Our pal Ryan Hemsworth has been torching the internet with a figurative flamethrower made of great remixes, bootlegs, refixes, mash-ups, and whatever else people like him do to transform a MP3 file into an even better MP3 file. Since the guy hails from Halifax, we figured we'd throw a party there with our friends at HTC Canada and have him play it. It all worked out splendidly. Watch him take us around the city while we chat about Asian films and party with this young phenom.

Image by Courtney Nicholas

I listened to the American Psycho audiobook recently. It was released in 2011 and is narrated by Pablo Schreiber, who performs his task quite well. He doesn’t clown it up, or put on too many funny voices for the different characters. It’s subtle, with just enough inflection to distinguish each bit of dialogue. He delivers everything with the cool factuality that Patrick Bateman demands.

If Bret Easton Ellis is, as many believe, literature’s enfant terrible of 1980s disenchanted youth, it’s only because he’s also secretly a warlock capable of conjuring multivalent spells of celebration and castigation that subvert the meanings and value of sex, money, consumerism, and entertainment. It only follows that American Psycho is (at least for now) the pinnacle of his art: the dark-hearted swansong of an era that sums up its subject matter with a perfect balance of breadth and incisiveness. Gross satire delivered with a hyperrealistic technique.          

The novel was published in 1991, so it’s clear that Bret was toiling away—one might even say slavering—as the last analog decade came to its close. The 90s rolled in, dismantling the “modern” and perhaps even “postmodern” eras, moving things sideways in a direction that wasn’t defined until late 2001, and only then under the guise of international terrorism and resulting proxy wars. But one thing was certain: the pre-established boundaries between the yuppie rich and downtown insiders all but melted under the all-pervasive pressure of the cyclopean laser-beam gaze of MTV and a generation who viewed its output as gospel. It was an era that effortlessly and ignorantly (with certain levels of bliss) blended the new sound of Cobain’s teen-spirit grunge with the explosion of G-funk hip-hop in the wake of The Chronic, even if the overarching cultural repercussions weren’t realized until the tail end of the noughties.

The solarized sheen of the 80s was and still is so bright that it’s proved difficult to chip away at its veneer to reveal what was going on underneath. This dilemma, in hindsight, is exemplified by what was ultimately one of Bret’s creations: the 1987 big-screen adaptation of Less Than Zero, the author’s exposé of well-to-do Los Angeles teenagers who were chiefly driven by irresponsibility and immorality. The film fails to incorporate much, if any, of the literary value of the book, namely the text’s stark and minimalist presentation of the unflinching nihilism pervasive in both its subject matter and characters. Instead the movie relies heavily on mood and production design, assigning the characters classic story arcs when the only arcs found in Bret’s book were steady flatlines that eventually plunge off a cliff and, as the title suggests, into the negative.

American Psycho, on the other hand, does it all, in both forms: the novel and subsequent film capture, celebrate, and melt the 80s down to its unabashedly shallow consumerist/capitalistic core. There’s no real fat to be cut on either end, because the decade was solely one of selfish indulgence, and it wouldn’t be so far-fetched to say that the consequences of its worst offenders are only now being felt by a generation that is at least twice removed. Hence why it is such a fascinating setting for storytelling, especially when that story has the substance to be spun across multiple media.

The book attacks the 80s on two distinct fronts: the appropriation and internalization of style—both in its aesthetic and plot—and the relentless accumulation of the abject. Patrick Bateman is the king of all things: money, music, women, fitness, murder, movies. The epitome of modern omnivorousness, he consumes and is a connoisseur of everything.

Patrick’s passionate exegesis of Huey Lewis & the News, a band who’s oeuvre some might argue doesn’t warrant such praise or attention, is both bleakly dark and humorous because it is so sociopathically detailed. It’s a truly modern obsession that falls squarely in line with detailed accounts of his abhorrent torture and murder of his innocent prey (mostly women, but, tellingly, his victims also include a homeless man, dogs, and a gay man). The type of obsessive attention he pays to Huey Lewis epitomizes the way the book and its protagonist operate: Patrick makes some salient but ultimately vapid points regarding the evaluation of what makes great pop music, while ironically deriding such fare by virtue of the attention that it garners from the public at large. It’s as if Bret is saying, Well this is what the 80s had to offer, so I’ll address it in a way that will make it so much more valuable in hindsight.

A product of the 80s, I love The Breakfast Club and Ferris Buller’s Day Off as much as anyone, but I wouldn’t say they are movies I return to time and time again to shape my soul or to remind me of the type of soul that previously inhabited me. Instead, the work of John Hughes and his contemporaries immerse me in aesthetic impressions of a specific time and place. So when I try to digest them in the context of my current life, my inclination is to attempt to preserve and recall the innocent spirit I had when I first experienced them as a boy (I had Ferris on VHS and would watch it every sick day, which were many, because I hated school) while simultaneously drawing on my experiences since then to critique their inane and benign gloss brushed over the human experience, as if the only problems that need to be overcome in life are being able to kiss the person of one’s dreams, and that everything will be OK as long as a feel-good soundtrack plays in the background.

That’s why American Psycho caused such controversy when it was published. The violence in the book is incredible. Its misogynistic excess has been well noted and criticized. But I’m sure its exhaustive detail of Patrick Bateman’s brutality is one of the ingredients that made the book a bestseller and a cultural touchstone, despite it being dumped by Simon & Schuster and resold to Vintage immediately before its scheduled publication. The level of detail in which the killings are described in the book are 100 times worse than what’s shown in the movie. Much of what was contained in these scenes was considered unfilmable at the time, but, in fact, I think they’re exactly what the film needs. And, if the internet has taught us anything in the interim, it is that humanity has absolutely no regard for humans. Videos of beheadings, egregious war crimes against children, and snuff videos can all be found online relatively easily if you want to see them. This was not the case in 1991, when American Psycho stunned the masses with its written depictions of wanton butchery—ones that actually had to be imagined by the reader. They were informed by Bret’s extensive deep dive into reports of particularly savage homicides at the New York Public Library, which begs the questions as to whether the author’s ultimate goal was to provide accurate depictions of the depths of barbarity in the modern era, or simply to acknowledge that human beings are capable of such atrocities.

In retrospect, the creation of a character as vitriolic and ruthless as Patrick Bateman could also be interpreted as a literary critique of the masculine, competitive, and largely destructive world of Wall Street: the dealmakers who merge and acquire and rape and pillage are metaphorical murderers, ones who don’t have to get their hands dirty and bloody as Patrick does so literally, but they still get off on it just the same. The book’s expertly crafted and choreographed murders are apt metaphors for the violence inflicted by the US’s financial system in more insidious and subtle ways—through unchecked capitalism and the ubiquitous sameness of mass culture. In the end, you could say, we are all the victims of such violence, every day.

A little over ten years after the novel’s release, the film adaptation of American Psycho found success on its own merits. Much of its momentum relies on the casting of a pre-Batman Christian Bale, who is in such excellent physical shape that he makes Schwarzenegger’s Terminator look chubby. From its inception, the production had a weighty crucible to bear: the negative residual press from the book and, even more daunting, the innate difficulties of depicting the novel’s most graphic scenes onscreen without straying from the psychopathic excesses its plot relies on. Overall, I believe the filmmakers did an excellent job of adapting the material, and I would imagine that selecting a female director (albeit a great one) to helm the project did much to dispel any potential criticisms of sexist sensationalism.

What’s odd is that the movie doesn’t stumble when it skirts the extremes of the source material. Instead its pitfalls are the result of relying too heavily on the era’s excess and recklessness in terms of its character development—to the extent that it sometimes muddles Christian Bale’s performance because it becomes increasingly difficult to see the depths of his psychopathy when everyone around him also seems like a psycho.

In the book, both Patrick Bateman and the reader (who is addressed directly several times throughout) see other characters as means to an end—cardboard cutouts and play dolls that serve no purpose but to distract the narrator from his incurable boredom and the numbness of apathy. It’s intentionally left unclear to the reader whether the disturbing occurrences Patrick eventually relays to his colleagues (who largely dismiss his stories as sick jokes) actually took place or are completely delusional. Either way, what’s certain is that he’s a complete psychopath. Logic, understanding, empathy are totally—almost oppressively—left out of the novel. You could say that these characteristics are also absent from most interactions in the modern age, even though they are more readily available than ever.

Leonardo DiCaprio was famously almost cast as Patrick Bateman following the megasuccess of Titanic, but he eventually pulled out, and Bale, the director’s original choice, stepped back in. Later this year Leo will star in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which will probably revolve around much of the same kind of extreme capitalistic culture that informed Bret’s novel and the subsequent movie. My guess is that it will represent and critique a very misogynistic and competitive culture, but it will be accepted in ways that neither the book nor film versions of American Psycho were. I suspect this is because no one could get past the idea that its protagonist (as opposed to the antagonist)—an extremely successful American businessman according to the standards of the masses—was also a brutal serial killer who really liked Huey Lewis.

All that being said, back in 2011 there were rumors of a remake of the film. It seemed that Bret Easton Ellis was excited by the prospect (albeit with the caveat that Kourtney Kardashian’s husband Scott Disick was cast as the lead), but I’m not sure what purpose it would serve because: 1) I can’t imagine anyone besides Christian Bale playing Patrick Bateman; 2) including more of the violence from the book, or setting the story post-Great Recession are the only ways to distinguish it enough from the original adaptation to justify a remake, and neither sound all that appealing; and 3) Why would anyone want to see a remake of the movie when American Psycho the musical is only six months away.

Follow James on Twitter: @JamesFrancoTV

Previously - My Name Is Tom and I’m a Video Game Addict

More film stuff from VICE:

North Korean Film Madness

I Was an Accidental Nigerian Film Star

Behind the Debauchery

All photos courtesy of the author

When I am depressed I must write. But I am surprised to find myself depressed upon the death of my dog this past Sunday during our fishing trip on Lake Pontchartain. I am surprised I’m even calling Mishka “my dog,” as I was never very fond of her. But now she seems perfect, as so many dead things do in retrospect.

Mishka was a skinny, medium-length, short-haired Kelpie with boundless energy that even our spacious Ninth Ward backyard couldn’t burn out. She came to us last year after several of our neighbors had passed her around, each too dog-loving and polite to admit to us or themselves that Mishka was destructive. “She’s just a puppy!” they all declared, choosing to focus instead on how much they loved her. That part was sincere. Mishka was remarkably sweet and submissive, exposing her belly upon my slightest (infrequent) kind glance.

Despite loving all animals, I’ve never wanted to own a dog. Dogs are too hyper, and often loud. Their shit is too big. I’ve watched dogs in need of excessive mental and emotional maintenance turn their owners into something like hospice nurses. After burying my last beloved cat Stone (who I found behind a dumpster at the Stone Lounge in Tampa, Florida, before playing a show there) in 1999, I’ve come to hate even the idea of “owning” another (very possibly strong-willed) mammal. When I moved to New Orleans in 2001, I made a point to befriend the city’s millions of stray cats, but swore off the burden of ownership. When I met my wife, that burden became inevitable. For our first seven years she mooned over Craigslist’s dog ads. I managed to stave her off, but upon the birth of our daughter in 2010, I knew I would be outnumbered as soon as the little one could speak.

My trump card was our goat, Chauncey Gardner, who we bought in 2004 after moving into a big Ninth Ward house with a huge yard we knew we’d never mow. At first my wife claimed to be only window-shopping when we visited a goat farm in the Louisiana sticks, but that day we, coincidentally, watched the birth of three boy goats. When the farmer told us that only female goats mattered and that the boys would all end up in tacos, we purchased one of the little guys, whom we bottle fed for the first six months of his life. Chauncey now weighs 70 pounds and has used up ten of his projected 15 years of life; through it all he’s always been easier to take care of than a goldfish—monklike quiet, no begging for table-scraps, no slavish behavior since he doesn’t really care if you “love” him. I love him for that. He’s been a pleasant companion during several hurricane evacuations. The ideal pet, he lives outside, the verdant yard taking almost complete care of him. Like the more famous Chauncey Gardner of page and screen, he could probably live out there independently forever if we happened to die inside the house.

For years Chauncey helped me block my wife's attempts to get a dog—I mean, what if they didn’t get along? Chauncey hates nothing more than a wet dog nose up his butt, and obviously dogs can’t proceed with a new animal relationship without first sniffing that ass a bunch. Chauncey has had a couple respectful dog friends, but if we adopted our own, and things didn’t work out, the Humane Society doesn’t do returns. 

Unfortunately, Mishka behaved well when the last of her previous owners dropped her into our yard "just to see how she’ll treat the goat!" She gave Chauncey the utmost respect, leaving his butt alone. My fate seemed so sealed that I myself finally invited the dog into our home on behalf of my wife and daughter, who both took to Mishka immediately.

Mishka and Chauncey Gardner.

I grew to fucking hate her, at times. She mostly lived outside with Chauncey but couldn’t refrain from destroying every object she was ever left alone with, from my flip-flops to the garden hose to a push broom twice her size to a large swimming pool—though oddly, I never witnessed any of the action, only the aftermath. Nor did I ever see her dig any of those two-foot-deep holes in the yard. And though she remained relatively respectful of Chauncey, her herding instincts often told her to chase him. We knew this was good for the fat old beast, but he hated it. He’s just too old for it. Once, while trying to escape her, Chauncey stepped in one of her deep excavation projects and twisted his knee. Chauncey forgave her soon after, when she ripped open the silver wrapping around the AC ducts under our house, exposing what to Chauncey was delicious pink installation—their first collaboration.

Even worse than all of that, she focused her mind and soul on figuring out how to run out the front door and down the street to a nicely paved street (a rarity in New Orleans), where she could chase cars at 25 MPH. Not just chase them, but dive in front of them, under them. As cars swerved she maintained a solid 20-foot distance from me, preventing me from nabbing her. Tears glazed my eyes as I helplessly watched her kamikazi up underneath oncoming cars, somehow never dying. Finally a stranger would agree to stop their car and lure her back to my house. “You need to whup that dog,” every one of them told me. “There’s no other way.” 

In many cases I will scoop a roach up with an envelope and put it outside rather than kill it, so nothing made me want my life rid of this dog more than realizing I would need to slap her silly. Still, I did it. Several times, with the chewed flip-flop I'd saved. I had to either punish her in a language she understood, or else watch her get killed by a car. So I did it. And the bad behavior lessened. But it didn’t stop. Eventually I refused to ever slap or chase her, or conspire with strangers to get her to come home. When she'd escape I'd remain in the house listening to the intermittent screeching of tires outside.

“She’s just a puppy!” I was told over and over again as my family blocked my attempts to give her away. They truly loved this sweet, misfit dog. And she loved them back. Mishka didn’t just let my three-year-old daughter tackle and maul and abuse her, she lived for it. During their loud tussles the dog would bite my daughter all over her body and head, sometimes wrapping her teeth around her face—but always so gently that she never left a mark on the new white skin. It was pretty amazing, and told me a great deal about the dog. Mishka and my daughter’s intense mutual love was pretty much the only thing the dog had going for her. But it was a big thing, the thing I think of most, now that she is gone.

The author, his daughter, Chauncey, and Mishka.

The dog’s behavior either kept improving, or else she simply ran out of things in the yard to chew on. If she had calmed down, she was still chasing Chauncey more than the old goat could handle. We were moving to a new house in July, and I lobbied to leave Mishka behind, but my wife wasn’t having it. So all I could think to do was to coldly bear down on the dog in hopes of further taming her. I’d never been mean to an animal before, but she seemed to need it. I honestly felt like she would learn. And I swear she did. By the time she died, she’d just become bearable.

And thus we took her fishing.

I’d obsessed over fishing as a child in Florida and had taken to it again since the birth of my daughter—nowadays it's easier to wake early and fish than it is to stay up late partying. I'd always thought of Lake Pontchartrain as poisoned before Katrina, but they’ve supposedly cleaned it up, so on a recent lark I fished a decidedly urban seawall, where the water looked really nice and clean, and watched my friend catch a 23-inch redfish—the holy grail of Louisiana fishing. I was eager to return to the lake with my daughter, my wife, and my dog. Their dog.

Mishka destroyed shit because she felt cooped up; a vibrant puppy stuck on a lazy goat’s schedule. So at the lake, Mishka relished the chance to go full throttle. She leapt from the car and tore across the grass with such abandon she slipped on a metal drainage grate and cracked her head very hard. She howled for a second as she kept on running for the water. For the next hour she attacked the waves lapping against the seawall’s steps, barking at the tiny whitecaps, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of briny water. The whole time she carefully avoided the personal space of strangers, and we complimented her behavior. I admitted she had gotten a lot better lately, and that she would probably do well at our new house.

Happier than I’d ever seen her, leash-less and biting the lake’s now supposedly “clean” water, after almost two hours she finally laid down with a huge, chilled-out smile. We thought nothing of her resting like this for a good half-hour.

As the sun set and we readied to leave, we finally noticed that she looked ill. Her neck bent at a strange angle, she couldn’t stand up, and thick saliva hung from her jowls. Before any emotion or even comprehension could set in for anyone, I whisked my daughter away to one car and took her home while my wife drove Mishka to the emergency vet. On the way, she stopped breathing. 

Our daughter is too young to comprehend or consider it too sad as my wife and—surprisingly—I do. Now July approaches, and with it our move to a neighborhood across the river about which we know very little. I can’t help wishing Mishka were coming with us to the new house to chase my daughter around the extra-large yard we shopped long and hard for. It's impossible to imagine ever finding another dog that I would trust to bite my daughter all over so gently.

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

Previously: 3D Na'Tee Brings Real Rap to New Orleans's Jazz Fest

Mounds of soil where graves have been exhumed are now a common sight in Roșia Montană.

Since 2004, the Romanian Roșia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC) has been illegally trafficking corpses in Roșia Montană, a mountainous area in the heart of—fittingly—Transylvania. The corpses in question are buried above a vast wealth of gold that the company wants to get their hands on, so they're buying the bodies from the families of the deceased and moving them to another burial ground, footing the bill for the whole operation.  

I visited Roșia Montană eight times last year in order to understand how Romania's morbid gold rush is affecting the area's community, both overground and six-feet under.

The exhumations began nine years ago with the deceased husband of Gabriela Szekely, a retired teacher. I tracked down her address in Cluj-Napoca, a city a couple of hours from Roșia Montană, where she'd moved after RMGC bought her home, and found her alone in her apartment building.

"The exhumation was mentioned in the [house] contract signed with the mining company," she told me, "but I only noticed it a year later. I told them that I wanted to bring my husband to where I live as soon as possible. They took care of all the expenses and I was very happy. It cost a lot—about 10,000 Leu [$3,975].”

A chunk of those expenses were spent on a new grave site for Mrs. Szekely and her husband in the central cemetery, the most expensive in Cluj-Napoca. She told me, "The grave was dug so deep that I'll also fit in it.”

A map showing where all the relocated bodies are being moved. (Map by Luminita Dejeu)

After the first exhumation, rumors about the “dead going away” started to circulate in Roșia Montană. The wish to have “their dead ones close” quickly spread among those who had moved away after selling their homes to the company, and the cemeteries of Roșia were soon filled with piles of excavated earth as bodies were exhumed and re-buried closer to the residents' new homes.

Local hearsay seems to suggest that the payoff for removing relatives from Roșia Montană's cemeteries (approximately $2,600 a corpse) might also have had something to do with people suddenly becoming desperate to have "their dead ones close."     

Sorin Jurca, the owner of a small shop in Roșia, told me, "My aunts exhumed my grandparents without telling me, which was a shock. They said that I'm too sensitive and told me to relax because they didn't take the money, despite the fact I hadn't even asked them about that."

I began to realize how underhanded the situation was when Andrei Gruber, the owner of the hostel I stayed at in Roșia, explained another perk RMGC were offering families of the deceased. “For everyone who is exhumed, the company offers an extra grave," he told me. "This is how they convince older people, because then they stop worrying about the costs of their own funeral.”

From one angle: yes, the company is setting people up with pricey graves—a hassle they'd otherwise have to undertake themselves. From the other: they are bartering in death—disturbing the resting places of these people's loved ones so they can continue to dig away for their own gold. In doing so, they're also destroying the landscape for anyone who's chosen not to exhume their dead and still wants to visit the graves of loved ones in peace. It's disrespectful, manipulative and, more than anything, just really fucking creepy.  


Dorel, a gravedigger who's been plying his trade in Roșia Montană since 1975, told me, “One time, a family took away ten corpses at once. Dude, money makes you greedy. Everyone says that they don't take money, but they do. I wouldn't move my mother and my father, even if they offered me billions.”

Unitarian priest, Arpad Palfi, standing by the grave of Jozsef Szekely, whose body was the first to be exhumed by RMGC.

His own mother and father may be safe in their graves, but that's not to say Dorel hasn't played his part in the exhumations. On a Sunday in 2004, a Unitarian priest named Arpad Palfi called on him to "take out a woman."

"If I can bury, I can also exhume!" Dorel told me, defending his decision. "I was with the niece of the woman, three monks, and Arpad," he continued. "I started digging, and when I was about 31 inches deep, a monk told me to stop. I broke the coffin with the pick, grabbed her legs, took her out, put her in the bag, and they took her away. She was just as I'd buried her, only the nails and hair looked like they had grown a little.”

That was the only exhumation Dorel ever carried out himself, but he also witnessed another that pretty much every Roșian I spoke to mentioned—the exhumation of Alexandru Toderaș, the former director of the state-owned Roșia Montană gold mine. Dorel recounted his version of the events:

“His nephew called me at around 3 PM to stand with him and guard the grave in case the diggers tried to steal anything from it. He was there with a box of beers. We drank and the workers kept on digging. They sort of broke a hole in the coffin, and when they pulled at the body, because the hole they made in the coffin was so small, the corpse came out without his head. They got the head out after with a hook. It had been five years since he died and his body wasn't decomposed."

Toderaș' exhumation, and likely many of the others RMGC carried out, were illegal. The Romanian orthodox church governs cemeteries in the country, and their rules (chapter five, article 26) state that, "Graves can only be opened seven years after the burial." Toderaș had only been buried for five years, two years short of the legal amount.

Two more exhumed graves in Roșia Montană.

Article 28 states, "According to orthodox tradition, exhumed remains will be reburied in the same place where they were originally buried.” The former director ended up in a completely different cemetery in the town of Baia Mare. That second one seems to have been ignored with every exhumation the RMGC has ordered, considering the bodies are being dug up specifically to be moved to new locations.

According to another set of laws, dictated by the Cemeteries and Crematories Administration, a valid legal motivation is needed—an autopsy, for example—to exhume a corpse. Legally, you can't just do it to get to some buried treasure.

The company also needed authorization from both the public health director in Alba county and the chief prosecutor from the town of Câmpeni in order to move Toderas' body. The two institutions contacted me in writing to say that they've never issued a permit for the exhumations in Roșia Montană, let alone an individual permit to move the body of Alexandru Toderaș.

I wanted to know whether the priests taking part in the exhumations knew that what they were doing was illegal, so I went to speak to the oldest orthodox priest in Roșia, Mr. Vasile Oprișa. He first vouched for what I'd heard about Toderaș ("Yes, the corpse without the head is true… I did the ceremony"), then he addressed the priests illegally exhuming bodies: "The children and wife came to me unexpectedly… and I didn't verify the papers."  

The communal cemetery in Roșia Montană.

From the beginning of his priesthood until 2004, Oprișa had never exhumed anyone—he'd never had the need to. However, when RMGC moved in, that quickly changed. Oprișa didn't want to tell me how many graves he's opened in the last nine years, or show me any of the papers authorizing the exhumations, but he did tell me stories from the early years of the RMGC exhumations.

"There was one time where it was a father and a son together. I buried them and I exhumed them. When I saw the flesh hanging off their ribs, I had to run off to drink some jinar [a local brandy]. Another time, some people came from the county of Arad to remove 12 corpses. The cantor [a member of the church] asked me, 'Hey, priest, what the horse's dick are these people doing? They're suddenly interested now they know abut the money?'"

I spoke to Oprișa's former boss, his Eminence Andrei Andreicuț, to find out his personal stance on the Roșia exhumations, considering the Orthodox Church of Romania has declared it is officially against the RMGC project. He told me, “The Church has a position regarding exhumations in general, not just those from Roșia. The graves are sacred places and, in some parts of the country, seven years after the burial, priests perform exhumations. They wash human remains with wine, holy oil, and holy water, place the remains in a smaller coffin, then bury them again in the same place.”

Andreicuț's statement was conveniently evasive, and regardless of whether he truly believed what he was saying or not, the exhumations in Roșia certainly lack the romantic spin his Eminence put on the situation.

The Prometeu funeral service truck.

Before the priests get anywhere near the bodies, a van from the Prometeu funeral service company arrives at the cemetery. A local, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me, "When you see [the van] by the cemetery, you know another corpse is being moved out." That's because Prometeu has been contracted by RMGC to exhume, transport, and rebury all of the corpses in Roșia Montană.

Prometeu's owner, Bogdan Ion, spoke to me under a confidentiality agreement, meaning he could only really harp on about the benefits of the mining project and didn't want to say anything about the number of exhumed corpses, how many exhumations were in the pipeline and how much the overall operation has cost so far.

“I don't know how many we have exhumed so far," he told me. "I have no evidence of that. Cafes aren't obliged, after ten years, to know how many coffees they have sold. Do you understand me?" I understood him fine, but suggested that dead human bodies were a little different to hot drinks. I also put it to him that Prometeu operate illegally, without filling out the proper paperwork. "We're not responsible [for the actions of the gold company]," he answered, unsurprisingly. "The gold company arrange the exhumation, we just dig. The responsibility lies with them."

I wasn't able to find out the exact number of exhumed graves from any of the priests, the funeral services company, or the RMGC, so went to the mayor of Roșia Montană, Mr. Eugen Furdui, instead. He told me three times in 15 minutes that he isn't interested in the subject because, "The alive are alive and the dead are dead." He also didn't know how many corpses had been exhumed, but was certain that everything was legal, despite the fact he completely failed to account for any of the laws being overtly flouted.

The exhumations started so that the RMGC could illegally gain better access to Roșia Montană's gold. In the nine years since then, the ordeal has become a testament to how ready people are to sell the dead bodies of their loved ones for a quick buck. The church declares itself helpless, the authorities completely ignore the phenomenon, locals have gotten used to it, and the gold company continues to pay people off and dig up more and more of Roșia's graveyards.

In 2011, the first time I visited Roșia Montană, I found a town where locals were forced to write, "This property is not for sale," on the front of their homes, as it was the only way to avoid the gold company constantly knocking on their doors. Perhaps the next time I go back I'll find graveyards full of monuments graffitied with, "This grave is not for sale." But from what I've gathered it seems that—using the mayor's words—once the dead are dead, they're just another commodity to sell off and forget about.

More fun in Romania:

An Interview with a Romanian Witch

The Romanian Woman Who Voiced Chuck Norris

Romanian Prison Vogues

Photos by the author aka Ms. "I Only Figured Out Calgary Was Cool Last Week."

The original version of this article contained some inaccuracies about the land of Calgary that have since been corrected. Sorry 'bout that!

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Calgary, and I gotta say, I was a bit nervous. Mainly because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I always felt like Calgary had a bad reputation. For starters, the city is inherently evil to anybody east of Winnipeg with sad sack left leanings—who enjoy Thomas Mulcair’s beard more than any actual Canadian politician—because of its deserved image as the oil capital of the country, and oil is evil, right?

Add all of that to the mental imagery we are imprinted with in the eastern provinces of this country of a desolate, always-on-fire, post-apocalyptic frontier town—grey and ugly with open puddles of crude all over the place that you can fall into—and everyone, even the most of angelic children accidentally born there, are given a cowboy hat upon birth. Then there’s the gasoline soaked cherry on this western Canadian sundae, Stephen Harper and his dead shark eyes which call Calgary his home away from Sussex Drive. So my hopes, given all those things, were not high.

Well Katie, did you ever blow it! Calgary, you son of a great golden western bitch, are you ever a nice place to be.

Now, I am predisposed to be agreeable in any place I can wear cutoff shorts in, but that wasn’t it. As soon as we dropped into the city, the mountains flanking out at the sides of the valley Calgary sits in stirred up the feeling of a whole lot of space. All you see is long, rolling fields of green, brown, and gold. The sky, as you’re driving into the city, is the kind of sky you forget even exists when you’re used bumping the corners of your peripheral vision on massive buildings in a dense urban environment like Toronto. The city itself is small, and its most famous tower looks like someone hucked an old Campbell’s soup can on top of a concrete pillar. And no, it’s not even the tallest landmark in the skyline anymore, it literally gets blocked out in almost every part of the city, but there’s something really great, slapdash, and unapologetic about it.

That sort of ruffian, rowdy mentality permeates the whole place. The feeling really is something of a frontier town, a place that knows it’s small but is thrust into a place of economic and national importance—even though it would rather be out back drinking a beer, or hauling ass down the river in a literal tire. It’s a bit strange to see that every building downtown that’s not a hotel is either an oil company or a direct affiliate—BP, Shell, Enbridge, Imperial, Suncor—not strange because yes, “duh”, but in that you start calculating how much money is passing through those towers and in what varying capacities, as you’re trying to find a Jugo Juice. It’s impossible not to have a clear awareness of Canada’s massive energy industry when you’re wandering around Calgary.

It’s also impossible not to be aware of the resolute and persevering sprit of the West. The statues of broncos, bulls and mustangs on every block help; but beyond them, there is a palatable sense that this place just sprung up from nothing and is still there in the middle of nothing. The sense of open space is so loud—it’s nearly a sound. Wander through downtown on a weekend and see maybe four to six people, get to the fringes and everybody is there, spilling out into the streets, driving around in trucks, lolling around on porches attached to weirdly SoCal looking homes, cozy as anything. People in Calgary work hard, and if they’re not involved in oil, they work even harder. Yeah, they’re rich, but they just want to go outside and not be a dick about it.

And they’re outside because man, is it ever nice there. It stays light outside until after 10PM, something about latitude. Everyone is active and very healthy looking as a result, sort of like Vancouver but less annoying. It’s a casual, cultural healthiness. The winters blow of course, but they have warm blasts of Chinook winds that roll in from the Pacific every few weeks to balance things out.

Plain and simple, the people there are nice. You can’t walk around with a chip on your shoulder when you’re bound to know everyone. Also, their Mayor? Considering the maelstrom of shit Toronto is going through right now, hearing about the young, Muslim, funny as hell dude calling the shots in Calgary brings out the kind of “That’s unfaaaaaaair” whining you’ve probably not succumbed to since that kid next door got a better bike than you.

These things are everywhere! They're supposed to make you less nervous on grates but they mainly just freaked me out.

The bigger issue at play here is the obvious disconnect we have in Canada when it comes to the other places in Canada. Do you ever think about how our lack of a national identity might spring from the fact that most Canadians don’t know much about Canada aside from the part of it they’re living in? Meanwhile we are very good at damning places like the U.S. for the same, prevailing ignorant mentality. We get so bent out of shape about stereotypes we’re slapped with as a country on the whole, but we’re pretty guilty of turning around and doing the same thing in our own gaping backyard. Thinking Calgary was full of nothing but oil-covered cowboys was ingrained in me by an overarching ignorant cluelessness because we’ve got something of a “who cares” epidemic on our hands. Yeah, the grass is always greener, but we’re behaving as if Canada doesn’t have any god damn grass, our attention for the most part is honed anywhere but here.

As a kid, I saw just about every American state but never went west of Wasaga Beach. There was a sense it wasn’t worthwhile. Aside from a couple schools trips to Ottawa, aka the most boring place on earth, and Montreal if you were lucky, as a kid growing up in Ontario you don’t so much get to see things beyond the wall we’ve built up around ourselves as a self-sufficient bastion of everything worthwhile (j/k!). But really, we’re not privy to Canada as the place we’re from, maybe because it’s just so big. So we get these textbook ideas of the other major cities and all we associate them with is the smell of a shitty old book.

People I know in Toronto seemed wholeheartedly confused that I could be having fun in Calgary, but it’s not like there’s a Matt Damon genius janitor equation to good times: be open to somewhere. Don’t shut down or go full-snarky mode before you get to a place. Be open to the people there, be open to taking their word for it. Driving into the city, in between screaming out of the window of my friend Brett’s car, I asked why people hated on it so hard. His answer was pretty simple, “They are doing the wrong shit.” So quit it, Canada, ‘cause Calgary just wants to party with you.


Follow Katie on Twitter: @wtevs

More Stuff About Canadian Places:

Why Laval Sucks

Hamilton Is a Paradise

Toronto Is Forgetting its Other Problems

Photo via Flickr User Joella Marano

I say a lot of things I don’t actually mean to say. When I let my mouth run, I find myself implying that I can do 100 push-ups, that my favorite movie is “something French and old,” and that I “read books for fun.” I guess you could say I’m a huge liar with absolutely no shame. That’s why when I found out that Michael Douglas, star of Behind the Candelabra and the movie that came before Basic Instinct 2, claimed that oral sex gave him throat cancer, I felt like I had finally found a celebrity to admire. Sadly, he couldn’t even keep that story going, because he’s retracted his claim.

As you can see in the below quote from the Guardian, and this audio transcript, Michael Douglas strongly implied, if not downright admitted, he got cancer because he loved to go down on women. Yeah, Michael Douglas decided to talk about how he loved to lick, suck, and drool all over vaginas. This is how it went:

Xan Brooks: Do you feel, in hindsight, that you overloaded your system? Overloaded your system with drugs, smoking, drink?

Michael Douglas: No. No. Ah, without getting too specific, this particular cancer is caused by something called HPV, which actually comes about from cunnilingus.

I know when someone is being coy, and that’s as far from coy as a dog humping your leg. Instead of just owning up to that, Douglas released the following quote:

"I think we would all love to know where our cancer comes from. I simply, to a reporter, tried to give a little PSA announcement about HPV, a virus that can cause oral cancer, and is one of the few areas of cancer that can be controlled and there are vaccinations that kids can get. So that was my attempt."

Your attempt was pretty fucking poor, Michael. Sorry to break it to you. Pretty much the entire planet thought you were humble-bragging that you get “dat gash” on the regular. Perhaps media training is in order? Maybe a quick public speaking class?

Somehow, after his “clarification,” I'm still confused. I don’t know if it was because his publicist told him his admission was embarrassing or if he realized that bragging that eating tons of pussy almost killed him is something he should only mention at cocktail parties. Either way, he turned what could have been a moment of honest—if gross—preening about his apparently good-as-fuck sex life into another celebrity "misstatement" that had to be "apologized" for.

I hope you're happy, Catherine Zeta-Jones (photo via Flickr User David_Shankbone).

Michael got caught showing off, which I relate to. I know a show-off when I see one. The first sign of a shameless braggart is the feeble attempt to seem humble or awkward about what is about to be said. The stumbling preamble, “No. No. Ah, without getting too specific,” really means, “Hey, I'm a little ashamed about what I'm about to say, but I know it makes me so fucking cool.”

For instance, if I said, “No. No. Ah, without getting too specific, I know one of the better looking, more successful Backstreet Boys,” then you should know that I need to get some well-deserved props for my celebrity connections. I don’t begrudge Michael Douglas the right to throw down the gauntlet on the entire straight male population of the world, but why take it back? Especially when all evidence points to his assertion likely being true? Why take it back when the Guardian has audio evidence that they did not take his statement out of context? That is the first rule of a shameless brag: never, ever feel regret.

Michael Douglas’s career wasn’t going to end from people thinking he chomped so much box that he had to endure painful chemotherapy. In fact, it might have made him more popular. Studies do show that HPV can cause cancer, both in your throat and (ahem) in your anus. It's a rare two-step brag: "I got cancer—" Awwwwww, poor guy! "—from chowing down on the freshest young trim Hollywood has to offer." What a badass!

I just hope that all of you out there learn a valuable lesson from this. Making a big deal about how cool you are is fine, as long as you stick to the script. If you can’t even decide if you’re awesome or not, then you don’t deserve to have people talk about how awesome you are in the first place. 

@dave_schilling

Close your eyes for a second and imagine you are at the party of your dreams. Everyone you love and are infatuated with is around you, the music you loved in your teens is playing and bad trips are not a concept. You dance and you love and you spin and you love some more, and then all of your friends die.

I know it's harsh, but it's also sort of what happened to Tom Bianchi in the early 1980s, with the onset of AIDS. It's also the subject of his latest book, Fire Island Pines - Polaroids 1975-1983 – a selection of photos taken in a small part of Long Island called The Pines, that apparently functioned as a kind of IRL utopia for a large community of incredibly beautiful and charismatic gay men in the 1970s.

Tom's name, by the way, is one of those you should know, because he's been integral in making the world you live in a nicer place than how you found it. You see Bianchi – who, in the early 70s, also worked as a lawyer in New York and Washington D.C. – has spent most of his life fighting AIDS and weird heterosexual attitudes towards gay culture. He is the co-founder of a biotech company researching AIDS medication and, if he feels like it, he can also boast a long catalogue of incredibly affectionate photography, poetry and video work.

With the release of his new book as an excuse, I called Tom up to talk desire and grow up a little.

VICE: Hi Tom, how are you today?
Tom Bianchi: I’m very good, I just had a lovely breakfast out by the swimming pool. I’m ready to go today.

Okay, let's do it. Shall we start by telling the story of how this book came to be?
Growing up and coming out in Middle America, you had to imagine a world very different to the one you were living in. The world we were living in disregarded us and called us perverts. So the brilliance of Fire Island was that it was built by those people who imagined a different world and set out to create it. We carved out the tiniest little place just for ourselves, where we could be safe and laugh, and play with one another on the beach, and not have any negative judgement surrounding us. What that did was attract the best and the brightest gays from all over America – particularly because of its proximity to New York, which was the centre of so much culture; fashion, style, even film. It was a very glamorous time.

Was the creation of this neighbourhood planned or circumstantial?
The island is a 36 mile-long barrier a few miles off the Long Island coast, separated into small communities by extended open sand dunes. The Pines, which is one of these little villages, is a mile-long grid of boardwalks connecting about 600 houses built on telephone pole stilts sunk into the sand. Back then, some real estate guys got to building on this virgin terrace, and it just so happened that the place began to attract bohemian New Yorkers; writers and artists would come out and live in little shacks. It wasn't intended for the gay community but it made sense when it formed to be a home for it.

And you happened to be there with a fancy, new Polaroid camera, too.
I was a lawyer at Columbia Pictures at the time. At an executive conference in Miami, we were given an SX-70 Polaroid camera. It was this little plastic thing, which I took to Fire Island a little while later and started taking pictures of my friends. At the time, a lot of people were still in the closet so, as you can understand, they were extremely wary of having their picture taken. So, the important thing about this camera was that it allowed me to take the picture and a few minutes later put it out on the table for people to take a look. It made everyone immediately more comfortable and I very quickly formed the intention to show the world what a cool, amazing place the capital of Queerdom was. Or the provincial part of it [laughs].

Leafing through the book, I can't help but notice that everyone in the pictures is unbelievable hot.
Well, the reason is twofold. Gay men in my generation were called pansies or poofs – we had been raised to have very negative feelings about ourselves. It was around our time that more and more guys began to discover gyms, too. And the more guys went from ordinary looking men to "Oh, my God, look at that stud," the more of a no-brainer it became that you had to be as close to perfect as possible. Suddenly this really beautiful community of men emerged, and they all boarded planes, trains, or buses to Fire Island every weekend.

At the same time, I wanted my sexual partners to be really beautiful, hot guys. And I never wanted anyone to think I was using my camera to seduce people, so for the most part the intimate pictures are of people I had relations with.

I think you can tell. The subjects of your photographs look at ease with their bodies and the lens. I'm not sure I would be that comfortable posing nude for someone that I wasn't having sex with.
You need to know you’re going to be loved, and not exploited.

Talking about nudity, in your introduction you recall a story about a guy approaching you on the beach while you were photographing some sea shells, proposing that you take some sexier photos with him. At another point in the book, you mention that Sam Wagstaff also urged you to make the book more explicit, after having a look at the first edit. Do you think this insistence of people on nudity had anything to do with the fact that the community had to suppress their identities and desires for so long?
Yes absolutely, I mean these were personal transformation stories. It is this generation of men who are responsible for the whole gay pride movement. We developed this sense of community and started seeing ourselves as really special people, indispensable to the culture we lived in. And ultimately the one thing that brought us together was desire.

We went to that place to get laid by guys who were fun and we were attracted to. We went for sex and we went for dancing. You danced until you found the partner that would fill your bed that night. Desire is more profound than gravity. Gravity just holds the planet together, desire brings human beings together so they can create things. The importance of nudity, the power of physical desire that brought us together, can’t be overstated.

And then HIV came along. The sense that I got from reading your book is that the disease set the gay rights movement back quite a few years.
I think it's the opposite. I think what happened was that we were kids, partying along, thinking we were untouchable, immortal. AIDS forced us to grow up.

It was a wakeup call, then?
It was a wakeup call – not that we were doing anything bad. We were just doing what kids do; we were playing and it’s very important to learn to play. What AIDS did was to completely change the way we saw ourselves. At the same time, heterosexuals began to recognise the horror of their discrimination, too. Stories started circulating about people who were HIV-positive being turned out of their houses, communities and not being admitted to hospitals. My eyes tear as I talk about it, because it was a holocaust. It was just unbelievable. We had to step up. We had to do something about it.  

And you did.
Loads of us rose to the occasion and fought against it. A group of us in Los Angeles, for example, formed a bio-tech company to develop new therapies to treat HIV. I spent seven intense years of my life financing that effort and the research. But all of this refocused us.



What is more, at the time I made it, I couldn’t get the Fire Island book published. It was considered too queer. When David Peterson, my partner at the time, died of AIDS in 1988, that's when I really decided to make a book as a memorial and testament that we were still alive and vital. That book was Out of the Studio. I shot in black and white because I thought it would be less expensive to make a book in colour. I was wrong about that. Anyway, Out of the Studio became a huge success, and the reason it did is because we were a community deeply in mourning and enormous fear. That book was a message of hope. It said, "We’re still intact, we’re still beautiful, we’re still powerful and we’ll work our way through this.” And all the books that followed are about self-empowerment.

What became of the Pines?
In the immediate aftermath, we left the whole town in a state of shock, because our friends were starting to die one by one. You'd go back every now and again and conversation revolved around "Did you hear about…?" It became impossible to absorb, so then I just stepped back. Going back to my house in the Pines a little later, it just felt… that my friends were gone.

I've bummed you out. Let’s end on a happy note: Tell me one happy story about the Pines.
Okay, there are so many of these. This one is from one of my first times in the Pines: These guys were hosting a dinner at their house; they made Hawaiian Turkey with chunks of pineapple. After dinner, one of the guys bought out a folding chair and placed it on top of the coffee table and put on this Hawaiian music record. Then this other guy came out of the bedroom, wearing one of those 1930s black jersey swimsuits, with port holes cut out on the sides, and one of those rubber bathing caps embossed with curls from the 50s. He proceeded to do an Ester Williams aquatic number on the chair. It was so beautiful. Right then and there I thought, "This is crazy. And this is what I want to be doing in my life. To be surrounded by these mad, beautiful, wonderful people."

If you'd like to learn more about Tom and his work you should visit his website and if you would like to get your hands on Fire Island Pines - Polaroids 1975-1983 you should click here.

Follow Elektra on Twitter: @elektrakotsoni

Previously:

Photographing the Loving Gays of Vietnam

It's Not Easy Being Maxime Angel

An Interview With Legally Blind Photographer Flo Fox

What is the sound of 1 million yuan flapping?

While most nouveau riche happily spend their new money on shit the old money has already deemed acceptable, China's spoiled young princelings aren't content with horses, sports cars, and insanely tacky watches alone. In tribute to the intrepid bootleggers who've propped up their country's market economy, China's rich have taken arguably the worst bird of all time, the pigeon, and slapped a Louis Vuitton logo on it. Racing pigeons are the new thoroughbreds here, with birds auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece and races netting millions for the championship flock. Which sucks for the old timers, whose balcony-bred birds don't stand a chance against these million-dollar superflocks. And which just sucks in general because, well, pigeons. Fucking pigeons.

My friend Adam was, until recently, making a living as a self-employed web designer in South Carolina. He'd been doing it for a couple of years, and had built sites for various small organizations like charities and clothing stores. In February, he was hired to make a porn site. The site was a pretty standard BrokeStraightBoys.com rip-off—it featured hetero guys making masturbation videos for a gay audience.

Then, a month ago, after the site had been online for just 24 days, Adam's home was raided by the police, and all of his computer equipment was seized, forcing him to close his web design business. Since then, he's had no way to make money. I called him up to see how he was doing.

VICE: Hey Adam, what made the police take your stuff?
Adam: I'm a web designer, and I was hired to create a porn site by a client. 

That's not illegal, right?
I don't think so. And an attorney I spoke to didn't think so either. The police haven't charged me with any crime, they just told me that I was a witness. I don't know what that means. 

What are they saying you're a witness to?
It's been alleged that the guy who paid me to make the site was also paying guys to let him give them blow jobs and film it.

Did you see any evidence of this?
No. And if it does exist, it definitely wasn't put on the site.

What has he been charged with?
Four counts of prostitution, possession of drug paraphanalia, and possession of marijuana. 

What happened when the police came to take your stuff away?
It was 8 AM and I was at my mom's house, and these four SWAT guys turned up in bulletproof vests and combat attire. I looked out the window and saw that the yard was filled with cop cars. 

The search warrant the police gave Adam.

That's seems pretty extreme for an illegal blow job that you weren't even involved with. What did they seize from you?
They took my desktop computer, my laptop computer, my camera, two broken computers, a broken iPad, a brand new iPad that I had bought a week earlier, my mother's Kindle, and my cell phone. 

How long ago was this?
A month ago. And I don't have any of those items back. 

Do you know when you'll be getting them back?
No idea. I spoke to an attorney and he told me he has clients who have been waiting years to get their stuff back. 

What's happened to your web design business now that you don't have any computers?
It's nonexistent. I don't have a cell phone or a computer to even get in touch with my clients or my contacts. I don't have any money set aside to deal with something like this—I wasn't expecting four armed guys to bust into my mother's home and steal all of my assets. They've seized my entire business, they've ruined me.

Do you know if you're eligible for any kind of compensation for the income you've lost as a result of all this?
I probably would be if I had the money to afford an attorney. Which I don't. The problem is, I haven't been charged with anything. If I'd been charged with something, an attorney would be provided for me, but as it stands, I can't afford one. 

Is there anything on your computer that you don't want the police to see?
There's nothing illegal on there. But, like, is there anything on your computer you wouldn't want the police to see?

Duh. I would probably have a heart attack if someone went through my browser history. 
The police didn't know how to access my files, so I had to access them for them at the station. Which included my own personal pornography. As in, personal sex images of myself and others. 

So the police were looking at sex photos of you while you were sitting there in the room with them? That's horrible.
Yeah. And the only thing that gave me comfort through the whole process is that they looked so fucking disgusted. They looked like they were gonna throw the fuck up. They probably hated it more than me. 

Yikes. Well, good luck. I hope you get your stuff back soon.

@JLCT

More on police overreach:

New York Cops Will Arrest You for Carrying Condoms

The Cops' Military Toys Aren't Just for Catching Terrorists

Silent but Deadly

Beautiful Shell Place. Coming soon!!

As far as most outsiders are concerned, the oil sands are ground zero for one of the world’s most destructive industrial projects, and the latest stop for Canada’s perpetual diaspora of unemployed Maritimers. The overwhelmingly male town boasts a public image of big paycheques, polluted rivers, cheap sex and all the cocaine you could ask for.

To others, Fort McMurray is a boomtown slowly turning into a hometown. There is nothing the protective residents of Fort McMurray desire more—even more than the proposed Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines—than to be seen as a relentlessly family-friendly, G-rated multicultural utopia.

During Fort McMurray’s Canada Day celebrations—an event sponsored by Nexen, which as of February, is owned by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation—Mayor Melissa Blake announced she was giving the city a 10-year, multibillion-dollar makeover.

By 2030, city council believes the population will exceed 231,000 residents. If everything goes according to plan, they will all be enjoying a brand new civic centre, an arena, an art gallery, waterfront hiking trails and a public gathering place called Franklin Square.

But even for a community literally sitting on billions of barrels of oil, turning a mining town of 80,000 residents, plus 40,000 temporary workers living in company dorms, into a functioning city is costly.

Fortunately, doors typically closed to advertisers are being cracked open by the town’s desperation to keep pace with the tens of thousands of newcomers, hoping to find their fortune in Alberta’s rush for black gold.

That’s why Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. helped build a Toronto-style suburb to lure family-oriented employees into becoming permanent residents and long-term employees.

In 2008, Suncor Energy contributed $2.5 million towards a Catholic high school’s theatre. One school district official described the partnership as a “win-win” situation for everyone. The cynical jokingly call the school “Suncor High” and “St. Suncor.”

Recently, Shell started increasing their community presence. The company recently spent $2.5 million on the naming rights for the expansion to the Suncor Community Leisure Centre, the largest community centre in western Canada. They also bought a $750,000 MRI machine for the local hospital.

In early May, British Petroleum—who are responsible for the largest maritime water spill in the history of the petroleum industry—donated $10,000 to a high school science program.

This baby is pro-Syncrude.

In fact, almost every school in Fort McMurray flashes well-equipped science programs, courtesy of companies like Shell, Suncor, Nexen and Syncrude.

 “We have provided unbelievable opportunities to the community. Anything we can do to bring the love for knowledge, the love for science, the love for engineering, whatever the interest is at an early age,” said Syncrude CEO Scott Sullivan in May 2012, after donating $1 million to the city’s public school board. “It just pays such huge dividends for the community, for the children involved, and also ultimately, for companies like Syncrude.”

Selling naming rights to corporations has always been a funding staple for cash-strapped cities and ambitious civic projects. It’s no surprise that a city in a province historically dyed Tory blue allows the oil industry to publicly plaster logos in exchange for donations.

But while traditional advertising tries to win loyal customers, allowing an industry starved for labour and good press to build a city begins to feel more like a recruiting campaign.

“These folks are going to come back and work for us when they grow up,” said Sullivan.

Business-wise, Fort McMurray is one exciting place to be. What other city offers a disposable household income of $177,000?

But as more oil companies project their brands onto public services, the city begins to feel less like a city and more like a commercial.

Corporations are more than employers and sponsors; they’re friends. To borrow a phrase from Shell’s communications team, they’re simply “being a good neighbour,” an argument affectionately repeated by locals.

Many newer buildings bearing corporate logos have the look and feel of a corporate headquarters, prime examples of the state of modern architecture: soulless masses of brick, glass, steel and unnecessary columns for cheap dramatic effect. Concept art for a redesigned downtown Fort McMurray has the same artificial feel.

The Suncor Centre for the Performing Arts at Holy Trinity High School.

On the home front, fat paychecks have allowed many young couples to start families - the average birth rate exceeds 100 babies per month—and purchase late model vehicles. Many have become homeowners in areas identical to the cookie-cutter suburbs of major cities.

The downtrodden proletariat is now flourishing, living the American dream in the Canadian subarctic.

What about the environmental criticisms? Most residents view them as outright lies or half-truths. Concerns regarding aboriginal treaty rights and high cancer rates on reserves are largely ignored.

As for the high rates of drugs, prostitution and domestic violence? Well, those problems happen in any city. And as one character in a locally produced play titled, “Hometown... the musical” shouts, “If you don’t like it, leave!”

“Fort McMurray is not going to be the beast my dad knew,” says Will Holmes, 31, a pipefitter from a small town near Thunder Bay, Ont. Holmes came to Fort McMurray with his wife in 2007.

“Fort McMurray is still just a working town,” he says. “There’s just something about this pristine image they’re promoting that’s phony.”

Holmes and his wife are expecting their first child in September. The couple plans to scrimp and save as much as they can from their combined income of $191,000 for their newborn son. When he turns four-years-old, the Holmes family will fly back to Ontario in time for kindergarten.

They don’t plan on ever returning.

“We’re very devout Catholics and I don’t want my kids going to a school with a giant Crucifix next to a Suncor logo,” says his wife, Rachel.

Approximately 200 kilometers downstream from Fort McMurray and the oil sands lies Fort Chipewyan, an aboriginal community of 1,200 Dene, Cree and Metis.

The isolated fly-in hamlet is not connected to any major road, and has long blamed a myriad of health problems and high cancer rates on development.

No one in the outspoken community of 1,200 believes the health and environmental problems are natural.

But residents can take advantage of the cardiovascular health and improvement program, paid for by Shell. They can visit the Mikisew Cree elder centre, also sponsored by Shell.

Youths can register for trade programs at a satellite campus for Keyano (Cree for “sharing”) College. Last year, the school shifted its focus towards the trades when 20 positions in the fine arts department were cut.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers points out that the oil sands are the largest employer of aboriginals. Even Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation chief Allan Adam, whose band is currently arguing that Shell’s proposed expansion of the Jackpine Mine facility will violate traditional land, admits industry has saved his people from living in squalor.

“We have jobs and great pay and facilities that have been provided to us, but at what cost?” says Eriel Deranger, a spokesperson for the ACFN.  “We see it as a desperate attempt for corporations to ensure they have leverage in the community, rather than an attempt at being our friends.”

Deranger views corporate sponsorship as bargaining chips. Whenever a company is criticized about pollution or aboriginal consultation, they can point to the good deeds they’ve done.

“It’s very strategic of them and they’ve done it to us before,” she says.

Back in Fort McMurray, Will examines a pamphlet from the municipality showing concept art for a reimagined downtown. The bar he is sitting in will likely become a parking lot for the arena.

“I bet if something bad happens next, and I mean really bad, they’ll go crazy with the handouts,” he jokes. “A baseball diamond would be nice. Or maybe something really fucked up, like a Syncrude-made church, or city hall even. How crazy would that be?”

Vincent is a reporter in Alberta. You can follow him on Twitter.

Previously:

Enbridge and Alberta Are Getting Lambasted

Dr Adrian Raine. (Photo courtesy of the University of Southern Carolina.)

The future that psychologist Dr Adrian Raine predicts – from a civil liberties perspective, at least – falls somewhere between Philip K Dick's most outlandish speculations and a genuinely serious cause for alarm. Here are the basics: come 2034, with the economic cost of crime spiralling and a public sick of murder headlines, the US Government introduces a programme of mandatory brain-scanning for 18-year-old men and women.

The scan cross-references every young person against a database of criminal genetics. It looks out for matches in three areas: violent assault, sexual assault and murder. A score above 79 percent in the first category, 82 percent in the second and 51 percent in the third will, in Raine’s dystopia, see the so-far-innocent 18-year-olds locked up in luxurious preventative "prisons". Indefinitely. Until some kind of therapy reduces their score or they’ve been subjected to a Ludovico technique of Minority Report so many times that they flick their own kill switch. 

Perhaps the strangest thing about all this is that Raine isn't an Infowars-addled conspiracy theorist, but a tenured professor, working at Pennsylvania State University with 35 years’ experience studying the biological roots of crime. I met Dr Raine a few weeks after the publication of his new book The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime, and not long after some important new research, to talk about his theory.

VICE: Hi Adrian. What’s happening in your field at the moment?
Adrian Raine: These two studies have just come out. One, I’m a co-author on. Both of them are very similar. The first focuses on the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that’s involved in emotion and decision making. What the researchers were doing was brain-scanning a group of offenders about to be released. They found that if offenders had lower-functioning in the anterior cingulate, they were twice as likely to reoffend in the next three years.

What was the second study?
That study was done by my group. What we documented there was that males with a smaller volume of the amygdala – which is the emotion part of the brain and generates feelings like conscience, remorse and guilt – those individuals are four times as likely to commit an offence in the next three years. That’s over and above social background, past history of violence, etc – which we controlled for. Both studies are showing us that brain imaging can give added value in the ability to predict future criminal offending. A word of caution, of course – these are just the first two. They need replication and extension.

Isn’t it a bit morally dubious to keep someone in jail just because of their brain chemistry?
Well, take a step back. Every single day in England and America – and all countries throughout the world – we make probation and parole decisions. Which prisoners do we let out early because we don’t think they’re at risk of future offending, and which ones do we keep in? Every day we make decisions on their future behaviour.

In California, for example, they take 20 indicators to try to predict dangerousness. They’re social and behavioural things. They'll look at questions like what’s your age? At age 20, you know, that’s the peak age for violence. Age 60? You’re far less likely to be an offender. What’s your gender? Males are far more likely to offend. Do you have a job?

Dr Raine conducting a lecture on the intersection of neuroscience and crime.

Okay, I see.
Imagine 20 indicators like that. But none of them are genetic or biological. What these studies I’ve just mentioned are showing us is that we could be adding in biological factors to enhance the parole and probation decisions we have to make on a day-by-day basis right now. If that research can be proven to be useful, isn’t it wrong not to use that information?

It’s a controversial area, though.
I've always been on the fringe of things. Back in the 1970s, when I started my research, the whole perspective on crime was exclusively social – bad homes, bad neighbourhoods, that’s the cause. At that time, there was a controversy on IQ: is it partly genetic? That was really heated. But I thought to myself, 'Well, if intelligent behaviour could be partly genetic, then what about anti-social behaviour?'

And the controversy followed you around?
Yes. In 1994, I was showing that babies with birth complications, combined with a bad home environment, triples the rate of violent offending in those children 20 years later. I was publicly called a racist. The paradox is that I did that study in Denmark, where the population is largely white. I was at a panel discussion when one commentator called me racist. I objected, then they called my research racist. Five minutes after that, protesters broke into the conference claiming it was all racist. This conference was on genetic links to crime – the protesters thought it would target ethnic minorities unfairly.

There is a history of genetics being used for racist means.
Yeah, there's a danger here; biology has been misused in eugenics, by Nazi Germany, etc. So the work I do isn’t popular with everyone. The right wing doesn’t like it because they think it’s going to let violent offenders off the hook: “They’re not responsible, it’s bad brains and bad biology that cause them to become violent.” The liberals don’t like it either, because they’re concerned we might use neuroscience to start brain-scanning people – and what about the civil liberties implications of this? So you can’t win, really.

Dr Raine conducting a lecture about predicting anti-social behaviour.

Do you think the right wing have a point? If people’s brains make them likely to commit crime, are they still responsible?
I’m a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on this issue. The scientist in me says, for some kids, they’re cast a bad hand, even aside from genes – and I say 50 percent of violence is genetic. Mums who smoke during pregnancy, that raises the odds of violence; drinks caffeine, that raises the odds of violence; bad nutrition, that raises the odds of violence. A baby who has foetal alcohol syndrome – that baby is 19 times more likely to be convicted in later life. Dr Jekyll says we can’t ignore that. Dr Jekyll says we can’t ignore poverty and social factors, and when we combine them with biological factors – well, it’s almost like some kids are walking time-bombs waiting to explode.

What about Mr Hyde?
The Mr Hyde in me rants and rages; where goes responsibility here? Isn’t this a slippery slope to Armageddon where there’s no responsibility and everyone’s going to have some excuse? I had my throat cut in Turkey on holiday in 1989, after a burglar invaded my room. That changed me. That changed my perspective on retribution. And that’s nothing compared to what other victims go through – rapes, homicide, paedophilia – so that really made me think about the victims. I felt the instinctive desire for an eye for an eye. I began to really recognise that we want people to be protected.

Which side, Jekyll or Hyde, is more powerful in you?
On balance, after 35 years of research, I’m more the Dr Jekyll.

You talk about free will in your book. Doesn’t a biological basis for crime undermine the very idea of free will?
I think our legal system – which makes this assumption of free will – I think they’ve got it completely wrong there. Because, as I said, for some people the dice are loaded in life, even if we buy into the assumption of free will. Okay, there’s free will, but some people have more free will than others.

I think it’s a spectrum. There’s a spectrum of free will, a spectrum of responsibility. Some of us are more responsible than others. Others are less responsible for their actions because of a conspiracy between genes, biology and the early environment, including child abuse, including poverty. It doesn’t make them destined to become a criminal felon, but it sure as heck raises the odds.

So how would you recommend our justice system changes to adapt?
I don’t know. I’ve talked about indefinite detention before in my book. One of the problems I have is that I can give the science, but I can’t make a decision for society. This is a question of, do we want to protect society? Or do we want to protect civil liberties? And what’s the balance going to be? From all the research I’ve seen, the best investment society can make in stopping crime and violence is investing in the early years of the child. The problem is that we have to wait 20 years for the payoff. And, in the lifespan of politics, that’s too long.

Thanks Adrian.

Follow Memphis on Twitter: @memphisbarker

More stuff about the future of crime:

The Future of Crime

2012 Is Bullshit; 2020 Is When We'll Really Be in Trouble

Everyone in Britain Is Getting Nastier

When you fly Virgin Upper Class out of Heathrow, you go through a separate set of airport security.

With a ticket that costs $4,000 round-trip, you swipe your boarding pass, go up a sleek private elevator, and pass through security and passport control that is delighted to see you. "Lovely suitcase," they coo. You're whisked away to the Virgin Clubhouse, with its free facials and single-malt scotch. Except briefly, you never interact with the airport's general population.

Some months ago, I got to fly first-class from London. Until then, I'd never realized it wasn't just a recliner in the plane and some cheap bubbly, but rather a separate sphere of being. In first-class, you weren't groped or barked at or treated like a combination of a terrorist and a cow. Instead, paid servants pretended your presence was a gift.

After years of work trips crammed in coach, being forced to show my underwear to the TSA, I felt like a guttersnipe in a palace. I loved it, but it was also deeply strange. "These people don't really like me," I thought, no matter how skillfully they acted like they did.

Until you see it, you never realize how separate the sphere of the rich is from that of everyone else.

I came from a middle-class, divorced home. As is typical, the upper-middle-class end of the split went to my dad, and the lower-middle-class to my mom. Like most people trying to make it in an impractical profession, I spent years living in rat-infested tenements with roommates who threatened to kill me in my sleep.

Unlike most artists, I started to make money. Not 1 percent money, but more than my mom ever dreamed of. Once I did, I started to realize how broken the idea of American meritocracy was.

Meritocracy is America's foundational myth. If you work hard, society tells us, you'll earn your place in the middle class. But any strawberry picker knows hard work alone is a fast road to nowhere. Similarly, we place our faith in education. Study, and the upper-middle class will be yours. Except the average student graduates $35,000 in debt.

Artists too have their myths. The lies told to artists mirror the lies told to women. Be good enough, be pretty enough, and that guy or gallery will sweep you off your feet, to the picket-fenced land of generous collectors and two and a half kids. But, make the first move, seize your destiny, and you're a whore.

But neither hard work nor talent nor education are passports to success. At best, they're small bits of the puzzle.

A fine artist, (successful, credential-festooned, with inherited money), told me that I was too focused on commerce to be an artist. A real artist endured poverty. Being poor was edifying, filled with moral uplift. I spent weeks in a murderous rage.

I've never been poor. I have always had the safety net of loving, middle-class parents. But what he said brought me back to me at 20, feverish and propped up against a subway pillar days after an abortion, on my way to a naked-girl job that I thought would get me raped.

What the artist was pretending he didn't know is that money is the passport to success. You claw a few bucks and use those to get more cash, while never growing ill or vulnerable, never caring for a child or sick parent, never letting your place slip on that greasy pole.

For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. It might have been fucking rich dude after rich dude you met on Seeking Arrangements. It might have been stabbing your stomach each morning with a syringe of hormones, in order to sell your genetically desirable eggs. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place.

My friends who came closest to attaining the American Dream did it by breaking the rules on how to get there. The standard plan—college to secure job to home you own—was either unattainable or a path to the American debt nightmare.

Those with money usually think they deserve it. But most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top. 

Once, I met with a man who runs an idea festival. He was a great admirer of businessmen who became Buddhist monks. "I don't like protest," the man told me. "It's too much about ego. Ego is the problem with America."

I thought of the workers busting their backs lifting boxes at warehouses, while an electronic tracker yelled at them to work faster. Are their egos too big?

So much of the difference between the experiences of rich and poor comes down to kindness. Kindness is scarce. Kindness must be bought.

If you have money, you can pay to live in a bubble of politesse. Excellent wine choice, sir. Here's your gift bag, madam. Often, you don't have to pay for it. The mere promise that you might will keep you sipping prosecco and deserving of servile attentions. Soon, you think this treatment is earned.

Meanwhile, we treat the poor with casual cruelty. Single moms on welfare have their homes searched by police to make sure they're not hiding a man in the closet. But it’s too much to ask bankers to justify the bonuses they sucked off the public teat. The poor get stop-and-frisk, drug tests, and constant distrust.

Newt Gingrich, whose idea of hard work is refraining from cheating on his wife, suggested that poor kids learn work ethic by working as unpaid school janitors. Rich children's work ethic is presumably absorbed in utero.

I told the festival coordinator that we needed a radical redistribution of senses of entitlement.

My own sense of entitlement served me well. I got my first job at a candy store when I was 14. I worked in the stockroom. I would open a box, take out a smaller box, put a rubber band around the smaller box, and put it back inside the big one. I lasted two days. This job, I remember thinking, does not make use of my intellectual abilities. When I did need work, I went straight into the naked-girl industry. Honest employment was a treadmill. It's extreme privilege to believe your life is too valuable to waste.

Every dollar I clawed, whether it was from modeling or an early gig drawing cocks for Playgirl, served to amplify my advantages. Art is sometimes seen as gnostic freedom. But being an artist means you're in thrall to cash.

My last art show would have been impossible without the money and network of contacts I'd built. I never could have hauled massive slabs of wood up to my old fifth-floor walk-up—never could have painted them in the lightless room I once shared with three roommates. Without an assistant, I never would have had the time to paint my show. Without sponsorships, I never could have afforded the paint. Sometimes, curators look at the work, and say, "Why didn't you ever paint like that before?" I'd answer, "Because no one gave me enough money to be able to."

A decade of practice honed my talent. But cash let me express it. To pretend otherwise is to spit in the face of every broke genius who can't afford materials or time. It's to say I got here because I'm better than them.

I am good. But it's never just about that.

An artist, like an activist, is expected to financially hobble herself. Purity is as important as survival. There's a constant criticism for earning "too much." But as we slash the social safety net, once basic things—a home, college, a dignified old age—become mirages. It’s near impossible to live the average American dream on the average American salary.

Not talking about money is a tool of class war. A culture that forbids employees from comparing salaries helps companies pay women and minorities less. Ignoring the mercenary grit behind success leads to quasi-religious abundance gurus claiming you can visualize your way to wealth.

Even we successful artists do it. It's easy to ignore luck, privilege, and bloody social climbing when you stand onstage in a pair of combat boots. It’s easy to say that if people are just good enough, work hard enough, ask enough, believe enough, they will be like us.

But it’s a lie. Winning does not scale. We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.

Celebrate beating a treacherous system. But remember, there is no god handing out rewards to the most deserving. Don't pretend that everyone can win.

(Illustration by Molly Crabapple)

It doesn't seem that hard out here for a pimp, at least when you tune into a 100s music video. The Cali-bred MC, who we introduced to you back in October of last year, has sharpened up his dick-wielding, perm-rocking persona with his latest clip for the synth-driven "1999." The song was always one of the standouts from his debut mixtape, Ice Cold Perm. But with visuals that really tap into the song's nostalgic inspirations—everything from House Party to Hype Williams's videos—the track is elevated to a whole new level. It's usually not good to live in the past, but when you get the call to "fuck her in the ass, while he beats up the pussy," who wouldn't want to party like it's 1999? Check it out:

Check the best 100s interview ever.

Listen to the entire Ice Cold Perm mixtape.

Follow 100s on Twitter: @IHate100s

Follow Wilbert on Twitter: WilbertLCooper

More new hip-hop:

Here's Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire's 'Kismet' Mixtape

The RZA and Adrian Younge Are Supreme Mutant Beings

Here Is Action Bronson's New Video, Featuring Riff Raff and Some Pit Bulls

An unaccountably terrorizing dream in which I have overstayed my welcome in somebody’s sleek, well-ordered, poshy loft, in what appears to be the Chelsea Hotel, sacred fleapit of Bohemia, though the building itself migrates from one quadrant of the city to another, eventually from one city to another, throughout the dream. After what I believed to have been a congenial dinner party, my hostess introduces a cluster of new arrivals, invited for coffee after the meal, among them a young man—at first he’s French, black-haired, and radiantly fuckable, but in each unfolding scene he becomes plainer and more freckled-American-farmer-boy-bland and blond—who offers to move my belongings, in a van parked outside, from the guest bedroom of this loft, across town—which town?—to my apartment.

I’ve brought my whole wardrobe and scattered junk over to this woman’s place, and dumped it in her guest room. Some of it’s in a state of wild disarray. There are, for instance, four jumbled pairs of shoes under the bed, including some white canvas espadrilles that I don’t own, but in waking life wish I had thought to buy yesterday when I saw them in Shoe Mania. Other items, neatly folded, include a bale of sweaters and pastel t-shirts, which my new friend carries out of the room, returning minutes later without them. He begins tossing odds and ends into a crude black wooden trunk that fastens with a hook latch. This belongs to the owner of the loft. I am about to protest that we can’t carry such a large object out to the elevator and then up six flights in my building, as that would turn a glancing favor into a major undertaking, which I would then feel obliged to pay for. Besides, how did everything I own get into this woman’s apartment? It looks like my stuff, but maybe it isn’t. I’m given to understand that I must leave certain items behind for safekeeping. The hostess, meanwhile, has disappeared into her bedroom after pretending to enjoy my company all evening and, judging from all these clothes, has been pretending this continuously for several weeks. I catch a glimpse of her face as she slips out of sight; it’s obvious she can’t even stand to see me there another second.

It’s true that someone at dinner last night lives in the Chelsea Hotel, and for years, as it happens, I regularly visited a friend there who has an enviably spacious apartment on one of the upper floors. But the last times I went there the new owners, who I’m told are embroiled in endless cross-litigation with ex-owner Stanley Bard, had taken all the art from the lobby walls and the staircases, padlocked the unrented rooms, and kicked out everyone except the rent-stabilized, permanent tenants. I’ve heard he’s an Orthodox Jew with no affinity for or cognizance of the hotel’s illustrious history, and has a reputation for half-assed, never-completed renovations of buildings he acquires and then abandons.

I knew Jakov Lind and Arnold Weinstein and Shirley Clarke and Viva and Pierre Clementi and Rainer Fassbinder and Gus Van Sant and Robert Mapplethorpe and many others who once lived in the Chelsea, many of whom are no longer with us. I acted in a movie shot in one of the rooms in 1980, and shot some videos of my own in a different room a few years later. For over thirty years, El Quixote was one of two default restaurants of choice. I’ve eaten lobsters and swilled margaritas there with every imaginable person. I’ve copped drugs at the Chelsea and done drugs at the Chelsea and met a wide assortment of people at the Chelsea and even had sex a few times in the Chelsea, though I always had an odd superstition about spending a whole night at the Chelsea, and never did.

I have no nostalgia for the Chelsea Hotel. I never lived there. I don’t care about it now that its day is long gone. I never cared all that much about it ever, even if it was, once upon a time, a sort of comfort zone. There was a time to care about its landmark status, its long history of la vie de boheme, the luminous names who passed through it. However, once all such welcoming places for nonconformists and eccentric creative types with little money in Manhattan began getting wiped off the map by vulture developers, enabled by our recent mayor-thugs, Manhattan had clearly abandoned any pretense of nurturing artistic culture, or caring about the arts at all, except as revenue vectors for tourist dollars and art dealers, and trying to preserve bits of nostalgic residue in the form of physical real estate is a fool’s errand. If you’re wise, anyway, you should never repine for any “good old days,” because they weren’t as golden shiny as you’d like to imagine, and have only taken on a sexy afterglow for people who weren’t around at the time, or if you yourself are so old at heart and over the hill that your feelings are all posthumous and your brain has stopped doing anything except pickle itself in memories.

What’s important now is to find a completely different kind of person to be mayor than the last two, preferably different than the last four, and to perform audacious acts of vandalism on hideous new shit like the “Citibikes,” a dubiously legal blend of corporate advertising and municipal corruption.

Two years ago I got snookered into being a talking head in a documentary film about the Chelsea Hotel. I didn’t want to appear in this film and kept trying, politely, to exclude myself from the cast list. But the person who made it is a lifelong frenemy—in the strict sense that Jessica Mitford defines the term—who has attached to me a completely cartoonish picture of who I am for over 30 years, and who insisted, for months and months, with implacable obliviousness, that I incarnate this cartoon figure in her movie, until I could only relent and agree to be at the Chelsea, to blather on camera, on a specific afternoon.

I planned to simply not show up, and to stay unreachable for at least a month. On the day in question, though, I happened to be on Eighth Avenue not far from the hotel, with J., my closest friend. I was filling a prescription at a compounding pharmacy. J. advised me to walk over to the hotel and just do the fucking movie and get it over with, and to view it as a good deed, even if it really wasn’t one. I always follow J.’s advice, so I did.

A doctor had gotten me addicted to Klonopin, the fashionable anti-anxiety drug. He had written renewal prescriptions for the maximum dosage of Klonopin (generic name, clonazepam) for many years, insisting I could, and should, take it every day, with no fear of addiction or harmful withdrawal symptoms. Doctors told Eminem and Stevie Nicks and a million other people the same thing.

I sometimes traded Klonopin for a friend’s surplus Adderall, since I always had much more Klonopin around than anyone except a pharmacy should possess at one time, and never had much speed in the house at all. For about two years, I occasionally took Adderall in the morning, Klonopin at night. (Adderall is not the glorious pharmaceutical speed we all took in the 60s and 70s, but a kiddie amphetamine salt for speed wusses, just as today’s crystal meth bears no chemical relation to the meth of yesteryear, which did not routinely promote homicidal rampages and irreversible insanity from being synthesized from Ajax and other cleaning products in a bathtub.)

Over time, not only did the Klonopin stop working for me, it started actively working against me. Once, when I tried going cold turkey, I had an epileptic seizure in an elevator. Not just any elevator, but an elevator in the CBS building.

Adderall stopped having any effect whatsoever, and I kissed it goodbye without any trouble. Except that I then navigated in a thick Klonopin hangover fog all day, and an even thicker one at night.

A cameraman I knew from a cable show I occasionally appear on told me he’d been weaning off Klonopin for months with the help of a psychiatrist on 57^th Street, following a plan of incremental withdrawal. However, fractionally reduced doses aren’t available from the makers of Klonopin, Roche Pharmaceuticals, who aren’t interested in getting people off their product. You have to step their wonderful drug down by an almost microscopic notch in weekly pinches, in what is known as benzodiapazine taper. If you sign on to the web site Benzo Buddies, you will discover that hundreds, even thousands of people, on any given day, everywhere in the country, are in some form of mental and/or physical extremity from miscalculated Klonopin reduction, reporting bizarre auditory hallucinations, twitching limbs, seizures, panic attacks, suicide attempts, blurred vision, temporary blindness, and other dire withdrawal effects. You will also discover that getting off Klonopin is a way of life for many people more addicted to the internet as their only form of social existence than they ever were to Klonopin, but that’s another story.

I saw the cameraman’s psychiatrist. He wrote out a stack of prescriptions and sent me to the one pharmacy, on Eighth Avenue, that could fill them (the only compounding pharmacy, or so I was told, for a city of ten million people), one week at a time. The completed withdrawal took eight months. There is a natural wish, toward the end, to just weather the remainder without that last teensy molecule of Klonopin, but you can’t. You will have a potentially fatal seizure. Or so they say.

And so it transpired that I was filmed, planted on the stairwell to the roof of the Chelsea in a canvas folding chair, one sleeting winter afternoon, with a plastic bottle of seven .02 mg Klonopin in my pocket. The director’s genius was such that there wasn’t any script. She hadn’t even prepared any questions to ask, and told me with her customary mumblecore vagueness to “just talk about your life at the Chelsea.” I reminded her that I had never lived at the Chelsea. “But just talk about the Chelsea, what it means.” “Well look, you’ve got to ask me some kind of question, I’m not a fucking vaudeville act.” “Oh, you talk better on your own than what I would think of asking...” I wanted this over with as quickly as possible, so proceeded to say anything about the so-called sweet bye-and-bye and its hotel headquarters that came into my head, with absolutely no help from the director. I frankly don’t remember a thing about this, since I haven’t seen the film and would rather not, except that it was the bleakest “film set” I’ve ever been on, and I have been on quite a few. The crew, for one thing, looked like film students working for nothing. They acted much too enthusiastic about what they were doing, considering what it was. The hub of this production, in my frenemy’s flat, had a leaking ceiling, with plastic tarps on the floor and slung over all the furniture, and an overall look of total desolation. There were no “craft services,” not even a cup of coffee. The whole atmosphere promoted the unpleasant feeling that something sad and stupid was taking its course for no discernible reason, and two hours later, my relief at fleeing this scene was immense.

I’ve been told the film came out well and I’m even rather good in it. I can’t imagine that’s true, but to each his own.

The dream had propelled me back to that once-fabled terrarium where Nancy Spungen bought the farm and Virgil Thompson composed his greatest hits at the age of 140. I’m aware the new owners are scumbags, and that they’ve enlisted other scumbags to their side in the current brouhaha about the fate of the hotel. Still, I don’t think it’s a controversy of global magnitude. The once-French youth in the dream, after morphing from flat-faced farm boy into a not-too-bad-looking surfer type, led me to the sea and began walking into the surf, embracing my laundry. Then he disappeared beneath the waves.

Previously by Gary Indiana - Cries and Whispers in Obamastan

David Bienenstock doesn't just smoke weed. He is weed. Cannabis is his mantra, his well-being and raison d'être. Hang around the guy long enough and by mere association complete strangers will start handing you weed.   

No, really. Total strangers will give you free weed, as if by mere virtue of the fact that you're in close proximity to Bienenstock, an unassuming and sweatered weed Yoda who acquaintances simply call Bean. I guess that's what happens after you've put in ten years at High Times—you become a magnet for stunningly dank marijuana, pulling in oftentimes rare and sought-after strains for you and those around you to, you know, sample.

What's rich about the whole thing is that Bean has to be one of the more soft spoken, if articulate humans I've ever met. So it could've been the din of thousands of attendees at the first annual High Times US Cannabis Cup last April in Denver over which some unbeknownst budtender couldn't hear Bean. Or it could’ve been a thickening head buzz off some of the best weed in America (if not the world) made it tough for him to hear Bean. Maybe it was both. Either way, the pardon was almost poignant.

“Where y’all from?” asks the tender, a bouncy rep for one of dozens of dispensaries and paraphernalia vendors casually doling out dabs, vape hits and flower to the masses in the outdoor grounds at what you can think of as the Super Bowl of Strains.  

“I’m from Cali,” Bean responds.

“Where?” the vendor asks once more, this time looking up from the vaporizer he's been loading before giving Bean the all-clear.  

“California. We used to be at the forefront of cannabis legalization,” adds Bean, a veteran journalist and author of Legalized It!. “Remember us?” He takes a pull off the vaporizer, gives the tender a thumbs up--high sign for When--and exhales.

Yeah, remember California? California. The Promised Land, where it all started back in the 1960s. From behind Mendocino County's Redwood Curtain, as they say, in Northern California—where land-race strains made landfall on US soil—cannabis would begin winding a long and complex path out of the shadows and into the public spotlight, with no shortage of experimental crossbreeding, cultural clashing and grinding politics along the way. In 1996, the Golden State become the first in the Union to decriminalize cannabis for medicinal purposes, a historic measure still looked back upon by pot advocates as a sort of Eureka! moment. Ah, California.

It isn't just Cali anymore, of course. Almost two dozen states have caught up with the Golden State, and another 11 are currently considering legalizing medical pot. And then you have Washington state and Colorado, both of which have since surpassed California in the march toward legalization—and, arguably, in the bongs race of high tech highs.

Continue reading over at Motherboard.

The allegation that a crew of drug dealers is holding on to a video of Rob Ford smoking crack has resulted in a prolonged and sad controversy in the Kingdom of Toronto. Our city’s once triumphant King—who we heralded for his ability to charmingly pose for a terrible photograph, or conquer his rivals after getting fired—has become a political outcast while still keeping both ass cheeks firmly on the throne. After the firings and resignations of several disloyal staff members and some strong accusations from the Globe and Mail that his brother Dougie used to love selling hash, his other brother Randy used to love kidnapping people, and his sister Kathy (who has been shot in the face) used to love hanging out with Nazis, the once sparkling face of the Ford dynasty is now looking pimply and scabbed up from crack use.

What with City Hall, the police, Toronto's drug dealers, and every worthwhile newspaper playing a major role in the unraveling of this story, at this point, there is really only one cultural phenomenon that this real life clusterfuck can be compared to: The Wire.  So here’s what Toronto’s embarrassingly insane political controversy has in common with the semi-fictional universe of David Simon’s Baltimore.

Mayor Ford/Avon Barksdale

Politically, most of The Wire’s narrative follows the rise of City Council star Tommy Carcetti towards the mayoral throne of Baltimore, as he defeats the crooked Mayor Clarence Royce. Even with that political drama keeping the The Wire’s viewers interested in the municipality of Baltimore, neither of those mayors can hold a candle to the controversies of Rob Ford. Sure, between the two of them, they handled the problem of witness murders, dealt with an outdoor drug market that was sneakily made legal by the cops called “Hamsterdam”, combatted a rise in murders where bodies were left in abandoned houses, and in the case of Clarence Royce got caught mid-blowjob by a former cop, neither of them insulted immigrants and referred to a fellow politician as a “fag” on camera while smoking from a crack pipe in the company of drug dealers.

That’s why Robbie is a bit more like Avon. Avon Barksdale started off as the king of his little world. While nosey ass McNulty certainly knew the strip club Avon owned was full of dirty money, and that Avon was running crack (WMDs!) through the project towers of Baltimore, Avon kept up a clean appearance and almost went for a whole entire season without getting arrested. You would never find a video of Avon Barksdale smoking crack and calling Mayor Carcetti a fag, either. And yet, Robbie and Avon share the same mantra of: deny, deny, deny…  We know that’s what Robbie is all about, since he denied driving around with weed in his pocket in Miami until it was proved that he did it.

Ultimately though, when Robbie is replaced with a new mayor, the infamy of his name is going to ring out on the streets of Toronto for generations. Even when Marlo eventually took over the projects of Baltimore from Avon, with an unbelievable mean streak in the wake of Avon’s collapsed empire, there was always a small part of me that missed the familiar cruelty of Avon Barksdale. I expect to feel this type of longing again whenever King Crackpipe is ousted from office.

Doug Ford/Stringer Bell

What is a medium-level criminal mastermind without another medium-level criminal mastermind to be their right hand man who works behind the scenes? Doug Ford is absolutely the Stringer Bell to Rob Ford’s Avon Barksdale. Without Stringer, Avon wouldn’t have much strategy or direction in his life. Just like Robbie and his big bro Dougie. Doug Ford clearly is puling a lot of the strings in the Ford administration—and while Avon and Stringer Bell were childhood friends who were roughly the same age—it was obvious that Stringer always had an older brother mentality when dealing with Avon, even if that all eventually fell to shit.

This might be tough to swallow, in part because Stringer Bell is a much cooler guy than Dougie, but Doug Ford is a far superior drug dealer and political operator to his fictional Wire counterpart. Where Stringer Bell only dreamed to eliminating violence from the drug trade as a method of keeping the heat off, Doug Ford actually achieved it in the mid-80s in Etobicoke (so says the Globe and Mail's sources)

Hopefully the relationship between Robbie and Dougie doesn’t end in death and prison time like it did for the wacky, allegedly drug-lovin’ Ford brothers, but who’s to say? Dougie may be a blood relative, but he is also a guy who may have ran drugs through the mean streets of Etobicoke. Who knows what kind of betrayal we could see go down in the next season—er, I mean in 2014, if the Fords can last that long. Even though Doug is the Ego to King Crackpipe’s Id, Rob should be able to keep his own shit together enough to keep his rock smoking habits away from the public eye. If things get any further out of control, it might be hard for Doug to hold on. Hopefully there’s no Toronto equivalent of Brother Mouzone lurking in the wings.

Mark Towhey/D’Angelo Barksdale

D’Angelo Barksdale and Mark Towhey truly could not be more alike. Both men essentially served as the canaries in the coalmine, who signaled the death of their respective institutions. Neither Towhey nor Barksdale could stomach the wrath of their cruel overlords, and spoke their mind bluntly while resigning from their posts. In D’Angelo’s case, it was the murder of Wallace—a teenage drug dealer who D’Angelo taught about crack and chess—via a Stringer Bell ordered hit, that really made him flip on the Barksdale power circle.

As far as Mark Towhey goes, it appears that Mark told Robbie to “get help” and also gave a “direct order” to his staffers to not accept any phone calls from the mayor when the crack scandal began, just before getting fired.  While no one can say for sure what the mayor’s exact verbal reaction to Towhey’s pro-rehab message was, I can imagine it was something close to Stringer Bell’s response to D’Angelo when he walked away from him and left him in prison, while D’Angelo yelled “Where’s Wallace, String?!” Perhaps Towhey yelled “Where’s the Crack Tape, Rob?!” while Rob called him a fag and told him to leave.

Mark Towhey also called the feds on Team Ford after a phone call with Ford staffer David Price, that led Towhey to believe ol’ Davey knew where the crack tape was, and made it seem like he was gonna track it down by any means necessary. And yet, even though there are homicide investigators snooping around City Hall, the cops say no one should assume the police are worried that there might have been a City Hall sponsored homicide. K, noted.

The Press/The Press/The Cops

With all due respect to David Simon, the reality of the press involvement in King Crackpipe’s possible downfall is far more interesting than any of the newspaper narratives seen in The Wire’s fifth season. While the fifth season of The Wire dealt heavily with the slow destruction of print media and the daily newspaper in general—the crackgate scandal pits that medium head to head with the exciting world of internet bloggery.

Just for Robbie’s crack tape, the folks over at Gawker visited a foreign Canadian city, hung out with drug dealers, tried to give said dealers $200,000 in an extremely public manner, lost contact with the criminals/video-owners entirely, have admitted the video may be gone, but will at least end up giving 200k to a Canadian charity instead. It has truly been a thrilling roller coaster ride, on which The Toronto Star is also sitting with its hands in the air, screaming like a crazy person to ensure they take a good ride photo.

Interestingly enough, The Toronto Star’s editor-in-chief Michael Cooke appears to be confident that the video will surface publicly. Along with that optimism, the stories they have broken about staff resignations, and their day-to-day coverage of Rob Ford’s “business as usual strategy,” has only increased the heat on King Robbie’s throne, far beyond the point of an acceptable temperature to freebase from. Then when you consider the folks at the Globe and Mail who figured out Dougie was a drug dealer in the 80s, it’s quite clear that there’s an all out media war against the Fords. So really, the newspapers in crackworld are more like the cops in The Wire.

Robyn Doolittle, John Cook, and Kevin Donovan are closer to Kima, Herc, and Jimmy McNulty. The cops in The Wire tirelessly tailed, targeted, and investigated the dealers in the terraces, just like these reporters have investigated The Fords. The Toronto Star is even investigating mid-level Ford staffers to paint the clearest possible picture of the Ford power circle.

Take David Price for example, a man who has the title of “director of logistics and operations” but has done little more in life than coach a few football teams, including one that young Robbie played on. That’s how they met. Price is not only the guy who hinted to Towhey he knew where the video was, he has also literally run away from reporters asking for interviews, and allegedly slung hash with Doug Ford.

Bodie and Crew/The Anonymous Drug Dealers

The details surrounding the drug dealing connection to Robbie's crackworld are sketchy. We know that Anthony Smith, a 22 year old man who was shot and killed in front of a Toronto nightclub, may have been involved with the men who made the video, though sources from his community deny that. What's certain is that Robbie, dressed in his finest sweatsuit, was photographed with Anthony in a picture that shows Anthony flipping off the camera while holding onto a bottle of something. While it is unclear if his death is connected to the crack video, CBC News is now reporting that the video itself may have been seized by police during a murder investigation. That is pretty fucking crazy.

Given that Rob is a bit of an Avon Barksdale figure in this story, it is of no surprise that he has also received protection and respect from certain drug dealers who supposedly “support the mayor and are angry at the video’s sellers,” possibly because he buys so much crack from them and they don’t want to lose an awesome customer, I don't know for sure. These supportive drug dealer bros even wanted to get a local man named “Slurpy,” who apparently is a Rob Ford lookalike, to stage a fake crack video they could leak out to hopefully discredit the real one’s credibility. Unfortunately they never went through with that plan, but guys, call me if you need a producer.

Anyway, the behaviours we're reading about in this story reminds me of Bodie, a longtime soldier who, for better for worse, operated within the confines of the drug game’s hierarchy until his bitter death. We’re seeing something like that here within a community that is clearly protecting the video from being released. Perhaps it is the negative attention resulting from the media's constant mentions of the dealers' alleged Somali background that is keeping the video hidden. I’m sure the community would like this story to die so they stop getting such a bad rep by association. But maybe Robbie has exerted some power, through money or other means, to ensure that iPhone video of him hoovering crack smoke stays buried. That's what Avon would do!

I'll wager that it’s a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. While the community certainly has a lot to lose, the story of Rob Ford’s crack tape is such an entangled mess of politics, crime, and media frenzy, that if the reports are true and Rob does know where the video was or is being kept, I’m sure he did everything in its power to keep it way down in the hole. 

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

The Facebook Comments Rob Ford’s Staffers Don’t Want You to See

We Spoke to a Former Crack Addict About Rob Ford

Rob Ford Might Be a Crack Smoker

Photo via DeviantArt user =lammssu72 

These days, most of my role models are cool, fearless artists (which is what I want to be), many of whom happen to be women. You can see one of my few male role models when I roll up my sleeve—I have a big tattoo of Jesus Christ holding open the Bible to Mark 2:9. (That’s the one where Jesus says, “Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?”) This is my rejoinder to the “decline of men” debate clogging the drain of American cultural criticism today.

If you’re lucky enough to have avoided the countless think pieces churned out on the subject, the “decline of men” narrative goes something like this: fewer and fewer men are graduating from college and earning advanced degrees, while women are making more and more money, to the point where they don’t “need” men the way they used to—as a result, four in ten American families have a mother who is the primary (or only) earner, according to one study.

The crisis of masculinity, or rise of women, or whatever, has been the topic of conversation among fancy-pants op-ed writers since at least 2008, but the most recent eruption of sociology-driven panic came in the form of an all-male Fox News panel freaking out over the rise of female breadwinners. (According to conservatives like Erick Erickson, women making as much or more money than men is unnatural and will damage children.) By now a lot of writers and thinkers are pretty good at getting the easy part right: men and boys spiral into pathetic failure territory more frequently than they used to, and it’s too obvious a phenomenon for us to ignore. People who insist (rightly) that the patriarchy is still dominant are missing the point. Even if women still get the short end of the stick, too many men are maturing into losers.

Loserdom can manifest itself in relatively boring ways—unemployment, ill health, illegitimate children, World of Warcraft addiction—but it can also show up in bone-rattling waking nightmares: think of the dude who held those three girls prisoner in Cleveland, or the maladjusted young men who go on shooting rampages.

Some pretty tuned-in people are doing good work on the economic sources of male loserdom. In Spain and Greece and elsewhere, it’s not just young men who are suffering, but it’s young men who are most at sea as the seemingly endless financial crisis hastens the ruin of the millennia-old patriarchal “breadwinner” model of family life.

But not many commenters are asking what should be done about all this, or even what all this means beyond a set of economic statistics. Even then, some of their cultural stories are retreads. Charles Murray’s recent book on downward white mobility, for instance, argues that super rich liberal whites have a social obligation to care about the fate of failing whites—and help them out by preaching to them about the importance of hard work and marriage.

Where Murray seems to fall back on the idea that old bromides about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will allow white winners to salvage the crumbling society they rule, German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger points us toward something very deep about our shared identity as individual human beings. Back in 2006, Enzensberger helpfully warned the world’s wonks to stop sifting through statistics and open their eyes to “the true drama of the radical loser”—the isolated, lonely, angry guy who gloms onto some thought structure or is scooped up by an organization of creeps, the guy who thinks he is nothing until he realizes he can be Death.

One of the most recent heirs to Enzensberger’s courageous and far-seeing view is Laurie Penny in the Guardian (who has written for VICE). While discussing men in Britain—who are spiraling even more swiftly toward terminal failure than America’s sad lot—Penny puts her finger on what’s missing from the economic blame game:

"There can be no doubt that men are in distress. Society's unwillingness to let go of the tired old 'breadwinner' model of masculinity contributes to that distress. Instead of talking about what men and boys can be, instead of starting an honest conversation about what masculinity means, there is a conspiracy of silence around these issues that is only ever broken by conservative rhetoric and lazy stereotypes. We still don't have any positive models for post-patriarchal masculinity, and in this age of desperation and uncertainty, we need them more than ever."

Except we do have a positive model for postpatriarchial masculinity—Jesus!

I don’t mean the Jesus who was turned into a convenient symbol of intolerance and hypocrisy by the militant atheist crowd, or the twisted version worshipped by the Westboro Baptist crowd. No, today is a boom time in the making for the real Jesus: the one who told men that the single-minded pursuit of wealth or honor or even “family values” is sure to leave the soul barren; the one who told men that they should never be shocked when they feel despair or feel despised, because there is no rest or repose for us in this mortal world; the one who told men what he told the paralyzed guy in Mark 2:9—and this is why I have that verse permanently inked on my skin—take up thy mat and walk.

In Mark, the paralyzed guy’s friends hear Jesus is around, so they approach the Son of God and ask him to use his healing powers on their buddy. Jesus starts by telling the paralyzed guy his sins are forgiven and some nearby theology experts hear this and flip out: “Only God can forgive sins, Jesus. WTF.” Jesus rolls his eyes. “OK,” he says. He’ll tell paralyzed guy the same thing in different words: “Take up thy mat and walk.” And that’s what paralyzed guy does.

Now, you can get hung up like an idiot on trying to “prove” that this “actually happened,” or you can accept the scorching, epochal idea staring you in the face. We are created in a divine image and can choose to forgive one another and ourselves for being losers and failures—for malfunctioning, for going wrong, for defeating ourselves, for “deserving” disgust and disrespect by the standards of the world. The lesson of Jesus is a message about what it means to be human that’s so radical, it makes our petty squabbles about what it means to be a “real man” seem hopelessly animalistic and juvenile.  

It’s a message so radical that, since the beginning, it’s resonated most strongly with the most wretched of the world. The decline of men can be just a prelude to a new elevation of all humankind. And no, we don’t all have to convert to some version of Christianity in order to make that happen, although I bet lots of men will. But instead of being scary—oh no! Religion! That means intolerance!—this will be a relief. I predict that increasingly, the Jesus-based lifestyles of the near future will be stripped of their political trappings and preachy judgment by the desperation and uncertainty of the times. It’ll be as if instead of Fight Club, we wound up with something more like Love Club.

Sometimes, for reasons which need not concern us here, I feel like a man in decline. Often, it helps to argue about politics. Even more often, it helps to rock the fuck out. But it helps most of all to let myself be forgiven—because only then can I forgive. That doesn’t have anything to do with economics or the broader trends so many are obsessed with. But it makes me feel better.

Thanks, Jesus!

@jamespoulos

More about my man JC:

Hipster Christians Are Saving London

Beach Reach Wants You to Party with Jesus Christ

I Ride with Jesus