"Smarks"—smart marks, the hipsters of wrestling-fans—have been complaining that Vince McMahon ruined wrestling ever since the 1980s Rock 'n’ Wrestling boom. It’s a well-worn narrative: Vince turned wrestling into a circus populated with gimmicky cartoon characters who make it impossible to take their simulated matches seriously. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it’s not. At best, it’s an exaggeration. But the McMahon family might have completely destroyed wrestling last night, when they launched their new subscription-based online streaming network.

With the WWE Network, you not only get the WWE archive of past pay-per-view events (along with a variety of other materials), but you also get every new pay-per-view. At $9.99 a month with a six-month minimum commitment, this means that you get six pay-per-views (and all the other stuff) for the price of one. For lifelong marks who have been buying pay-per-views since their paper route days, this is an unbelievable dream. Ten bucks wouldn’t have even been enough to order the first Survivor Series back in 1987, now it can buy you a month of access to essentially every wrestling pay-per-view ever. It’s hard to fathom how this is even worth it for WWE.

And that is where they get you. Yes, you’re getting pay-per-views at a much lower price. But because each pay-per-view now comes as part of the package, they no longer have to sell themselves on their own merits. In other words, I’ve committed to ordering every disappointing pay-per-view event that WWE puts out this year at a reduced rate because I want to watch their old shows. 

By all accounts, April’s WrestleMania XXX is going to be a dump. The top matches have either been announced or are rapidly establishing themselves: Randy Orton versus Batista for the championship, Undertaker versus Brock Lesnar, John Cena versus Bray Wyatt, and Daniel Bryan versus Triple H. Each match is a disappointment when compared to other choices that WWE could have made. There’s no way that I’d pony up the old pay-per-view charge of $60 to watch this parade of flawed visions and missed opportunities, but I would happily pay $60 for six months of unlimited access to the more compelling WrestleManias of past years. The frustrating current product can therefore sustain itself on our nostalgia for the archive.

This actually fits WWE’s self-image. For years, WWE has been moving away from the concept of a “top draw.” This is partly why they’ve been content with their top guy, John Cena, getting rejected by at least half of the audience for much of the past decade. Cena’s not supposed to be the draw, at least not in the singular, absolute sense that Hulk Hogan or Steve Austin were. In Cena’s era, you pay to see an ensemble of stars—some elevated above others and some appearing as special guest stars—but the real draw is the WWE brand. The WWE Network continues in this direction. By subscribing to the network, you’re buying every future pay-per-view, based not on your interest in specific wrestlers or matches, but your loyalty to WWE. It doesn’t matter who’s in the main event of this coming SummerSlam, you already paid for the show a half a year in advance. Maybe it’s an amazing bargain, because you get that $60 show for $9.99, but perhaps you’re paying $9.99 for a show that you wouldn’t have watched for free.

In addition to the “Vince turned serious pro-wrestling into a circus” narrative, another major theme of smark discourse insists that the wrestling business is cyclical. This cyclical theory rests on the fact that many fans can remember two periods in the last 30 years that wrestling suddenly penetrated pop culture. Some smarks are even aware that wrestling enjoyed peaks of popularity in previous generations, such as the Golden Age of television. At times when wrestling is less popular, smarks rest on this supposed cyclical history to predict that at some point, wrestling will inevitably find its next transcendent star and hit another boom. I’m not convinced that Hulkamania and the Attitude Era gave us evidence for a reliable cyclical model of wrestling history. At any rate, cyclical doesn’t mean eternal, and wrestling booms of the past don’t make future booms an undeniable fact. But now that the brand itself represents the virtual entirety of American pro-wrestling, WWE doesn’t actually need another boom. WWE is confident in its place. This new WWE Network is not a move to reach out to pop culture at large. Instead, it's an appeal to the consumer community that it calls the “WWE Universe.” WWE Network will not be supported by the casual viewers who show up in boom periods, but the hardcore smarks who constantly complain about how awful WWE’s storylines are and how the wrong guys always get pushed. Like the NFL, the WWE is presenting brand loyalty as a lifestyle. They want you to watch the WWE because it’s the WWE. 

Vince has said that his father, also a wrestling promoter, tried to discourage him from getting into the family business, insisting that wrestling was too speculative. With WWE Network, the business might be less speculative than ever, because the names of the people in the ring will matter less and less. 

Michael Muhammad Knight (@MM_Knight) is the author of nine books, including Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing.

Two young black men were found dead in a river in Mississippi. The year was 1964, and many suspected the men died at the hands of the KKK. But this was the South in the 60s—the case was never solved. Decades later, filmmaker David Ridgen returned to Mississippi with the brother of one of the victims. What they discovered there cracked open a 40-year-old cold case and changed the course of history.

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About a month ago, I wrote a story on how Los Angeles is being affected by the apocalyptic California drought of 2013–2014 (from which we are getting a short respite in the form of a huge storm coming tomorrow). The ideas in it weren't completely novel: Water really doesn't occur naturally in Los Angeles. Our man-made aqueducts are our lifeline. All that water actually comes from somewhere, and that supply is far from unlimited.

I called Los Angeles "California's drain hole," but I didn't emphasize the place that got really, tangibly drained: California's Owens Valley, about 200 miles north. 

It wasn't just an economic disaster for residents. The ensuing dust bowl was an ecological disaster with far-reaching consequences. Today, industry would love to march right into a similar ecological disaster. In order to do so, businesses keep harping on about stupid little expendable fish, but the fish are beside the point. More on that later.

You can go to the site of that 100-year-old ecological disaster and see it with your own eyes. I did. Off Highway 395 in Inyo County, just past the site of Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp, you take a quick turn at Goodale Road and head east. Open a gate by hand. Drive down a dirt road. Open another gate by hand. Finally you'll find yourself at the very spot where William Mulholland stood 101 years ago, redirected the flow of the Owens River to LA, and created a metropolis. Here it is:

In the years leading up to the creation of the aqueduct, there was a drought called the worst "in a quarter century." That drought didn't have much of an effect on Los Angeles, and it wasn't enough to launch William Mulholland's water-stealing project (see my earlier story for more about this), so in the early 1900s, yellow journalist Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times invented the story of a much more severe fake drought. The short term solution (above) was to obtain water rights from the Owens Valley in order to slake the fake thirst of Los Angeles.  

Next, I drove a few miles south to see what happened when the water disappeared. This once biologically diverse valley is home to a purely theoretical, 110-square-mile body of "water" called Owens Lake. In the 19th Century, it was navigable, with steam boats putting around its surface and sailing in from its source: the Owens River. The other day I walked from the lakeside community of Keeler, out into the middle of Owens Lake and looked down. It looked like this:

The bottom of the lake used to be a salty sediment, made of a mixture of minerals and microbes. When Los Angeles drank the water from the lake's source over the course of the 20th century, the lake drained completely, turning into a salt flat. The sediment at the bottom crystallized and morphed into a unique formation the locals call "Owens Lake Snow." Whole square miles of the lake are completely covered with it.

When a breeze hits, it breaks up and becomes a dust. For decades, the windy seasons created heavy fog, or even total whiteouts made of cadmium, chromium, chlorine, and iron. Does it give locals cancer? God yes, but in the short term, the airborne particles whip your face, causing bloody noses and lips. It's awful. When the dust blew into my face, I could taste it.

In the 1990s, Los Angeles was finally held formally responsible for the massive dust clouds that traveled all around the state and, according to a ranger I spoke to, as far away as the East Coast. They launched a massive, billion-dollar project to mitigate the dust, involving the cultivation of "managed vegetation" on the lakebed, mainly a grass that could handle the salt. In a masterstroke of irony, the biggest anti-dust effects come from the addition of thousands of sprinklers on the lakebed's surface, piping in water from—you guessed it—the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Did Los Angeles fix the mess we made of Owens Valley? No. Negotiations and lawsuits happen constantly: the legacy of our city's bizarre origin. After further negotiations in 2006, we agreed to put some of the water back in their river, and we, the residents of Los Angeles, paid for it. It was called the Lower Owens River Project. That didn't do much, either. Owens Lake remains the single biggest source of particulate air pollution in the United States. 

Life became largely unlivable for the residents of the towns of Keeler and Swansea. Just about everyone left. What was once a panic over supplying water to the rapidly dehydrating people of a totally unnecessary city wound up ruining and ending the lives of people in another.

Image via 

Today, farm lobbies are making a similar case, arguing that their sector deserves someone else's water. The TV news loves to have farmers stand in fallow fields, frowning and contemplating their families' futures. Mainstream journalism has changed exactly zero percent since the days of Harrison Gray Otis.

The reality about agriculture in the United States in 2014 is that it makes you insanely rich. Large-scale agriculture, particularly in California, where destructive flooding is almost nonexistent (hint, hint), do really well. American farmers, particularly the gigantic agricultural conglomerates like Cargill, rake in mindboggling profits, and dynastic farm families who own their own land regularly pull in seven- and eight-figure incomes.

But the press doesn't show Cargill representatives frowning at dry fields on TV. They show this guy:

Image via 

What's happening is that a drought in California is a good time to try to divert water away from conservationism and toward agriculture. Farmers say that environmentalists are wrong to try to protect California's Central Valley to the extent that they do. 

Last Friday, it emerged that farmers won't be getting their share of water this year from the Central Valley Project, the huge network of channels, aqueducts, and reservoirs feeding precious water from wet parts of California to the majority of the region, often hundreds of miles from an actual water source, in this case farms instead of a city.

Some of the Central Valley Project water is contractually obligated to go to the agricultural sector. But when it's not there, simply because rain didn't happen, then, well, it just doesn't get any, contract or none. 

Image via

They blame a fish. It's called the delta smelt, an endangered fish that lives in the San Joaquin Delta, and for decades it's been a major feature of right-wing talking points about water, California's biggest political issue. Farmers and the legislators who love them have been whining ad nauseam about them for years, saying that "never before have the pumps been shut down for a fish" back in 2007, and as often as they possibly can ever since.

I'm sure it's very stupid. Look at it in that fisherman's hand (above). It's so small, and it's got those big, expressionless eyes. How could we prioritize this ugly little monster over humans who desperately crave cheap artichokes?

The smelt is—pardon the idiotic pun—a red herring.

Image via 

When you want to protect an ecosystem (above) just because it's nice and you like it, you need an actual piece of law, like the Endangered Species Act for instance, to empower you to do so. When environmentalists hoping to protect the delta narrowed their focus to the smallest and dumbest of fish, they came upon one whose numbers had dwindled enough to merit federal protection. Jackpot.

Much of what could have gone to agriculture was diverted to delta preservation. That's good news for the smelt and six other stupid fish, ten stupid birds, five stupid amphibians and reptiles, nine stupid mammals, and fifty stupid plants, plus anyone who lives near the river and doesn't want it to become another dust bowl. Instead, certain farm fields became a much bemoaned "dust bowl." Never mind that that wasn't fertile land to begin with. 

So when John Boehner spouts a talking point like "How you can favor fish over people is something people in my part of the world would never understand," it suggests some kind of simplistic fantasy situation. One in which there's a pool full of dumb fish on the left, and weeping farmers on the right, and a valve handle that lets you choose the direction water flows. 

"But surely the delta ecosystem can't be completely destroyed, right?"

Yes, it can. Weren't you paying attention to the first part of this story? We built this state by destroying ecosystems. The California flag should be an extinct animal. That'd be hilarious. Oh, wait, that's exactly what it is.

When the House passed a symbolic, smelt-smiting bill in order to provoke the Senate, destroying the Sacramento Delta is pretty much exactly what they had in mind. It won't be as fast as the draining of Owens Lake, but since we're always making new mouths to feed, agriculture is a growing sector. The Delta will suffer a death by a thousand cuts over the next century, and it will have bipartisan support. 

Supporters of the bill literally call the river's natural tendency to flow to the sea a "waste of water resources." I can think of no better way to illustrate the pointlessness of water conservation rhetoric than that. "Conserving water" is a platitude we can all get behind, right? But what about when we're keeping it from being "wasted," by continuing to let animals live in it, instead of turning it into stuff we can sell?

The drought Los Angeles caused in the Owens Valley made my city what it is today. Maybe another, similar disaster is what we need in order to keep the cost of avocados down. If that's what we're going to do, and we're going to use this natural drought as our excuse, let's at least be up-front about it. We love cheap guacamole way more than we love a stupid fish and its stupid ecosystem. 

@MikeLeePearl

Aberdeen is a paradise city, full of angels in miniskirts, walking the streets barefoot in the cold, stepping in puddles of puke and blood. Who knows if they're having fun but at least the seagulls have plenty to eat if they, too, get the munchies.

You can see more of Vincent's work here and here

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

Eduardo Barreto isn’t sure if the armed guards that have been shooting at him were even Venezuelan.

Since joining his country’s protests earlier this month, the 20-year-old economics student from Valencia has been tear gassed and chased by officers on motorcycles. He has watched his friends get shot in the back as they fled, and he was marching on the same street where student and beauty queen Genesis Carmona was killed last week.

He has little love for the national guard that the government has unleashed on protesters, but if he’s going to get shot, he’d like it at least to be coming from a countryman.

“We know there are Cuban officers within our national guard,” said Barreto, repeating widespread but unconfirmed reports that president Nicolas Maduro’s government might have tapped its island neighbor for help in protecting its Bolivarian revolution. “Can you imagine Russian officers joining the US National Guard to shoot at American citizens there? That’s unacceptable.”

Barreto says he has no doubt that at least some of the officers he has come across are Cuban. Early on in the protests—before guards started shooting at him – he brought them water bottles to cool off while they watched over demonstrators.

“They were in the streets standing in the sun all day and I wanted to be friendly,” Barreto said. “One of them, when he thanked me, had a Cuban accent. I know a Cuban accent, I have uncles there.”

Venezuelan officials have neither acknowledged nor denied the accusations. But reports like Barreto's have multiplied over the last several days, also fueled by Angel Vivas, a retired Venezuelan general and government critic. The embattled former military man tweeted to over 200,000 followers that “Cuban and Venezuelan henchmen” were coming to his house after Maduro ordered his arrest, according to several reports.

Instead, Maduro has called for a “peace conference” on Wednesday and said demonstrators have a right to protest peacefully. “But if you’re going to go out and burn and destroy, I won’t permit that,” he said.

In Caracas, students singing the Venezuelan national anthem took to a heavily guarded Cuban Embassy on Tuesday, to protest the involvement of Cuban troops in the repression, and to call for an end to Cuba’s longstanding influence on Venezuelan politics.

“We won’t let the Castro brothers keep controlling Venezuela,” student leader Gabriela Arellano told local reporters. “Enough with Cuban interference.”

Opposition party Voluntad Popular tweeted photos of heavily armed Venezuelan guards protecting the Cuban embassy on Tuesday. Protesters said they handed out a document to a national police representative outlining their concerns, then withdrew peacefully.

In the video below, taken by Voluntad Popular outside the embassy, Arellano calls on the “Castro regime” to withdraw from Venezuelan territory.

Student leader Gabriela Arellano spoke outside the Cuban embassy in Caracas on Tuesday.

It’s not the first time that anti-government protesters have gathered at the Cuban Embassy in Caracas. Back in 2002, during a coup that briefly ousted former president Hugo Chavez, protesters broke the windows, pierced the tires and poured white paint into cars parked by the embassy, the AP reported then.

Venezuela’s close relationship with Cuba dates back to Chavez’s early days in power and was largely defined by Fidel Castro’s personal friendship with the former Venezuelan president, who was widely perceived as his ideological successor until his death last year.

But money also keeps the two nations’ interests aligned.

Venezuela is Cuba’s top trading partner and aid provider, to the tune of $3.5 billion and 115,000 barrels of oil a day, according to The Economist. Cuba pays its neighbor back in doctors, as well as in intelligence and security officers. It can also lend a hand in times of crisis.

Former intelligence officer and Cuban government critic Uberto Mario said in an interview that the elite Cuban troops known as Avispas Negras—literally the “black wasps”—have been traveling to Caracas undercover.

“They know how to infiltrate the protests, dressed as civilians, and this way they move all around Venezuela to neutralize the protests' advance,” Mario said. “They’re here for that, to repress.”

Several hundred people have been detained since the protests started, and there have also been reports of torture, including one of a student who was sexually assaulted with a rifle.

“The G2, the Cuban equivalent of the CIA, they have practice torturing citizens,” Barreto said. “We believe the reason they are here is to do those things.”

But if the Cuban government is watching Venezuelan protesters—and rather closely, according if the accusations of infiltration are true—so are its critics.

“There must be much nervousness in Havana’s Revolution Square,” Cuban blogger and activist Yoani Sanchez recently tweeted. “Venezuela is taking it by surprise.”

Meanwhile clashes between demonstrators and police have continued this week across Venezuela, as protesters organizing via social media and phone apps have set up barricades and snarled traffic.

This video, filmed in the Altamira Square area of Caracas on Monday, shows protesters moving away from loud explosions as smoke from a street fire fills the air.

Protesters clashed with police in Caracas on February 24.

Further protests are also planned through the week, including a women’s march on Wednesday, called by opposition congresswoman Maria Corina Machado and the wife of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez.

Protesters are also planning public memorials on Wednesday for the 14 people killed in clashes so far, and have called for a Friday mobilization of motorcyclists wearing white shirts and Venezuelan flags—a rebuttal to the motorcycles normally used by the national guard and pro-government colectivos.

They also planned a Saturday rally against the national oil and gas company, which is in the spotlight after Maduro reopened a controversial debate on gasoline price increases.

Finally, protesters are calling on fellow Venezuelans to boycott the upcoming Carnival holiday, which Maduro extended by two days in an attempt, many said, to distract the country from the unrest.

“He declared Thursday and Friday national holidays to tell people to go to the beach, go travel, get off the streets,” said Barreto. “We want to make sure that people don’t go to Carnival, that they stay in the streets.”

In Valencia, some have planned to lie down along the city’s highways in their bikinis “to tan,” Barreto said.

“That’s the way we’re gonna celebrate Carnival this year.”

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All illustrations by Jocelyn Spaar

My boyfriend and I have called it quits, broken up. The breaking-up part is done, but I am still living daily with an unshakeable sadness, which is only increased by the knowledge that there are practical things I need to do to disassemble our seven years together—buy cardboard boxes, empty his closet, separate our books. But I haven’t done any of it.

Here’s what I have done: gone through my underwear drawer and sorted my lingerie.

This was a lengthy and emotional process, although some decisions were easier than others. There were two bra-and-panty sets, for instance, that I immediately threw away, putting them down my apartment building’s garbage chute to make sure I couldn’t have second thoughts. These were the pieces he had given me most recently, one a gray satin Elle Macpherson balconette bra and thong, trimmed with yellow ribbon, and the other a gray mesh full-cup bra embroidered with small fuchsia flowers. Both were pretty, and in good condition, but I associated them with those sadness-tinged late visits in which we both knew things had changed.

There were other easy decisions. Some things (a black underwire from a recent Agent Provocateur sale, a 50s-style polka-dot number from Fifi Chachnil via eBay) could stay right where they were. He might have seen or even liked these, but I’d bought them in his absence and they held no particular significance. A few (Princesse Tam-Tam pieces I’d picked up at a recent online sale from my favorite boutique) were new enough that he’d never encountered them.

The remaining three sets of lingerie I own went into the Archive, which is what I call a particular drawer of my dressing table. The Archive contains a plain brown cardboard box, which holds several of those overpriced linen underwear-sorting boxes, each of which in turn holds bras and panties tenderly wrapped in tissue paper. In total the Archive consists of some 12 sets, the oldest of which (a pink Liberty Print demi bra full of holes) date back to my first boyfriend. To this drawer I added the slightly padded pink silk polka-dot bra and ruffle-trimmed bikini that had always been his favorite, the navy silk Mimi Holliday comfort bra and matching French bikini that I was wearing the last time we saw each other, and a green lace Princesse Tam-Tam set that I bought on a happy vacation to Paris years ago.

I remembered the fun of bringing that jade-colored diaphanous getup back and modeling it for him in our hotel room, and how much he enjoyed my pleasure in them, and pretended to care that it was a brand that was, at the time, hard to get in the States.

My thinking, in memorializing these intimates, was not merely that I didn’t want other men to see any of these things. Although that was certainly part of it, that possibility still felt remote and vaguely grotesque. Rather, it felt to me a way of paying respects, of laying something to rest—sort of like retiring the number of a beloved ballplayer. I quietly embalmed the clasps of a relationship forgone. I deliberately put aside garments inlayed with intimacy.

Of course, the Archive isn’t only for relics of past loves. Even before our breakup, I had enshrined certain things (the blue floral soft-cup set I was wearing on our first date; the black Princesse Tam-Tam balconette bra that was the first he ever saw me in), and my curation is in fact somewhat idiosyncratic. There are sets that have accumulated the indignities of age—flaccid elastic, torn fabric—I can’t bear to throw out, because I associate them with good luck on job interviews or confidence at a particularly terrifying party. There is one teal lace situation in there that, although it looks innocuous—moderate coverage, underwire, boy-short—is in fact so powerful I had to put it in the drawer just to contain its gray magic; men seemed to find it as irresistible as Aphrodite’s girdle, and I was not sure I was woman enough to govern it.

Part of the thinking behind my Archive is simply that these things are expensive. You can’t give your old lingerie away—well, you probably could, but I don’t think I’d choose to give it to anyone who really wanted it. And it feels wrong (garbage chute notwithstanding) to literally toss away the priciest garments I own. Short of creating some kind of tired performance art, or a grotesque variation of a T-shirt quilt, I don’t really know what to do besides throw them in a drawer. There’s a sentimental preciousness to my practice, I know, akin to preserving in amber moments that are irrevocably extinguished, but I do this because for me lingerie has always possessed a certain power, and not a merely sexual one.

Shortly after the breakup I attended a literary festival in Philadelphia and ended up visiting a high-end lingerie shop not far from my hotel. The store was feminine and boudoir-ish, with chandeliers and perfume wafting through the air; in the way of contemporary lingerie shops with pretentions to “elegant naughtiness” or whatever, it carried a gratuitous selection of discreet vibrators and the occasional handcuff set. I found this somewhat tiresome—I just wanted pretty underwear, not to crash a nightmarish bachelorette party, and besides, if I wanted sex toys I’d go to a sex-toy store—but I could live with it. And I needed a lingerie fix; following the breakup and the accompanying Archiving I was feeling both terrible about myself and in need of underpinnings.

The place didn’t carry my favorite brands, and the aesthetic wasn’t really to my liking, but I still found the experience soothing. Shopping for lingerie has been a reliable emotional palliative for me for years. I searched the color-coded racks and found a couple of simple lace tops with respectable matching bottoms. The saleswoman started a dressing room for me behind one of the extravagantly swathed purple velvet curtains and suggested a bunch of things that weren’t really my style but I agreed to try on anyway.

Then the couple came in. This particular shop encouraged couples shopping—they advertised it, I learned later—and there was a special chair set up right outside the two adjacent dressing rooms. After selecting a bunch of stuff for his ladyfriend to slip into, the dude in question ensconced himself smugly in said chair while the saleswomen plied him with cheap champagne and—I kid you not—chocolate-dipped strawberries. My heart (covered by a hideous, sheer, cherry-appliqued bra I had tried on to be polite) sank.

If this sort of folie à deux brings couples a frisson, well, more power to them. But let me just say that from the perspective of the naked woman in the next changing room, it’s not conducive to a big sale. I was of course glad to know babe looked hot in that ludicrous merry widow, uncomfortable to hear that a thong showed off her muffin top, and really, really wished her boyfriend wasn’t looking to see what I was picking off the racks to try on myself. A man slipping into a Victoria’s Secret can be sort of endearing. A droopy master-of-the-universe who dictates his woman’s (he likely refers to her as “his woman”) underwear choices while chomping on a chocolate-dipped strawberry, not so much.

The first modern bra, after all, was invented by a woman, a bohemian poet and publisher who wrote under the name Caresse Crosby—in 1914 she was granted a patent for a “Backless Brassiere.” While the dialectics of the history of lingerie vis-à-vis the male gaze are thesis-worthy, no one can deny that at the end of the day, the bra’s original purpose was functional—not to mention a welcome departure from the corset. And isn’t that part of the appeal? Something made for a specific, pragmatic purpose that we choose, in the face of all fiscal sense, to render beautiful and luxurious? Yes, one can get esoteric: merry widows, corsetry, pinup bullet-bras that cater to a range of niche tastes. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I mean the things most of us wear every day.

The things I like tend to hew to a pattern: shades of blue and green, underwired, demi-cup, with a bottom that is neither too spare nor provides too much coverage. While the occasional thong is a necessary evil under certain pants and skirts, I always find them vaguely jarring when I catch sight of my reflection. They get a special place of shame in my underwear drawer, too, which is ranked in descending preference order—in stark contrast to the chaos of the rest of my drawers, or, indeed, life.

I could venture a guess about the origin of my love of lingerie. Perhaps a line from a teen novel, or a scene in a movie. Or maybe, instead, it can be traced back to an adolescent reaction. My mom gets her underwear at discount stores, and while I lived at home I did the same. Ours was not a house where one went in for self-indulgence, and my desires felt secret and shameful.
I remember slipping into the dowdy lingerie store in the suburban town where I lived and furtively buying a discounted peach-hued DKNY bra and matching boy short. It was hardly Agent Provocateur; this particular shop specialized in bras for women who’d had mastectomies, and the selection was, shall we say, limited. My first set didn’t fit right. In retrospect the band was four inches too big and the cup a size too small. (I would find this out from the Orthodox Jewish professional fitters I’d visit on the Lower East Side some years later.) But I didn’t care. I smuggled them into the house and donned the set for a chorus concert, feeling wicked and vaguely guilty.

It wasn’t that anyone was going to see them. I didn’t have a boyfriend or even the prospect of one, and the thought of anyone seeing my underwear, had it even occurred to me, was as bizarre as it was remote. But it was, I think, the beginning of a change, an understanding, however hidden, that something utilitarian can be a source of pleasure, could be a performance of my own creation. And this was heady stuff. Less so when the woman at the shop apparently told my mom I’d been in, what I’d bought, and how “cute” it was that I had finally filled out and was “turning into a little woman.”

And yet, my course was set. My tastes in life are generally simple. I’m fine with the roughest generic toilet paper, crummiest wine, and secondhand clothes, but since I first started earning babysitting money as a teenager, I’ve been secretly spending a disproportionate amount on underwear.

I’m not saying I’m buying, like, Eres and Carine Gilson pieces—although I do stalk the Barney’s lingerie floor fingering thousand-dollar bras like a low-rent pervert—but the things I buy are certainly more than what I can, in grown-up terms, afford. I take care of them (hand-washing in the special solution, carefully sequestering each bra from the marauding hooks of any others) and tell myself they’re “investment pieces,” which by definition makes no sense, particularly when I retire them in the prime of their lives to a cardboard box, never to be seen again.

We all have our totems and ways of exorcising the looming demons of past loves gone wrong. Of course, I don’t want an exorcism. I want an Archive, a reminder that there were moments amid the chaos when there was something special underneath that I cherished and cared for.

The Boyfriend. Robert Geller top, vintage pants

PHOTOS BY CLAIRE MILBRATH

STYLIST: MILA FRANOVIC

Assistant: Darby Milbrath

Models: Brandon, Martin, Bazhad, and Alejandro 

The Artist. Stussy Delux jacket, Dockers pants

The Basketball Player. American Apparel shirt, Nike shorts and socks

The Boy Next Door. Diesel underwear

The Weightlifter. American Apparel shorts

The Tennis Player. Paul Smith shirt, Thom Browne shorts

The Businessman. Filippa K shirt, vintage suit

The Skater. Wings + Horns top, Levi's jeans

The Stoner. Stussy shirt, Alexander Wang pants

The Chongo. Givenchy top, Dickies bottoms

The Chiller. Vintage top, Barena pants

The Student. Engineered Garments top, Yaecca pants

The Cop. Vintage shirt, pants

The Raver. Stussy sweatshirt, Bape x Stussy pants

The Handyman. A.P.C. + Carhartt shirt, Acne jeans

The Pool Boy. American Apparel swim trunks

The Dad. Tommy Hilfiger boxers, Fillipa K shirt, S.N.S. Herning cardigan

The Frenchman. S.N.S. Herning top, vintage pants

The Hunter. Browning top, A.P.C. jeans

The Eurotrash Guy. Stussy top, Kappa pants

The Logger. Givenchy shirt, Acne jeans

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Parniak.

I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t like Tim Horton’s. I never crave watered down “double-doubles” or old-fashioned (and often, literally, old) donuts, no matter how cheap they are. For some reason, the mediocre Ontario-based coffee chain has become synonymous with Canadian identity, as if there was nothing better to unify our country than reheated pastries and not liking gay people. So naturally, when I saw Cup (24 Ounces of Misrepresentation), I, like many Redditors, was taken aback as to what a beaded X-Large Tim Horton’s cup could possibly mean in the larger context of the nebulous national identity. Art is already tough enough to “get” as is, I wasn’t sure how I felt about giving so much visibility to, what is in my opinion, a brand that has already been attributed way too much significance. Regardless, there must have been some reason it was shown at Stockholm’s Supermarket art fair’s only Canadian booth, so I decided to call up the artist behind the work, Guelph's Gabriel Parniak, to figure out what it’s about.

VICE: Hey Gabriel, a lot of people seem confused about your piece and what it stands for. What would you tell these people who seem to not be getting it?
Gabriel Parniak: It’s not about Tim Horton’s.

That’s a good start.
Yeah, it has very little to do with them. Tim Horton’s is just the perfect symbol of how Americanized Canada’s identity is becoming in subtle ways. We never had a supersized cup like that before. This is a supposed Canadian iconic brand that has this cup, and downsized everything else. I just found that very poignant. The piece is about what Canada’s becoming, and how a lot of people in Canada seem to just unquestionably accept little things like that and don’t tend to think about the connection between supersized corporate culture.

How did the idea for this beaded Timmy’s cup come about?
I made the piece originally in October-November 2012, while at NSCAD in Halifax, finishing my BFA. I was inspired earlier, when I was walking to work on Canada Day, just super pissed off seeing how all these families were all decked out in Roots gear and all drinking Tim Hortons, when voter turnout had barely reached 60 percent that year. There was all this trash everywhere—Timmy's cups and beer cans—and I saw this one freakishly large Tim’s cup. It was the first time I’d seen the super large version, a full 24-ounce cup. It actually had a tiny Canadian paper flag stuck in it upside down, in the mouthpiece. It struck me as this super tongue in cheek representation of how Canada is right now—an upside down flag is an international symbol for distress.

I was also taking a contemporary indigenous art history class at the time with an amazing professor—Carla Taunton—as an elective in my fourth year. I wanted to try to do something that spoke from my non-aboriginal viewpoint and question why I was in my fourth year at a supposedly exemplary Canadian institution and yet this was an elective course. I was trying to draw connections there.

Has Tim Horton’s contacted you at all?
No, nothing! I got an email from the guy who originally designed the cup, or created it. He thought it was funny. He liked it, but it wasn’t on behalf of the company.

Have you tried to contact Tim Horton’s?
No, it’s not about them, but it did end up on some Tim Horton’s fan site.

How does beading and putting the cup into a glass casing come into play?
Specifically, I decided to bead the cup with glue just to make it a symbol of the surface treatment. None of the beads are from Canada either, they’re all imported. We don’t have glass beads here. I always wanted the cup to be shown in a Plexiglas vitrine because it mimics the colonial action of coming into an area and taking things that were contemporary art and ritual objects and giving them a purely anthropological standing; they weren’t upheld as contemporary objects.

Would you feel like people will look at this cup in a couple hundred years and treat it like an artifact?
I don’t know! If it lasts that long, perhaps. It would be interesting to know whether the context would hold up and I hope we can change the context in that time.

So, this is a call to action?
I suppose so, or at least a call to acknowledgement and question. I just wanted to ask questions, I really don’t have a ton of answers with the work I make and I don’t want to. I think a lot of Canadians don’t want to be faced with questions about our identity. We want to see our country and our political self as very benign or respectful, when really there’s a lot we don’t talk about in the education.

Was Cup purchased?
I had an offer, but I chose to bring it back to Canada in the hopes that maybe, eventually, it would get into the hands of a Canadian collector and I could continue on with the conversation. I was amazed with the amount of debate it was sparking. The stuff on Reddit was more about the food, but it was interesting to see some real conversation and this was on a very non-artistic media.

Why did you choose to expose it abroad rather than in Canada if you wanted to keep the discussion here?
Well, I showed it at my grad show and, to be honest, since I graduated I haven’t had any large public transits to show it. I included it in a proposal for the Arts Incubator here in Guelph, for which Scott McGovern, who took it to Stockholm, is on the mentorship board. He messaged me after looking at the applications and he wanted to take something he saw as very ponderous and tried to create a dialogue.

Do you mind me asking what the offer was?
Sure, I mean I didn’t take it. It was over $2,000.

If you saw your own piece at Supermarket, in Stockholm, would you have placed an offer on it?
I can’t say. I’m a maker, and it’s a hard thing for a working artist to put a price on their work. I’m not a collector… I collect my friends’ stuff when I can; we trade. I don’t know, I can’t put myself in that position. What would you offer?

Hmmm… I don’t know, I’ve seen art go for millions or end up in trashcans without really understanding why one was better than the other. It’s always surprising.
It surprises me too, and I’m in the industry.

And it changes depending on context, right? Do you think that’s why people didn’t know what to make of the Reddit post?
I think Scott [McGovern] intentionally posted it de-contextualized; it makes it more ponderous that way, as a singular art object. There’s no context for people to talk about, which is really interesting. It created a lot of conversation and confusion. Without context, it pushes people to talk to each other more, rather than just focus the conversation towards Scott or me.

And how would you explain to these people who don’t get it, me included, why a beaded cup would go for over $2,000?
The fact that I’m here talking to you to explain it and getting a conversation going, that’s more satisfying for me, to get the word out and talk about these things than the money is.

That being said, I still took 'X' number of hours to do it, and art is labour. A lot of people don’t want to recognize that because they think it’s selfish labour. But then again, a lot of art can be and that’s where there’s some confusion. My justification, I guess, is that I’m at least trying to say something broader.

So it’s giving value to the conversation and the ideas?
Exactly, to the creation of ideas that aren’t necessarily talked about.

If you could chose anyone in the world to buy the piece, who would it be?
My end hope would be for a Canadian collector to buy it and eventually leave it to a regional or national museum collection. But it would be hilarious if Stephen Harper bought it.

You sound open to people projecting their own interpretation onto the piece.
It’s unavoidable. There's no point in fighting it. You’re deluded if you think your creations speak perfectly. Nothing speaks perfectly. Acceptance is key.

Any parting words?
The aim of the piece is really to put a Canadian icon in display and freeze your acceptance of the identity we uphold for a second. It’s about national identity, and how histories are created. Maybe sometimes we shouldn’t just shut our mouths.
 

@martcte

Illustration by Chiara Sbolci

We didn’t even want to go to Chicago. Especially not during the worst winter the Midwest had seen in years. And definitely not after our last week, most of which was spent snowed-in and stranded at a Native American casino in Osceola, Iowa. Yet here we were on the same highway that led us to the casino, heading north, for eight hours, with the fleeting hope of getting last-minute Indian visas so that we could write a profile on a very important man.

Don’t tell us anything about Indian visas if you haven’t tried to get one yourself in the past five months. It’s all different. It’s been outsourced to some Indian company that promises on the opening web page (which looks like it was made by a hysterical seventh grader) that if they lose your passport, they’ll give you $150.

Things went from bad to worse when Amie said, “For this one, let’s use a Ouija board.”

I should make it clear that Amie and I have a lot of experience with ghosts. I have been seeing them since I was a child, when a small yellow gnome crawled up my leg and told me the year I would die. He said I would die of a heart attack in 2019. At the time that sounded longer than anyone could possibly live. (When I told my father about it, he comforted me. He said, “Don’t worry; they often lie.”)

On a two-lane highway in southern Louisiana, during a nonstop drive from Miami, Florida, to Waco, Texas, I saw something like 50 ghosts. They were in a slow march, single-file on the edge of the highway, each of them glaring at me as I passed. They were wearing ordinary clothes, different clothes.

When we were in India year before last, we had stayed at a famous hotel, where I saw and Amie felt many ghosts. When we asked the clerk at the front desk if the hotel was full of ghosts, he said, “Not... any evil ones, sir.” He explained that there had been “a terrible fire during a banquet, about sixty years before, in which many people had died, sir.”

About a year later, while staying at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle, we were repeatedly locked into our room by a ghost who, according to the hotel staff, was fond of flipping deadbolts and playing piano.

Trust me when I say that you don’t even want to hear about the experiences we had at the rooming house Amie moved into a couple years ago when she first arrived in Iowa City to attend the Writers’ Workshop. (She even superstitiously forbade me from going into further detail here.)

So it seemed downright foolish that we were driving to Chicago’s famous Drake Hotel—where the ritziest scenes in Risky Business were shot, the grande dame of American hotels—to investigate not one but two forlorn women who, according to local legend, had long been stuck in the realm between this world and the next. Tibetans have a name for this realm, or more precisely six specific variants that all fall under the term bardo.

Outside Chicago on 55, the wrecks were piled up for miles. We regularly passed overturned cars, their axels and struts exposed to the relentless snowfall. Snowplows scraped sparks off the highway, and dozens of police cars and tow trucks lined the shoulders of the highway throughout our route. All these ominous signs, and we hadn’t even bought our Ouija board yet.

“We can make one,” Amie said. “I heard they’re more powerful that way. We have that cardboard box from my red folders.”

I categorically refused this rash and dangerous idea of pure lunacy until Amie said, “Well, then we’ll have to go out and find one.”

I’m Canadian, so I don’t mind sub-zero temperatures, but we’d already been driving for ten hours. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was poke around the board-game aisle of Walmart, looking for what some people consider to be a portal to hell.

“OK, make one,” I told Amie. When I said it I felt like I was one of those Japanese teenagers in The Ring, when they decide to play that mysterious video.

Once we were settled in our room, Amie got to work. She scrawled the alphabet on a plastic folder, and, using the hotel keycard in lieu of a planchette, asked the Ouija board if she could speak with the Woman in Red. Perhaps the most famous of the hotel’s resident ghosts, the story goes that in 1920 the Woman in Red committed suicide by jumping off the roof on New Year’s Eve, in the middle of the Drake’s grand opening reception, where earlier in the night she had spotted her fiancé cavorting with another woman in the Palm Court parlor.

Amie’s makeshift Ouija board offered no reply. She asked if the Woman in Red was present. Again, no reply. Then she turned to me: “Are you going to help me with this?”

“All that thing is going to do is magnetize any ghost around here, and none of them are going to answer you,” I said.

“Is Clancy grumpy?” she asked the Ouija board, purposefully moving the hotel keycard across the letters to spell out Y-E-S. Afterward she took the Ouija board out into the hall and left it by the ice machine.

That night I tried a trick I had learned in Iowa City. In the past, I’ve only seen ghosts when I wasn’t looking for them. I think this is one of the truths about ghosts: They’re like lost things. When you’re looking for something that’s been lost or misplaced, you never find it; it’s only when you give up, after your attention has been diverted elsewhere, that you find what you were looking for. I learned this the hard way in Iowa City: If you are in the vicinity of bad ghosts—the ones that can hurt your soul—sitting perfectly still, in total silence, will most likely result in a confrontation.

Later Amie and I visit the Palm Court room, where the Woman in Red saw her fiancé seducing another woman on the Drake’s opening night.

It must have been a grand, roaring party—something out of The Great Gatsby, combined with the opulent menace exuded by the party room from Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Giant, shimmering chandeliers hung from the roof of the enormous ballroom. Amie and I could easily imagine the scene the night she jumped off the roof: Everyone trying a bit too hard to have fun, to be glamorous, to feel pretty.

“This place is perfect,” I said. “This place has more ghosts than humans.”

“Where?! You see some?” she asked, excited.

“I was joking. But it does feel weird, doesn’t it?”

That night, before we went to bed, I sat on the floor and waited. Nothing. I waited some more. Nope. Then a bit longer. Spooky vibes were not present in the slightest. I was starting to worry that maybe we were wrong about this place, that maybe it was all hype.

When I got up to go to bed—Amie was already half asleep—I noticed that the door to our room was open. Just a crack. I asked Amie about it.

“I put the bolt on it. I always do. You know that,” she mumbled, semiconscious and irritated. And that is true; she always does.

Well... that may be something, I thought. I pulled the door open and looked around. It was empty and quiet, so I locked up and got under the covers.

That night I dreamed about the Woman in Red and her fiancé. They had been living in an apartment together. It had an ornately beautiful brass staircase that spiraled upward. I was there, for some reason, and the fiancé took me out to the terrace. The woman stayed inside. I suddenly realized I had lived in the building before, that I had lived there many times over. Yet it surprised me to think of myself there, as a guest or resident.

“How’ve you been?” the fiancé asked. He had the surly expression of a seagull, dumb in a hateful way.

I told him I was fine.

“We still have your mother’s coat,” he continued.

The Woman in Red called out from within. She corrected him, explaining that they’d sold the coat.

“Oh, that’s OK,” I said.

“She’s just teasing you. We have it.”

That’s why I woke up. I was terrified and overcome with jealousy. It’s the same feeling I get when a young man sits next to my wife and—at least it seems this way to me—ostensibly speaks to someone else in the room while pitching his tone to Amie. Waking up from the dream I had the same feeling I do in those situations, the lonely feeling of wanting to die.

My instinct was to flee immediately, to urgently get away. I woke my wife. “I think she visited me in my dream,” I said of the Woman in Red. “I think we have to change hotels.”

She laughed and said, “That doesn’t count.” In the morning, when room service came, I noticed the door was open a crack even though I am absolutely certain I closed and locked it before going to bed.

On our second day at the hotel, we wandered the halls somewhat aimlessly. I got the sense that we were being watched, but by whom I wasn’t sure. That night I told my wife we should go to bed early, and we slept well until three in the morning, when I heard a loud banging.

Again, I woke my wife. “What was that?” I asked.

“You’re dreaming,” she said.

I got up to check the door. It was closed. Then I decided to be brave, which isn’t like me. I put on my clothes and went to the eighth floor. Some strange, primal instinct told me something was wrong up there, and I needed to find out what it was.

Stepping off the elevator, I turned around suddenly because—there’s no other way to put it—I just knew. Seated on the loveseat in the elevator was a woman in her 30s. She was wearing a red dress with cap sleeves. Her lips were tightly pursed, and her bare arms were fully extended with her palms pressed against the elevator walls. Even as the elevator doors closed, she did not look at me. Instead she was fixated on something above my head.

Instinctually, I knew it was another ghost. But when I looked up there was nothing. When I looked back the Woman in Red was gone. I pressed the button, which inexplicably caused the doors to close and sent the elevator up.

My stomach turned. Without looking up above my head again, I walked as quickly as I could without running to the stairwell and down the two floors to our room.

I woke Amie and told her the story.

“Say ‘Vajrasattva,’” she said, and fell asleep.

I pulled the covers over my head in case whatever I'd seen in the hallway had decided to follow me into our room. The thing is, after all this time and so many sightings, I’m still very much afraid of ghosts.

In the morning we left early. I insisted on it.

“Check-out’s at noon,” my wife said. “It’s such a nice hotel. Let’s have breakfast in bed and look at the lake.” The view from our big windows was the frozen edge of Lake Michigan and the icy blue water out beyond it.

“I saw a ghost,” I said. “The Drake is a haunted hotel. I don’t think the ghosts here are happy. When you get on the elevator with the sofa, then tell me check-out’s at noon. Plus that elevator is more or less exactly like the apartment in my dream.”

I looked at her. “Are you laughing at me?” I asked.

“No, no, not at all. I’m sorry. It was just when you said the elevator was from your dream. Just the way you said it. I’m not laughing at you.”

“You are! The same woman who thought she had a ghost perched on her shoulder for a semester. Remember the—”

“Sh! God! Don’t say that.”

My wife and I are both of the opinion that talking about ghosts, or to ghosts, is dangerous. But we do it anyway. Even still, there are some we will not mention.

She kicked off the comforter, defeated. “Sheesh. If you’re gonna be like that, fine, let’s go.”

On the way out of town, we spotted the Congress, the infamous haunted hotel that inspired Stephen King’s short story “1408,” and the eponymous movie. (Don’t watch it unless you’re looking for something scarier than The Conjuring.) It is probably the scariest hotel in America. You look at it and it looks back at you, as though whispering, “REDRUM.”

“Do you want to try it?” Amie asked. I couldn’t tell if she was goading me.  “One night?”

“No, not really,” I said. “But I bet we’ll end up there sometime, whether we like it or not.”

Photos by Alexia Tsagari

Hamid is waiting for me at a bus stop right next to Alexandras Avenue in Athens, Greece. He’s almost 35, extremely skinny, and he has scars all over his face. This evening, he's chosen to wear a reflective white jacket, torn jeans, and a shiny pair of red sneakers—not a very wise choice for someone trying to sell small amounts of sisa, the dirt-cheap alternative to crystal meth that's become popular in Greece's capital over the past couple of years.

But at least his clients can spot him easily in this outfit. A quick nod is enough to tell them that it's safe to approach him and hand over their money.



Hamid was born in Tehran. He started working some part-time jobs at the age of 14, and when he turned 20, he joined an anti-regime group to fight against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he calls "the world's most vicious man." At some point he was arrested and held captive, but he doesn’t like talking about that, and he changes the subject as we approach the park entrance.

Pedion tou Areos Park—one of the largest public parks in Athens—is only supposed to be open to the public until 11, but we manage to sneak in after midnight. Figures start to gather in the shadows around us, and a raspy voice moans: "Does anyone have some dope or sisa?"

"Follow me, please," Hamid says.

We walk down a small road and, after a while, reach a building covered in graffiti. "This is the first place I stayed when I was released from custody," Hamid says. I ask him why he was in jail in the first place. "Documents and passport stuff, what else? That's what everyone in that jail was there for," he answers as a shaky light bulb reveals his missing front tooth. "In Greece, it's far better to be arrested for drugs than for not having a visa."

He continues: "I was incarcerated for 18 months, along with 11 other people. That was when I started learning Greek. The worst thing back then was the fact that only one toilet was functional. But on the other hand, I finally succeeded in getting clean from dope. Eventually I got out, penniless, and a friend suggested I come stay here for a bit."



I look at the wrecked squat and wonder what exactly the point was of renovating the Pedion tou Areos Park. The work was supposed to revitalize the area, but the whole $12 million investment and all the pomp around it just seems to have been entirely pointless. All I can see is a building in really bad shape, surrounded by scrap-metal parts and covered in anti-fascist graffiti.

"We’ve been attacked by members of the Golden Dawn quite a few times. They usually appear out of the blue, accompanied by their dogs, and beat anyone they find. There are 25 to 30 people from Iran and Afghanistan living in this building—all drug users, of course," whispers Hamid, as a group of Afghan men begin to stare at us. "Let’s leave now. We can come back some other day."

We walk by bumper cars and a carousel, which look eerie in the quiet park—like the set of an unreleased Baz Luhrmann horror film. "Some sort of carnival took place here over the past few days, which explains all these," Hamid explains. We're heading towards the "little theater," where the drug dealers hang out after the sun goes down. Sisa costs $7 per crystal, and a gram can cost up to $110 in the Menidi neighborhood, a 20 minute drive from the park.

There's a kind of hierarchy inside the park. Along with the "oldies," who make the pipes and basically run the place, there are the addicts and the casual drug users. Some are regulars and stick around, but others just pass through quickly—grabbing what they came for and leaving straightaway.

Violent disagreements aren't rare around the little theater. Algerians and Africans are the usual suspects, Hamid says, but the the Russians who sell weed in the north are considered equally tough. For whatever reason, Hamid looks unwilling to continue talking about this. "Everything is OK. We're all good friends," he says.



Drug users hang out on the park's benches all through the night, often until the sun comes up. They light fires and sit around, talking endlessly about all kinds of stuff. "Sisa gets you off in a similar way to cocaine, but it messes with your stomach big-time—makes you unable to eat or sleep," says Hamid. A few yards away, some addicts who claim to be detoxing are trying to exchange syringes and pills for heroin or sisa.

We sit down so Hamid can get high. He drops a small crystal inside a glass pipe and heats it with a blowtorch. He exhales the thick smoke almost immediately and starts talking about Shakira. As it turns out, it's not the Shakira I had in mind, but a female friend of his who occasionally hangs out in the park, wearing a weird beret. Nobody can tell how old she is—she could be anywhere between 45 and 65. She usually leaves the park at around 7 in the morning to go home, and then she’s back again after a couple of hours. Hamid believes that, thanks to her drug abuse, she never sleeps, just like most people there.

After a little while, Shakira turns up. She's rude and swears with every other word, her loud voice drowning out everything around us. "I haven’t slept in seven fucking days! I took something that got me high, then leaned on a bench, and some asshole came and pushed me. Guess what, buddy? This bench is not your fuckin’ property!" she shouts.



Another familiar face in the park is 25-year-old Christina, who lives in one of the shipping containers left in the park after its refurbishment. A few days ago, her husband was put in jail, and sometimes she'll sit quietly in the dark and try to write him a letter. She usually just ends up sketching a little heart in the corner of the paper, next to a scrawled "I love you."

Christina is a prostitute and HIV-positive. "You shouldn’t think of me as a classic prostitute—I just trick men into giving me their money and then kick them to the curb," she says. "I’m not like all the others. I’m smarter than that." One night, Christina got so high on a combination of heroin and sisa that she started pretending she was a cat. Some people laughed, some swore at her, and others told her to go home.

According to Hamid, Arab men tend to feel uncomfortable when they meet female drug users in the park, because, in their opinion, "This is not the right place for a woman." When Hamid comes across a woman in Christina's condition, he gives her some drugs for free to stop her from sleeping with random guys to raise the cash for her next fix.

Just next to us, Ali—a 55-year-old man from Afghanistan—won't let me take his picture. "My kids are studying abroad. I wouldn’t want them to see me like this," he says. Ali started using heroin and sisa when he lost his home. "Living here is tough," he sighs. "Could you ever stand staying in a place with no windows? The only thing left for me now is to die."

Every day, 200 to 500 drug users buy their supply in Pedion tou Areos, with some using it to feed their wallet as well as their habit. Yiannis, for example, is a 35-year-old Greek guy who usually buys his drugs in western Greece and then sells them to two or three friends in the park, making between $10 and $30 a deal. "Arab people know pretty well that I’m not a loser. I‘ve got a home, and I’m generally pretty sorted, so they treat me politely," he says. "They even try to teach me the best way to inhale and enjoy sisa."



As he shows me out of the park, I ask Hamid how long it's been since he last saw his mother and brothers. "It’s been quite a while. I really want to see my family again. But I can’t go back to Iran, given the situation," he answers.

He says goodbye and disappears into the bushes. A few cars are now running down Alexandras Avenue, heading towards Patision Street. The sun is about to come up, but things in the park don’t look any better in the daylight.

Jon Langford has been one of my favorite artists for more than a decade now. He is also probably my favorite punk rocker, though you might not immediately recognize his new record, Here Be Monsters, as punk. Langford is a founding member of the Mekons, a band that began in Leeds in 1977 and went on to essentially establish the alt-country genre in the mid 1980s, on records like The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll, Fear and Whiskey, and The Curse of the Mekons—which fused the group’s punk ethos and radical left-wing politics with the sounds of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Ernest Tubb. Working in the deceptively simple forms of punk and country, Langford and the Mekons described a world that was irrevocably hopeless and doomed, yet still fun and containing the possibility of love. The novelist Jonathan Franzen put it best when he said that the Mekons were his favorite band not because they give you any hope of winning the battle but “because they teach you how to be gracious and amusing losers." Lester Bangs put it more hyperbolically when he dubbed them “the most revolutionary group in rock 'n’ roll.”

While the Mekons still get together every few years to produce a new album, hit the road, and raise hell, Langford spends the majority of his days in Chicago, where he paints, teaches, and records music with the Waco Brothers, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, and as a solo artist accompanied by the band Skull Orchard. I had the pleasure of talking with him on the phone after listening to Here Be Monsters, his latest album with Skull Orchard, which comes out in April on Bloodshot Records.

VICE: The Mekons began as a punk group in England before embracing elements of classic American country music in the mid 80s. When did country music become important to you?
Jon Langford: Well, I listened to that stuff a lot in the 80s. We were never trying to imitate American country music, but we found it incredibly powerful. People like Hank Williams, Jimmy Rogers, Johnny Cash. The Mekons were kind of like the flipside to the “cowpunk” movement in England, which was people blacking out their teeth and putting dungarees on and yelling “YEE HAW!” and thinking that country music was incredibly funny and kitschy. To us, it was very serious stuff. With the album Fear and Whiskey, what happened was, we had been punk rockers who thought any other type of music was shit, and then we discovered that there was all this other music that was dealing with the same sort of things we were. Classic honky-tonk music—there was very real power in the simplicity of the structure. The fact that Ernest Tubb was terribly concerned that his songs weren’t too foofy or flowery, and that the boys back home on the farm would be able to sing them, that had something to do with what the Mekons were trying to be. And to deal with politics in a kind of small-p, everyday-life sort of way. I could feel these similarities, even though it probably didn’t sound very much the same.

The most spiritually, if not stylistically, punk-rock song on Here be Monsters is definitely “Drone Operator,” which embodies the strain of dark political humor that you and the Mekons have long specialized in.
“Drone Operator” is politics with a capital P. I was trying to work out what it might be like to be a drone operator, and felt like someone who did that might have some serious issues in their personal life. I liked the idea of thinking about the drone operator going home, and what would he do? I knew as I was writing the song that this was really fucking wrong, but nobody was really talking about it at the time. Everyone is finally talking about it now that there’s been that interview with a drone operator, which was done by Glenn Greenwald. This particular drone operator realized that he was killing American citizens without due process, and that he was violating the Constitution in a way where the regime might find him to be an enemy of the state. It was interesting that he was actually a thoughtful drone operator and managed to get out of it. He’s also kind of a whiney drone operator. The real pilots would mock the drone operators because they didn’t actually fly planes, and this guy is moaning about how he’s a real pilot; he really was flying planes. It seems like the most cowardly form of warfare you could imagine. God knows what people living in dirt and poverty in Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan think of somebody who would even do that.

In addition to being a musician, you’re a painter, and you make all the artwork associated with your records. I see that Here Be Monsters comes with a booklet featuring a painting for every song. Did the songs come out of the paintings or the other way around?
Both. I had very strong ideas about what the artwork would be like. There’s a painting for each song on the album, and the artwork features quite heavily, along with the lyrics and the guitar chords, if anybody wants to play them. I’ve been painting skies full of my own personal mythologies. While I was hanging out down in Australia with my friend Roger Knox, the great Aboriginal country musician, we would go outside at night in the Australian bush and look up at a completely amazing Southern Hemisphere sky, where I couldn’t recognize any of the shapes. I was a keen astronomer when I was a kid; I used to have a little telescope, and I knew the names of all the constellations. But in Australia I would look up and not know what was going on. When Roger was first pointing out shapes in the sky to me, I thought he was talking about making constellations by connecting the stars, but he was actually talking about the dark areas of sky. I thought it would be interesting to make a kind of alternative astronomy where you put your own myths up there. You could have Hank Williams up there if you wanted, so I imagined a painting of Hank Williams as a sort of zodiac sign. To me, it would be better to have Hank Williams up there than Mars, the god of war, or something like that. On the cover of the album, I had to put a drone buzzing around up there as well. I’m very realistic about these things, and I don’t think the drones are going away.

Something that people ought to know about you is that you’ve been active in using your art and music to campaign against the death penalty in the United States. The Pine Valley Cosmonauts recorded a series of albums in the 90s called The Executioner’s Last Songs, which raised thousands of dollars to help abolish the death penalty in Illinois. How did you get involved?
Just by coming here from England. It was actually the John Wayne Gacy execution in 1994 that stunned me. I didn’t know much about Gacy; I just knew the urban legend about the clown who killed people near where I was living. When he was executed there was a kind of vigil outside of the prison, and I remember watching the news and seeing them treat the people at the vigil like they were freaks. The attitude was that anyone who opposed killing this guy must be some kind of lunatic. I realized then that by moving to the States I’d fallen off the edge of the political map somewhat, because nobody was really for the death penalty in Great Britain. To see people baying for Gacy’s blood, and the parties that people had once he was executed, it kind of shocked me.

Some time later, I opened for Steve Earle at the Old Town School of Folk Music, and he said, “I haven’t got the time to do it myself, but you should make an album against the death penalty and I’ll be on it,” and I said fine. He came up to Chicago to spend a little bit of time in the studio with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts and recorded a rendition of “Tom Dooley.” He was busy and couldn’t stay long, so he recorded his vocals and said, “OK, put some of that Mekons guitar on it.” I guessed he meant some distorted, out-of-tune guitar playing, so that’s what I did. The death penalty is abolished in Illinois now. It was a great campaign to be involved in, even just being a fundraiser and morale builder.

Are you involved in any political activism today?
Well, I’ve become very interested in working with the Aboriginal community in Australia through working with Roger Knox on his album with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. The album, which is called Stranger in My Land, was meant to reclaim those songs, which had mostly disappeared, and make them relevant by forcing people to listen to them.

Photo by Jean Cook

How did you meet Roger Knox?
I met Roger at the Tamworth Country Music Festival. Tamworth is like the Nashville of Australia—a kind of racist, country town in New South Wales. Roger had been living there for a while and had all sorts of run-ins with the powers that be. His gig at the festival was actually in the Aboriginal Youth Center. Through various people I knew, we managed to contact him, and he was quite happy for the Pine Valley Cosmonauts to come down and play. It was a big, weird scene for the people at the Aboriginal Youth Center, because they weren’t used to white people even going down there, so when we walked in it was kind of a strange thing. We got up and played, and then Roger played his set and brought me up onstage with him. Afterward we sat around talking, and I asked if he’d ever thought about making an album of these great songs, and he was like, “Oh, yeah, that’d be good!” He came over here, and I went over there a couple of times, and we made the album.

I still can’t listen to it without bits of it making me sob. A lot of that music wasn’t really available; it was maybe out on cassette tapes that got passed around. Roger had made a couple of albums, but they were all out of print. There was no way to get hold of it. I thought, This doesn’t deserve to die; it deserves to be heard. It’s amazing the sort of disservice that mainstream, popular music does to these things. I’m not against pop music, but the idea of mass acceptance of a very few artists to the detriment of all this richness, that just seems to be what happens. I really believe the way forward is to make things that five or six people might really like. If somebody really likes it, I think that’s great, but it certainly doesn’t have to be everyone in the Western Hemisphere. The Mekons were on A&M Records in the late 90s, and we sold 25,000 copies of The Mekons Rock 'n’ Roll and were told that this was a major disappointment. I couldn’t believe we’d actually sold that many records! I thought it was extraordinary that 25,000 people had our record, and A&M thought it was just pathetic. I don’t really get how it works and I never have. I’m a 50-something-year-old man who’s probably never going to get a job, so I have to pursue this art and music thing in a way that makes sense for me. It’s a really privileged position, actually. It’s nice.

@yrfriendmatthew

Stacy Martin in Nymphomaniac

Landing a role in the most infamous movie of the past decade isn't a bad way to start your acting career. In her screen debut, 22-year-old British model Stacy Martin spends the majority of her time groaning, moaning and doing weird things with a set-square, in her role as the titular character in Lars von Trier’s four-hour epic, Nymphomaniac. Dark, depressing and funny all at the same time, it follows the often brutal sexcapades of a woman (played by both Martin and Charlotte Gainsbourg) from birth to the age of 50.

I went to meet Stacy in Soho, where we drank free coffee and spoke about sex addiction, porn doubles and the awkwardness of shooting sex scenes with Shia LaBeouf.

The trailer for Nymphomaniac: Volume 1

VICE: Hey Stacy. What was your first reaction when you read the script for Nymphomaniac?
Stacy Martin: I loved it! I read the script before I went to Copenhagen for a screen test, and really fell in love with how dense it is and how there are so many different elements to the film – and the dark humour, which is very specific to Lars.

Shia LaBeouf said that, when he received the script, there was a note saying he had to send a picture of his dick to the production team. 
Did he?!

Yeah. I’m guessing it wasn’t the same kind of deal for you?
No, I don’t have a penis [laughs], so I didn’t get that.

No weird requests?
No, actually. I just got the script on its own in a little brown envelope – pretty standard.

How were your sex scenes worded in your contract?
We had a nudity contract; everything was set in stone before we did the film, so we all knew what we were doing. I was told that I would have a porn double – that I wouldn’t be doing anything sexual. We all agreed – and Lars agreed – that we would be using prosthetics and just stuff like that.

The blowjob scene in particular looks incredibly real.
Yeah, it looks real. I mean, I’m convinced that it looks real – but no, it’s not real. It’s not a real penis… they made fake vaginas and fake penises and we used them for that.

No CGI?
Well, we did the CGI for the porn doubles, so when – for example – you have the wider shots of Joe [Martin’s character] having sex, they took what we did and what the porn doubles did and then put them into one image so that it looks like we’re having sex, basically.

How do you prepare for the role of a nymphomaniac?
I mean, I didn’t prep for the role of a sex addict, I prepped for the role of Joe, especially because I play her from her formative years, when she’s 15 to 31. [It's during] that time that you discover who you are, and you kind of experiment a lot. So to play a sex addict from the beginning is wrong, and Lars told me not to. He was like, "I don’t want you to play what you think is a sex addict, because Joe isn’t like that, and it isn’t about making this stereotype of a nymphomaniac; it’s about showing the humanity of this person who has an addiction." I thought that was a fair point, and he was right.

How did you and Shia prepare for your sex scenes together?
We talked a lot about them. We obviously… well, because of the nature of the scene – because we’re both naked with prosthetics – it was very important for Lars and us as actors to know each other and to be comfortable and get on the same page, rather than going, "Hey! Here we are!" And, I mean, he was great, and very dedicated to what he wants to do. With him, you’re there immediately and you know what you’re doing. You’re not just kind of messing around. 

So it wasn't awkward between you guys, filming those scenes?
Well it wasn’t the most natural moment of my life, that’s for sure. But, as actors, if you’re gonna take on a role like Joe or Jerôme [LaBeouf’s character], it’s your duty in your work to honour those circumstances. And that’s what I did, for Lars, for his film – for all those things. It wasn’t like, "Oh, I’m gonna play whatever part and get naked" – definitely not.

Shia and Stacy in Nymphomaniac

So did Lars kick everyone out to film you and Shia?
Yeah, it was a closed set, so there was only Lars, me, Shia – or whoever was doing the scene with me – and the camera operator. It was very intimate, very calm. Lars works with people who he's known for years, so there’s this family feel. So, immediately, you feel like you’ve entered – it sounds weird – this safe haven. You can talk about things and I could be very honest with Lars. 

Okay. Let me get this straight – you and Shia both had porn doubles; how did it work between the four of you on set?
Because of the special effects, they needed the porn doubles to do it first. So they would have sex – they would do their job, basically, because I think they’re porn actors in Germany – and then we would come on and do exactly the same thing, but with pants on, basically. And then it’s all [edited in] post.

Did you hang out with your porn double?
No. I mean, I met her, but we didn’t have tea or anything. It’s strange just to see how quickly a set can change. Like, the atmosphere really changed when they did those scenes, and I did stay a bit too long at one point. When they started filming, I was like, "Actually, this is a bit too weird – I’m gonna go." It was like they were doing a porn movie, and everything they do, they do [for real].

When you were watching them have sex, did you think, ‘That’s going to be me on screen. That’s my sex scene'?
You have to. You read the script and you know what’s demanded of you. It is weird, but it’s great. I mean, I can actually do this film without breaking my own integrity, and it’s like, "Yeah, great, thanks – go have sex for me! Thank you. I’m gonna go have a cup of tea and not have sex."

Stacy with a set-square

Maths plays an odd part in the sex scenes, and you even have a remarkable scene with a set-square. What did you make of that relationship?
It’s funny, because I don’t think Lars made a conscious decision to put maths and sex together, but there’s something very technical about sex, and there was something very technical about the way we had to film those scenes. It’s very mathematical, because it’s how we survive as a race; we reproduce constantly – that’s technical, that’s maths in a kind of weird, abstract way. But it’s also his way of taking all the romance out of it, of what you expect a sex scene to be on screen in movies, with the music and the beautiful sheets, and then suddenly they’re in bed. He takes it all away and shows it matter of fact, and mathematics does exactly that.

It’s very unnatural the way that Shia’s character thrusts the same amount of times – three from the front, five from behind – when he has sex with your character.
Hmm, yeah, it’s very formal. I guess maybe Shia knows more about it – it’s his character.

So how did you get on with Shia behind the scenes?
He’s got this energy that I think I would say is – I’m probably wrong – very American. So as soon as he arrives, he’s very dedicated – he’s there. He kind of arrives, and we’re, like, European, chilled and quiet. So he kind of livened everything up, because he was so excited to be there. You do the scene and there’s no waiting around, because you love the part and you want to be there, rather than going, "Oh, I like this film, but I’m having a really shit time."

Shia, pre-plagiarism and paper bags

Do you think Shia absorbed some of Lars’ provocative nature, given what’s happened with him since?
With everything that’s happening, I think only he has the answers, really. And he’s not gonna give them out that easily. I mean, we filmed it about a year and a half ago, so he could have changed completely.

What do you make of his recent bag-on-head antics?
If he has an idea like that and he goes 100 percent… do it. I mean, I didn’t think of it!

Lars is known for his suffering female characters who go through all kinds of shit – were you nervous about that aspect of the role?
You know, the female leads in Dogville [Nicole Kidman] and Breaking the Waves [Emily Watson] – yes, they are going through shit, basically, but they’re also very strong women. I don’t think a lot of human beings can go through those things and be so brave and kind of stay true to what they believe in. And I think it’s empowering, because you see them in shit situations – which, most of the time, are influenced or happening because of men or culture – and they still manage to power through and believe in what they believe in. That’s great, so to play that is a gift. Because, otherwise, I might as well just not act. You know, why does a painter paint? You need to communicate, you need to challenge preconceived ideas.

Thanks, Stacy.

@OliverLunn

Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 and Volume 2 is released in UK cinemas on the 28th of February

This article was amended at 11.27AM, 27/02/14 – as a von Trier points out, Shia LaBeouf's character actually thrusts five times from behind, rather than three, when he has sex with Stacy Martin's character.

Illustration by Molly Crabapple

In May 2013, Monica Jones, a student and sex-work activist, was arrested for “manifesting prostitution” by the Phoenix police.

Hers was one of more than 350 arrests carried out by Project ROSE in conjunction with Phoenix police since the program's inception in 2011.

Project ROSE is a Phoenix city program that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online.  They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion program to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.

In the Bethany Bible Church, those arrested were not allowed to speak to lawyers. Despite the handcuffs, they were not officially “arrested” at all.   

In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were “programs.” The arrests were “contact.” And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms—they were “lawfully detained.”  

“Project ROSE is a service opportunity for a population involved in a very complex problem,” Lieutenant Gallagher wrote to me in an email. Sex workers were criminals and victims at once. They were fair game to imprison, as long as they were getting “help.”

Project ROSE is the creation of Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. She is the director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research and a tenured professor at Arizona State University, where Monica Jones is a student. Once, she and Monica had even debated Project ROSE.  

According to Project ROSE's website, most costs are absorbed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries of the officers carrying out the raids. Fifteen-hundred dollars more per day goes to the Bethany Bible Church. Volunteers, including students from Arizona State University, fill in the gaps. SWOP-Phoenix, an activist organization by and for sex workers, is filing freedom-of-information requests to discover ROSE's other sources of funding.  

At first, Project ROSE may seem similar to the many diversion programs in the United States, in which judges sentence offenders to education, rehab, or community service rather than giving them a criminal record. What makes ROSE different is that it doesn't work with the convicted. Rather, its raids funnel hundreds of people into the criminal justice system. Denied access to lawyers, many of these people are coerced into ROSE's program without being convicted of any crime. Project ROSE may not seem constitutional, but to Roe-Sepowitz, “rescue” is more important than rights.  

In November 2013, Roe-Sepowitz told Al Jazeera: “Once you've prostituted you can never not have prostituted... Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like, and intimacy.”

“As a social worker, you’re supposed to see your clients as human beings,” Monica told me. “But her way of thinking is that once you’re a sex worker, you can never not be a sex worker.”

To the best of Google's knowledge, Roe-Sepowitz has not spoken to any press since Al Jazeera. She ignored my repeated requests for comment, and she has only been willing to engage sex workers if they risked their freedom by speaking to her class alongside members of the police.  

Monica is a proud activist. Days ago she spoke to USA Today, comparing struggles against Arizona's SB 1062 bill (which permits businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals) to those her family fought for their civil rights. On her third year of a social-work degree, Monica volunteers with battered women, works at a needle exchange, and passes out condoms to sex workers. She is a member of SWOP-Phoenix. She describes herself as “homemaker at heart,” a girl who loves to cook, dance, and party, but also as an “advocate.”

Monica fears she was targeted for this advocacy.  

On the day cops dragged Monica to Bethany Bible Church, she had posted on Backpage.com, an advertising service used by sex workers, to warn them of a coming sting. The day before, she had spoken against Project ROSE at a SWOP rally.  

Monica told me she had accepted a ride home from her favorite bar the night of her arrest. Once inside the car, undercover officers handcuffed her. They were rude, she said, calling her “he” and “it” (Monica is trans, but her ID lists her as a female). They threatened to take her to jail. Like many incarcerated trans women, Monica had previously been imprisoned with men.  Frightened, Monica agreed for them to take her to the church.  

Ineligible for Project ROSE's diversion program because of previous prostitution convictions, Monica now faces months in jail and worries incarceration will hamper her pursuit of a degree. She has been questioned on the street three times since her arrest. Once, police handcuffed her for 15 minutes.

“Because I was very outspoken about the diversion program, being out there protesting and also being a student of ASU School of Social Work, I feel like the police knew about me,” Monica said.  “I was very loud, so they could pick me out of the crowd.”

Monica was arrested for “manifesting prostitution,” a statute in the Phoenix municipal code that takes everything from starting conversations with passersby to asking if someone is an undercover cop as proof that you're selling sex. In the state where Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost massive lawsuits for racially profiling Latinos, “manifesting prostitution” is another way to discriminate. The main victims are trans women of color like Monica, who are seen as sex workers even if they're buying milk.

Some might say Project ROSE is harmless. After all, those eligible for diversion can have their charges dropped if they're among the 30 percent who manage to complete the program. But many of the hundreds arrested in Project ROSE's raids are not eligible, either because cops find drugs or weapons on them or because they've been charged with prositution before.

“All persons found to be participating in prostitution activity are breaking the law, regardless of motive,” says the fact sheet Project ROSE gives the media. Those not eligible are criminals. Their freedom is a small price to pay for forcing others into a program that might remove them from “the life.”

To effect this rescue, Project ROSE offers a buffet of services, including emergency housing, detox, and counseling. All these services are available without being arrested, Jaclyn Dairman, an activist with SWOP-Phoenix, told me.    

But at ROSE's heart is DIGNITY Diversion, 36 hours of classroom time run by Catholic Charities.

Catholic Charities' website boasts a photo of a white girl, a tear running down her cheek. Who could resist opening their wallets before such innocence destroyed? Catholic Charities offers walking tours of the sketchy parts of town. Tender-hearted folk can gawk at sex workers. These excursions are like the slum tours beloved by Victorians. Popular enough in the 1890s to be listed in guidebooks, these tours of impoverished London neighborhoods gave a philanthropic gloss to the thrill of mingling with the poor in brothels, bars, and boarding houses.  Then and now, participants got the self-satisfaction of pity mixed with the frisson of proximity to vice.  

This cocktail may be why sex trafficking, as opposed to trafficking in maids or construction workers or farm labor, is always a fashionable cause.  

Monica is a graduate of DIGNITY Diversion.  Forced into this program by another prostitution arrest, Monica sat in a classroom from 8 AM to 4 PM, without food, while vice cops described girls overdosing on heroin. Jail was held over the heads of attendees until they finished the program, though many were going broke from their loss of sex-work income. Monica described the class as having the religious overtones of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In keeping with the program's Catholicism, no condoms were provided. Neither was child care.  

“I wasn’t ashamed about being a sex worker. I kept bringing this up during the diversion program,” Monica told me. “Girls would ask me why I didn't feel this way. Well, 'cause I don’t. I have the right to my own body.”  

Catholic Charities requested that Monica leave early, fearing her influence on others.  

Monica's trial is in March. The prisons she may be sentenced to are brutal. Arizona is the home of the notorious Tent City, an outdoor complex of bunks and razor wire, where prisoners' shoes melt from the relentless heat.  

In 2009, Marcia Powell, a sex worker serving two years for agreeing to a $20 blowjob, was left in an open cage in the maximum-security yard of Perryville Prison Complex for four hours. Guards ignored her pleas for water. Under the pitiless sun, her organs failed her. Her corpse was covered with burns.  

No guard has ever been charged for Marcia Powell's death.

“There is no gray. It's illegal behavior,” Dominique Roe-Sepowtitz said, speaking about prostitution to Al Jazeera.  

Like Catholic Charities' hooker tours, her attitude is Victorian. To those like Roe-Sepowitz, there are God's poor and the Devil's poor. There are victims Project ROSE can save, and there repeat offenders, unrepentant whores. They can be locked in cages and dismissed.

When the police brought Monica to the Bethany Baptist Church, she saw Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. “She refused to talk to me,” Monica said. “She wanted nothing to do with me.”

Why would she? It's easier to speak for people if you pretend they have no voice.  

Follow Molly on Twiiter @MollyCrabapple

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons. This story is from VICE News, our new news website. See more and sign up now at vicenews.com.

The US and South Korean (ROK) militaries have begun their annual military exercises, dubbed Key Resolve and Foal Eagle. Among the largest and most important military exercises in the world, they have become a yearly spring ritual. Kind of like prom.

After all, Key Resolve and Foal Eagle are costly annual spectacles that, each year, have a slightly different theme. What the events mean to you, how you prepare for them, and how badly you lose your shit over them says a lot about who you are and where you fit into the hierarchy of your peers. There's even probably some taffeta involved.

But what makes the exercises so interesting is the wildly different strategic maneuvering they put on display—on both sides of the DMZ. The Korean War ended more than 60 years ago with a ceasefire agreement, but no peace treaty. That means the war, which resulted in more than 6.6 million military and civilian casualties—including 128,650 amongst US military personnel—never technically ended. And the large-scale military exercises regularly held on both sides of the border (they've been going on for decades) are incremental steps in the evolution of this conflict.

Military exercises are simulations—or, if you prefer, massively multiplayer Live Action Role Playing events. These simulations are carried out for one of two reasons. Some exercises are experiments in which two teams compete against each other in an effort to find out what tactics, equipment, or practices are the most effective and which ones are ludicrous nonsense. The other purpose of an exercise is to provide training and practice. Most militaries spend much of their time “training” in a classroom—if they’re lucky—with computer simulations. Field exercises give people a chance to work with real gear in the real world.

The ability to physically move large numbers of people and tons of equipment, in a manner that sort of looks like real war, is also a good way to let other countries know your capabilities and intentions. It tells foreign militaries and governments, both allied and opposing, that your military could, if called upon, find the keys to their tanks and planes.

This year’s exercises, which will involve 12,700 US troops and 190,000 South Korean troops, run till April 18, and have already generated agitation and consternation from some corners.

For the US and South Korea, the exercises are primarily focused on one thing: deterring North Korea from starting another war... or continuing the current one that never really ended. The Korean War kicked off with a (more-or-less) surprise attack by North Korea, and since then, the South has gone to great lengths to make it clear that nobody will ever get the jump on them like that again. Part of their effort includes proving that the US is both willing and able to support South Korea, should North Korea come pouring over the DMZ.

The typical response for a nation in North Korea's situation would be to hold a huge exercise of its own and deter right back. But the problem for North Korea is that large-scale exercises are both a complex pain in the ass and frightfully expensive. So what is a very poor North Korea to do if it wants to deter its opponents?

Deterrence means letting the other guy know you're a threat. And, as far as analysis goes, there are two measures for determining whether something is a threat: capabilities and intent. The easiest and clearest way to think about threats is to look at capabilities. Does an opponent have the ability to kick your ass? A lot of folks prefer to think about threats this way because it’s far easier to count tanks and airplanes than it is to read minds.

The other way of thinking about threats is to focus on intent. This can be tricky because it’s hard to measure and quantify... well, feelings.

North Korea is not able to scare off the world’s largest and best-funded military by strength of arms alone. However, North Korea can make it quite clear that they are crazy enough to start a war so horrendous that nobody wins. The North Koreans routinely attempt to do this in order to achieve two things: one, to show the US (and South Korea) that they can’t be pushed around. And two, to create enough of a fuss to get some extra concessions out of their frequent negotiations with the rest of the world.

And so to push back against potential military threats and score some points for future negotiations, North Korea reliably stages a number of high-profile diplomatic events (read: stunts) before and during. Last year, this involved the sixth North Korean announcement that they were pulling out of the Korean War ceasefire agreement and hinting that they might nuke Austin, Texas.

This year should prove no exception, and North Korea has already been laying the groundwork. To start, like every other year, North Korea has been calling the exercises provocative and dangerous, asserting that they’re really intended to cover up US and South Korean preparations to launch an invasion of the North.

Meanwhile, much like last year, North Korea is apparently doing a lot of advance work at their nuclear weapons manufacturing facility, nuclear weapons test site, and missile launch facility. The North Koreans know that American satellites will see this, so this work is an early part of the North’s deterrence effort. Further, it lays the groundwork for further activity, like testing nuclear bombs or launching ICBMs in coming weeks

In a somewhat more benign measure, North Korea has agreed to permit reunions of families torn apart by the Korean War. Now that both sides have agreed that the reunions should go ahead, they both have something they can halt in protest, should the need for such a protest arise.

Last year’s annual Korean crisis was one of the most dramatic seen in decades, which has fueled uncertainty about the relatively new Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Some speculate that he needs to be more dramatic and macho to convince regime hardliners that he is tough enough to rule the country. Others have wondered whether or not the more aggressive posture indicates that Kim is even more erratic than dear ol’ Dad.

What does this mean going forward? The mood on the Korean border is always a bit touchy: Since the end of the Korean War, more than 450 South Korean and 100 US military personnel have been killed in cross-border skirmishes. Military exercises have played a role in some of the sporadic bouts of violence. On one hand, exercises raise tensions, increasing the likelihood of war, either through deliberate action or miscalculation. On the other hand, both sides can renew their deterrent posture, which perversely can indicate that nobody wants to fight.

There is no doubt that Korea watchers will be closely following what unfolds over the next two months. Diplomats will be shuffling responses, recalculating postures, and making formal statements on a regular basis. Military commanders will be adapting and tweaking deployments and exercises, in constant response to directives from civilian leadership. And yet despite some of the loudest and scariest saber rattling on the planet, we’ll probably get through this without a catastrophically violent war breaking out in Korea. However, much like prom, everything can seem different the morning after the big event.

Young women in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Photo via DVIDSHUB

I saw a documentary the other day about Afghan women who'd been imprisoned for "moral crimes"—a euphemism for stuff like running away from abusive husbands or reporting that they'd been raped. At one point, one of them said, "Prison is much better than my own home; you can watch the outside from here." The film, Love Crimes of Kabul, wasn't a look back at a repressive but bygone past—it was made last year, and Afghan women are dealing with this oppression today.

It's because of stuff like "moral crimes" and women being trapped inside without any access to windows that a 2011 poll of women's-rights experts named Afghanistan "the worst place in the world to be a woman." And with the last of the coalition troops set to leave the country by the end of this year, there are worries that the small amount of freedoms Afghan women have won are going to be further eroded without Western forces keeping watch.

"It's worth remembering that the starting point [for women's rights] under the Taliban was incredibly low," said Heather Barr, the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "It's still one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman, but progress in the last few years has been amazing. There are now about 3 to 4 million girls in school, infant mortality and maternal mortality have fallen dramatically, and Afghanistan now has a parliament that is 28-percent women—something lots of Western countries should aspire to achieving."

Heather Barr

A lot of these changes wouldn't have been possible without the Western armies currently stationed in Afghanistan. Say what you will about the reasons for their deployment, but they've generally done a good job of keeping the Taliban from influencing the political process. The danger is that after NATO and the US withdraw from the country, the tenuous situation they have established could collapse. And one of the first things to be lost would undoubtedly be the hard-won improvements in the lives of women.

Sadly, in the run-up to the troop withdrawal, it already looks like that process could be underway. Last year, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission elected five new members, one of whom—Abdul Rahman Hotak—used to be associated with the Taliban. Following his appointment, according to Heather, women’s seats in the Afghan Parliament were reduced by 5 percent.

Also last year, a provision was inserted into a new criminal-prosecution code that barred relatives of a defendant from testifying against him or her in court—an alteration that would effectively leave female victims of domestic abuse without any chance of seeing their attackers prosecuted. "It basically means that no one can testify against their family members," Heather told me. "This makes most of the evidence of violence against women unusable, because any kind of abuse against women from their family is only going to be witnessed by relatives."

At the beginning of February, the upper house of parliament passed the law, provoking international outcry. But Heather said that the outrage was a long time coming, considering how long the provision had been public knowledge. "People are starting to feel like the foreign troops have already left, because the sense of disengagement by the international community is so strong," she said. "They don’t want to hear about anything; they just want to declare victory and leave."

A girl attending the 2009 International Women’s Day celebration in Pajshir Orovince, Afghanistan. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Thankfully, President Hamid Karzai blocked the law last week after a protest campaign by Afghan rights activists and Western diplomats, ordering major revisions to be made. But the fact that it made its way through parliament unchallenged is worrying; and with the presidential election in April signaling the end of his term limit, Karzai doesn't have much time left in power to veto that kind of law.

In December, UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared that the mission in Afghanistan is "accomplished" and that a "basic level of security" had been established. Clearly this is part of the "declare-victory-and-leave" playbook, but it also underscored how little certain Western powers care about what happens to Afghan society when the troops go home.

"The reason why this is happening now is because, before last year, people who were unhappy with [the progression of] women’s rights thought, Oh, there isn’t anything we can do because of the pressure from the international community," said Heather.

With Western world leaders washing their hands of the situation, opponents of women being treated fairly will again have free rein to impose their repressive ideals on the country. And that conservative backlash could well obliterate any of the women's rights that have been enshrined by law, though they aren't often honored in the culture at large. But most Afghan women will continue fighting to protect their freedom, even if the legislature starts working against them again.

Ramika Khabiri performing in Kabul. Screenshot via

Ramika Khabiri is a female rapper who's been directly affected by the changes the international community brought to her country. "Before, women weren't even allowed to leave their houses, let alone be artists," she said. "Then the foreign troops brought a more secure environment to Afghanistan, and as an effect women felt safe to become artists. They encouraged us to join projects and work for ourselves."

The first US troops arrived in her hometown when Ramika was still a child. Since she turned 17, she's been rapping about the suffering of Afghan women, hoping to spread awareness throughout the rest of the world. In her latest song, she calls on people to vote in the upcoming elections and emphasizes how important it is for the youth to take on political power so they don't end up repeating the mistakes of the past.

Ramika said things have come a long way since her childhood, but in contrast to the assertions of various world leaders, she says there's still a lot left to achieve. "I still can’t walk anywhere without a mask right now," she told me. "Being a musician is still quite difficult for a woman in Afghanistan, and people on the streets still often find abusive words for it."

Since 2011, there has been a platform for her music: Sound Central Festival in Kabul, the first independent alternative-music festival for male and female artists. Founder Travis Beard believes that progress in the arts will survive, even though some of the funds will dry out when the international militaries leave. "Kabul is pretty accepting in its attitudes, but the countryside is more conservative," he said.

This May, Ramika will perform at Sound Central again. Regressing to a time when women weren't even allowed out of the house—let alone into schools or high-profile jobs—is out of the question for her. But she realizes that defending the improvements will take some effort.

Shannon Galpin and Travis Beard delivering laptops to a girls' school in Afghanistan

"I think people forget how much time it takes to rebuild a country that has been at war for so long and has so little infrastructure," said Shannon Gaplin, founder of the women’s charity Mountain2Mountain. "When I look at the projects for women, I look at generational change. You shouldn’t expect change to happen within one or two years—we’re looking at generational shifts of maybe 21 years. It’s most important to empower the youth movement now so that they can be the change-makers in the future."

There are, of course, a huge number of issues that stem from foreign troops' being stationed in the country—an important one being the populace's justified resentment against the soldiers over the civilian casualties inflicted during the long occupation. And it's about time that control over the country was put back into the hands of the Afghan people. But it does feel like something needs to be done to ensure that women's rights don't take a giant step back.

After April's presidential elections, the new government's policies will be a decisive factor when it comes to foreign military presence and influence beyond 2015—which could be instrumental in establishing whether the progress gained will last or roll back in the hands of hard-line conservatives.

Either way, foreign powers must realize that their role isn't over as soon as the troops pull out; they have a responsibility to keep an eye on the changes they've helped to bring about. The conflict in Afghanistan has been criticized as pointless by countless soldiers, senior officers, and observers over the years, but abandoning all sense of responsibility for the country's situation would make the decade-plus of war and death even more futile.

As Shannon told me, "The troop-contributing nations really see the moment when their last soldier gets on the plane and leaves Afghanistan as the moment they’re done. And that’s incredibly damaging."

Question Mark & the Mysterians, photo via. Artwork by Brian Walsby

Bobby Balderrama is a wonderful guy who started one of the greatest punk bands ever: Question Mark & the Mysterians, otherwise known as the humans who wrote and performed “96 Tears” back in 1966. The piercing organ riff, bare-bones vocal track, and low-fidelity production make it a safe candidate for first punk rock song ever. If you haven’t heard it I feel sorry for you, and you should press the little orange button down there before we go any further.

I talked to Bobby about 20 years ago, when I was doing the original interviews for Please Kill Me. He was a delight to interview. As he recounted how "96 Tears" came to be a hit single, his enthusiasm, naïveté, and sheer love of rock ‘n’ roll was completely infectious. Bobby told his story so well I could just imagine him walking the single to record shops and radio stations, hoping against hope that somebody would notice it. Sort of like how That Thing You Do might have been if the theme song were actually good.

His recollections are below, starting with his childhood in a Mexican community in Saginaw, Michigan.

MEXICANS

There was kind of a big Mexican-American population in Saginaw, because a lot of migrant workers came up here and worked on the farms. General Motors built a big plant up here in the 40s or 50s. When the migrant workers found out they could get hired at GM without a high school education, they got jobs and settled in. That’s what my dad and my oldest brother did, and that’s how we settled here.

There wasn't a lot of us at our high school, maybe six or seven Mexican-American students, so that was a little rough. Even so, everybody was pretty nice; it was more that a lot of the social clubs were prejudiced. After we started the band, they wouldn’t let us play their clubs. We couldn’t play in them because we were Mexican, you know? That was a weird thing, but then we got so big so quickly we didn’t want to play them!

See, it was me and my cousin, Larry Borjas, and a drummer named Robert Martinez, who started the band. It was just a three-piece thing. We were doing Ventures songs like “Walk, Don't Run,” and Duane Eddy’s “Guitar Man,” and all instrumental stuff like that. We didn’t really have a name back then.

One day me and my cousin were watching this Japanese monster movie with a bunch of crazy aliens called "the Mysterians," and that’s what Larry wanted to call us. At first, I didn’t wanna go with it, but about a week later, after we started using that name, I got used to it.

QUESTION MARK

My dad encouraged me to play guitar. He was a guitarist himself; he played accordion, guitar, violin, harmonica, and all this stuff. I used to watch him play all the time, so I wanted to play too. Then me and my dad started watching shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig! and all these bands from England when the British Invasion was coming in: The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were on Ed Sullivan, and I was really getting into it. So Dad basically got us motivated to play this stuff, and then we started playing out a lot, just doing parties and stuff. At some point someone asked us, “Who’s singing?”

No one in the band was really a singer. We wanted to find a singer, and we knew Question Mark and he said he could sing. Actually, my sisters knew him because he had a reputation as one of the best dancers around the area, you know? And my sisters used to go watch him dance, so they recommended Question Mark, and we tried him out and he sounded real good. He covered Mick Jagger, and we thought, "Well, we could do a lot of Rolling Stones cover songs…” So we started doing that.

The Vietnam War was happening, and Larry Borjas and Robert Martinez were the right age to get drafted, so they both joined the Army. I wasn't too much aware of Vietnam, but I was more aware of it after they started telling me they were going to be drafted. They didn't want to go to Vietnam, and if they enlisted, they would have a choice of where they wanted to go. So that’s what they did. They enlisted and got sent to Germany, so they didn’t have to go to Vietnam. But after they joined up, we were kind of left out in the cold.

So right before they went into service, we got a keyboard player named Frank Rodriguez. We were looking for a keyboard player anyway, because a lot of bands coming out had that great organ sound, like the Moody Blues, you know?

So we were looking for a keyboard player, and that’s when we found Frank Rodriguez. Me and Frank, we were like the young kids who wanted to hang out with the big guys. Frank was only 13 years old when he joined the band. The only way we could hang out with the older guys was to play music with them, so that’s what we did.

Then we got Frank Lugo, who played bass, and we started writing songs. One day, Frank started playing a little organ riff, and we really liked it a lot. I kinda came up with the chord riff, and every time we practiced, we recorded everything. At first it didn’t have words. Then Question Mark said he had words for it, but I thought he was just singing off the top of his head. I thought he was just improvising.

How we came up with the name “96 Tears,” see, when we were putting the song together, Question Mark was singing, “Too Many Teardrops,” and I think we wanted to call it that, but then our drummer said, "Let's call it ‘69 Tears!’"

And we said, "Well, it's a real catchy name, but we don't think that they’ll say that on the radio; it’s too dirty.”

Even though I was only 14 when we were recorded the song and 15 when it came out, I knew what 69 meant. The Rolling Stones almost got banned for doing the same thing on The Ed Sullivan Show when they sang, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” the censors at the Ed Sullivan Show thought that line was too dirty, so they had to change it to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.”

So the drummer said, "Let's turn the numbers around!"

I said, "What do you mean?"

And he said, "Let's call it ‘96 Tears,’ you know?"

All of a sudden there were light bulbs and stuff, and we said, "YEAH, THAT'S IT!"       

So that's how we came up with the name.

TOP 40 RADIO 

We went to this producer named Lilly Gonzales. We had gone to her a year before that, and she had turned us down, but she said, “Well, you don’t sound like you’re ready yet; why don’t you come back next year?” And that’s basically what we did. I guess we got turned down at every venue, so we went back to her the next year and played her our new songs, and she said, "Yeah, I’ll put you through now." 

She owned a four-track recording studio in Bay City, Michigan, and that's where we recorded “96 Tears” and “The Midnight Hour.” Miss Gonzales had a Mexican label down in McAllen, Texas, and she found a lot of Mexican bands. She had a Mexican store in Saginaw too.

But Miss Gonzales didn’t really want us to be a Mexican band, because she really played a lot of rock ‘n’ roll too. So this was our only opportunity to get out there. I hate to say this, but back in the 60s there was a lot of prejudice.

I think if we had gone to a white record company, they would have just laughed at us. I think they would've turned us down, because we were so young. We were only in high school, you know? Miss Gonzales gave us a shot. She quickly started a record label called Pa-Go-Go Records and sent us 500 copies of the “96 Tears” single.

So me, Question Mark, and the rest of the guys started hitting all the stores, dropping them off. First we went to the radio station, WKNX in Saginaw. They told us, “Well, you better drop them off at the store first and see if they sell.” That's just what we did. 

We hit all the other radio stations, and Rob Dyer and Dick Dave at WKNX said, "Yeah, if you guys can help us out, we'll help you out, you know? If you play for us at gigs, and do promotions for the station, we'll play your record and get your PR going.”

We weren't making that much money anyway. I mean, all we wanted to do was get the record out. So WKNX started playing it; I think they were the first. I just wanted to hear it on the radio to see what kind of reaction it got. And WKNX used to have a “Battle of the Songs,” like a “Battle of the Bands,” only they played different songs on the radio and then people called to tell them which one they liked better. And I just wanted to phone in and go, “Wow, I heard this song, and it’s great,” but I never did.

I was actually in the 9th Grade when the record came out, and I’d be walking down the halls and people would come up to me and say, "Hey, Bobby, I heard your song on the radio!”

I thought I was the only one who listened to the “Battle of the Songs,” you know? But I came to realize that everybody was listening to it, so we started doing those gigs for WKNX, and then we took the record down to this guy Bob at WTAC radio, and he made the same kind of offer to us that WKNX did. Bob said, “Yeah, you guys play for me, and I'll play your song, and it will get a lot of people to come out and see you play.”

We said, “Great, let’s do it!”

So Bob started booking us and we were playing down in this place in Mount Holly, and all of a sudden, from that time on, it was crazy. First they played it in Saginaw, then Flint, and then all the record stores started calling us up 'ause they were out of records. And I couldn't believe it, you know? We had this big pile of records, and we dropped some more off.

So we said, “Let's go down to Detroit and hit DTFW,” because that was like the big time. We were kinda intimidated by Detroit, but we went down there and dropped off the record at DTFW, and they kind of looked at us like, "Well, OK, yeah, sure."

When the song made number one in Flint, we got a call from DTFW for more records, but we’d already sent them some. Back then, radio stations would get thousands of singles all the time and throw them right in the trash. I guess that’s what they’d done with ours. So we went down there and dropped off some more.

They started playing us in Detroit, and people started caring and were requesting it. And DKSW, the biggest station in town, was left no choice but to start playing it too. It made number one at DKSW and people were telling me, “YOUR SONG IS NUMBER ONE ALL OVER THE STATE!”

I couldn’t really comprehend it, ya know? I had people I didn’t even know saying, “Yeah, your song is going number one,” and I was looking around like, “Huh?” I didn’t even what that meant—“number one?” You mean, in the morning? Is that good? I mean, does number one mean you’re the lowest level, or what? I didn't understand the rating system, until someone told me, “No, your song is the best song on the radio right now, in the area, you know?”

FAME

So we had to go down to the record store and sign autographs. I was just awed by it, you know? Like when you go to see a star and you want their autograph and once you get that autograph, you’re like, “Wow, I got it!” So I was awed by people wanting my autograph. I’d sign anything.

All of a sudden we had all these major companies coming at us, wanting to license our songs. We went with Cameo Parkway Records, which was Neil Bogart’s company. Neil set us up on some TV show in New York City, I forget what it was, and we went on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. I used to watch Bandstand every Saturday morning. I was thinking, “Gosh, I’m gonna be on American Bandstand!”

I was kind of intimidated by Dick Clark, but he was really a down-to-earth person. He came to our dressing room and shook our hands, and he wanted to take a picture with us. He was real good people, and from that time on we toured for him. Dick Clark put us on the bill with the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Electric Prunes, the McCoys, the Shadows of the Night, the Seeds... We were traveling in a van and took turns driving, everybody with the equipment in the van. It was fun traveling around, playing, and a great way to see the country.  

And we did some Beach Boys tours too, and that was great. I used to love listening to those guys play. I used to think, “God, I wish I could do some of that live.” They were great. But we never could get close to them, 'cause they'd come in a limo and go right on stage. And soon as they were done, they left in the limo and were gone.

My mom and dad were real proud of me, just nervous about me getting involved in drugs and stuff. On one of the first tours, I was about to get on the tour bus with those bands—the McCoys, the Shadows of the Night, the Seeds—and my dad said to me, “I’ll sign the permission form so you can go on the road, only if you promise you’ll never take anything in your life.”

I said, “What do you mean, Dad?”

And he goes, “You know, marijuana…”

So I said, “Sure ,Dad, I never even smoked cigarettes!”

As soon as I got on the bus, somebody behind me said, “Gosh, I wish I had a joint”

Frank, the bass player, said, “Joint? What do you mean, a joint? What are you talking about?”

And the guy goes, “Ya know, weed...”

Franks says, “Yeah, what about weed?”

And the guy goes, “Marijuana!”

And I go, “Holy shit, my dad warned me about that!”

We were also all influenced a lot by Little Richard and his whole wild-man act. He played a lot of real high-tempo music, and you can hear that on out records. Question Mark did the whole Little Richard act. He was definitely the star of the band and everybody loved him. He was a hell of an entertainer. He’d do flips and dance all over the place, was way before Michael Jackson. Question Mark was just as good as James Brown, but I wasn’t really into soul music. I was more into rock ‘n’ roll, like the first Rolling Stones album, you know? 

When “96 Tears” went to number one nationally in the fall of 1966, we knocked the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” out of the number-one spot. That blew me away. I used to watch the Monkees on TV all the time. To me, they were like the Beatles when they first came out. They’d ignite chaos, running all over the place, playing their songs, and their TV show was the first kind of rock-‘n’-roll video program, years before MTV. And I loved it.

So when “96 Tears” went number one nationally, “Last Train to Clarksville” went to number two, “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” to number three, “Poor Side of Town” to number four, and "Walk Away Renée" to number five.

HEROES AND VILLAINS

That’s around the time we played Cobo Hall in Detroit. That was the big time. Once me and Frank arrived at Cobo Hall with our girlfriends, there were all these people coming in and I thought, “Gosh, I remember when I came to see the Rolling Stones here.” It looked like the same kind of a situation; everyone was lined up with their tickets. It was like going to watch a concert by somebody else. And I was thinking, “God, are we really playing here? Or is this a dream?”  

When our song went number one across the country, we got a chance to go from East Coast to West Coast. We hit American Bandstand a couple of times, and we did another show that Dick Clark had, Where the Action Is, out in LA. They had go-go dancers and stuff, and the house band was Paul Revere & the Raiders—they were always on that show. But I never talked to the go-go dancers, because they were a lot older than I was. They were like 18 or 19, so it was kinda tough being 15 or 16 years old. The only time I’d get to meet girls that were my age was at teen dances we played, but those were becoming fewer and fewer.

We did a lot of concerts and stuff, and we did some gigs with the Yardbirds, who were one of my favorite bands. I couldn’t wait to see them. I couldn’t wait to watch Jeff Beck; I loved his guitar playing. But then, I guess he quit the band or went on a hiatus, and Jimmy Page took over. I was so depressed, but when I heard Jimmy Page playing, I went, “Wow, man, he’s pretty good too!” So I was impressed with him, but Jimmy was checking out Question Mark when we were playing, looking like, “Where the hell did this guy come from?”

One of the biggest disappointments I ever had was with the Doors. I used to love the Doors, and “Light My Fire” was one of my favorite songs. Our song had already come and gone by the time “Light My Fire” came out, but we were still gigging and stuff, and then I read something by Jim Morrison, who said, “Well, I don’t like bubblegum music like Question Mark & the Mysterians and the Monkees,” and all this stuff. He was putting us down!

I mean Jim was a great writer, and I still admire him, but it bummed me out to hear that from him. I guess bubblegum music might even be considered punk, so I was defiantly a punk. But Morrison really bummed me out because, whenever I hear “Light My Fire” on the radio, I think of those times.

Back in 1975, Legs McNeil co-founded Punk Magazine, which is part of the reason you even know what that word means. He also wrote Please Kill Me, which basically makes him the Studs Terkel of punk rock. In addition to his work as a columnist for VICE, he continues to write for his personal blog, pleasekillme.com. You should also follow him on Twitter: @Legs__McNeil.

Previously: Moe Tucker - Snapshots of the Underground