On Wednesday, Adult Swim dropped a new Rick and Morty clip in honor of Thanksgiving—and the thing is so unexpectedly touching, you'll probably have to pull a Lady Bird and call your mom once it's over.
He leans back in his chair, pulls out a scrap book, and starts to peruse the pages, flipping through photos and souvenirs from his life—a life that's taken a turn for the better after breaking ties with the Smith clan.
Do you want to tear up over photos of a Mr. Poopybutthole and his dog mourning the loss of a cat? Or shed a tear when Mrs. Poopybutthole tells him there's going to be a baby Poopybutthole joining the family? Maybe get the waterworks flowing when Mr. Poopybutthole walks into the kitchen to join his wife and Poopy child without the use of his cane, proving that gunshot wound is finally healed? Well, you're in luck.
Wallowing in a sea of emotions caused by a talking chorizo in a top hat isn't exactly how I thought I'd spend my Wednesday morning, but here we are. In any case, the clip is a nice, positive epilogue to what was Rick and Morty's darkest season yet. Give it a watch above.
I'm not crying, you're crying. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami isn't afraid of mystifying readers. His tales are grounded in just enough reality that they're plausible, so when supernatural forces inevitably intervene, the effect is disorienting. Because they're intended to flummox us, Murakami's stories are best when not logically analyzed, but intuitively felt. They take readers on a metaphysical journey, appealing to something primal and experiential.
It's this quality that also makes Murakami's world perfect for performance. When Rachel Dickstein, director and founder of Ripe Time, first read the novelist's short story "SLEEP," she thought, I have to put that on-stage. She connected with the story’s strong female lead, but something more instinctual compelled her to adapt "SLEEP." “[Reading Murakami] is such a visceral experience,” Dickstein says. “The challenge of how do you do that in the theater was really exciting to me.” Her adaptation premiered in Philadelphia last month and comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on November 29.
"SLEEP" is a story about a woman who hasn’t slept in 17 days. But she doesn’t feel tired; she feels alive for the first time in her life. As her body drifts through her routine as a mother, wife, and caretaker during the day, her mind runs free through the world of Anna Karenina, the Tolstoy novel she pours over each night. "SLEEP" draws the reader into her surreal world, where all separation between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, internal and external have collapsed. It creates a dreamscape both hard to picture and immediately recognizable to anyone who has stayed up all night on pure adrenaline.
JiehaePark, TakemiKitamura
To adapt the novel's mystical world to the stage, Dickstein assembled a world-class group of artistic collaborators, starting with playwright Naomi Iizuka and Ripe Time company members. She felt strongly that the cast should be an all-Japanese ensemble. “I wanted to collaborate with artists that were connected to the culture. I had faith that through their imagination we would find a kind of truth that Murakami had tapped into,” Dickstein points out.
Unlike traditional plays that have a set script, Ripe Time specializes in devised theater, which relies on improvisation and invention. The artists started by conducting extensive research, curating reference images, drawing architectural renderings of spaces in the story, watching Japanese horror films, reading scientific journals about insomnia, and reading multiple versions of Anna Karenina, including a Japanese translation.
The research provided the fuel for Dickstein’s devised work sessions, where the team moved scene by scene, trying out ideas from all of the artists involved. They tackled challenges like representing anxiety through sound design, or trying to visualize emotion through projections. The final play slowly emerges through rigorous, exhilarating workshops, providing a unique framework for creativity.
The process makes writing a script difficult, however. “I think you have to be willing to throw out 30 pages that you’ve written because they’re not just right,” says Iizuka. “A willingness to let go is a very good thing for a writer.” Because SLEEP is a devised collaboration, dialogue and stage directions can’t be set in stone; they need to be open and flexible. In other words, Iizuka's challenge was to provide just enough written guidance that the artists could understand the intent of a scene, but leave enough room for playfulness.
Another challenge of adapting Murakami is that his worlds defy logic and reason, and can be interpreted any number of ways. To decide what worked and what didn't, Dickstein and Iizuka set up a fluid system of checks and balances. When someone presented an idea, the entire team evaluated it on relevance, clarity, and most of all, gut feeling. Pressed to articulate what that gut feeling is, Dickstien and Iizuka describe it as “faith,” “intuition,” and “reptilian brain.” In a Murakami-esque way, it's fitting that a story about the subconscious can only be adapted by the subconscious.
Jiehae Park, Akiko Aizawa
“Everybody at different points of the process felt it: it was in the groundwater of their psyche. This story gets under your skin and you can’t shake it—it’s very much in your soul,” says Iizuka. The cast and crew of SLEEP used this feeling of connection to “take the temperature” of each improvised moment.
For example, at one point in the play, a stranger visits the main character while she’s in bed. It’s unclear whether she’s dreaming or awake as the stranger begins pouring water over her feet. Reacting to the water, her feet start washing themselves like hands might, cupping and scrubbing. The effect is terrifying, like something out of The Exorcist. But Iizuka's script never contained a stage direction that dictated: Her feet should move like hands. The movement evolved naturally during rehearsals and was unanimously accepted and added to the production.
SLEEP is a surreal, seamless patchwork of magical moments like this, woven throughout the story with the hope that if the artists found something transcendent, an audience might too. But unlike a written story, devised theater never fully settles. Between each performance, it exists in limbo—half on the page, half in the minds of the cast and crew—and continues to change. This flexibility is essential for making something physical out of the fractious sinews of the subconscious. Grab hold of anything by Murakami too tight, and it disappears.
SLEEP comes to BAM in Brooklyn as part of the Next Wave Festivalfrom November 29-December 2. Learn more about Ripe Time and the production here.
It's pretty easy to find dog meat for sale in the Indonesian city of Medan. Just walk down Jalan Jamin Ginting and listen for the sound of dogs barking. The street is known for the sale of dog meat, colloquially known as "B-1"—a term that stems from "biang," the Batak word for dog. I chose Warung Jhon, a small wooden restaurant with an open kitchen and a pungent smell of smoke and what I could only imagine was grilled dog meat.
Normintargian, the warung's owner, greeted me with a list of the dishes on the menu. There was dog soup, barbecued dog meat, and saksang, which is a kind of dog meat curry. The meat is always cooked with a heavy dose of herbs and spices that mask the gamey taste beneath a layer of ginger, white pepper, and lemongrass. But why, I asked, eat dog in the first place?
"Because it's delicious," Normintargian said.
Dog meat has been a staple of Batak cuisine for centuries, where it is commonly served in Indonesia's Christian-majority communities (the dish is part of Manado cuisine as well). Dog meat is seen as a meal that increases one's energy and stamina, as well as cures some illnesses. It's also a lot cheaper than beef or pork, which adds to the meat's popularity among non-Muslims living in North Sumatra.
But that doesn't mean dog meat isn't a controversial dish. Dogs are seen as unclean and therefore "haram" by most Indonesian Muslims—although plenty of Warung Jhon regulars told me that local Muslims still eat the dog soup for its alleged medicinal purposes.
Watch: Dining on Dogs In Yulin
"I’ve driven many people here who were Muslim," said Abet, a driver with Grab. "I could tell because the men were wearing peci. I often drive them straight here from the local hospital so they can drink the soup when they are sick."
Then there are the animal rights groups who see the sale of dog meat as a cruel and unnecessary industry. The coalition Dog Meat Free Indonesia believes that only 7 percent of the country consumes dog meat, but this still translates to millions of dogs killed for their meat every single year. The campaign to stamp out the dog meat trade in Indonesia has attracted the support of celebrities like Ricky Gervais and Chelsea Islan.
I was on Jalan Jamin Ginting to get to the bottom of Medan's dog meat trade. I wanted to know where the meat came from. Was there some kind of dog farm in the countryside? Or were people eating, as some urban legends had it, stolen pets? Turns out the truth was somewhere in the middle.
All the dogs for sale at Warung Jhon were once someone's pet, explained Normintargian. But that doesn't mean her staff are out there stealing tail-wagging canines off the streets. Some of the dogs were sold through middle-men who offer pet owners money for their dogs. But others were sold directly to Normintargian's restaurant by the owners themselves. These are problem pets, she told me, the ones who prove to be too difficult, or too old, for their owners.
“The other day someone brought in their dog because it kept eating its owner’s shoes and they wanted to get rid of it," she said. "We also get a lot of German Shepherds. People buy them as guard dogs, but they can get very aggressive, so they sell them."
German Shepherds aren't ideal for eating, because their flesh is pretty tough, Normintargian told me. She prefers smaller, younger canines, the ones with sweeter and softer meat. The young pups are bought at Rp 40,000-a-kilogram ($2.95 USD) and butchered within a few days.
But shouldn't the shop wait a few days to make sure the dogs don't have rabies? The virus is endemic in Southeast Asia, where 96 percent of rabies cases stem from infected dogs, according to data released by the World Health Organization.
Normintargian told me that their staff inspects the dogs for disease and erratic behavior, but the demand for fresh meat is too high, and the supply too low to keep the creatures around for long.
"They are killed within a few days of arrival," she told me. "We have a very fast turnover rate."
I walked out to the restaurant's courtyard to see how the dogs were killed. Outside, I found six dogs of varying size contained in a cramped metal cage and a young Batak man named Fernando. The 23-year-old butcher was too shy to look me in the eye as we spoke. I wondered if he had it in him to repeatedly kill man's best friend for a living.
But Fernando told me that he grew up eating dog meat back in his village on the banks of Lake Toba. The restaurant already had enough meat for the day, so there was no need to kill another canine, but Fernando offered to walk me through the process—without killing one, of course.
First, he clubs the dog over the head with a large stick, knocking it unconscious, Fernando said. He then binds its legs and ties it to a stake in front of the cage in case it wakes up before he gets the chance to plunge a knife in its chest.
"We do this so that the dogs can’t fight back," he told me.
Fernando then aims his blade straight at the dog's heart and collects the blood to make sauce. The body is thrown over an open flame to scorch off its fur before he cuts the dog in pieces, separating meat from organs and bone.
I squatted down and peered into one of the cages. A dog rose and started to wag its tail, staring up at me with these large chocolate-brown eyes. I asked Fernando if he ever felt bad about killing so many dogs. He shrugged and said it was just his job.
Back inside, Normintargian was eager to show me the full menu. She laid out a plate of grilled dog meat, a plate of saksang curry with a side of blood sauce, and a bowl of dog meat soup. She put a glass of nira, a sweet drink made from palm sap, on the table as well.
The smell coming off the dishes was absolutely foul to someone who isn't used to eating dog meat. It smelled like a more pungent version of goat meat and looked a bit like char siu pork. The curry was mushy and filled with offal and throw-away cuts.
I stared at the meat for a while and decided that I couldn't eat it. Part of me wondered whether the dogs had any diseases before they were butchered. But the rest of me just couldn't wrap my head around eating an animal that only a few days ago was someone's pet.
Did Normintargian ever get attached to the dogs before they were killed? Did she ever feel sorry for eating an animal seen worldwide as the closest creature to man? She shook her head and then leaned in to quietly tell me a secret. Sometimes, she gives the dogs names, Normintargian told me. Two of the pups outside were actually named Andre and Sule.
Andre and Sule, like the celebrities, I asked.
"Of course," she said. "We always name them after celebrities."
The latest in a long series of examples comes from Conservative MP Peter Kent, who recently compared growing weed at home to giving kids access to the deadly opioid fentanyl.
“Kids today will learn from one another. When it’s legal, despite the ...allowable age to consume, kids are going to harvest leaves, kids are going to experiment,” said Kent speaking in the House of Commons Tuesday. “I think what we’re doing, it’s the same, virtually the same as putting fentanyl on a shelf within reach of kids. Having plants in the home, it’s just as wacky, it’s just as unacceptable, it’s just as dangerous for Canadian society."
VICE reached out to MP Kent to ask how he came to such a conclusion. The ensuing conversation became somewhat heated.
“I’m quite aware that cannabis is not the equivalent in terms of its deadly opioid content,” Kent told VICE. “THC, if kids consumed one way or the other, deliberately or accidentally or as a joke, and became intoxicated, they’re just as at risk at home or on the street as they would be—the outcome could be just as deadly.”
When asked to point to any evidence that suggests a child could overdose and die from weed the same way they could from fentanyl, Kent said, “They are at risk, their judgment would be lost, they could wander into a red light crosswalk, they could injure themselves with tools or equipment at home, they could have any number of accidents under the influence.”
He then admitted his claim was an exaggeration.
“I said that with exaggerated rhetorical intent to say that a child under the influence who suffered a fatal accident would be just as dead as if they were negligently given access to fentanyl or any other opioid.”
Across the country, thousands of Canadians are now dying from drug overdoses each year.
In BC alone, there were 914 illicit drug overdose deaths that involved fentanyl from January to September 2017. That’s a 147 percent increase over the same time period in 2016. In all of 2016, there were 935 drug overdose deaths in BC, many attributed to fentanyl, and 2,458 opioid-related overdose deaths nationally. (The federal government has not released national fentanyl death numbers and many provinces haven’t made that data public.)
Kent said his point is “not to make a chemical equivalency discussion here” but to draw attention to “the number of children who are going to be at risk” when recreational weed becomes legal next year. At no point in the conversation was he able to point to any scientific evidence or statistics to back up his claims.
Kent, before entering office in 2008, was a long-time journalist, working for CTV, CBC, and Global television. During the interview, the Conservative politician told me, “I put my journalistic reputation against yours any day of the week.”
Now it’s easy to dismiss Kent as an out of touch opposition MP with no drug literacy trying to land a quote on the local 6 o’clock news. But in the context of a country with a long legacy of prohibition, his words do matter. For decades, the Canadian government has punished racialized and marginalized people over a plant that is significantly less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol.
Many Canadians are still trepidatious about legalization, fearful that “the children” are going to turn into stoner zombies. But, as is the case with alcohol and prescription drugs, we should leave it up to parents to be responsible with their cannabis.
Each year when the holidays roll around, we ask ourselves the same question: How should we talk to our families about contentious political issues without completely losing our minds? Otherwebsiteshave generously provided advice on how to talk about Trump with your racist uncle. But let's be real—most Thanksgivings are unlikely to turn into a CNN panel discussion. Instead, your family will probably spend the long Thanksgiving weekend relitigating the same argument they've had every year since the 1997 release of Batman & Robin—is the film, which holds a 10 percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, really that bad?
As you all know, due to the film's overwhelmingly negative reception, Warner Brothers cancelled its sequel, and the franchise wasn't resurrected again until Christopher Nolan's gritty 2005 reboot, Batman Begins, a sharp departure from director Joel Schumacher's delightfully campy rendition of the caped crusader.
I'll say it, I don't care if this makes me a member of the "coastal liberal elite": Batman & Robin did not deserve such critical condemnation. After all, great movies like Psycho, Alien, and The Shining also opened to bad reviews, but now we see the light. So this year, when your problematic grandma launches into her annual expletive-filled tirade on the ridiculousness of Batman's superhero suit having nipples, you should stay calm, cool, and collected. Here's how you demolish your relatives' bad opinions:
The fundamental divide in the typical family debate about Batman & Robin comes from whether you respect camp as an art form. The negative response to Batman & Robin was a reaction to the movie's abundance of camp—from the bright colors to the nipples on Batman's suit to Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy bellowing her lines as if she's a 1940s starlet. The movie is ultimately a celebration of artifice, exaggeration, and ridiculousness.
When your grandpa begins to quote Robert Ebert's 1997 review of film, in which the late film critic wrote the film failed "to explore the bizarre world of its heroes" and instead "settle[d] down safely into a special effects extravaganza," whip out a copy of Susan Sontag's "On Camp" and let him know that camp "is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice."
Bring the conversation back to Arnold Schwarznegger's performance as Mr. Freeze
Few universal truths exist, but it is self-evident that Arnold Schwarznegger, in his infinite and glorious stupidity, makes every movie better. Schwarznegger's admittedly silly interpretation of Mr. Freeze, with his nonsensical ice-themed puns, is part of what makes the movie so enjoyable, even to the biggest haters.
Compare Batman & Robin to other superhero movies
My biggest issue with other superhero movies, for example The Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, or even The Dark Knight Rises, is that they can be mega-boring and take themselves too seriously. Batman & Robin is a celebration of the silliness of a comic book franchise that once upon a time embraced things like the Bat-Mite and whatever is going on here.
The nipples on the Batsuit is part of the film's delightful queerness
George Clooney as Batman via Warner Brothers
In an essay about the queerness of Batman and Robin from his book, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, critic Glen Weldon wrote that both of Schumacher's Batman films "proved a final, defiantly queer victory lap for the Bruce and Dick team. What Schumacher produced wasn’t gay subtext; it was gay domtext."
So when the unavoidable question of the Bat-nipples arise, redirect the conversation to be about a far less controversial topic—queer representation in film.
Focus on the things you agree on
As a great respecter of Batman & Robin, even I can admit it has its flaws. It's at least a half-hour too long, George Clooney is uninspiring as Batman, and the plot line about Alfred dying is really, really boring. If disagreements over Batman & Robin get too heated, bring the conversation back to the points all Americans can unite around.
So this year, don't let the annual family argument about Batman & Robin get you down. Remember the advice Alfred Pennyworth gave to Batman: "There is no defeat in death, Master Bruce. Victory comes in defending what we know is right while we still live."
Once ordered only by British grandmas, the humble G&T is now mid-renaissance. Simple enough to order at the pub, fun enough to order on a night out—it might be the perfect drink. Refreshing, good price-alcohol ratio, and definitely not the reason you're suddenly telling all your friends "what you really think" about them.
Or maybe it is.
New research using data from the Global Drug Survey has found drinking spirits is strongly associated with feelings of aggression. Nearly a third of spirit drinkers reported feeling aggressive when they imbibe—more than 20 percent higher than the findings beer, red wine, or white wine.
"For centuries, the history of rum, gin, vodka, and other spirits has been laced with violence," says Professor Mark Bellis who co-authored the study. He's right, though gin in particular has long been mired by associations to poverty, madness, depression, and death since its early days of excess in 18th century London.
"This global study suggests even today consuming spirits is more likely to result in feelings of aggression than other drinks," Professor Bellis says.
Men were far more likely to experience feelings of aggression when drinking any type of alcohol. However, beer and white wine drinkers were the least likely to feel aggressive when they drink, and were far more likely to feel relaxed and confident.
For those throwing back red wines, the most commonly reported feeling was "tired," which is genuinely the least surprising finding in scientific history.
Almost across the board, spirits were found to elicit a stronger emotional response from people than any other alcohol—rendering drinkers feeling more energised (58.36 percent), confident (59.08 percent), sexy (42.42 percent), aggressive (29.83 percent), ill (47.82 percent), restless (27.81 percent), and tearful (22.24 percent).
Digging into the data for Australia, there are a few interesting differences. For one, white wine tends to be most strongly associated with feeling aggressive downunder, rather than spirits. The chardys also make us feel more ill than other drinks. And, if you're worried about getting a bit teary after a few, probably avoid the beers.
According to Global Drug Survey founder Professor Adam Winstock, the emotions people experience when they drink aren't linked to the type of alcohol they are drinking. Instead, the issue is the amount they're able to throw back.
"Alcohol is alcohol no matter the form and it all acts on the brain in the same way," Professor Winstock says. "So it's likely that part of our key findings will be related to dose, that is how much alcohol people end up drinking when they consume different types of alcohol."
According to Professor Winstock, it's easy to consume more alcohol than you planned to if you're drinking spirits—particularly if you're mixing them at home and trying to eyeball 30 mLs.
On the whole, the study is bad news for those of us who tend to overdo it with the mixed drinks. But especially vodka, lime, and soda drinkers. Not only are they boring, they're just as moody and aggressive as us G&T fans.
The 2018 Global Drug Survey is currently open, it takes about 15 minutes to complete. If you want to have your say, check out the survey site.
“Excuse me, sir? I found a couple pairs in the size you were looking for,” the saleswoman at a well-known shoe warehouse told me recently. “They’re pumps, not ankle boots, though.” She held out a pair of glossy teal heels with a sharp toe, having scoured the shelves and storeroom for any shoe that might fit me, period. When I tried them on, I felt like a caricature of a high-powered businesswoman—they fit my narrow feet, but they were a far cry from the taupe-colored low-heeled ankle boots l was looking for.
“Sir,” though, fit even less comfortably than the pumps. What was it about my eye makeup, leggings, and thigh-length sweater that said I wanted to be called “Sir”?
The twinge of discomfort that followed is one of the small taxes the world extracts from people who don’t play by the rules of gender. It was clear the warehouse that I went to, one of several stores where I’d been trying to track down elusive ankle boots for fall, just didn’t have what I was looking for. But I didn’t want to shop online. Part of the joy of shopping for me is in feeling the textures of fabric, seeing the stitching across a leather shoe vamp, trying on styles that I find attractive but would be reluctant to wear, like heeled oxfords in show-off blue. (Eventually I caved and ordered a glut of shoes off Amazon, almost all of which I sent back.)
It was just one of many situations in which I’d encountered difficulty shopping for shoes and clothes as a gender-nonconforming (GNC) person. And I’m far from alone.
The indignities GNC people often encounter when shopping for clothes has led many to loathe the experience altogether, like Roxy Sticks, a trans woman and a textile designer from Seattle. “Especially at first, I found it really unpleasant being in stores that were explicitly gendered with clearly defined menswear and womenswear sections, like Target,” she said.
For Sticks, finding clothing that’s both flattering and empowering is difficult, both socially and emotionally. Jaden Smith may grace Louis Vuitton womenswear campaigns in self-aware knee-length black skirts, but most GNC people don’t have expert stylists at their disposal. “There are very few resources, in my experience, for helping transfemme people shop,” said Sticks. “Few answers to questions like, ‘How do I shop?’ ‘What kinds of things do I look for?’ ‘How do I find cuts and styles that pair with my body?’”
The answers one does find frequently include some compromise. “When I have to go into a shoe store and they’re like, ‘What size are you?’ I just give them both men’s and women’s sizes,” said Marshall Luther, a genderqueer person from North Carolina. “I did this the other day when I was buying Vans. Vans are advertised as a pretty unisex shoe, but they’re still divided by size systems and by colors.”
Such binaries, however, can also be a sort of rallying point, a way to spark progressive conversations about what fashion can look like post-gender. “Why do we even have different sizes for so-called men and women’s shoes? It sucks because the fashion industry can totally exclude trans and GNC people,” said Luther. “But it’s not only gender nonconforming folks that feel this exclusion. My guess is that a lot of women feel very similarly about certain clothes and the need to perform femininity in certain ways.”
Sofia Yarberry is genderqueer, masculine-presenting and an erstwhile California surfer. They said the baggy fits of Carhartt clothing and relatively gender-neutral looks of skater brands, like Altamont and Wildfang, have provided some refuge from the nagging problem of sizing. “There are a few other androgynous or genderqueer brands that I like, like Dapper Boi,” they noted. “Even though they cater to the queer body, which is amazing, they tend to be prohibitively expensive, so it usually ends up being easier for me to just find men’s extra-small.”
“I grew up in southern California, and everyone—all the boys, that is—wore board shorts,” Yarberry said. “I remember my mom finally letting me buy board shorts—knee-length, surfer brand, really terrible board short—and thinking they were the coolest thing I had ever owned in my whole life. I wore those shorts all summer; they were bright blue with a little comb for surf wax that was attached to the back pocket, which is ridiculous, because I wasn’t even surfing at the time.” Those shorts, alongside other pieces they remembered fondly, like a skater jacket, allowed them to start shaping their own identity from within the skater and surfer communities. Far from an insignificant accessory, that surf-wax comb became a serious request for recognition.
Watch VICE profile how the Ukranian fashion industry changed after the country's 2014 revolution:
The fashion industry, through editorial photo spreads, Cosmo questionnaires and photoshopped advertisements, inherently asks us to tailor our bodies to its gendered demands. And though GNC people aren’t the only group putting pressure on the fashion industry to be more inclusive—for instance, the war for larger sizes and plus-size models has been underway for years—GNC people refuse one of fashion’s most deeply entrenched and primary demands: the gender binary.
Paul Tran, a transfeminine editor and poet from San Diego, told me they find a distinct pleasure in upsetting clothing and gender categories; they said they first learned the power fashion can hold from their mother, a Vietnamese immigrant. “She moved to the States in 1989 and got a job as a seamstress and an apron factory worker,” Tran said. “Every weekend we would take the bus downtown to this mall where we would look at storefronts, go into Macy’s and touch and try on things we could never afford. She would study and replicate them later and, at her most devious, sell them with false tags.” Tran said their mother taught them to undermine the biases and prejudices of society through clothes, using them as “empowerment—although an empowerment that borrowed from elitist and classist assumptions about beauty and identity.”
Ultimately, choosing one’s outfit is never simply a question of becoming comfortable enough with one’s body to wear whatever you like—one’s shirts, shoes and hats always carry an extraordinary amount of meaning and emotional complexity for the wearer. “I wear a hat all the time, especially if I'm around a lot of people,” said Red, a writer pursuing their MFA, playing with the brim of their brown mechanic’s cap. “First of all, I look fucking good in hats. Second, I feel like it gives me a little extra protection—it's like a talisman for me. But a baseball cap is also a recognized symbol of masculinity, which I think about a lot when I get dressed or when I’m pondering my sex life or how I walk in the world. Like, how do I stay true to the parts of myself that feel right while wearing things coded as masculine, and do that without participating in the devaluation of femininity?”
Some days, dressing up as a GNC person is all about wearing those shoes, that hat, and one’s shimmer and shine outside in the world, just knowing they make you look fucking great. And it’s not about anything in particular your clothes do for you, necessarily—it’s that they open a little window and give you a way to exist in a place that’s not your skin. “All of the stories I write are about being seen, about light hitting people, about sequins,” Red told me. “The question I have to ask is, who do I need to love me? I know that's me—I need to be able to see me when I look in the mirror.”
“Clothes are how I can cultivate a face,” Tran told me. Clothing is not a mask, they said, but a way of “teaching the world how to treat you. Every time I go into a store and pick out what I want to wear, every time I get ready for the day, it’s because I’m seeing the possibilities and the potential of who I can be.”
On an all-new episode of VICELAND's MOST EXPENSEVIST, 2 Chainz takes a trip to the priciest health facility on the planet. It costs $50,000 to get in the door, and the gym, sauna, and steam room are a testament to what all the money gets you. But 2 Chainz can't seem to wrap his head around the fact that it costs $10,000 to breathe from a can of fancy air.
VICELAND is also airing a new episode of THE TRIXIE & KATYA SHOW, on which two former RuPaul's Drag Race contestants dig into life's most pressing issues. This time around they're tackling death, musing on what it might be like to pass away before interviewing a mortician, quizzing strangers about fatal diseases, and playing a game called "He Dead?"
Cancer is a shit diagnosis for anyone, period. It strips a person of their daily life, throwing their relationships, career, and general sanity into chaos. And younger women who survive cancer are often dealt a unique hand of related health issues, including early menopause and fertility issues, which can lead to a decrease in libido. During treatment, as well as after, women also face a disproportionate impact on their sexual well-being that can affect them for life—yet there seems to be a void when it comes to talking about that toll.
The statistics are there: over 250,000 living American women under forty have been diagnosed with breast cancer. For both women and men, one's young adult years are a pivotal time in life to explore and learn about one's sexuality. But for younger women who survive cancer of various forms, chemotherapy can also affect one's body image and self-esteem in profound ways. And in a survey of 115 cancer survivors under 50, more than half reported genital dryness, and many reported exhaustion and genital pain as post-survival symptoms affecting their sex life. Life after cancer clearly poses notable changes in a person’s sex life—but folks also deal with changes in sexuality while undergoing treatment, too.
So much of how women carry and view themselves is tied to their bodies, and, in turn, their sexuality. A cancer diagnosis can not only cripple a woman's sense of who they are as a female, it can completely alter her understanding and exploration of her own sexuality. Although sex may be the last thing on a cancer patient's mind, several women I spoke with—who are currently in remission, but spoke to the ways cancer affected them both during treatment and afterward—confirmed it was something they grappled with.
Two of the most prominent sexual symptoms female cancer patients experience are dryness and pain in the vulva and vagina, symptoms that often follow the various surgeries and chemotherapy treatments cancer patients must endure, according to Dr. Jeanne Carter, a psychologist and sex therapist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "If you're having dryness and pain it's hard to have libido," Dr. Carter said. "It's hard to get aroused, and it's hard to discuss that sometimes."
Once they are in remission, Dr. Carter noted female patients continue to deal with sexual changes. The need for vaginal moisturizers, which is not lube, becomes important for survivors. Even though patients may undergo different symptoms and changes within their sexual repertoire, Dr. Carter noted that understanding what happens to their bodies before and after cancer is equally as important.
Talking about sex is awkward. Sharing your sexual problems with someone, whether it's your doctor or a partner, can be a process riddled with insecurity, shame, and embarrassment. And it can be hard to keep track of what's normal for your body and what isn't. As a result, women can be unsure whether to address these changes with their doctor. "Women want to talk about it but they don't know whether they should bring it up or not. Their providers know it's a concern but sometimes they're not sure whether they should bring it up or not," Dr. Carter said. "It leaves people sort of feeling alone."
It's also hard to feel desirable and literally have sex when you've got an ileostomy bag (also known as a poo bag) attached to you, said Polly Rodriguez, CEO of Unbound, an online company that sells sex products for both women and men. Rodriguez was diagnosed at 21 with colorectal cancer and given a 30 percent chance to live. "Cancer is a fucking roller coaster that you desperately want to get off of, but can't," she told me.
Rodriguez said in addition to being physically exhausted, she felt completely undesirable during treatment. "So much of sexuality is enjoying and appreciating your body, and I hated mine," Rodriguez said.
Ten years after her diagnosis, Rodriguez is in remission and said she has an active and healthy sex life; she said her experiences partly inspired her to start Unbound, "because I realized how underserved female sexuality is in today's marketplace," she said. "I also realized how uneducated I was about my own body. I didn't even know what menopause was, much less that I was going through it."
Watch VICE report on the future of cancer treatment:
For Erika Lee, a sporting brand account manager in Los Angeles, a bone cancer diagnosis altered her approach to communication and relationships. Diagnosed at the age of 18, Lee, now 28, said her college experience vastly differed from that of her friends.
After undergoing several major surgeries and chemotherapy, Lee said she just couldn't relate to folks her age. "During those years in college, that's when all of your friends are going on dates, living on campus, hanging out with boys, and focusing on other things," she told me. In turn, Lee dated and spent more time with older individuals she felt she had more in common with.
It's hard to connect with, much less sleep with, someone you can't relate to. "Female sexuality is a huge interplay between the mind and the body," Dr. Carter said. "If they're in a relationship, they worry about these symptoms and changes and how it impacts their partner." Navigating dating and relationships is doubly difficult for cancer patients, and can be accompanied by a sense of guilt or feeling like an inconvenience.
"The overwhelming mindset was that I was concerned that it would be a burden on someone else," Lee said. "I didn't want someone else to feel like they had to take care of me. Subsequently, that made it much more difficult to be vulnerable with somebody, and that includes emotionally in the relationship, but also sexually."
However, learning to cope and accept the changes in mental and physical health, Rodriguez noted, altered how she internalized her cancer battle. "It taught me that we all have our own paths in life, and sometimes the things that feel like the greatest derailments are the greatest gifts."
Despite sexual challenges and obstacles, both Lee and Rodriguez made one thing clear: a cancer diagnosis didn't eliminate their sex lives. Both women emphasized the importance of communication, and learning to rely on their partner for support. "For me, it's almost been like this blessing of permission," Lee said. "To talk about things that might be uncomfortable or awkward at first, but then it opens up this whole new line of communication that we wouldn't have had otherwise."
Plus, having the tools to have those awkward conversations are equally as important. "If I can get partners to work as a team, it's really a wonderful thing," Dr. Carter said. Speaking with patients about the changes they undergo, and sending them home with the resources they need—be it lube, communication strategies, or dilators—can empower patients. "Different doesn't have to be bad."
Battling cancer ruthlessly forces people, especially women, to mentally triage one's life. Often, understanding how it affects one's sex life comes last. And though it comes last, that doesn't mean it—or cancer patients—shouldn't come at all.
While Donald Trump was trekking through Asia earlier this month, his top economic adviser Gary Cohn met with a group of Democratic senators to talk about tax reform, the most important item currently before Congress. About 30 minutes in, Cohn took a call from Trump—but when the conversation dragged on too long, he faked a bad connection to get out of it, according to Democratic Senator Tom Carper, who was at the meeting and described it in an on-air interview with CNN.
About 15 minutes into the call, Carper said, he turned to Cohn and advised him to cut the president short. "We’re not going to have a real conversation here," Carper said in an interview on Capitol Hill. "Can’t you just tell the president that he is brilliant and say we’re losing... the connection and then hang up?”
As he tells it, Cohn took his advice.
"Fifteen minutes later, the president is still talking," Carper told CNN. "I said, 'Gary, why don't you do this, just take... your cellphone back and just say, Mr. President, you're brilliant! But we're losing contact, and I think we're going to lose you now, so goodbye.'"
"And that's what he did," Carper added, "and he hung up."
The White House released a statement calling Carper's account "completely false."
"Gary Cohn took the phone off speaker and continued to speak with the president privately for several minutes before they concluded the call," Raj Shah, a White House spokesperson, told CNBC.
Cohn still hasn't publicly weighed in on the mini-controversy, which feels a little like a scene out of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which might actually prove useful here. An accidental text on purpose could be just the thing Cohn needs to put himself in the clear.
German police recovered a trove of stolen artifacts belonging to John Lennon, including a set of diaries that the singer last wrote in on the morning he was murdered, the Associated Press reports.
Along with the diaries, police found two pairs of Lennon's iconic round glasses, handwritten musical scores, a tape recording of a 1965 Beatles concert, a cigarette case, and more—a massive haul totaling about 100 items. The memorabilia has been missing since 2006, when it was reportedly stolen from Yoko Ono's place in New York.
A majority of the stolen possessions—86 pieces—were uncovered in a German auction house last July, prompting police to investigate how they wound up there. On Monday, the cops arrested a 58-year-old man in connection to the stolen goods. When they searched his home and car, they discovered more of the missing items stuffed into his trunk.
Photo by Erbil Basay/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
According to police, Ono's former chauffeur is also wanted for the theft, but the guy is currently "unattainable" in Turkey and needs to be extradited.
Over the course of the investigation, police flew to New York to show Ono some of the recovered items. Prosecutor Susann Wettley said that Ono "was very emotional" when she saw her late husband's belongings, which have been missing for over a decade.
"We noticed clearly how much these things mean to her and how happy she would be to have them back," Wettley said.
Police are hanging onto Lennon's stuff for the moment as they continue to investigate. Hopefully, it won't take another ten years for the items to make it back into Ono's hands.
“So where’d you meet?” you ask your friend who has said they’re seeing someone. And your friend makes a weird face before going, “Oh you know, just…” And you can see their brain trying to crunch 50,000 options for admitting or potentially lying about meeting someone on Tinder. “Ummmmmmmmm” they’re saying with their eyes sideways and kind of down, before going, “WemetonTinder,” in one big rushed mumble. “And anyway I didn’t use it for long. It was just once or twice—maybe three times—and now I’ve deleted it AND erased my profile and now I’ll never use it ever again… so that’s that… just so you know.”
And so, despite the fact that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starred in You've Got Mail all the way back in 1998, online dating seems to still have a smell, while Tinder is widely considered just about unmentionable.
These brash assertions are reflected in a recent YouGov poll of 1,014 people, finding that 53 percent of millennials say they’d be embarrassed to admit they’d met a partner through a dating app. But interestingly and hypocritically, 50 percent of millennials also admit they’ve used dating apps.
And of all apps (or websites if you’re so inclined), Tinder and Bumble are widely considered the uncoolest. In a respectability rating, eHarmony scored 49+ while Tinder got 6+. Nobody seemed swayed by Bumble’s emphasis on gender equality either and also gave them 6+.
This is because, as the polling company behind the poll explained, eHarmony seems to have an air of respectability because it’s associated with long-term picket fence-style monogamy, while Tinder is just associated with hookups. Yet despite this division in social acceptability, Tinder is only slightly less famous than eHarmony, with 92 percent of adults having heard of those guys, while 91 percent have heard of Tinder.
So where does all of this leave you? Well, perhaps just happy in the knowledge that people are idiots. You just carry on swiping and doing you—because the people who are judging you are also carrying on swiping and doing themselves.
One of the most jarring things about Justice League is that Batman doesn’t want to be there. No thanks to a lethargic performance from Ben Affleck, the dark knight has become a total drag. Look, Batman is expected to brood, but this is bad. Affleck is eyeing the exits from under the cowl in every scene like an emo teenager. It’s baffling to see one of the most popular characters in DC Comics history reduced to a bloated sad sack. Over the past 75 years Batman has become a titan in pop culture, and the character has proven to be malleable, but we’ve reached a breaking point. We need to call a timeout on Batman, and it will be for the better. Think of it as a trial separation. A little breathing space will allow us to assess the incredible legacy of the character before the next step in his evolution. After all, absence makes the dark knight grow fonder.
There’s been a version of Batman in existence since the 1930s. The character was used sparingly outside of comics in the early days with the live-action Batman (1966), starring Adam West and Burt Ward, the biggest step from the page to screen. There’s a generation of fans, most discovering the series via reruns, who will talk fondly of the ’66 Batman without a hint of irony, because throughout the 70s and 80s it was the only live-action Batman around. The character hadn’t reached the unrelenting saturation point it has now in pop culture. Fans were appreciative of any adaptation, and there was no preconceived notion of what Batman “should be”. In 2017, being spoilt for choice with Batman means you always get nerd-bros lecturing you about the rigid rules Batman must abide by to be successful as an adaptation. The ’66 Batman has grown in stature each time the modern interpretation of the character has taken a huge misstep. The live action Batman of the late 1960s now looks like a multi-coloured beacon of hope during these dark times.
How did it get so crowded in the Bat-Cave? Everything changed in 1989, when Tim Burton’s Batman smashed box office records and delivered an urban gothic take on the character, which then turned the ’66 Batman into a joke it would endure for the next decade while the more appreciative fans came of age. In the late 80s, the rate of Batman suddenly accelerated to the point where a new film dropped, on average, every three years throughout the 90s: Batman Returns (1992) , Batman: The Mask of Phantasm (1993), Batman Forever (1995), Batman and Robin (1997). On the television front, Batman: The Animated Series won over news fans with its luscious art deco animation style and emphasis on telling great Batman stories with a focus on his detective skills and a deep dive into the rogue’s gallery. Somehow, within a decade we got more Batman than ever before, and experienced his rise and demise.
Batman & Robin killed the character’s mojo. The proof is in how long it took him to return to the big screen: eight years. Somehow, the timing was right. We got a period long enough to take stock of Batman before Christopher Nolan would redefine the character with the Dark Knight Trilogy, which pushed the comic book movie beyond its limits. Critics praised the film and Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his chilling portrayal of the Joker. The Dark Knight was nominated for eight Oscars in total; Batman wasn’t just blockbuster fodder anymore, the character had serious cred in cinema history.
Still, the rate of a Batman film every three or four years picked up again during this period, which has persisted through to now with Batman versus Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad (Batman has a cameo, but it counts) and Justice League. Amongst all this, Batman got bricked in The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie, which further complicated things (in the best possible way) by offering a self-aware, meta take on the character’s existence. The Lego Batman Movie functions like a thesis on the contradictions of Batman’s long history, differing characterisations and varied adaptations. Any take on Batman that follows the Lego version has to work hard to outpace the way it joyfully makes fun of itself and the entire Batman canon.
Batman got called back into action, prematurely, because of one major event: The Avengers. Marvel executed their dream of a shared cinematic universe and no blockbuster was ever going to feel the same ever again. Warner Brothers scrambled to squeeze their heroes into this model of filmmaking with their rejigged, mopey take on Superman, Man of Steel—the first to take flight. Naturally, Batman had to be shoved in as soon as possible. DC Comics have been adding Batman to things like a bad habit for years. Batman’s presence can significantly boost sales because the character has always been a Bat-Magnet for fans. You can always tell which comic title needs a bump or is about to be axed when Batman shows up. But as soon as Batman appeared in Dawn of Justice it was clear more time was needed to catch our breath from The Dark Knight Rises, which provided an ending worthy of giving Batman a well-earned rest.
Warner Brothers is expecting to lose up to $100 million on Justice League after it failed to draw a big enough audience in America to chip away at the film’s $300 million budget. When a film studio can’t make bank off the back of a team of iconic heroes, which includes Batman—one of the most profitable characters of all time—there’s a huge problem (also, maybe don’t spend $300 million on one summer movie?). While most of the blame lies with the film itself, I can’t help but feel Batman fatigue has crept in, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s a betrayal of Batman’s legacy, which is now full of rich interpretations no matter how you feel about ’66 Batman, Burton Batman, cartoon Batman, Bat-Nipple Batman, Brick Batman or Nolan’s reboot.
Another Batman film is in the works with director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) at the helm (for now), with the strong possibility that Batman will be recast. Batman’s best ally at the moment is time. We know the magic number is eight years, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of Batman in the world. Use the time to revisit ’66 Batman in its entirety, watch the remarkable animated film The Mask of Phantasm, or appreciate the brilliance of the only Batman Christmas movie, Batman Returns. I’m confident the next great interpretation of Batman is on the horizon, but a break would be nice.
For decades, many people dealing with addiction have been branded with an obscene label by their own doctors: SPOS—an acronym for “subhuman piece of shit." It's hospital slang, handed down over time from attending physician to resident to intern to medical student. In a recent story for the New Yorker, Dr. Jerome Groopman described his own introduction to the label: As an intern at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1970s, he was proud that he had saved the life of a patient named Vinny, who had a dangerous infection spread by unclean needles. The young doctor believed it when his patient swore he’d never shoot drugs again. But the guy was back in the E.R. with another addiction-related problem in less than a month.
“My supervising resident told me that I had been naïve to have any faith in Vinny’s promises; he was, in the parlance of the resident, like all addicts, an SPOS—a subhuman piece of shit.”
The very existence of the label encapsulates the way America’s health care system has made physicians and people with addiction into natural enemies. While docs who have trained more recently suggest casual use of cruel medical vernacular has declined, many say the bias it reflects remains devastatingly common. And if we don’t change the structural features that create this problem, it will be almost impossible to end the overdose crisis, which is now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
This brutal stigma helps explain why people with addiction frequently avoid medical care—and why, as recently as 2015, only an estimated 3 percent of primary-care doctors had done the legally mandated training required to prescribe the lifesaving medication buprenorphine, a.k.a Suboxone. (And fewer than half of them were actually dishing it out.) Obviously, addiction is heavily stigmatized in society generally, in part because the whole point of criminalizing a behaviour is to shame and damage the reputation of those who engage in it in order to deter others. But why does the stigma seem to be even worse among those who we expect to compassionately care for it?
“I’m so sad that this is even a question,” said Dr. Esther Choo, associate professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, noting that it is difficult to quantify prejudice.
“I’ve heard ‘addict,’ ‘junkie,’ ‘drug seeker,’” added Dr. Molly Rutherford, an addiction specialist in Louisville, Kentucky, “I’m sure it’s funny to a lot of people, but it’s also not productive in tackling an opioid epidemic.”
“I don’t know if I’ve heard people use that phrase,” Dr. Adam Lake, a family physician in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said of the SPOS label. But “I’ve heard ‘drug seeking’… and if there is any whiff of somebody seeking drugs for addiction reasons, their concerns are not treated the same way."
Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a primary-care doctor at Mass General, has himself suffered from opioid addiction and told his story in a recent book, Free Refills. While he suspects use of extreme language like SPOS by doctors has declined in recent years, he thinks the prejudice remains as strong as ever. “They have the same thoughts— but not maybe the same stigmatizing nicknames,” he told me.
Drug criminalization itself is a key part of the problem. Since opioids are illegal other than for medical purposes, doctors are the only legit gateway to these substances. This has extremely problematic side effects for the treatment of both pain and addiction. For one, it means that doctors risk not only losing their licenses if they fail to detect that someone is faking pain to feed addiction—but they can also face criminal charges if patients re-sell the drugs or overdose.
“There’s just this sort of vague threat,” said Lake, adding that fears about licensing and criminal charges “have this really chilling effect and make us really nervous.”
The fact that there is no plausible lie detector or pain detector out there means physicians who are basically too kind can wind up in trouble, even when they mean well. For instance, they can be held responsible for overdose deaths even if the patient is injecting a drug meant to be swallowed or drinking alcohol with their dose. That leads many to simply avoid treating pain with opioids, period.
“It’s like, I can lose my license for treating you well,” as Lake put it. Noting that patients in addiction or pain treatment with opioids are often required to sign contracts about appropriate medication use and to be available for regular urine testing, Grinspoon inveighed, “We’re put in the role of policemen and that’s really stressful… it’s destructive to the doctor/patient relationship.”
All of the physicians I interviewed also noted that in the current medical climate—where appointments are rushed and doctors are being asked to do many more things than is temporally possible—one more rule or demand can seem intolerable. “You can see why a lot of doctors say, ‘I just don’t want to deal with this,’” Grinspoon said.
And because doctors have the final say on prescriptions, they can easily become targets of rage and desperation among addicted patients who believe they need the medication, no matter what.
One way to solve the problem would be to reduce the perceived need to lie when addicted patients are desperate for drugs. If emergency rooms and physicians who catch people “doctor shopping” began to simply prescribe a dose of methadone or buprenorphine on the spot, there would be far less incentive to fake pain to get drugs.
“Gail D'Onofrio's work has shown that initiating medically-assisted treatment for opioid use disorders in the emergency department is feasible and works,” Choo told me. “Her initial findings are being tested in a multi-center trial now.”
In order for this to be most effective, patients would have to be offered access to maintenance drugs with far fewer strings attached than is typical now. In other words, both the health of addicted people and their relationship to doctors could be improved if getting access to drugs to avoid withdrawal (and reduce exposure to deadly fentanyl) did not include requirements like seeing a counselor, showing up to a clinic regularly and being at risk of being thrown out of treatment for things like using marijuana.
Doctors also need a genuine safe harbor in the law when they prescribe in good faith, either in this kind of “low-threshold” addiction care or for pain. It is not the doctor’s fault if she gets fooled by someone whom she has no reason to suspect is lying, dealing or misusing drugs. People shouldn’t be held responsible for things over which they have no control.
Blaming physicians for overdose deaths that occur in such situations helps no one—and simply leads doctors to hate and fear treating both pain and addiction, which reduces their ability to empathize overall.
No one deserves to be “treated like an addict,” and it is outrageous that America’s medical and legal systems have created a situation in which once addiction is suspected, compassion is eliminated. There’s no other disease where, after diagnosis, doctors simply drop patients for showing symptoms, all the while calling them despicable names.
And the irony is that treating addiction is far from the most difficult or hopeless task in medicine. While people in active addiction can admittedly sometimes be “hard to like,” as Rutherford put it, people in recovery tend to be quite the opposite—and given time, most people actually do recover.
“Once I started doing it, it just became my passion, because it’s so rewarding to see how their lives change when they get into recovery,” Rutherford said. “That’s why we went into medicine… to help people.”
For Isabelle, the need to seek out ayahuasca as an alternative form of treatment came after a long and continuous battle with an eating disorder growing up.
“When I was young I had experienced some trauma and abuse in my family, and I had a lot of resentment towards it, and I think it definitely contributed to my eating disorder,” Isabelle, 25, who works in the energy field in Toronto and has requested anonymity due to ayahuasca’s illegality, told VICE.
“I had tried a lot of external things for my mind to heal my eating issue, and none of them worked for me. I tried a lot of therapy, medication, drugs, diets—so many things,” she said.
In addition to practicing the 12-step program, Isabelle decided to incorporate ayahuasca into her recovery plan.
Isabelle explained how her first ayahuasca retreat took place in a private residence outside of Toronto, after being referred by a friend.
“I experienced quite out-of-this-world stuff. You have to see it to believe it,” she said. “The medicine stays with you after because you can’t deny some of the lessons you’ve learned from it—it’s not just, ‘I need to take shrooms for the day and have a good experience and that’s it.’
“It’s been five years now that I have not had symptoms of my eating disorder. On the mental side, ayahuasca has helped with that and also furthered me along a spiritual path,” she said, noting she undertook one more ceremony.
Eating disorders are among the most difficult mental disorders to treat, involving high rates of mortality. But a 2017 Canadian study found that the ceremonial use of ayahuasca on individuals diagnosed with eating disorders led to reductions in symptoms, with participants reporting that the drug altered their perception towards their physical bodies.
Researchers acknowledge that since there haven’t been any clinical trials and only qualitative studies on the connection between ayahuasca and eating disorders, we are very much in the preliminary stage of unraveling the psychedelic brew’s healing potential.
But the study highlighted the need for new and innovative approaches in treating eating disorders, including more research on traditional ayahuasca ceremonies.
Known today as one of the most potent hallucinogenic drugs in the world, ayahuasca was largely off the cultural radar until the past few decades, where it is gaining notoriety as an alternative form of therapy for addiction and mental health disorders.
But experts are arguing that the criminalization of the substance, as well as the challenges in getting government research grants, have made it difficult for the medical community to push forward research on its healing potential. (It’s a problem that scientists studying any controversy drug or subject often deal with.)
The psychedelic plant-based tea brew has been used for centuries by Amazonian Indigenous groups. While ayahuasca practices vary, they retain key traditional elements, such as taking place in a ceremonial group setting where individuals drink with a few experienced drinkers, otherwise known as “healers” or “shamans.”
In a global study published last week by the University of Exeter and University College London, researchers drew data from more than 96,000 people worldwide and found that ayahuasca is linked to improved wellbeing and holds potential as a treatment for alcoholism and depression.
Other research, such as a 2013 observational study of a rural First Nations community in British Columbia, have found that ayahuasca-assisted treatment is associated with positive and lasting changes in participants suffering from substance abuse and stress.
But amid legal challenges around the criminalization of ayahuasca, experts are highlighting the need for the traditional brew and its heritage to be incorporated into Canadian public health policy discussions.
Dr. Kenneth Tupper, director at the BC Centre on Substance Use, told VICE that what makes ayahuasca unique to other psychoactive drugs is its rich spiritual history and ceremonial aspects.
But he said the legality of ayahuasca use is a “major impediment” to determining how ayahuasca in its traditional form, can address mental health disorders.
“As a result, there’s no standardization or accreditation on who has done the training,” said Tupper. “It’s a bit of a wild west.”
Ayahuasca, which contains the drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is classified as a Schedule III drug in Canada, making it illegal. Other schedule III drugs include amphetamines, psychedelics and hallucinogens. According to the Canadian Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, those found trafficking ayahuasca could potentially face up to ten years in jail.
Those that want to conduct activities with ayahuasca, including studying its use in a clinical setting, need to apply for a Section 26 Class Exemption under the act.
In 2001, Céu do Montréal, a Santo Daime church in Quebec, applied to receive religious exemption under Section 26 to import and use ayahuasca in their rituals.
An investigation by Health Canada’s Office of Controlled Substances in 2008 found that the risks of ayahuasca are minimal when used in traditional ceremonial contexts and when participants were carefully screened. But when Health Canada provided a recommendation to exempt ceremonial ayahuasca use from the Canadian Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the request was eventually denied by federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, who cited that the brew “would not be in the public interest.”
In 2011, Health Canada sent a cease-and-desist order to physician Gabor Mate, who was experimenting with the ceremonial use of ayahuasca to treat addictions in a First Nations community.
Most recently, the Céu do Montréal was eventually granted a Section 56 Exemption in June 2017 - sixteen years after applying. But Tupper says there hasn’t been a similar pathway for the research community to access ayahuasca brews for clinical trials. He adds that some researchers expect the exemption process for medical purposes to be equal to, if not more difficult.
“It is theoretically possible to go about getting the necessary approvals,” he says. “But the regulation and protocols are not well suited to a traditional indigenous medicine.”
Tupper adds that the “amount of work and red tape” it would require to go through the exemption process makes it extremely difficult for researchers to study ayahuasca in its traditional forms.
While the regulation of ceremonial ayahuasca has not been clearly articulated in recent years, the Canadian government released a recent report exploring different approaches to legalizing the non-medical use of marijuana (which is currently illegal in Canada, except when used for medical purposes. It will be legal by next July) and other psychoactive substances.
While the report states that substances like ayahuasca “are currently planned to remain illegal” even in the context of spiritual or medical practices, it acknowledges that once marijuana is legalized, arguments may be made for other substances to follow suit.
Tupper explained that the road to becoming an ayahuasca healer requires a great deal of medical training and preparation, not unlike that of a medical doctor. Those who partake in traditional ayahuasca ceremonies must also engage in “rigorous periods of dieting, restrictions of foods like salt, alcohol and meats, and refraining from sex,” he said.
But ayahuasca’s criminalization has made it a mostly underground practice, contributing to “risks around the training and integrity of practitioners doing ayahuasca ceremonies…for instance, there have been accusations of sexual assaults on the part of practitioners,” Tupper added.
“In the Amazon, it’s the same way—some people are putting themselves out there as more knowledgeable in order to get tourist dollars.”
Tupper added that the need for more research also speaks to the limitations of modern medicine in treating a variety of illnesses.
While we are still at the early stages of unraveling ayahuasca’s healing potential, research is showing promising results, said Tupper.
“We need to recognize that ceremonial ayahuasca drinking is a different practice than Western approaches of addressing mental health issues,” he added.
“For some people, modern medicine is an effective treatment…but for many, they are not and we are in need of exploring further scientific research [to] clarify for whom and under what conditions ayahuasca can be used as a form of treatment.”
I feel so strongly—beyond all the shit that is depression/anxiety—that I am creative (I like writing). Yet when this shit comes up, whether with the arrest of a depressive episode or with the unease of anxiety—all that creative energy is gone and I either end up crying, fucking, hanging out w friends out of a need to be not alone, or getting sleepy/going to sleep. I read all these spiritual books about the center of your spirit that’s beyond the ego and I hear all these sober people (I just got sober) who talk about it, yet I can’t tap into that. Am I just kidding myself and am not really an artist? I feel like there’s a 5 lane freeway of like 10,000 pages of words in my head and there’s a sixteen-wheeler blocking it all off.
I think the reason I am so preoccupied with the artist label is that if I let it go, I fear I will be nothing, but maybe that’s the first step to making peace with it? I am thankful for my depression because it at least holds the hand of my creativity until I actually try to create then I’m like fuck this shit I wanna be happy. Then I start trying to pursue happiness the way other people do, you know, normally with a healthy balance. But it’s not too long till I have to admit that’s an act or more often it blows up in an obsession/episode.
-Jammed
Dear Jammed,
It sounds to me like you are in need of some space in a few capacities—a space to allow yourself not to create, a space in which to create, and a space that is free from labels like “normal” and even “artist.”
I congratulate you on your newfound sobriety, and also, I feel for you. As a newly-sober person, it’s common to feel an uptick in depression and anxiety, because you aren’t self-medicating your symptoms. In keeping with your freeway analogy, picture yourself like a car, with a ton of shit in the backseat, that has been driving super-fast on a road trip. Suddenly, the car comes to a complete stop and all of that shit that was in the backseat flies forward.
It’s also very natural that you would feel self-doubt regarding your identity. I know for myself that as an addict, drugs and alcohol shaped much of my self-conception. I bought into the “fucked up artist” archetype for years and wrote off my drinking and using as synonymous with being a creative human being. Most of what I was writing was shit—and at many points I was barely writing at all—but as long as I was fucked up, it sort of felt like I was doing something. When I got sober, I was scared I would never write again. I gave myself an entire year off just so I wouldn’t have to confront a blank page with a lucid mind. Looking back, this was the best thing I could have done for myself and I encourage you to allow yourself that space. If writing is in your blood, you will return to it.
Illustration by Joel Benjamin
The year that I took off from writing allowed me to divest myself of grandiosity regarding the act, and its relationship to my identity. I could just be a human being. It was enough to stay sober and help other sober people. Then, after a year passed, I enrolled in a local writing workshop that anyone could be part of (this was years after I had received a degree in it). The deadlines were enough to give me a bit of structure within the “nothingness” but the informality of the workshop made it so that I didn’t put the existential weight of the world on what I wrote. I committed to one poem at a time. And it was one poem at a time that very gradually, over many years, led me to becoming a working writer.
In terms of the nothingness—that fear of erasure we have if we extricate ourselves from those labels that seem to give us a shape—maybe that is the key to your writing. I personally prefer to read writers who have soaked in that nothingness than those who seem to know “what is what.” Knowing nothing seems like a more profound place to start (and finish! I hope to never believe I know anything, actually) than knowing everything.
I also recommend that you play with the nothingness, a lack of structure, in terms of the physical way you write. As a result of my self-defeating thoughts (depression symptom) and predictions of worst-case scenarios (anxiety symptom), I don’t think I would ever get anything done if I sat down at a desk and said, “Okay, it’s time to write now.” Rather, I write as an escape hatch from living amongst people, an act of rebellion, a thing I am not “supposed” to be doing. I write on my phone in bathrooms at parties, while walking down the street and lost in crowds. I’ve dictated two books in the car in Los Angeles. All of this is to say that writing, for me, is definitely a respite from anxiety and depression, but only when I don’t make it its own accomplishment-focused entity with which to further beat myself up.
xo
SST
Watch: Why Anxiety Is Actually Good for You
Dear So Sad Today,
What does it mean to be “okay” as someone who suffers from mental illness? Will we ever be okay as opposed to “okay.” Is the “okay” state where you’re depressed, feeling like dying every day but living your days out of bed better than feeling every feeling and sleeping because being awake is a nightmare?
Thanks,
Not Fine
Dear Not Fine,
I think it’s up to every human being to say what being okay means to them. I sometimes push myself to perform society’s definition of “okayness,” which only creates anxiety in terms of the discrepancy between my insides and my outsides. While sometimes we act better than we feel and it helps us to get out of ourselves, I don’t know that “fake it till you make it” is a permanent solution. I think “fake it till you make it” causes a lot of us with depression to run around wearing masks. We look at the person next to us and perceive they are “okay,” when in reality, they may be performing too.
For me, “okayness” is less about an outwardly-imposed expectation of what my life should look like and more a question of experience. There have been countless times when I’ve thought my feelings were going to kill me. There have been many periods of anxiety and depression from which I said, “What if I never recover?” And yet, I’ve come out the other side of each of these, thus leading me to believe that there is, somewhere, an underlying okayness underneath an overwhelming not-okayness.
Likewise, I’ve found that it’s dangerous when I’m feeling good to just assume that I’m going to be “okay forever.” Depression is a chronic illness, and just when I think I will never have to contend with symptoms again, I find myself surprised with them.
All in all, I say do “all the things” to take care of your mental health. Make sure there is one person on Earth with whom you are always completely honest. Show up for therapy, and/or a support group to whom you are accountable. If you’re on psych meds, take them as prescribed. Then, knowing that a structure is established in which you are safeguarded, feel free to not get out of bed.
xo
SST
Buy So Sad Today: Personal Essays on Amazon, and follow her on Twitter.
The president of the United States is an important job, so much so that it would seem like his words should carry considerable weight. Pronouncements from the Rose Garden, the Oval Office, or—in America's current predicament—Donald Trump's smartphone presumably signal what the US government is doing or plans to do. Stocks rise and fall on his word alone. Foreign policy observers carefully watch Trump's Twitter feed for indications on the direction of US diplomacy, and note the apparent gap between the president and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. After all, these tweets, as the White House confirmed in June, are "official statements" from the president.
But what do you do when the president's official statements are often nonsensical, toxic, or even dangerous?
All year, journalists and other Trump-watchers have faced this problem. In December, before Trump took office, I wrote that his tweets "aren't necessarily deliberate statements of misinformation, but neither are they necessarily true; sometimes they reflect the important issues of the day, while other times they're meant as a distraction from it." I don't think that has changed, but it's proved pretty tricky to sort out the distractions from the important declarations. Occasionally, Trump has tweeted angry screeds that seem designed solely to alarm people concerned about fading political norms. Other times, he's used Twitter to announce concrete policies, like when he said trans people should be kicked out of the military.
As Trump's presidency trundles along, it's becoming increasingly clear that the best thing to do is to ignore his online persona. That course of action has been suggested by White House and Republican officials who obviously don't want to talk about embarrassing tweets. But there's a better reason for tuning the tweets out, which is that what Trump says matters far less than what Trump does.
There has been an assumption for a long time that the president was the most important official in government and that everything he said was carefully considered and therefore worthy of analysis. But Trump does not consider his words carefully—he spews them out at great volume and with great velocity. When he was merely a wealthy TV star, he feuded constantly with other celebrities. On the campaign trail, he never met a conflict he couldn't turn into a conflagration, including one particularly ugly spat with the parents of a KIA Muslim soldier.
A change in address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has obviously not affected Trump's temperament. Early Wednesday morning he launched into a Twitter tirade that included shots at controversial basketball dad LaVar Ball and the NFL that could have come from a third-string ESPN2 talking head, a retweet of a Hillary Clinton–bashing Trump fan, and a retweet of Fox News host Laura Ingraham who was, uhhhh, praising Charles Manson? Or something?
Ball has previously been one of the president's top targets after proving insufficiently grateful for Trump's help in getting his son, UCLA player LiAngelo Ball, out of Chinese jail—and later hotel detention—for allegedly shoplifting. The president's whinging has elevated Ball's already-high profile to the point where he did a bizarre CNN interview on Monday. This obviously has nothing to do with any big-ticket item on Trump's agenda.
I don't believe Trump tweets in order to purposefully draw the public's attention to shiny objects. He requires no ulterior motive to manufacture tabloid-ready drama; he beefs with whomever he can as naturally as a dolphin frolics in the ocean. Functionally, Trump's tweets are mostly just empty calories. Trump's trans military ban, for instance, wasn't formally proposed via that tweet but a memo signed a month later. It is still under review by the Pentagon and multiple courts have already ruled against it. Meanwhile, Trump's angry rhetoric against North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un—his number-one antagonist before Ball, at least—came around the same time the US and North Korea were actually engaged in back-channel talks. (What may have actually made diplomacy with the Hermit Kingdom more difficult was not Trump's tweets but his recent designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.)
Trump can send cable news into a tizzy with a few thumb-taps, but he hasn't demonstrated anything close to that much command over his own government. Congress has largely ignored Trump's budget proposal, and even Executive Branch officials feel free to contradict and disagree with him in public. And what might turn out to be his lasting legacies—such as the politicization and paring back of vital federal agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Census, or the administration's brazen conflicts of interest—are never discussed on Twitter.
At this point, ill-considered presidential tweets—along with the occasional bizarre IRL statement—have become routine, as has the outrage they generate. For Trump himself, they obviously provide a way to blow off steam. For his opponents, they are another piece of evidence that he is not a serious or competent chief executive. Many of his supporters, I suspect, enjoy the fact that Trump is publicly taking the fight to his haters—even when those haters are as inconsequential as LaVar Ball or Oakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch. (One can't help but notice that a lot the targets of his digital ire are black.)
Which is to say everyone gets something out of these "official statements," and I don't expect people to stop working themselves into a lather over the president's Twitter presence. But if we're interested in analyzing what the Trump administration is doing, its goals moving toward, which policies it is actually changing and why, @realDonaldTrump provides little guidance.
Trump won the Republican primaries and then the 2016 general election at least in part because too few people too him seriously. When the leading news stories on the president are so often about his personal grudges and outrageous shitposting, it doesn't seem like we've learned a whole lot of anything.
Like all good things – at least, all things that start out good but finish in a toxic pit of misery – most relationships come to an end. When they do, you're usually left with some memories, some lessons learned and a box of junk – stuff your ex gave you, or stuff they just couldn't be bothered to pick up after it all ended in tears. Depending on how painful the breakup was, you might want to chuck that box at some point, or douse it in gasoline and set it ablaze. But chances are that, before you finally do, you'll snatch out that one little thing you can't bear to part with. A card, a book or a shirt that looked great on you.
We asked people from cities around Europe to show us the stuff they've held onto long after a relationship ended.
Bugsy, 26, Musician, London, United Kingdom
Photo by Chris Bethell
I've kept a rare Gaslight Anthem record on vinyl that's not available online, on CD or on Spotify. It's coloured red and it's got the words "fuck you" scratched into it.
My ex-girlfriend originally bought it as a gift before we broke up, but decided to give it to me as a parting gift. At first I was like, "Oh, fantastic, thank you very much," and then she apologised and said, "Sorry, I've carved 'fuck you' into it." I felt extremely emotional when she gave it to me, knowing the soreness she was feeling was because of me. But also, strangely, it made me smile, because it reminded me of how well she knew me.
I've never thought of throwing it away. The good times we had were good times regardless, and although carving "fuck you" into a record seems quite spiteful, it reminds me of the nature of relationships, the nature of humans and how emotional we can be. It's also a symbol of forgiveness – I totally forgive her for what she put me through, and I hope she does the same.
– As told to Chris Bethell
Emma, 29, Artist, London, United Kingdom
Photo by Chris Bethell
I wear this watch every day. It was a present from a girl I was dating – the first girl I ever dated. I was living a very heteronormative life before her, but then suddenly I met her and she became my girlfriend. We’re still friends now. This was the last gift I got from her and it was the first time I got something from a lover I really liked.
We broke up over Christmas in 2013. There wasn't one reason, really – but it was partly that I lived in London while she lived in the Netherlands. It was complicated – I'm a complicated person to be with. I don't associate the watch with her on a daily basis, it's really mine now. But I do sometimes realise it was from when we were together.
– As told to Chris Bethell
WATCH: Meet the Man Servants You Can Now Hire to Get Over Your Ex
Maria, 28, Journalist, Athens, Greece
Photo by Panos Kefalos
My ex bought this router for me two years ago so I'd have a faster internet connection. Actually, he bought it because he played online games every time he came over, so the upgrade was more a gift for himself than for me. It's the only thing I've kept from him, because it's very useful. All the other things he left at mine – underwear, shoes – I threw out about a year after we broke up. Don't ask me why it's over, ask him. I still don't know.
I never considered throwing it away, because it's a good router. I do want to change the password, though, because it consists of a combination of letters from his name and numbers from his date of birth. Whenever someone visits me and asks for the wifi password I think of my ex – which is especially uncomfortable when I have a new boyfriend over.
– As told to Pavlos Toubekis
Konstantinos, 30, Musician, Athens, Greece
Photo by Panos Kefalos
This is my acoustic bass – I rarely use it, but I love it. My first real girlfriend gave it to me for my 19th birthday.
I remember that day well – she called and asked if she could come over. When she arrived she hid it behind her back, and I acted very surprised. I didn't want to ruin the moment for her. That gift meant I could play along with my band's acoustic sets, and it meant I had a girl who loved me enough to spend all that money on me. I think it was one of the happiest days of my life. We broke up four or five months later, because we both wanted to have some new experiences.
I will always think of her when I see this guitar. My current girlfriend knows this was a gift from an ex, but she's not bothered by it at all. She plays the bass too and thinks it's cool. What can I say? I'm very lucky.
– As told to Pavlos Toubekis
Fritz, 23, Photographer, Berlin, Germany
Photo by Hanko Ye
My ex gave me this for my birthday a while ago. It's a dark brown, wooden box with a latch and a holder for long rolling paper. It's a box for pot smokers, if you couldn't tell.
Smoking pot is a big part of my everyday life, so I love using high-quality items for it. This box is hand carved, and it's a thing of beauty – I use it every day. The gift was very special to me, because a lot of thought and care went into it. We split up a year ago and we're no longer in touch, but it's never crossed my mind to throw it out. To be honest, I barely ever think of my ex when I take some weed from the box. It's just my little stash box now.
– As told to Hanko Ye
Lars, 22, Student, Berlin, Germany
Photo by Marvin Ku
This jacket is from a flea market in the Prenzlauer Berg area of Berlin. My ex was broke, but he wanted this jacket so badly that I paid for half of it. That whole day was amazing – we sat in the grass and drank beer, and later we bought another two jackets. I really love jackets.
He only wore it a few times after that. I never really understood why he wanted it so badly – his entire wardrobe is black. Even grey is too flamboyant of a colour for him. I'm the exact opposite, and I thought it looked better on me anyway. So I started wearing it a lot, and gradually just made it mine.
We split up in January – we had a lot of unnecessary drama over New Year's. I kept the jacket after the breakup and he never asked for it back. Of course I think about him when I'm wearing it – but more about the lovely day we spent together than about how everything went to shit in the end. The guy I'm seeing now commented on the jacket – I just said I got it at a flea market. It's the truth, after all.
– As told to Marvin Ku
Nikolaj, 24, Student, Copenhagen, Denmark
Photo courtesy of Nikolaj Rohde Simonsen
These are a pair of silk cuffs you can use to tie up your partner during sex. My ex gave them to me on my birthday, but we never tested them out – we broke up two days later, in August of 2015.
She said that I could go back to the shop and get a refund, but I didn’t feel like doing that. I think they're pretty nice and fun to have, so I kept them. I've never used them, though – I do still associate these cuffs with my ex, and it would be too weird to think of her while using them in bed with someone else.
– As told to Clara Krohn
Cecilie, 24, Student, Copenhagen, Denmark
Photo by Amanda Hjernø
My ex bought a star for me in 2010. The gift contains a certificate, a star map, the coordinates of the star and a guide on how to find it. He named the star "Unique", I guess because I was unique to him. We broke up two years later, and these days the certificate sits in a box in my attic. As shitty as the gift might be, I don’t have the heart to throw it away.
I remember that, right before our first Christmas together, we were hanging out when he suddenly said, "Now I know what to buy you for Christmas!" He sat down behind his computer and began to type away. When he asked me stuff about my star sign I got really excited and wondered what he had come up with. And then on Christmas Eve he handed over a bunch of papers from some company that said a star was named after me. I remember feeling so embarrassed.
I mean, the thought itself is sweet, but it's so impersonal. And it's not like there's actually a star officially named after me now – he just paid for a company to send me that certificate. I probably wouldn't give it another thought if I accidentally threw it away.
– As told to Clara Krohn
Read: Australians talking about the stuff from past relationships they've kept
Andreea, 30, Digital Marketer, Bucharest, Romania
Photo courtesy of Andreea
I kept almost everything my former boyfriends ever gave me, but this huge fluffy Eeyore is my favourite. I noticed it in a shop where I was buying gifts to donate to children for Christmas, and I couldn’t stop hugging it.
Nine months later, on my birthday, we were in my ex's car driving through the pouring rain on our way to meet our friends in the pub. At one point, he pulled over and gave me a gift bag, with a night light in it and a birthday card with the message, "So you won't be afraid to sleep alone in the dark". Then he asked me to get an umbrella from the boot of the car. I flat-out refused, considering the weather. He insisted, but finally we both got out and opened the boot. And there it was. I was ecstatic.
We broke up almost five years ago, and were together for seven. I don't think about him when I see it – it's this huggable donkey in my living room, which does very well with my friends when they're drunk at my house and in the mood to take some random selfies.
– As told to Iulia Roșu
Dimitrije, 26, Airline Customer Service Agent, Belgrade, Serbia
Photo courtesy of Dimitrije Gušić
I've had many opportunities to throw this sock away, but I don't want to. My ex left it at mine, and I found it later on my bed, after she had left. We were in a long-distance relationship, and she told me to keep the sock safe until she came back with the other one. It felt deeply romantic at the time.
We broke up over four years ago – she told me she was cheating on me with two other guys. But I won't throw it away – I got over her, but holding the sock and knowing I still have it makes me feel good. I don't have anyone special in my life right now – I suppose a new girlfriend wouldn't like this sock as much.
– As told to Ana Jaksic
Nada, 19, Student, Kragujevac, Serbia
Photo courtesy of Nada Uštević
My first love gave me this Easter egg last year – an actual egg, which has the words "Faculty of Medical Science Kragujevac" painted on them. That's where he studied at the time. I liked it so much that I didn't eat it, but kept it. We broke up about six months ago because I started uni in another city. We just drifted apart.
I haven't met anyone new after we broke up. The egg is still on my shelf – it's not broken or cracked yet, so it doesn't smell. I'lI keep it until that happens. You know, eggs have an expiration date, but memories don't.
I read a while back that the stars of 13 Reasons Why (Netflix’s problematic teen drama) Dylan Minnette and Katherine Langford decided that their characters would have matching Arcade Fire posters in their bedrooms. This happened because Minette is a big fan and both actors thought the posters fit their characters personalities.
I think they were right, because I thought the two leads were the most pretentious people alive when I watched the show, and the abstract Arcade Fire posters were the cherry on top. Is that what they intended? Maybe not. Am I wrong for thinking Arcade Fire posters are pretentious? I don’t think so. But it illustrates an important point: people (like me) are going to judge you based on what you have on your walls. Your “Live Laugh Love” poster is going to say a lot more about you than anything you could actually say. Especially in college, where your drunk floormates are inevitably going to end up in your dorm room looking at them.
So VICE ventured into college dorms to check out what students are putting up on their walls and ask them what they want people to think.
From left to right, Adyn Langlois and Mateus Butterwick.
Adyn Langlois and Mateus Butterwick, 19
Please explain this very moody poster of teen idol Shawn Mendes. Adyn: OK, so at first we liked him “ironically” but the more we listened to him, it became a real thing. Mateus: Yeah, we really like him now. Adyn: So we bought the poster off Amazon and put it up.
Have you guys seen him live? Mateus: Yeah, we saw him at WE Day in Toronto two years ago. He was really good.
What do people think when they see the poster? Adyn: We have to explain to people that we actually like him. It’s not ironic anymore. He makes good music!
Both of you also have Montreal Jazz Fest posters in your rooms. It’s a pretty big cultural shift from Shawn Mendes. Adyn: Well, we like Shawn Mendes and we like jazz. It’s a taste of both worlds.
Daniella Chan, 21
VICE: You’ve got a lot of Lady Gaga and RuPaul going on. Daniella: Well, they’re like pretty much mostly gay people, because I’m gay. It’s just all of my favourite people, I just think they’re really beautiful and having queer beauty and art up on my walls is really inspiring to me, and it makes me feel really beautiful.
What do you think people who walk into your room think about them? Do a lot of people recognize the RuPaul stars? People who aren’t familiar with it are always kind of surprised. But I have mostly queer friends, so that doesn’t happen a lot. With this Gaga poster, people are always like “woah, what’s going on with her eyes?” People are always very inquisitive about them.
Why those specific Gaga posters? They’re pretty wild. They’re both from ArtPop which is my favourite album and I just like how they look.
You got some art on your other wall? Yeah, I want to kind of shift from those fandom posters and move towards art that I resonate with.
I guess it’s a more “mature” aesthetic? Yeah, I’m kinda getting there.
Cameron Pinto, 20
VICE: Explain your poster collection. Cameron: It’s mostly Nicki Minaj, but a lot of other cool, badass people too. It’s a collection of the people who represent who I want to be,
Lts of Nicki. Did you see that PAPER magazine cover? Yeah, I’m actually getting that blown up and putting it on the wall. I want to fill the entire space.
It’s a pretty expansive collection for one wall. Yeah, sometimes they don’t stick! In the mornings I’m ready to wake up and look at them and they’re all on the ground. They just fall on me during the night, it’s pretty sad.
It is because you’re using scotch tape? They don’t let you nail stuff on in dorms.
So how do people react when they walk in here and see all of this? People are mortified! They don’t expect it. The first time my roommate walked in I could tell he was shocked.
Do you think your roommate likes them? No, he doesn’t. But I don’t care.
Niko L.
You got some artsy fandom posters going on. Yeah, I got Sherlock and some Pokémon. They’re all from FanExpo. I get them from the Artist’s Alley.
Why do you buy artists’ renditions instead of actual posters? I just think they’re a bit cooler. I like seeing artists at cons and supporting them.
Do you get a lot of people coming in here being like “Sherlock!” No. No one really recognizes the show.
Tristan Larnyoh, 19
VICE: You’ve got a lot of black tape going on. Take me through your walls. Tristan: OK so my first wall, it’s “The Wall of Fame,” I’ve got that written in black tape. And then I stick whatever art I’m into right next to it. I’m usually sticking up a T-shirt. But this way people know what’s going on.
You just stick up a T-shirt with black duct tape? Yeah, I treat them like art, like posters.
This wall has “T-Bone” written on it, what does that mean? It’s my nickname.
Do people actually call you that? Yeah.
What’s this wall here? You’ve got a “T” inside a rectangle. Yeah okay so “T” is my intial, and it’s inside— that was supposed to be a square not a rectangle. Anyways, the “T” is me and it’s in the box because it’s like a reminder to “think outside the box” you know.
But the “T” is in the box? Yeah, because you’ve got to think of it outside the box.
OK, cool. Yeah, it’s very abstract. I’ve also got this tapestry that has all the major American Dolls on it, but it’s too heavy to put up. I tried but it keeps falling down.
Wait, what. Why do you own this? It’s just cool, it’s got all the dolls on it. It’s classic.
What do you think other people think of it? They’d probably think it’s cool too, when they see it. Got to figure out how to get it up.
Sawyer S., 20
VICE: You’ve got exclusively film posters. Sawyer: Yeah, I’m a film student so I decided people should be able to tell, so I got a bunch of movie posters and put them up.
What do you think people think of the movies you’ve picked? I think I’ve picked some classic ones, The Godfather, Back to The Future, movies that everyone likes. Hopefully people think I’ve got good taste and stuff. I mean, I am in film.
You’ve got Pulp Fictio n up here too. Do you think it’s Tarantino’s best? Dude yeah, easily.
Nuvaira Tahir, 19
You’ve got a space theme going on here, was that intentional? Nuvaira: Nah. I just really like Space Odyssey because I used to watch it all the time when I was younger. And this tapestry with the girl and the moon, I just thought it was cool. Like how she’s alone in solitude, looking at the moon. It’s peaceful.
What do people think when they see you poster? The first thing people always ask me is whether I’ve actually seen the film.
Have you actually seen the film? Yes!
I believe you. Where’d you get the poster from? My university has these posters sales. I always check stuff out. This was the only poster liked and it was my favourite movie so I got it. It’s a really nice poster, really pretty.
KiKi Cekota, 20
VICE: What do you think your posters say about you? Kiki: I think they show that my taste is all over the place cause there's no real running theme with them, I have the Travis Scott album cover and then like a poster about Lincoln's assassination and another one about Frida Kahlo so it just indicates that I like a lot of different things I suppose.
What do people usually say when they see them? People usually comment on the New Yorker covers saying they really like them or are kind of curious about the Lincoln poster. One person said they didn't even know Lincoln had been assassinated, so I'm glad my posters can be educational too.
The New Yorker covers are really nice. Where did you get them? The New Yorker covers I bought outside the Met for like two bucks apiece and I just really liked how they complimented each other. One's the city during sunset and the other is the city at dusk so they just look really nice side by side. And I love the New Yorker.
Why the little Frida Kahlo portrait? I've just always loved her and how unashamed she was to be herself and be an independent woman at a time when it was harder to do so. My mom brought me back that portrait from Mexico when she went last winter.
You got things like the New Yorker and Frida Kahlo, do you ever worry that people will think you’re a pretentious snob or something? Honestly it's never crossed my mind, but now I’m slightly worried.
A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated.
An extremely famous or notorious person, especially in a particular field.
From Margate, will kick it the fuck out of you.
So, some footage has just emerged from a public disorder incident that took place in London Bridge, on a Monday night in 2016. Normally we wouldn’t trouble you with a trivial event like that, but, come on, have you watched the video? Have you watched the video where a bloke from Margate shouts about what a legend he is before threatening to "kick it the fuck out of" a number of Network Rail staff, a couple of lads from Millwall and the small woman trying desperately to calm him down? Have you?
It’s strange how we behave – the places we find ourselves. One minute in the office, looking out at the blank, expressionless sky, wondering whether or not we can justify a cheeky "beginning of the week beer". The next minute, we’re being tasered a few feet away from an Upper Crust. Falling to the faux-marble floor like we’ve got broom-handles for legs. It happens to the best of us. It happens to legends.
We don’t know much about the Legend of Margate – other than him being, clearly, both a legend and from Margate – but we do at least have some concrete proof that nightlife in London isn’t over. Sadiq Khan’s affirmation that "London is Open" never rang more true than of a city worker spinning out of his head and starting on ticket barriers on a quiet Monday night. Obviously the Legend himself probably wouldn't see it that way. Safe to say he is having a proper dark one. The sort of night you don’t shake off for years. The sort of night you completely change your life over – the quit your job and move back to Margate type.
More importantly, though, you’ve got to feel for anybody in London Bridge on that fateful Monday night. First, the great Legend of Margate unleashes his weekend rage five nights too early, and then a couple of flat-capped Millwall boys pop up out of nowhere, smelling the opportunity to square up to someone, without ever actually taking a swing, from a mile off. It’s like watching Blue Planet, when a great white is suddenly flanked by two manta-rays, all hovering around the same fetid whale corpse. "Do you want the Millwall? Do you want the fucking Millwall?" The Legend of Margate, of course, does want the Millwall, leading to even more in the way of blokes defying physics by somehow simultaneously thrusting forwards while holding themselves back.
Eventually the police arrive, bringing us to the dramatic conclusion of the tasering: a weirdly filmic moment as the Legend is backed into a corner by the barriers like a rabid dog, before being ceremoniously shocked to the floor, causing a ripple of applause and cheers – probably the first real sense of community London has felt in about 20 years.
There’s everything of the rank desperation of London in the Legend of Margate. His collar, popped open; the shirt tight around his puffed-up chest. His wild, gasping howls for validation – screaming at the Network Rail night staff, the Millwall fans, whoever’s working in WH Smiths, the deep and eddying abyss: I am a legend. Perhaps the only person he really wants to convince is himself. Maybe the Legend of Margate is symptomatic of a culture, or rather the breakdown of it. He is a broken dream, a snapped synapse, an after-work pint turned nuclear.
On the other hand, maybe the explanation is a little simpler. "A lot of cocaine was involved here," says whoever is behind the camera. My friend, for legal reasons, I couldn’t possibly comment.
