A small town mayor in British Columbia has apologized after spreading false information about supposed “fentanyl-laced” vape juice. He had told a public meeting in January that a friend of his son's teammate had died from taking a hit off a vape, CBC News reports.
"You'd think even an amateur, small-town politician would know better than to repeat hearsay, because upon further inquiry, I find that nothing happened at Rockridge [Secondary School in West Vancouver]. There was never laced vape juice, and what likely did happen was elsewhere and for other causes… I apologise to all affected by my incorrect statement."
Lions Bay has a population of just over 1,300 and is located between Vancouver and Whistler, BC.
"Let me just tell you a sad story," Buhr originally said when telling the story in January that ended up being false. "My daughter, as you know, is 15. My son is 14. A kid who played on his soccer team and baseball team last year… [his friend] died yesterday after taking one hit from a vape that had fentanyl in it. Bought the juice, they call it, from a dealer at Rockridge. One hit, fell down dead in front of his friends."
In response to VICE’s request for comment, Buhr emailed us a statement.
“That story I told was hearsay doing the rounds at the local high school. It didn't happen,” he wrote. “The resulting CBC story unfortunately omits me calling out the presence and dangers of opioids and vaping in my subsequent regular Friday message to the community. I said ‘…opioids are here, and Lions Bay is particularly not unscathed.’” Buhr referred to how he wanted to highlight how the overdose crisis has in fact impacted members of his small community.
“I could have used the opportunity to do something effective. I hope a full read of my apology does that,” he said. “I accept responsibility for poor execution, and again hope it won't dilute the need for communities to acknowledge the danger present among us.”
Though Buhr rightfully apologized, this is an example of how hearsay and hysteria is complicating the public health crisis we're currently facing. Given that the opioid crisis claimed at least 4,000 lives across Canada in 2017 and tens of thousands in the US, it’s understandably become hard for many to not become highly concerned about themselves and their loved ones being in harm’s way.
The vape story was bogus, but fentanyl has indeed been found in non-opioid substances. It’s a strange phenomenon harm reduction experts say is likely due to contamination rather than intentional acts, but it’s especially dangerous because people who don’t use opioids have low tolerances when met with this type of drug.
I personally interviewed a man named Ken Davies from Sooke, BC who survived a near-fatal fentanyl overdose after snorting cocaine laced with the deadly opioid. Contaminated drugs are indeed a real danger, though stories like Ken's are not common. Just last week, harm reduction workers in Toronto warned of fentanyl-laced crack that had caused overdoses in the city’s east side. Fake prescription pills have also played a significant role in the crisis, notably the fake OxyContin commonly found in western Canada, but extending to faux pill pressings of non-opioid substances such as Xanax.
However, stories about fentanyl-laced drugs are widely read and shared—sometimes to viral levels—contributing to public perception of the reality of the crisis overall.
There's a resounding amount of public concern surrounding fentanyl-laced substances in the US and Canada, though not all of it is based in fact. Cannabis has been notably plagued with unfounded concerns of fentanyl contamination, which was explored in a 2017 VICE article.
Hysteria aside, If you’re looking to use substances as safely as you possibly can, remember to use small amounts; wait in between doses; don’t mix substances; don’t use alone; test your substances if you can; and pick up a naloxone kit, which can halt an opioid overdose.
Correction note: An earlier version of this story stated it was the mayor's son's teammate who died, while it was actually a friend of his son's teammate.
The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots on Sunday night, securing their first-ever Super Bowl win and sending the entire City of Brotherly Love into complete pandemonium. But not everyone celebrated by running the streets naked or eating horse poop off the ground. One congressman reveled in his home team's victory by going to work, sitting back, and enjoying the humiliation his colleague had to suffer through—sporting a full Eagles helmet on Capitol Hill.
According to CBS Philly, Michael Capuano, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, showed up to the Hill on Tuesday wearing the headgear after losing a bet to Pennsylvania representative Bob Brady. He even sat through a House Financial Services Committee hearing with the thing on.
The bet was probably something Brady, a ten-term congressman, has been waiting to win since he was forced to put on a New England helmet when the Eagles lost to the Patriots in 2005, the Boston Globereports. Still, Capuano, unlike maybe everyone else in Boston, seemed pretty chill about the whole thing—copping to the loss on Instagram, understandably eager for baseball season. And, while the Eagles regalia might have made some people on the Hill take a double take, it's certainly not the strangest thing a lawmaker has brought to work.
Weed is officially legal in California as of this year, and everyone from Mike Tyson to the Girl Scouts are getting in on the action. Last weekend, an intrepid young Scout on a mission to move cookies posted up outside of a cannabis shop in San Diego to sling Samoas, and sling she did—according to the girl's father, she wound up selling more than 300 boxes in just six hours, ABC 10 reports.
Seeing as how a box of Girl Scout cookies runs upwards of $5 these days, the girl wound up making roughly $1,500 over the course of the afternoon, about $250 an hour. It's unclear how much money Scouts usually make peddling cookies on average, but it seems like this ingenious girl's plan to cash in on the green rush worked out a little better than going door-to-door.
The dispensary, Urbn Leaf, posted an Instagram photo of the Girl Scout on Saturday, telling its followers to "Get some Girl Scout Cookies with your GSC today." News of the girl's sales quickly spread around the internet, with people praising her brilliance and business savvy.
"I think our customers loved it," Urbn Leaf's Savannah Rakofsky told Mashable. "They went out and bought boxes."
Unfortunately, not everyone was so excited about the haul. The Girl Scouts of San Diego told the San Diego Union-Tribune that it's against the rules for a Girl Scout to set up shop outside a store without a permit, and Urbn Leaf isn't an "approved site for booth sales." But since the girl was reportedly mobile, pulling a wagon full of cookies up and down the sidewalk, not technically on the dispensary's property, and accompanied by a parent, she wasn't expressly breaking the rules—though Girl Scouts San Diego spokeswoman Alison Bushan called it a "gray area."
Apparently, the rules about whether Scouts are allowed to take advantage of legal weed stores varies by state, much like the rules about legal weed itself. Back in 2014, the Girl Scouts of Colorado issued a statement making it clear that it doesn't allow "Girl Scouts to sell cookies in front of marijuana shops or liquor stores/bars," but when a girl tried the same move in Oregon, her local troupe gave her a pass.
But really, come on. High people want cookies, Girl Scouts have cookies to sell—this is the beauty of capitalism in action or whatever, right? The Girl Scouts of America should probably get its shit together and make a final decision on whether or not it's chill to sell Thin Mints in front of dispensaries, but until it does, it looks like more Scouts will be cashing in on the munchies.
"The funny thing is, after the news story ran, we had more Girl Scouts show up over the weekend," Rakofsky told Mashable.
So… some shit is going down in the stock markets it seems.
It’s dropping and it’s dropping fast. On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 666 points (nice) and on Monday, it dropped by 1,175 points which represents the biggest one day point drop in history after investors were spooked by possible high interest rates and the threat of rising inflation. Now, if you’re like me, you don’t really know what that means but you know it sounds bad.
To further that sense of anxiety, if you take even a peak at the headlines going out today and yesterday it feels like you might as well just walk out of a window, 1929 stockbroker style—however, that might not necessarily be the case. Shannon Lee Simmons, the founder of the New School of Finance, told VICE that while the numbers seem immense, “market volatility is normal” and that “you should simply stick to your plans” in terms of investment.
Anyhoo, it’s not like this is even our first time dealing with this shit.
“Many millennials graduated during and just after the 2008/2009 stock market crash,” Simmons told VICE. “Their first experience hearing about investing as an adult may have been negative. Hopefully this volatility doesn't solidify any apprehension or distrust of investment markets.”
All that said, it’s hard not to be worried when you read sentences about trillions—TRILLIONS—of dollars being lost in the plunge. So because we broke, anxious millennials here at VICE know our audience—other broke, anxious millennials (there are a lot of us)—we’re here to answer some questions. So here is what you, a broke-as-fuck millennial, need to know.
Is the stock market crash going to impact the $1,600 in rent I pay for my closet sized apartment? No, it’s probably not. The reason behind the fact that most of us pay insane amount of rent is real estate not the stock markets. There are several things that drive these prices, mainly being the ever existence pull of supply and demand. An increase of trained young professionals making their way to major cities drives up demand for smaller spaces—meaning that spaces that you, a broke millennial, would be going after become more expensive.
How will this affect my student loan of $42,598? Federal (and most provincial) student loans have locked-in monthly payments, so a change in interest rates won’t affect you today, but will change how much you pay in interest over the course of the loan if you have chosen a floating rate. So a change in the prime rate could affect you like eight years from now when you pay your loan off a few months earlier or later than planned.
[My boss wrote this because I am very, very dumb.]
How will this affect my investments? First of all, let me start by saying: you have investments?!!? Nice work. Secondly, this is where you might be the most impacted. However it’s not completely doom and gloom—Simmons told VICE that if you’re investing for 10 years down the road this plunge “shouldn’t keep you awake at night.”
“Yes, it's scary, but it's a normal part of investing,” Simmons said. “This recent volatility may make some first time investors nervous, especially if this is their first taste of investing. But, as long as they don't need that money for a long-time, then they can handle the ups and downs of the market and hopefully wait out the storm”
However, if you’re investing money you might need in the next three to four years, like for a downpayment… well, it’s going to be a lot scarier. As Simmons says, it’s “so so so important not to invest money that you may need in the short-run.”
How will affect my job(s)? Because you’re a broke-as-fuck millenial, you are most likely working for a soulless corporation or several soulless sharing economy corporations. And if that’s the case, no this most likely will not affect you. While yes, a drop in the stock market changes the value of a company on paper it tends not to influence actual corporate profits very often. It certainly does influence investors in the company you work for but, when the drops are this wide, most companies are affected which means a relatively even playing field.
That said, you’re probably still going to lose your job but that’s because you’re reading this story while hiding in the bathroom at work. Get back to work!
IS IT AS BAD AS IT SEEMS?!?! YOU HAVE TO LEGALLY TELL ME! Ok, first of all, please don’t yell at me. Secondly, no it really doesn’t seem to be as bad as it is. Now, again, I’m no stock market expert but there are several things making this look way worse than it is. First of all, as this Poynter article articulately puts it, the market “has done that before. In fact, it has done far worse in a single day.” This is because the markets have grown so much in several years, and yes this is the biggest drop in points, but the thing is the points don’t matter as much as the percentages. The 1,175 points for the Dow Jones only constituted a 4.6 percent drop—wherehas in 2008 it was 7.8% and in 1986 it was a devastating 22%. Furthermore, the stocks were riding such a high that even with a major drop, many of them are still sitting a lot prettier than they were a year ago.
So, my best advice for you—and I should be perfectly clear on this, do NOT listen to my advice on this—just go back to not giving two shits about the stock market and crapping by paycheque to paycheque like a good young person should.
Donald Trump says a lot of crazy shit on the regs, which was actually a good thing, more or less, when his job was yelling at Gary Busey on TV. But now he's the literal president, and his words matter—if you don't believe me, ask North Korea. How, then, do we approach Trump's latest lunacy, when he casually suggested the Democrats, who did not clap for him at the State of Union, were "treasonous"?
In a speech on Monday that was supposed to be about tax reform but was not, the president said of the Democrats, "They would rather see Trump do badly, OK, than our country do well. It got to the point that I didn’t really want to look too much on that side. It was bad energy." Though the opposition party traditionally avoids applauding during the State of the Union, Trump was fixated on the Democrats' silence. “They were like death. And un-American. Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not?” Trump said with a shrug. “Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”
The straightforward response to this is to point out that not clapping for Trump is actually not treason, whether it be VICE News quoting the Constitution or CNN's Chris Cillizza providing a dictionary definition of the word. But if anything is certain in these chaotic times, it's that Trump is not careful with his words, and tends to say what feels right to him, not what's actually correct. We're in the post-truth era! Facts don't matter!
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, clarified that Trump was "clearly joking" when he accused the opposing party of committing a crime for not being nicer to him. The deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, asserted that Trump's comment was "tongue-in-cheek."
As we know, Trump is a man who gets away with saying a lot of unacceptable bullshit under the guise of him just messing around. Like during the 2016 election when he publicly asked Russia to hack his opponent's campaign, which his administration later clarified was just a hilarious joke.
“No, no, no, no, don’t take him literally, take him symbolically,” Anthony Scaramucci, famous for his brief stint as the White House communications director, said of Trump back in December 2016. "Don't take Trump literally" has become a cliché, but that doesn't make it wrong, exactly; it serves as a useful warning, a kind of code for, This dude is gonna say a lot of crazy shit, so take it all with a grain of salt.
In one sense, flipping out about the "treason" comment seems like an overreaction—obviously, he is not calling for Democrats to be executed for not clapping. But dismissing it as simply another one of Trump's hilarious jokes also feels misguided. Sometimes he's clearly talking out of his ass, like when he promised not to cut Medicaid. But at other times, seemingly offhand remarks are actually new policies, like when he tweeted that he wanted to ban trans people from serving in the military—the Pentagon wasn't sure he was serious about that, but he was. (Courts later blocked that move.)
How seriously should we take Trump? I have no idea. Let me know if you've figured it out.
On Tuesday, Fox Searchlight debuted a brand-new clip from Wes Anderson's upcoming stop-motion film Isle of Dogs—and only Anderson could make a dogfight over a moldy rice cake look this twee and fanciful.
Isle of Dogs is Anderson's second full-length stop-motion film, following 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox. But where Mr. Fox was a kids' movie based on Roald Dahl's book, Isle of Dogs appears to be a little bit bleaker. The film is set in the near-future where a debilitating dog flu has forced Japan to banish all their puppers and good boys to a deserted island full of trash called, appropriately, Trash Island.
And yet, despite the film's diseased dogs and dystopian wastelands, this is still a Wes Anderson film and Isle of Dogs's first trailer checked all the boxes we've come to expect from the director. Obsessively symmetrical set design? Yup. Fairytale atmosphere? Of course. Bill Murray? Sure, why not.
Tuesday's clip gives us our first in-depth look at Trash Island and its garbage-eating inhabitants, and the thing doesn't disappoint. In the clip, a dog named Rex (Edward Norton) and his gang of doggos square off against some rival pups over a fresh bag of garbage. The dogs are about to brawl when Rex recommends that they crack into the bag and check out what they're about to fight over.
After some discussion, the rival gang agrees, and they tear into the sack to inspect the goods, which includes a dried-up pickle and a rancid apple core, among other tasty morsels. A bloody battle ensues and one dog gets his ear savagely bitten off, but the scene still somehow manages to look like a delight since, you know, it's Wes Anderson.
Along with Norton and Murray, Isle of Dogs features a huge cast of voice actors like Bryan Cranston, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, and a ton more. The film is set to debut later this month at the Berlin Film Festival, with a wide release coming March 23. Until then, marvel at how adorable stop-motion maggots can be in the clip above.
It looks like Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have found a new project to work on after their HBO hit wraps. On Tuesday, Disney announced that the duo has signed on to write and produce a new slate of Star Wars movies.
"David and Dan are some of the best storytellers working today," Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy wrote in a statement. "Their command of complex characters, depth of story and richness of mythology will break new ground and boldly push Star Wars in ways I find incredibly exciting."
Details are still pretty slim at this point, but Disney says that these new movies will be a stand-alone series set in the Star Wars universe, not a continuation of the classic Skywalker saga. Benioff and Weiss's deal sounds similar to one Disney locked down with TheLast Jedi director Rian Johnson last November, though it's unclear whether the Game of Thrones creators are also aiming for a trilogy.
Benioff and Weiss are currently finishing up production on the final season of Game of Thrones, which is set to air sometime next year, so they will likely have some time on their hands once they finish burning Winterfell to the ground or whatever. The duo is also reportedly developing another drama series for HBO about an alternate history where the South won the Civil War, but maybe they've decided to put that one on the back-burner after the massive backlash against the project last summer.
In Tuesday's announcement, Benioff and Weiss expressed their excitement about the upcoming Star Wars project, saying they've both been "dreaming of" the opportunity since watching A New Hope back in 1977.
"We are honored by the opportunity, a little terrified by the responsibility, and so excited to get started as soon as the final season of Game of Thrones is complete," the duo said in a joint statement.
TV host Steve Paikin, who is being investigated for sexual harassment by his network, has called the claims against him "100 percent false."
In an extensive Facebook post, seemingly called “My Turn,” the TVO anchor refutes the claims that he once asked a mayoral candidate to sleep with him as payment for an appearance on his show. In doing so he says he’s beginning to “to reclaim [his] reputation and fight back against these scurrilous allegations” calling the claims “complete fiction.”
“To be clear, I did not have sex, suggest, request, imply, or joke about having sex with you,” reads his post.
Paikin is referring to allegations that were made by Sarah Thomson, a politician who has run several losing but headline grabbing campaigns for the mayoralty of Toronto. Thomson, who did not name Paikin directly, originally laid out her claims on her website, Women’s Post on Friday. In her story entitled “Media personality uses his position to gain sex” she said the incident in question occurred in 2010 when Thomson, Paikin, and Thomson’s assistant met for lunch.
“Not five minutes into the lunch the host asked me if I would sleep with him. My assistant almost spit his drink all over the table. I politely told the host that I loved my husband and would never do that. I then excused myself, went to the washroom and called my campaign manager,” reads her account.
Thomson also alleged that Paikin, in the years since the initial incident, approached her “several times, usually at political functions, to suggest we 'sleep together' and he always laughs about it.”
Paikin said that he first heard of the allegations against himself in an email from Thomson which he immediately forwarded to TVO. In response to the allegations, TVO hired a third-party investigator to look into the claims but allowed Paikin to remain in as the anchor of his popular show The Agenda. In response, TVO’s CEO Lisa de Wilde released a statement outlining the networks response, saying “based on the evidence to date, TVO sees no reason to remove Mr. Paikin from his role as Host for The Agenda pending the outcome of the investigation.”
The initial story hit the media on Monday and Paikin kept relatively quiet on the subject. That changed mid-day Tuesday when he posted a lengthy Facebook post outlining his version of events. In the post Paikin tells his readers that it is written by him not “a committee of lawyers or spin doctors at 4 o’clock this morning.”
“This past Saturday afternoon, I received an email from Sarah Thomson,” reads the post. “I’ve known Ms Thomson for almost a decade, having covered her municipal and provincial political campaigns and seen her at various political events over the years, although I don’t believe I’ve seen or had any contact from her in several years.
“To say I was gobsmacked by the allegations in her email is the understatement of my life. Even though I knew the allegations were 100% false, I did what I suspected was the appropriate thing to do and immediately passed the email on to my superiors at TVO. I knew the charges were bogus but I knew I owed it to my employer to be totally transparent about all of it.”
Paikin said that he welcomes his network’s investigation and spent two hours this weekend being grilled by their lawyers. He adds that he understands the importance of allegations like this, especially during the ongoing #metoo movement.
In 2013, Thomson raised complaints that she was sexual harrassed and groped by then mayor Rob Ford who she claimed drunkenly “grabbed [her] ass.” She claimed that, at the same function, he also told her she should be with him in Florida because his wife was away.
The post, which Paikin said he wrote at 4 AM after trouble sleeping, ended with a rather dramatic flair.
“You’ve defamed me Sarah. I have no idea why, but you have. And I simply can’t allow that to stand. The quest to reclaim my reputation, which you’ve tried to destroy, begins now. I look forward to vindication.”
A few weeks ago, police in Scotland received a strange call from an "extremely concerned" citizen. Bruce Grubb, a farmer who had just moved into a new home in the area, called to report sighting a tiger out in his shed, which housed around 200 of his pregnant cows, the Scottish Sunreports.
"Unusual as the call may have seemed, any call reporting a potential danger to the public has to be taken seriously and efforts were made to verify the sighting as soon as possible, including starting to make contact with the nearest wildlife park to make sure they did not have an escapee," North East Police Division wrote on Facebook.
The cops reportedly sent in several units to the farm, including three cruisers full of armed officers and a dog handler to diffuse the situation with the massive feline. Grubb, who was having a housewarming party at the time, told the Sun that he and his guests weren't the only ones freaking out about the fanged creature in his shed. A few officers who first showed up to the scene wouldn't leave their cars, apparently terrified of getting taken out by the tiger—which happens a whole lot more than people think.
Eventually, armed officers from the North East Police Division surrounded the place and moved in on their target. But after a 45-minute standoff, they realized the fanged predator was actually just a stuffed animal and not a terrifying, bloodthirsty cat.
"I feel a bit silly for calling the police, but I thought it was a real emergency,” Grubb told the Sun. "I had absolutely no doubt it was real. I got a hell of a scare."
There's no word from police on who might've planted the plush tiger in Grubb's shed, but it's not unreasonable to assume some unruly guest at his house party decided to play a prank on the farmer. To be fair, Grubb isn't the first person to call the cops over something totally innocuous. At least he didn't lose his shit over a giant zucchini.
On an all-new episode of VICELAND's HATE THY NEIGHBOR, comedian Jamali Maddix treks to South Carolina for an inside look at a controversial reform program for kids with a habit of getting in trouble, designed to scare them into cleaning up their acts. The cops behind "Project STORM" force their campers to experience prison life for a grueling 72 hours, introducing them to inmates, putting them through brutal drills, and screaming at them every time they get out of line.
A bag full of money hits a small southern Chinese city like a Mack truck in Have a Nice Day, a gritty, animated indie film that took director Liu Jian three years to draw and animate, frame by frame. The neo-noir thriller slipped through China's strict censorship apparatus to deliver a punishing look at the bleak economic conditions away from Beijing and Shanghai's Instagram-friendly skylines.
The drama starts when Xiao Zhang, a driver for local Don Corleone–wannabe Uncle Liu, holds a knife to his partner's throat. He drives off with a million yuan (roughly $160,000) and asks his fiancée to run away with him to Korea to fix her botched plastic surgery job. All that stands in the way is the sly, opportunistic inventor Yellow Eye, Uncle Liu's butcher-assassin Skinny, and the greed of every economically downtrodden urbanite Xiao comes across. The bag's journey unfolds in a series of Pulp Fiction–style slices of characters lives—usually talking about how awful their lives are, their personal philosophies, or Steve Jobs—just before the wreckage of the central plot smashes into them.
Jian's style is rooted in his training as a painter at the Nanjing University of the Arts. At times, watching the film feels like viewing a series of works at a gallery show. He'll hold on a nearly static image for ten or so seconds at a time, showcasing the details of hanging meat's marbled flesh, ivy creeping up a crumbling building, or maniacal smiles painted on a wall. These scenes offer a breath in between bursts of lethal action, and flesh out the world in which each person struggles. The city is as much a character as the people in it. The Shanghai Restoration Project's killer soundtrack enlivens these pauses, blending traditional Chinese instruments with hip hop, electronica, and trance.
Like all Chinese films, Have a Nice Day had to be approved by the State Administration of Radio Film and Television. According to LA-based Chinese film producer Robert Cain, this means a committee of 30 or so individuals graded the content on, "Confucian morality, political stability and social harmony." Subjects like sex, violence, religion, gambling, drinking, and, "any hint of criticism of the Communist party, its leadership, or its legitimacy," must be purged from a script before it will be approved.
Related:
"I often joke with friends who run their screenplays by me that, according to the government, nothing bad or subversive ever happens in the modern day communist utopia that is China," Cain continues. "If you want to explore any salacious topics, either set them somewhere else, or in some cases, you can set them in the past."
With these restrictions in place, it's easier to make propagandistic films like billionaire Alibaba founder Jack Ma's absurd Gong Shou Dao than a cathartic story that acknowledges the problems modern Chinese people face. Have a Nice Day is driven by murderous gangsters, failed entrepreneurs, and a woman who wants to escape China to get better plastic surgery in Korea—and that's the version after the changes Liu says censors made to the script.
Liu masks his criticisms in poetry, metaphor, and subtlety, but leaves plenty of clues for anyone who wants to catch his drift. He quotes Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection before the film even starts, describing a land "disfigure[d]" by hallmarks of industrialization like paved roads, pulverized forests, and clouds of smog. We asked him about how he made the film and kept his ideas intact.
VICE: Nobody seems to be having a nice day in this film, so how did you come up with the title, and what does it mean? Liu Jian: "Have a nice day” is a colloquialism and conveys a kind of optimistic feeling. Regarding the story itself, this title reflects a rather striking contrast. And it is also ironic given that everyone in the film isn’t having even close to, a nice day. But behind this story, I still wanted to express a love of life. Tolstoy’s quote in the beginning and the end credits song both convey this feeling. Perhaps the world is a mess, but life is still worthy of our love.
Tell me about your animation process, from storyboarding to the finishing touches. Have a Nice Day is a traditional hand-drawn 2D animation. We also used Photoshop, After Effects, and a variety of other general software.
We did a lot of location scouting. We took a lot of pictures. Based on the pictures, we drew the landscape part of the animation. Even the characterization, if there’s any action—like a punch—we will do it, take a picture and draw it based on the pictures.
My favorite artistic style (and in fact my artistic philosophy) is plain and simple. In this film, I use the minor actions and subtle movements of the characters to evoke their emotions, which, along with the vivid landscapes and interiors the characters exist in, constitute the poetic, and in some sense sad and melancholy, aesthetic philosophy of the film. In my eyes, this film as a whole can be seen as a landscape painting representing modern China.
Why did you animate Have a Nice Day almost entirely by yourself? There is no shortcut when making animation films. The images must be painted one by one.
Where did you get the inspiration for the characters and story? I live in China, and I wanted to show a picture of contemporary China with my film.
Have a Nice Day is an animated film, but it’s penetrated through and through with the philosophy of realism. The film portrays an urban story that takes place on the edges of a southern Chinese city. There are so many uncertainties and possibilities to be imagined in such a dynamic and lively space as the city’s borderlands. What some might call surrealism is often the reality there, and that is fascinating to me in itself. I love to observe and reflect on how people there are living, thinking, and acting. The cultural landscapes of the city’s edges and the people who live there are one of the main sources and inspirations for my work.
At the same time, the coexistence of realism and symbolism emphasizes the fantasy and the absurdity of these characters and their stories. In modern China, magical realism is happening around us almost every day. Life at times can resemble a surreal comedy that is filled with both jubilance and self-paralysis.
Have a Nice Day is an ensemble film with no specific character who could be described as the main protagonist, unless we say that the bag of money is actually the film’s lead. The movie is set in a town outside of a small southern city in China, and the trends of rapid urbanization and industrialization in the country change a small town like this in vivid as well as in subtle ways. I am fascinated by all of these changes and the people whose lives are affected by these dynamics. My main goal is to stay close to them, to observe the lives of the different groups of people, listen to their voices, and then be able to share their stories through filmmaking—showing their happiness, their anger, their sadness, but also their hope.
How did China's censorship policies affect the production and distribution of the film? After completing production, all films in China are subject to official censorship. Anything needed to be changed is communicated. Changes to the last part of the film were inevitable and therefore, adjustments were made content-wise. Only after that were we granted permission to distribute publicly. But the producers were responsible for this aspect. I honestly don’t know that much. With regard to myself, seeing my film on the big screen was very important because it was made for the big screen.
Do you have any ideas for what kinds of projects you want to work on next? Will you also animate your next film alone? My next film is a coming-of-age story about a group of students at an art university in the early 90s, and it will also be a traditional hand-drawn animation. I hope to have a small team, but that’s very difficult to get, so I am prepared to do it all by myself once again.
Losing your virginity is supposed to be memorable. Most people look back on the act with affection and, probably, a little embarrassment. But David Huggins says the first time he had sex was more—er, out of this world—than most.
“When I was 17, I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial,” the 74-year-old says in a documentary about him called Love and Saucers. “That’s all I can say about it.”
The coitus in question allegedly went down in 1961, when Huggins was a teenager living on his parents’ farm in rural Georgia. It wasn’t the first time extraterrestrials had appeared to him; he’d been seeing strange creatures since he was eight. But on this day, as he was walking through woods near his house, an alien woman appeared and seduced him. “I thought, if anything, I’d be losing it in the backseat of a Ford—something like that. But it didn’t work out that way,” he says in the film.
Film still from Love and Saucers, picturing Huggins holding his painting First Time
According to Huggins, these visits from extraterrestrials, and his sexual relationship with them, continued into adulthood. When I interviewed him for this story, Huggins told me his last encounter with Crescent, his name for the woman in the woods, was six months ago. “I was sitting down in a chair, and the woman, Crescent, was behind me, and she put her arms around me," he said. "And that’s about it. I don’t know anything else outside of that."
Huggins is unnervingly matter-of-fact when he talks about his encounters. It sets him apart from what most of us expect from truthers and UFO enthusiasts. He’s not in it for the notoriety and doesn’t care if anyone believes him. When Huggins talks about fathering hundreds of alien babies—and yes, that’s another facet of his encounters—he sounds about as even-keeled as a farmer explaining crop rotations.
It’s one of the things that drew filmmaker Brad Abrahams to track Huggins down in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he lives now. Abrahams heard Huggins’s story on a podcast about UFOs and the paranormal. “In a sea of outlandish claims, there was one that rose to the surface,” he said. “And that was David’s story.”
Huggins was born in rural Georgia in 1944. In Love and Saucers, he talks about hunting for arrowheads in nearby fields for fun and not liking the evangelical Baptist church his grandparents took him to sometimes. When strange beings that no one else could see started appearing to him around the farm, he thought he was losing his mind.
“I am sitting under a tree, and I hear this voice say, ‘David, behind you.’ And I turned around and there is this little hairy guy with large glowing eyes coming straight towards me. I thought it was the bogeyman. I didn’t know what to think of it,” he says in the film. Another day, an “insect-like being” that reminded Huggins of a praying mantis appeared. “I was very terrified,” he says. “It was like, ‘What in the world am I looking at?’ And for an eight-year-old, you don’t know what to think.”
Once the shock wore off, Huggins says his encounters were weird, but not all that threatening. When he left Georgia in the mid 60s for art school in New York City, the beings followed. Nocturnal visits from Crescent, the ET who deflowered him, became routine. “My relationship with Crescent was warm and friendly. A little strange. What do I mean, a little. Very strange. She was my girlfriend, really,” Huggins says in the film. “A very unconventional relationship,” he adds.
Floating Up, David Huggins (left); Huggins in his studio with a painting of an alien woman he says he had sex with (right)
One of the first paintings Huggins ever made was of him and Crescent, having sex. “[The painting’s] not really all that good. She was on top of me, I reach my climax, then she and the insect being leave,” he says. Similar paintings fill his apartment. They’re surreal and a little childlike, dominated by deep blues and greens.
This is another thing that sets Huggins apart from most people with alien abduction stories: he paints his encounters. It started in 1987, when Huggins started remembering details from early visits. He says the deluge was triggered by Budd Hopkins’s book Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods.
“It was like a compulsion. I was being led to the book,” he says in the film. “There is this chapter ‘Other Women, Other Men’ and I start reading it. And I go, ‘Oh my god, this is the woman I never told anyone about.’ As I was reading it, memory upon memory came flooding back. It was image upon image. They wouldn’t stop. I think what bothered me the most is I didn’t know what to do with it. I was so scared.”
“It seemed like he was almost going crazy [...] from not being able to process these experiences that happened to him. What were they? Why him? It really sounded like he was losing his grip on his life and reality,” Abrahams told me. “And then, apparently, he got this message from [the beings] that he should paint the experiences, and as soon as he started doing that, it changed him.
“He said it was a release. He was able to sleep for the first time in weeks. And since then, he has painted every single detail of every encounter. A hundred-something paintings. It is art therapy. I don’t know if that’s how David would describe it, but that was a big part of what I wanted to show, too. Once he found a way to show the rest of the world, or even just himself, [what happened] visually through art, he was able to process, make sense of, and come to peace with whatever it was that happened to him,” Abrahams said.
David Huggins works on a painting (left); Caught, David Huggins, Oil on canvas, 1989 (right)
What makes Love and Saucers a very good documentary about a man who paints himself having sex with aliens is that Abrahams lays out the details of Huggins's story and lets viewers come to their own conclusions. At its core, Love and Saucers is a film about belief. The first half is Huggins telling his own story, but the second half is interviews with his friends and neighbors. Some of them weren’t aware of Huggins’ encounters beforehand. But they all believe him.
Then there is Jeffrey Kripal, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Texas. He spent the early part of his career studying erotic mysticism, which led him to study alien abduction literature. “The whole history of religions is essentially about weird beings coming from the sky and doing strange things to human beings, and historically, those events or encounters have been framed as angels or demons or gods or goddesses or what have you. But in the modern, sort of secular, world we live in, they get framed as science fiction,” he says in Love and Saucers.
Kripal believes Huggins. He says the mix of terror and euphoria Huggins describes lines up with age-old descriptions of humans encountering the sacred. Plus, details of Huggins's abductions mirror those described by other people Kripal has interviewed who believe they’ve had supernatural experiences. “I’m completely convinced they’re not lying; they’re being very sincere. But again, what it is is an entirely different question, and that’s where I think we need a lot more humility,” he says.
Her Eyes, David Huggins
Whether or not you think Huggins has really been having sex with aliens for the last 50 years, what's apparent is that Huggins himself believes it. “Consider that this man isn’t lying and that he’s communicating something that he’s experienced, but it doesn’t have to be taken literally. Someone can not be crazy but still claim to have these completely unexplainable experiences,” Abrahams said.
What I think is more fascinating than whether or not "the truth is out there" is what stories like Huggins's say about the impulse to explain away what we do not understand, and our limited ability to interpret all the sensations, experiences, and randomly-firing neurons that come with being human.
When I asked Huggins why he thinks the beings appear to him, he said, “I have a feeling that tens of millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, have had [similar] experiences. Mainly as children. That’s all I can really say, but I think as children we are so open to things, that these beings can appear to us. I know I never closed up on it, because it has continued through my whole life.”
Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.
US News
Lawmakers Hashing Out Yet Another Funding Stopgap The House passed a short-term spending bill that would cover the military through September and the rest of the government until March 23. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed confidence their parties could reach a deal on spending caps and avert a government shutdown this Friday. President Trump, however, said he would “love to see a shutdown” if the budget doesn't include measures to address illegal immigration, and the House bill was said to face up an uphill climb in the Senate.—The New York Times
SpaceX Launches Car Into Space Elon Musk’s company successfully launched its new Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida Tuesday, capturing stunning live images of its Tesla Roadster and “Starman” dummy jetting toward Mars’s orbit. Musk confirmed that the rocket’s center core engine—intended to land on a floating pad in the Atlantic—had crashed into the ocean.—VICE News
Pence Teases ‘Aggressive’ Sanctions Against North Korea Speaking on a visit to Japan, the vice president said the US “will soon unveil the toughest and most aggressive round of economic sanctions on North Korea ever.” Although Pence suggested earlier this week that the US might meet with North Korean officials at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, the new sanctions will reportedly take effect before the games end.—CBS News
Trump Demands Military Parade in Washington The Pentagon was working on putting together a military pageant in the US capital after Trump insisted on a display similar to one he witnessed in France, according to two anonymous officials. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump has “asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.”—The Washington Post
International News
60 People Missing After Earthquake Rocks Taiwan A magnitude 6.4 quake struck near the city of Hualien late Tuesday night, leaving at least six people dead and 258 others injured. Rescue workers were searching through the debris of collapsed and badly damaged buildings for dozens of people believed to still be trapped underneath or inside the rubble.—Reuters
Kim Jong Un’s Sister Attending Winter Olympics Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of the North Korean leader, will join other senior officials from Pyongyang at the opening ceremony in South Korea on Friday. The majority of the 280 North Koreans taking part in the Winter Olympics—including competitors, journalists, and 229 cheerleaders—arrived in the South Wednesday.—BBC News
Merkel Seals Deal for Coalition Government German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union sister parties agreed to form a coalition with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SDP) after months of dialogue. SDP leader Martin Schulz was reportedly set to become the country’s foreign minister and was slated to give up his party leadership role. The SDP also appeared likely to snag the finance and labour cabinet posts—The Guardian
UN Warns: 68 Million Girls to Endure Genital Mutilation by 2030 The UN Population Fund has predicted that the number of girls subjected to genital mutilation is on track to rise from 3.9 million per year to 4.6 million per year by 2030. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the process as “a gross violation of the human rights of women and girls.”—AP
Everything Else
‘Game of Thrones’ Showrunners to Make Star Wars Movies David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have agreed to write and produce a new series of movies for the Disney and Lucasfilm franchise. The series will be distinct from both the current Skywalker saga and the new trilogy helmed by Rian Johnson.—VICE
Diane Kruger Shows Support for Quentin Tarantino The actress insisted her experience working with the director on Inglourious Basterds was “pure joy” after Uma Thurman said Tarantino forced her into a dangerous scene that left her injured. Kruger said Tarantino “never abused his power or forced me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with.”—Variety
Casino Boss Resigns over Sexual Misconduct Claims Wynn Resorts CEO and Republican money man Steve Wynn stepped down amid allegations of serial sexual harassment against him. Wynn denies the misconduct claims, but said the “avalanche of negative publicity” meant he could no longer continue in the job.—NBC News
Netflix Paid More than $50 Million for ‘The Cloverfield Paradox,’ Report Says Paramount reportedly sold J.J. Abrams's sci-fi horror movie to the streaming service for the huge sum because the studio feared a disastrous box office showing. It received poor reviews after its post-Super Bowl release.—The Hollywood Reporter
Kendrick Lamar Shares New Video for 'Black Panther' Track The rapper dropped visuals for “All the Stars,” his collaboration with SZA for the Black Panther soundtrack. In the video, Lamar lounges in a boat floating on a mass of humanity and walks in a forest alongside live panthers.—Noisey
Wes Anderson Drops Clip from New Movie The first clip from the director’s stop-motion film Isle of Dogs shows rival canine gangs fighting over moldy food on a quarantined island. The movie, Anderson’s first feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014, is out in the US on March 23.—i-D
Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we're highlighting the women of colour leading two of the most prominent groups devoted to reforming America's drug laws.
If teen movies (or Steve Carell movies) have taught us anything about virginity, it’s that the label comes with a lot of baggage. We expect virgins of a certain age to be wracked with shame and angst—they don’t want us to know their dark secret, and yet they also desperately want to end the drought.
As far as 29-year-old virgins go, Lauren seems at ease with the “virgin” label. She’s not exactly screaming it from the rooftops, but she’s not in any rush to get laid either. In fact, she’s pretty chill with the idea of living her entire life without having sex. Part of this comes from growing up with a gland disorder that affects her body’s hormone production, but there’s also an element of genuinely giving zero fucks.
In a deeply religious Manitoban community, it’s this attitude that pushed Lauren to seek a sperm donor and eventually become a single mom—against the advice of doctors and friends. This has been Lauren’s hot ticket out of the dating market, where she says apps allow dudes to act like turds.
“People say horrible stuff,” she told VICE. “I remember when I had an online dating profile the first comment I got was ‘Do you want to come sit on my face?’ For one, does that actually work on anyone? And two, no thank you. People like that turn me away.”
VICE caught up with Lauren to talk about thirsty DMs, pregnancy hormones, and that very specific kind of FOMO that comes with swearing off sex for life. (For the record, her baby’s due in June, and she’s currently taking name inspiration from Game of Thrones.)
VICE: Can you remember feeling different from a young age? Lauren: I knew I was different from the beginning. I was born with hypopituitarism, which means my pituitary gland is not formed properly. It doesn’t send the right hormonal messages to the other glands in the body, like the adrenaline gland or the ovaries. Because of that I have to take hormone replacements to even myself out. I’ve had it under control now for 29 years, so it’s not an issue now. But it was very obviously different because I was taking thyroid pills and taking a needle of growth hormones every day.
Because of my pituitary gland, I went through puberty super late. I wouldn’t have gone through it at all without higher estrogen levels. I really only started that because I was getting made fun of for being really flat chested, whereas everybody else was getting their boobs and everything at that point. That really sucked because it forced me to do something I wasn’t necessarily ready for.
Was it hard not going through puberty like your friends? Were kids cruel about it? In junior high I feel like I was getting it the worst. I got teased for being flat chested or having buck teeth. Kids would latch on to anything that was different. A lot of that teasing has given me social anxiety to this day. My life started improving when I started looking like everyone else. I went from a junior high school with only 100 students to a high school of 1,500 with more than 500 in my graduating class. It was really easy to hide and blend in to a different group.
The hardest thing was probably getting pregnant. Initially my endocrinologist said it won’t happen, that I’ll need to get an egg donor and spend tens of thousands of dollars on IVF. I felt really shut down. But he referred me to a fertility clinic anyway. I spent an entire year on a waiting list thinking it was never going to happen and then after one five minute appointment with a fertility expert that all changed.
I’m quite amazed by your lack of FOMO when it comes to sex. Do you ever feel like you’re missing out on something? Since I’ve been pregnant there have been a few times where I’ve felt like maybe it would be nice to have someone for that—to go out and have sex... Sometimes, out of curiosity, I think maybe I could try a random hookup, but that feeling very quickly passes—I realize I’m not acting like myself.
If you were to act on those rare feelings, what would your ideal hookup look like? Dinner? Netflix and chill? The best possible situation would be with someone I’ve known for awhile. No dinner or anything like that. I’d be strictly seeing what this sex thing is all about. I feel like I would chicken out if there was a big lead-up to it. I’m a fairly anxious person, so I feel like going out to dinner with someone, I would either try to find reasons why I don’t like this person, or try to talk myself out of it.
You’ve said that dating feels pointless. Can you tell me more about that? I don’t know. I’ve tried dating here and there. I had a boyfriend in Grade 10 and we would hold hands and stuff like that. We mutually agreed it wasn’t working out for us. We’re still friends and there’s never been anything negative between us. I haven’t had negative thoughts about the people I’ve gone on dates with, it’s just not for me. I’ve tried going online to dating websites. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me at all. The most recent date I went on was around last Christmas. I remember a friend was trying to hook me up with her brother. Nowadays I just do what I want to by myself. Not having to worry about anyone else is easier.
Does kissing appeal to you at all? I’ve been kissed, very awkwardly. It’s not something I want to relive.
Is masturbating a part of your life? I tried it, and I didn’t really like it. Never did it again.
What do your friends think? Do many people know? With the group of friends I grew up with, it wasn’t a big deal, which was kinda nice, because it wasn’t like I felt pressure to do anything I didn’t want to do. These days I talk more about their sex lives than mine. It’s not that they’re not supportive, I just feel like if I don’t bring it up, they won’t push.
It’s hard to say who knows. I live in a fairly small religious community, it’s very Mennonite. It’s gotten a bit more progressive lately, but up until a few years ago it was a dry town. So it’s not something you’d openly talk about. People know I’m single and having a kid by myself. But they don’t necessarily know the virgin part of it.
Did you want to be a mom for religious reasons? I make jokes about it but basically this is me giving a middle finger to the people who told me I couldn’t do it because I’m not married yet. It’s the opposite of a religious reason. If you’re telling me I can’t do this, I’m going to do it anyway.
Is there something you think non-virgins out there could learn from your situation? I think it’s just about knowing yourself. The more you know yourself, the more you’re going to be comfortable with the choices you make. I know what I’m comfortable with, I know what I want. I think people always say to take time to love yourself. It sounds so friggin’ cliche, but that’s the best thing you can do. Once you know what you want, who the hell cares what others think?
Do you think you’ll ever change your mind? Maybe wake up at 35 and decide to just go for it? I feel like that would be terrible. Even just thinking about being in my 30s and telling someone I’m a virgin at that age, it would be like that old Seinfeld episode. It’s too embarrassing. At a certain point, if I wanted to hook up I would just not mention the virgin part... Maybe I will have regrets in ten years. Who knows.
For decades, the cultural conversation around sex work has been essentially the same: Sex workers are abused, dehumanized victims, and sex work is bad for society. In the 1970s, radical feminists and antiporn crusaders like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon made it their mission to perpetuate the cultural misconception that all sex work is inherently degrading, bolstering both the sexual objectification of women and the patriarchy. Some have gone as far as to say that all sex work is rape. We don’t consider consensual sex violence, and we don’t consider being paid violence, but if you put the two together, you’re being exploited and need to be saved... apparently. While the moralists who preach this ostensibly mean well, what this discourse does is imply that sex workers have no agency. Even if a sex worker insists that she works of her own free will, she shouldn’t be taken seriously, because she must be either lying or brainwashed or on crack.
So, of course, when faced with my own decision about whether to begin sugar babying, all these things were swirling around in my mind—along with, What the fuck would I do if my Catholic parents ever found out? Of course, I had a choice. I was in no way being forced into selling my body in the dark and sensational way that we often imagine is the case with sex workers. I wouldn’t have starved or become homeless or died if I didn’t set up a sugar baby profile. But I might have had to move out of New York. And I might have had to give up on my dream of being a writer, perhaps taking out a loan to go back to school, choosing instead a career that was more practical but less fulfilling. And I didn’t want to do those things. So I made what I felt was the best choice for me at the time. I looked at myself in the mirror and said: “Yo, you have sex with people you don’t like all the time; you might as well get fucking paid for it.”
Madeline—my sugar baby roommate at the time, and ever the whore mentor—offered to help me make my SeekingArrangement profile. I remember that afternoon vividly: We were lying on the living room couch in our pajamas, scarfing gummy bears, as Madeline casually spouted bits of hooker wisdom. “OK, so the most important thing to remember when filling out your profile is that men have small brains but huge egos,” she said, mouth full of candy. “You have to convince these guys that they’re taking care of you, rather than paying for you, because that makes them feel pathetic. You want to make them feel powerful by using words like ‘benefactor’ and ‘mentor.’ Basically, you’re a scared baby lamb in the big city who needs a real man with a big cock and a big fat wallet to show you the way—or you’ll die.” It was all so... predictable.
Madeline explained that there’s generally two types of guys on these sites. She’d nicknamed them the Bleeding Hearts and the Contract Sugar Daddies. A Bleeding Heart actually thinks he’s in a relationship with you—he wants to put his hand on your inner thigh in public, to go to sporting events together, and for you to pretend to come like five times during sex, basically. Bleeding Hearts are often saying things like, “I’m always really generous with my girlfriends, so I don’t see why this is any different.” When the issue of money comes up, you both have to pretend that it’s for your rent, or a camera that will help you launch your photography career, or basically anything to distract from the fact that he has to pay a girl to stand next to him. And then there’s the Contract Sugar Daddies. These guys are more businesslike about it—they pay you a set fee each time they see you, or give you an allowance each month. These guys, she explained, tend to be more confident—they’re not embarrassed about the money element of the relationship, meaning they generally see sugar relationships as a convenience rather than as a necessity. Maybe they’re simply too busy or lazy to date for real, or maybe they’re married. The married guys, she explained, are the best, because they tend to have the least amount of free time to hang out with you.
Madeline prepared me pretty well, but being the good journalist that I am, I wanted to do my own research. So I set up roughly a million dates. Essentially, SA functions like any other dating site: Everyone fills out a profile explaining who they are and what they’re looking for. The main difference is that, on SA, men’s profiles list their net worth, yearly income, and an estimate of how much they’re willing to spend on a sugar baby (ranging from a “practical” amount of $1,000 to $3,000 a month to a “high” amount of over $10,000 a month). There’s also a box where they note their relationship status—the “married but looking” option is one I assume they don’t offer on most “normal” dating sites.
At first, I wasn’t being selective, and I agreed to meet pretty much every guy who sent me a message. This proved to be a huge mistake and a nightmarish waste of time. I mean, imagine applying the same logic to Tinder—literally terrifying. In my defense, it’s harder to assess who you’re meeting through SA, because the majority of men don’t upload photos, for purposes of discretion, so you’re left assessing them by whatever they write in their profile. But they all write the same fucking thing. I’m paraphrasing, but it goes something like:
Handsome businessman looking for beautiful young woman to explore the world with. I’m very busy and travel too much to have a regular relationship. I don’t mean to brag, but I know quite a bit about art and fine wines. Travel junkie!! Chemistry a must. No professionals!!
Translated into reality, that means:
Aging, frumpy businessman looking for someone young to have sex with because my wife won’t fuck me anymore. I sometimes go to Florida on vacation. I like drinking and traveling, like everyone else on earth, and I’ve heard of Damien Hirst. I don’t want to pay you by the hour, and you have to pretend to like me.
Of course, I didn’t know all this at the time. I was a newbie. But I was about to embark on what I now reflect on as my second desensitization period.
The first guy I met was Jack. He was 35 and referred to himself on his profile as a “Cary Grant type.” We met at a dive bar in the West Village, and it turned out he looked less like a 1930s movie star and more like the Unabomber. When I asked him what he did for a living, he told me he was a “student of the world.” It didn’t sound very lucrative. To make a short story even shorter, it turned out that Jack lived in his mom’s basement in Long Island, and had recently been given control of his parents’ bank account, following his father’s death. I told him I had to pee and snuck out the back entrance.
The next guy was a chubby-faced bond trader who, about seven minutes into our meeting, asked me if I wanted to move with him to Fort Lauderdale. After him was the guy from the Texan oil family, who took me for drinks at the Peninsula hotel and told me I looked like a “perfect little Nazi.” There was more than one guy who didn’t even show up, and multiple men who, when I brought up the financial component, tried to make me feel embarrassed about asking for money in exchange for my time—as if that weren’t the exact fucking dynamic that the site was founded on. As it turned out, they don’t call it sex work for nothing—and I hadn’t even banged anyone yet. I felt like I was going on a million tiny job interviews and never being hired. These were not the glamorous rendezvous I’d had in mind.
In her essays, Jerkins is equally critical of the social structures in place to erase the black narrative and the pressures from within black communities to ensure that their daughters conform to white ideals—often through physical means, like the arduous process of hair straightening. She also doesn’t shy away from exploring different experiences of blackness—or wrestling with the ways the black experience is unique from those of non-white women of colour.
I spoke with Jerkins on the phone as she was driving home to her apartment in Harlem. Our conversation’s been edited for length and clarity.
HarperCollins
VICE: What did you mean when you titled this collection This Will Be My Undoing? Morgan Jerkins: I spend a lot of time online—my career started through freelancing—and a lot of exchanges, especially on Twitter, would be about “unlearning.” So many other words start with “un.” I gravitated toward that word because the book goes from when I’m a young girl to a young woman, and I’m unpacking narratives I’ve had about myself and other people, and how they demonstrate racial and gender conflict. I didn’t want it to be seen as too ominous.
In the collection, you discuss the messages black women send to their daughters. Can you talk about these messages from your own experience? Mothers often advise their daughters that if they are too bossy, self-assured, and opinionated, it’ll be hard to find a husband. That admonition becomes more loaded when you’re a black woman. You get these signals from the world at large that you are the least desirable and very unmarriageable. Those people might have the best intentions, but they want you to try to fix yourself over and over again for someone else’s comfort. They don’t ask, “Why can’t someone else fix themselves to be with you?”
What do you mean when you say black girls are “under surveillance” by the community? Black girls are sexualized very early in life. There’s a term “fast-tailed girl,” which is a form of slut-shaming, but it’s directed toward a black girl. There’s no equivalent for black boys and men—it’s about, “How is this black girl getting too out of line sexually, and how do we control that?”
You write about an experience where you felt you didn’t feel at liberty to engage in the same kind of activity available to white women. When you think of pop culture and coming-of-age TV shows, it’s not rare that you find a white female character experimenting with drugs and alcohol—but you rarely see black girls experimenting with drugs. We’re all taught that drugs are bad, but in terms of what we see visually black girls are taught that you aren’t respected or acknowledged from the moment you walk in the door. You have to make sure you look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way. You don’t start off with a clean slate, so you can’t go out of bounds––even if you want to.
The book’s opening essay is about your desire to earn a spot on the cheerleading team at school. You write that you wanted to be “swallowed up” in a white identity. How do young black girls begin to make sense of their own identity? I knew that I was different from other girls—I could see it in our hair, our dialect, our music. But I knew I wanted to be seen as beautiful not just by my community, but by everyone. I equated beauty with white girlhood. In high school and middle school, the people who are popular are white cheerleaders. I wanted to assimilate. I wanted to be absorbed by them. I wasn’t confident in my identity.
It was one of the most difficult essays I’ve had to write because it was so painful. It was at that moment where someone used my identity against me in a dehumanizing way. The validation I was seeking was not just from the cheerleading squad. It was because I wanted to be acknowledged by them in the way that I’m always conscious of who they are. White girls in my school could see reflections of themselves in the squad. I didn’t. That’s the difference.
You write that the black female body is a “target for destruction.” Talk about this concept and what it means to you personally. Violence is not just physical. Microaggressions are a type of violence. It’s a short, trivial moment, and even if the person is well-intentioned, it puts stress under you. People of colour can be under stress for generations because of these traumas. It’s also about the way we’re treated in the media and pop culture. We’re often ignored, erased, made fun of. Serena Williams––how many times has she been compared to an animal?
It’s not always the physical violence. We could talk about street harassment, domestic violence. But it’s violence that comes from other ways––ways that try to make sure black women don’t exist. That we don’t have to be aware of them. I wrote about an experience I had with an adviser’s family who asked why I call myself a black woman. He wondered why don't just call myself a human. It was as if being called a black woman is not human. That felt like a form of violence. It put me under great stress. You see that people don’t understand, but you think: Is that my issue? Why do people need to compartmentalize me to understand me?
Words we use to describe race can be powerful. Can you talk about what terms like “black” and “brown” mean to you? If a black girl wants to define herself as brown, that’s fine. But we should ask: Why we would call ourselves brown? I read criticism of a film called Girlhood by a black girl who asked why we black girls call ourselves brown, when it’s a dilution of blackness? It’s a good question. It should be considered when we think about these identifications.
Class also plays into conversations about race. How does your background influence your story? I’m not the resolution. Black women are not a monolith. But there are privileges I do have. When I talk about going to an Ivy League school, the way I look, my socioeconomic status––that matters. My experience as a woman who grew up in suburban New Jersey is not the same as someone who grew up in the Mississippi Delta. I have to acknowledge that. If I don’t, I reinforce the fallacy of a single story.
You write that Beyoncé is a divisive figure. How do you see that happening? She’s mainly divisive between black and nonblack audiences. When she was announcing her pregnancy, I saw stories that said “it’s not that big of a deal.” Actually, it is. If you look at how many black mothers die in childbirth, it is a big deal. It’s OK to celebrate that. When I think about Lemonade and how many times people wanted to diminish what its impact is, particularly for black women, that’s when it’s divisive. She’s important, but the way she’s covered in the media shows that she’s divisive.
How does feminism leave black women out? How should it look instead? Listen to black women. Include them when you have conversations about sexual harassment, the pay wage gap, and reproductive health issues. Don’t put them as an afterthought. White women are usually at the forefront, and if women of colour are included, they’re in the background. They need to be in the forefront. Feminism cannot last or sustain itself if it just prides itself on white women.
Are black women invisible in the #MeToo movement? The #MeToo movement was started by a black woman, years ago. But we need to get different stories out there. There’s a spectrum of pain that men can inflict on women that all fall under rape culture. I hope it keeps unfolding, and we keep talking about how race adds a layer to them.
Who can tell the stories of black people? Does the intention behind it matter? Can a white person fairly represent black lives? If not, how should this be done? It’s hard. I’ve spent a lot of time online, and you hear black women say, “I do not want anybody but black women to write about black women.” They have a point. There’s such a disconnect between communities of colour and journalists and critics, and what can be said, and how things can be misconstrued and messed up.
But at the same time, I think, Is that too radical? If a black woman publishes something I don’t like, does the same rule apply? When I think of who should write us, it depends on the situation and the context. I personally don’t believe that someone who is not black can’t write about black women. It’s too radical of a jump.
When I think about exploiting black women, we need to have to be very careful with black pain and black trauma and how it is often used as a crutch for critical thinking. When I saw Orange Is the New Black, it was so hard to get through. It gutted me. But when I found out that there were no black writers in the writing room, it made me feel a certain way. There were so many black women in the series, so much violence being committed to them, but there’s no black women in the room? That unevenness is what I want to address.
If you wanted to send a message to white writers and critics about how to better listen to and understand black voices, what would you say? Include them and compensate them properly. It’s not enough to say, “Come in the room and tell us about yourself.” Give black writers the space to do the work they want to do. Make sure there’s mentorship in order. Listen to their perspective. Pay them accordingly, as you would your white colleagues. You need to help make sure these people are sustained.
Personally, I’d like to see more male voices to rise up and support women when it comes to the current conversations around harassment and abuse. Is there a parallel here for you as a black women? Do you want white allies? For the women’s movement, I want to hear men [talk] about how they can do better. It’s usually men trying to gaslight women, or say the experiences weren’t that bad. When white people speak about racism, I think––How can they speak on that? There are all of these structural barriers at work. White people need to talk about it as a reckoning. Not in a way that tramples on the people who experience racism firsthand.
You write that when it comes to some form of abuse from black men, black women are often placed in a difficult situation––wanting to protect themselves while still remaining loyal to black men, who are unfairly targeted by the law. Can you talk about how black women grapple with this? I’m talking about street harassment, but you can use Bill Cosby as an example. When we have these conversations of sexual harassment or rape, a lot of the time, black women feel like they have to choose between their blackness or their womanhood. The problem I have is the compartmentalization that is unfair to us. Black women are conditioned to be pillars of the community. Who will take care of us when we’re weak? We’re conditioned to protect everyone, even at the expense of ourselves.
This story is a part of VICE's ongoing effort to highlight the contributions of black women around the globe who are making a difference. To read more stories about strong black women making history today, go here. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
Everything is really goddamn dumb—like really, really goddamn dumb.
Case in point: there was international “controversy” over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau using the term “peoplekind.”
To catch you up, at an Edmonton town hall, Trudeau responded to a long, meandering question about “the mother god” with a clear joke by saying, “we like to say ‘peoplekind,’ actually. It’s more inclusive.” A clip of the remarks, edited down and removed of context by right-wing media and trolls, quickly went around the web. But as my colleague Drew Brown pointed out, a mere three minutes of fact-checking would have shown it was just a joke gone awry.
Stupid? Yes. Unfunny? Yes. Pointless? Yes. A dad joke? Yes.
Now, after an international cabal of shitty media commentators, including Piers Fucking Morgan, raised their angry voices in unison, the prime minister has backed away from “peoplekind.” On Wednesday, when speaking to reporters outside a Liberal caucus meeting, he addressed the dumb joke in the room, unprompted.
"I made a dumb joke a few days ago that seems to have gone a little viral in the room on the 'peoplekind' comment,” he told reporters. "It played well in the room and in context. Out of context, it doesn't play so well.”
(Yes, the internet kills context and therefore comedy, but bad jokes are also bad for comedy.)
After initially being amplified by a pizzagate affiliated site, right wing media seized on the comments and the dumbest thing to happen in 2018 thus far spread across the globe. Notorious salad tosser Piers Morgan called the PM a “spineless virtue-signalling excuse for a feminist,” and controversial anti-PC prof Jordan Peterson stated that Trudeau “will pay” for this leftist dogma (on Trump’s favourite TV show, no less), and Australian columnist Rita Panahi called Trudeau “dangerously dumb” and “shameless.”
In a shocking twist, opposition MPs grabbed some low hanging fruit to score some cheap heat against Trudeau. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel apologized to the woman Trudeau interrupted on “behalf of Parliament,” and Lisa Raitt told Trudeau to “people up” in the house. HAHAHAAHA. Hilarious.
Now, Trudeau isn’t exactly a hilarious guy, even with a dad joke bell curve, and he does seem to acknowledge this—a bit. In his comments to reporters he admitted that humour probably isn’t the best option for him anyhow, saying "it's a little reminder to me that I shouldn't be making jokes even when I think they're funny.”
Now, after YouTube cracked down on the Tide Pod craze, New York lawmakers are stepping in. The New York Postreports that State Senator Brad Hoylman and Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas laid out legislation this week that would force detergent companies to make their packets a "uniform colour that is not attractive to children" and package them in something that's "not easily permeated by a child’s bite."
The Democrats aimed the bill at every detergent company on the market—Tide isn't the only player in the pod game—but called the brand out in a letter they sent to its parent company, Procter & Gamble, on Tuesday.
"We write to urge you to alter the appearance and packaging of your Tide PODS detergent packets," they wrote. "You and other manufacturers must use a stronger bittering agent to prevent ingestion of pods, reduce their pleasant smell, and make them feel more firm."
Tide is trying to crack down on the fad, putting child guards on its packaging, getting Rob Gronkowski to yell "No!" at would-be detergent eaters, and asking folks on Twitter who claim they've chomped into a pod to call Poison Control. But in response to the new legislation, Procter & Gamble argued that "colour does not play a critical role in a child's accidental exposure to laundry pacs."
"Consumers have a choice: Those who prefer single coloured pac can use Tide Free and Gentle, which is all-white," the company said in a statement, according to USA Today. "Tide is also available in a liquid and powder product form."
Or, if people really just can't fight the urge, edible Tide Pod pizza is a thing now.
It's been more than two years since we saw hard-drinking Marvel detective Jessica Jones take on her nemesis in a gritty superhero saga that confronted sexual assault, control, and trauma. Now, the super strong PI is back in an all-new trailer for the show's upcoming second season, and she's out to find answers about her past.
Unlike season one, there's the absence of one big bad villain in the new trailer. Instead we see Jones trying to connect the dots of her origin story, Charlie Kelly–style, and creeping around dark laboratory-looking hallways and having flashbacks of undergoing "horrific experiments" after her family's death. In the midst of trying to figure out how she got her abilities, Jones reconnects with Trish and Malcolm, takes on some professional competition, and kicks plenty of ass along the way.
But it doesn't look like our titular heroine is completely free of Kilgrave's clutches. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg said that Jones's mind-controlling rapist will be coming back in some shape or form this season.
"He's such a part of her construction and her dilemma. I think just having him come back and be that mirror again is really important," she said. "She was somewhat of a mess even before Kilgrave came into her life, so [season 2] is about digging deeper into that chaos and peeling back those layers."
All 13 episodes of the forthcoming season, which were all directed by female filmmakers, are slated to hit Netflix on March 8. Until then, check out the full season two trailer above.
Growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s, Meryl Meisler had the typical suburban life: girl Scouts, ballet and tap dance lessons, and prom. But while she loved her family and friends, she didn’t quite fit in. She quickly realized she didn’t want to be a housewife, teacher, nurse, or a secretary—pretty much the only options available to young women at that time.
As Meisler came of age, she began to discover her sexuality as a lesbian as well as her identity as an artist. “Photography is in my genes,” Meisler said. Her paternal grandfather Murray Meisler, her uncle Al, and her father Jack had all been lifelong practitioners of the art.
Meisler got her first camera in second grade, but it wasn’t until she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the mid-1970s that she became serious about the form while pursuing an MFA in illustration. During school breaks, she returned to her childhood home, where she staged a series of self-portraits that examined her past, present, and future. At this point, Meisler hadn’t heard of Cindy Sherman, but she had the same instinct. She sought to examine the construction of the female gender, from its rituals to its poses to its personas.
A selection of these photographs appears in Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY 70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre), while others have recently come to light as Meisler prepares for her next book. Here, she speaks with us about this seminal period of her life, sharing a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman ready to take flight.
VICE: Can you take us back to what life was like growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s? Meryl Meisler: I’m from Massapequa. It was called “Matzo Pizza” because there were so many Jewish and Italian families. There were Irish and German and maybe one Chinese family. It was, and still is, a very segregated town.
Growing up, everyone was a first and second generation American. All the parents were from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens and bought their homes on the G.I. bill for under $15,000. Everything was just starting. All the farmland was quickly becoming housing developments.
My parents, Sunny and Jack Meisler, relished the suburban lifestyle and made sure my brothers and I had all the things they didn’t have because they both grew up very poor. I had piano lessons, ballet, tap, twirling—everything but art! I was active in the Brownies and Girl Scouts, all the way up to Cadets.
It was very provincial. I was lucky that my parents took us to the city. My father had a printing business and my mother loved theater. We used to go to Broadway shows. I think you can see this in my work—it’s very theatrical.
At what point did you begin to realize that you didn’t quite fit in and weren’t going to start an adult life in the suburbs? If you want to talk about being gay, yes I had feelings. But I also dated, went to proms, Sweet Sixteens, and had boyfriends, and enjoyed it all. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know what it was.
My brothers and I were the first generation in my family that had the luxury of going to college. I got into Buffalo State. I didn’t think about what I wanted to do. On the first day, we received a battery of tests and it came back that I could go into education or the arts. I took a class for non-art majors and loved the assignments. The teacher asked if I ever thought about becoming an art major and I literally felt my heart thump.
I called my parents and told them I wanted to study art. But it was under the condition that I get a teaching degree so that I could always make a living. I loved it and graduated first in my class in the school of education.
It turns out Cindy Sherman went to Buffalo State as well. She was an art major there and graduated a year or two after I did. She was also from Long Island, which is funny as well. But I never took a photography class there.
How did you get into photography? Photography was always part of my life. Any time I saw my paternal grandfather he had a camera on him and a light meter, and he used it. My dad had an eagle eye and photographed with a Rolleicord. My style is very much influenced by him. He photographed friends, family, and special occasions and he did it really well.
Going into my senior year of college, my boyfriend in Buffalo broke up with me. He said I wasn’t a real artist. So what did I do? I took myself to the Museum of Modern Art and saw the Diane Arbus show. It was a consciousness that, “I am an artist. Tough noogies.”
While I was in graduate school, I decided to take a photography class because I wanted to learn how to use a real camera. I bought a Pentax SRT 101. I was reading the directions on the plane to school and I jammed it and thought I broke it—that’s been a theme ever since.
As soon as I went home, I started photographing myself and my friends. I am going through my first rolls on 35mm film now for the next book. I discovered one of the pictures, where I am smoking cigarettes in front of the dishwasher. I don’t know if that was the first or second roll but I made a self-portrait immediately.
That photograph shocked me. I never printed it. I was wearing nothing but my mother’s house dress and I took her cigarettes even though I didn’t smoke. I was asking myself, “Am I a future housewife?” It was a very private moment.
How did making these self-portraits allow you to explore this pivotal period of transformation in your life? I wanted to photograph this life that I knew, that I had been seeing and living for many years. I would come home from school and go through the closets and the attics, where we kept everything from special occasions. The photos are about life between childhood and adulthood, where I asked myself, “Who am I? What do I want to be?”
Going to the theater was very influential. I lit the rooms in my house like a stage, very direct and crude, using the curtains as curtains and the objects as backgrounds. The house was like another member of the family because that is the place that I lived in since I was two years old.
I was 21 going on 22 when I started taking these pictures and I was definitely saying, “Come on already! Come out!” (Laughs). It eventually did happen, but many of the photos are in the ‘twixt and the ‘tween. I was questioning my future in the suburbs. I didn’t see how I would fit in.
Looking back, do you see something in the photos you weren’t conscious of while you were making them? I see it as extremely brave—and I even dared to print them. It surprised me to see how determined I was.
Speaking of daring, could you speak about the Lynda Benglis photo and how this inspired you to create one of your most radical self-portraits? There was a poster for a Lynda Benglis exhibition hanging in the hallway of the art department at the University of Wisconsin. There she was, just standing there naked, wearing a huge dildo!
I didn’t know where I got the inspiration for that photo until we had this conversation. For me, my camera was my power. I took the shot more than once. One time I had this guy I was dating help me with it, and another time, it might have been my future bride (Laughs). It certainly wasn’t my brother!
When Steven Kasher was considering giving me a show in 2016, he was looking through my prints—and he picked that one! I was like, “I have to give it a title,” so I called it “Untitled Film Still” as a reference to Cindy Sherman.
It’s a ballsy picture. Just showing it was like, “Ohh!” I am very critical about what is a photograph. It can’t just be shocking or composition or lighting or history—it has to be a little bit of everything. I looked at the photo and said, “It has all of that.”
I also had a moment when I thought: “If not now, when?” You know what? It’s a perfect image.
