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The gigantic ballistic missile pictured above is the result of a chain of assumptions that starts with an imagined traffic accident on the streets of Pakistan… sort of. What you're looking at it isn't a Pakistani missile. It is India's new Agni-IV, and it was test-launched last week for the third and final time before officials announced that it will now go into regular production.

Before we get to the traffic accident, some background: the Agni-IV missile is a short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) that can drop a nuke on a target up to 2,500 miles away. That’s nowhere near far enough to hit the United States or even Moscow, but it is far enough to ruin everyone’s day in Beijing. One important feature of the Agni IV is that the missile and launcher are mobile, so its crew can drive it from location to location to hide it from enemies. The launcher can stop anywhere and launch the missile in a matter of minutes, the sort of system popular in Russia, China, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Most Americans first witnessed the advantages of this kind of missile system during the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraq launched a number of Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel. As advertised, the Scud launchers proved to be extremely difficult for the US to track down, despite the fact that the US military had complete control of the air. (The US had a very brief flirtation with the idea in the early 1980s but has never deployed any road-mobile strategic nuclear missiles.)

Nations often have to plan their strategic capabilities (especially their WMD) around the threat posed by their peers, and a main driver behind India’s decision to build this missile has been China’s own nuclear arsenal. Relations between the two countries have been touchy for decades, marked by regular border skirmishes. While India and Pakistan openly hate each other, India’s nuclear program need only be large enough to convince Pakistan that using nuclear weapons wouldn’t be worth it. By contrast, China’s own nuclear program poses a very real strategic threat to India.

The same day that India conducted its test, China published photos of its own advanced road-mobile ICBM, capable of hitting the US. China often sends the world strategic messages by publishing photos and videos through official online sources. What makes this release hard to figure out is that it coincided with the arrival of a senior US diplomat to Beijing on a visit intended to, among other things, defuse regional tensions. It may be that China is telling the world to back off, but it’s hard to tell because China often cultivates uncertainty as part of its deterrence strategy.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has been going nuts with its nuclear program. They currently have a nuclear arsenal of at least 100 warheads and are producing ten to 15 more each year—and they hope to increase that rate to 14 to 27 warheads per year. Because of all the regional instability and the close ties between Pakistan and the Taliban, US security officials are extremely nervous about this rapidly growing stockpile and have reportedly been developing contingency plans to send Special Forces into the country and seize a warhead if it gets stolen.

Pakistani officials have interpreted US preparations slightly differently. In a nutshell, they fear the US might swoop in and take all of their nuclear weapons. In response, Pakistan has taken several steps to prevent such a thing from happening, including moving the warheads from location to location on a regular basis, in the spirit of road-mobile launchers. The most cringe-inducing aspect of this practice is that sometimes Pakistan has moved the warheads in unescorted, unmarked delivery vans. Which could, of course, be easy pickings for any militant group with the right intelligence, some guns—and the ability to cause a traffic accident.

And that brings us to the Agni-IV. Not surprisingly, the risk of nukes getting into the hands of al Qaeda keeps US planners on edge. And when US planners are on edge, the Chinese get tense. And when the Chinese get tense, India gets uncomfortable. And when India gets uncomfortable, they improve their nuclear-missile capabilities.

Ryan Faith is the Defense and National Security Editor for VICE News.

The other day, VICE received the following pitch:

My name is Kristina Podobed, I am a photographer from Odessa, Ukraine. My friends and I did a shoot about the Ukrainian school life. We will be very glad if you can use it in any way!

Our shoot is about our immortal wish to look like American school kids from the Hollywood movies of the 80s and 90s and the impossibility of making it real because of the total poverty. Growing up in Ukraine in the 1990s, we were bombarded with beautiful impressions of life in the West—impressions reinforced by Hollywood movies such as Home Alone, Problem Child, and The Parent Trap. Every girl was raised thinking she was a Disney princess and then taught manners by Clueless and Legally Blonde. Unconsciously, we were living under the American soft power.

The thing is that we all grew up. We are all around 20 years old now, and we want to show the world that we are proud of our ugly, post-Soviet withering past. Everything in the world is globalizing and made to look similar. Which, for a poor middle-class country like Ukraine, is a good thing. Globalization will take years to reach the core of our mentality and blend with every level of our society.

Our photographs hopefully show it's touched us superficially, but our counties are still filled with hate, racism, corruption and violence. As we write this, brave young people all over Ukraine have managed to obtain the abolition of our totalitarian government's anti-demonstration laws simply by breaking them.

With this shoot, we'd like to show that we love ourselves and our past, but that we feel it's essential to move on. This place is too depressive to raise children in.

Models: Anastasiia Chorna, Nastya Anelchyk, Margo Dostoyevskaya

See more of Kristina's work here.
 

Don't try this at home. Photo by the author.

Earlier this month I watched a doctor demonstrate how to perform an abortion on a papaya. Apparently papayas are perfect teaching tools for abortion techniques because their shape closely resembles the anatomy of a uterus. I was at Reproductive Health Access Project, an organization dedicated to ensuring that all females, regardless of their socio-economic status, have access to a safe abortion through their family doctor. The practitioner wanted to show us how simple it is to conduct an abortion—it can be done right in a standard office and doesn’t require super fancy tools. She requested to remain anonymous because doctors who perform abortions can be targeted and physically harmed by anti-abortion groups, and she was essentially teaching us how to practice medicine without a license. As is probably evident, I’m not in medical school, nor am I trying to perform an at-home abortion (or any back-alley botch job). I am, however, a proud graduate of SoapBox Inc.’s Feminist Camp, Winter Section 2014.

If being this straightforward about the mechanisms of aborting a fetus makes you uncomfortable, that’s expected. But spend a week at feminist camp, learn about how women become second-class citizens the moment they become pregnant, and next thing you know, you’ll be wearing a T-shirt reminding people you’re not an incubator. Today it’s not only about maintaining reproductive rights for women, it’s about keeping personhood rights once they get knocked up as well. In October 2013,The New York Times highlighted the case of Alicia Beltran, a pregnant woman in Wisconsin who was ordered by a judge to spend 78 days in a treatment facility or go to prison because her doctor accused her of endangering her fetus through suspected drug use. Alicia, brought to the court in shackles, didn’t have a lawyer during the proceedings — but her fetus did.

Or take the more recent case of Marlise Muñoz who was pronounced brain dead at a Texas hospital. A paramedic, Marlise was aware of end-of-life matters and had requested to be taken off life support should a situation like this come to pass. Marlise was 23 weeks pregnant and the fetus would not have survive were it born this early in the pregnancy. Her family was fighting for the hospital to follow her last request, but it refused to abide by their pleas. The hospital contended that it was bound by Texas law, which states that life-sustaining treatment cannot be withdrawn from a pregnant patient, regardless of end-of-life wishes. It was finally decided that the hospital was misreading the law and that is doesn't have absolute authority to keep someone in Marlise’s state on life support against her stated direction.

And Alabama is considering a law that would allow doctors and other medical staff the ability to opt out of any aspect of terminating a pregnancy, even if it’s just treating a woman who just had a miscarriage.

With women’s rights in America at such a schizophrenic state today, 15 young women from around the country gathered in polar-vortexed New York City to attend Feminist Camp. The camp is an intensive weeklong program for budding activists, thinkers, and truth-seekers. It consists of talks, quick internships, thought provoking lectures, and movie watching.

I’ve just begun to see myself as a feminist over the past few years, though I’ve agreed with the politics for as long as I can remember. Embarrassingly, I think I became more comfortable with publicly identifying as a feminist only as it’s become more mainstream, or at least from my perspective as a left-leaning, college-educated middle-class chick. There are hot girls on Twitter proudly proclaiming themselves feminists and now I want to be one of them. The fact that this is what prompted me to top-toe out of the feminist wardrobe has always irked me.

I’ve been steeped in the work of generations of feminists. The legacies of second- and third-wave feminism have hugely informed women’s status in many parts of the world today. The awe-inspiring work of Pakistani teenage education advocate Malala Yousefsai, programs that give microloans to women’s communities in Bangladesh, and other 21^stcentury Global-South versions of feminist projects have all been positive and disruptive forces in the fight for equality between the sexes. But for all of my feminist cultural immersion, I still didn’t really know that much about it besides the basics: equal rights for women and the belief that white men have been dictating too much for too long. I heard about Feminist Camp through a friend who’s public with her feminist proclivities. It sounded interesting, and the fact that I needed her endorsement to brave signing up only confirmed it essential I attend.

While feminism has found a sort of hipness in certain circles, the broad project of gender equality has languished over the years or been pushed to the margins in favor of other bullet points on the progressive agenda. That’s where the camp comes in, offering a space for those activists-to-be who want to keep their faces close to the grindstone. Perhaps the best lesson I received at camp, papaya abortion notwithstanding, was getting to know the other women in attendance.

Kaitlyn is a soft-spoken, small, single mother from a part of Indiana where people participate in roping competitions—feminist theory isn’t big there. Attending camp was her first time in “The Big Apple.” Kaitlyn graduated from Ball State University where held she down a 30-hours-a-week job while taking 21 credit hours and raising her son. She said she became an outspoken feminist in college when, while working as a single mom, supporting her unemployed boyfriend and child, her (former) guy came home and said his parents were coming over for dinner and requested that she cook and clean. A few days later she was folding laundry when Miss Representation, a 2011 documentary about the sorry state of women in the media, came on TV. She marched into her advisor’s office and declared her major. Less than 2 percent of teen moms graduate from college and now Kaitlyn is on to her way to a Masters. Kaitlyn was especially moved on the day we looked at incarceration as a feminist issue. After a screening of the documentary the Mothers of Bedford, she said the realization that a woman could be a good mother, even from behind bars, made her want to fall back in her seat.

Campers with Gloria Steinem. Photo by Carly Romeo

Three of the girls at camp had friends who were raped in college and were sparked to action after seeing a lack of initiative from their universities. Caeli started a group at her school after a roommate in her dorm suite was raped across the hall from her. Over Facebook message Caeli explained how the police asked her if she had heard anything from across the hall as they removed her roommate’s bedding and rifled through her things. Caeli described it as very “cold and procedural.” The girl ended up not pressing charges since she knew the boy and was embarrassed. She later left school that semester. Caeli said, “This is where I simply wished I would have known how to deal with that situation more, and I don't think she got the support, especially emotional counseling, that she needed at the time. I started the Feminist Union more so as a result of seeing how she didn't feel like she had an outlet to speak about her experience. She had nowhere to truly go.”

For others, feminism is less about gender-based violence and more about eschewing labels. Carly Romeo, one of the Project Managers running camp, said for her, feminism is about “taking the step to push away what’s expected of you.” That’s where the identification with LGBT comes in, as well as solidarity with disabled communities and any other person that didn’t make the straight, high-income, white man team.

This unanimity was markedly apparent when we met with Audacia Ray, the founder and director of the Red Umbrella Project, which works to amplify the voices of people in the sex industry and give sex workers a platform to tell their stories. A former sex worker herself, Audacia spoke frankly about her past and the people she works with, completely normalizing the topic (though ‘normalizing’ is never the right word to use when you’re talking feminism). I was hesitant to ask questions about her experiences at first, not wanting to seem disrespectful or like I was demanding gratuitous stories, but her comfort set me at ease. Sex work is a complicated subject to talk about because unlike human trafficking, there is a level of choice on the part of the people in the industry. It’s also, however, the oldest profession in history, a global one that’s not going away. The business of sex, and talking to the extremely few individuals and organizations working to protect the rights of the many in the industry came up numerous times throughout the week.

Many of the other campers began identifying themselves as feminists when they learned about the theories in introductory Women’s Studies courses in college. Most said learning about feminism itself was really just giving a name to thoughts they had already had.

“The way I was raised—with powerful, influential women and a mindset that I could do anything—led me to my natural place in feminism,” emailed Taylr, a camper from Ohio. “I was a feminist far before I knew what a feminist even was.” 

Some of the campers coming from ‘red states’ or more conservative necks of the woods are already strident activists at their schools or in their communities. For Yesenia, a mother from Oregon, for example, “The most memorable thing about camp was honestly being able to meet all of these amazing feminists who think like me.” She wore a navy blue Free People-esque winter coat around the city, and I enjoyed speaking to her on day 3 of camp on the F-train uptown as we headed from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center to our next stop at the HBO Screening room in midtown where we spoke with Evan Wolfson, the founder and President of Freedom to Marry and then watched the striking documentary Valentine Road. Yesenia makes sure her son has dolls as well as trucks to play with. He also enjoys painting his nails; her attitude is he should be able to play with whatever he finds most entertaining. Her frank attitude and completely non-judgmental stance strikes me as extremely rational and lacking any bias.

The camp is led by major feminist players Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. Jennifer is the Executive Director and Publisher of the historic Feminist Press at CUNY. She’s the producer/creator of the award winning documentary I Had an Abortion (a major feminist "aha" moment for me, I saw the film in college and realized if I had an abortion I would never tell a soul because of the shame). Her documentary, It Was Rape, began screening in late 2012. Jennifer writes regularly for publications including Glamour, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New York Times and NPR’s ‘All Things Considered.’

Amy is a long-time adviser to feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Most recently, she was the director of educational outreach for the PBS documentary MAKERS: Women Making America. Amy is the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, an activist organization that builds social justice movements led by young women and has been publicly recognized for her work with numerous awards.

Together the duo have appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and co-authored Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism. To be in the presence of such giants all week was intimidating, exciting, and affirming.

Notably, there was a striking lack of diversity at camp—it is open to men as well as women, and though there have apparently been some in other years, there were no men in my winter section. The majority of the campers were white, as was the majority of the speakers with whom we interacted. This was something we discussed amongst ourselves quite a bit. The founders have developed a great offense on this point, clearly it’s come up before— and on the first day they suggested we contemplate why so many white women are leading these NGOs, think tanks, and production companies. Even with their forewarning, If you saw the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen, which trended on Twitter earlier this year, well, it did little to diffuse that message.

An intensive camp like this is surely an invigorating experience, but it might only serve to isolate the feminist movement among already aware and privileged groups. Turning college-educated would-be activists into professional activists is definitely a worthwhile cause, but its tangible efficacy in terms of overturning the entrenched status quo is still up for debate.

But to be awash such a fountain of notable women left a unmistakably positive impression on me. The founders’ connections meant each day was crammed with an impressive roster of leaders for us to meet. On media day we sat with New York Times journalist and author Jodi Kantor, image activist and CNN contributor Michaela Angela Davis and Jamia Wilson, the Executive Director of YTH. Media day ended at Hosteling International in Morningside Heights where the non-local campers were crashing that week. After dinner we worked with the award-winning spoken-word poet Kelly Zen-Yei Tsai who got us up and moving around the room with improv games, and then sat us down and had us write our hearts out with the prompt “What you don’t know about me is…” A few courageous souls stood up to read their pieces. Kelly had the readers speak once looking at their papers. The second time around she gave the orator cues to look up, pause, and direct their gaze at a specific person. Her direction intensified the exercise. This, I thought, is how you turn someone who cares into an activist.

@hypersbole

Roman in some of the gear he's bringing back to Kiev to protect protesters. Photos via Roman Pokorchak.

Salad bowls, scarves, earplugs, and goggles. These are a few of the supplies Roman Pokorchak, a Ukrainian Canadian, is taking back with him to the violent protests in Kiev, Ukraine. He’s trying to offer protection to his fellow protestors, who have been victim to extreme violence from Ukrainian riot police since mid-January.

The protests, which have been ongoing since November 2013, escalated in violence when Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych signed into a new set of laws aimed at banning anti-government demonstrations. The laws appear to have been passed illegally and are considered by many Ukrainians to be unconstitutional. Led by ex-boxer Vitali Klitschko, protestors have been fighting back with anything they can, including Molotov cocktails and catapults.

Ukraine’s government resigned on Tuesday, and has repealed anti-protest laws, but protests continue as the opposition is still pushing for further change. Roman was just in Toronto collecting what he can before going back into the front lines of a demonstration that has already claimed at least five lives.

Canada’s Ukrainian community is outraged at the level of institutionalized violence and police malpractice: “We are absolutely horrified that it has been allowed to go to this extent—it’s beyond words,” says Ukrainian Canadian Congress member Oksana Bondarchuk. Ukrainian Canadian Congress President Paul Grod blames the Ukrainian government for the chaos in Kiev in a recent media release: “Canada must strongly condemn the deliberate beating and killing of protestors and journalists. The Government of Ukraine and its leadership are to blame for this escalation.”

Meanwhile Ukrainian Canadians like Roman Pokorcak are taking matters into their own hands and returning to their homeland to join the protests. I reached out to him over the phone before Tuesday’s repeal of the anti-protest laws to talk about giving up his simple Canadian life to be on the front lines in Kiev.

VICE: Hello Roman. What have you been doing the last few days?
Roman: I was just on the front lines in the protests in Kiev, and just came back to Toronto. I am stopping here shortly to get supplies to bring back. The people need protection because the police are fighting with real guns and using bombs—it’s real violence. They don’t care about journalists. They don’t care about anybody. They’re just trying to stay in power. Too much is too much, people need protection now.

What exactly are you taking over there?
I am using everything I have. I am taking things to cover people’s heads—like salad bowls, scarves, and construction hats. Not everyone has helmets and police are beating people over the head with sticks. I’m also bringing goggles because people have already lost their eyes from police bombs on the street. I’m bringing earplugs because of the noise bombs. I am taking the money I have as well—a few hundred dollars. I am taking 23kg of things on the plane because they don’t allow more than that.

Protester camp in Kiev.

Where will you be staying?
I made lots of friends in Kiev who invited me to stay with them. They are all very friendly people helping each other. I will be living with other protestors. They are mostly very young people who need a change because it’s like a police state, like North Korea or something.

What’s it like being on the front lines? Were you afraid going into it?
This is my first time at a street protest. It was scary at the beginning; you’re there on the line and you can look the police right in the eye. But then you lose your fear and just start fighting. That loss of fear is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. It’s very dangerous. There are 8,000 officers trying to remove everybody from streets. At night they beat the guys, undress them, and leave them in the snow. What the police are doing is just crazy, it's like they’re on drugs or something. I know it’s dangerous, but I just can’t stand looking at the recent events. I want a change and I don’t care how. I wish I could stay there this time.

What about the life and the job you have in Canada? What are you leaving behind?
I am self-employed, doing renovations. I am a simple guy, you know? My family is all in Ukraine right now, so it’s only friends I’m leaving. I got my home mortgaged to get enough money to go.

Are you worried for your family?
I fear for their lives. They used to live in a peaceful, good country. It was the country I grew up in, now they might get their eyes blown off if they go outside. If I protect just one person then I have done my job. I can only imagine how many children there are right now in Ukraine who can’t go outside because they might get killed. I never thought my country would come to this, nobody would believe what’s happening if you told them, if it weren’t for the photos.

Do you know anyone else coming back to get supplies like this?
I am here so briefly that I didn’t get a chance to speak to anyone, but I heard that a few guys came back here from Kiev to get supplies. I am going by myself. The support in the Canadian Ukrainian Community is very strong; it’s a really nice community. There are petitions going around in Canada right now.

What is the ultimate goal, for you and other protestors in Kiev?
It would be nice if we have a parliamentary election and a presidential election, but I don’t think this will happen. There has to be justice brought to the riot policemen, they are really doing crime. They are directly fighting journalists, of which there is video proof. We have to remove them from the country. If we want to punish someone it’s the minister of police in the Ukraine that’s responsible for the violence, for killing people.
 

Last week was the 30th anniversary of Sundance, America's most famous independent film festival. It was started by Robert Redford back in 1978 and has played most of the best films of the past three decades. The whole experience of Sundance is weird, because the festival takes over this small ski town in Utah called Park City. In fact, the best time to ski in Park City is during Sundance, because no one is on the slopes. Instead, everybody is walking around the main street gawking at celebrities drinking coffee and bundling up... I spent a week at this year's festival, cooped inside of dark theaters searching the screens for something worthwhile to write about. I was at the movies so often, it took me five days to actually meet the people I was crashing with during the festival. They came home from a party late one night and shook me awake, whispering loudly at my face, "Who are you?" I told them I was reviewing movies for VICE and they asked me if I knew where the bathroom was. Then I told them I was in bed, asleep. That really stumped them.

Anyways, I've reviewed some of the movies I saw at Sundance below. Some of these films have celebrities, some do not. Some are going to get a wide release—but some are so awful, you better hope they never come to a theater near you. 

THE OVERNIGHTERS

America has always been a land of second chances—especially to those who can pay for it: presidents, bankers, R. Kelly, etc... Jesse Moss’s documentary investigates this phenomenon in a small, bible-belting town in North Dakota after fracking became big business. While most of the country’s economy is still struggling, this town has tripled in size and keeps dishing out six-figure jobs in the oil fields. That population boom includes second chancers from all over—people with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. There are thieves, abusers, and sex offenders. When the local pastor starts practicing the bible’s edict of "love thy neighbor" and allows the felons a free place to crash overnight, the other neighbors practice their right to be dicks. The more the pastor tries to do good, the more the film reveals evil. Nothing is better than hypocrites getting their comeuppance. This shit has loads to spare. 

A MOST WANTED MAN

Billed as the thinking man’s spy thriller, I couldn’t help but think everything was really fucking obvious. From the moment they introduce any character, they lay it all out for you. It’s pretty hard to watch a spy movie when there’s no mystery about who’s guilty, who's getting screwed over, who’s playing who, and what’s going to happen. All that’s left you to do is watch Philip Seymour Hoffman look dangerously diabetic, Rachel McAdams be a one-dimensional "cute girl," Willem Dafoe not be a good Willem Dafoe, and all three of them speak in crappy German accents. Anton Corbijn, your films used to be cool.

WHIPLASH

I hate it when the premise of a movie nearly destroys the film itself. In Damien Chazelle's second feature, Whiplash, a young student wants to become one of best jazz drummers ever, which is kind of weird considering this film takes place today and not 80 years ago. These days, most people want to rap or make music with knobs and switches. The student's teacher is a hard ass and makes him cry until he’s good, which sounds like pretty lame entertainment. However, on the silver screen, the film is as tense as a great jazz song. The thing two-steps, waltzes, and punches. It sweats, has a breakdown, and then crescendos. The teacher, J. K. Simmons, is as brutal as the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket and, even though he’s really close, Miles Teller doesn’t pull a Private Pyle. The feature was adapted from the director’s Grand Jury Prize winning short last year and is just as big a crowd-pleaser.

GOD HELP THE GIRL

God get me out of here is the only thing anyone will think when they watch the Belle & Sebastian singer Stuart Murdoch's directorial debut. It’s a movie about a girl with undefined emotions surrounding her vaguely defined anorexia and it is told through song. With the help of her trusty, trust fund girlfriend and the dopiest of mediocre songwriting wannabes, they set out on pretty fucking lame adventures—going to the park, rowing canoes, swimming, going to concerts, etc... These are the moments the girl couldn’t experience before? I mean, the girl is played by the beautiful Emily Browning and—minus her urban outsider outfits—she isn’t shown to have any real problems in life. This is just another High School Musical, but with a European cast and school happens to be out for summer. Stick to music, Stuart, but make it like you used to—like when it was good. 

JAMIE MARKS IS DEAD

This film made me wish I was dead. There was nothing remotely interesting about this bullshit attempt at a brooding gay ghost film. It follows a kid named Cam, who regrets not having been nicer to Jamie Marks, a loser at school who recently died and may or may not have been murdered. The ghost of Jamie can transport Cam anywhere in the world via dark closets, so at one point in the film they go and stay in the barn of a psychotic murderer... Then there's Cam’s mom, who gets hit by her best friend in a car accident. His mom becomes paralyzed, but it doesn’t actually impact the overal film except that her drunk friend who hit her hangs out at their house, a fact that also has no impact on anything. Are you following any of this? I couldn't. Not one of the arcs in this movie sticks. The story is kind of ambiguous, but the narrative is so all over the place, it just couldn't pull it off. 

KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER

This was one of my favorite films at the festival. It is based on the fantastic true story of a Japanese woman becoming disenchanted with her dull life in Tokyo and absolutely enchanted by the Coen Brother’s film Fargo, specifically the scene where a bloodied Steve Buscemi buries a briefcase of cash on the side of a Minnesota highway. After stealing her boss’s credit card, the meek Kumiko takes off on a journey to the United States with just the clothes on her back, her homemade maps, and—of course—a DVD copy of Fargo. Filled with offbeat humor, beautiful cinematography, and a psychedelic score, this is one you have to see. 

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

If one was to replace Lena Dunham’s character on Girls with a bi-sexual Iranian woman, but keep the hipster humor and nudity, you would have Appropriate Behavior. While that sounds like a legit recipe for vomit, it’s much sweeter and funnier than mouth excrement. I know it’s an unfair statement to compare every modern young female-centric movie to Girls because guys have been doing the same stories since we could talk, but this is really fucking similar. That said, the writer/actor/director doesn’t just rehash a story of a disenchanted New York youth, but pulls off a fresh coming-of-age in America, as she embraces modernity versus tradition. 

FRANK

If a movie starring the Oscar-nominated Michael Fassbender wearing an oversized papier-mâché head for 95 percent of a movie while performing in a super weird neo-punk band alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal, Domhnall Gleeson, and Scoot McNairy sounds amazing then we're on the same page. Imagine my surprise when all of the fun, irreverence, and creativity of it is zapped out of it once the head is removed and everything is chalked up to mental illness and mediocrity. Even more troubling is that most of the movie is enjoyable. It’s essentially a catalyst for absurd little jokes and peculiar moments, but when added up it’s just a funny looking piece of shit. Poised as the path artists take to find themselves and as an expression of outsider art, the resolution proves it’s the antithesis of its goal: Art isn’t recognized for its quality, but instead, championed for it’s novelty and viral ability. Like how every review of Frank says it’s good or bad because they do or don’t like the weirdness of Michael Fassbender in a mask the entire time, not what the movie’s actually about.

BOYHOOD

Filmed over the span of 12 years, Richard Linklater’s new film is nothing short of a modern masterpiece of minutiae. The years see the growth of a six-year-old boy through primary school and ends as he enters college. Filming three or four days every year, the team—including Ethan Hawke as his semi-deadbeat dad, Patricia Arquette as the hard-working, Alcoholic-marrying mother, and Lorelei Linklater (the director’s own daughter) as his older sister—literally age and grow in front of our eyes. If you’ve ever had parents, had a sibling, or grew up (or didn’t) there’s something in this movie for you. The film grew with the actors and the world simultaneously and incidentally, now serves as one of the most accurate period pieces of the 2000s. Music, gadgets, fashion, and the news are used as cultural signifiers, the density of which will be more appreciated from multiple viewings. The cumulative results of the film are remarkable and hard to ignore—you get to witness a boy become a man and you don't have to knock anyone up.

THE SIGNAL

What starts out as a tense mystery about three computer hackers and their failing love life’s turns into the The Matrix Reloaded, with Laurence Fishburne reprising his monotone messiah role. This time, we think it’s aliens instead of technology, but little Laurence has got the same stuff up his sleeve in this film. It starts off like The Matrix, following the rabbit, but halfway through it becomes the sequels and veers mainstream with big explosions and silly CGI, before tripping over its ideas again and again (which is funny because the main character’s legs don’t work and he falls a lot, too). This is the type of movie that will please some genre bros, but it is too arty to play mainstream and too mainstream to play arty. 

LIFE ITSELF

I grew up watching Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert. I knew his name and face before most celebrities. I mean, “Two Thumbs Up.” Although he was easily the most famous film critic of the last two decades, I really only knew that he won a Pulitzer, was on TV,  married a black chick, and had his jaw removed because of thyroid cancer. Life Itself is a thorough, funny, and heartbreaking documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) that gives you an inside look into Roger's life. The film is beautifully rendered with interviews of his peers and loved ones along with great archival footage, viscous arguments with Gene Siskel, and awesome candid stories about Ebert getting sloshed at bars with hookers. The film turned the man into a legend. I mean, Ebert, the lovable film critic was a vitriolic, alcoholic slut for a lot of his life before he cleaned up—and when he did in the movie, I cried tears for him. 

OBVIOUS CHILD

If this movie proves anything, it’s that you can’t go wrong with an abortion joke, especially if you’re the funny and very talented Jenny Slate. She stars as the immature and accidentally knocked up mama-to-be, whose life is falling apart faster than she can say a fart joke. The film is a lot of things you’d expect from a modern female comedy, but when they break taboos and upset the status quo, it’s much more tasteful and sensitive than dudes crossing swords. This is a perfect icebreaker film for all you first-daters out there that feel the need to be honest about your past and talk about the time you went gay, took two at once, or Plan B’d your B. 

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD

I thought we were done with over-the-top suburban melodramas after Douglas Sirk perfected them in the 60s, but here is Gregg Araki trying to do it again, this time with a gay twist (because he’s gay). Oh wait, Douglas Sirk already did that twist when Rock Hudson, star of All That Heaven Allows, came out as one of Hollywood’s most prominent homosexuals. Regardless, this movie is supposed to be about female teen angst, so there’s plenty of nudity, bitchiness, and very obvious, cliched poetic metaphors about feelings. The film is like watching an angry, mentally-challenged family play Clue with all of the mystery cards face up, yelling at each other that they can’t read the words that look like “gay,” “murder,” “basement,” and “obvious.”

CAPTIVATED: THE TRIAL OF PAMELA SMART

I went into this film thinking it was going to be boring. If you don’t remember, Pamela Smart was on trial in the 90s for allegedly colluding with her 15-year-old lover Billy Flynn and three of his friends to murder her husband. The trial was the first ever to be publicly broadcast and it had all of the elements news outlets love: a pretty woman turning an innocent seeming boy bad, adultery, conspiracy, and murder. The story has already been made into two movies, one starring Nicole Kidman and the other with Helen Hunt. But similar to Errol Morris’s crime documentary, The Thin Blue Line, Captivated convincingly shows how the media and this perfect cocktail of a story influenced the public’s—and therefore the jury’s—decision to convict Pamela to a life sentence without the chance of parole. What results is a fascinating and haunting mediation on America’s flawed justice system, the solidifcation of gossip into fact through media, and how people can convince themselves of anything to survive.

NO NO: THE DOCKUMENTARY

Dock Ellis is one of the most fascinating and controversial baseball players to ever step onto the field. The dude is such a badass that he actually pitched a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres in 1970 while under the influence of LSD, amphetamines, and other stimulants. This documentary tries to show that he’s more than a crazy, outspoken druggie—he's a crazy, outspoken druggie of moral, upstanding qualities regarding the role of black athletes and drug rehabilitation. But he also beat his ex-wife. With this movie, they’re basically saying he’s complicated. The film is fine, but for someone as amazing as Dock, this should’ve been more amazing. I’ll prove it with two videos: the no-hitter and him reading a letter from Jackie Robinson. There, now you know Dock. Dock rocks. I saved you 90 minutes.

PING PONG SUMMER

The best and maybe the only throwback film at Sundance. Ping Pong Summer recreates the nostalgia of the East Coast 80s like nobody’s business. Wind breaking pants, fly names, big ol’ boom boxes, arcade video games, and family vacations in the station wagon. This coming-of-age-but-in-the-past picture stars one Radical Miracle, a hopelessly dorky teen who’s out to do it all: get the girl, beat the jerk, make a friend, and have a good time doing it. The film’s plot moves like that of its ancestors, but it successfully mines all of the humor, awkwardness, in-jokes, and references. With everything thrown in, it tastes like Rad’s favorite drink, a “suicide,” which is a dash of every soda in the soft drink line. The film—like the drink—is cool, but it’s not the best in the soda fountain.

BEST ONLINE SHORT: RAT PACK RAT

Mad genius Todd Rohal's Rat Pack Rat is the winner of a Special Jury Prize for Unique Vision. The film is incredibly bizarre and could change your opinion of Sammy Davis Jr. and the song "Candy Man." I don't want to spoil it. Just watch it before Monday morning, when it gets taken down.

1983

I’ve got a year-long gig in Saudi Arabia, subcontracted by Aramco Oil, to make slide/tape training programs, which means I fly around in helicopters taking pictures on oil rigs and at gas-oil separation plants. American tinkerers have been taking apart radios and cars and putting them back together for fun since the dawn of the 20th century. In 1983 the Saudi’s don’t yet have a comparable background in technology so we take their money and teach them the blue-collar and computer skills that will eliminate their dependence on us. They don’t want us there. Too many American expats are assholes, especially in a country where everyone is of a darker complexion and doesn’t speak English or wear pants or worship Jesus.

I live in a camp a few kilometers inland from the Persian Gulf with about 3,000 men, most of whom are third-world worker bees with long contracts and shit wages. The few hundred Americans are paid high-end blue-collar tax-free wages and housed in long trailers with six rooms and three bathrooms on either side. My room has a single bed, a wardrobe, a desk and chair, a sink and a mirror, a small fridge, and a black and white television. I share a bathroom with the guy next door.

Women are not allowed in the camp and an outbreak of the clap in the Filipino neighborhood has been traced back to a blow-up doll named Farrah. Alcoholic beverages are illegal and possession could mean jail time and lashes. I favor a clear moonshine called sadiki, which I mix with Pepsi. The kingdom has no Coca-Cola. When opening a new bottle I pour a little puddle in an ashtray and set it aflame. If it burns blue it’s a good batch.

Monday is the official Aramco day off and an hour before dawn I haven’t yet gone to bed and I’ve just switched from sadiki to coffee. I have a motor-pool Toyota and, along with a video guy named Jim from San Diego, I’m driving north and then west into the Arabian desert. This is an unauthorized trip and we’ve unhooked the odometer. The main roads are paved but the super highways are yet to come and street signs are a thing of the future. Turn left at the rusted skull of a car and hang a right at the bloated camel. We stop in Dammam and pick up Jim’s friend Abdul Aziz, a coworker, who will be our guide and translator.

Taking pictures of the roaming Bedouin tribes, especially the women, is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, which is why we’re making this day trip and why I have my camera and two rolls of film. Abdul, who is an urban transplant from a nomadic family, has an idea of where to find Bedouin tribes and he directs me off the road into the desert without a trail; around hills and holes and dunes like we have four-wheel drive. He is grinning and smoking a Marlboro, telling me this way and that. He tells me he wants to go to America next year and he’s looking forward to fucking American women. I tell him it might not be as easy as he thinks and he tells me all he has to do is give them money, all American women are whores. He tells me he knows this because his American coworkers have told him and shown him filthy pictures. I tell him yeah, that figures.

I’m lost in the vast emptiness for 20 minutes when on the horizon I see a herd of camels and a couple of kids in underpants. I see a long horizontally-striped tent made of home-loomed goat yarn and overdressed women in niqabs. Two men appear on another horizon in a Toyota pickup. They have a couple more women bouncing in the truck bed. I park to the side of the tent, which is separated into multiple living spaces. There are goats everywhere and the sand is speckled with small baked-black turds. In the trunk of our car we have two big chunks of ice along with a case of Pepsi and a box of Milky Ways (two of which I’ve already eaten), and toy cars and dolls. Abdul tells the men in the truck we’re Americans and one of the guys says, “America, Ronald Reagan.” I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Abdul tells them we just want to hang out for a while to better understand their culture and opens the trunk to show them the booty. They accept the gifts and invite us in the main room to take an afternoon meal with the family. We take off our shoes and socks and sit on mats in a circle. I’m wearing my Nikon and make occasional exposures. No one seems to mind.

We are with an old guy and his three wives and a younger guy with his one. The men smell like sweat and cardamom; the women smell like hippie girls and flowers. The women show their hands and feet, their hair and eyes. They mostly seem like jovial wrinkly grandmothers, but one is young. She has long pigtails and her hands are dark. Her fingers are ringed and her palms are hennaed like iodine stains. I point the camera at her face and wait for her to look at me. My right eye is on the viewfinder and my left is watching from just above the camera so that both eyes, at different angles, look into hers when she looks at me and I hit the shutter. I get a little throb in my dick and I send her a bolt of love and lust but she just blinks and looks away.

I ask if they go to Mecca once a year and the young guy, Mustafa, tells me of course they do. I say that’s a long trek from here and Mustafa says yes it is. I ask him does he ever go into the big city, and he tells me he doesn’t need to because the city keeps coming to him. He asks me why do I want pictures of him and his family and I tell him pictures will help to keep my memories fresh. He smiles and says he likes to tell stories. I ask if he’d like to tell one now and he says no, it’s time to eat.

I’m not hungry. The heat, the drive, the coffee, the candy bars, and the sadiki hangover have all come together to make me sick. My neck muscles are tight, my jaw is clenched and I’ve got a head full of bells. My stomach is boiling and bloated. I’m holding in hot farts and the thought of the upcoming feast is making me perspire.

First we pass around a large tin of dates. Flies are suspended over the sticky brown fingers of fruit like a flock of starlings. I’m polite and take one like I’m choosing from a box of chocolates. Next we get jiggers of hot tea that taste like Lipton’s and are sweetened almost to syrup. Now a large round tin pan heaped with roasted goat and Biryani rice is set before us. We ball up admixtures in our right hands, pop them into our mouths, chew, and swallow. Jim seems to love it and takes extra greasy handfuls. I tell them mmm yum yum, but don’t ask for the recipe.

Our hosts have outdone themselves. A Toyota hubcap appears filled with warm curdled camel's milk, bits of dromedary hair, and desert detritus. We pass it around like a joint. When it gets to me I go to blow a fly off the rim but instead blow it into the milk where it buzzes around a clotted-milk-burg like a toy boat. I pretend to drink then hand it to the guy next to me who pinches out the fly and buries it in the sand. He takes a long drink and then gives me a big missing-tooth smile and offers me another.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

Palestinians refugees in Lebanon are excluded from the social and political sphere. They are prohibited from pursing citizenship, working in high-skilled professions, and owning property in the country.

While many children in refugee camps have few options, spending their days going to school, manning unhygienic machinery, or working in family markets, for a team of girls, basketball has become a steady influence.

“I found my soul with this sport,” said Noor, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, smiling as she neatly sunk a basketball through an iron rim with no net.

Noor lives with her family in Shatila, a 65-year-old Palestinian camp in south Beirut and one of 12 ungoverned by the Lebanese state. With sewage covering the streets and electric wires dangling in the air, remnants of the 15-year civil war are still visible. And for Palestinians such as Noor, Shatila symbolizes eternal displacement.

Noor is part of the first all-girls team to emerge in Shatila. “We play twice a week,” she said smiling, as she held the basketball against her hip. 

“Girls in this camp have just as much of a right to play as the boys,” said Mejdi, the team's coach.

Mejdi is a construction painter who struggles to support his family with a meager 400 dollars a month. Since finding a playground less than a mile from the camp, he’s trained the team every weekend. With an emphasis on teamwork and sportsmanship, many parents have welcomed his efforts.

“This is the significance of basketball,” said Razan, coach Mejdi’s 14-year-old daughter. “We’re not just a team, we’re a voice.”

With state restrictions facilitating poverty and broken governance in the camp, the children of Shatila have had little safety to play. While poverty often pushes boys to help their families financially, lack of security confines most girls indoors. Consequently, displacement has severely impacted a child’s right to play.

Mejdi recalls his reluctance from time to time, but never second guesses himself. “Imagine sharing a home with 20,000 people who you don’t know. This is life here. This isn’t about restricting a child, it’s about security.”

Since many of the girls’ parents survived the civil war and sieges of the camps, it seems past traumas have influenced their children’s upbringing. Memories of Palestinian guerrillas, Israel’s invasionand the frailty of Lebanese society are summoned to rationalize Palestinian exclusion. And with the prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence, parents remain hesitant to let their daughters play outside.

Many of the players heard about the club from their friends at school. And as word about the team traveled, more parents considered the idea. However, not everyone was convinced.

“You don’t know what we’ve seen as children,” said Samir who’s the father of Hannah, the team’s playmaker. “We want her to play, but this isn’t a safe environment.”

It wasn’t until coach Mejdi and Razan visited Hannah’s home that her father began to reconsider. “I told Samir that I’ll look after Hannah the way I look after Razan, as if she was my own daughter,” said Mejdi.

Despite Samir’s reluctance, he soon put confidence in Mejdi. Yet more significantly, he built greater trust with Hannah as well.

“I never asked my parents to play until I heard about the basketball club,” said Hannah. “But now I feel a possibility with this game. If I work I can be great.

Hannah’s mother, Nabine, was always against the idea that girls should be restricted. However, she was always more afraid of what might happen to Hannah in the camp. It wasn’t until Hannah came home from playing basketball for the first time that Nabine felt it too. She shared her daughter’s unfamiliar freedom.

“I never had the chance to play as a child, there were never any clubs for girls,” said Nabine as she wrapped her arms around Hannah. “I thank God. I’m thankful for this team.”

With winter approaching, coach Mejdi has had to find an indoor basketball court for the girls to play, a task that hasn’t been easy.

“I found a Christian school willing to lend facilities and transport for 250 dollars a month, but I just can’t afford that,” said Mejdi.

Despite the obstacles, the team remains committed. Just three months ago, a week before the team played their first organized game, coach Mejdi encouraged parents to come to the match. “I wanted the team to convince their parents they weren’t here without reason,” said Mejdi. “I wanted their parents to see what their kids could do on the court.”

With Hannah sprinting down the wings, Noor chasing every rebound, and Razan leading the team, Shatila’s first basketball club relished every moment of the match. As Majdi stood on the sidelines with his arms folded, watching his players voice modest “good jobs” after each made basket, it was clear the team never ceased to compete. 

Although the team ultimately lost to a squad from a Lebanese Middle school in Sidon, a city about an hour drive south from Beirut, something greater had taken place. The team had evolved to include those watching.

Yet while Mejdi finds difficulties raising 750 dollars to keep the team playing from January to April, his daughter embraces her freedom today. With her back against the wall and a basketball between her knees, Razan took notice of her father.

“We have a right to play,” said Razan. “And we’ll never let it go.”

Is Toronto really ready to elect a man who has never smoked crack? Maybe. Photos via Justin Friesen.

Toronto’s administration has devolved into lunacy. The mayor smokes crack, drinks and drives, speaks in Jamaican Patois, and has most recently been accused of orchestrating an intricate jailhouse beating, on the day he denied being involved in the murder of an alleged gang member. Naturally, with an election coming up in October, people are looking for a Rob Ford replacement—and fast. Since he’s immune from getting fired,and city council could only strip him of some of his powers, it’s safe to say anyone opposed to Ford’s position as mayor is looking forward to Election Day.

January 2nd was the first day to register as a mayoral candidate, and we’ve already been treated to our fair share of interesting characters who have entered the race. You’ve probably already heard that a man named Al Gore is running, along with Matt Mernagh the man who almost made weed legal in Canada, and there’s also a white supremacist looking to secure about 1% of the vote—but did you know that Juno-award winning jazz saxophonist Richard Underhill is also trying to unseat Rob Ford?

In case you’re not familiar with the musical prowess of one Richard Underhill, he’s a founding member of a Jazz-fusion band called The Shuffle Demons; the group responsible for one of Toronto’s greatest anthems: “Spadina Bus.” If you haven’t checked it out since it was a hit back in 1986, you’re missing out.

A public transit classic.

We sat down with Richard in Kensington Market to talk about his candidacy for mayor, and to figure out whether or not he’s smoked crack.

VICE: First off, thanks for meeting with us, how has your campaign been going since you first announced your candidacy?
Richard: It’s been amazing. I brought in a marching band to city hall. It didn’t quite go as planned. They kicked them out a bit early. It was so cold I didn’t have the throngs of people outside that I wanted to have. But I still thought it was fun. What I really want to do in this campaign is bring arts and culture to people, and use arts and culture to heal the rifts that have been formed—especially during the recent administration. So that’s why I brought the marching band to city hall, you know, I just wanted to signify that things were going to be a little different with my campaign.

Your hit with the Shuffle Demons’ Spadina Bus paid tribute to the glories of riding the TTC. Did the success of that song influence your transit-based platform?
Transit is kind of key, it’s a great equalizer. If people can get to their work or get to socializing easier, maybe they won’t be encouraged to buy a car, which is a big drain on their personal economy. I really think a comprehensive transit plan is huge for people to be able to enjoy the city. I’ve had some ideas, I’ve travelled around the world and when I’m in Berlin, I noticed that, “hey it’s three in the morning and there’s a bus every 15 minutes that goes everywhere.” They have 24-hour full service, it may not be quite full but way better than what we have on the weekends, and I think that’s really important. It’s great to cut down drunk driving and to get bar staff home. So transit is a really big part of what I’m about, I want people to use their automobiles less. I want them to cycle more. It makes for a healthier, greener, nicer place to live.

So you’re advocating for the subway to run until 4AM on weekends?
Yeah I think that’s a great idea, on the weekend, keep subways open till 4AM. Encourage people to leave their cars at home, go out and have a great time, get home on the subway cheaply and safely. It makes sense.

Do you think there is a set of skills to being a professional touring musician that are different than common politician-y professions like lawyers and business people? Artists are known for lateral thinking, which I think more politicians could use.
I think being an artist actually sets you up well for the job as mayor. For an artist, I would think the job as councilor would be a little more difficult, because that’s more about a lot of technical issues around development and things like that. Whereas, the job of mayor is more about setting an agenda, being a conciliator, bringing different people together and getting ideas, presenting a platform that’s very ideas-based and then working with council to get it to work.

I saw a really great article about why Jazz musicians make great leaders, and one asset is the ability to think on your feet and that’s what we do everyday, we come up with what the problem is, like how to solo over this song, and we figure out how to do it. I find that politics can be so argumentative, and we’ve got this British debating style going where we’re trying to score points on the other person and I find that so frustrating. What musicians do is try to work together.

So city hall should be more like a band?
Yeah exactly. It should be more like a band, we have to work and play together. People have different strengths, some people are really great at the numbers and budget and are real fiscal conservatives, and other people have wonderful ideas about the positive future that they want to see.

How do you feel about the other candidates? Like Rob Ford or that neo-Nazi guy?
One thing I would say is that I appreciate the input from other candidates no matter how “off the wall” they are, except maybe theneo-Nazi. I’m really disappointed with the current system that we have where the media or the powers-that-be pick the top five candidates and those people go to the debates. It’s not democracy in my view. As tiresome and difficult as it is to listen to all the people who’ve joined in this discussion, it’s really important.

Have you received any negative press or been discounted so far by folks for not being a “serious” candidate?
Toronto Life came out with their list of fringe candidates and I was in there with the sexual stalker [Dimitri the Lover] and the nazi, and the guy called Al Gore and I actually think it’s funny. Hopefully, because of my connections in the music world and the amount of people who actually know who I am, I’ll be able to breach that barrier, but I think it’s okay for now. I’ve sort of embraced the “fringe” candidate label because I want to do some really great things and then go, “is this what a fringe candidate does? Is this how much a fringe candidate raises, is this the kind of a detailed platform a fringe candidate has?” Just to kind of throw it back in their face. Anyone in the race should be considered to be in the race, and it’s convenient and expedient to just pick the ones that have either had council experience or that have a lot of backing behind them.

Have you ever smoked crack?
I have not ever smoked crack, thank you for asking. It’s weird when the mayor has done more drugs than the Jazz musician… but I’m afraid that’s the case.

Do you know what bumbaclot means?
Oh, you know I’ve heard the term, I know it’s a Jamaican term, but I don’t know…

It’s a dirty word.
You know, my hipness factor has dropped about seven points because I did not know, but I never looked it up…

Fair enough. Finally, can I get confirmation on my information about my transportation to Spadina Station?
You can indeed, because you’ll be on the Sp-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa Spadina Bus. Having said that, I do like the streetcar. It’s faster and easier.

Thanks Richard. 

There are two types of Super Bowl viewers: those who actually watch the football, and those who spend the game cramming their mouths full of whatever delicious greasey grub is at hand. Super Bowl food is an event in itself, the most gluttonous day on the American finger food calendar. On this day, the fried concoctions, dips, and booze we all love scores a real touchdown (that's a football reference), but after the coin toss in MetLife stadium, no one is going to be bothered to head out into the polar vortex to source wings, pizza, beer, or White Castle—thank God, then, for takeout. And on this decadent day of edible indulgence, one’s hands must be cleaned and ready for licking—no nail soiled, no manicure overlooked. 

For our own Super Bowl experience, we wanted nails that matched the caliber of our food. That meant nails with team-specific designs and nails that went perfectly with the food we're digging into. So we put together this photo shoot—if you’re in New York for the game, it doubles as a visual guide to sourcing all of the libations and refreshments you'll need come game day. 

Alastair Casey is a Brooklyn-based photographer. Check out his work here. 

Holly Lynn Falcone is a New York-based manicurist. Check out her work here. 

Early on a morning in 1994, Scott Sasso scribbled the name “10.Deep” on a piece of notebook paper taped to his dorm room wall at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The name came to Scott on a complete whim—he just picked it because it sounded cool. At that point, he would have never imagined that kernel of an idea would grow into an internationally revered streetwear brand worn by hip-hop icons like A$AP Rocky and pro-skaters like Jamal Smith. The former graffiti artist and writer was really just looking for an outlet to quell his boredom and take his love of street art to the next step of wearable art.

It has been nearly two decades since Scott started painstakingly hand-printing T-shirts with "10.Deep" emblazoned across them. Today, you can find his brand in over 300 retail stores across the US and they now offer a full fashion range beyond T-shirts that includes cut-and-sew garments, weird toys, and coveted skate decks. 10.Deep is even slated to launch its own flagship store in NYC later this year.

To find out how the brand has managed to survive the economic recession that decimated so many of its peers and has continued to stay relevant among a new wave of streetwear brands, I visited Scott Sasso at the swanky 10.Deep offices in downtown Brooklyn.

When I arrived, Scott was in the middle of a marketing meeting with his team huddled around him. I waited for him in a showroom that looked like the study in Clue, with a colorful Persian carpet and stacks of books on the tables. The tropical florals and Egyptian-inspired patterns of the brand’s current holiday collection hung on the walls around me. When Scott finally entered the room, he was surprisingly fresh-faced for someone who has been leading a successful streetwear brand for two decades.   

With 10.Deep’s 20-year anniversary in sight and so many new things on the horizon for the brand, I figured this was a good time as any to get reflective about its long and ragged journey to becoming one of America’s dopest streetwear labels. So I asked Scott to walk me through the evolution of his brand, from his first designs to 10.Deep’s latest holiday collection.

VICE: Tell me about your first logo.
The first one I made unintentionally looked like the Champion logo, just turned it around so it looked like a D. It had a graffiti style print on the back that just said "10.Deep." I didn’t realize it looked like the Champion logo until I went to a store and tried to sell it. The person’s reaction was, "So it looks like the Champion logo. I am supposed to buy that?"  I was like "Uh, it looks like the Champion logo? OK, cool."

What was your first successful design?
The design that allowed 10.Deep to continue was my second set of T-shirts in ‘96, which was a series called the Urban Survival Games. I was playing with designs during the time of the Olympics and drew one of a stick figure jumping over a turnstile. That sold and really turned 10.Deep into a business. I thought, there might be something more here than just making T-shirts for my friends.

So there was a growing interest in the brand at that point?
I got my first order from Japan at the end of ‘96. I had actually stopped doing 10.Deep by then. I was like, OK, that’s done. Then I got a call from someone who said, "Japanese guys want to buy your stuff and they just kept coming back for it." Those first three years ended up being all about Japan.

What was your next step for moving 10.Deep forward?
The next thing I wanted to do was make a good line. At the end of ‘97, I started to think about what I was going to do to differentiate myself from other people. I started to produce some cut-and-sew items, like a pant and button down shirt. My mom was a clothing designer, so she really helped me with the patterns for the earliest cut and sew stuff.  I found manufacturers in Salt Lake City because my mom moved there when I was graduating from college. She ended up being my production manager. She would go to the factory and kick ass and make sure everything was right. I am not sure if I would be here if she hadn’t helped me out early on.

When was the first time you saw someone sporting your brand?
It was funny, the first person I ever saw wearing 10.Deep wasn’t until ‘98. I ran up to this guy and I was like, "Yo, that’s my shirt!" It was a Japanese guy, who didn’t speak any English. He kind of just looked at me blankly and said "Yeah, 10.Deep." He kind of blew me off and turned back around to whatever he was doing. I was bummed. I think the next two people I saw wearing it did kind of like the same thing. To this day, when I see people wearing 10.Deep, I am not really that jazzed about it.

10.Deep's fall 1999.

When did you feel the brand start to really develop in the streetwear community?
The first line that I created that I felt good about was fall 1999. I designed embroidered sweatshirts and it felt mature. It felt like something real. There wasn’t any particular design that was strong. But as a whole, it looked good. I think it was the season where I started to get a little bit of respect in the streetwear community. At that time, the top dog in my eyes was Ssur. I used what Russ was doing as a measuring stick for myself, and I think with that season I thought it was as good as that. Then there started to be other designs that were successful that started to propel the brand.

How has 10.Deep survived with so many fluctuations in the economy over the years?
The high point before the market crashed was like 2000 and the beginning of 2001. I was just trying to hold on and make sure I didn’t have to shut the brand down after that. I think in 2002 we started to do the business that we had been doing before. 2001 was just horrible. in 2002, I had a couple of winners. I did this Problem Solvers tee that was kind of big for the brand. It was just an image of brass knuckles with the words PROBLEMS SOLVERS above it and ALL WRONGS RIGHTED beneath it. It helped define the brand for a lot of people, but it was a joke to me. I am not a tough guy. It kind of took over all of the other stuff that I was doing for the brand. The next thing I knew, the knuckles were my logo and I was like, I don’t know if I want this to be a logo for the brand. 

What was your next successful design?
There was another T-shirt too with a gasmask. Both of those tees I sold like 500 units. Where as prior, my best tee would sell like 300. In that season—spring/ summer 2002—it felt like the brand started to be successful. It started to be financially rewarding also.

Once the brand became profitable, how did life change for you?
Well I quit my job in 2004. I was working at an urban brand that I helped some of my friends start. I just got totally fucking bored with it. I figured I had enough of that. I had never really planned on being a designer. I thought I was going to go back to school or build a portfolio of my work to bring to galleries and just do 10.Deep on the side, but 10.Deep ended up taking over. I got the office in this building in 2004. 

So were you ready to commit to 10.Deep at that point?
At the end of 2005, I was ready to be done with it again. I drew the lines in the sand. I told josh and another guy working with me at the time, "If we don’t do this much in sales this season, we are done." I had burned through all the money I had saved from my other job through all the years of doing 10.Deep.

10.Deep chain gang hoodie.

What was it that kept 10.Deep alive?
The chain gang sweatshirt, which was another joke to me. I didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. Josh had gone to a tradeshow and we had the sweatshirt there, in February of ‘06. We had 300 in the company and we got orders for 4,000 of them. He called me and he was like, "I think things just changed." That was the big one, because I was ready to be done with it. 

Do people get the humor in your designs?
When I think of all of the misreadings of some of the bigger designs we have done, I think of the chain gang print. People think that it’s about wealth in a positive way, where it is kind of glorifying it. To me, it was just a joke. I am not a person who takes myself seriously. It is the same thing with the Problem Solvers graphic. That was a joke, but I see guys wearing the shirt trying to be extra tough. I am like, really? That is not what it is about. You put things out there and it becomes what people want it to be. You think I would have figured this shit out by now...

What are some of the challenges you have faced with the brand?
All those years early on, my struggle was trying to sell the brand. People would say, is this a black urban brand or is this a skate brand? I was like, "It’s neither, it is all that shit." 10.Deep is just youth culture. Nobody got it and then the streetwear thing blew up and to me that’s what it was about. Now what that was has been turned on its head and now streetwear is urban again. I am totally confused about what it is, honestly. I get people that come up to me now like, "Oh this is an urban brand." I am like, "No, this is just a whatever brand." It is about togetherness.

How have kept the brand relevant for almost 20 years?
I started to focus on the cut and sew stuff and for fall of 2007, what I focused on was making nice plaids and having nice fits on the button down shirts, which nobody else was making. Everything in the market was big and wide. That is really what kept us on through the recession.

10.Deep fall 2007 lookbook.

T-shirts weren’t your priority anymore?
By 2010 I stopped even designing the T-shirts. These days, I design cut and sew stuff first with the patterns. 

10.Deep summer 2010 lookbook.

So you focused on evolving your cut and sew styles?
I was sick of streetwear trying to be plain and heritage. Everybody was trying to do everything super clean, so I decided to do the exact opposite of that and started doing the allover patterns again and the top and bottom matching thing for summer 2012. I frankly didn’t think people were going to respond positively to that at all, but I thought it was great and funny. That sort of change brought even more attention to the brand.

10.Deep summer 2012 lookbook.

Do you have a favorite collection?
My favorite lines were those where there were significant changes, like summer 2012, when I first started doing the pattern matching. Maybe the Holiday Collection for this year is my favorite. This whole year I have felt like I have finally produced on a level that was up to my own standards. I didn’t even want to do 10.Deep again, that is like a constant theme in my life, but I decided if I was going to do it I was going to make product that I felt was interesting. But of all the things, what I've enjoyed the most is the excitement of the growth and getting to share that along the way.

10.Deep holiday 2013

What’s next for you and 10.Deep?
I want to get the store finished. The store is going to be about creating a cool space. I want to open the doors of the community to the brand. I think doing that will help bring the next generation of folks into 10.Deep. But I am old now. I feel like I want to move forward and do different things for myself. The same way I have reinvented the brand, I want to reinvent myself. 

Winter slammed the East Coast this year in the worst way, so Vito Fun chased the sun to warmer climates. These pictures are breadcrumbs along Vito's funtrail as he traveled from witch-tit-cold New York to stiff-dick-hot Hawaii, and a few bizare places in between. In this dump you'll find butts, bongs, a chihuahua driving a car, and enough unclothed young people frolicking in the sun to make you want to go outside and stop Facebook-stalking your friends who live in warmer places.

Sometimes, we need to be reminded that the world is a fundamentally absurd and silly place; that while there are people out there who command a lot of power and money, those people aren’t generally smarter or less goofy than you or me. For instance, there must have been a moment when there was a presentation, probably in some sleek conference room, about what events should be thrown in honor of the Super Bowl coming to New York City. One of the slides that appeared on the hi-def flatscreen read something like:

THROW A BIG STREET FAIR IN TIMES SQUARE IN LATE JANUARY? INVITE ALL THE BRANDS! (SUSAN PLEASE REWRITE TO MAKE IT SOUND BETTER THX)

And with that, or something like it, the Super Bowl Boulevard Engineered by GMC came into being. 

A press release has described the Super Bowl Boulevard as “a series of football-themed experiences that will take over Times Square the week before the big game. Stop by a live concert, snap a photo with the Vince Lombardi Trophy, or race down a specially made toboggan. [sic]” Another way to think of it, via Business Insider, is as a “garish branded hellscape… placed on top of the preexisting garish branded hellscape that is Times Square.” Having wandered around the Boulevard for a couple of hours in the freezing cold on Wednesday night, I can confirm that it is indeed both “football-themed” and “garish.” But calling it a “hellscape” is maybe being a bit unfriendly to the giant, multinational corporations responsible for it. They just want you to have a good time! Look, they brought the Rockettes in to do this:

They also built these giant Roman numerals, which rose from the ground like a heathen idol after an elaborate ceremony that involved not only the Rockettes, but also the Boys Choir of Harlem, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, NFL Commissioner Roger Gooddell, and the cast of the musical Jersey Boys:

Oh, did I mention Kevin Bacon’s band, the Bacon Brothers (best known for their hit “Wait, Kevin Bacon Is in a Band? Huh. OK, Good for Him I Guess”) played on Wednesday night? Kevin started off on the bongos:

The corporations even got some guy to dress like Cleatus, the robot that serves as a CGI mascot for NFL broadcasts on FOX and used to tweet fantasy football tips. (As he went through the crowd, a bunch of people started following him and shouted things like, “Yo! Is that a Transformer?” It was sort of like what I imagine would happen if Spider-Man were real and he walked around Times Square.) 

Not surprisingly, given football fans' well-known love of television, there were also a huge number of screens on hand. Normally this stretch of Broadway is already full of giant televisions constantly beaming advertisements at the crowds of bewildered, over-stimulated tourists thronging the streets, but the NFL and their corporate sponsors decided to take it up a notch with kiosks streaming nonsensical social-media-related gibberish: 

…and giant, Stonehenge-esque monoliths showing looped advertisement for various attractions in New York State:

…and entire walls of buildings that transformed into commercials for the idea of football itself:

…and flatscreens mounted on stands that said “PEPSI” to no one in particular:

…and video games for those youngsters bored of meatspace:

…and finally, plain old televisions tuned to the NFL Network, just in case you wanted to veg out for a second in the midst of it all:

So, yes, this is possibly an excessive amount of screens. This is possibly an insane amount of screens. This is possibly the kind of thing that would have terrified earlier generations of humans, people who would have questioned why “#NYC” needs to be written in giant, glittery, shimmering letters on the side of one of the many temporary structures that has sprouted up in the middle of Broadway:

But needs has nothing to do with it. The NFL brings in roughly $10 billion a year in revenue, and GM, PepsiCo, Mars Chocolate, Microsoft, and the other companies whose logos peppered the Super Bowl Boulevard are some of the richest entities to ever roam the Earth. These avatars of wealth can do anything. If they want to build a huge artificial hill you can ride down in a toboggan, and they want that hill to resemble something that a particularly effective and brutal tyrant would build to entomb himself in, well: 

In fact, it seems to me that the problem facing these companies when they want to throw an event like this is that when you can do literally anything, it’s hard to figure out what to do with all that money. FOOTBALL FAN STREET FAIR may seem like a pretty good idea on a brainstorming sheet, but—well, let me put it this way. Here is an incomplete list of the things you can do on the Super Bowl Boulevard: 

-Aforementioned toboggan ride down artificial hill

-Film yourself dancing around in a fake living room

-With the aid of a green screen, pretend to be interviewed by a talking M&M

-Run through an obstacle course like a real athlete at some kind of tryout

-Kick a football like a real NFL kicker

-Run through a tunnel with a bunch of lights and smoke and sounds, just like a real NFL player running through a stadium tunnel to reach the field

-Jump onto a pile of soft rubber with a football

-Whatever it is that these guys are doing:

-Get your photo taken with a statue that resembles an NFL player’s body so you can pretend to be the head of a football player

-Get your photo taken while wearing a helmet and holding a football in front of a fun backdrop that says “TOUCHDOWN”:

-Get your photo taken with the Vince Lombardi trophy

-Get your photo taken in front of the giant Roman numerals/the giant television screens/one of the mascots walking around Times Square/whatever else you see

-Go onstage and compete in a trivia quiz against other fans

-Play Xbox

-Fill out a form to enter a drawing for a free car

-Get autographs from NFL players

-Vote for Fantasy Player of the Year

-Get a free slice of Papa John’s pizza

-Just kind of mill around and enjoy the sights and sounds of Times Square, like these folks:

With the exception of “milling around,” most of those things involve waiting in line for a long, long time. On Wednesday night the line to get your photo taken with the Vince Lombardi trophy snaked through a building and out into the street, the line for the toboggan ride was on par with what you’d see at Disneyland during peak hours, and the line for the free pizza defied logic: that slice was worth about a buck, getting it involved standing in the cold for at least half an hour—surely that wasn’t a good tradeoff?

“Standing in the cold for at least half an hour” is, actually, a decent description of the Super Bowl Boulevard experience as a whole. The activities are all kind of hokey, like things you’d find at a county fair somewhere in the middle of America, but with the temperature hovering in the 20s, whatever homespun joy you could get from waiting in line to pretend to be in a living room was more or less wiped out by the constant voice in your head going, I’m cold I’m cold I’mcoldImcoldcoldcold.

If it were just a chintzy outdoor event held in the wrong season, I imagine it wouldn’t merit any attention: it’d be just one of those odd things New Yorkers walk through without taking their iPod buds out of their ears. But thanks to all that corporate money, every element of it is fantastically expensive and overwrought: the omnipresent screens, the sets where the talking heads of the NFL Network and ESPN are filmed on location, the spotlights scanning through the sky, the yellow-jacketed employees and volunteers of the Super Bowl Committee huddling together for warmth and steering the occasional lost tourist, shivering cops directing traffic, police helicopters droning overhead, human mannequins dancing in the windows of the store selling what seemed like extremely expensive yoga pants…

It’s like the set of Batman Forever. It’s like a massively complex practical joke played by a few rich men in suits who never laugh. It’s like one of George Saunders’s near-future dystopias come to life. It’s like those times when you take some drugs and then spend long nervous hours waiting for the trip to kick in. In one five-minute span I walked past a truck wearing a helmet:

…then wandered into Macy’s, where a pop-up NFL shop was selling hand-painted helmets for $5,750: 

All of this stuff is fantastical and magical and clearly the result of a painstaking process. The Super Bowl Boulevard, like Times Square itself, is a towering feat of technological innovation that stands as a monument to culture; simultaneously it’s incredibly lame and dull and gives you a headache if you’re inside it for too long. It’s essentially a multimillion-dollar theme park built for people to take selfies in front of.

In the past, humanity has constructed elaborate tributes to the gods, or to national heroes, or to honor the spirit of great tragedies or triumphs. The Super Bowl Boulevard is a tribute to really liking the same sport that everyone else in America likes, which might be part of the problem with it. If you have any doubts that this event—like this country—takes the NFL altogether more seriously than it deserves, just walk into the front hall of Macy’s:

Every year, more money and veneration and effort gets poured into the Super Bowl, and every year it makes less and less sense. Every year, more anticipation and branding gets built around THE football game until all that remains visible is a lot of glittering, incomprehensible graphics streaking across a series of screens while everyone cheers because they’re supposed to.    

This isn’t to say that these people are rubes or that the corporations behind the screens are evil. One odd thing about the Super Bowl Boulevard is that very little is actually on sale—most of the activities are free. These corporations aren’t after your money (which they already have anyway), they want some positive brand awareness, meaning they want everyone to have a good time. It’s just that “having a good time,” after going through the meat grinder of focus groups and meetings and whatever else happens at the largest companies in the world, eventually came to mean “watching a massive television screen only it’s outdoors, it’s freezing, and there are cops everywhere.”

On Saturday night, Blondie will play the Boulevard, which sounds like the only part of the whole event that an ordinary New Yorker might be interested in. After that, the trucks are going to pack up the screens and the LED displays and the television sets and Times Square can go back to its baseline level of branded intensity. Next year, when the Super Bowl comes to Glendale, Arizona, something more garish and more terrifying with even better branding will appear there. These things never get any smaller.

@HCheadle

Pearson airport, potential international spy trap. Photo via.

This morning, the CBC released a bombshell story about CSEC, Canada’s NSA. The CBC’s breaking news comes from previously unreleased documents from Edward Snowden, which they analyzed in tandem with Ronald Deibert, founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab—an “interdisciplinary laboratory” that analyzes the contentious intersection between technology and human rights.

I’ve previously reported on CSEC and speculated on their trustworthiness in the wake of Snowden’s unrelenting fire-hose of leaked spy files, but until today there wasn’t much information about the notoriously mysterious agency that operates out of a 72,000 square foot, $800 million dollar surveillance palace in Ottawa.

Last year, thanks to the Guardian, we learned that Enbridge was canoodling with CSEC to gather information on Brazil’s mining and energy industries. Glenn Greenwald also brought Snowden documents to the CBC, who then reported the Canadian government allowed for the NSA to set up a surveillance operation in Ottawa during Toronto’s G20 in 2008, to spy on the other world leaders. The redacted documents from that operation are available to read on Wikipedia.

Around the time CBC broke the G20 story in December, Greenwald warned that more CSEC leaks were just around the corner—adding that there was “very substantial evidence” that CSEC spying on Brazil was “far from aberrational.” He also pointed to Canada’s membership in the Five Eyes spy club—a partnership with the NSA, the UK’s GCHQ, New Zealand’s GCSB, and Australia’s DSD—and explained how those countries have placed “a massive spy net over the entire world.”

So, today’s breaking news greatly illuminates Canada’s role in the Five Eyes and how they are apparently using dragnet surveillance programs to spy, indiscriminately, on “thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they leave the [airport] terminal.” CBC is hosting the redacted, top-secret overview of CSEC’s airport-spying program on their website. Apparently CSEC is able to identify airport travelers’ phones and laptops in a massive spying sweep, and then continue to track them backwards and forwards in time, to determine which Canadian hotels and other Canadian airports they’ve visited, what local internet cafes they may have checked in at, and then which international hotels, airports, and other WiFi hubs they’ve logged into abroad.

This ability to go backwards and forwards in time indicates CSEC has access to vast treasure troves of data that they are matching to the wireless devices they’re scooping up and identifying through their airport surveillance program. This helps them to create what sounds like a very comprehensive record of any traveler’s coming and goings throughout the world. I contacted Ronald Deibert this morning to clarify that capability: “CSEC is acquiring data from several sources, including what's described as a ‘Canadian Special Source’ and several databases, which are possibly operated by other private companies or agencies abroad. This means that they likely have the capability to interrogate data in bulk over a large stretch of time—depending on what's contained in those databases and what's been handed to them by the ‘Canadian Special Source.’ I take the latter to mean a large telecommunications provider in Canada.”

Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy and the Dark Side of the Internet, a comprehensive, must-read account of the global surveillance and censorship network that the governments of the world have unleashed on the planet. Much of the book deals with the secretive, internet security and military industrial complex formed by government agencies such as the NSA, and private contractors like Edward Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen. While journalists and activists—like the currently imprisoned Barrett Brown, or the Telecomix group, through their Bluecabinet Wiki—have done extensive research in the United States to discover how this shadowy network operates, very little is known about how CSEC operates alongside private contractors to gather information.

According to Deibert’s own interpretation of today’s bombshell, CSEC may be using information collected from private companies, along with Canadian telecom providers, to create a massive database of information they can use to track the comings and goings of large amounts of people en masse. Revelations like today’s CSEC leaks show how our laptops and smartphones are treated, in Deibert’s words, as “digital dog tags” to the surveillance agencies that ostensibly aim to track every single movement that occurs on planet Earth.

This morning’s report from the CBC states: “CSEC claims ‘no Canadian or foreign travellers' movements were 'tracked,' although it does not explain why it put the word ‘tracked’ in quotation marks.” After James Clapper, the United States’ Director of National Intelligence, lied to Congress when he said Americans were not being spied on by the NSA—any such statement from a Five Eyes spy agency comes with almost zero credibility.

Top secret CSEC doc, via the CBC.

On top of that, CSEC’s own language in their overview of the airport-spying program does not seem to indicate they’re only collecting data on alleged terrorists or other dangerous targets. The presentation’s slide on “Data Reality” describes how travelers tend not to linger when they arrive at the airport, so their WiFi usage is limited to the wait time between connecting flights, or at baggage claim, or even in private lounges. To me, this kind of high-level, macro-analysis on passenger behaviour describes an all-consuming surveillance program, rather than one that is specifically out there looking for the “bad guys” in the interest of “national security.”

The presentation goes on to describe “a new needle-in-a-haystack analytic” that apparently allows CSEC to sort through the mass amount of information they’re collecting to find specific targets. They use a case study example of a “kidnapper based in a rural area [who] travels to an urban area to make ransom calls,” in an effort to hide-out in an place where there is a greater volume of communication data to spy on and sift through—i.e., a bigger haystack. The CSEC presentation explains to its spies how they can “sweep” a public area to determine where ransom calls, for example, are being made if they know the time of the call—even if the “kidnapper” is using public WiFi at a library or coffee shop.

If CSEC knows the time of the “ransom calls” they can sweep an area where they believe the “kidnapper” is located, and then look for aberrations in the data. For example, they’ll remove all of the “heavy users” from the list that are constantly connected—because their “kidnapper” only popped online to make one quick call.  The more “ransom calls” their “kidnapper” makes, the more information they have to hopefully separate the needle from the haystack—as they put it.

As Ronald Deibert wrote in the Globe and Mail today, in an article titled “Now we know Ottawa can snoop on any Canadian. What are we going to do?”: “When you go to the airport and flip open your phone to get your flight status, the government could have a record. When you check into your hotel and log on to the Internet, there’s another data point that could be collected. When you surf the Web at the local cafe hotspot, the spies could be watching.”

It’s this kind of surveillance-based law enforcement strategy that will likely divide people on the usefulness of agencies like CSEC. If we think about in their terms—i.e. how this kind of dragnet surveillance can be used to catch a kidnapper—it’s easy to get comfortable with such a massive spying power operating in Canada. But when you consider the haystack, beyond the needle, and realize that CSEC is not just collecting information on that one supposed kidnapper, but also the data of the other hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people surrounding that bad person, suddenly the usefulness and even the legality of such a program becomes highly dubious. Ronald Deibert has stated quite clearly he believes this CSEC program is illegal, so it will be very interesting to see how the government reacts—if at all—and if there’s any significant social fallout from this highly revelatory leak.

@patrickmcguire

Looner porn is a subset of pornography involving balloons and the people who love them. VICE caught up with Grim Looner, a masked, 25-year-old looner porn star from Melbourne, Australia, to help burst any misconceptions we had about one of the most innocuous fetishes on the net.

John Cena, a professional wrestler, bodybuilder, rapper, and actor associated with the WWE. Photo via Shutterstock

Pro wrestling is fake. Sad, but true. Hulk Hogan didn't grow 24-inch biceps by taking vitamins, and Andre the Giant wasn't really a 500-pound giant. Regardless of the fixed nature of the sport, between January and April each year, referred to as “The Road to WrestleMania," thousands of wrestling fans forfeit their hard-earned dollars and place online bets on fixed WWE pay-per-view matches. Sure, betting happens year-round, but during these four months, the action is hot on a "sport" as predetermined as an Arnold Rothstein poker game.  

Several online sports books, including 5Dimes and Bodog, have been accepting bets on pro wrestling for years, and lately pro wrestling insiders have begun to notice an unsettling trend. You see, unlike boxing or MMA, the odds for pro wrestling matches (favorites vs. underdogs), flip in such a manner that pro wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer, who has been covering the business for nearly 30 years, is convinced insiders are pulling the strings. "If you're smart and you know people," says Meltzer, "you can make money because you'll know what the results are."

For example, during the WWE's "Tables, Ladders, and Chairs" pay-per-view last December, just hours before the main event between John Cena and Randy Orton, something unusual happened. John Cena, the WWE's biggest star and the "good guy" was a clear favorite going into the show. But just hours before the match, Randy Orton, the "bad guy," shifted into a 750-point favorite. In the real world, this sort of movement on the lines would never happen without one of the competitors breaking a leg, literally.

"Smart money," which is betting with insider knowledge of the outcomes, shifted the balance in Orton's favor. And the experts, including watchdog blogs like WWE Leaks, all seem to think that WWE employees, or moles within the organization, are responsible for the shift in the odds. Not only does "smart money" manipulate the odds on the various online sports books, it also makes for a shitty experience of watching a show where the script gets leaked every single time.

It actually took the WWE them nearly six months to realize, via a Deadspin article that raised a few eyebrows last year, that their storyline results were being leaked. Nobody knows for sure who's responsible, but a mysterious Reddit user, who the WWE referred to as a "modern day Nostradamus," seems to have a good idea. Going by the nonsensical alias Dolphins1925, the account has been able to predict the results of every single WWE pay-per-view match since February of last year with near 100% accuracy. 

According to Dolphins1925, who even went as far as posting his own manifesto to justify his spoilers, someone within the WWE is leaking the results directly to him through a connection. His results are posted in Reddit's popular Squared Circle Prediction Series. Meltzer, who claims to have a good idea who Dolphins1925 really is, seems confident that the Reddit user is the real thing. "He absolutely has a connection, " says Meltzer, who also tells VICE that the WWE would fire the leaker, assuming they discover the mole.

But that's just it—the WWE doesn't seem to care about match results being leaked. No action has been taken, publicly that is, and when asked for a comment, the WWE refused to acknowledge the issue with any seriousness.

Pro wrestling fans.

During the recent Royal Rumble pay-per-view, where 30 wrestlers throw each other over the top rope for a chance at championship match at WrestleMania XXX, the "Animal" Batista was the favorite, and to nobody's surprise, the subsequent winner of the match. As for Dolphins1925, the Reddit user once again selected the winners correctly, and this time, he took his spoilers to Twitter. It's also worth noting that Dolphins1925 always bets in line with the betting odds—meaning he always picks the favorites.

With WrestleMania XXX, the WWE's "Super Bowl," coming up on April, it should be interesting to see if Dolphins1925 will be able spoil the WWE's biggest show of the year. WWE doesn't seem to be too concerned, and their email to VICE required the following thought-provoking clarification from their PR rep: "Since WWE is scripted entertainment and the outcomes are pre-determined, why are people gambling on it?"

More and more, it seems the old days of pro wrestling, when the match results were protected like nuclear launch codes, have been replaced with corporate sponsorships, reality TV storylines, a new WWE Network, and confused fans willing to place bets on predetermined outcomes that are clearly being manipulated by insider money.

Speaking of the WWE Network, the reported deal to make WWE the Netflix of pro wrestling includes a partnership with MLB, which recently announced their inductees into the 2014 Hall of Fame, sans Pete Rose, again. Ironically, Rose, who was banned from Major League Baseball in 1989 for gambling, was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2004 as part of his silly rivalry with WWE Superstar Kane—who wears a mask and sets the ring on fire (really). But while Pete Rose will not be involved in the launch of the WWE Network, his second favorite pastime, gambling, will most certainly be a part of the upcoming WrestleMania XXX pay-per-view—which is expected to have millions of fans tune-in online or through pay-per-view to watch the WWE's "showcase of the immortals."

Dolphins1925, who was 38-38 between February and July of last year, could certainly spoil the whole thing and send subscribers of the new WWE Network into a panic once they realize everything they watch could potentially be spoiled by some random Reddit geek. With rumors floating around that Hulk Hogan could return for a match with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper at WrestleMania XXX, picking a winner between the two legends might be tough call. Unless of course you're Dolphins1925, or the CEO and Chairman himself. "In wrestling, there are no surprises," says Meltzer, "at least no surprises for Vince McMahon." No surprises, right… as long as you're not betting against the house.

This Wednesday a new Red Hot Chili Peppers track was birthed upon the world. Called “Abracadabrafornia,” it hit all the beats that longtime RHCP fans had come to expect from the venerable band: nonsense lyrics about an “Alabama scamma” and having a stick jammed into your butt, strummy guitars, alternating rappy and singy parts, and references to California (“bang-a-bong-a-bong-a-bang-Burbank!”).

“The song is classic Peppers, so much so, it almost sounds like a parody,” wrote a Yahoo music blogger. “Of course the title immediately recalls their year 2000 hit 'Californication.' The track begins with a slightly melancholy guitar riff before slinking into the prototypical Peppers' groove, with Anthony Kiedis's pained vocals, amped up rapping, and nonsensical scatting.”

Except it wasn’t Kiedis singing, it was comedian Jon Daly (of the Kroll Show and Betas), and the whole thing was a parody expertly executed by Jon and the musician Cyrus Ghahremani. The song was good but the website where you can download it was the icing on the cake—stuffed full of corporate logos, it looks like exactly the kind of thing that a past-their-prime band would release right before their Super Bowl halftime performance.

Media outlets more hip to the comedy world than Yahoo (or simply more careful about avoiding internet hoaxes) figured out it was Jon almost immediately after connecting it to a bit he and Zach Galifianakis did on an old episode of the Comedy Bang Bang podcast about being part of a RHCP fan club called the Peppermen. But to my knowledge Jon hasn’t formally acknowledged that it was him yet—he’s just been basking in the glory of having made something good that the internet is eating up. So I called him up to ask him how the whole thing came together.

VICE: The response to this has been pretty crazy. How did it feel to trick Yahoo?
Jon Daly: That was the biggest dupe so far, other than some people online getting really mad about it. [Chili Peppers drummer] Chad Smith tweeted it out, so that’s all I needed to feel OK. He liked it, he was like, “Hahahahahaahahahaha.”

“Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!@johnmoe: From what I understand, this new Red Hot Chili Peppers song is 100% real: http://t.co/pvUrkiTSA1”

— Chad Smith (@RHCPchad) January 30, 2014

A lot of people caught on to this coming out of that Comedy Bang Bang bit you and Zach Galifianakis did last March. How did that joke start?
Me and Zach were at a party one time and there were a lot of celebrities there, so we started joking around. I was like, “Hey man, Flea texted me, he’s stuck in traffic but he’ll be here soon.” He was like, “Kiedis said he’s parking so we can hang out soon.” By the end of the night, we were like, “Have you heard their new album, Bing Bong Burbank? It’s gonna be great.” Every time I saw him for the next two months we’d do this dumb bit to each other—we’d talk about how the Chili Peppers were our friends and how all their California-isms and California style and stuff came from hanging out with me and Zach in California. We came up with that song during the podcast and we were like, “This song actually kind of exactly encapsulates the Chili Peppers.”

I had already made a song with [Cyrus] for some project, and I was like, “I’ve got this Peppers song…” I sat on it for about a year knowing it was good but wanting to put it out at the right time and then [it was announced] they were playing the Super Bowl. Then Cyrus built the website.

Were you ever a big Chilies fan?
They were my favorite band for about three years of my life. My older brother gave me the record Mother’s Milk when I was in seventh grade and then I was like, “This is my favorite band.” The Chili Peppers, Dave [Matthews], Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Nirvana… I saw them at Lollapalloza, I was a huge fan. I have all of their records up to Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I think that “Abracabralifornia” is a nice conglomeration of what I like about their old stuff and what is terrible about their new stuff.

Yeah, you brought back the super explicit stuff when you sang about getting your butt jammed with a stick and your dick sucked.
They abandoned they whole “We really talk about fucking in detail” thing after Blood Sugar Sex Magik so I put a little bit of that back in.

How quickly do you think people figured out that it was you behind the song? On Wednesday, it seemed like some people immediately knew it was you—I saw that Comedy Bang Bang bit making the rounds.
A lot of people passed around that episode of Comedy Bang Bang. One of the reasons we made that song was that people really loved that episode and this was the next logical step. People thought it was my buddy Tom Scharpling for a while in the morning… I tried to get friends with a lot of music connections to tweet it out so it wouldn’t be coming from a comedian. I wanted it to be dropped by big Twitter accounts that would say, “Have you heard this new Chili Peppers song? It’s insane!” I tried to make it like that, but I think by like 10 AM people knew it was me.

But the beauty of it is, people are still being tricked by it. People are tweeting me people who are tricked by it, which is really funny. If anyone buys into it or it makes them angry, that’s amazing—to me that’s a big victory. I love it when people like it, like, “The Chili Peppers are doing kind of a early Faith No More thing here and I like it.” Or like, “The Chili Peppers are going back to their roots. The song has a dumb name but it’s kinda good.”

Download the new Chili Peppers song here and follow Jon Daly on Twitter

@HCheadle