Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels didn’t intend to start a conversation about race and gentrification when she opened roving art gallery We Buy Gold in Bed-Stuy last summer. “I was kind of misquoted, and then every other writer picks that up. But I’m like, No, I’m not trying to bridge those gaps!” she said. “But I learned, if that’s the conversation people are having, then I need to acknowledge that and not shy away from it.”
In truth, Bellorado-Samuels opened We Buy Gold to put on “the shows that had been in my head.” As a director at Jack Shainman Gallery in Manhattan, she wanted to bring artists closer to her community in Brooklyn’s rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. Last summer, We Buy Gold hosted three exhibitions featuring artists like South Africa’s Mohau Modisakeng, whose video installation examined the traumas of the Middle Passage, and Brooklyn-based Alexandra Bell, whose photo project inverted the “bad guy” public image given to Mike Brown, the teenager killed in 2014 by a police officer in Ferguson, MO.
“There’s this misnomer that We Buy Gold is only showing artists of colour,” Bellorado-Samuels explained. “That was never something that came from me. [Artists of colour are] just my normativity.” As if in response to this misconception, Bellorado-Samuels will help poet and author Claudia Rankine interrogate the narrative that has centered whiteness as the criterion as a curatorial committee member of Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute. The institute will host its next art show at The Kitchen, in June, right after Bellorado-Samuels opens We Buy Gold in Chinatown on April 29 through June 3.
Below, I talked to the gallerist about the evolution of We Buy Gold and how black woman can take up space in the art world.
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels is wearing a coat by LUAR, her own Kimono, and shoes by Helmut Lang. All original photos by Maroon World.
VICE: Why did you open We Buy Gold? Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels: I was interested in trying out different models and working with artists that we don’t represent at the [Jack Shainman] gallery. I wanted to make the shows that had been in my head. And I was also really interested in opening it where I live. It was really important for me to do something in Bed-Stuy that was a departure from the model of institutional spaces.
There’s often a sense of hostility felt by people who aren’t used to inhabiting those types of spaces. Did you seek to erase any of those tensions with We Buy Gold? Oh yeah, totally. Access is something that is really important to me and to what I was trying to do with We Buy Gold. I definitely don’t feel like I came up with any solutions to that, but it was definitely something I’m committed to. Sometimes I think breaking down those barriers has to do with just being there and consistency, because it does take time to get people in there and familiar with the art.
You’ve mentioned before that you feel like you should be taking up more space as a person of color in the art industry. Can you break that down? While there are a lot of artists of color, I don’t think they are necessarily represented in a lot of spaces. And there are definitely not a lot of us on the other side of that, within those roles, working in galleries or museums or curatorial practices. I think it’s important for us to do as much as we can, to make sure our voices are heard and we’re representing as much as we can. And that isn’t exclusive to artists of colour. There’s kind of this misnomer that We Buy Gold is only showing artists of colour. But that was never something that came from me. That’s just my normativity, in the same way that it is for a lot of other people in seemingly exclusionary exhibition industries.
It does seem like the discussion of race can be limiting in the art world. I find it interesting that We Buy Gold caught on as a "black artist show." Yes, it’s a gallery show that exhibits a lot of artists of colour. And I do think that’s something that should be remarked upon. But I’m cautious about anything that describes a space within a certain distinct limitation. It feels too easy. Other spaces, even though they are very singular in what they show, are never discussed in that way.
It’s not about not wanting to talk about race—every single show that we did talks about race. It’s just that I want to have a conversation about the nuance in that. I’m not interested in shows in which race is the only thing that strings them together. There’s so much nuance and complexity in that, and I just find it can be quite lazy—not from the black artists, but from people who are gazing on us.
What do you see for the future of black women in art? As art makers or art workers?
Art workers. I’m just hoping that there ends up being more of us, but I do think the community is growing. There’s this group of women who all work at galleries and we all get together and have quarterly gatherings and we make sure to stay in touch consistently. It’s not a support group, but it’s supportive. It's this kind of building community within the community just because there are so few of us and we end up having this sense of isolation. I just hope that there ends up being more of us so our voices can be represented more thoroughly.
Photography and Styling by Maroon World Makeup: Wanthy Rayos
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.
Great acting may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Jennifer Lopez, but maybe that’s our fault for remembering Gigli more clearly than Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight.
We’re now 20 years out from the role that should have cemented J Lo’s reputation as an onscreen force to be reckoned with. Instead it led to a career of duds, interrupted by very minor hits (and no fewer than seven Razzie Award nominations). Out of Sight is a movie with a shockingly star-studded cast of supporting players (Don Cheadle, Catherine Keener, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, and Ving Rhames, just to name a few), and yet Lopez more than holds her own.
Out of Sight was the last in a short string of high-profile 90s adaptations of Elmore Leonard novels. And it’s worth remembering how much Soderbergh accomplished with this film. Not only is it better than Get Shorty and Jackie Brown, both of which came before it, but it’s likely the best Leonard adaptation we’ve seen so far. (I mean, no one’s going to bat for The Big Bounce or Be Cool, but there are a few solid titles competing.)
J Lo’s chemistry with George Clooney also happens to be spot on. Lopez is US Marshall Karen Sisco playing cat and mouse with Clooney’s bank-robbing escaped convict Jack Foley. Foley’s prison break sets the stage for their meet cute, which is immediately followed by a cramped ride together in the trunk of his getaway car. Throughout the film, the two play off of each other with just the right amount of attraction and forced animosity to sell the whole thing perfectly.
It’s a pretty typical Elmore Leonard set up. We follow deeply flawed protagonists who alternate between likeable (even honourable) and anywhere from petty to sociopathic. And all the while the line between criminals and the law remains blurry. That’s a tough balancing act. Get Shorty makes John Travolta a little too cool (in that weird John Travolta way that really hasn’t aged well), while Tarantino predictably plays up the seedy side of things in Jackie Brown.
(It is worth noting, though, that Jackie Brown is a great compliment to Out of Sight and probably the only underrated Tarantino film. The two movies are worth putting into conversation with each other. Michael Keaton even reprises his Jackie Brown role as FBI agent Ray Nicolette in Out of Sight, suggesting the two films exist in the same narrative universe.)
It’s maybe no surprise that some of the best takes on Elmore Leonard have been TV shows, like the current Get Shorty series on Epix and the near-perfect, slow-burning Justified, which wrapped up on FX in 2015. Having the room to let characters breathe and develop over time makes it a lot easier to strike that morally grey balance that Out of Sight achieves. Not that a weekly rollout did much for ABC’s Karen Sisco (starring Spy Kids’ Carla Gugino in the lead role), which felt a little redundant when it premiered a few years after Out of Sight and was cancelled after just seven episodes.
But what Out of Sight manages to compress into two hours is an instantly likeable pair of protagonists engaged in a funny, charming, and moving professional relationship that involves interesting power dynamics and surprising emotional complexity.
Clooney and Lopez weren’t the most obvious choices, however. Soderbergh has become known for unconventional casting, from non actors in Bubble, to a porn star in The Girlfriend Experience, to an MMA fighter with no acting experience in Haywire. And while the casting in Out of Sight is clearly more conventional than in these examples, it certainly wouldn’t have seemed like a sure thing at the time. Lopez had been relatively well received in Selena, but roles in the aforementioned Anaconda or Money Train didn’t exactly propel her to the A-list.
More than anything, Lopez seems to just have a lot of room to be cool in Out of Sight. Her performance feels effortless, and her butterflies-in-my stomach attraction to Clooney’s Foley feels perfectly on point. Karen Sisco is a professional, but she’s also not someone who automatically equates what’s right with what’s legal. She’s also not afraid to get what she wants. Lopez’s acting hasn’t drawn a lot of praise over the years, and that’s largely unfair (a bad movie and a bad performance aren’t the same thing, after all). Nevertheless, Out of Sight is miles ahead of anything else she’s done. It makes me wish Hollywood would send some meatier roles her way.
Surprisingly, Clooney was much more of a wild card in 1998. Fresh off the spectacular failure of Batman & Robin, he seems like he would have been much more likely to sink a film’s marketing than Lopez. It’s hard to imagine today, but Clooney wasn’t such an actor of note at that point. He was definitely a big name, having wooed America as irresistible Dr. Doug Ross on E.R., but scanning through his filmography, there wasn’t much to boast about yet.
And more notably, there was nothing to hint at his roguish-charmer persona of more recent years. Films like One Fine Day put him squarely in the romantic comedy bracket, while From Dusk Till Dawn seems completely against type today. What Out of Sight gave us was the first glimpse of the Clooney we now know so well.
He’s a criminal with an iffy sense of ethics, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s bumbling at times, waving instinctively (and awkwardly) when he recognizes Karen across a room, knowing full well she’s there to take him him. And he’s charming as hell, beyond just being handsome. We don’t wonder for even a second why Karen has fallen for him so quickly (nor he for her, for that matter).
It’s the kind of role that sets the stage for everything from Danny Ocean in Ocean’s Eleven to Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Out of Sight is a career reset for Clooney, showing us that he’s not just a TV actor who failed to transition to film, or a pretty face without substance. No, he’s a bona fide leading man, ready to settle into a couple decades of stardom.
Why Out of Sight didn’t give Lopez a similar kickstart is a mystery to me. Not that she hasn’t had a good run, but Hollywood’s collective choice to relegate her mostly to rom-coms feels unfair, and like a missed opportunity to see her full range. For the record, I love a good rom-com, but it’s a hard genre to climb out of once you’ve been pigeonholed, and The Wedding Planner and Maid in Manhattan certainly aren’t the cream of the generic crop.
Now that Soderbergh is effectively out of retirement and looking to shake up Hollywood, it could be a good time to reteam with Lopez, and give her the comeback she deserves. Clooney was considering a sequel to Out of Sight a few years ago, based on Leonard’s Road Dogs (written with Clooney in mind). And we know Soderbergh likes working with Clooney.
It could be a good time to check back in on Sisco and Foley. Count me in, as long as J Lo’s along for the ride.
A California judge has ruled that Charles Manson's body will go to his grandson, Jason Freeman, after a months-long battle over who has the right to the former cult leader's remains, Washington Postreports.
Kern County Court Commissioner Alisa R. Knight named the 41-year-old Freeman to be "the surviving competent adult next of kin" for Manson in her Monday ruling, beating out a crowd of other people vying for control of the body, including another alleged relative, Michael Brunner—the son of Manson Family member Mary Brunner—and Michael Channels, a long-time Manson pen pal who claimed to have a 2002 will that named him sole beneficiary.
The will was dismissed due to lack of witnesses and Brunner had been adopted as a child, forfeiting his right to be Manson's heir, so the right to the body fell to Freeman.
Freeman reportedly never met Manson in person, though he found the convicted murderer to be a "kind, giving person" in the pair's long-distance correspondence over the years. He can now pick up his grandfather's remains from a California morgue, where it has been hidden under a fake name since last November, and will be "responsible for the costs of burial and funeral expenses," according to the ruling.
"I've always known who my grandfather was, from as far back as I can remember," Freeman told Rolling Stonein an interview earlier this month. "I am a grandson working to take the proper steps to show my respect to my grandfather and his true close friends."
The battle over control of Manson's corpse began long before he died last year. Back in 2015, Manson almost married a 27-year-old groupie nicknamed Star until she was revealed to just want him for his body, his dead body, so she could turn it into a tourist attraction after he died. Freeman, on the other hand, has said that he plans to cremate Manson's corpse—though he reportedly played with a Manson puppet and joked about stuffing it with his grandfather's ashes in a recent Facebook Live video, according to the Daily Beast, which doesn't seem much better than Star's Lenin-style tomb.
"They have a puppet that looks like Charlie that they’re going to put his ashes in. What is it, do they want to make Chucky Part 4 and sell him off?” Channels, Manson's pen pal, told the Daily Beast last week. "That’s what [Manson] didn’t want. That’s the only thing I'm trying to stop."
Nevertheless, Freeman has now gained custody of Manson's body, and what comes next is up to him. "All I wanted to do was take the dude’s ashes and dump them in the desert where he wanted," Channels said to AP after learning of the court's decision.
Over the weekend, Fox aired a special called O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession, where host Soledad O'Brien played an old interview from 2006 with the former sports star promoting his highly controversial book If I Did It. And from what he said in the interview, it seems like he really "hypothetically" might have done it.
In the old interview, Simpson was questioned about how he would have murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, a crime he was acquitted for in 1995. He goes into full detail about what he would have "hypothetically" done in between bits of laughter, but it reads as a little too real for a hypothetical situation.
On Monday's episode of Desus & Mero, the hosts shared their thoughts on the interview and Simpson's "hypothetical" confession. And according to Desus Nice, "O.J. did it. Stay away from my family, O.J."
You can watch last night’s Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.
Another day, another Trump cabinet member bites the dust. On Tuesday morning, the president tweeted that CIA Director Mike Pompeo would replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, and that Gina Haspel would be the first woman to lead the CIA.
To say Tillerson's ouster was a surprise move wouldn't be quite right—this shake-up has been rumoured for months now. Still, as reported by the AP's Josh Lederman, who was with Tillerson in the hours before his firing, "There was zero indication on flight home that this was imminent." Meanwhile, a State Department official told CNN's Elise Labott "that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson found out he was fired from President Trump's tweet."
Since Tillerson's and Trump's relationship ended by way of a mighty tweet, it's only appropriate to look back at the tweets that got us here.
December 2016
Remember December 2016? Simpler times! Barack Obama was still president, his successor misused quotation marks in a tweet not-so-subtly hinting at Tillerson's appointment, and it was hard to envision just how chaotic the Trump administration would be. Two days later, Trump took to Twitter to formalize the announcement.
"The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments," Trump added, also on Twitter.
February 2017
Trump congratulated Tillerson on his confirmation. "He will be a star!" the president predicted. And hey! He wasn't wrong.
October 2017
Fast forward eight months, and much of the Trump administration has begun to resign, or in the words of Donald Trump, "[has gotten] fired!" Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Michael Dubke, Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci, and Sebastian Gorka are no more. But despite the odds, Rex is hanging on by the skin of his teeth.
Still, Tillerson's firing seemed inevitable. On the first of the month, Trump undermined his secretary of state's diplomatic efforts with North Korea when he tweeted the following:
Soon after, it was reported that Tillerson called Trump a "moron," something the former secretary of state never denied. In response to the report, he said at a press conference, "The places I come from, we don't deal with that kind of petty nonsense and it's intended to do nothing but divide people. And I'm not going to be part of this effort to divide the administration."
Meanwhile, the NBC News report that alleged Tillerson called Trump a "moron" also asserted that the secretary of state had threatened to quit. In response, Trump decried the report as "Fake News" on Twitter.
Despite Trump and Tillerson's denials of his imminent departure, a month later, the Washington Postreported Pompeo was already preparing to take over the State Department.
December 2017
The continued flailing here kind of speaks for itself.
February 2018
Tillerson sat down with 60 Minutes's Margaret Brennan, who asked him about the "moron" thing. He replied, "That's a really old question" and "I think I've answered the question" and "I'm not gonna dignify the question."
March 2018
Finally, on March 13, not long after both White House Communications Director Hope Hicks and Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn announced their resignations, Trump took to Twitter to fire ol' Rex.
In a press conference Tuesday, the president spoke further on his latest staffing upset. "Rex and I have been talking about this for a long time," he explained. "We got along actually quite well. But we disagreed on things... Rex is a very good man. I like Rex a lot. I really appreciate his commitment and his service. And I’ll be speaking to Rex over a long period of time."
The president continued,
I really didn’t discuss it very much with him honestly. I made that decision by myself. Rex wasn’t, as you know, in this country. I made the North Korea decision with consultation from many people but I made that decision by myself. I actually got along well with Rex. But really it was a different mind-set. It was a different thinking.
CNN's Kaitlan Collins then asked, "Did you fire him because he called you a moron?"
"What?" Trump responded.
"Did you fire him because he called you a moron?" Collins repeated.
"Say it again," Trump commanded, before noting, "I wish Rex a lot of good things. I think he’s going to do—I think he’s going to be very happy. I think Rex will be much happier now."
And just like that, Rex was gone, no tears were shed, and Trump refocused his Twitter attention on a less delicate topic: his beloved border wall.
In Spain, a "picadero" is any public place a couple goes to have sex, either because they can't get the privacy they need at home, or because they're looking for a change of scenery to liven up their sex lives. Thanks to a Spanish web designer, the search for a nice place fornicate in peace has never been easier.
In 2009, Josean, 43, launched the website Mispicaderos to help Spanish couples find picaderos by encouraging people to share their favourite spots and rate them. Since then, he has collated around 12,000 picaderos across Spain – allowing users to search by location, sexual orientation, privacy, mode of transport to the area and whether the spot can accommodate up to 20 people.
The site offers all kinds of options – from picturesque, secluded car parks and roadside B&Bs to shopping centre toilets and cheap hotels that organise sex parties. After requesting we use a pseudonym, Josean told me all about his mission for the site, why his friends confuse him for a sex expert and his plans to take his website global.
VICE: Hey Josean. How did you come up with the idea? Josean: It came to me back in 2009. I noticed there were no websites that offered couples new and exciting places to have sex. So being a web designer, I got to work. At first it was just my mates who were suggesting spots and leaving reviews, but the website spread quickly and soon I had lots of users submitting their favourite places. The first picadero on the map was an already famous spot on a road leading to Bilbao's Artxanda mountain range. If you drive up it at certain times, you will see rows of cars parked to the side with couples inside doing their thing.
What's your overall mission? To create a tool for people to share their favourite spots to be intimate for others to use, too. Before my website started in 2009, all Spanish couples had to rely on was word of mouth.
One of the most frequented picadero in Barcelona is a room in a sex shop called Cine X.
There are picaderos marked in airports, shopping centres and pretty much anywhere you can find some privacy. I'm no longer shocked by the places people suggest. I've learned that if a building has a toilet or a changing room, someone has had sex in it.
Outside of teenagers sneaking out to have sex, who do you think mainly uses your website? I think there are three main reasons anyone would go to a picadero – you don’t have a place of your own to do it, you’re having an affair, or you're looking for a bit of excitement.
What's the strangest place a user has suggested? The vast majority are in places you'd expect, such as museums, bathrooms and cemeteries. But when I know it's fake – like when people add the home of a famous politician – I always take it down. I once received a threatening note from a monastery asking me to remove their listing or they'd sue me. I obviously removed it because I'm not doing this to piss people off. But I can't help but wonder who at the monastery found it and what they were doing on a picaderos website.
My girlfriend and I actually found a great place the other day. It was inside this sex shop which had a room specifically designed for couples. Minutes after we had started fucking, a bunch of other couples came in and started having sex right next to us.
What do your friends think about all of this? Although I prefer keeping it a bit of a secret, all my friends know about it and now they think I'm some kind of sex expert. I get people complaining to me that there are no good places to go in their area, as if I'm responsible. When that happens, I just encourage them to find their own spots and share it on the website.
Watch: How to Build an Affordable Sex Robot
I noticed you've recently started expanding into other countries. The response I've received in Spain has been phenomenal – on average we get three to four new suggestions a day, which are often submitted with a lot of care and thought. So I just figured it would be easy to take it abroad because people fuck everywhere, right? But it has only really worked in Portugal and South America. I think it works in South America because it's a lot more normal over there for hotels to let you pay by the hour.
So you may not be a sex expert, but do you see yourself as Spain's biggest picaderos expert? I'm really not. Before I can call myself an expert I'd have to be able to say that I've personally tried most of the spots on the site. And considering we have around 12,000, that would be quite a challenge.
Alright so the setup to this one is this: There is such a thing as a "podcast co-host shirt." Look, here’s the tweet:
Here’s the bit from Modcloth, the online store that sells it:
And I mean fair play because it is a very "guys!! don't forget our Patreon has new rewards up!!" kind of shirt. It's very "extremely slowly reading the details of a 20-year-old murder out off Wikipedia." Serving executive Blue Apron ad placement realness. But it makes you think of other clothes, does it not? It makes you think of the things we wear, and what they say about us as a person. How we project ourselves to the world around us through our sartorial choices. How every hat, every t-shirt, every accessory, and every shoe says to the world: Hey, world. This… this is me.
Here’s who you are based on what you wear.
The "I comply with the police when they knock on the door of a house party" fleece
“Yuh, hi officers. The dealers are in the upstairs bedroom. Nobody invited them, they just came in! Yuh. Oh, whoops, I dropped the wallet my dad gave me… who’s in the army, by the way.”
The "shares petitions about library closures on Facebook a lot" small cardigan
It’s basically impossible to spend more than a day in east London without bumping into one of these girls, sorry. Their Etsy page is dedicated to disruptive cross-stitching. This girl has a special sideways smile she does in selfies and group photos. She always sits down in the pub with a coat on her lap. Oh, g— oh, God. She’s: Yeah, she’s talking about Harry Potter again. “Dobby was oppressed—“ Can I get anyone a pint? Anyone? Just please give me an excuse to get up and go to the bar instead. Can I get anyone a pint?
Joke’s on me here because these are my actual glasses. But every time I wear them, I feel a bit like Revolver Ocelot when he grafted Liquid’s hand onto him—suddenly violently overtaken by someone else’s personality, a mask on top of my own, only in this case, mine is a guy called Rory who says he’s from Hackney but actually very much is not, and I keep getting this irrepressible need to describe things as either “hoppy” or “sour,” those are the literal only two adjectives I know.
The "technically a vegan in that all I eat is hash browns and veggie nuggets" dad hat
√ He takes tons of Instagram stories of entirely empty train cars because the commute from London College of Fashion [LCF] to his parents’ house on the residential outskirts of London takes more than an hour even though his Tinder bio is just the pin emoji followed by the word "London." √ Once had a panic attack at Carnival √ Spends every Christmas with his parents in Dubai and got given £6,000 [8,326] for his last birthday √ [Extended montage of scuffling sounds coming from a nightclub smoking area] “I listen to grime, dude! So yeah, I think I can say it!”
The "what's student debt? Hold on: So you all have to pay loans?" ring
You had to explain the concept of bars very carefully to him over a 30-minute conversation during his first week of college, but now he’s a complete convert, jugs of Blue Lagoon and everything. He stayed in a Spoons Hotel once just for the laugh of it all. This joy will dissipate entirely overnight when, after a year and a half of traveling, he’ll get a £55k [$76,000] starting salary job at his father’s company, finance a Mercedes-Benz, and only ever go to rooftop bars in St. Paul’s.
The "girl who makes noise complaints to both the upstairs and downstairs neighbors" shirt
"My roommate is having a really hard time and your bedroom is right below hers, so if you could turn down the one song you’ve been playing at a medium volume on your record player, OK? I have your landlord’s number inexplicably and I’m not afraid to text him about this, incessantly, exaggerating the agony of hearing mild noise thru the floor more and more every time, until he has no real option but to evict you and keep your deposit. Just think before you play a song at 4 PM on a Sunday."
The "I want the 90s style but without buying vintage in case a poor or dead person wore it once" tracksuit
You know those friend-of-a-friends who happen to be apartment shopping at the same time as you, and you end up agreeing to go thirds on a three-bedroom with them? And you’re in the pub before looking at some place, and she goes "so what’s your budget, like one a month? One-two a month?" And you realize they are talking about one thousand or two hundred dollars, per month? Each? And you realize suddenly that they’ve never paid rent in their life because their dad just direct deposits rent straight to the landlord. And you end up saying you’ll stay in the box room because "I don’t need much space, honestly!" but it’s actually just so you get to pay less rent per month as a result of it. And it’s still somehow £900 [$1,249]? This is their tracksuit. They never cook because every night they order through Uber Eats. Every time the house gets messy, they go and stay a night at a hotel. Their glam mom comes to visit one day and brings you one of those big Diptyque candles, which they actually light instead of keeping as precious holy decorations. Rich people are crazy.
The "I bring a 35mm camera everywhere I go and always finger on the first date" shirt
He's one of those weird guys who, hours after you finished up a really agonizing drug session, posts a really calm and wholesome-looking picture from a museum of him wearing a little beanie hat and looking at a painting.
The "messages your girlfriend offering to pay for nudes" Chelsea boots
√ Keeps advertising stock trading seminars that you’re pretty sure is just a complex pyramid scheme √ Comments on Bella Hadid’s selfies as if she will actually notice him √ "How much for sex? LOL. I’m a nice guy, you know." [seconds pass] "You’re not even all that, you know. You're a seven rejecting a ten." [days pass, 4 AM occurs] "LOOKS FADE! GOOD GUYS DON’T COME AROUND OFTEN!"
The "we've got to go see Clapton F.C. play one time you know. You can bring your own beer" soccer-style scarf
Somehow, he is wearing six coats at once and keeps talking about xG. When you invite him over to your place to watch Champions League and eat Domino’s with the boys, he keeps turning the audio commentary off to put a soccer podcast on instead. Please stop talking to me about the St. Pauli youth team dude, I’m just trying to get excited about the World Cup.
The "has exactly one viral tweet that is just a four screenshot tableau of a bad conversation she had on Tinder" sneakers
She does that thing where you post two selfies of slightly different poses in front of a ring light that gets 1.2K likes, for some reason. Then stays up until 3 AM every night looking at SpongeBob memes but doesn’t know why she’s tired all the time. She also keeps read receipts on—that sort of thing.
The "books a week off of work around the weekend of the Field Day music festival" overalls
√ Hour late to his job as a barista at one of those £4 [$5]-a-latte places that is filled with ill-placed cheese plants with the leaves all crushed and brown √ Not a single lampshade on any of the lightbulbs in his room, not even one lampshade √ Gives you paintings for your birthday that, out of sheer politeness, you are duty-bound to keep for the next three to four house moves
My editor said I’m allowed exactly two digs at the rest of the staff around me because any more than that and I’ll never make friends but: Nobody here ever knows exactly what day payday is and all we drink instead of water is Old Blue Last beer, please save us all from this hell.
The "crowdfunds a zine without even once checking whether a zine covering the exact same issue in the exact same way already exists or not" nose ring
‘Guys, wow, the GoFundMe is looking pretty empty (£120 [$166] of £10,000 [$13,878] raised) and only six of you turned up to the planning meeting I organized. Can we start taking this a bit more seriously, please? Actual charities are really on my case about whether my plan to just print tote bags and @ Theresa May telling her to “fuck off” is really going to do anything to further the cause (still undecided on the cause BTW: If you RSVP, you MUST attend the planning meetings). We need to fight back!’
The "'U up?' text" straight male pink hair dye
His Instagram Story the day Lil Peep died was just tons of black and white videos of him crying a single tear and there's a whole bit where he very slowly lit a candle. Now, it’s 3 AM on a Friday night, and despite ghosting you six weeks ago, he’s on WhatsApp sending pictures of his new tattoo and asking if he can go down on you.
"Nah man, we can’t use my account to get one. They all cancel on me. Use your phone and I’ll pay you back when we get to the place. I definitely won’t instantly disappear into the dark recesses of a warehouse rave never to be seen again, like the last time this happened."
√ Celebrates a "birthday month" √ "Interesting guys only. Do NOT ask me to just come for a drink with you. Think outside the box! ASK ME ON AN ACTIVITY DATE." √ Actually does adult coloring books
The "part-owner of a vape emporium" patterned shirt
What did these guys do before vaping? Do you remember? You went to school with one, didn’t you? His name was Liam. What did he do before vaping? Who was he before vaping happened? I know I knew one—I knew I talked to one, or went to the pub with one—and now: Who was he before there was vaping? All he does now is blow out smoke rings and pushes them with his hands in the direction of a single flickering laser lamp while two sad silent girls just watch him do it. He wears big structural hoodies and always smells faintly of vaped bubblegum. But who was he before this happened? Who was he?
The "catch me on Depop ten days before payday every month without fail selling a box logo t-shirt so I can continue to afford to live" silver bullets
1 Day After Payday: “Uber Uber Uber Uber! Uber Uber Uber Uber! Deliveroo Deliveroo! Uber Uber Uber Uber!” 3 Days After Payday: [sound of scrolling the Grailed website for one and a half actual hours] “What do you think of this £400 [$555] fleece?” 8 Days After Payday: “Dude, we’ve got to look for somewhere cheaper to live. I can’t live like this. The bank keeps texting me about overdraft fees.” 20 Days After Payday: [sound of typing the words "can u sell ur blood" into Google] “Dude, can I borrow a mug of pasta from you? I think I might honestly die if you say no.”
The "relentlessly makes fun of people who are just trying to live their lives—and wear clothes that are mildly adherent to trend while they do it—all while personally wearing a collection of mainly boxy and ill-fitting Uniqlo plain pieces because he's 1. too scared to truly commit to any fashion trends or any ways of dressing that are in any way variant from the norm 2. the size and shape of an upright standing fridge and so cannot actually flex with tailored or in any way fitted clothing 3. agonizes over every daring fashion choice he might ever make to the point of sartorial impotence 4. fundamentally has bad taste anyway, so I mean all of this combines to build to a position of high hypocrisy, here, sitting at a desk wearing a plain black hoodie, a plain black pair of jeans, and plain black classics, looking basically like a large goth who got reformed by a prison" wardrobe
Honestly, I spend most of my clothes budget on old football shirts off of eBay that I do not ever actually wear. Please don’t listen to me.
The road itself is narrow—the kind where two Canadians driving in opposite directions would have to pull over and gesture at one another until someone finally went first—and it’s lined on both sides by a hodgepodge of quaint bungalows and obnoxious mega mansions. The lawns are well-manicured, and the yards are large, unmolested by even a sidewalk in either direction. But while Paton Street might be short, its legacy is long on racism, assault, kidnapping, miscarriage of justice, and even a possible connection to the Ku Klux Klan.
“I don’t think that naming streets after people with such racist histories is a good idea at all,” says Stuart Smith, a member ofvolunteer advocacy group Abundant Housing Vancouver. After discovering Paton Street’s history, the organization began discussing ways to get it renamed. “All the events down in Charlottesville have really opened my eyes. It matters what you put on a pedestal, and it matters who you name things after.”
JA Paton in 1937. | Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives
Christened exactly 60 years ago, Paton Street was named for a guy who would have seemed, on paper, to be the perfect candidate. He had a long and distinguished career in public service—first as a school board trustee, then the mayor of Point Grey (a neighbourhood on the city’s west side that was once a separate municipality), then later as a Conservative MLA. He owned the Vancouver Courier (then the Point Grey Gazette), a community newspaper that still exists more than 100 years later. He served his country during World War I, losing a leg in the process. He was active in the town planning movement of the day, served on a number of boards and committees. He was a mason, a member of the United Church, and a man well-respected by his community.
Unfortunately, he was also a ferocious racist—one who would aid the violent forced confinement of a Chinese man by men wearing white robes and hoods, but would not face any repercussions for those crimes.
Town planning, Smith notes, was often used in the 1800s and 1900s as a tool to segregate wealthy Europeans from perceived undesirables—in their eyes, people of colour, and the poor—and Paton seems to have subscribed to this idea wholeheartedly. In a 1922 editorial for the Point Grey Gazette, he articulated his hopes for turning Point Grey into a “first class residential district”—one free from both apartments and “Orientals.” In a later Vancouver Sun editorial he described Chinese Canadians as “problem people,” and during the latter part of his political career, even vocally opposed their right to vote. He wasn’t alone; anti-Asian sentiment was common in the Vancouver of the early and mid 20th century—in 1907, a group calling itself the Asiatic Exclusion League had staged a full-blown race riot in the streets of Chinatown, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage—and racist policymakers were everywhere, crafting legislation like the 1885 Chinese head tax meant to discourage immigration, and later Japanese internment during World War II.
Wong Foon Sing, as seen in the May 18th, 1925 edition of the Vancouver Sun.
“Everyone at that time was generally racist,” writer and historian Ed Starkins told VICE. “The labour unions were racist, the newspapers were racist, the political parties were all vying for the ‘anti-Oriental’ vote. The Liberal party placed a newspaper ad in 1935 that said something to the effect of ‘Don’t let the Yellow Man take your job.’ People were highly inflamed.”
However, Paton took his xenophobia beyond just rhetoric and policy; in 1925, while serving as both mayor of Point Grey, and chairman of its police commission, he helped orchestrate the kidnapping—using municipal funds and police resources—of a Chinese houseboy named Wong Foon Sing, who was kept chained in the attic of a Shaughnessy mansion for more than six weeks, and beaten to get him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit.
First, some context:
In the summer of 1924, Vancouver was rocked by the violent death of Janet Smith—a 22-year-old nursemaid who was found facedown in the basement of the Shaughnessy mansion where she worked. It was a case that captivated the public’s imagination, and even today, remains one of the city’s most notorious unsolved murders. There was a gun near her body, and a bullet hole above her right eye. Wong Foon Sing, the Chinese-Canadian servant who discovered her, immediately called the police, who ruled the death a suicide. And it certainly seemed open-and-shut; the gun belonged to the house’s owner, one Richard Baker, who was, at the time, away on vacation with his family. Nobody but Smith and Sing were in the house at the time of death. The coroner found some irregularities during his examination, but nothing that indicated foul play. And that was almost the end of it—until everything went completely off the rails.
A portrait of Janet K. Smith. | Image Courtesy of the BC Archives.
Rumours from some of Smith’s friends reached the ears of the local Scottish Society—rumours of her feeling unsafe around coworker Wong Foon Sing—as well as the ears of fanatical preacher Duncan McDougall, a man known for his anti-immigrant, pro-KKK sermons. Pressure from McDougall and the Scottish Society led the government to reopen the case. A second coroner’s inquest concluded that:
1) The original examination had been botched, and
2) Smith had, in fact, been murdered.
And with a wholesale lack of other suspects, everyone’s eyes turned toward one man: Sing. Sing had been interviewed by both the police and by the coroner, and his story had always remained the same: he was peeling potatoes, heard what he thought was an engine backfiring, and when he wandered into the basement, found Smith’s body at the bottom of the stairs. Even though there was absolutely no evidence linking him to the crime, Sing became a target—for the public, the newspapers, and for those willing to work outside the law.
“He was actually kidnapped twice,” says Starkins, whose book Who Killed Janet Smith? is an exhaustively researched account of the murder and its fallout. “The first time, it was by two guys—named O.B.V Robinson and Verity Norton. And they dragged him down to the Empire Building on Hastings, beat him up, and tried to get him to tell them who killed Janet Smith. They were convinced that he knew what had happened to her. They let him go the next day, but then about six months later, they came back.”
The second kidnapping wasn’t nearly so brief. When Robinson returned—this time with several accomplices—they nabbed Sing at the front door of the Baker house in Shaughnessy, and this time, they wore the robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
“At the outset, the houseboy recalled, the men in white robes had demanded that he tell them who killed Janet Smith,” Starkins wrote, in his book. “When he insisted that he did not know, they began to curse and threaten him, and one man pretended that he was going to smash his head in with a club. Later they pointed a gun at his face and told him he would be shot if he didn’t name the murderer.... So brutal were these attacks that he eventually lost his hearing in one ear and suffered blurred vision.”
After six weeks, Sing’s story remained unchanged, so his captors tried a different tactic. He was released, dazed, on the side of the road, while they simply circled the block, picked him up again—this time in an official capacity—and arrested him for murder. The resultant trial was a farce; by this time, even those in power knew Sing was innocent, and said as much in the pages of the local papers. Ultimately brought before a Grand Jury, Sing was acquitted for lack of evidence.
But before the end of 1925, it came to light that his kidnapping hadn’t been a random act of vigilantism; in fact, it had been organized and financed by the Point Grey police commission—of which Paton was chairman—with the blessing of the BC Attorney General. Following the arrest of O.B.V. Robinson, a dozen indictments were issued in the summer of 1925, including for a number of prominent Point Grey officials, on charges of kidnapping and unlawful confinement of a suspect.
Official records showed that the commission had paid Robinson $1,250 in March of 1925 for what it termed “secret service work.” And while Paton managed to escape the first round of indictments, his luck didn’t hold out for long. On November 4, 1925, he—along with Police Commissioner H.P. McCraney, provincial Special Counsel Malcolm Jackson, and several members of the Scottish Society—was charged with engineering Sing’s kidnapping. Despite the white robes worn by the kidnappers, it was never definitively proven whether Paton, Robinson, or any of their accomplices had actual ties to the Klan, or if the outfits had been used as an intimidation tactic (the Klan was only briefly active in Vancouver, and never particularly popular—although their original headquarters still exists, and today, it’s Canuck Place, a youth hospice).
In fact, nothing ended up being proven in court at all, since, when it came time for the trial to begin in December of 1925, all charges were suddenly stayed by special order from Deputy Attorney General William Carter.
“To subject respectable citizens, some of whom have already been discharged by the magistrate, to a criminal prosecution is an indignity which ought not, in common fairness, to be permitted,” read Carter’s letter to the judge. “The matter has been fully ventilated, as far as is possible, and no public good can come from further proceedings. That are, in my opinion, a useless waste of public money, and should be stayed.”
Paton had caught something of a lucky break—Special Counsel Jackson (his co-accused) was intimately connected with the Attorney General’s office, and AG Manson, likely fearful of the effect Jackson’s conviction would have on his own political career, gave his associate a stay of execution. Provincial politicians were outraged, and the resultant scandal cost Manson his career. Paton, however, became a local hero, seen as a man dedicated to advancing the cause of justice where the courts had failed. He became a city alderman in 1929, and leveraged his considerable local popularity to win a Conservative legislature seat in 1937. Then, not content to rest on his racist laurels, he immediately turned his attention to what he viewed as a serious provincial problem: Asian immigration. Paton was named in a 1938 issue of the Vancouver Sun as a vocal proponent of “Oriental” exclusion, airing his suspicions in the house that Japanese fishermen were in fact enemy agents attempting to seize control of the coast. Paton was also an outspoken supporter of Japanese internment in the early 1940s, an initiative that was eventually adopted by the federal government after pressure from Paton and a number of BC politicians.
Paton remained a Conservative MLA for the remainder of his life, resurfacing occasionally in letters to the Sun to debate racial politics, and once to oppose the right of Asians to vote. He repeatedly defended Japanese internment, arguing in a 1943 Sun interview that the camps were “only half as bad as they sound.” And by the time he died in office at the age of 61, he left behind a dubious legacy, having dedicated much of his life to making things harder for Asian Canadians—working to have them interned, marginalized, kidnapped, and assaulted.
There’s now a movement to recognize and potentially rename sites with troubling legacies like Paton Street—be it Ryerson University, the Langevin Block in Ottawa, John A MacDonald schools, or Trutch Streets in both Vancouver and Victoria. In the winter of 2017, Vancouver City Council unanimously adopted a motion to determine which city assets had racist histories, with an eye to renaming them. No word on whether Paton Street is on their radar, or whether Abundant Housing Vancouver’s project will proceed, but with the current cultural awakening well underway, it’s entirely possible that this sleepy, narrow street’s 60th birthday may be its last.
“My understanding of how these things worked in the past is a bit hazy, but nowadays, I don’t think that it’s an option to just leave it alone,” Smith said. “It says a lot. Maybe a sign on a street isn’t as in-your-face as a statue, but I don’t think it helps, and it’s important that we start having conversations about what types of people we want to commemorate.”
West Vancouver cops had to break up a house party Friday at a short-term rental home where teenagers caused $20,000 in damage.
According to the North Shore News, the “character home,” located in one of Canada’s wealthiest municipalities, was rented by a 14-year-old girl who used her parents’ credit card behind their backs. She apparently only intended for a few dozen friends to show up, but instead around 200 rowdy teens crashed the party and boy they did they fuck shit up.
West Vancouver police spokesman Jeff Palmer told the North Shore News the havoc included “artwork smashed, furniture smashed, damage to the walls, furniture tossed into the hot tub. Just a really long, long list of damage that by the owners’ estimate is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20,000.” He said when the cops were called, at around 8:30 PM, (learn to pace yourselves, guys), “kids were flooding out all over the place.”
The girls’ parents have reportedly agreed to pay for the damage, so the owner isn’t going to press charges. According to the News, the home goes for $600 a night and is listed on Airbnb and VRBO, another site used for short-term rental properties.
Neighbour Michael Markwick told the North Shore News “the streets stank of Jägermeister” when the party was broken up. He said bass from the rager caused the whole neighbourhood to shake and that even after getting busted the teenage hellions were setting off fireworks. As someone who once worked in West Vancouver, I would take his words with a grain of salt—the place basically doubles as a retirement community, where one of most contentious issues is tree-cutting bylaws. Having said that, these kids do sound like legitimate little shits.
Palmer said the issue sparks concern about how parents control their children’s access to credit cards. Maybe that’s the case for rich kids, but I know if I had taken my parents’ card and caused $20,000 of damage I would learn my lesson by going to jail.
Alleged former hash dealer Doug Ford, also known as the leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, says he supports a free market for legal weed in the province.
Ford, who was minted leader of the PCs over the weekend, told CBC he’s open to a fair market for weed.
“I don't believe in the government sticking their hands in our lives all the time. I believe in letting the market dictate,” he said on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning, adding he will consult with his caucus on the issue.
Kathleen Wynne’s government has announced a provincial monopoly for regulating and selling weed in the province, which will be operated by the LCBO.
The Liberals’ plan is to open 40 Ontario Cannabis Stores this summer, followed by 80 in 2019 and 150 by 2020. Many have pointed out that Toronto alone has at least 80 illegal pot shops right now. The system will also favour licensed producers, who will supply the legal cannabis, while likely cutting out people who have been a part of the underground weed industry for decades.
Ford was previously the subject of a 2013 Globe and Mail exposé in which the paper alleged he sold hash during the 1980s and that his brother Randy Ford as also involved in selling drugs.
The story alleged Ford supplied local Etobicoke dealers, who sold their product at “a hash drive-thru” at James Gardens. Ford has denied the allegations.
Ford’s other brother—Toronto’s former mayor Rob Ford—struggled publicly with substance abuse issues, and, after months of denying the existence of the infamous “crack tape” he admitted to smoking crack cocaine.
Somewhat ironically, Doug Ford said he thought Justin Trudeau was unfit to be prime minister because Trudeau had admitted to smoking weed.
“I know one thing, it wasn't Stephen Harper sitting around a table smoking a joint at a dinner party like Justin Trudeau was, so I find it pretty hypocritical,” he told CTV News at the time.
There are a lot of weird pictures of Donald Trump, but this might be the weirdest. Here our president is, holding a lobster, in all its shining red glory, looking into the camera with a scowl that's practically screaming, "You, sir, are no longer employed!"
Blake Little for Parade Magazine via Getty Images
How, why, and when did our current president find himself intently gazing into the camera, fists clenched around a napkin wrapped around the handle of a skewered lobster? I had to know, so I did some of my signatureinvestigativejournalism to find the answers you all are craving.
The picture is from Parade magazine's 2004 "What America Eats" edition, an annual issue that, at one point in time, featured a celebrity cover star holding a food item, as well as an interview with them that, unfortunately, was not about the food item they were holding. Past "What America Eats" cover stars include Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin, Jay Leno, Brooke Shields, and, most recently, Andrew Zimmern.
Parade Magazine
There's no mention of the Trump-lobster photoshoot on Parade's website, and the magazine did not respond to my repeated requests for comment. But the genius behind the picture, a Los Angeles-based photographer named Blake Little, gave me the deets on how Trump and the lobster came to be.
"He held the lobster and freely repeated his signature 'You’re Fired' quote." - Blake Little
The photoshoot, which took place at Trump Tower, only took a half-hour and it was Little's idea to have Trump hold the lobster. Despite being a notorious germaphobe, Trump apparently didn't have any issue posing with the crustacean.
"Mr. Trump had no problem holding the lobster. I believe he approved the concept before the shoot," Little explained in an email. "It was his opportunity to be on the cover and he took full advantage of the shoot. He held the lobster and freely repeated his signature 'You’re Fired' quote."
But why a lobster? "I wanted something that made a visual statement, something appropriate for a wealthy business man," Little explained, which is why he chose the lobster. "Lobster is food of the wealth and success and the red color was perfect match for [his signature] 'You're Fired' [quote]. The whole lobster on a skewer created an over the top visual prop and [it] makes the cover memorable."
Although Trump made a name for himself as a vicious reality TV boss, Little said that he "was easy to work with."
"He was clearly excited to be on the Parade cover be seen by millions nationally," Little told me. "Unlike other celebrities, he did not have a publicist at the shoot. I had to be quick and efficient with time. He was very businesslike [and] not very social. He seemed preoccupied with his business of the day."
"I was completely shocked and dejected that this man was now president of the United States," Little told me. "But, I realized I had now photographed a US president."
Little wasn't lucky enough to witness Trump's grooming routine, since the Apprentice host arrived to the shoot with his hair and makeup already done. "He did have his own personal hair and makeup person. I believe she is the only one who does his hair," the photographer said. "He was conscious of his hair and made sure his groomer paid close attention to it."
Parade Magazine
The accompanying article, written by the late gossip columnist James Brady, doesn't provide us with any new or revelatory information. In classic Trump fashion, he told Brady that the launch of his short-lived syndicated radio program, Trumped!, was "the biggest launch in the history of radio" and "I can't remember a launch that was any bigger."
On The Apprentice, Trump remarked, "All the networks wanted me for a reality show of some sort, but I refused."
Over a decade after he held the lobster, Donald Trump won the presidency, and the photographer who witnessed him parading around with the majestic crustacean found himself shaken. "I was completely shocked and dejected that this man was now president of the United States," Little told me. "But, I realized I had now photographed a US president."
"I oppose everything Trump stands for," Little emphasized. "I still think of taking the photo down from my website but you can’t erase history you only learn from the past."
The present may be grim, but the past provides infinite wonders—for example, a picture of Donald Trump holding a lobster.
For high school and junior high students, science class can be a place where one can learn about humans' insignificant place in the world's ecosystem, or how to jump rope using cat intestines. It all really depends on what kind of teacher is running the show. But even the most creative of public school educators don't often find themselves at the middle of a police investigation due to their teaching practices, like one teacher in Idaho who allegedly fed a puppy to a snapping turtle in front of a bunch of students.
According to East Idaho News, Robert Crosland allegedly served the reptile a defenseless pup one day after school last week. Now, police are investigating exactly what went down after a local animal rights activist reported Crosland for animal cruelty, USA Todayreports. KSTU reports the dog was alive when it was eaten, though it was apparently sick, for whatever that's worth, and the school superintendent hasn't commented on how many students were present.
The school district has been vague about the situation, describing it as a "regrettable circumstance involving some of the biological specimens" at the middle school in Preston, Idaho, and hasn't confirmed whether or not some students caught a glimpse of the show. Crosland reportedly has a history of feeding other animals (like mice and birds) to his collection of reptiles—but there are a whole host of questions that still need answering. First and foremost:
Where'd you get the puppy?
Was it his own dog? And, if so, how many times did it have to pee all over the carpet or chew up furniture before he got so pissed off he allegedly fed it to a turtle? Was the thing so sick he couldn't pay for it to be euthanized? And if it wasn't his own pup, how does one find an ailing, dying puppy to turn into reptile chow? Do you go rummaging around near some dumpster for strays? Take out an ad on Craigslist?
Do snapping turtles even eat dogs?
It turns out that snapping turtles do, evidently, eat more than plants and small fish. Usually, the omnivores will chow down on insects, spiders, frogs, snakes, birds, small mammals, and even their own kind, but cute, dying puppies doesn't seem to be a consistent menu item. It's likely then that this incident started, like any well-designed experiment, with Crosland posing a question: Will my snapping turtle eat a live puppy? Then came the background research before Crosland, science teacher that he is, ostensibly formed his hypothesis: When presented with a live puppy, my snapping turtle will, in fact, eat it. Which would make this one of the most fucked up "experiments" of all time.
Is this part of the Common Core?
Maybe this puppy was mauled to death by a snapping turtle due to one man's bad judgment, but just maybe, there's some fucked-up chapter in the Common Core curriculum nobody knows about. Next to the segment on cumulus clouds, before you get to sedimentary rocks and stalactites, perhaps there's a paragraph all about the best way to feed a bloodthirsty reptile the cutest animal known to man. Or maybe Crosland just went a little off book.
What kind of lesson were you trying to teach here?
Assuming that a handful of students may have witnessed this atrocity, Crosland ostensibly could have used it as a lesson. But what the hell do you learn from watching a turtle eat an innocent ball of fluff alive? If Crosland wanted to enlighten his students about the fact that snapping turtles will chow down on pretty much anything, he could've just told them. Maybe he wanted to show them exactly how powerful the reptiles' jaws are—but, you know, that's why we have YouTube. So what the hell was the point, here? Something about the circle of life? We've got Planet Earthfor that.
What kind of puppy was it?
Admittedly, this doesn't really matter. Still, we'd like to know.
What did puppies ever do to you?
It's understandable to take out some mangy, problematic pest like a possum, or feed a turtle a rat, because they’re gross, and there are too many of them. But a puppy? What could anyone possibly have against puppies?
For now, Crosland is still teaching at Preston Junior High School as local law enforcement continues its investigation. Maybe police will turn up some dog-related horror story from Crosland's past—a Rottweiler bit him as a kid, or some neighbourhood mutt spent years dropping deuces in his lawn. Who knows: Maybe, long, long ago, some dog ate one of his pet turtles, and last week's "experiment" was just payback.
He's shown us that, while he may look like a god, he's just a mere mortal who's big enough to admit when he's wrong.
And the guy's even been known to drop some heavy history knowledge on his followers.
But on Tuesday, Hammer shifted mediums to Instagram to share a very revealing, personal moment from his past. Even though it's not Thursday, the Call Me by Your Name star was compelled to post a #TBT photo of his 2011 mugshot, geotagged at the Sierra Blanca checkpoint along the Texas-Mexico border.
That's right, people. Armie Hammer, the guy who played Harvard bros Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, as well as a fucking Disney prince, has a criminal past. According to TMZ, the mugshot is from Hammer's 2011 arrest in Texas for marijuana possession, where he was found with one pot brownie and not one, not two, but three weed cookies. He apparently spent the day in jail and paid a $1,000 fine before the cops let him go.
But instead of, you know, just going about his movie star life, palling around with Timothée Chalamet in Italy or whatever, Hammer bestowed on us a souvenir from his trip down south, giving all his followers a subtle and important reminder that like Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, Barry O, and a majority of Americans, the guy likes to blaze it. Maybe that explains some of his tweets.
"Going country" has gone national. Selling crack and heroin in rural and coastal towns is now a career taken up each year by thousands of school-age children from the three major UK drug hubs of London, Liverpool and Birmingham.
Today, the National Crime Agency (NCA) publishes its third report on the growing phenomenon the police call "county lines", better known to its workers as "going cunch" or "OT" (out there). As VICE documented last month, there are now a growing number of young people employed by city gangs to sell drugs in towns across the UK. The report emphasises the major issue for police is not one around drug selling itself, but instead the public protection of vulnerable adults and groomed children involved in this highly lucrative and violent cottage industry.
The "county lines" phenomenon has now been covered extensively by national media and TV; there's even a film being developed on the subject. But what's missing from these depictions is a three-dimensional picture of what it's actually like for the young people doing this job; much of the conversation paints them as either helpless exploited victims or masked London thugs with knives and bags of crack cocaine.
Many of these children are officially classed as missing, exist off the radar of social services and their own families. Rarely are their voices heard, which is why I decided to meet with and interview two young men who have done this job. To protect them from harm we are masking their identities.
"Ellis" is a white teenager from Liverpool who has just turned 16. He's been selling drugs 300 miles away, in Devon, for the last two years. In an attempt to stop his involvement in county lines, the council relocated Ellis's family four weeks ago. But like many other young people who have been relocated to extract them from the county lines drug trade, it appears not to have worked. Ellis got back from his last five-day stint in Plymouth two weeks ago.
"Ade" is a 21-year-old black African from a church-going family in east London. He sold drugs on-and-off from the age of 14 to 17 in a city in the east of England. Since being busted for class A supply there a week before his 18th birthday, Ade has become a life coach for children at risk of joining the estimated 4,000 young people from London involved in the county lines industry.
Both agreed to speak to VICE about their experiences because they want the public to know what the job is really like. They want to warn others that once you're in, it’s hard to get yourself out.
WATCH: The Great Council House Scam – The Cocaine Dealer
Ellis's father is an immigrant from the Balkans who came to Britain in the late-90s. His mother died three years ago, and he has a younger brother. He’s got an angelic face and is heavily built: from the age of five he’s had a reputation for being a fighter who never gives up. He was always getting into trouble at school for smoking, arguing with teachers and fighting. Passed between several colleges and specialist educational units, he's not been in mainstream education since he was 11. Despite all this, Ellis comes across as polite, intelligent and charming.
His dad works as a chef, but the family has never had much money, which is why Ellis was keen to find his own. He started working on a weed phone aged 11. Two years later, the local drug selling gang asked him if he wanted to "make some proper dough". Bunking school and putting in nine-hour shifts, he made £50 to £100 a day selling crack and heroin on the streets of Liverpool.
At 14, he was sent by the gang to sell crack and heroin 60 miles away, in Stoke, with a friend of his. Their base was the dingy flat of a middle-aged woman who was addicted to crack and heroin. "It was shit, it stunk, it was scruffy as fuck," says Ellis. "There was mould up the walls. I pulled out a plant that was growing out of the fucking wall! I had to do all the cleaning myself. I had to burn weed to take the smell of crack smoke away. I asked the dealer to get us another place it was so bad." However, business was good, and because they were using a long-established phone line to sell from and earning 10 percent commission, they sometimes made £1,000 a week. Ellis spent most of his money on weed, cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, clothes and trainers.
Why does he do it? "I've no money, and I want some trainers on my feet and I want a coat on my back. My family haven't got a lot of money, so I need to earn some, and selling drugs OT is the best way to do it."
I ask him what it’s like doing this job. "You’ve got to be ready for it. Stand your ground, not get too paranoid. You’ve got to be proper on it, be aware of the police, make sure you don’t lose money. You have to be aware at all times, in case a crackhead or rival dealer tries to stab you. Always under pressure, always crackheads trying to rob you. I'm always armed, either a screwdriver, a brick, a flick knife between my cheeks. It’s them or you. I’ve scared a few crackheads with my blade and I had to stab one in the bum cheeks. I told him, 'Don’t fuck with Scousers, you’ll get stabbed.'
"My boss only puts the pressure on me if I start taking the piss, like sometimes when it’s 3AM I can’t be arsed to go out [and] he gets annoyed. He went mad and threatened to smash my head in. I got robbed once – was walking back to the house and three crackheads grabbed me from behind. They stuck a blade to my neck and took the wraps in my pockets, but they didn’t get the drugs up my arse. My mate got robbed of £3,000 and stabbed in the belly."
Now a trusted drug vendor, Ellis started selling class A drugs in Devon, a drug-selling outpost to which Liverpool gangs have been sending older drug market "managers" and an endless supply of young sellers for more than a decade. This time, Ellis stayed in relative luxury, at the house of a girlfriend of one the older dealers.
"The worst part about the job is having to carry around a weapon the whole time and having to stab people."
"It was a really nice place – I had my own room and I could get a proper night's sleep," says Ellis, who sold from a moped that he had paid a drug user to steal for him. He was driven there for two-week stints, selling drugs hand over fist, offering bulk deals, sometimes making the gang up to £5,000 on a busy day. In Plymouth, where he recently returned from, he made £1,800 for five days work. He stayed in a crack user’s flat, paying them three rocks of crack every 24 hours for the "rent" of their home.
For Ellis, the best thing about the job "is coming back home from OT and jumping in a hot shower, having some of my dad’s home-cooked food and a nice smoke". The worst part, he says, is "having to carry around a weapon the whole time and having to stab people".
His dad isn’t pleased about Ellis’s career path: he thinks he's being exploited – but Ellis disagrees.
Earlier this year, a group of dealers linked to Ellis kicked down his front door, saying he owed them money. They put a knife to his dad's throat – the first time he understood how deeply involved his son had become in the criminal world. Ellis says they were rival dealers, but the incident prompted the council to relocate the family in a bid to extricate Ellis from involvement in county lines. But it has plainly not worked, and there's nothing Ellis's father can do about it.
Ellis says his time going OT will only end "when I get caught", adding that he wants to be an architect, but that the real alternatives are working at a car wash or a chippy – or perhaps "doing cannabis and cocaine grafting".
When he does get convicted, isn’t he scared of jail? "I’ve been arrested many times, but never been to prison. I’m a lucky guy – I think I must have a guardian angel, because I should be in jail. Going to jail does not worry me – I’d be comfy there."
A dealer (not quoted in this story) handing over drugs in south London. Photo: Gianni Muratore / Alamy Stock Photo
Ade got involved in county lines drug selling for similar reasons to Ellis: a bad education and claustrophobic poverty. He started shoplifting and robbing when he was 12, in order to eat. He remembers sneaking some change from his aunt’s coat when she came to visit. His strict Christian parents were both unemployed, and banned him from playing football because they thought it would lead to him hanging out with the wrong kids.
"I was confused, miserable and depressed, but very restless," he says. "I was depressed because I didn't have the stuff everyone else had, because they didn’t let me. My parents were trying to hide me from the real world, but it didn’t work because I just did it anyway."
At 13, Ade was introduced to some older teenagers, who eventually became like big brothers to him. He’d never smoked weed, so they forced him to get stoned, which he didn’t like. They asked him if he wanted to make money and he started selling weed for them, convinced into working long hours even if it meant getting told off for missing his parents' 9PM curfew. Then he started selling heroin and crack – drugs he’d never heard of – in suburban London. A year later, trusted by his handlers, he was on a train to go OT.
He met a female member of the gang at the other end. "She showed me the roads and the yard I was staying in," says Ade. It was a council flat in the centre of the city, home to a 35-year-old man addicted to crack and heroin, who Ade fed with class As in the morning and at night in return for the use of his flat.
Ade sold in the streets in the day and from the flat at night. Sometimes he paid drug users in crack and heroin so they would act as his driver as he dropped drugs around the city. When he ran out of stash, it would be replenished by the woman. He told his parents he was off on football trips and staying with friends, when he was really working 15-hour days, making between £300 to £1,000 a week.
"My 'boss' was strict – I got some beatings for making mistakes or for being a bit mouthy – but he was friendly," says Ade. "He knew how to deal with people. He told me if my parents were nagging me that 'your family will be happy with the fact you are earning some money'. I was only 14, so it was hectic trying to do this job without making mistakes. You had to focus, otherwise you lost money, and that was taken from my wages."
"One night my addict flatmate kept on asking me for drugs so much I had to sleep outside in the graveyard. It was scary – I was only 14."
What was the job really like? "It was a nightmare, but I had to do it. I was excited because I was making money. The job itself was easy – just get a call, make a drop off. The worst thing was the paranoia and the fear. I felt uncomfortable. I just tried to see the money, not the bad side."
Did he like his flatmate? "We didn't get on at all. He was always greedy for more drugs, always trying to steal them from me. He was like a zombie – a weird fella. I kept a machete stashed near the flat, just in case. One night he kept on asking me for drugs so much I had to sleep outside in the graveyard. It was scary – I was only 14. At the back of my mind, though, I was worried about what my family would think."
The constant threat of violence was part of the job. Ade has been robbed and stabbed twice for drugs, and confronted by a gang armed with Samurai swords. He carried a flick knife between his buttocks for protection. One day, while picking up a fresh batch from his female accomplice's home, they were raided by a rival gang, beaten and threatened with knives and bats, before the gang walked out with £3,000 in cash and drugs. Ade said it was like being in a gangster film. He had to pay for this loss out of the savings he had made.
Ade worked OT for over a year, doing alternate fortnights in London and the city in the east of England. At one point, his parents and his school were worried enough to register him as a missing person. Eventually, Ade was arrested, pounced on by undercover police as he made a relatively small deal, and given a nine-month sentence for class A drug supply.
This is where Ade’s story diverges from the vast majority of young people caught selling on county lines, who carry on where they left off as soon as they are back on the streets. With the support of his youth offending team worker, Ade was allowed to do voluntary work at a football club as part of his community order, and now has a coaching job with young teenagers at risk of joining gangs.
"I’m lucky. I was given a chance," he says. "It helped that my parents were always nagging at me, because some people don’t have that. I was tired of getting robbed and threatened."
Police handcuffing a suspect. Photo: Don Jon Red / Alamy Stock Photo
Preventing people from getting involved in drug selling on county lines is key, because – he says – it’s "almost impossible" to pull people out. Between the ages of 11 to 15 is the right time to try to help young people, before they get too deeply involved. "There’s a lot of peer pressure to hang out with the cool kids and not the goody two-shoes kids at school," says Ade. "It’s about finding the balance between being cool and still doing well."
Ade says it’s not all about poverty: some of the kids have well-off parents, but are attracted to the perceived glamour of earning money by selling drugs. Some are not loved, so when an older person says they'll look out for them, they're attracted to that. "You have to find out what is good for them individually, and school's not good at doing that," he says. "If kids are too challenging they're put to one side."
In his view, the best way to drag young people out of a county lines life is to "work with them, show them routes out [...] They need to be shown they can use the mind they have in different ways and different areas. Most of these people working county lines are very intelligent – they're entrepreneurial. Their minds can be put to use in other ways.
"For me, what worked is I realised there are different ways of earning money. I moved from my area, I cut off some of the people I talked to and I did my own thing."
“I feel like changes to gun laws need[ed] to happen a long while ago,” Rivers told me in an interview. “For kids from all over taking part in something so empowering feels amazing. At the same time, I’m sad and angry that it took this recent mass shooting and the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas rallying everybody to create this movement.”
Rivers is a student at William H. Turner Technical Arts High School in West Little River, a predominantly African-American neighborhood roughly nine miles north of downtown Miami. Last December, Miami-Dade Police found a dead 16-year-old boy riddled with bullets not far from the high school. The teen was among four children shot in Miami-Dade County during that week alone.
“I have friends, friends of friends and kids at school who have been personally affected by gun violence,” Rivers said. “It has taken something of this magnitude to rally people. Is there going to be real change to protect all schools and communities with regards to gun violence? I don’t know, but we have to try.”
The murderous rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Senior High that left 17 people dead ignited a national movement—largely driven by young people—to prevent senseless mass gun-violence at a school from ever being repeated. But for teens like Rivers and activists in Miami, where guns were an urgent concern long before Parkland, the infusion of energy has lent new hope to the prospect of reducing more routine gun-violence plaguing their communities.
Earlier this month, a group of Marjory Stoneman Douglas students traveled to Chicago to meet with student activists in that city, where they discussed joining forces to combat gun violence nationwide. In a tweet, Parkland survivor Emma González touched on the disconnect between teens who hear gunshots all the time and young adults from an affluent suburb like Parkland whose serenity was shattered by an AR-15. “Those who face gun violence on a level that we have only just glimpsed from our gated communities have never had their voices heard in their entire lives the way that we have in these few weeks alone,” González noted.
There’s still a lot of work to be done to bridge that divide, but the signs ahead of the walkout on Wednesday suggested some ground had already been covered.
“I love what these Parkland kids have done,” Romania Dukes, founder of Miami-based Mothers Fighting For Justice, a gun-violence reduction advocacy group, told me. “This is something I have been screaming and shouting about. We have to make sure people in my community get involved like these kids.”
Dukes, whose organization last year helped successfully lobby for a new state law protecting the identities of witnesses in homicide investigations, said she was encouraging her 15-year-old son and his friends to walk out Wednesday. “I’m getting him involved because he is growing up in an urban neighborhood where you hear gunshots everyday,” Dukes said. “He has to understand why this is so important.”
A mother of six, Dukes recalled losing her oldest son four years ago. She added that the Parkland survivors have inspired more African-American teens to get involved with her organization. “I have been getting calls from students who are googling for groups to join,” she said. “They are asking me what can they do. It’s motivating me to fight even harder.”
Meanwhile, there were signs of post-Parkland mobilization further afield ahead of Wednesday's walkout. Ruby Noboa, a junior at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the Bronx, New York, told me she was helping organize a walkout there. “I’m confident we will have more than 300 students participating,” she said. “My school has been very supportive, but they really can’t tell me to go out there and protest.”
A 17-year-old of Dominican descent, Noboa said watching news reports of the Parkland mass shooting as it unfolded sparked an anger inside her. “We lost a student to gun violence and the sadness that his death brought to the people at my school was crazy,” Noboa said. “When I heard about the walkout, I thought it was a great idea.”
Noboa added that she was walking out in memory of her fallen classmate, but also to protest President Donald Trump’s proposal to arm teachers and school personnel with more firearms—which he doubled down on this week while backing away from stricter gun-control.
“To me, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard,” Noboa said. “That would be escalating a bad situation instead of solving it. Black and brown people have to deal with guns being waved in our faces constantly. To bring guns into the classroom will make it worse.”
Today in tragic airportpet deaths, a French bulldog died onboard a United plane after a flight attendant forced it to spend more than three hours crammed into the overhead bin, the New York Post reports.
According to one passenger on the New York–bound flight from Houston, a woman traveling with her two young daughters had carted the pup onto the plane in a TSA-approved pet carrier. And although United's policy says the kennels have to remain under seats "at all times," Monday's flight crew reportedly demanded that the woman shove her ten-month-old puppy in the overhead bin.
"They INSISTED that the puppy be locked up for three hours without any kind of airflow," June Lara, who claims he was on the flight, wrote on Facebook. "They assured the safety of the family's pet so wearily, the mother agreed."
According to passenger Maggie Gremminger, the dog let out a few yips and barks during the journey, but—by the time the plane touched down in New York—he'd gone silent. The little pup's family called his name, but he wouldn't make a sound.
"I held her baby as the mother attempted to resuscitate their ten-month-old puppy," Lara wrote. "I cried with them three minutes later as she sobbed over his lifeless body. My heart broke with theirs as I realized he was gone."
United apologized for what it called a "tragic accident," telling the Points Guy it was "thoroughly investigating" how anyone thought flying a bulldog halfway across the country in a tiny, unventilated compartment was a good idea.
"Pets should never be placed in the overhead bin," a United spokesperson wrote. "We assume full responsibility for this tragedy and express our deepest condolences to the family and are committed to supporting them."
On a new episode of VICELAND'sHATE THY NEIGHBOR, comedian Jamali Maddix heads to SlutWalk to meet the women taking to the streets to speak out against rape culture—along with the anti-feminists and conservative Christians protesting the demonstration. He learns what it means to be a second- and third-wave feminist, and hears from one protestor convinced that the female activists are "provoking sexual assault on themselves."
Many districts across the country have pledged leniency and even support for those who walk out, while a handful of others in places like Maryland and Texas have vowed publicly to punish them. Nevertheless, there were close to 3,000 registered actions on the Women’s March #Enough website by Tuesday evening in what could amount to the single-largest student walkout in American history.
But will it work? Experts say that depends a great deal on what student-activists do next.
“Many of these young people will find out that it’s the entry point to taking social responsibility,” said Harry Gamboa Jr., a professor of photo-media at Cal Arts in Los Angeles and a leader of the 1968 Chicano Blowouts, a series of walkouts by Mexican-American teens over school conditions in East LA. “It really took many people, students and their parents and many of the other people involved to document, to complain, to sue, and to engage in legal battles,” to win even a fraction of the students’ demands.
It also took grit.
“It was kind of a life-or-death situation for students to protest for their rights,” the photographer explained. “Within minutes we were surrounded by hundreds of police officers who were armed to the teeth.”
In fact, organizers had been jockeying with school administration for close to two years by the time Gamboa walked out of James A. Garfield High School that March. But the protests helped change the game.
“There was documentation of students getting hit for speaking Spanish—literally high-school students getting paddled because they spoke Spanish in class,” said Dolores Delgado Bernal, a professor of Chicana(o)/Latina(o) studies at Cal State LA and an expert on the Blowouts. “You see that getting abolished shortly after.”
The next year, Latinx enrollment at local colleges soared. Soon after, Chicano studies program began springing up across the southwest, while LA's school system saw hints of what would become a major influx of Mexican-American educators. But many of the students’ most urgent demands were never met, and others languished for decades.
“The thing I try to explain to people when it comes to social protest is that what you can do as a movement activist really depends on the constraints around the issue,” said Fabio Rojas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington and an expert on social protest.
Take the 1963 Freedom Day boycott in Chicago: Among the largest student walkouts ever staged, it pushed perhaps 200,000 students into the streets to protest segregation and second-rate schools, and preceded a wave of similar actions in cities from Cleveland to Seattle. In New York City, more than 450,000 were estimated to stay out of school as part of a boycott in February 1964.
“This walkout was a powerful event in the context of a massive campaign to integrate Chicago’s schools,” recalled Professor Todd Gitlin of Columbia University.
But as recounted in Matthew Delmont's 2016 book Why Busing Failed, Chicago schools remained heavily segregated. Likewise, the 40,000 LA-area students who clogged the streets of downtown Los Angeles in March 2006 couldn’t ultimately force comprehensive immigration reform through a conservative Congress, even if they may have helped (at least temporarily) prevent a right-wing crackdown.
“They got a lot of publicity, they were on TV, but immigration law is still what it is today,” Rojas said.
In other cases, a little attention went a long way. When school board members in Colorado's Jefferson County—the district that includes Columbine High—proposed revising the AP US History curriculum to be more “patriotic” in 2014, hundreds of students walked out in protest. The walkouts won national coverage, the planned revision was widely condemned, and the district got a warning from the College Board, which writes the AP exams.
“The Board got our message very clearly,” said student leader Connor Reetz. “We were successful in recalling [part of] the Board, which I believe made our walkouts extremely effective.”
The success of that protest showed how important the relative size of an action is in determining what political fruit it bears.
“Say you live in a school district with 40,000 people—only 4,000 people may vote in a school board election," Rojas noted. "But on the national scale, to change Congress, that takes a huge swing in public opinion.”
Still, even if protesters fail to change any federal gun laws in the short-term, they may succeed in other ways.
“There’s quite a bit of agreement that one of the biggest outcomes [from the Blowouts] was empowerment of these students,” Bernal told me. “Some were arrested, beaten, suspended, but it gave these students a sense that they could make a difference.”
“Everyone who walked out had a belief in themselves, had a belief that they would achieve something,” he recalled of the LA protests. “I feel the young people that are protesting now are actually in the process of making history.”
Every day, in a care home on the outskirts of London, 54-year-old Omid sits in his bed and thinks about how to die. He has Multiple System Atrophy (MSA), a rare nervous system disorder. His brain is deteriorating over time, but Omid still feels like he can remember everything. He is bed-bound and has great difficulty controlling his breathing and bladder. “I feel bad”, he says. “It’s getting worse and worse.”
Omid (who wanted to keep his surname private) would kill himself if he could, but the fact is he can’t. He has tried. While living with his mother and younger brother in 2016, and feeling worn down by his pain and suffering (it takes many years for those with MSA to die), he took an overdose of pills. His mother found him. He was later admitted into hospital where he vomited up the pills.
Since then, Omid has been in a hospice, fighting for his right to die. He wants to force a change so that he, and others like him, can be allowed an assisted death. So far, he’s raised over £34,000 on the legal crowdfunding site CrowdJustice. “I have set up this page,” he writes, “because I need help to have a dignified death. This requires a change in the law.” And so Omid – like Paul Lamb and Tony Nicklinson and many other right to die campaigners that have gone before him – has brought a legal challenge to change British law.
When I arrive at his hospice on a Tuesday afternoon, he’s watching an American TV show on YouTube. Propped up in his bed, his laptop sits in front of him and he listens to it through headphones. In the corner of the room an actual TV is on, with the sound turned down. “It’s the only thing I can do now,” Omid tells me. “I can’t read anymore so I just have my computer and the TV.”
Wearing glasses, a sweater and sporting a salt and pepper beard and a shock of salt and pepper hair, Omid resembles a kind, thoughtful dad on his Sunday off. He eats one meal a day at the hospice and his mother regularly brings him a special kind of candy he likes. Underneath his blankets, his legs are thin. He has a pen that comes out of his phone, letting him write emails and messages.
Omid is a British citizen, but was born in Iran. He came to England with his mother and stepfather when he was 12 years old. The plan was to learn English and return home, but the Iranian Revolution happened and his family stayed in the UK. “If I had gone back I know I would have been killed by now because I would have had to go to war,” he explains. “That’s what happened to some friends of mine – they had to go into the army and they died in the war with Iraq.”
At 17, he started to work and eventually became a successful local businessman. “When I was younger, I was only thinking about making money,” he laughs, though he found time to meet his wife at the age of 27. They had three children together. When he wasn't working hard and being with his family, Omid played tennis at 6AM every weekday morning.
A young Omid
It was his wife who noticed the early signs of Omid’s disease. His business was hit hard by the financial crash of 2008 – “I lost everything,” he says – and as he tried to regain a footing for himself and his family, he began behaving differently. He would scream in his sleep and hit his pillow – something Omid tells me his eldest son witnessed, much to his shock. His speech began to alter and though doctors initially thought it was simply a sign of stress, by 2014 he had been diagnosed with MSA.
Omid has been unable to stay close to his family since his diagnosis. In March 2015, he separated from his wife, not able to bear her and the children seeing him in his condition. He is ashamed of his condition and though he is open and friendly with me, he apologises more than once for his speech. His wife still visits irregularly and talks to Omid for hours, but he doesn’t want his children to see his condition, and he asks her not to bring them.
“Do you miss them?” I ask.
“Yes, yes,” he says, with a long sigh that comes from deep within, “I miss them a lot. I lost everything. Everything. I left my wife. I left my family. I left my manhood. I left my business. I left everything. I can’t provide for my family. That’s really bad for me. I have to do my responsibilities and I can’t do it.”
Omid’s solicitor, Saimo Chahal, has become the QC that people involved in right to die cases come to. She represented Debbie Purdy, who had multiple sclerosis and who in 2009, won a ruling to get clarification on whether her husband would be prosecuted if he helped her to end her life.
Chahal then represented Tony Nicklinson, who was paralysed and wanted to end his life but could only do that with help. Nicklinson lost and, devastated by that loss, ended up refusing nutrition and hydration until he eventually died. After Nicklinson, Paul Lamb picked up the fight to change the law in Britain to allow assisted dying in certain cases. Now we have Omid.
This can be uncomfortable territory for many. The finality of death and the idea that someone could die when they didn’t want to weighs heavier than the suffering of those still alive who would rather be dead. As Chahal points out, “The argument is always: if the law changes, the weak and vulnerable will suffer.”
The fear is that family members or a care system stretched to breaking point could pressure people who don’t want to die into ending their life. “In order to address that argument,” Chahal tells me, “we want to present evidence from experts to show that in the regimes in which the law has been changed, that is not what has happened.” Besides, she adds, a change in the law would also see an introduction of a set of safeguards that prevented the kind of “slippery slope” arguments those who oppose assisted dying conjure up.
The courts are currently in the process of determining whether the expert witnesses Omid’s lawyers have lined up for him will be allowed to give evidence in person. The whole process is likely to last into the summer.
“Even if the law changes, I won’t be able to use it because it will be too late for me,” Omid tells me. “My only hope is that the law changes and that people keep talking about human rights.” On his CrowdJustice page, Omid has recently written to his supporters to tell them that he plans to go to Switzerland to end his life:
“It is torture for me and I don't understand what is the use of all this suffering. The funny thing is that those who are against me say they are doing this in the name of human rights. Whose human rights? Not mine it seems”.
Back in the care home, I ask Omid if he is scared to die and he tells me he isn’t, that it will be a relief. He doesn’t describe himself as religious but he does believe in God. What happens next, I ask him? “I believe in life after death,” he says. “It’s in God’s hands. The most important thing is that all the suffering and loneliness will go away and that is the most important thing. Anything is better than this.”
In Early Works, we talk to artists young and old about the jobs and life experiences that led them to their current moment. Today, it's actor and stand-up comedian Martha Kelly, who just kicked off the third season of FX's Baskets. (You've also seen her in Spider-Man: Homecomingand American Gods.)
I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles. It was close to the beach and I didn’t really like it very much. I have very pale skin and I’m not a great swimmer. The only time I’ve liked the beach was on the Florida Gulf Coast. That was fun because the waves are really small. Where I grew up, waves could knock you down. I’m not coordinated. I never wanted to try surfing.
My first job was at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and that was in high school. I don’t really remember exactly how long it was but I did not enjoy it. Eventually I got an older person who worked there to buy me a bottle of vodka. I kept it at work and would mix it with orange soda in order to not hate being at work. But now I’m sober. I think a lot of people hate working in fast food but not everybody orders a bottle of vodka, so I’m not blaming Kentucky Fried Chicken for that.
My first full-time job was in the library of Mount St. Mary’s college and that was after I left school and moved back to LA. I didn’t finish school—I’m still two classes away from a Bachelor’s degree in English. That’s not a huge money-making career choice but I took it because it was easy. I eventually got tired of it and also I was dealing with clinical depression and not getting treatment for it, so I didn’t realize how much that was affecting me. I went back to school for one quarter in 2013 as a middle-aged person. It was a lot more fun. I might take those last two classes at some point.
My senior year of high school, I was in drama, in a musical comedy play. It was the only thing I really enjoyed in high school. When I was in college and I was really depressed, I tried to think, What would I want to do if I could do anything? What would be something I would actually enjoy? and I remembered that experience. Initially I wanted to be an actor. Then I went to one day of acting class in community college and was way too self-conscious and inhibited to actually do all the stuff that actors do in training. That’s how I ended up with stand-up comedy: you are the one who decides what you’re going to do, what you’re going to talk about, how you’re going to look, and how you’re going to act on stage. Also, Roseanne Barr and Joan Rivers—especially Roseanne Barr—were very different female stand-ups than what I had seen when I was younger. I saw Janeane Garofalo in the 90s and thought—and still think—she’s amazing.
When Zach [Galifianakis] called me about Baskets in January 2014, it was totally out of the blue. We kept in touch over the years but didn’t keep it constant. It’s not like we hung out a lot. A lot of the time leading up to and after The Hangover, I was living in Texas, so maybe once a year we would talk on the phone. He said he was going to do a pilot and wanted to know if I wanted to play his… at first it was going to be a personal assistant to a down-and-out rodeo clown in Bakersfield. I said, I can’t. I’m not an actor. I can’t act. Years before, I had for a voiceover part on a TV show, and I was just horrible at it. I was so nervous.
Zach said, “Just say the lines like you would in real life. You can just act like yourself. You don’t have to be a professional actor.” I still didn’t think I could do it. At the time, I was living with my parents and my job was editing documents for an online company, like a professional proofreader. Mostly college papers for people where English was a second language. A lot of it was science and technical stuff, which was boring and didn’t pay great. But I was living with my parents, and I felt like it might be my only hope to ever move out.
That’s why I did it, really. I thought I would be terrible and probably get fired, but I had to try or else I didn’t know how I would get out of the situation I was in. When we actually started doing it, from the time we started the pilot to now, it’s been one of the sweetest, happiest, most fun experiences of my whole life. The crew and the cast and the director—it’s a really great group of people. It’s like going to summer camp every year.
