers, of course, could only come from traveling to Cuba, so in 1988, I made my first trip to the island. Since that emotional initial visit, I've made more than 60 trips to Cuba. Traveling with cameras and a notebook, I've crisscrossed the island, determined to record the struggles of this misunderstood people, and committed to documenting the magical Cuban spirit.

Remarkably, Cuba is opening up at a faster pace than I predicted. Much has changed since my initial trips, when I was often the only tourist walking down the streets; when having a few US dollars was a crime against the State, something that could get you sent to jail for several years. Today, I no longer see long bread lines. Streets are now crowded with tourists. Hotels are operating at peak capacity.

Other things stay the same, however. Entrancing music continues to fill the streets. Salsa dancers sway late into the evening. Drums beat, folks congregate on the streets, and the Cuban people remain ready and eager to talk and engage. Most of all, the powerful Cuban spirit remains lively and unbroken. Like the dependable old '57 Chevys that roll down the streets of Havana, Cubans stay respectful to the past, while never failing to move forward, full speed ahead, with optimism and determination.

To everyone, let me share with you a small part of beautiful, vibrant Cuba.

'Cuba: A Personal Journey 1989-2016' is out now. Visit Daylight Books' website for more about Pagenelli's work.

No Peace, No Pussy: A Brief History of Political Sex Strikes

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It's a Monday, in 2003. It's been weeks since hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets in London, Glasgow and Belfast in mid-February, to march in protest against Britain sending armed forces to fight alongside the US in the Iraq War. It's too late, though. By the 18th of February, the US already has 100,000 troops in Kuwait, ready to accept the order to "execute a mission." On the 20th of March, the war will begin.

But on the 3rd of March, weeks before the war began, anti-war protesters still had hope. Some had channeled it into worldwide readings of ancient play Lysistrata, centred on a plot where women in Greece deny their partners sex until the men in question finally call off the long-running Peloponnesian War. The suggestive and raucous story written by Greek playwright Aristophanes in 415 BC has been used multiple times ever since to send a political message about the perceived futility of conflict. Basically, whenever you hear those jokes about this or that modern-day politician's wife being urged to slip on her chastity belt to get her husband in line, this is the play that those jokes all came from.

For the protesters in 2003, its message felt as pressing as ever. "Before we started Lysistrata Project," New York-based actresses Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower wrote on the protest movement's site, "we could do nothing but sit and watch in horror as the Bush administration drove us toward a unilateral attack on Iraq. So we emailed our friends and put up a website. The response was enormous.

"If America rushes into a unilateral attack on Iraq, the White House not only drives our country deeper into deficit spending, but also alienates our allies, and fans the flames of anti-American sentiment all over the world," a statement on the website read. "Our purpose is to make it clear that President Bush does not speak for all Americans."

Now, Lysistrata's been given the Spike Lee treatment in film Chi-Raq – which is released in the UK this month. On paper, it's a bit of a hard sell, lending a satirical edge to a story that grafts Chicago's epidemic of shooting-related deaths onto the template set by Aristophanes. Chicago natives in particular have voiced their disgust at what looked like a lighthearted trailer making a mockery of a painful issue. Emily Klein, associate English and modern drama professor at St Mary's College of California – who literally wrote the book on modern Lysistrata adaptations – remembers the initial backlash when the film first came out in the US in 2015.

"A lot of his fans and Chicagoans said, 'what the hell?'," she says. "We're used to seeing Spike Lee make these activist films that speak to different issues of inequity and the black experience in America. So I think a lot of viewers said: 'A film in rhyming verse, that's a comedy and is flamboyant and is about gang shootings? What kind of trip is he on?'"

The trailer for Chi-Raq

But Klein says she felt Lee's interpretation was one of the most authentic she's seen, especially since it holds on to the comical context in which Aristophanes wrote the original. "He was trying to use humour – really bawdy, sexy, offensive humour – to hold people's interest and get them to take notice, then think about what the hell is going on with this 20-year Peloponnesian War. To get them asking, 'Why are our politicians so deeply corrupt and allowing this way to continue?' And Spike Lee, I think, is making that exact same call."

The sex strike isn't just a fictional idea, though. It's been used by women in countries like Italy in 2008, Kenya in 2009 and perhaps most famously Liberia in 2003, to try and get men talking rather than fighting. The conflicts ranged from gang-related murders in Colombia to women in a southeastern Turkish village enacting a no-nookie rule until their husbands pressured local government to secure a stable tap water supply. The actual effects of the sex strikes have varied too, with little gained from a much-publicised proposed strike in Togo in 2012, while the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement went on to help end the country's 14-year civil war with an armoury of tactics – one element was a sex strike, but others included marches, sit-ins and the massive growth of a grassroots political awareness.

Both the film and the IRL versions raise a niggling question: if women feel they can only use their vaginas to wield power on a par with straight men, do they have that much power at all? "The sex strike's leveraged with literal, real effects in these developing countries," Klein says, "then as a rhetorical device in the US. I think what it points to is that we're nowhere near being a society that treats men and women equally. Women are still primarily seen as sex objects." It's complicated, she continues, as if to make the women on strike say: "'Well, if I'm just a pussy, watch what my pussy can do to you.' It's a very distilled kind of owning and appropriating, a taking back. 'If that's all I am to you, watch me work that.'"

Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata in Spike Lee's Chi-Raq

The film handles that contradiction beautifully. Teyonah Parris shines in her role as Lysistrata, girlfriend of Nick Cannon's gang member/rapper Demetrius Dupree. She unites the women on either sides of a gang faction to "deny all rights of access or entrance", leading them towards a militaristic takeover of a building until both gangs agree to put down their guns. That all of this happens, as Klein noted, in rhyming verse seems corny at first but turns into a device central to the film's sometimes dark, other times silly, sense of humour. The film isn't perfect, but its message isn't even diluted by its gags.

It's ripe ground for a battle over sexuality and gender, though. The idea of sex as a bargaining chip could make you talk yourself in circles when you try to square it with whatever the word empowerment even means anymore. "The one thing that is sort of feminist, in a sex-positive way, is that these women have real sexual desire," Klein says. "And the film helps to normalize the idea that women love sex too, and that it's natural and normal for women to enjoy sex. It's a huge sacrifice to give up sex – you have to be pushed that far." Rather than sticking to the tired idea that "women tolerate sex", Klein continues, you come to see the sex strike as a last resort; a sign of desperation. It may not have worked for the anti-Iraq War protesters, but given the way the world's been run so far, there'll be another decision or feud to fight with forced celibacy soon.

Chi-Raq is out in UK cinemas on Friday the 2nd of December.

@tnm___

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The Dakota Pipeline Will Be Rerouted, but the Standing Rock Campers Aren't Moving Just Yet

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A line of cars entering the Standing Rock camp. (Photo by Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

On Sunday afternoon, the Army announced that it would not grant an easement for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, marking a major victory for opponents of the DAPL and the "water protectors" who have been camped at Standing Rock, North Dakota, for months.

The pipeline was scheduled to run close to reservation land where the Standing Rock Sioux live, and many members of the tribe were concerned that the DAPL could lead to their water supply being contaminated. Protesters calling themselves "water protectors" have been camped out to block the pipeline, and in recent weeks aggressive police tactics have contributed to an atmosphere of tension and distrust. On November 28, North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple ordered these people to evacuate and warned that emergency services would not be provided to them as winter approached.

But despite the falling temperatures and the threat of police action, the thousands of campers—including indigenous people from across the continent and non-indigenous activists looking to make a difference—weren't inclined to leave. In fact, they had just received reinforcements to the tune of 2,000 veterans prepared to serve as human shields for the water protecters when the Army announced its decision on the easement.

At the camp, many speculated that the presence of the veterans was what persuaded the government to act.

"It was a strategy, they didn't want to be seen as beating up on the vets," said Damien Wair, a 71-year-old veteran whose mother was Creek and father was Kiowa. "This is fantastic, I just hope they're able to sustain it... I'm guardedly optimistic."

Though many celebrated the Army decision with chanting, prayers, and drumming, few of the campers were preparing to leave just yet. Art Zimiga, a Oglala Lakota who is also a veteran, told VICE that the water protectors would need to be on hand to monitor further activity in the area. "People will stay," he said. "They want to make sure that the pipe is out of the ground."

Though the easement denial means the DAPL will be rerouted, the future of the pipeline remains murky.

"Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it's clear that there's more work to do," Army spokesperson Jo-Ellen Darcy said in a statement. "The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing."

I Did a Gong Bath to See If It's a Better Way to Chill Than Gorging on Netflix

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As a young person, there can be a lot to worry about.Soaring rents, low-pay, shitty jobs, mental health problems, romantic disasters and a sinking sense that we'll never make anything of ourselves, to name a few.

We all have a lot on our plates right now, and for that reason we all regularly need time to chill out. We give this cute names, like "duvet day" or "me time", but basically we just mean microwaving some dinner, lying flat on the sofa and watching Netflix until it prompts us to tell it that yes, we are still alive and yes, we would like to continue streaming the current episode of How Clean Is Your Crime Scene.

TV binging feels like it should be good for your temperament, but often leaves you feeling sort of empty and alone. As you pull yourself off the sofa and into bed after four hours of watching old 30 Rock, you feel guilty, like you just had a wank over some particularly grizzly porn. And this isn't just a weird feeling; a study released earlier this year found that people who binge watch TV are more likely to experience anxiety, depression and stress.

So if having a relaxing night in isn't actually relaxing, what are the other options? I know some people read books in the bathtub, but who are those people, really? Mums and nerds. What about the rest of us? What's a good way for us to properly unwind?

Well, there's a bit of a craze emerging, brought to us – I'd imagine – by the same people who introduced yoga, meditation and other new-age mysticism to the western world. It's called a "gong bath", and despite the name there is no water or nudity involved. Instead, a group of people lie on the ground while a shaman-like leader bangs gongs over you. The Independent called it "the zen new craze" last month, and the New York Times said the practice is moving "from the metaphysical to the mainstream". If you needed further proof, Robert Downey Jr, Charlize Theron and Robert Trujillo of Metallica are all reportedly bang into it.

To me, a gong bath is of particular appeal because it taps into my hippy inner-core. In my day-to-day life I take pride in a bitchy cynicism that guides both my work and personal life. But I spent much of my youth with my weekend-hippy parents, going to festivals called things like "Earth Spirit" to hang out in drum circles and drink chai out of melamine cups. I feel a certain affinity with the hippy-nonsense community; when I see group of patchouli-smelling, middle-aged stoners bashing on a djembe, it feels a bit like home.

So instead of my normal afterwork practice of throwing my bag down in the hall, kicking my shoes across the front room and settling in for a night of tortellini and Transparent, I instead headed to a community centre in Peckham to see if a gong bath could chill me out.

I arrived at Bosse & Baum gallery in Peckham, where mats had been arranged on the floor and there was hot ginger tea awaiting us. Already my inner hippy felt sated. We needed the tea because it was the coldest day of the year, and two gas burning heaters were doing little to heat the space. Our leader would be Leo, who quietly assembled his two impressive-looking gongs at the front.

After everyone arrived the lights were switched off and we all took a mat. Before we began in earnest, Leo explained to us what we'd be doing. Despite my preconceptions, Leo was not a new-age type in the traditional sense: he was wearing a scarf and had thick, slick hair. Also, he was as posh as posh can be; every time he spoke about the positive energy in the gong I felt like he was really saying, "I've made some life choices that make my parents feel absolutely sick."

Leo says that a gong bath is like a shortcut to meditation, which sounded great to me, because I really don't have the patience or temperament for meditation. Then he said that, before the bath, we would do 30 minutes of yoga to get us in the right frame of mind, which sounded bad to me, because of the effort it would take.

After a few breathing exercises we were told to shake with our arms in the air – to shake with wild abandon, non-stop, for half an hour. Leo took the shaking very seriously: "KEEP YOU ARMS STRAIGHT!" he would shout, "CHALLENGE YOURSELF! IF YOU GET COMFORTABLE CHANGE HOW YOU SHAKE, NEVER GET COMFORTABLE!" It quickly became apparent that constantly shaking is incredibly tiring, but also does a weird thing to your brain where you can't really think about anything else but the shaking, because it's taking all your energy just to keep moving. In that moment it was impossible to want to check my phone or worry about work, because I had someone screaming "MOVE YOUR BODY IN UNEXPECTED WAYS!" at me.

I felt brilliant after the shaking: energised and exhausted and weirdly calm. When it finally ended there was a sense of sweet relief, and then we lay down on the mat and started to hear the music. Leo, it turns out, has the voice of an angel, and sung with the gongs and various other accordions, creating this weird harmonic sound that seemed to reach inside you.

I realised then that you have to be incredibly musical to lead a gong bath, because this guy was like emulating the different harmonics it was making with his voice. For about three minutes I started to see cool patterns as the different sounds passed around the room. I thought what everyone must think in these situations: 'This would be very cool if you were high.'

Then I must have fallen sound asleep, because the next thing I knew Leo was holding the gong directly above me and banging away. Suddenly the mystical properties didn't feel so strong as I tried to work out how long I'd been out for and if everyone had heard me snoring. I must have been dead to the world for a while because, about ten minutes later, it all finished. We took a final few minutes to breathe and then the lights came on.

Afterwards, I spoke to Leo about how he got into gonging.

VICE: How did you get into this? Doesn't seem like something you can quickly pick up.
Leo: Five years ago I went to this amazing workshop – they were teaching yoga, but at the end they did a gong bath, and I actually preferred that to the yoga. I thought, 'I need to get one of these.' So I got a little one and just played on my own, and did that for quite a while on my own – about ten months. It's done a lot for me; it's had a massive impact on my nervous system, my movements, the way I think.

What's one thing that's changed since the introduction of the gong into your life?
I feel much more fluid. It reminds me of the element of water. The vibrations are so strong and, for me, the gong is quite feminine. I was much more angular before; now I think I round things off more. I'm calmer. Even though it's a wall of sound and you feel like you have every single note at the same time, somehow, in my composition skills, it's improved them – it's made me more creative. It's stopped me trying to be clever, because you can't be clever: it's just a disc that you strike with a mallet.

I thought this would be more of a mystic thing or a new-age thing, but your background is more musical.
I think healing therapy with music is very old, if you look at ancient shamans who sing and chant for hours. But it's also very fashionable at the moment. And these gongs are not from South East Asia; they're European musical gongs. The gongs you get in Bali tend to produce one note. These guys, when you strike them, you get so many notes. That's what makes them amazing, in my opinion.

So it can be quite linked to music therapy?
Other practices are heavy on the yoga and you get a little bit of gong at the end. I focus more on the gong because there tends to be less bullshit. Words can only take you so far. That's why sound is so cool, because it's beautiful.

Sometimes when I do something like this I just think, 'Well, is this properly working? Am I relaxed, or am I just trying to be relaxed? Oh shit I'm thinking so hard about being relaxed.'
Well, I mean, I don't think it's possible to have no thoughts. Some people go places and don't realise. They fall asleep and they don't realise they were. I think it's a bit of a dark area, and it's better not to over-analyse the experience. It's beneficial regardless of what the mind wants to say.

Leo

Do you have thoughts when you do it?
I have lots of thoughts. Whether I'm playing or receiving, because my partner is trained too, so we give it to each other and that's really nice. But with several sessions you do learn to let go and ease into the sound as well.

You said at the beginning that it was a shortcut to meditation. I can see why that would be appealing – meditation seems like a lot of hard work.
I disagree with the idea at having to work at meditation. There's a lot of pressure around that word. I don't think anyone in London knows how to meditate. There are probably a few people in the world who really know how to meditate, but before that comes concentration – being able to focus your mind. I can't really do that; I don't think some of my teachers can do that. So this really is a fast track to observing some of the feelings that you have. It's really like we're throwing you in a cage with some wild animals and there's nothing you can do. You're really courageous in a way, because it can be quite intense, it really comes over you.

§

I didn't feel thrown in a cage, and when I left the gong bath I wasn't sure I was really feeling any different. But then, that evening, I managed to process all the stuff I had to do the following day in a clear way, I felt kind of calm in myself; I didn't have that grizzly post-TV-binge feeling. Even days later, I think I felt more positive about life.

Perhaps you wouldn't be able to bring yourself to do this; perhaps your inner cynic is just too strong. Perhaps you think there's nothing three pints of Guinness and a Westworld before bed can't sort. But I say: embrace your inner-hippy. Lie on the floor in a cold community centre and see how it makes you feel. Maybe you'll find out that you've never known true relaxation until a man in a scarf shouts "KEEP SHAKING, WITH YOUR ARMS, SHAAAAAKING!" at you.

@samwolfson

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