This past year, we've taken the holidays as an opportunity to turn our most beloved cultural signifiers on their head using bright colors, a lot of goop and hot dogs. This Christmas, Gifriends and I collaborated on a series that looks at the horrifying side of the holiday that most of us hold dear to our hearts. Here we show the darker side of this festive day, including a deadbeat Santa stuffing his face with rancid Pannetone bread. Check out the rest of our Holiday Horrors photo series below.
Marisa Gertz is a member of the photo and Gif collective Gifriends. You can see more of her work here.
Ever felt a sneaking suspicion about your boss who never seems to do any real work? Maybe they're always coming and going, without ever delivering anything or returning with any products. Maybe you've noticed that "Simmo," your shifty manager at the corner store, hasn't made any effort to restock the shelves in a really long time, and you know the money has to be coming from somewhere.
Or maybe nothing seems suspicious at all, which really makes you wonder—is that ice cream store on the corner really an ice cream store? We chatted with some people who discovered they'd ended up working at their local Los Pollos Hermanos, and their workplace was actually a cover for a drug business behind closed doors.
Image by Mike Petrucci/Unsplash
Maddie, Cafe
Looking back, I probably should've known the business was a drug front from the very beginning. The owners were a 30-odd-year-old couple who, in their spare time, wore watching Adidas tracksuits with Adidas slides and bum bags. They'd just moved to the small country town where I lived and had purchased the venue where I worked, turning it into a high-end cafe by morning, and restaurant and bar by night.
At the end of a shift, while I was polishing glasses and cutlery, my new boss would always ask me questions about where the party was, or what the people of the town "got on" and at which clubs. He was always going to "pick up and drop off deliveries" [despite the fact] it was a business that didn't deliver. He'd never actually return with any goods.
About six months after the venue opened, one of my fellow employees bought a car from our boss. It was a secondhand hotted up sports car. When she took the car to the petrol station to give it a little interior clean she found a set of scales and a bulk load of baggies stashed in the boot. She told me almost immediately, but we said nothing.
As time went on, the owners underwent more "deliveries" and continued the weird questions, until one day they sat us down and told us they were leaving. We didn't ask a lot of questions, so they didn't give us any answers. They sold the franchise to an uncle and aunty. And everything seemed like it was ending on pleasant terms, until their last shift when everything came out in the open.
The owners were standing at the bar when the aunty stormed in, shouting. She'd gone to their house, which had been turned upside down by the police. Turns out they'd been using the business to launder money for a cousin, who'd been in jail for the past six months for drug trafficking.
We later found out that they'd been pocketing all of our tax and superannuation too. But I can't tell you what happened to them after that, they disappeared. I quit my job, moved towns, and I never saw them again.
Image by Armando Castillejos/Unsplash
Dave, Coffee Shop
It wasn't hard to tell my manager was a stoner. She always looked like she was a little bit blazed. She used to sell weed to loads of people in the office. We worked in a huge building with over 2,000 employees, and sold coffee and food at a small café.
She'd been selling weed to employees from the offices above us for a few years. That was until she ended up selling to the nephew of one of the big corporate bosses upstairs and got busted. She had a meeting with the CEO and the next day she was gone. As it turns out, the head honchos discovered her drug dealings because the CEO overheard his nephew on the phone saying that he had been buying his gear from a girl at work.
Once the CEO discovered it was someone in the café he organised meetings with dozens of people to figure out who smoked weed in the café. Finally they pinned it down to my boss and they fired her. I haven't seen her since.
Image by Michael Browning/Unsplash
Alex, Restaurant
It wasn't my boss who shared the secret of the drug dealing she was doing at the restaurant every single night. It was the chef who had long shifts and productivity levels that increased rather than decreased, which got me asking questions.
I'd been working as a waiter at a busy restaurant for about two months. The chef had always been complaining about his workload, his long hours, and how frustrating it was that our boss was never there. She was always coming and going, taking people out the back into her office.
The chef was overworked, stressed, and fuming at the boss for not taking into consideration the hard work he was doing, or offering to hire another chef to help. So one night he decided to barge into her back office to quit. Little did he know, he had suddenly stumbled upon a major drug deal. Our boss was taking wads of cash from a customer in return for a large bag of cocaine.
Our boss freaked out and the chef made a new deal—he would keep his silence under the condition that our boss would supply him with enough coke to get him through his long shifts. I did notice the chef had increased his productivity and general contentment in his job.
But I didn't uncover any of this shifty business until I had to ask the chef what had changed. He let me in on the secret that our boss would supply him with coke to get through his long shifts, as long as he kept his mouth shut. I guess it was a win-win for all.
Everything is disposable, and no time is this more obvious than at the tail end of the holidays. Having traded a bunch of deliberately over-packaged candles, booze, jelly beans, and other novelty trash, it's not long before much of it actually ends up in a dumpster.
It takes a lot of effort to hang onto things when wages are low, space is limited, and life itself feels precarious and uncertain. With this in mind, Vancouver photographer Jackie Dives set out to find the personal items young people decide to carry with them over decades and long distances.
A balloon given to Laura Cuthbert's mother on the day she was born. She has had it for 25 years and keeps it because if it pops, she worries she might pop too.
A baby blanket given to Andrea Papin at birth, 33 years ago.
A necklace given to Jordan by his mother 10 years ago.
A dental model of Sharon Bradley's teeth from when she was 12 and got fit for a retainer. She still has an overbite.
The first jewellery-making tools Hailey Gerrits bought 11 years ago.
A Sri Lankan puppet that Marie Farsi bought 20 years ago on a trip with her father.
Teresa South keeps her mother's modelling photos from the 1960's as personal and professional inspiration.
Postcards Alex Elkabbany got from his sister 16 years ago, when she was travelling in Europe. He kept them despite going in and out of drug treatment and unstable living conditions over the past five years.
Forty stuffed animals, pared down from 100, most of which Laura Davies has had for 30 years.
A sketchbook Alejandra Simmons has owned since she lived with her parents.
A skeleton bobble head given to Max Inverarity as a gift from his mom's ex-boyfriend.
A T-shirt Monique McQueen stole from her mom and now wears to bed. One of the only things that made the trip from Australia to Vancouver. McQueen says she will never get rid of it, and perhaps might even be buried in it.
A Lego 6933 Spectral Starguider which Ryan Jones has kept for 25 years. Ryan is currently re-building all of his Lego from when he was a kid.
Journals from 2001 to 2013. Caitlyn Spence says they are full of MSN fights and feelings about nothing.
Hitch in Trump's Plan to Dissolve His Foundation The New York attorney general's office said it was not yet possible for President-Elect Donald Trump to neatly wrap up his charitable foundation. Trump announced Christmas Eve he would dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation, but a spokesperson for the attorney general said in a Saturday statement that the charity "is still under investigation by this office and cannot legally dissolve until that investigation is complete." The foundation was the subject of campaign controversy over allegations of self-dealing and accusations that Trump himself was not nearly as charitable as he said he was. –NBC News
Two Killed in Christmas New York Nightclub Shooting Two people were killed and four others were injured at a shooting at a nightclub in Westchester County, New York, in the early hours of Christmas morning. A 36-year-old suspect is in custody after shots were fired at the Mansion Club, near the Bronx, around 4:30 AM Sunday. Owner O'Neal Bandoo was one of the two people killed. –CBS News
Obama Tells Troops Military Role Was a Privilege President Barack Obama told US troops his role as commander-in-chief was "the privilege of my life" during his final Christmas Day visit to a Marine base in Hawaii, near where the first family is staying on vacation. "I want you to know that, as a citizen, my gratitude will remain and our commitment to standing by you every step of the way—that won't stop," said Obama. The president also made calls to troops stationed overseas. –The Wall Street Journal
Winter Storm Travel Warnings for the Dakotas Meteorologists have warned that travel in Dakotas remains dangerous because of the winter storm in the northern Great Plains region. Greg Gust of the National Weather Service told people in the Dakotas to "stay put" Monday, rather than travel on icy roads that were closed on Sunday. The Dakotas, Nebraska, and western Iowa were hit by power outages over Christmas weekend. -Associated Press
International News
92 Dead After Russian Plane Crashes into Black Sea Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Monday a day of mourning after a Russian plane carrying 92 people crashed into the Black Sea. The defense ministry said all 92 were believed to be dead and the transport minister said a technical or pilot error was to blame. The Tu-154 plane was headed for Syria, carrying soldiers, reporters and members of the popular Alexandrov Ensemble military band. Eleven bodies have been recovered so far. –CNN
Israel Demands US Ambassador Explain UN Vote on Settlements Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has summoned Dan Shapiro, the US ambassador to Israel, to explain the country's decision to abstain from a UN vote over settlement building in the Palestinian territories. By abstaining rather then using its veto power, the US, Israel's staunchest ally for years, allowed the UN to pass its first condemnatory resolution against Israeli settlements since 1979. –BBC News
ISIS Attack on Syrian Town Kills 30 Civilians, Says Turkey The Turkish military issued a statement to announce that an ISIS attack on civilians in the town of al-Bab in northern Syria left 30 people dead and several others wounded. Although al-Bab is held by ISIS, the attack was reportedly carried out to stop people fleeing the town. Syrian rebels, assisted by the Turkish military, have been attempting to take the town for the past four months. -Reuters
Typhoon Nock-Ten Hits the Philippines Typhoon Nock-Ten hit the east coast of the Philippines on Christmas Day, killing at least four people and destroying thousands of homes. Three were killed in a flash flood in Albay province. More than 218,000 people were displaced by the typhoon, forced to seek refuge in evacuation centers. –Al Jazeera
Everything Else
George Michael Dies at 53 Singer George Michael died on Christmas Day at his home in England at the age of 53. The pop star "passed away peacefully," according to his publicist. Elton John described him as "the kindest, most generous soul and a brilliant artist." –Rolling Stone
Carrie Fisher in Stable Condition After suffering a heart attack on a London to Los Angeles flight, actress Carrie Fisher is now in "stable condition" in hospital, said her mother Debbie Reynolds. "To all her friends and fans, I thank you all for your prayers and good wishes," said Reynolds. –The Guardian
A&E Cancels KKK Documentary Series over Payments The A&E network has cancelled an eight-part documentary series on the present day Ku Klux Klan set to air in January. An A&E spokesman said the series' third-party producers paid people cash to participate, breaking the network's policy. –The Washington Post
Run the Jewels Drop New Album Early Run the Jewels have released their long-awaited third album RTJ 3 ahead of schedule. Killer Mike and EL-P gave fans a festive surprise by making it available for free on download and streaming late on Christmas Eve. –Noisey
Five States Prepare "Bathroom Bills" to be debated in 2017 Lawmakers in Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, and Washington have filed anti-trans "bathroom bills" for the first legislative session of 2017. Texas' lieutenant governor also said passing a bathroom bill would be one of his top priorities. Laws that require people to go to the bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate have been hotly debated across the US, though only North Carolina has passed one, resulting in widespread boycotts. –VICE News
Carol Service Accidently Prints Tupac Lyrics Organizers of a Catholic Joy to the World carol service in Colombia in Sri Lanka accidentally printed out the lyrics to Tupac Shakur's "Hail Mary." They included the line "Revenge is the sweetest joy next to getting' pussy." -Noisey
George Michael, who went from teen idol to fully adult pop king in one of the most successful musical careers of the 21st century, died in his English home on Sunday afternoon. His publicist said he "passed away peacefully"; his manager said he died of heart failure.
Michael, born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, had 11 number-one hits in his native UK, including songs from his time with Andrew Ridgeley in Wham! like "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," recorded when Michael was just 21. After Michael went solo he continued to churn out era-defining songs throughout the 80s, including "Careless Whisper," "I Want Your Sex," and "Faith." As he aged he turned slightly away from the spotlight that had shone so brightly on him, though he continued to perform and record—his last album, Symphonica, came out in 2014.
In the day since his death there have been a number of tributes to Michael, who quietly gave millions to charity while publicly campaigning for causes including AIDS awareness and gay rights. The public speculated about his sexuality for years until the singer came out in 1998 after he was arrested by LA police for a "lewd act" in a park. But even before that, he was a gay icon who was an inspiration to millions. After his death, fans gathered outside his homes to pay tribute in vigil.
New York has seasons. Until global warming burns that truth into oblivion, we New Yorkers get the markers of time passing via waves of fresh vibrant vegetables at the farmers markets, the bursts of autumnal rainbows in the changing of the leaves, and the first freshly fallen snow—so pure, so white, so fleeting. There's also the fact that seasons—at least summer and winter—last a really fucking long time, and what was once all charming and shit at first turns into a repetitive torture, not unlike having to listen to a Celine Dion album in entirety. During summer's long months, everything becomes so sticky and lethargic that even the jingle of Mr. Frosty can't motivate you to move away from the whirling fan. Winter becomes the abysmal frozen hell that makes all humans edgy and bitter (I might be projecting, but I still think I'm right).
And if you are anything like me, you are tired of seeing Instagram posts of abstract platings of sliced fruit with the Caribbean Sea as the backdrop from some yoga chick you know who likes to vacation in Tulum. And your ass hurts from slipping on some black ice when you were only a block away from home and it was too freezing to cry out in pain. Does this sound familiar?
I read less this year than I have in almost 15 years—less than I did in 2014, 2013, 2012 (when I read 135 books), and every other year since I was still in college. From what I'm told, this is true of a lot of people. How could it not be? Our attention span is under attack, among the many other things that are under attack and have been and might be even more so in the months and years to come. For a while, particularly as the election cycle and its coverage and the fallout have gone hyperdrive, my reaction, when not full of fury, was to go blank, to try to think of nothing, as a matter of intermittent relief. Which is, of course, exactly how they get you: Kill the body and the head will die.
What I've found, though, in even just the past week, amid whatever other forms of fighting back, is that as I started to believe even I don't give a shit about books anymore, much less the rest of all of it, I suddenly realized again that reading has long been one of the ways I ever felt alive: Something in the written word can't be struck. It can be erased, ignored, but it can't have been not ever written.
Perhaps now, amid fake news and actual news and actual bullshit, real reading might be more important than it has ever—or at least a reminder of how important it always was. As for looking back on a completely fucked year, some of the most clearly recorded times in my memory are made of language. These memories are vital to maintaining the ownership of a brain in a time of social, psychic, viral plague. It's not the endpoint of why we're here, but it's fuel for the fire.
Anyway, now that I've talked myself into being OK with sharing a list of books that worked for me this year, here are some of them amid the piles and piles of ones I gave up on or haven't had the heart in general to try to read yet.
It's an extreme feat of economy and vision that Vi Khi Nao was able to so robustly depict the aftermath of the death of one's child in such a fascinating and exciting set of sentences and logic as she has in Fish in Exile. She seems to be able to traverse any kind of theme and terrain and wield them together into an assemblage that dwells in the interstitial state between dreams and our darkest waking places, a kind of laughter derived from shock of the new. For fans of Lars von Trier, Anne Carson, Kobo Abe, and Amy Hempel.
Some folks need a hundred pages to get you in the gut. Potted Meat, meanwhile, contains 101 pages of miniature texts that keep tapping the nails in, over and over, while speaking as clearly and directly as you could ask. A childhood of confusion and abuse blossoms into military inscription like watching a life pass before your eyes. Zero indulgence, all formative. Bone Thugs, underage drinking, alienation, death, love, Bob Ross, dreams of blood: This thin thing is flooded with power.
Speaking of pain, I don't think I've ever read so graceful and understated an exploration of one's own damage, and the traditions and self-flagellation that helped encode it, as A Bestiary. Amid an age of oversharing and self-awareness, Hoang takes the fragments of a life riddled with intense expectations, systemic abuse, mislaid desire, and binds it together, constructing a book that allows the reader into an astonishing range of emotions and gives so much more than it asks.
The next time you hear some dick say "women aren't funny," hit them in the face with this book. Jen George takes the legacy of Barthelme and Coover or whoever and drives off a cliff with it in a car that gives no shit for GPS, signals, seatbelt, or steering. Recommended especially if you like butt play, masturbation, and advice—and doubly so if you don't like any of those things.
I'm engaged to the person who wrote this book, so I won't try to hype it to you in any way other than how I first heard her talk about the frame in which it operates; that is, that she grew up the daughter of a man who robbed 11 banks and lived a double life. It was fascinating to me then, as a person who hardly knew her, and the grace, humor, and intelligence with which she tells the story, in all its fragments, to all you strangers, is as necessary and distinctive a memoir as they come.
Maze of the Blue Medusa by Zak Sabbath and Patrick Stuart (Satyr Press)
The book of my dreams was always one that I didn't actually have to read, I think, or even exactly know how to hold or look at, but rather, one that seemed to change every time I opened it, that revealed secrets via maps, indexes, fragments of description, cryptic drawings, and instructions that you weren't sure how to apply but that seemed to suggest the portal to another reality. MotBM is a full-color dungeon game book designed to be played as a tabletop RPG. But, to me, it's a kind of encyclopedic novel you could spend forever just flipping open, staring, searching out the impossible combination to its labyrinthine lock.
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B. S. Johnson (New Directions)
It might say the most about 2016 that one of my favorite books of the year was written in 1973 by a guy who slit his wrists at age 40 because he was sick of feeling like a failure. And of course, in death, the British-born Johnson got that cult following. Shit is hilarious. This book is about being pissed as fuck and tired as fuck, angry at the world, and it's insane how closely it reflects the extremities of our present.
If it's an era of oversharing, it's also an era of overconsumption, to the point of nausea, disorientation, and misdirection. Flamingos hypnotically embodies the present poly-cacophony of being by taking turns moving through a small cast of voices that all smear together, referencing performance art and black metal and prescription drugs, around the central being of a new messiah, through whom to try to heal is to go blank.
The latest collection by one of my all-time literary heroes, A Collapse of Horses finds Brian Evenson continuing his work of burrowing deeper and deeper into the slickest and blackest parts of human psyche. In Evenson, nothing is true, and every face has many layers, just like in real life. Every book he writes, to my mind, is required reading, and this collection's release alongside new editions of three older works is the perfect place to start, or to continue.
Few forms can be as satisfying to my mind as the novella, and here Denmark's Nors combines two of them, each doing something different, but of a near mind, somehow combining a timid tone with ongoing, vibrant observation. Each unfurl themselves as items in a slowly stacking list, including the calmest of lines, like, "The email contains 56 exclamation points" and "Slept as though I were two people, and one of me awake." There's a ton of kinetic motion here for something so simple, such that it gets wedged in your head and stays there, forming a new sliver of you.
For those under 19, the cultural scene in Vancouver is notoriously destitute. Liquor licensing makes it disadvantageous for bigger venues to put on all ages shows, illegal spaces where many of these events are forced into are constantly under threat, and positive relationships between the minor and major music communities have yet to be fully formed, as attitudes of ageism and pretension run deep.
"There are the very physical barriers of 19+: you're not allowed in, no drinking, the cops get called and things get shut down," explains Mati Cormier, 17-year-old show promoter working under the name Trash City Productions. "And then there's the emotional barriers."
Behind hot pink glasses, Cormier's eyes radiate a devastating calmness—but you can tell awkward ageism gets under her skin just a little. "Even if there is an all ages show often it's begrudgingly put on by a 19+ crowd, you show up and it's terrifying. It's a very elitist attitude that comes from adults who realistically don't really want kids there," she told VICE. "They understand the importance of an all ages scene, but there's a certain distance between the two groups."
Trash City inhabits the opposite side of the spectrum from these more corporate attempts at engaging youth. Car garages, derelict East Van character homes, and abandoned Italian ballrooms, are just some of the DIY spaces that have played host to Cormier's shows. Coordinating all aspects, from booking bands to spreading the word, her shows are often sweaty, jam packed, and bathed in the kind of no-holds-barred earnestness reserved for those not yet legally considered by the government to be human beings.
Cormier's first forays into the music industry were through volunteering for organisations like Safe Amp and the Ignite Youth Festival where she learned more about what goes on behind the scenes in producing shows. From there a wish to see her favourite local bands on stage more often and in certain pairings drove her to step out on her own and start promoting.
It's clear Cormier's pride lies not in the profits she makes off events, or the adults who're impressed by her achievements, but in the community she's fostered with each show.
In conversation, Cormier recounts tales of intimacy, mutual respect, and feeling welcome with the most enthusiasm. She may not have the budget to pay a $1,500 rental fee for a fluorescent lit community centre with a kids-can't-dance attitude, but she does have a roster of private studios with pseudonyms and the unwavering young underground to back her up.
VICE: Do you have any relationship with the over-19 world of promoting and producing shows? Has anybody collaborated with or mentored you? Mati Cormier: Yeah, definitely. When I first got started I worked with Timbre Concerts on one show, and that was a really big experience hosting Cherry Glazer. So I was the youth promoter for that and I got a bunch of kids to come and people were impressed. Then recently I've been working with MRG Productions and when they do local all-ages shows with larger touring bands I get to be kind of the all ages promoter and we work together to coordinate that which is a fantastic opportunity because they do it so much more professionally and legitimately than I ever could, so being able to participate in that is really exciting.
Have you experienced a lot of ageism in putting yourself out there in this position? You know I don't heavily try to promote myself as "look at me I'm a young person!" I don't want that to be the appeal of myself. So if people know my age that's fine, but often they're surprised when they find out and they take me seriously because they look at the work that I'm doing and the reputation that I have, and that's the first thing they see which I'm appreciative of.
Working pretty much exclusively in illegal spaces that's always the risk of getting shut down. Has that happened to you before, have you had pushback? It's actually really funny because the only time I've ever been shut down by cops was the one entirely legal legitimate show I had with licensing, it was at Astorino's. The reason it got shut down was because a liquor inspector came through and discovered that out back and in front of the venue people were drinking, and they were obviously youth. So cops had to come and shut that down. My mum was there to talk to the cops because I couldn't, I was too intimidated. But what they said was you know it's unfortunate that it came to this because it's really impressive what you're doing here gathering all these young people. When I'm hosting at illegal venues or underground venues, cops drive by but they don't stop. Realistically often these venues have really good relationships with the community around them and the cops, so there is kind of a little bit of give there.
So it puts you more in a position of vulnerability when you actually go through… Yup. When the city is aware of what you're doing or has to be aware and has to recognize it instead of kind of pretending it's not happening. That's more of an issue than when they just don't see it.
These DIY spaces obviously have less restrictions than the legal venues. So do you have any precautions or rules in place to make sure the venues are safe? Personally I really heavily promote the idea of take care of yourself take care of each other, be safe. If you're doing anything this is your responsibility, I'm not here to babysit you. And for the most part that's worked. I've never had any real disastrous issues with, you know, underage drinking or drug abuse. That's never happened because I think it's very much a community of if you're doing this you have to be doing it responsibly or don't do it at all. Which I'm so grateful for because as a young person myself I cannot babysit and I cannot hold authority and make rules for people my age or older than me. As much as I'd like to be taken seriously to that extent it can be difficult, so I'd rather promote self monitoring.
So what are you planning to do after high school? Do you want to continue Trash City or are you going to try and work for a bigger company? I'd love to continue Trash City as it has become sort of my baby. Like I can't imagine ever giving it up and I also can't imagine ever not promoting and hosting events of some sort. So I'd love to continue with it and grow it and kind of gain more knowledge and more professionalism in the way that I'm doing things. I'd love to be able to book bigger bands, like really big at really large venues. But I could never give up the all ages underground local music scene. I could never stop promoting for that. I would love to have the best of both worlds. The goal is to make enough money from Trash City that I don't have to have a normal job. Which might be impossible.
Lastly, where did the name come from? I don't know. It just happened. I must have been 14 or 15 and you know one day I had to host a show and I thought if I'm going to do this then I'm going to do it properly, I'm going to have a name, I'm going to have a Facebook page. What do I do? Well you know what, Trash City that's a great idea! And now I'm stuck with it, now I can never leave Trash City, which is ridiculous. It's the most disastrous name.
It's not some sort of subversive political statement, then. No! I mean I love the concept of Vancouver as trash, I am trash, all of these kids are trashy. That's okay. But now I have to own that, [laughs] I can never not feel like trash.
Justin Hurwitz sits behind a piano in a house in Hollywood, California, down the road from the Paramount Pictures studio lot, where Cecil B. Demille shot The Ten Commandments and Dr. Phil currently films his daytime talk show. With his Adidas sneakers and jeans, Hurwitz looks like an average dude who would watch X-Men movies, but then he frowns and stares at the keys. His fingers start flying across the piano, forcing out of the instrument the jazzy melody that runs throughout La La Land, the polarizing movie musical poised to win Best Picture at the Oscars in February.
His score has turned La La Land into the Stranger Things for musical fans and cinema freaks. As the Netflix sci-fi series' theme triggered viewers' memories of 1980's kids movies like E.T. and Stand by Me, La La Land's music has sent audiences into a technicolor spiral of nostalgia for 1950's movie musicals— Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris—and the 20th century dream of moving to Los Angeles and becoming a star. Although the film has been predicted to win Best Picture since its debut at the Venice film festival, its romanticism has alienated some critics who find the musical vapid in the era of Trump, a time of serious political danger. Hurwitz, though, wrote the score to tell a story, and explore themes about art and ambition, instead of conjuring images of movies long past. "It can make you nostalgic for a time when those musicals were commonplace, but it hopefully doesn't feel like an old fashion movie," he says. "It was never intentioned to feel or sound old-fashioned."
La La Land tells the story of two artists: Mia (an actress) and Sebastian (a jazz pianist). Emma Stone is the female star, Ryan Gosling is the male lead. Both characters are struggling to make their dreams come true in contemporary Los Angeles, and over the course of the film, they fall in and out of love with each other and their respective arts. Throughout the movie, Sebastian struggles to freshen up jazz, while Mia fights to land a role—or even an audition for a role—better than a one-episode part on a bad network crime show. Although Hurwitz and director Damien Chazelle took inspiration from the scores of musicals directed by Jacques Demy (best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) or produced by Arthur Freed, the mogul who oversaw The Wizard of Oz and dozens of other MGM musical classics from 1939 to 1962, they aimed to use the music and plot in a way unseen in films like Freed's girl-meets-boy musicals, like Meet Me in Saint Louis.
"The movie gets at some interesting ideas about art and the idea of art being rooted in the past but needing to move forward," Hurwitz says. "That's an idea that I haven't seen in any of the older musicals we love."
Barack Obama wasn't even a US Senator when he showed up onstage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, in a prime speaking slot. Relatively unheralded and unknown, the self-described "skinny kid with a funny name" was a 42-year-old Illinois state senator who, it turned out, could speak pretty well. In 16 minutes he brought the convention to its feet with a message of inclusiveness, progressive politics, and a boundless, almost naive faith in America. It was praised universally, and had people talking about Obama as the first black president.
And then, improbably, he delivered on that promise, thanks in no small part to his unparalleled ability as a orator. During his presidential run, whenever he needed a big speech to boost his candidacy, he gave one. When he was president, whenever the country needed him to address a tragedy, he did so.
Obama's 2004 DNC Speech:
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That 2004 speech is rightly remembered as the start of Obama's rise, but it won't go down as his best or most powerful address. Nor did it power him to victory in his senate race, which he won easily after his opponent dropped out after an absurd sex scandal involving allegations of wanting his ex-wife to go with him to a sex club. But it marked out the major themes of future Obama speeches: the promise of America, the genuine love of country, the notion that Americans as a people are always working to improve their lives and lives of those around them. It's the kind of optimism that Americans love, the kind of hope and faith in progress that seems uniquely powerful coming from a black man.
As a presidential candidate, Obama's best speeches were, obviously, all about pushing forward his campaign. One of the most consequential came out of the 2007 Jefferson Jackson Dinner speech, a fundraising event in Iowa. In that stem-winder, Obama both told his story and contrasted himself against his rival Hillary Clinton—painting himself as a more honest, more progressive alternative to her, while dismissing criticism that he was too inexperienced to be president. Then there was "A More Perfect Union," an address on race, anger, and the importance of the church in the black community that Obama gave in March 2008 to respond to criticism of his Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright. It was eloquent, nuanced, and careful—and maybe more importantly, helped put to rest a controversy during a contentious battle for the Democratic nomination. The rest is literally history.
Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
Over the next eight years, Obama would give many speeches. Lots of them were routine, some were obviously in service of some policy end (his 2009 address at Cairo University was a carefully planned, and controversial, olive branch to the Muslim world), and a few were streaked through with more beauty than you'd expect from an ordinary president (his eulogy for the victims of the Charleston shooting, which ended with him breaking into "Amazing Grace").
As Obama's presidency ends, it's an open question how much of his legacy will survive the coming Republican efforts to tear it down. But the best of his speeches will remain to be studied—as snapshots of how Obama and his administration thought about the world, as explanations for his actions, and also as a guide for how liberals can remain hopeful even in a post-Obama age.
Twenty-six of Obama's most important speeches have been collected in We Are the Change We Seek, a book edited by MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid and liberal commentator and author EJ Dionne that's coming out next month from Bloomsbury USA. It's a compilation that reminds readers of both the power of some of Obama's rhetoric and the sweep of the issues he attempted to tackle during his presidency—he spoke about just war while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, racism and reform in Selma, progressive economic policy in Osawatomie, Kansas, gun control in Newtown.
Recently I spoke with Dionne about Obama's speaking style, the difference between hope and optimism, and why Obama wasn't able, despite all his gifts, to persuade the country to support his most important policies.
VICE: Do you think that we'll be studying Obama's speeches years down the line? EJ Dione: The answer is yes for a number of reasons. One is I think Obama so clearly falls into the tradition of Lincoln and Martin Luther King in rhetorical strategy that so often involves calling America back to its own promise. Like Lincoln and King, he loves to cite the founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and his love for the phrase "more perfect union," his use of the word perfect more as a verb than as an adjective—all of that puts him in a long and I think it's fair to say noble tradition.
The second reason is he's the only president who addressed race from the point of view of someone who is African American. But also someone who straddles the divide as a biracial person. He was constantly explaining black America to white America, though he was occasionally explaining white America to black America. There's no other president who has done that.
The third is another tradition he represents, which is a preacherly style that I think of as "Civil Rights Christianity." It's a style that is very much out of the African American church in the 50s and 60s. The place you obviously see that particularly powerfully is in the Charleston eulogy. We remember rhetoric that forges a tradition—and I think he did that by combining those elements—but also is part of a tradition. I think there are elements of Obama on both sides of that.
Obama's eulogy for the victims of the Charleston shooting:
You mentioned the Charleston speech. Do you think that will be the one he's most remembered for? There's a philosopher [Paul Crittenden] with a book called Reason, Will, and Emotion. In Charleston, Obama channeled emotion in an incredibly constructive way. In Selma he channeled reason and emotion to spark a will to reform. I think Selma explained his view of American history, of the role of the reformer, of the importance of the agitator to reform, and also of a vision of a very inclusive America. So I think Selma would be at the top of my list. But the Charleston speech is incredibly powerful.
Obama speaking at the 50th anniversary of the famous Civil Rights march in Selma, Alabama:
What are your top three or four Obama speeches? Either the most important historically, or your personal favorites. One of my personal favorites is somewhat eccentric because of my own interests. I think his 2006 speech to the Call to Renewal Conference—run by Jim Wallace, a progressive evangelical—is the best speech a politician has given about religion and public life in a very long time. It so powerfully and intelligently describes the obligations of believers to nonbelievers and the obligations of nonbelievers to believers in a pluralistic democracy. More than most liberals, he is insistent on the role of religion in American public life and American history and he takes liberals to task for a certain prejudice against religion. But he also takes to task religious people who will not acknowledge the importance of nonbelievers in the American population.
Selma I think will go down as an extraordinarily important speech. But if you want to take three, it gets harder for me. There are a lot of runners-up in that category. The Nobel speech was a fascinating argument from someone who is not a pacifist—it's in a way one of the best defenses of just war that a politician has given. I happen to really like the Howard commencement speech this year because it's calling for patience in a democracy and it insists that activism has to be harnessed with patience and persistence, which is not something you hear people talk about a lot.
Obama's commencement address at Howard University from March 2016
You have to include two others just because they were so politically important. One is his '04 convention speech, which I think is fascinating because we remember it as "there is no red America and no blue America, but the United States of America," a conciliatory speech, but when you read the whole thing it was also a partisan critique of the Republicans who were dividing us. I think the tension between those two ideas is the tension that animated and plagued the whole Obama term—he constantly wanted to be the unifier but was well aware that he was facing an implacable enemy, particularly after his first year in office.
Then there's the Jeremiah Wright speech, which was so important to his political survival at the moment—but it is one of his most complete efforts to take on race in American history and race in contemporary life.
How do you think history will judge some of these speeches after time goes on and the immediate political context they were given in fades away? I think a lot of his speeches endure because they have a sense of history. The example from the past would be Lincoln's Cooper Union speech. The historian Harold Holzer called i "the speech that made Abraham Lincoln president." And it had a very clear purpose politically of situating Lincoln in the Republican Party in a way that would make him an appealing person to be nominated in 1860. But it is also a whole view of the role of slavery in American history. So Cooper Union lives both for its political effect and for its gloss on the American story. I think the Wright speech will be similar to that.
As you acknowledge in the introduction to the book, for all of Obama's obvious gifts, he failed to really sell two of his major achievements in his first term—the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act. Why do you think that is? I've been struggling with this for a long time and I've never come up with a wholly unsatisfactory answer. Obama was in general better at broadly thematic speeches than at speeches linked to particular policies. In some ways he was not as good at selling himself. If you compare Bill Clinton's speech on behalf of Obama at the 2012 Democratic National Convention to Obama's own speech at that convention, Clinton's speech was better, which Obama himself pretty much acknowledged.
Obama, somehow, did not dedicate himself in the same way rhetorically to selling particular policies. If you look at a speech like Osawatomie after the fact, he sold his approach to healthcare and the stimulus better in that 2011 speech than he had at any point before. The other thing is, I think he always had certain ambivalences about the stimulus. And while they were fighting for healthcare, they never fixed on one central argument that they thought worked. There was not a consistent pattern—at times they were talking about cost, at times they were talking about coverage, at times they talked about other elements of the healthcare bill.
The other issue is political: By the time the healthcare bill passed it had been so demonized that Democrats in general made what I think in retrospect—and I thought at the time—was a mistake. They didn't want to talk about it because they'd thought that would hurt them. I think it would have been better to try very comprehensively to sell the thing.
Obama speaks at Newtown, Connecticut, after the shooting there:
Can you think of a good example of a time when Obama did succeed in selling the nation on a certain idea or policy? He was a very good advocate for stronger laws on guns—which were persuasive to the nation, but insufficient to break through the grip the gun lobby and on Congress. I think the country agreed with him on guns and he made the case on guns very effectively, but not in a way that could break the logjam in Congress. But some of those gun speeches are really really powerful. He's not somebody who conveys anger very much but he did convey anger quite effectively on those occasions, I thought.
Ironically, he got the stimulus and the healthcare bill even though he didn't sell them very well, but I thought he sold his gun policy very well and he couldn't get it passed.
Obviously a lot of liberals are not feeling very optimistic right now with Trump's election. What can people learn—either emotionally or intellectually—from reading and listening to these speeches? One of my very favorite things that Obama talked about a lot was the difference between hope and optimism. He was very insistent that he was not necessarily an optimist. An optimist, as he defined it in a few speeches, will try to stare reality in the face and see only the good things. Hope requires staring reality in the face, admitting how difficult things might be, and nonetheless retaining the confidence and the will to make change in the face of the biggest obstacles. Hope is a virtue; optimism is a disposition.
No movement has been successful in the long haul if it couldn't hold onto hope in the face of the most excruciating barriers. That is in a way a religious side to Obama's rhetoric. He would remind people in a lot of his speeches, in our history when progressives—in the broadest sense of that word—were losing the argument, when they felt defeated. He called people to remember that our forbears didn't give up hope even though things looked fairly hopeless. That's why I think in this coming period a lot of people are going to be turning back to Obama. They may not be very optimistic about the country at the moment, but they need to maintain the hope that they can change it again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There's a fascist in every one of us. Yeah, you too. At least that's the thrust of an argument first made in the 1930s by an Austrian psychoanalyst who studied under Freud, developed theories on politics and sexuality that infuriated both communists and Nazis, and eventually came to the conclusion that you're more likely to warm up to the idea of fascism if you're sexually repressed. Wilhelm Reich, to put it mildly, pissed a lot of people off.
But before his theory linked fascism to stifled orgasms, Reich posited his idea on right-wing nationalism in his 1933 text "The Mass Psychology of Fascism." "My medical experience with individuals from all kinds of social strata, races, nationalities, and religions showed me that 'fascism' is only the politically organized expression of the average human character structure," he wrote, "a character structure which has nothing to do with this or that race, nation, or party but which is general and international. In this characterological sense, 'fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society." Meaning the way we defer to authorities—first our parents, then our teachers, then our bosses, and so on—bakes a potential predilection for fascism into every society.
Fast-forward to 2016. It's been a year when we've struggled to even verbalize the direction in which Western politics has drifted. Some call this wave of Anti-Establishment surprise election results and anti-immigrant sentiment a form of right-wing populism. Others, a pivot toward conservatism or perhaps nationalism. People first started using the word "fascist" to describe Donald Trump in 2015, before he was even made the Republican presidential nominee. We've ended up with a load of different ways to try to express a basic concept: There are lots of people worried about safety and security who want the firm hand of an authoritarian state to shield them from the perceived trauma of globalization, migration, and international terrorism.
Left-wing politics as we've come to know it—centered on the ideas of welfare, openness to other nation states, and accepting multiculturalism—has lost ground to a politics steeped in law and order with just a touch of protectionism. And as Reich observed in the 1930s, cash-strapped, overworked people who feel afraid can vote (some against their interests) to pick authoritarianism over liberalism.
But the question is: Why? Just what is it about, say, Brexit or Trump that psychologically appeals to millions? Voting emotionally isn't really understood, and we easily descend into damaging stereotyping—"'Little England' northerners voted to Leave" or "out-of-touch London elites voted Remain"—rather than proper analysis. But politics professor at Birkbeck University of London Eric Kaufmann quickly discovered a unifying thread running through the types of people more likely to want out of the EU. And it had nothing to do with class, wealth, or location.
"Culture and personality, not material circumstances, separate Leave and Remain voters," he wrote the day of the referendum result. "This is not a class conflict so much as a values divide that cuts across lines of age, income, education, and even party." And those values relate more to authoritarianism.
When looking at a 2015 British Election Study survey of 24,000 white Brits, the probability of someone voting Leave leapt to 73 percent if they were in favor of the death penalty. Similarly, if they responded to wanting to see people who commit sex crimes "publicly whipped, or worse," they were much more likely to want out of the EU. On the other hand, the probability of voting Leave hovered at about 14 percent for those who said they were opposed to the death penalty. Boiled down, those more likely to favor a tough-on-crime, conservative approach to punishment leaned toward wanting Brexit.
This not only explodes the idea that the white working class somehow voted as a monolithic bloc in favor of leaving the EU, but also hints at why times of economic and social upheaval push populations toward the right. "Right-wing authoritarianism is on a level of psychology almost," says Kaufmann, speaking over the phone. "In one population, you're not going to have one response—it's not like 'all whites' are going to say no to immigration. What you have is one group of whites, to put it crudely, interested in change and novelty and experience. They're quite accepting of change, or even embrace it. Another group sees the world as a dangerous place and wants to be protected from it—they embrace law and order."
Though Kaufmann noticed this in June, more data seemed to confirm it elsewhere. In November, YouGov data from from 12,000 people polled showed that authoritarian populist ideas—once consigned to the margins—were held by about half the population in eight out of 12 European countries. In Britain, this figure was at 48 percent, though 20 percent of those polled self-identified as "right-wing." Many still ascribed to an opposition to human rights (itself a deeply counterintuitive view, surely) and anti-immigration views backed by support for strong foreign policy. From Romania to the Netherlands to Poland, a particular value system appears to be on the rise.
Academics have tried to define it for years. In the 1980s, now-retired psychology professor Bob Altemeyer came up with his own extension of a 1940s right-wing authoritarian scale, which is exactly what it sounds like: a sort of ranking system to make sense of why people gravitate to the right. It encompasses traits like a submission to authority, aggression toward outsiders, and loving social norms or traditions. Though Kaufmann isn't a fan of the term "right-wing authoritarianism," he acknowledges its complexities.
"There are really two types: one, social dominance, who really believe in survival of the fittest; and two, those who are fearful and seek order and security and routine," he says. That bid for comfort feels magnified when life is hard—for example, during the Great Depression, before World War II, and in today's post-recession uncertainty.
"At the moment, people do not perceive their future as vivid or certain," says Dr. Simon Moss, associate professor in psychology at Charles Darwin University. "Because of this uncertainty, they tend to prioritize their immediate needs over their future goals." In turn, that leads to a heightened response to perceived threats. "When people bias their attention to information that aligns with their preferences and preconceptions," Moss continues, "they tend to perceive their own group as superior and other groups as inferior. That is, they want to feel better rather than seek accurate information. Consequently, prejudices are rife. They gravitate to leaders that reinforce these prejudices. Brexit and Trump follow."
Academic Matthew MacWilliams pointed this out as early as January, in relation to Trump. Again, authoritarianism looks to be the unifying factor among the president-elect's supporters. "Authoritarians obey," MacWilliams wrote. "They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to 'make America great again' to building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations."
And that's where the appeal lies. A strongman becomes both a comfort blanket and a stern, trusted figurehead. They're the ones who can help people "take back control of their borders" or make their country great again. And if there's apparently a little fascist inside each of us, that may be just what they want to hear.
Now that Aleppo has fallen to Assad's forces, people in Eastern Ghouta, a heavily populated, rebel-held Syrian suburb outside of regime-stronghold Damascus, are wondering if they will be next.
A hot spot for some of the earliest and most intense anti-government protests in 2011, Eastern Ghouta became a rebel-stronghold in 2013. That year, the city suffered a sarin gas attack by government forces that killed hundreds and famously prompted U.S. President Barack Obama to ignore his previously drawn "red line" on chemical weapons use. The area's been under siege ever since.
Home to an estimated 450,000 people and one of the strongest remaining rebel coalitions, Eastern Ghouta has endured frequent bombardment and shelling from regime forces and ally Russia, which entered the war in 2015.
Regardless of how bad this year has seemed—and it's seemed pretty bad—2016 still hasn't been the worst year ever. Compared to the giant-scale tragedies of a year like 1918, in which World War I mingled with an unprecedented flu pandemic, wiping out tens of millions, this year has been a comparative trip to Disneyland on a day when they ran out of frozen bananas. But 2016 has still sucked, dominated by a depressing rejection of cosmopolitanism in the UK, the ongoing refugee crisis fueled by civil war in Syria, and an inescapable presidential election here in the US that dragged the whole world through the sewer (and has, arguably, left it there). Plus, we've seen a rash of unusually high-profile celebrity deaths and the worst mass shooting in US history.
So, yes, it does feel like it's at least been the worst year in recent memory. Still, that's just a feeling. I decided to gauge the veracity of that feeling the only way I know how: by going back and watching every episode of Charlie Brooker's yearly Screenwipe series.
Brooker is a British comedian and TV show host who moonlights as Nostradamus. In 2011, he created Black Mirror, a speculative fiction anthology series, usually summed up as "The Twilight Zone with iPhones," only insanelyprescient. But the Wipe series is more of a traditional guy-talking-at-a-desk show in which the year's events are dissected over the course of a profane hourlong TV special by Brooker himself, along with two fictional average couch potatoes named Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan), and Barry Shitpeas (Al Campbell).
If 2016 really was worse than all other recent years, I was about to find out.
Screenwipe Review of the Year 2009
9:05: The first thing that really resonates with me is Kanye West's "Imma let you finish" performance art thing, where he interrupted Taylor Swift's VMA acceptance speech. It's a reminder that, here in 2016, West is being treated for what appears to be a serious mental health crisis, and maybe this kind of behavior was never as funny as we thought it was.
15:10: Michael Jackson dies. I remember 2009 being a big celebrity death year. There was even a South Park episode about it. But apart from Michael Jackson, the losses were mostly less shocking than the ones in 2016. Sure, it's sad to see Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays, and Ed McMahon go, but they aren't exactly David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Harper Lee, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Sharon Jones, and Leonard Cohen, are they?
A couple things from 2009 are hauntingly resonant. With all the fuss about Brexit and UKIP for the past couple years, I forgot all about Nick Griffin from the UK's British National Party. He defends David Duke (24:57), saying, "I shared a platform with David Duke, who was once a leader of a Klu Klux Klan, always a totally nonviolent one, incidentally." Also, there's this moment where Brooker calls a dumb news show in the UK called Live from Studio 5, "a horrifying vision of our inevitable idiotic future." Hmmm.
2010 Wipe
8:30: Wow, in 2010 Tiger Woods sure takes a lot of flak for cheating on his wife with a ton of women. I wonder if he ever grabbed any of them by the pussy.
23:15: There's a UK election in 2010. During a debate, a live approval meter shows that the British people absolutely love when David Cameron says the rate of immigration is too high. Would you look at that? It seems like the UK's had some feelings about immigration for a while now.
10:37: Oh, speaking of relevant moments from that election, remember Prime Minister Gordon Brown's hot-mic moment? What happens is, he's on a campaign whistle stop, and when he walks away from talking to an old woman who doesn't care for immigration, Brown calls her "bigoted," but the press hears it all on a hot mic! And then they go and tell her all about it, and she's very offended. The gaffe basically ends Brown's political career.
42:30: One of the bleakest stories in history happened in 2010: The lady who got caught on tape putting a cat in a lidded trash can for literally no reason. "Our world was left revolving in the cold, dark universe knowing only two things: 1) There are some cruelties that can never be adequately explained, and 2) that we are all alone. Not as alone as a cat in a bin, but alone," Brooker broods.
There are certainly metrics, like a body count for instance, or the scale of a seismic political shift, that historians could point to when trying to measure how bad a year was. But a bleak story that hangs around, even if the bleakness is small in scale, can also add to the public's misery.
2011 Wipe
Brooker kicks this episode off by dryly referring to 2011 as "possibly the least eventful year in human history."
The year 2011 was insane! This is a year that really gives 2016 a run for its money. Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man whose death kicked off the Arab Spring, actually killed himself at the end of December in 2010, but throughout 2011, the world really felt the impact from the gesture. "In a normal year," Brooker says, "a revolution in Egypt would be the biggest story, but 2011 wasn't a normal year. More like an end-of-season finale for all of mankind."
But it's not just the Arab Spring that makes this an eventful year. As 2011 Wipe reminds me, this is the year US forces hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden, the debt crisis ravages the eurozone and tears Greece a new asshole, and the Tohoku Earthquake and its ensuing tsunami kill more than 15,000 people, causing a nuclear waste leak. Then there are riots in England following the police killing of Mark Duggan. And then there's Occupy Wall Street. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
But is 2011 horrible?
49:30: When Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is dragged into the streets by a lynch mob and tortured to death, a lot of Libyans take phone pictures. Brooker is reminded of those cultural myths about how having a photo taken will steal someone's soul. But he says in the Libyan footage, it "looks like the ones taking the photos are the ones who've had part of their soul's stolen." But looking back from 2016, it's impossible to feel any outrage about tasteless selfies anymore.
I don't think 2011 can hang with 2016, but it sure is eventful. More than that, I'm starting to feel like watching this stuff is highlighting patterns and trend lines that link together in ways I hadn't seen before. Then again, I've also been sitting still for three hours watching rapid-fire news clips and drinking coffee.
2012 Wipe
Brooker calls 2012 "a year so laden with incident, I hardly know where to begin."
9:21: Kony 2012. I remember loving Kony 2012, the viral video designed to get the internet involved in the effort to stop a Ugandan war criminal named Joseph Kony. Back then, I remember feeling like sanctimonious internet activism was the dumbest thing in the world, so I got a real rush from watching the video's creator fall apart so publicly. I mean, come on. Using oversimplifications to manipulate the raw emotions of people on the internet is never going to make a real political impact.
42:00: Apart from the London Olympics, what makes 2012 such an eventful year for Brooker, it seems, is the seemingly endless avalanche of allegations against Jimmy Savile. For Brits, Jimmy Savile is a TV personality from the days of yore who makes people feel warm and fuzzy—Bill Cosby might be a good analog. After Savile dies, a huge number of plausible accusations reveal that he was a breathtakingly prolific child molester, and generally kind of a monster, who seems to have been linked, #PizzaGate-style, to other child molesters in media, and in seats of power all over the UK.
The government at all levels gets pulled into a kind of inescapable witch hunt.
So Savile's history of being a monster dominates TV throughout late 2012. According to Brooker, "tuning into the news became like riding an endless, looping ghost train with this creepy, cadaverous monster perpetually leering toward you through the gloom, the news ticker scrolling in front of him like police incident tape." Boy, do I know how that feels, having just lived through 2016.
51:30: It's almost cute reliving the 2012 election. Brooker is mad at people like Nate Silver for saying the election will be close, and keeping him in suspense, when, actually, Obama wins easily. "Moneyball-style stats geeks had long been predicting a modest win for Obama. Despite this, come election night itself, the news wheeled out its most bombastic graphics and tried to play up the drama of a race it insisted was still too close to call," he says. LOL. Imagine a race where the person leading in the polls doesn't win!
2013 Wipe
Brooker starts by saying 2013 is "overflowing with terrorist incidents, abuse allegations, natural disasters, and high-profile deaths."
17:20: Politics in the UK are stale, but here comes a populist hero! "Guffawing Admiral Akbar-lookalike, pint magnet, and man-of-the-people impersonator Nigel Farage impressed a sizable chunk of the voting population with his non-racist, un-racist, racist-less, absolutely not racist party, UKIP, whose members, when interviewed, routinely describe themselves as not racist," says Brooker. Today, of course, Farage is a dear friend of the US president-elect.
25:00: Here's something interesting I forgot about: Charles Ramsay. Ramsay helps free the Cleveland women held captive by Ariel Castro. Then he's funny on TV. Then he goes viral. Then he turns out to kind of suck, and no one wants to see him on TV anymore. "Basically," Brooker says, "Charles Ramsay went through the trad celebrity career trajectory: fame, worship, disappointment, and then backlash in record time." Fortunately, this kind of thing never happens again.
55:00: Former South African president Nelson Mandela dies, and his death, along with Margaret Thatcher's earlier in the year, makes it a pretty big death year. I remember 2013 for the untimely departures of Paul Walker and James Gandolfini, but those don't show up in this episode.
2014 Wipe
7:55: There's a Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk segment about 12 Years a Slave, culminating in a pretty depressing monologue from Cunk: "They don't have racism in America anymore. When they voted for Obama, they sorted all of that out, y'know, drew a line under it. These days, America's changed, and black people can be whatever they want to be, as long as it's either president, or shot."
20:55: Nigel Farage's UKIP Party keeps hurting people's feelings throughout 2014. A member calls a Thai woman a "ting tong," for instance. But it turns out, saying racist stuff doesn't really do much to damage the anti-immigration party's standing in the polls. Huh.
In debates, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who was once a far-leftist outsider, fends off attacks from Farage, who is currently an outsider. Brooker characterizes Clegg as "the company man, defending the closed shop against a new wild card, man-of-the-people outsider," adding, "as soon as you're part of the system, you're not a man of the people anymore." Maybe this will be an important lesson for President Trump to learn before 2020.
27:30: After talking about ISIS, Brooker pauses a moment to note a changing tone in the discourse. A feeling of "ever-expanding madness has been unfolding all year, not just with ISIS, but with Russia and the Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Ebola, mistrust with politicians, with institutions, with the media, with cultural icons."
That monologue turns out to be the lead-in to a short documentary by Adam Curtis that absolutely stops my heart:
Oh dear, indeed.
2015 Wipe
In his intro, a lead-in to a segment about the Charlie Hebdo shooting, Brooker says, "Usually the first few weeks of January are kind of uneventful." Looking back, the observation holds up. Horrific tragedies tend not to happen right at the start of the year. (Fingers crossed on that one.)
Everything in 2015 seemed to revolve around Syria in one way or another. Brooker calls Syria "a hellish tangle involving a brutal regime, rival rebel factions, extremists, and vested national interests. It's a civil war, a proxy war, an ideological conflict, and a monumental humanitarian disaster all at the same time."
15:00: We see the first mention of Donald Trump in a Wipe special, and it's a reference to Nigel Farage, whom Brooker calls "Tiny Trump."
18:48: More remarks about polls. In the UK election last year, the Conservatives won an easy victory after polls had been making it look close. "It seems voters had been trolling the pollsters all along," Brooker said, noting "it's hard to know really how they could make opinion polls any more accurate." LOL.
46:00: Another poignant Barry Shitpeas/Philomena Cunk sketch about the photo of Alan Kurdi, that three-year-old Syrian migrant whose dead body was photographed on a beach in Turkey. The photo came along, according to Shitpeas, "just as I was really getting into hating the migrants." Cunk breaks it down. "It was like the white and gold dress. Once it's flipped to blue and black in your head, that's it. You'll never see it any other way forever. Well, until Paris happened. Then they went back to being a swarm of bastards and criminals again."
54:00: In another Shitpeas/Cunk joint, we finally see Trump's face. Shitpeas monologues: "He says all these things that aren't true, and loads of his followers don't trust the media, so they believe whatever he says. So he can basically create his own mental reality and have thousands of people blindly agree with him. Actually, saying that out loud makes him sound sorta terrifying, but luckily he's also got silly hair you can laugh at."
Holy shit.
The whole thing ends with Brooker clicking fearfully through the channels, terrified of a Trump victory, and all the other madness from the year. He lands on a funny TV commercial, and oh, how he laughs and laughs. I do, too!
By watching all seven of these, I feel like I just binge-watched the entire last seven years through Brooker's eyes, and it was more than I bargained for. He sees the world with a kind of blacklight that illuminates the techno-social jizz stains on society's fabric. I now feel like 2016 was not only the worst year in recent memory, it was also the point at which the trend lines of the recent past converged in a very final and epoch-ending way.
And of course, 2016 Wipe will air on BBC Two on December 29. I'm much more excited about that air date, than, say, the year 2017.
If you're like us, you probably owe the first wave of your most brutal hangovers to partying as hard as Andrew WK did in his music videos in the 2000s—bloody face and all. The man is a party god, and now, 15 years after his anthem "Party Hard" was released, he remains the earth's foremost authority on the art of having fun.
But how does food and diet play into his way of life?
MUNCHIES caught up with the legend to find out how exactly he fuels his lifestyle, how he throws a party, some tips and tricks on giving the best damn toast possible, and why the party never really stops.
Fair warning: Things got deep.
MUNCHIES: To you, what is a party? Andrew WK: In some ways, it's an event that involves active expressions of gratitude and celebration regarding something specific—a holiday, the weekend, whatever. But in the larger sense, or maybe the simpler sense, you can party about the ultimate event, which is being alive. In that way, it's a mindset that is continuous. It's my desperate struggle and effort to live that way.
What do you think parties are all about? It really can be whatever helps express that essential excitement and gratitude and awareness. Anything that brings that sort of enthusiasm. That type of unbridled joy seems appropriate for a party.
In 2008, Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash) and Marc Guggenheim co-created Eli Stone, an unconventional legal drama that aired on ABC for two seasons—the first of which was cut short by the writers strike. Despite its brief existence on the air, the series remains intriguing for two particularly memorable elements: it centered on a lawyer who might be a prophet but definitely has a brain aneurysm, and it also basically functioned as an ongoing tribute to George Michael.
Currently available to binge on Hulu, Eli Stone follows the basic structure of a legal procedural. The titular corporate lawyer Eli (Jonny Lee Miller) has a new case each episode, but the overall narrative is tied together by several ongoing juicy and slightly scandalous storylines (infighting within the firm, an ex-fiancee, an old flame who dates his brother). To counterbalance any encroaching legal mundanity, Eli begins having wild hallucinations (while in a work meeting, during foreplay) that he learns are caused by a brain aneurysm—but his acupuncturist-turned-confidant Dr. Chen (James Saito) believes that Eli may actually be a prophet, helping Eli to understand the meanings of these visions. What's inspired about Eli Stone is that it doesn't turn into a weekly rumination on religion; it's most reminiscent of Joan of Arcadia, a CBS series about a teen girl who regularly talks to God but mostly keeps religion at arms' length. Eli Stone specifically finds levity in its premise, keeping things silly even when Eli faces down death.
But what stands out the most is George Michael. In the pilot, Eli's first hallucination comes in the form of the pop singer: he begins hearing Michael's song "Faith" everywhere, culminating with "seeing" the singer perform it in Eli's living room. (There's a silly explanation for why Eli's hallucinations are focused on George Michael, but the reveal is better when watching it yourself.) The episode itself isn't the strongest (I'll never understand why the writers thought it would be a good idea to intro the series with a misguided vaccinations/autism court case), but it's a surprising amount of fun, especially when George Michael actually shows up. The device is a clever wink and acceptably cutesy (at one point, Eli informs the courtroom that, yes, they've gotta have faith), and it's hard to picture it succeeding with any other singer.
George Michael is prominent throughout the whole series. Berlanti is a huge fan of the singer—he briefly eulogized George Michael on Twitter on Sunday—and he lucked out that George Michael was down to pop up in the show every now and then. His songs basically soundtracked the entire series (featured in 12 of the 26 total episodes), and every episode of the first season is named after a George Michael track. His second cameo was in the seventh episode, "Heal the Pain," but his biggest appearance was the ninth, "I Want Your Sex," arguably one of the season's standout episodes of the season.
Eli Stone delightfully blended comedy, legal drama, and fantasy—but "I Want Your Sex" succeeded in turning fantasy into reality, bringing George Michael out of Eli's hallucinations and into Eli's office. When a high school student is suspended for playing the titular song over her school's PA system to protest the administration's "Abstinence Only" sex education policy, George Michael shows up at the law firm to ask Eli to take the case. It's a role-reversal, too: this time, Michael had a dream about Eli and decided to seek him out.
It's also the perfect plot for George Michael; not only does he get to have fun—the singer was clearly up for whatever in the episode, even taking jabs at himself when someone confuses him for Bono—but the courtroom sequence allows Michael to elaborate on the meaning behind the song, and to share some of his well-known sex positive ideals as he helps elevate the episode's message about the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only programs.
But George Michael's last appearance on the show—the season one finale "Soul Free"—that was most indicative of the infectious fun and joy that he brought to the series. He appears to Eli as a God-like figure, teaming up with co-stars Loretta Devine and Victor Garber, to perform a fantastical rendition of "Feeling Good" that brings together multiple elements from the first season.
In the grand scheme of all of George Michael's accomplishments—music and otherwise— Eli Stone is a small blip, as well as one that is mostly forgotten. But it showcases how game George Michael was for branching out and exploring other opportunities—especially ones where he got to have a good time.
In the early 90s, I was living out my 20s in New York City, and Michael Alig's infamous Disco 2000 club ruled Wednesday nights. Dressed in outrageous outfits, our faces made up in horror movie glamour, my friends and I would get high and dance until the music ended. Then we'd pile into my best friend Aaron Blue's Alfa Romero and speed east through the city toward Save the Robots, an after-hours club in the Lower East Side where drag queens, businessmen, club kids, and hitmen would dance together for hours, lost in the music. Eventually, we'd end the night at Florent, eating escargot and French fries.
We owned the city back then. Caught in a swirl of drugs and parties. We thought we were invincible.
By 1996, Aaron Blue would die from a heroin overdose, and Disco 2000 would crash in scandal. But those nights still burn in my memory, bright and fierce and full of magic.
It was during this time that I went to work as an escort. I was a junkie with no job, dependent on my rich father for money. I thought being a whore would solve all my problems, allowing me the freedom to buy drugs and club all night long while answering to no one.
It wasn't until I met Laurent that I learned how unfree I really was.
Laurent was the second client I ever saw, and he taught me that all of life is a choice—that we choose our destinies and the course of our future each and every day, and that all that was right or wrong in my life was of my own making. Whatever I became, his only preference was for everything I did to be as beautiful as possible: "It is every gay man's duty to create beauty and to force it down the throat of the world," he'd tell me.
He had a round face, curly blond hair, faded milky blue eyes, and soft Southern cadences. He lived on the top three floors of a brownstone that looked out onto a quiet, tree-lined section of 17th Street, from which the city took on a lush, decadent kind of beauty. And he was dying of AIDS, which he called "the cancer."
He would make me rose tip tea infused with just a hint of opium, and ask me to read for him from a collection of Hart Crane poems. Certain passages would make him cry, and he told me the story of how, after being beaten up for cruising male crew members on a luxury ship, Crane threw himself overboard, toasting a crowd of partygoers before plunging to his death. "We have always paid such a heavy price to be allowed to suck dick," Laurent said.
The second time I met with him, he asked if we could get naked together. We did cartwheels around his living room, bumping into furniture and rolling around on the floor.
It was hard not to stare at the purple lesions on his pale, near-translucent skin. "They're like little paintings of a disaster that is occurring inside me," he would tell me. "Reminders of my future. Tiny outlines of death. Yet when I look at them, all I can see is life. All the men I've fucked, all the men I've loved, every breath I ever took, all the choices I made. I have lived the most gorgeous life imaginable. And I know in death that every beautiful man I kissed, every hand I held, every drugged out boy I danced with will be waiting for me with chocolate and champagne and strawberries," he laughed.
He fell, breathless and naked, into his large blue leather couch.
"Do you have any idea how lucky we are? To be gay? To not have to live by their rules? To be able to create the lives we want? Our lives get to be great works of art. You get to be as beautiful as you want to be. As bright and shining as the stars."
One day I arrived to find a small pool filled with lavender bubbles and hot water in the middle of the room. I sat beside him, reading him Lorca poems, drinking champagne and talking about my day. He always wanted to know how I spent my time, even mundane things like laundry and grocery shopping.
"It isn't being a whore that makes you interesting, or being a junkie—those are just moments, snapshots that distract us from what's really interesting," he said. "It's the tiny moments, the way your lover farts in his sleep and it makes you want to pull them even closer, the way you feel as you stumble through your day, paying your bills, washing your dishes, the things you think while you're wiping your ass. If there is a God, then that is when he reveals himself."
Once I told Laurent about a sex party I went to. His eyes grew wide as I told him about my adventures. When I was through he clapped his hands and ran about the room in a manic fit, dancing to the song playing in the background.
"We are such decadent, beautiful monsters."
"You don't think I should feel bad?"
"For what?"
"I don't know. Maybe it was too much?"
"The whore asking me if sex is too much? Nothing is too much. We are free. Promise me that you will never feel guilty for being who you are and doing what makes you happy. "
He lit candles throughout the apartment as we rolled hash joints, and we would dance wildly, without regard for the world outside. Laurent would roll on the floor, kicking and screaming and singing as loud as he could. Once he took me to his rooftop, where Manhattan sprawled against the dark sky like a giant burning altar, and he told me a story of his first love with an art thief who lived in Rome. He told me about wild adventures smuggling drugs from Marrakech into Spain, and strange gatherings of Satanists in France "that always turned into rather boring sex parties," he said. "I could almost have accepted their stupidity, but the boring sex, that was unforgivable."
He painted elaborate tales of summers on Fire Island and parties out on the west side docks. He made the world seem magical.
"The world will tell you you are amoral, and they will call you evil," he said. "They will use religion and God and all sorts of silly, banal reasons why you should not be allowed to live your life. Being free reminds everyone else of the chains they have chosen. Living your life the way you want reminds them of the ways they have compromised, sacrificing themselves on altars of Christianity and mediocrity. We will be the great beasts. We will choose life over everything. Being gay is the key that unlocks the door. We don't have to live our lives by anyone else's rules. We have a choice."
Like Aaron Blue and so many other people I knew back then, Laurent died because of the life he chose—the heavy price paid for living life on one's own terms. I often wonder if it was worth it. Is there a point where a life lived in extremes is no longer a life worth living?
But then I think of Laurent, in his beautiful brownstone surrounded by priceless works of art, dancing and singing and paying whatever price was asked of him for living his life his way.
"I regret nothing," he once said to me. "Not even the moments that hurt the most, not even the ones that burn with shame. I regret none of it."
Actress and writer Carrie Fisher has died at the age of 60, just days after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to LA, Peoplereports.
"It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning," family spokesperson Simon Halls announced in a statement. "She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly," added Lourd, Fisher's only child.
While Fisher was perhaps most famous for her role as Princess Leia, which she began when she was only 19, she also made a name for herself in Hollywood as a script doctor, working on the screenplays for Sister Act, Last Action Hero, and The Wedding Singer. The daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, she had a tumultuous life that included struggles with addiction from a young age and often spoke about her bipolar disorder. She wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards From the Edge, that was turned into a movie, and a one-woman show about her life,Wishful Drinking, that became a best-selling book.
The actress had been promoting her latest memoir, The Princess Diarist, in London before she suffered her heart attack last Friday. She's survived by her mother, Debbie Reynolds, and Billie, her daughter with talent agent Bryan Lourd.
Last week, after a highly controversial trial, a Missouri court of appeals threw out the conviction of college wrestler Michael Johnson, who was sentenced last May to over 30 years in prison for "recklessly" infecting a sexual partner with HIV and exposing four others to the virus.
Johnson maintains he told his partners he was HIV-positive before they had sex. They say he didn't, which is a felony in Missouri. The Missouri Court of Appeals declined to rule on the nature of his sentence—Johnson has argued that the length is disproportionate to the crime, constituting cruel and unusual punishment. However, the court did agree that prosecutors had strategically withheld evidence from Johnson's attorneys in order to convict him.
The decision could spell good news for Johnson, who remains incarcerated. But advocates say the case highlights a larger problem within the American criminal justice system: the prevalence of a widespread body of HIV criminalization laws, which use medically outdated criminal law to stigmatize people living with the virus.
Thirty-two states have laws that explicitly criminalize the transmission of HIV, according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), a LGBTQ law and policy think tank. An additional six prosecute exposure and transmission through laws concerning sexually transmitted infections. These laws, which advocates for HIV-affected communities say are based more in stigma than fact, have led to decades-long sentences for those convicted. Many do not take low-risk behavior, like condom use, into consideration. Others ignore the fact that some behaviors, like spitting or biting, have been scientifically proven to be unable to transmit HIV.
The first HIV criminalization laws were introduced in 1986, and medical knowledge has advanced by leaps and bounds in that time. But despite the fact that those with an undetectable viral load are virtually unable to transmit the virus, and that HIV is now a highly treatable condition, lawmakers remain stuck in the past, a stance that has disproportionately impacted people of color, who have been most impacted by both HIV/AIDS and the American criminal justice system. That's why many advocates for HIV-affected communities seek to reform or outright repeal America's HIV criminalization laws, state by state.
"These laws do not promote public health," said Kate Boulton, a Staff Attorney at the Center for HIV Law and Policy, an organization that advocates for the rights and needs of HIV-affected communities. "[They] really do the opposite. There's no evidence that they promote safer sexual behavior or promote the disclosure of one's HIV status. They function to create a disincentive to knowing your status, since [one can only be prosecuted] if you know."
The result, she said, is nothing but more incarceration, more disrupted lives, and more "stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV."
Trials like Johnson's are nothing new. Examples of prosecutors using HIV criminalization laws to serve disproportionate sentences abound, from the case of Patrice Michelle Ginn, who was sentenced to prison for failing to disclose her status to a partner despite witness testimony to the contrary, to that of Willie Campbell, who is serving 35 years in prison for spitting in the eye and mouth of a police officer.
Most HIV criminalization legislation was passed in the 1980s and 90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, but these laws are far from uncommon today. In 2011, Nebraska passed the nation's most recent HIV criminalization law, making "assault with a[n HIV-infected] bodily fluid against a public safety officer" a felony. The law named saliva as one of those bodily fluids, despite the fact that saliva carries no risk of transmission—something scientists had proven long before 2011.
"Since the beginning of the epidemic, when many of these criminalization laws were enacted, treatment for HIV/AIDS has been revolutionized," said Peter Meacher, the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center's chief medical officer. "In many ways, these laws were a product of their times—fear and panic were rampant, even within the medical community. Thanks to advances in treatment, today, people with suppressed viral loads have lifespans not much different from those who are HIV negative. Additionally, having a suppressed or undetectable viral load makes it very unlikely that the individual can transmit HIV."
A number of experts, right up to the United States Department of Justice, agree that there are only two ways forward to bring these laws in line with modern science: repeal or reform them. Either course would need to take place at the state level, and, as such, repeal might be a more viable solution in some states, and vice-versa.
As far as reform is concerned, Boulton said states should lower felony convictions to misdemeanors and update legislation to align with current medical knowledge about transmission. These reforms would reduce the magnitude of sentences and take low-risk behavior into consideration, while removing no-risk behavior, like spitting and biting, from consideration entirely.
Reform has happened once before. In 2014, Iowa became the first state to replace a flat 25-year prison sentence for exposing others to HIV with a tiered-sentencing system that takes low-risk and no-risk behavior into account. It was largely motivated by public backlash over the conviction of Nick Rhodes in 2008, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for failing to disclose his status to a sexual partner before having sex, despite the fact that he wore a condom and did not transmit the virus to his partner.
The Iowa Supreme Court reversed his conviction in 2014, meaning that Rhodes met some sort of justice. The same sort of justice might find its way to Michael Johnson in the coming years, but is retroactive justice really justice at all? Not for advocates who seek full repeal of HIV criminalization laws.
"We need to eradicate all laws criminalizing people on the basis of HIV status," said Naina Khanna, the executive director of Positive Women's Network, who recommends restorative justice models and counseling services in their place.
Obama Warns Against "Tug of Tribalism" Speaking alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was making a historic visit to Pearl Harbor, President Barack Obama made a pointed warning against nationalist sentiment around the globe. "It is here that we remember that, even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward," Obama said in a speech. "We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different." -CNN
Trump Tower Evacuated Over Suspicious Backpack The public lobby of Trump Tower was briefly evacuated on Tuesday afternoon after an unattended backpack was discovered, leading to a momentary panic. The NYPD bomb squad found the bag was full of children's toys, and gave the all-clear around 5 PM. -AP
Montana Officials Denounce White Supremacist March Top public officials in Montana, including the governor, the attorney general, and the state's two senators and one representative, have issued a joint statement to denounce an anti-Semitic march planned by a white supremacist group. "Rest assured, any demonstration or threat of intimidation against any Montanan's religious liberty will not be tolerated "will not be tolerated," the statment reads. The Daily Stormer website announced plans to hold a march in the city of Whitefish in January "against Jews (and) Jewish businesses." –CBS News
US Prosecutors Charge Chinese Citizens with Corporate Hacks Three Chinese citizens have been charged in the US of profiting off corporate secrets obtained in hacks. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York say Iat Hong of Macau, Bo Zheng of Changsha, and Chin Hung of Macau made over $4 million in stock trades based on information obtained in hacks into a law firm who did business with Intel. Hong was arrested in Hong Kong, but the other two men are not in custody. -Reuters
International News
Bomb Attack in Kabul Leaves Politician Wounded A bomb attack in the Afghan capital of Kabul injured Fakori Behishti, one of the country's members of parliament. The MP's son and several others were also injured in an attack targeting the vehicle Behishti was travelling in. No group has yet claimed responsibility. -Reuters
Former Argentinian President Faces Corruption Charges The former Argentinian president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, two of her former aides, and the head of a construction company have all been charged with corruption. They are alleged to have been involved in a scheme to give Lazaro Baez's company government contracts. A federal judge also ordered $633 million worth of Fernandez's assets be frozen. –BBC News
Romanian President Rejects Muslim as PM Romanian President Klaus Iohannis has refused a Muslim candidate for prime minister put forward by the Social Democrats (PSD), the party that won December's parliamentary election. President Iohannis gave no reason for his decision to turn down Sevil Shhaideh, who would have been Romania's first Muslim and first female prime minister. –Al Jazeera
Train Crash in Northern India Leaves Two Dead At least two people were killed and 38 others injured when a train was derailed close to Kanpur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Two of those badly wounded in the crash later died, according to a police officer. The cause of the crash was not immediately known. –AP
Everything Else
Star Wars Alumni Lead Carrie Fisher Tributes The team behind Star Wars have led tributes to actress Carrie Fisher, who has died at the age of 60 days after suffering a heart attack. George Lucas said "In Star Wars she was our great and powerful princess." Harrison Ford described her as "funny and emotionally fearless. She lived her life, bravely." Mark Hamill tweeted: "No words #Devastated." –Sky News
Arkansas Police Want Amazon Echo Audio in a Murder Investigation An Arkansas police force has asked Amazon to provide them with any recordings made by an Amazon Echo speaker owned by a suspect in a murder investigation. The listening device belongs to James Andrew Bates, accused of strangling Victor Collins while the victim was staying at Bates's home. The Echo is designed to always be listening for its "wake word," after which it records audio and sends it to the cloud so any spoken commands can be deciphered. –USA Today
Scarlett Johansson Top-Grossing Star of 2016 Scarlett Johansson has topped Forbes' annual list of the world's highest-grossing actors. Her 2016 movies, including Captain America: Civil War and Hail, Caesar!, brought in $1.2 billion at the global box office. –Forbes
"Garcia" Sixth Most Common Surname in the US A new report by the US Census Bureau show that six of the 20 most common last names in the US now have Hispanic or Latino origin. "Garcia" is the country's sixth most common surname, according to the last census. "Smith" and "Johnson" remained the most popular surnames. –VICE News
Tyler, the Creator's Original MySpace Page Discovered A Reddit user has found Tyler, the Creator's old music MySpace page. It contains six early songs recorded back in 2008. The rapper and producer's MySpace music page was called "I Smell Panties." -Noisey
North Korea Gets Its Own Tablet Researchers at the Chaos Communication Congress, a hacking festival, have revealed details of a new North Korean tablet PC called Woolim. The "locked down" device uses bespoke software to track users and limit the distribution of media online. -Motherboard
Over the holiday weekend 61 people were shot in Chicago and11 people died from their wounds, according to data complied by the Chicago Tribune.
On Christmas Day seven people died in Chicago, according to the data—more than the three previous Christmases combined. The weekend numbers are much worse than the 2015 tally of 25 shootings and seven deaths. Chicago police said most of the holiday violence was gang-related.
It's been a particularly bloody year for Chicago. More than 4,300 have suffered gunshot wounds so far in 2016, and 770 people have died from gun violence. That's a nearly two-decade high. Last year, by comparison, 2,989 were shot and 492 died from gun homicide.
This past holiday weekend, two teen girls—aged 13 and 14—were shot while waiting for the 13-year-old's father, according to the Tribune. The father is a gang member. Both girls survived their wounds, but the 14-year-old is in critical condition. A 2-year-old boy waiting with the girls was unharmed.
