Yesterday, Ukrainian opposition leaders and President Viktor Yanukovych agreed to a deal to end the chaos in Kiev, but activists have refused to stop protesting until Yanukovych resigns. In the last 48 hours, according to BBC News, the protesters have essentially taken over Kiev, including Yanukovych's palace. This morning, Yanukovych called the protesters' actions a “coup” and said he refuses to step down. As the coup unfolds, VICE News is in Kiev, live streaming the events in the streets. 

Thirty years ago this week, the 1984 Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo, the capital of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ten years later, the Olympic site, the city, and its inhabitants were gripped in a ferocious civil war that still resonates today. As the Sochi Olympics wind down, I thought it would be a good time to travel to Sarajevo and visit the former Olympic sites. I wanted to meet people who were at the games and who also lived through the brutal three-and-half-year civil war that raged from April 1992 to February 1996.

This was my first time in Bosnia. I was greeted at the airport by Tanya and Ken, both of whom were born in Sarajevo. They spent their late teens holed up in basements as the civil war took hold. We drove out of the airport past some bombed-out ruins on the way to the city. I asked a very pregnant Tanya about her time during the war, and this is what she had to say:

“I was 17 years old, in high school, and had no idea that war was about to begin. In our school at that time, we were all mixed ethnically and had all grown up together. The first violence I saw, or felt, was during the protests leading up to placement of the barricades. That was in March 1992. Soon the city was under siege. It happened overnight in early April 1992.

“My mother, who is a Bosnian Muslim, told me at the time that Bosnian-Serb soldiers, together with the Yugoslavian People's Army (JNA), were surrounding the city and starting to kill civilians in the streets. When I asked my mother, ‘Why are they killing people?’, she answered that they are trying to rid Bosnia of Muslims, who make up the majority of the population in Sarajevo.

“Politically, at that time, Bosnia-Herzegovina wanted to follow Croatia and Slovenia into independence, which they had gained a couple of years before. On February 22, 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina held its first national referendum for independence to separate itself from Yugoslavian rule. The result of the vote after February 22 was a resounding yes to independence, but representatives of the Bosnian-Serbs had boycotted the process and then one month later the war began.

“In the first few weeks, the Bosnian-Serb army cut off the communications with the outside by bombing the post office and telephone exchanges. They cut the power and water and surrounded [the city] with guns. That was the beginning of our almost four-year nightmare."

The Olympic rings in the Sarajevo City Center.

“Living conditions during the war were horrible,” Tanya said. “I was 17, but I aged very quickly. We could not go out because there were snipers and shelling everywhere. I lost many friends and saw so many dead bodies—too many to remember. I became numb to it all. Every day, someone died. All I wanted was for it to be over. My family used to exchange gold jewelry for flour to make bread. We had no fruit for three years.”

Children gather at the basin of the ski jumps at Igman.

The 1984 Sarajevo bobsled run on Mount Trebević as it is now. The three-kilometer-long run winds its way down through the woods to a bombed-out spectator area below.

The remains of a bombed-out building in central Sarajevo. In the background is an entire hill dedicated to victims of the war.

The finish of the bobsled run on Mount Trebević.

This tunnel was built by the Bosnian Army during the Bosnian War to link the city with Bosnian-held territory on the other side of the Sarajevo Airport—the airport itself was controlled by the United Nations. The Bosnian Army used this tunnel to shuttle food and humanitarian supplies into otherwise landlocked Sarajevo neighborhoods. It also helped the Army bypass the international arms embargo and smuggle weapons into the city.

The northern exit of the tunnel was hidden in a house only a tenth of a mile from the airport. During the war, the tunnel was constantly in use. Between 3,000 and 4,000 soldiers, as well as civilians, traveled through the tunnel daily, which passed directly under the airport's runway.

This is where skiers were presented with their medals after winning events in the 1984 Olympics. It was also the exact spot where the Bosnian army executed many prisoners during the war years of 1992­–1995.

The Bosnian-Serbs planted thousands of mines in the hills around the Olympic sites. Today, there are still many left unexploded in the off-limits areas.

A graveyard at the Igman Ski Center honoring Bosnian soldiers who lost their lives in the hills above Sarajevo during the 1992–1995 war.

Snezana was 24 years old when the Olympics came to town. “It was a beautiful time to be in Sarajevo. Teams of athletes and people came from all over the world to see us and enjoy our city. Ten years later, we were living in hell. This building behind me was the Olympic Hotel in Igman, where the skiing happened. It was also the place that my husband was imprisoned and tortured during the war. He was a Catholic Bosnian-Croat and captured by the Bosnian army. He only escaped because one of the soldiers in the prison recognized him from his primary school and let him free one night. He then ran 30 kilometers through mine-infested hills back into the city. I was very happy to see him.”

The view from a former motel near the bobsled track on Mount Trebević. During the 1984 Olympics, this building housed guests and spectators watching bobsledding. During the war, it was an artillery point from which Bosnian-Serbs would fire guns into the city below.

Tanya and Mirsada Kosic stand at the grave of one of the ten close relatives that they lost during the course of the war.

Mirsada Kosic was a midwife in the children’s hospitable both during the Olympics and the war. She helped deliver hundreds of babies during the siege of Sarajevo, in terrible conditions. She clearly recounts her worst memory of the war:

“It was May 26, 1992. The hospital was being attacked on all sides by the Bosnian-Serbs, and we lost six new-born babies to the shelling. It was the most awful night of my life.”

Two months later, her brother was killed in an ambush nearby.

This generation's version of GI Joe isn't a buff, rough, and tough army soldier—it's a meek, visually-impaired computer specialist. That's right, folks, the hottest new action figure in town is Edward Snowden.

Oregon-based company ThatsMyFace.com, which specialize in creating “3D sculptures” (a.k.a. dolls), is the creative mind behind the figurine. The product description says, “Introducing the Edward Snowden action figure. Edward Snowden's lifelike head mounted on a 12-inch fully-articulated action figure body with detailed pre-fitted clothes.” However, if you're looking to get multiple outfits for your Snowden, be prepared to pay an extra $25 to $60 for the already $99 toy. For the base rate of $99, Snowden is shipped to you wearing a basic “Military Brown” outfit. Can you say fashion suicide? Of course, if you dish out the extra bucks, you can get him wearing outfits like the “Indiana Jones” ($25), the “Casual” ($35), or the “Business Suit” ($60). Quite pricey yes, but ThatsMyFace.com adds that all proceeds go to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Plus, they're made to order! Personally, I would go with the Indiana Jones, which, of course, comes with a whip and messenger bag.

Still too steep for your wallet? Well, you can skip getting any outfits and, in fact, skip even owning Snowden's body. For the price of only $60, you can purchase Snowden's head. What a deal! Make your own Snowden body out of popsicle sticks, glue his head to a Mr. Potato Head, or fit his head on a Ken doll's chiseled body. The possibilities are endless.

Previously, ThatsMyFace.com made a Julian Assange action figure. They also created the above video of Snowden and Assange hanging out, talkin' leaks, and blastin' some sick techno beats. Note: The tiny laptop Snowden is holding does not come with the “Casual” outfit, but you can custom order it.

I'll admit, their ability to make Snowden's face so eerily lifelike is impressive. I assume this is difficult to do, takes a lot of time, and is probably why the toy costs so much money. This is the perfect gift for die-hard Snowden fans (Edheads? Snowboys and Snowgirls?). Use him in classic action figure fashion by playing with him on your carpet and making Snowden, along with his sidekick Mr. Laptop, save the world from the evil NSA, or you can make him a little more handy around the office and use him as a paperweight for your own private documents.

On the other hand, this can also be the perfect gift for die-hard Snowden haters. Dump your Snowden in the toilet as a form of water torture, put him in “jail” by stuffing him in a shoe box, or have him sit in a corner of the room wearing a tiny dunce cap that says “world's worst whistleblower.”

What you do with your Snowden figurine is purely up to you, but remember all proceeds go to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. According to Business Insider's Agence France Presse, the group is “a San Francisco-based non-profit that added Snowden—currently living in asylum in Russia—to its board of directors in January.”

Agence contacted the foundation, and they said they knew nothing about the action figure. “It's not us selling the dolls,”  said Executive director Trevor Timm. “I'm actually not sure who is. The first time I saw anything about it was when someone tweeted about it, and no one has contacted us about it since, to my knowledge.” ThatsMyFace.com also provides this disclaimer on their site: “Edward Snowden and Freedom of the Press Foundation does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this site or our Edward Snowden figure.” 

Alison Stevenson is a stand-up comedian with a prodigious Barbie collection. See her and other VICE west coast contributors at ENTITLEMENT on Wednesday March 5 at Los Globos on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @JustAboutGlad.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I went to my first A.A./N.A. meeting in 2004, after I was first arrested with a decent head-stash of various intoxicants. At that time there was legitimate confusion as to whether I was a drug addict. I had kept my abuse strictly confined to the weekends, and even though I had a ton of coke, weed, E, and assorted other goodies on hand thanks to my dealing business, I wasn’t getting loaded 24/7—that, to me, meant I wasn't an addict.

However, in an attempt to beat the drug beef against me, my lawyer said that if I went to rehab and showed that I was willing to go that route and stay outta trouble, there was a slim chance I’d get 18 months of drug-court hell and avoid prison. Long story short, I was all about that rehab shit. I had no problem stopping using, but I still wanted that money, and I figured, What’s the harm as long as I don’t get caught? so my arrogant ass continued selling the stuff. I was open for business, but I went six or seven months without even a drink after my arrest—it was alright, but I was bored as fuck and felt really weird staying in the house and rarely going out.

At my rehab intake interview, I was honest about my drug abuse over the years, and the counselor said I was no doubt an addict. His main reasons were that I started in my young teens and abused hallucinogens throughout high school. Truthfully, though, anyone who said they smoked weed a couple times a week, or even drank to get drunk on the weekends (a.k.a. BINGE DRINKING!), was an addict according to the standard assessment test.

It’s amazing how much the rehab world has changed in the past ten years. Back then, it was strictly a 12-step program, whereas the last spot I was at, in 2013, was on some client-based shit where they listen to you, let you relapse, and don’t pressure you. They no longer push God either, unless you decide to go with Alcoholics Anonymous, which still adheres to the notion that your Higher Power will save you. With the new method, they won’t punish you as much, but they'll keep you in rehab forever while they get compensated with taxpayer Medicaid money—“It’s OK, relapse is part of the recovery process,” they’ll tell you. You might reasonably conclude it’s all about the money for them. With drug court programs expanding all over the country, there are fewer people incarcerated, but a helluva lot more locked up in rehab, and since this is America, you know someone is finding a way to profit off that.

Anyway, when I got into the 12-step program, there was a lot of things that bugged me. The religious aspect rubbed me the wrong way, and the group’s doctrine goes back to 1939, which made it seem seriously dated. Basically, you’re supposed to relinquish your will and give yourself fully to Him. I can’t tell you how many meetings were completely hijacked by some chick who was pissed off about being sober and sat in the circle for an hour yelling about how it’s sexist that she had to succumb to Him. “Who says God is a man? You misogynist-spoke-in-the-wheel-of-patriarchy motherfucker!” Then some smarmy douche-lick (me, for instance) would say, “Hold up. How do we even know there’s a God, and why would He care if we’re doing drugs or not?” Then the counselor would say, “Fine, fine. Things have changed. It doesn’t actually have to be the Christian God. It can be anything. You just need to give yourself over to something that you think is greater than yourself. You are not God. Your higher power can be that chair over there if you want.” Great. So lots of us ran with that one. Eventually, I settled on Johnny Law as my higher power, which was hard to argue with. No doubt the police and the prisons were more in control of my life than I was.

As far as the meetings go, A.A. is mostly for whites, and N.A. (Narcotics Anonymous) is for the more urban crowd, if you get my drift. A.A. is run by grumpy old men who are addicted to preaching sobriety and telling stories about how they used to get fucked up. They don’t like newcomers, ‘cause most of them are there because of a judge's orders, are looking for sex, and might even be high at the meeting. If you talk about drugs, some old-timer might bark at you and yell, “THIS IS ABOUT ALCOHOL, NOT HARD DRUGS, YOU SCUMBAG JUNKY!” Lots of people are cross-addicted to drugs and alcohol, so they get shunned and end up at N.A. The N.A. groups I attended were a fashion show where everyone was trying to get their fuck on. I witnessed some amazing theater, awe-inspiring performances, and magnetic speakers at N.A. At one of the first meetings I attended, a toothless black guy dressed up like a pimp screamed at us about his drug use and how he sucked dick for crack back in the day. This 19-year-old Jewish white chick—who had got drunk, blacked out, and fucked a lot at SUNY New Paltz—started bawling hysterically and ran out. I think he scared her away by yelling that we'd all suck dick for crack if we didn't get clean. I was captivated. There is one aspect of A.A. and N.A. that I think can definitely be beneficial, and that is the way you bond with the people at meetings, but you gotta be careful—you might bond with the wrong person and follow them to Get-High City.

I spent a lot of time complaining about 12-step programs and arguing with counselors, who made me out to be a nut, but today there are loads of doctors and scientists questioning the A.A. orthodoxy. For 50 years, if you relapsed and/or didn’t follow the 12 steps verbatim, you were considered a failure, which seems to be a very religious take on recovery: Sin by using drugs, and you'll go back to the hell of intoxication and misery.

A more scientific approach would dictate that if A.A. doesn’t work for you, you should try a new method, instead of blaming yourself for being too immoral or lazy to follow through on the steps. A.A. often accuses those who relapse of being dishonest with themselves, not accepting their powerlessness, and not giving themselves completely to their Higher Power. Lots of people just aren’t ready to get clean, so they fight it. With all that said, the brainwashing techniques and camaraderie actually work for a bunch of people, so I can’t knock A.A. too hard—two of my close friends got sober thanks to the 12-step method. I just think there are alternatives that will probably achieve a higher success rate. Most of all, the addict needs to want sobriety. I know I didn’t want to get with the program when I first went to rehab—I just wanted to stay the fuck out of prison, and that didn’t even work.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

Photos by Sam Clarke

Last Monday night, the New York art world convened at Postmasters Gallery to raise money for Art Fag City. In case you don't know, AFC is a nonprofit platform for art criticism, news, and reviews that has been called “New York's best art blog” by both the Village Voice and the New York Times. The blog supports the under-served community of emerging artists, and provides a bullhorn for young art writers with fresh ideas. AFC is also one of the few art publications that is not afraid to call bullshit. 

This year's benefit was hosted by VICE favorite Jaimie Warren, who performed as Freddie Mercury. Jaimie's performance was equal parts hilarious and bizarre: After entering the stage by crawling through the hairy anus of a gargantuan ass she and her team fabricated for the event, she performed a selection of musical numbers accompanied by a second, shorter Freddie Mercury who played a cardboard guitar.

The evening's roast master, famed Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, joined Jaimie onstage to present the awards, which came in the form of golden butt plugs. Almighty art dealer Mary Boone won the butt plug for “Most Powerful (by eyebrows),” while the Marina Abramovic Institute predictably picked up a plug for “Best Self-Promotion.” This year the art world has put out an astonishing sausage fest of group shows containing mostly male artists, so competition for the “Ballsiest Group Show (by count of balls)” award was, well, stiff.  In the end, the butt plug was awarded to Gagosian London's The Show is Over. Thirty-four of the 35 artists in the show were men, so this one was well deserved. 

After the last glitzy butt plug had been awarded to Richard Serra (he won “(Chris) Christie's Award for the Most Significant Contemporary Artist,”  which was given to the artist with the most steeliness, manliness, and appeal with blue-chip collectors), the roast began.  

Viveros-Faune insulted every art world insider you've never heard of and more. One of his better jabs was directed at former Sotheby's Principal Auctioneer Tobias Meyer: “You remember Tobias, right, folks? He was the 24-inch-waisted poodle with a poker face who said these words: ‘The best art is the most expensive art because the market is so smart.’ Fact is, Tobias made financial history, selling Picasso’s Boy With the Pipe for $104 million, Munch’s The Scream for $120 million, and Warhol’s Silver Car Crash last November for $104 Million. Fuck, if the price was right, he’d sell his own mother, am I right?” Viveros-Faune didn't stop at Tobias's mother, adding, “Time was Tobey could swallow a piece of coal and dump a diamond. Turns out today, not so much.”

The evening ended with an auction of artworks donated by artists ranging from super famous Marilyn Minter to not-so-famous yours truly. The auctioneer was CK Swett of Heritage Auctions, and he was really, really lively. I didn't quite understand his outfit, though: He was shirtless under overalls, but on top of that he wore a formal coat with tails. It looked like a fast-talking farmhand was halfway through some kind of My Fair Lady experiment. Whatever his look was supposed to indicate, he was really good at selling art. One of Minter's photographs of pubic hair titled “Fur” sold for $3,600, and I think it's wonderful that bush will keep Art Fag City blogging over the next year.

Sam Clarke is a 20-year-old NYC-based photographer. He is available for editorial commissions. 

Matthew Leifheit is Photo Editor of VICE, and you can find articles he has written for Art Fag City here.

Screenshot via.

For two weeks, 30-year-old Joseph Elija Ettima was on trial to determine if he was legally insane when he killed his grandmother and set her body ablaze in front of two small children. He entered the Orange County courtroom only briefly last week to deliver a message to the nonplused lady stenographer: “Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,” he said softly, in a vaguely Spanish accent.

The judge asked Joseph if he was waiving his right to appear in court during the testimony of his lawyer-ordered psychiatrist.  Joseph, dressed in casual clothes (khakis and a summery red plaid shirt) with long dreads dangling down his back, politely confirmed he would rather remain in his cell. “Sincerely,” Joseph told the stenographer and the judge before being escorted out of court. “Buenas noches.”

“At least he doesn’t hiss at you, like he does at me,” joked Deputy District Attorney Sonia Bailey. Then the jury filed back into court from their lunch break; they were there to decide where Joseph was going to spend the rest of his life. Only a few weeks earlier, the same twelve citizens found Joseph guilty of murder, arson, robbery, and child abuse. They began deliberations this week to figure out if Joseph was legally—not medically—insane when he stabbed and lit his grandmother on fire. Being legally insane would mean that he has a mental disease or defect, and because of that disease or defect, he didn't understand that his actions were morally or legally wrong when he committed them.

If the jury found Joseph insane, he would have been sent to a state-run medical facility where he could have eventually been released—if he was deemed fully recovered by a clinical staff. Of course, most patients committed to psychiatric facilities for the criminally insane never leave. Their sane prison counterparts typically serve shorter sentences.

The burden of proof was on the defense to prove Joseph’s insanity. [1]

And you know what? They had a pretty good case.

In January 2009, Joseph was freshly paroled out of prison after an eight-year stint for possessing an illegal weapon. Joseph dropped in on his 69-year-old grandmother, Emma Hardwick-Street, in the working class neighborhood of Los Alamitos, to see if she could give him a place to crash.  Emma refused—she was full up from parental custody of Joseph’s eight-year-old nephew and three-year-old niece—and then a fight erupted between Joseph and Emma. His nephew, Matt, was downstairs when he heard his grandmother wailing. He ran upstairs and found Joseph straddling their grandmother, pummeling her with blows. Joseph then pulled out a knife and stabbed Emma to death.

“I’m now free,” Joseph said to his nephew.

Joseph started barking orders at Matt, asking him to bring him anything that could catch on fire—clothes, a broom, whatever. Joseph dug through Emma’s closet, snatched up some of her belongings, and then cleaned out her bathroom cabinet. He nabbed slippers, tennis rackets, toothpaste, deodorant, a bag of cough drops, a box of breath mints, and a plastic bag of coins. Then he went into the children’s room and yanked some of their clothes from the drawers. Joseph stuffed it all into a backpack and then dragged Emma’s body into a bedroom and laid her on top of the bed.

Matt came back upstairs with the flammables; he was joined by his crying three-year-old cousin, Georgia. Joseph piled the clothes on top of Emma, doused the carpet with rubbing alcohol, poured the rest out on Emma’s body, and handed his nephew a box of matches. Joseph commanded Matt to strike a match and toss it onto his grandmother’s body.

The third grader didn’t move until his uncle threatened to kill him and Georgia.  Matt lit the match, threw it on the bed, and the bed went orange with fire.  

Joseph rushed the kids outside, locked the front door behind them, thrust the tennis racket and the backpack filled with clothes into Matt’s hands, and then took off running down the street.

Four months later, Joseph resurfaced at a border gate between Mexico and Belize.  Mexican authorities deported him in April 2009 when he attempted to escape US marshals while boarding a commercial flight from Mexico City. Joseph spent the next five years in jail awaiting trial. Partially, it took so long for Joseph’s criminal trial to start because he refused leave his cell to come to court several times.

While in Orange County’s Theo Lacy correctional facility, Joseph made a brief, but memorable, appearance on MSNBC’s prison docu-series Lockup. The footage shows a barefoot Joseph wielding a broken mop handle and hurling cleaning products at over a dozen sheriff’s deputies. For months in prison, Joseph refused to speak with any psychiatrists because he insisted he wasn’t mentally ill.

“My first two visits with him were friendly, even to the point of being flirtatious, which is inappropriate because I’m old enough to be his mother,” Dr. Nancy Kaser-Boyd testified during Joseph’s sanity trial. “He was smiling and polite and [talked] about being Nigerian royalty, inheriting a lot of money, and going to back Nigeria, and being a congressman there.” Joseph had refused to speak to two other court-appointed doctors before Nancy’s visits. She testified that she was able to complete three four-hour sessions with Joseph by dodging his questions about her intentions to testify at his trial for the defense. 

Nancy’s diagnosis of Joseph: schizoidaffective disorder with psychotic features and bipolar depression.  “He believed he had a microchip in his head and people could hear his thoughts,” she told the jury. Of course, the microchip delusion is a commonly known symptom of psychosis, and it could make a skeptic believe Joseph was repeating what he saw on a crime drama to escape jail. But what makes Joseph so different from other defendants who enter an insanity plea is how much paper is attached to him. Joseph spent most of his life in institutions, and several different doctors have diagnosed Joseph since he hit puberty, and they all have said the same thing: This guy is fucking crazy.

Joseph was born in California to a Nigerian father. Social services tagged him as high risk for abuse and neglect at age four. A doctor evaluated Joseph at age eight and reported that he likely suffered from early onset schizophrenia. His speech and thoughts were disorganized. He seemed paranoid, anxious, overly guarded, and overly distracted. “There is substantial evidence that [the] child has auditory hallucination suffering thought disorder,” the doctor wrote in 1991. “If schizophrenia bears out, major neuroleptic medication will be needed.” In other words, the doctor diagnosed Joseph with an organic brain disease that creates delusions, and believed Joseph needed serious psychotropic medication to prevent him losing control of his mind and body.

Joseph’s father died when Joseph was nine years old, causing his condition and behavior to deteriorate. He was sent to live in a psychiatric home for young children, where he told doctors he had visions of his mother beating him and of bodies being dismembered. He heard a low murmuring voice that said, “Joseph be bad.” Sometimes, Joseph would suffer a night terror and run screaming out of the facility and into the street.

The next diagnostic report came from when Joseph stayed in juvenile hall from 1997 to 1999 for attempted arson and assault. While at juvi, he was taken repeatedly to the hospital for banging his head on walls and eating staples, bolts, an ice pack, and cleaning fluids.

From 2000 to 2008, Joseph was in jail for probation violations and a weapon’s charge. His file got thick with manic episodes and violent outbursts against staff and other prisoners. In 2002, Joseph set his mattress on fire in the jail’s psychiatric ward. His psychiatrist wrote in a report, “Patient has a severe mental disorder and a low IQ” and suffers from “severe psychotic symptoms.” The doctor added that Joseph was “very defensive and denied being mentally ill.”

Joseph was put on the involuntary medication program, where doctors forced him to a take a cocktail of psychotropic drugs to stave off hallucinations. After two years of steady medication, Joseph’s psychiatrist reported good results: He was “behaviorally stable” with significantly “fewer incidents” and was overall much improved.

Once released from prison in 2008, Joseph went off his meds. 

Update: The jury came back from deliberations on Thursday afternoon and found that Joseph was sane when he killed his grandmother and lit her on fire in January 2009.

Hollywood isn’t so much of a place as it is a locus of yearning. It’s a crucible for those who aspire to fame. Cheap businesses thrive here, catering to the tastes of the masses, while daring artists toil on the fringes making ambitious work. It’s a city where sexual politics are at their worst and their best—women are treated as sex objects on and off screen, but most of the major studios are actually run by ladies. Tinsel Town is such a peculiar city, it has been canonized in innumerable novels, memoirs, biographies, and tabloids. Surprisingly, not many books of poetry have sought to make the strange city its muse. Robert Polito took on that challenge in 2009 with Hollywood and God, a collection of poems that deals with celebrity, new Hollywood, old Hollywood, successful superstars, and washed-up has-beens.

The book is about Hollywood, but Robert isn’t an insider. He never played a significant role in a major motion picture like writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner did in the 20s. Robert is someone who has viewed it from the outside.

In the book, Robert creates tension between the triviality of the entertainment industry and the highbrow elements of the poetic form. The collection’s title speaks to this dichotomy and the mission behind the book: to explore the spiritual state of the country by examining its most popular medium of entertainment through its most underappreciated form of artistic expression.

The poems in the collection differ vastly in terms of form. The three-poem sequence that begins the book—“Hollywood Hills,” “Barbara Payton: A Memoir,” and “Paris Hilton Calls on Jesus”—is especially effective because of the way each poem’s similar subject matter is accessed with a different perspective and execution.

“Hollywood Hills” is the first work in the book. It is lineated in a traditional style, which tricks you into thinking that Hollywood and God will be a “typical” book of poetry. “Barbra Peyton: A Memoir,” which follows “Hollywood Hills,” destroys that notion with its prose structure and establishes the scrapbook variety that defines the book.

“Barbara Payton: A Memoir” begins with the narrator speaking about his youth and his father. His father had two jobs. His main gig was with the post office, and his second one was tending a bar on Sunset Boulevard called the Coach and Horses. The narrator describes how he spent time helping his dad at the bar and ended up proofreading manuscripts for a publishing house owned by one of his dad’s customers. Actress Barbara Payton, who is long past her prime when the narrator becomes acquainted with her, is a regular at the bar. Eventually, the narrator starts working with Barbara on her own memoir. Thus, the poem is built around two levels of flashbacks. The first is the narrator, reflecting on his days as a 13-year-old, and the second is the narrator reflecting on Barbara, who is divulging her past to the storyteller for her memoir. Through the narrator, we hear the sad and very true story of Barbara Payton—how she went through a series of turbulent marriages and then worked her way down to hooking on Sunset Boulevard, before dying in her mid-30s. The narrator’s nostalgic and earnest retelling of Barbara’s story energizes the facts so they don’t feel like a Wikipedia entry.

The narrator and Barbara are in analogous places, considering they are both preoccupied with recalling their former lives. However, the stories they tell are vastly different. The narrator is telling the reader of his days working at a bar where his father moonlights to make ends meet, while Barbara tells the narrator (and the readers) about her glamorous and gilded days working in Hollywood. But by the end, they switch places. The storyteller is doing something artistic—writing poems—and Barbara has turned into a drunken $5 whore.

“Paris Hilton Calls on Jesus” follows “Barbra Peyton: A Memoir” and really hones in on the theme of the whole book. In the poem, she’s not an actual person. Instead, he uses her as a symbol of the vacuous spiritual state of the town in general. Here the figure of Paris is a stand in for a type, not a non-fictional examination of the actual Paris.

It is meaningful that Robert writes non-fiction (check out Savage Art, his great biography on Southern noir master of darkness Jim Thompson) as well as poetry, because it allows his poetry to examine territory that he covers in his factual writing but through a different lens. In the poetry, Hollywood and its high and low priests and priestesses become icons that he can manipulate to find poetic truth rather than journalistic proof.

@JamesFrancoTV

My old friend Jummy recently posted a photo of our high school band the Fascist Police. Looking at the photo of my 16-year-old self, I saw the joy of my teenage affinity for punk music and pot—neither of which I fully grasped at the time. Two of my bandmates abstained from smoking, but Jummy and I puffed away after many shows, slowly diminishing our tolerances and loving every moment. It was a time when pot was the highlight of my day instead of a mundane habit. The photograph sparked many other memories of high school and my early days of drug exploration, including memories about a band I was in before the Fascist Police—a group that was not keen about weed.

Shortly after I first started smoking pot my freshman year of high school, I moved away to another town, and my access to pot was right back to square one, so I ended up hanging out and playing music with a group of dudes whose views on pot were unclear. They never mentioned weed, so I never mentioned it. 

The front man was a guy named Jerry. Scott, one of my other bandmates, seemed perpetually impressed with his own disobedience, which frequently landed him in trouble for smoking, spitting, swearing, and other habits that matched his patch-covered motorcycle jacket—he sincerely gave no fucks about the rules, and I thought that was pretty awesome. His best friend was a guy named Chucky, who was out of high school and lived in a sketchy brick apartment complex. He had a two-bedroom apartment with his mom and sister. The ladies took each of the rooms, and Chucky slept on a sofa bed in the living room with the family’s pit bull. The family saw the sofa bed as both Chucky and the dog's living space; I thought this was a bad ass living situation. When Chucky's mom, sister, or dog occupied the living room, he sat on the stoop smoking cigarettes. This was also where we typically hung out. 

At the time, Chucky and Scott were looking for a bass player and a drummer to join their band, so they recruited my friend Neil and me. At the time, I had spent a few years behind a drum kit. Neil had no experience playing an instrument, but Scott and Chucky figured that was sufficient enough to play their songs' simplistic basslines. 

I wasn't particularly in to punk music, but I was excited to play in a band with the coolest kids I had ever met—to join them in their spitting, swearing ways. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that hanging out with them meant spending my time doing nothing. Sitting on Chucky's couch, we'd spend entire evenings watching reruns. If the dog had occupied the living room, we'd sit on the stoop and smoke cigarettes for hours. We had very few common interests, so these stoop sessions were riddled with long periods of silence that made me want to scream. I never screamed though—I didn’t want to be the lame guy pointing out that what we were doing was incredibly boring. I considered mentioning that we could pass the time by smoking pot, but I was worried I'd be ridiculed. This suspicion was confirmed one day when one of Chucky's sketchy neighbors walked by smoking a blunt and offered us a hit. I reached out to take a drag, and Chucky admonished me for considering his offer. It became clear that these guys lumped pot into the vague category of “drugs.” It seemed counterintuitive that they were against it, especially because Chucky displayed the distinct characteristics of someone who had done one too many hits of acid. Nevertheless, I realized that the time I spent at his apartment would remain boring, so I sought out other friends.

Eventually, I met Jummy, who also wore a patch-covered jacket and always had a pocketful of his parents’ weed. I spent hours sitting in his tree house, as I had sat on Chucky's couch, but weed made sloth-like activities fun. When we first met, we didn't have much to talk about, but as soon as we smoked together, we couldn’t shut up. We’d go on and on about the dumbest things, making each other laugh. After I hung out with Jummy, I considered the other guys lame. They had begun to catch wind that I had found a new friend, but they held their tongues about their unease for a long time. Sometimes, we’d be sitting on Chucky’s front stoop, and they would be dismayed when I stood up and told them I was going to do something else. “But we’re having band time!” Neil would say. Seeing as “band time” involved no songwriting or practice, I excused myself. Finally, the guys confronted me: “You’re going to go smoke pot with that druggy kid, aren’t you?” they asked.

I finally told them, “Yes. I’m going to go hang out with Jummy. We have been sitting on this stoop for hours, and I have no idea what we are doing. It’s so boring that I’m going blind, and it’s always been boring.” They were irked. Neil said, “Well, I guess you’re not as dedicated to the band as we are.” I found it strange at the time, but this happened with several other bands I played with later in life. A lot of people perceived being in a band as a pact involving both musical collaboration and massive time commitment—the ridiculous paradigm led to many tumultuous band breakups.

I told the guys that I simply couldn’t do it anymore, and that I’d rather go hang out in Jummy’s tree house. Quitting the band was a glorious experience that made me feel extremely punk rock—a vague adjective that was important to me in my mid-teens.

Eventually, I had a stoned conversation with Jummy that led to the formation of our band the Fascist Police, and we recorded a handful of terrible songs, played a few backyard shows, and kept smoking his parents’ weed. Musically, both these bands are shit stains on my resume, but my days with the Fascist Police comprised many of my few positive teenage memories. I’m now in the process of digging up some of those old recordings and will share them as soon as I find them. They'll make for a good laugh.  

@ImYourKid

Image via.

Sometimes there's not a lot of commentary that can be added to a story. This is one of those times. In Sudan a married 18-year-old Ethiopian woman stood trial for adultery and prostitution charges. If found guilty she would have been stoned, but instead the court convicted her of “indecent acts” after she convinced them she was divorced. She was sentenced to one month in jail and a $880 fine. (The jail sentence has been suspended since she's pregnant.) Why did authorities arrest her in the first place? Because back in August, seven men filmed themselves gang-raping her when she was three months pregnant, and the footage spread on social media. By the way: According to the Guardian, she slept on a jail's concrete floor as she awaited trial. Fuck you, Sudan.

Image via. 

Did you miss the boat on the 13 years of comedic genius that was Tom Scharpling's The Best Show on WFMU? Okay, well here are the archives. Go ahead and catch up. I'll wait! Okay. It was great, right? Of course it was. Now, remember when Jon Wurster would call in, end up in some terrible trouble with the law, and right before he got carted away would yell, “Hide my spank mags?” Well, folks, a former US congressman actually did that this week! That's right. Former Democratic Representative Mel Reynolds had been living in Zimbabwe, and the government busted him for having porn, which is a big no-no there. According to the Chicago Sun Times, Mel asked government officials to give him his phone and laptop as they dragged him to a government vehicle. That's code for a dude telling people to hide his digital spank mags!

Image via. 

Do you ever get bored, start thinking about how you haven't had a successful date in a long time, and then troll through Craigslist's dating section? Then because you're only human, you find these dating profiles exhausting and you move on to the oh-so Casual Encounters section and start trolling there? And you start answering a few ads, slowly building up the nerve to go on a late-night hook-up, because you have nothing to lose? And you finally go on a few, and some are great, but others are awkward, and once or twice you get this sense of creepiness in the other person's eyes? And then one day you read the news about some crazy woman confessing that she and her husband would pick up dudes on Craiglist and kill them? And then you google her name and find out that she claims to have murdered 22 men across four states, including the state where you live? And so you go ahead and consider yourself lucky for getting through that particular time in your life and vow to never again take those risks again? But then as each update to the story comes through, it seems she was full of shit, so you begin battling with yourself over whether or not you need to keep that original promise to yourself, because even if this particular woman is lying, there’s still a lot of creeps out there? No? Me neither. Carry on.

@RickPaulas

In Part 1 of Fresh Off the Boat - NYC, Eddie travels north to the Bronx, where he and WorldStarHipHop star Loopy hit up local bodegas, chow down on a Japanese-Dominican platano mashup disaster, and talk about holdin' down the hood over mani-pedis.

Freedom Industries, Inc.

School ended early on last Monday for students at three elementary schools and one middle school in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Members of the National Guard and the state departments of environmental protection and health were called in. It was the rapid response team's third deployment to schools in the county this month.

The teachers said the tap water smelled like licorice candy—a fragrance associated with MCHM (4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol), a coal extraction chemical that flooded the water supply for 300,000 people in nine West Virginia counties on January 9. Residents of Charleston and the surrounding area live in fear of the sweet scent and they have grown increasingly bitter.

West Virginia is coal country. More than a million acres of mountain have been blown apart in Appalachia, where the state is situated, in order to retrieve it. Not to mention, West Virginia is plastered with signs extolling the patriotic virtues of the black geological discharge. The signs tout coal as a source of energy independence for the Red, White, and Blue and implore residents to be proud of their natural resources. They frame regulation as an impingement upon freedom and a threat not only to the livelihoods of West Virginians, but to the country as a whole. Environmentalists have been harassed, beaten, and threatened with their lives for suggesting otherwise.

Meanwhile, local ambulance chasers have launched ad campaigns of their own, appealing to those diagnosed with silicosis, mesothelioma, pneumoconiosis (commonly referred to as Black Lung), and other diseases associated with coal extraction to seek their legal services. It's a sign of the imprint the industry has had on the state's rural communities over the decades. Now, the 10,000 gallon MCHM spill from a chemical storage facility run by Freedom Industries—just a mile upstream from a water treatment plant on the Elk River—has raised questions over how much environmental degradation West Virginians are willing to tolerate in the name of patriotism.

In the immediate aftermath of the contamination, 671 people called poison control, complaining of severe vomiting and diarrhea, rashes and dizziness. The White House declared much of the state a federal disaster area and state troopers were deployed to deliver water.

Five days later, the local water utility declared their product safe to drink. “We are in compliance with all the standards set by the health-based agencies, like the CDC [Center for Disease Control], the West Virginia Bureau of Public Health, and we have been since the 13th of January,” Jeff McIntyre, President of West Virginia American Water later testified at a congressional hearing in Washington on February 2nd.

But the safety claims have come with a caveat attached, as a note that was still taped to water coolers at the Charleston airport more than a month after the spill illustrated. “West Virginia American Water has announced that our water meets all regulatory standards,” it read, explaining to visitors that the cooler was placed there simply for the sake of their “convenience.”

But there was an asterisk: “Pregnant women and children under the age of three are advised not to drink our local water.”

The trouble is MCHM is actually an unregulated chemical, meaning there are no federal or state guidelines demarcating what levels are toxic and what levels are not. To quote the CDC's website, “There should be no MCHM in drinking water.”

The CDC relied on independent studies conducted by Eastman Chemical Company, who manufactured the MCHM in question, to determine a safe dose but said more research is needed.

A second toxic chemical—a compound of propylene glycol phenyl and dipropylene glycol—was also released in lesser amounts in the spill, but not disclosed by Freedom Industries until January 21st. Just like MCHM, little is known about these toxins.

At the same hearing that McIntyre spoke at the head West Virginia's Bureau of Public Health, Letitia Tierney, described the water as "usable," although she said, "everybody has a different definition of safe."

Scrambling for some marker of quality control, officials have set cut-off limits of one part per million of MCHM and 1.2 ppm for those who are not with child and who are above the age of three.

Robert Goodwin, Project Manager at Coal River Mountain Watch, an environmental group that has been conducting field testing of water in the Charleston area, said samples taken in homes on the 13th of January were at one tenth of the official MCHM safety threshold, but it remains uncertain what the long term effects of ingesting the chemical will be on residents of the poisoned counties.

“It's a scientific experiment to have people drinking this water,” said Goodwin.

West Virginians don't want to be used as lab rats. On January 30th, around 60 people protested in front of the statehouse calling for stricter safety standards. One man, who traveled to Charleston from nearby Boone County for the rally, attempted to enter the capitol building to show legislators water from his poisoned well. He was denied access by security, who considered the jug of orange liquid he carried a threat.

A fear of the tap has made bottled water a highly sought-after commodity. Locals don't trust their water. They won't drink it, won't wash with it, won't let their pets or livestock near it, either. On Valentine's Day supermarket marquees in Charleston advertised bottled water and roses. Local environmental groups are considering conducting epidemiological studies among residents in the affected counties. Everyone has a story.

“My fiancé has several allergies and sensitive skin,” said Michael Withrow, explaining what happened when the couple showered after getting the go ahead from American Water. “Almost immediately she broke out into a rash and complained of pain in her hands. They were swollen and flush. She spent six hours in the ER. Since then, the licorice odor has decreased and we are back to taking showers, but, we are only taking them every few days and, occasionally, she still has mild reactions.”

Twylla Bays has a 28-year-old daughter with muscular dystrophy who experienced severe bouts of diarrhea in the initial contamination. Now, Twlla said, “I can't bath her at all.”

American Water has continued to bill customers at regular rates since the spill—even for pregnant households and those with small children—though a deduction of $10.25 was made for those who were advised to flush their pipes in January.

Inexplicably, local residents have also said they felt the symptoms of MCHM—rashes, headaches, nausea, diarrhea, retching, along with burning, itchy eyes, and inflamed sinuses (signs of airborne exposure)—days, weeks, even years before the spill was announced. These claims could be based on hypochondria or unrelated to the contamination. But Freedom Industries has been operating their chemical storage facility since 1986 and the last time federal regulators visited prior to the spill was in 1991. Chemical storage facilities are not regulated by the state of West Virginia at all.

“There could have been many more, smaller leaks before this one that we never learned about,” said Robert Goodwin with Coal River Mountain Watch. He noted that local politicians have “toned down their anti-regulatory rhetoric” recently and expressed hope that the spill could lead to greater protections for West Virginia's water and air.

Even as damage control continued in the aftermath of the Freedom Industries spill, new catastrophes have begged attention. One hundred thousand gallons of coal slurry spewed from a ruptured pipe into a creek that feeds into the Kanawha River on February 11. Then last Wednesday, melting snow caused a pond containing coal mining refuse known as “blackwater” to overrun into a stream in the town of Gary.

“You don't protect the environment after the fact,” Randy Hoffman, with the state's Department of Environmental Protection, told reporters last week, though his office has so far rejected pleas from the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement that it apply stricter regulatory safe guards to the coal industry.

Until regulators step-up, disasters will keep coming as certain as the sun will rise. 

@JohnReedsTomb

Gaspar Gloves lace gloves, PRB Studio necklaces, earrings, and rings, vintage bracelets

PHOTOS BY LOGAN WHITE
STYLIST: KRISSIE TORGERSON

Photo Assistant: Ariana Papademetropoulos
Makeup: Melissa Abad
Hair: Darine Sengseevong
Models: Lauren Avery, Dasha Nekrasova, Sylvia Kochinski

Maison Close bodysuit, Va Bien underwear, Wolford tights, Kiki de Montparnasse belt and cuffs, Gemma Simone earrings

Emerson jacket, vintage hat; PRB Studio earrings

Burberry jacket, American Apparel thigh-highs, PRB Studio shoes and earrings, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves

Kiki de Montparnasse corset, PRB Studio necklaces, earrings, and rings, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves

Kiki de Montparnasse corset, Clare Bare underwear, Wolford thigh-highs, Missguided shoes, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves, PRB Studio necklaces, earrings, and rings, vintage bracelets; Kiki de Montparnasse bra, Maison Close underwear and garters, American Apparel thigh-highs, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves

Kiki de Montparnasse corset, Clare Bare underwear, Wolford thigh-highs, Missguided shoes, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves, PRB Studio necklaces, earrings, and rings, vintage bracelets; Kiki de Montparnasse bra, Maison Close underwear and garters, American Apparel thigh-highs, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves

Emerson jacket, vintage hat, Gaspar Gloves mesh gloves

Anachronism in Action corset, American Apparel pants and choker, Carlo Pazolini boots, Gaspar Gloves mesh gloves

Wolford thigh-highs, Missguided shoes, Gaspar Gloves lace gloves, PRB Studio rings; Emerson jacket, vintage hat

Photo by Quincy Branch. 

For this week's Mahal, I spoke to 3L$, a 12-member art and rap collective based in Cobb County, Georgia. Many rappers pretend to hail from Atlanta, but this group has no desire to represent the ATL as their home base. When I spoke to Xavier Lee, one of 3L$'s ringleaders, about the collective, he remained true to the group's mission to make Cobb County as famous as the ATL.

VICE: What is 3L$?
Xavier Lee: The group in total has ten key artists, and the rest just do track listing and all that. We're from Cobb County—Austell, Smyrna, Marietta, and Mableton. However, we have group members located in Chicago, Charlotte, and even Iceland. We changed the s in suburban to a 3, because we are not your regular rappers from the burbs—we actually have real life stories to tell. Some kids we know didn't even make it to senior year in high school; you can hear it in our songs. We don't rap about the same shit. 

How young is the youngest rap collective in Austell, Georgia? 
We're actually the only rap group in Austell, I think. Everyone else is on their solo wave. We range in age from 16 to 20. Most of us are still in high school—middle fingers to homework by the way. Shout out to South Cobb High School! Eagle nation!

Have you guys been hit with any of the recent snow out there? 
Hell yeah, man. I don't know why we made such a big deal about the snow. It was only two inches, but [we had] no school. So we were cool with it.

Were there any other effects, besides missing school?  
We were just coolin' in the crib honestly. Nobody we know really was trippin' about it. Only the parents [cared] honestly. They blamed the mayor and all the politicians. 

What do you want people to know about Cobb County?
North Cobb and East Cobb are lame as hell. All the rich people live up there, though. Our side of Cobb is really the livest part of the county—mainly because we're closest to the city. We actually got a lot of talent out here. We want to be the ones that finally showcase that. 

@RedAlurk

On the cover: Jeans, shirt, and beret by American Apparel. 

PHOTOS BY JAIME MARTÍNEZ
STYLING BY ELLA CEPEDA

Styling Assistant: Natalia Comel
Models: Ixchel, Lucía, Daniel, Cuauhtémoc, Arantza, María José, Octavio, Natalia, Alma

UNIF coay, H&M shirt, American Apparel skirt, Vans sneakers.

Rook Brand coat and hat, Tony Delfino jeans, Vans sneakers; Roberto Sanchez tank top, Levi's shorts, vintage sneakers.

Cheap Monday dress, T.U.K. shoes, vintage accessories. 

Cheap Monday sweater, Alejandra Quesada leggings, Vans sneakers, vintage hoodie.

Rook Brand shirt, Levi's jeans, Nike sneakers.

Carolina K dress, Alejandra Quesada shoes.

Vintage hat and coat, Cheap Monday shirt, Levi's jeans, Dr. Martens boots; H&M coat, Thrasher shirt, vintage jeans, Nike sneakers.