Danielle Cosgrove rested in a hospital bed with an IV slowly pumping the meds into her veins. She knew the drugs were working when the walls started to melt.

“It was very, very scary,” the petite 27-year-old said of her first experience with ketamine-infusion therapy, an increasingly popular but largely unregulated treatment for ailments ranging from intractable depression to untreatable pain, for which she is an outspoken advocate. “I thought the walls were made of icing and they were melting down on top of me trying to suffocate me.”

For Danielle, the only thing worse than the hallucinations is her constant, excruciating pain, the hallmark of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder she developed after a devastating ATV accident in Qatar in 2010. She experimented with a series of invasive treatments and even strong opiates like Oxycontin, with no end to the pain. As a last resort, she turned to ketamine-infusion therapy in 2011.

“Imagine it as having the volume of your pain system cranked up to a ten—everything that hurts after you develop the disease will hurt more, and everything that hurt beforehand will also hurt more,” explained Dr. Enrique Aradillas Lopez, a protégé of ketamine-infusion therapy’s American godfather, Dr. Robert Schwartzman, and a high ranking physician in Drexel University’s neurology department. 

“The neurons that have changed are disinhibited and in a constant state of excitation,” like a club kid lost in a K-hole, Dr. Aradillas Lopez explained. “Ketamine blocks the NMDA receptors and gives a chance for the neuron to go back to the way it was before. In a way, it’s rebooting your pain system.”

It was desperation that pushed Danielle to the street drug—Special K—she had avoided as a student in London. Since starting treatment, she’s shuttled between her home in Texas and hospitals first in Chicago and then Philadelphia, subjecting herself to dozens of intravenous ketamine infusions and consecutive days of terrifying drug trips. She carries ketamine pills and a ketamine nasal spray in her purse. For her and untold others, the horse tranquilizer turned trippy club drug is the only medicine that works.

“It’s a profoundly valuable drug as [a painkiller],” said Colonel Chester 'Trip' Buckenmaier III, a military physician who championed ketamine as a frontline pain drug for American soldiers wounded in combat. “Ketamine became something that we were falling back on when everything else was maxed-out and failing.” 

Ketamine infusion therapy started in 1999, and the last decade has seen the rise of more and more unorthodox uses for the operating-room anesthetic, and in the past two years alone, the number of US clinics offering ketamine infusions to treat everything from fibromyalgia, a syndrome that causes long-term, body-wide pain, to eating disorders and OCD has ballooned.

Dr. Aradillas Lopez cited more than a dozen new clinics giving outpatient infusions. Colonel Buckenmaier wouldn’t estimate how many military hospitals have adopted ketamine-infusion therapy, but said he’s asked for his protocols roughly once a week. Dr. Philip Getson, another Drexel University–affiliated physician, who practices in New Jersey, put the number of clinics closer to 60.

“It’s probably the antidepressant drug with the least significant side effects of any other antidepressant agent now in use,” said Dr. Glen Brooks, an anesthesiologist who opened the New York Ketamine Infusions center in downtown Manhattan to treat patients with drug-resistant depression two years ago. “Most of my patients are suicidal. Most have failed electroconvulsive therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation, and in spite of that I’ll still see a significant number of patients that have a dramatic response to ketamine.”

Researchers believe the drug works similarly to other antidepressants, by regulating the activity of specific electrochemicals in the brain. The difference, Dr. Brooks explained, is that while other antidepressants act on monoamines like serotonin, norepinephrine, or dopamine, which together account for just 15 percent of the brain’s neurotransmitters, ketamine targets glutamate, an amino acid that accounts for 50 percent of nervous tissue in the body. SSRIs must be taken every day, but a single shot of Special K can keep a patient smiling for months.

“The only real side effect of ketamine is during the infusion itself: There is a sort of out-of-body experience,” Brooks said. “Most patients actually enjoy it. Young patients listening to their own music can really get into this out-of-body thing.”

Some patients described feeling goofy and happy for about a day afterward, while Danielle described more of a drained and edgy feeling that made her antisocial for a few days. 

Ketamine is FDA-approved strictly as an induction agent—or what knocks you out on the operating table. But off-label prescriptions are a common practice in the medical field, like the seizure medication Neurontin prescribed for anxiety or the narcolepsy drug Provigil given to patients with ADD.

Ketamine is different in part because it’s most effective as an IV drug, one that must be administered in a hospital or clinic, often in combination with other strong drugs like Versed, to counteract its hallucinogenic effects. Infusions can last for hours and are sometimes spread over days. Experts have yet to agree on how much and how many doses of ketamine make a safe and therapeutic treatment.

“I do ketamine regularly: It can be up to every two weeks or every two months,” Danielle said. “It is a heavy drug to be putting into your body constantly. You want to be able to say, I’m doing this until this point.”

The lack of large-scale clinical trials and funding makes that point difficult to identify. Depending on the patient and the condition, Brooks administers the infusion in one- or two-hour doses while patients sit in a chair, similar to chemo or dialysis. Aradillas Lopez orders a ten-day stay with slow, continuous infusions at intensive care units.

“This drug will never be approved by the FDA [for therapy],” Dr. Brooks said, noting that without the administration’s bureaucratic gold star, most insurance companies won’t foot the bill, either. “There aren’t that many of us out here doing this, so there’s no standard of care.”

According Buckenmaier, who's spent his career treating injuries that would have been universally fatal even a decade earlier, the medical establishment is losing out on one of the best pain drugs there is.

“In my 26-year career in the military, the deaths that I’ve seen from pain management have been from opioids,” the Colonel said. “I often say, if only the drug in that machine had been ketamine, those people would be alive today.”

But for now, ketamine-infusion therapy is likely to languish without set standards or FDA approval, confined to a handful of military hospitals and a smattering of research institutions, with offshoot clinics like Brooks’s few and far between.

Follow Sonja Sharp on Twitter.

The Cronut was birthed into this cruel, vacuous existence on May 10, 2013, making it less than a year old. In meme years, however, it’s ancient. The “most virally talked about dessert item in history,” chef Dominique Ansel’s Cronut® (emphasis on ®) caused one helluva fuss a few months ago, with lines of hungry trend hounds famously snaking around the block of Ansel’s New York City bakery.

But that was then, and this is now. In a world in which the news cycle is such that we forget about shamed politicians, rape accusations, and the existence of Joseph Kony within days, any logical person would assume the shelf life of Cronuts as a five-hour-wait-worthy snack had surely expired. But the Grove, Los Angeles’ premier outdoor mall, located across the street from a Holocaust museum, apparently is a logic-free zone. I say that because hundreds of people recently lined up there, in the rain, for a chance to purchase the passé pastry.

A promotional event for Barneys New York’s “newly converted” boutique at the Grove, a gibberish-laden postcard told attendees that “to celebrate this Fashion Mash-Up, [they would] have access for the first time in Los Angeles to the original hybrid dessert: the Cronut®.”

I got to the Grove more than an hour before the boutique’s doors were set to open; an enormous queue, snaking through the parking garage, was already at capacity. A standby line nearby held the stragglers who were unwilling to wake up before sunrise for the privilege of paying $5 for a mouthful of over-hyped sugar and flour.

The first person in line, a young, theoretically normal-looking woman sitting in a folding chair, noticed the gaze of my camera as I snapped her photo. In response, she contorted her face into a mixture of shame and displeasure. I, however, wasn’t the one who put an icing gun to her head and made her sit in a wet, drafty parking garage for seven hours in exchange for the privilege of eating a deep-fried croissant. Every time I took her photo, which I did often because I knew it upset her, she gave me a surly look. If legend was to be believed, she had been there since 3 AM.

She wasn’t the only person willing to abandon reason and personhood for a pastry. One dweeb allegedly drove up from San Diego (a two-hour drive under pleasant conditions, let alone in a goddamned rainstorm). Once allowed entry into Barneys, people wrote their own pathetic tales on whiteboards they held while posing for iPhone photos with a pained-looking Ansel, the deranged genius himself. One had to “drive on the 101 in a downpour!" Another “woke up at 4:30 AM!" My friend Rob, who witnessed the devastation alongside me, quipped that the whiteboard should have read, “This is why the terrorists hate us.”

Thirty minutes to launch time, I set up shop outside the entrance and waited for the gates to open. An endless stream of people, all of whom looked upwardly mobile enough to afford trendy baked goods, approached and took countless iPhone photos of the (ample) signage. A woman in yoga pants (natch) was among them. After she took her shot, she clicked back to her phone’s home screen. I immediately noticed she had the TMZ app installed. In that moment, nothing could have made more sense. A sharp-dressed man in his mid 20s approached and asked me to take an iPhone photo (again) of him and his equally sharp female friends, in front of the Cronuts sign. I did as asked. He immediately made me take it again because he “wasn’t smiling.”

A gabble (like a gaggle, but comprised of broads instead of geese) of fashion victims, the most excitable of whom carried a Céline handbag the internet informed me was worth more than my car, ran over to a similarly vacant, ostentatiously dressed woman. “Brad said you can’t eat a whole one,” the excitable woman gushed, “so we’re gonna get three for the four of us.” The next thing out of her mouth, devoid of any segue, was “Oh. My. God. Rachel. You Look. So. Gooooood!!” The gabble giggled and squealed and OMG can you believe this line–d for what seemed like an eternity. When the doors eventually opened, they abstained from getting in line. Hovering outside the entrance like vultures, they made small talk with the doorman, operating under the assumption that, at some point, their enthusiasm and entitlement would allow them entry over the plebes who had to wait. I kept them in my prayers.

The line itself was filled with a surprising amount of young people, squandering said youth, snapping selfies, and scrolling through Instagram. The typical cat mommies one would expect to be excited about new pastry technology were mixed with these young, “adventurous” types. When it rained, which it did on and off, both groups were sheltered from the storm, a fact I found unfortunate.

A sign, labeled "Cronut® 101," outlined the rules for consuming the pastries.  They were to be eaten immediately (“The Cronut® has a shelf life of less than six hours!”). They were not, under any circumstances, to be heated, cut with anything but a serrated knife, or refrigerated or frozen (“The humidity from both will destroy the Cronut® and make it soggy and stale. Keeping it in a cool dry room for a short time is okay.”). For a baked good, these Cronut things seemed pretty uptight.

Despite the Cronut’s limited shelf life, few folks ate theirs immediately after purchase. Most seemed content to merely wander around with their tastefully boxed treats, cradling them like Céline-quality status symbols. I watched a man take an iPhone photo of his while sitting outside the Grove’s fountain. I wondered what the street value on a scalped Cronut would be. I wondered what was going on in Ukraine right then.

I finally tracked down a young man who was eating, not photographing, the mythical pastry. He and his friends had waited in line for two hours. I asked if the wait was worth it; shrugging, he responded that the Cronut was “merely OK.” As the group joylessly chewed in silence, he continued, “You’re not missing much, if that’s what you’re wondering.” One of his female friends, vacantly staring into the middle distance, told me a bakery in town called Frances made their own “pretty good” version of them (which begged the question, why the fuck was she here?).

Indeed, despite Barneys’ claims that this was the “first time” the treat had been available in Los Angeles, multiple shops sell their (non-copyrighted) versions of them. One such shop, a place called SK Donuts, hawks an iteration called the SKronut. SK Donuts is less than a mile away from the Grove. As I drove by it on my way home, there was no line.

Megan Koester is a writer and comedian who scoffs at your novelty pastries. See her and other VICE west coast contributors at ENTITLEMENT on Wednesday, March 5, with special guest Emily Heller, at Los Globos on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter.

This week in the realm of things affecting the lives of people with vaginas, we need to think about everything from a delightful satire of your typical thinly disguised, blustering misogynist, to the horrible death of Loretta Saunders, an Inuk woman researching murdered and missing Aboriginal women. Recently in lady business:

Screencap via the Belle Jar.

Misogynist Manifesto Circulates Internet

Women, have you ever been told to be careful what you wear when you’re going out, in the same tone one would use to admonish another for chain smoking cigarettes in the company of a baby while stuck in a compact vehicle with the windows rolled up? Or to “stop being so hysterical” when getting animated about a project, or in a meeting? Have you ever been asked to explain your politics, only to begin and be smugly interrupted every other sentence?

The Belle Jar just published a “misogynist manifesto,” perfectly drizzled with the hypocrisy of the puffed-chest dude who feels threatened by women. In case you’re dying to feel crazy-eyed rage and the creeping feeling of déjà vu from being talked down to by especially ignorant dudes, here’s an excerpt: “The thing is, if you’re a young girl out drinking and partying with the boys, he’s sure we all know that certain things might happen. Of course any rapist is a terrible person and deserves to be punished, but. Well. Women need to practice risk management, don’t they?”

One of the most troubling things about this is that commenters were fully convinced that a real dude wrote this. You can rest assured that it’s a satire. (I checked.) But it could easily be real, and that is a problem.

Screencap via. 

Loretta Saunders’ Death: Pay Attention

The day Loretta Saunders passed away, my Facebook newsfeed blew up with the news. Saunders, a 26-year-old Inuk woman from Newfoundland, died last week, and one of her roommates is now facing a murder charge. Her body was found on a stretch of barren, snowy highway near Moncton, New Brunswick.

In no way am I critiquing people for drawing attention to Loretta’s death. What happened to her was sickening, and it was somehow magnified even further by the cruel irony that she was writing her thesis on missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The Nova Scotia Native Women’s Association is saying Loretta’s death should trigger a national inquiry into the hundreds of murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada, whom nobody (particularly the government) seems to care enough about .

People were concerned about Saunders’ death because her story had the added elements of her pregnancy and academic aspirations. If it hadn’t—if she’d been a sex worker of any kind, or a drug user, or even just if she’d been an unpregnant server somewhere, the story wouldn’t have garnered much attention; i.e. it wouldn’t have received as much “play.” People can argue that as much as they’d like, but I’ve worked in enough newsrooms to know it’s the truth.

There are over 800 missing Aboriginal women in Canada right now. How many have you heard of?

Cheryl Maloney, president of the NSNWA, told the CBC: "She wasn't what society expected for a missing aboriginal girl. Canadian society, and especially our prime minister, has been able to ignore the reality of the statistics that are against aboriginal girls.”

The truth is, a woman is killed by her partner every six days in this country—and those are the statistics we’re sure of. There could easily be more unsolved cases. And Aboriginal women are far more likely to be on the receiving end of violence. We really do need an inquiry, at the very least.

Screencap via.

White Feminists: “It’s Not About You”

This week, I’ve had a number of discussions with various friends about White Feminism, and whether it may or may not be okay for white women to write about and discuss issues faced specifically by women of colour.

The answer is that white women shouldn’t write about shit they know nothing about, and also shouldn’t be rude and talk over those who are talking in the same arena, but who are generally less often heard, and who speak from experience. It doesn’t mean white women should ignore the issues, it just means they should participate in these conversations by listening.

Luckily, I found this piece by writer Aaminah Khan, who explains it all perfectly, driving home the point about privilege that It’s Not About You. Read it. It’s great. Especially if you tend to get mad about being called a white feminist.

Photo via Michael Toledano.

Yes, We Can (?)

Fellow VICE Canada writer Michael Toledano sent me these shots of an out-of-touch campaign by the Canadian Forces. Ostensibly, the ads are meant to recruit more women to the Forces.

Would this not be better accomplished by not trying to turn them into a stereotypical vision of a Creatine-hopped army bro?

“When I have something to say, people listen,” says “leading seaman” Christa Crocker, apparently. Seaman? I can’t. Look, I see what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to send the message that women are strong, can do anything men can do, and can find empowerment by excelling in a traditionally cismale field. That’s all perfectly fine, but these ads imply that the women are finding fulfillment by enrolling in and conforming to a male-dominated energy, and being obedient within that domain by embodying and operating with a certain degree of recognizable straight maleness. Rosie the Riveter remains more relevant, IMHO. In short, I don’t see how this speaks to women (or anyone, really), and further, it implies that only a certain “type” of woman belongs in the Forces.

All of that is to say, they can’t possibly want to recruit women, and they also did a thoroughly deplorable job on the market research front.

Photo via Facebook.

Duke Porn Star Cusses Out Haters

For those who harbour unexamined hatred of sex work and the porn industry, and who insist on rescuing women in those industries, read this piece by a porn star in her freshman year at Duke. Frat boys started talking shit about her, so she fired back with this. I’ll leave you with a note from her. People ask her whether she’s concerned about being hired after school, given the fact that she works in porn. Her answer:

“I wouldn’t want to work for someone who discriminates against sex workers. I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality. As a bisexual woman with many sexual quirks, I feel completely accepted. It is freeing, it is empowering, it is wonderful, it is how the world should be.”

[Ed's note: And she just publicly revealed her identity.]
 

@sarratch

As one of the gateways to mainland Europe, Greece is home to thousands of immigrants—but at the moment, it's not a particularly happy home. Many spend their days trying to escape the xenophobia and erratic immigration policies that characterize present-day Greece. More often than not, the immigrants look westward to countries like the UK or Germany, where, they feel, they will be able to lead richer, happier lives.

But even if certain sections of Greek society would welcome a mass exodus of foreigners, especially the ones who have entered the country illegally, the laws of the European Union mean that this would be easier said than done. What do you do when you're trapped in a country that doesn't want you? You can't just walk from one country into another that suits you better.

Actually, as we discovered, you can just walk from one country to another—VICE discovered that many immigrants who wanted to get out of Greece traveled on foot along an increasingly well-worn path from Greece into Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary.

Image by Ben Thomson

As each day passes, more depressing news about Australian asylum seeker policy comes to light. And as the media continues to chip away at the government’s operational silence, we gather the pieces for you in one depressing and convenient post. This week we look at the Government’s new bestie in resettling refugees—Cambodia, hear a recount of the Manus Island riot by an Australian security employee, and examine the $46,000 lifeboat that’s the government’s latest weapon in the political pissing contest that is Operation Sovereign Borders.

– The Abbott government has added another name to its line-up of neighbouring countries willing to take on Australia’s responsibility for asylum seekers. This week Cambodia was added to a list that already includes Papua New Guinea. This time at least the country in question is a signature on the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, although that doesn’t mean as much as you’d hope. Cambodia raised concerns in 2011 with an incident where members of a Vietnamese minority tried to claim refuge and were returned to where they came from without their cases being heard.

It’s not just refugee rights concerns that are causing angst over the Cambodian deal with economic, health and political concerns also causing backlash. With a population of 14 million people, just over a fifth of the country lives in poverty and almost half of all children are malnourished. The results of an election held in the middle of last year, which the incumbent government won, is still contested by the opposition to the point they’ve boycott parliament proceedings. This is topped off with a culture of government brutality and corruption is rife, with incidents of forced evictions, and freedom of speech concerns including the assassination and intimidation of journalists.

The biggest question raised by the Cambodia deal remains—where to next? Foreign Minister Julie Bishop recently visited Cambodia in a trip that also included the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Get acquainted, these countries could soon be coming to an asylum-related headline near you.

– Information regarding the Manus Island detention centre riot that left Reza Barati dead continues to slowly revealed. An anonymous Australian employee of G4S, the security company who ran the Manus Island Detention Centre, has given a harrowing account of the events.

The employee recounts that after the second night of rioting the G4S staff asked to withdraw from the centre and hand over security to PNG police. Police acted by firing warning shots, but then stood back as enraged Manus locals, some of whom were employed by G4S, poured in to the compound over a back fence.

“We saw them going in with machetes. They had anything they could pick up: rocks, sticks, the poles from the exercise weights. Once they knocked people to the ground, they were stomping on their heads with their boots. A day later you could still see guards and staff and cleaners walking around with blood on their boots.”

While a PNG police report described the conflict as exclusively between detainees and detention centre workers, the Australian G4S employee claims police did not nothing to control violence and some even joined in.

“The police went from room to room as well and held guns to people's heads and said, 'If you don't give me your cigarettes, we're going to shoot you.’”

The expat employee reports that detainees are now so intimidated and fearful of Manus locals that when the centre tried to bring in local cleaners after the incident another riot almost erupted. As tensions continue, concerns of another riot is high.

– An Egyptian asylum seeker who was turned back to Indonesia has revealed details of the government’s turn back process using lifeboats. The bright orange, disposable, and unsinkable lifeboats were purchased by the government as a part of Operation Sovereign Borders. Omar Ali and 27 other men were travelling on a boat towards Australia and were intercepted near Christmas Island. Australian Border Protection officers tried to recommission the old wooden boat the men were travelling on to no avail. The asylum seekers were then transferred to an Australian Customs ship where they remained below deck for a number of days. Later the men were forced on to one of the orange lifeboats in view of some land with just enough fuel to get to it. When the men arrived on land they found that it was in fact Java.

Ali described travelling inside the lifeboat as sickening, with little room and barely any fresh air. “We are very sick. We have no oxygen. We are very sick,'' says Ali. ''It's like animals. Animals [cannot be treated] like this.''

– Freedom of information laws continue to pester the government’s silence over asylum seeker matters with The Guardian obtaining information on medical procedures and force feeding. A controversial regulation introduced in 1994 gives the secretary of the Immigration Department extraordinary powers to approve medical procedures if the detainee’s condition is serious, even when the patient has expressly refused consent. The Immigration Department has approved medical treatment on people in detention centres without their consent ten times since 2005. 

The two most recent applications to the department both related to asylum seekers who had gone on hunger strike. Protesting through hunger strikes regularly occurs in detention centres in Australia and offshore, with asylum seekers on Christmas Island beginning a hunger strike just last week in protest of Reza Barati’s death on Manus Island.

– And finally, the government continues to do nothing to stop the flow of four-legged asylum seekers particularly in relation to these queue jumpers from South Africa, who could potentially land in Sydney sometime this year.

@MitchMaxxParker

Icarus with a gun. All photos via Nohl Rosen.

Will our collective obsession with cats ever end? We dress them up, give them Facebook profiles, bake them birthday cakes, put them on game shows, have serious conversations with them, watch them billions of times on the internet, and open up cafes for them. One man from Phoenix, Arizona, has been happily frolicking in this cat madness for 13 years by running the world’s only radio and TV station for cats, by cats: Cat Galaxy.

Nohl Rosen estimates that 5 million listeners have tuned into Cat Galaxy since it started on April 21st, 2001, most of which are from the US, Canada, and Japan. The basic idea is this: cats enjoy music and TV just like we do, but they have a particular taste that humans can’t fully understand. So, Nohl gets his cats to ‘choose’ what is broadcast to Cat Galaxy’s fluffy viewership around the globe. Radio content plays 24/7 with weekly shows like Morning Meows, Meow Mixing Monday, Tuesday Night Cat Club, Wednesday Night Cat Attack, Thursday Night Purr Party, and the Friday Night Feline Frenzy. When Nohl isn’t running his station, he goes to gun rallies and dresses up as a superhero that warns cats about bad humans—more on that later. I reached out to Nohl over the phone to talk about his radio station, his cats, guns, and metaphysical awareness.

VICE: Hey Nohl. So, how did Cat Galaxy start, and where did your inspiration come from?
Nohl Rosen: It all started with my cat, Isis. She was the driving force for the radio station. I mean, she was the whole inspiration for it. I remember one day she was meowing pretty insistently and she didn’t want food, she didn’t want water, and she didn’t want to play. I just kinda clued in and said, OK, I think I know what you’re asking me for! There was a CD that was sitting on the table—I think it was a funk mix CD. The music started playing, she immediately lay down and relaxed, and Cat Galaxy was born. She wanted to hear the music and I just kinda—I don't know if you want to call it psychicly connected to her—but it seemed like I knew what she was asking me for. And of course not long after that happened, on April 21 2001, we went on the air and Cat Galaxy has been playing ever since.

You say the cats choose the music, what does that mean exactly?
Actually, the way it’s done is we play songs and they choose what gets aired. If they don’t like it, it doesn’t get aired. A lot of music does get aired, but some doesn’t. It’s just our taste. If you don’t like something, you’re going speak your own mind. Cats do it in their own way. We’ve had several artists looking for airplay and when the cats don’t like something, they leave the room, so you know that they’re really not interested. I do intend on adopting another cat again so we’re gonna have more cats on this team.

One of Nohl's cats, Icarus, on air.

How would you compare your cats’ DJ styles as they’ve progressed over the years?
Well, it started with Isis in 2001, then Jade joined 2002, and Icarus joined in 2004. Jade’s management style was relaxing, but very vocal. If there was something out of whack, she made her meows and her voice heard. She was a fan of Outkast, and of course I could never figure out—are you familiar with the band?

Yeah.
I could never figure out why she was into them I just kinda said OK. She loves smooth jazz, too. She was a smooth jazz cat. Isis, who was the manager, owner, and creator of the station, loved Ozzy Osbourne. She liked rock, smooth jazz, and funk. A lot of the things you hear on our station have to do with Isis. Her style was much different. Icarus’s management style, out of all the cats, has been the most vocal. A lot of times you will hear his voice when I’m on the air. But there are times, however, that you won’t. I think it just depends on the mood he’s in. Ever since Isis passed away, Icarus has been a take-charge kinda cat. Icarus will jump up in front of my screen to say, “Look, I’m here. Pay attention to me.”

What kind of feedback has Cat Galaxy gotten?
We’ve heard from listeners from Japan where someone wrote to me telling me they had this unruly kitten who was not so unruly anymore thanks to Cat Galaxy. Music really can be a soothing thing for animals, just like it is for humans. They enjoy music just like we do it. They may not respond in the same way, but it’s in their own way. If you open up your heart and your mind, you’re going to learn something from them. I run into so many humans who are so closed minded, when they hear about our radio station they say, “Are you joking?” Their first reaction is they don’t know what to think, and then when they check out the station they say, “You know what? My cat loves this music, but gosh darn it—It’s appealing to me too!” That’s the side effect thing. No station has ever decided we are going to target cats as our audience. We did. And it’s been successful.

So, what is it about the content on Cat Galaxy that makes it specifically for cats?
I think they enjoy it just like we do. If you’re connected with your cat, you can pretty much understand what they’re telling you. It goes beyond words. There are sometimes when I wonder what Icarus likes about a particular show. He’ll follow and track things that have a lot of motion. Other times its just mindless entertainment and a great opportunity for them to spend time with their human. You’d probably have to ask Icarus yourself. I think he enjoys the action and likes to feel stuff too. It’s about energy, too. I’m a metaphysical person and I understand things at a deeper level. That’s how I’m able to understand what they’re feeling.

Isis on the mic.

Describe the Cat Galaxy Internet TV station and how that got started.
One of the inspirations was sitting with my cats and watching Stargate SG1, Boston Legal and Ultraman Max and getting a feel for what they liked and didn’t like. We had a show called In the Cat’s Eyes, where we talk about cats. One of the first shows we had was called Catnip, which was our version of Survivor. Basically, the last cat in the cat tree won some meaningful prize. The viewers and listeners would vote on which cat they wanted to stay. In hindsight, nobody cares about that anymore. One of the shows we want to do is a reality show where we go into a cat rescue and show the reality of what they go through. Another show we did was on spay and neuter clinics.

Tell me about your gun channel and how it relates to cats.
We’re still in the beginning stages, but we will have shows that are going to deal with guns through our internet TV for cats. If you want to reach people you have to grab them in a unique way. When you start arguing about guns, you’re either preaching to the choir or they don’t want to hear it. But when you put cats into the mix then you might have some people that are more apt to listen. They might not agree with you, but animals seem to be the one thing that people seem to agree on.

I also started a group called Cats For The Second that stands up for the second amendment. The second amendment of the constitution gives us the right to keep and bear arms. I’m a second amendment advocate. So I decided to add a little cat twist to it, because I’m a cat lover! And so I started Cats for the Second, a show that stands up for second amendment rights. Of course, the pictures that you see are, well, cats posing with guns. It’s a unique approach to the second amendment that hasn’t really been done before. Well, there are some pictures that I’ve seen online of cats with weaponry and firearms, so it’s not completely new, on second thought. 

Isis trying to take a nap.

Tell me a bit about your other projects.
Well, of course, there’s Cosplay. I’m a Cosplayer, which is costume play. You know how you see people dress up as superheroes when they go to Comic Con or they dress up as their favourite characters?

Yeah.
Well We’ve got our own superhero that I've developed over here called Calico. He's going to appear on the Breaking News Journal channel. Calico is very human looking and he’s a superhero that saves cats from bad humans. I dressed up as Calico last month at a second amendment rally, and I will make it known that one of my guns there was real. When you go to a second amendment rally, you gotta put your money where your mouth it. Of course, second amendment rallies are great because everybody is armed!

Nohl, on the right, dressed as his dreamed-up superhero Calico at a Second Amendment rally in January. Calico protects cats from bad humans.

Right, so your life really evolves around cats.
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve really strayed from that. Let’s just say that the stuff that people are going to be seeing [on the Cat Galaxy channel] and cats are going to be seeing—because our audience geared toward cats, humans are just a side effect—is really cool, but Icarus has sworn me to secrecy on a lot of it so I’ve had to bite my tongue about everything that the viewer is going to be seeing when the channel hits Roku with Breaking News Journal, but it’s gonna be pretty cool.

Any final thoughts?
You know what? Cats know what’s going on in our world. To say otherwise would be a very ignorant and stupid thing to say. There is other intelligent life on this planet. Only human ignorance would say otherwise. We are not the dominating force here. Cats have given me a lot of great ideas, and they keep giving them to me. They’re the managers, and I’m their servant. I couldn’t ask for better bosses than cats. If you love something, stick with it. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s stupid, that you shouldn’t do it. I have never cared. I’m gonna go for the brass ring when people tell me not to. And you know what? I have backup, and it has claws, and much better vision than we do.

Thanks, Nohl. 


@keefe_stephen

John McCain is one of the prominent Republicans using the Ukrainian crisis to call Barack Obama weak, again. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

The Millenial generation is often accused of being narcissistic, of inhabiting an imaginary world where events and actions are only real and important insofar as they touch on us, the super special ones who actually matter. There’s probably a kernel of truth to that stereotype—hey, young people can be shitty and self-centered. But even the most hashtagging, selfie-taking, Thought Catalog–contributing 20-something can’t match the sheer ego of Republican foreign policy hawks, who think that there's no problem that American bombs can't solve.

In case you need some background: Late last week Russia sent troops to Crimea, which is a big deal because Crimea is in Ukraine, a country that has recently gone through the bloody process of overthrowing its government and getting a new one. According to some prominent GOP politicians, this is Barack Obama’s fault.

Onetime presidential candidate John McCain said that the Ukrainian crisis is “the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy where no one believes in America’s strength anymore.” Senator Jim Inhofe got on his high horse to announce the president’s “disarming of America over the past five years limits our options in Ukraine today.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers went on Fox News to say that Putin was playing chess while Obama was playing marbles. And Lindsey Graham, a sack of skin currently serving in the Senate, thinks that if we had killed more Libyans in response to the Benghazi embassy attack Vladimir Putin would have stayed away from Russia’s weakened neighbor:

It started with Benghazi. When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression. #Ukraine

— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) March 4, 2014

Obviously this is just a repetition of that old Republican narrative about Obama being a weak president. Sure, he sent a lot of young soldiers to fight and die in Afghanistan, he oversaw the expansion of using drone strikes to kill people in Pakistan and Yemen, he bombed Libya without Congressional approval, he sent a SEAL team to assassinate Osama bin Laden in Pakistan without the cooperation of the Pakistani government (supposedly a US ally), and he’s continued the longstanding American practice of spending a staggering amount of money on the military (though he just proposed some cuts to defense spending)—but he’s bowed to dictators and other foreign leaders when greeting them, so he must be a pussy! He won’t even go to war with Iran!

Sometimes these hawkish critiques of Obama veer into territory that is legitimately terrifying, like when the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that the US Navy should deploy some ships near Russia. (As transparent empty militaristic muscle flexing? As an actual precursor to maybe potentially getting into a war with Russia? Just because it’s no fun to have these big ole battleships if you don’t use them?)

More often, the Republican hawks are just kind of vague. Putin is clearly winning this game of chess/marbles—he's basically a genius, as far as Republicans are concerned—but it's not clear what moves Obama needs to make to decisively beat him at whichever board game is being played. “Do something,” Graham helpfully suggested on CNN, adding that maybe Russia’s membership in the G8 should be suspended.

“You’ve got to exert energy,” former NSA director Michael Hayden told conservative media outlet Newsmax. “We just can't pontificate and condemn Russian activity.”

Except the White House is already doing a bunch of stuff, including canceling a G8 meeting in Sochi and considering freezing the assets and banning the visas of some Russian officials, which is exactly what some Republicans have suggested. Meanwhile, investors are panicking about the invasion of Ukraine, damaging Russia’s economy, and the US is coordinating with European countries to impose sanctions on the country. It sure seems like Putin’s aggression was a terrible idea. But don’t take my word for it—here’s the Guardian’s Michael Cohen:

“Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.”

If the GOP acknowledged that Russia's actions are more of a problem for Russia than the US, it would problematically leave the party with nothing to yell at Obama about. It would also fly in the face of the Republican tendency to see geopolitics as a high-stakes dick-measuring contest: If America isn't constantly threatening to go to war with multiple countries, it means Obama is telling everyone he's weak; if Obama had only bombed the shit out of Syria, Putin would have been too scared of America's big guns to threaten Crimea.

The last time a Republican was in charge of foreign policy was during the administration of George W. Bush, who disastrously invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (and who was once buddies with Putin). The politicians and talking heads telling Obama to “do something” are the same ones who have yet to meet a war they didn’t like: Graham, for instance, has gone on the record as wanting to intervene in Syria while keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their view of the world, whoever is doing the most posturing is winning. No wonder they seem to admire Putin's tactics so much.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) crowded into the center of Jerusalem on Sunday to protest against mandatory armed service. As things stand, they are exempt from being drafted into the military so that they can carry out their orthodox lifestyle, but a proposed bill could change that, and the Haredim are not happy.

They turned Jerusalem into a sea of black hats, white shirts, and long beards, but there were no fiery speeches and no chanting. Instead, the Haredim came in massive numbers to pray. The men carried out the Amidah, a standing prayer that’s recited silently. They were observing Mincha, the afternoon prayer service. Bodies of all sizes swayed back and forth while their lips moved without noise. Haredi leaders had called on all males over nine to attend the protest. Even women were asked to join, though they stood apart from the men, in segregated groups along the periphery of the crowd. Around 500,000 were expected to show up. Local media later reported that the real number was between 250,000 and 400,000. Either way, it was the biggest crowd I’ve ever stood in, but it was eerily quiet.

Until last year, the ultra-Orthodox had been exempt from serving in the Israeli military since the creation of the state, in 1949. While the army has the authority to conscript any citizen or permanent resident once he or she hits 18, teenage Haredim are able to avoid conscription by studying religious texts in institutions called yeshivas. The Haredim feel that this study is a contribution to Judaism that is equal to—if not greater than—serving in the Israeli army. They see compulsory military service as a form of religious persecution, denying them the right to practice and pulling them toward a more secular lifestyle.

A lot of Israel’s Jewish population pretty much resents the ultra-Orthodox community. In their eyes, the Haredim are unwilling to contribute to society, place a financial burden upon the country as a whole, and exert cultural control over secular and liberal Jews through the rabbinical courts. Haredim make up ten percent of the eight million Jews living in Israel. They receive the most financial assistance from the state while being one of the lowest-employed demographic groups in the country. They are also a rapidly growing segment of the population—it’s estimated that, in 25 years, a quarter of all Israel's Jews will be ultra-Orthodox.

Haim, a teenage Haredi boy, came up to me at the protest and asked if I wanted to put on tefillin—two small black boxes worn on the arms that contain scrolls with verses from the Torah. I politely declined and asked him how he felt about the protest today. Haim was born in Jerusalem and would be compelled to serve in the military if and when the law takes effect. He feels that the state is trying to lure religious youth away from their pious lifestyle, but today’s rally had made him hopeful for the future. “The whole community is putting their differences aside and coming together for the good of us all,” he said. He thinks the law will pass but says, “This protest is about showing the world that we oppose it. We oppose the state trying to get rid of prayer.”

In 2012, the Israeli Supreme Court declared the exemption illegal on the grounds of inequality. The government proposed a bill last month that would call for strict numbers of yeshiva students to be drafted into the military while still allowing a certain amount of exemptions. Those who refused to serve in the military could face jail time. Even though the bill is expected to be passed into law later this month, it wouldn’t take effect for three years, which is a long time in Israeli politics. The Haredi community plans to keep the pressure up, through protests and prayers, in an effort to stop the law.

The demonstration was an impressive display of the sheer numbers that the ultra-Orthodox can muster when they need to. The major roads leading into the city were blocked off. The main bus station and the light-rail system were shut down. Thousands of police were stationed in the area to prevent any of the violence that has recently erupted at ultra-Orthodox protests. But on Sunday, the cops were conspicuously absent from the throng, choosing to hang back.

Flyers with protest slogans littered the streets, and young boys held up signs that declared in English and Hebrew, “The Israeli Government harshly persecutes and tramples observant Jews!” and “You created the problem by establishing the State of Israel. Don’t ask us to fix it by joining the IDF!” This second statement is evidence of a strong anti-Zionist sentiment held by some sections of the Haredi population, most notably Hasidic Jews.

Hasidic Jews believe in a form of ultra-Orthodox Judaism that originated in 18th century Europe. They are easy to spot by their traditional dress and payot (long, curly sidelocks). Early Zionism was actually opposed by Hasidic Jews because of what they see as Zionism's tendency to champion secularism, and the belief that Jews made a promise with God not to establish a state in Israel using force. So obviously they’re not all that happy with how things have gone since Israel’s formation.

One of the largest anti-Zionist sects, the Satmar, has large communities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Stamford Hill, London. The Satmar are so thoroughly opposed to the Israeli state that they accept no monetary aid from the government. One of their religious leaders recently declared a “jihad against the Israeli government.”

I met Yakov, a 20-year-old Hasidic Satmar from the UK, before the protest began. He told me that “it’s better to convert to Islam than join the army.” He explained, “At least then you’re still monotheistic. In the army, you’re worshipping the state.” Yakov is against any interference in what he calls a "pure" way of life. For him, being Hasidic means living a life full of prayer. He says that he has a closer connection to God by abiding to strict rules and daily rituals that fill his life with deep satisfaction and meaning.

He sees no hypocrisy in being anti-Zionist and living in Israel. “I don’t have any other choice. I want to live in an environment where I can be immersed in a religious lifestyle. Living in Mea Shearim [a Hasidic enclave in Jerusalem] keeps me pure. I can go outside and not see anything secular.” While being a relatively idyllic place for a Hasidic Jew to live, tensions against the state in Mea Shearim frequently boil over into full-scale riots. This past July, a Haredi soldier who was visiting his family in the neighborhood had to be rescued from an angry mob by police.

Because Yakov is not an Israeli citizen, he wouldn’t need to serve in the military. Yet he is a strong opponent to the idea and doesn’t think the government can back up its threat to imprison those who choose not to serve. “They can't arrest every yeshiva student,” he says. “They’re going to have to build detention camps for them and what's that going to look like? Putting Jews in camps?"

He had a fair point.

“Even if they started doing that, we'd start yeshivas in the jails. Wherever they put us, we'll study; there’s no difference.”

After the prayer service had concluded, religious music blared from towering racks of speakers that had been set up around the area. The mood was festive, and young Haredi men began to dance, arm-in-arm, in large circles. As the sun set, tens of thousands of Haredim crowded the streets. Encouraged by their sheer weight of number, they seemed confident that God would answer their prayers. Whether it's through political maneuvering or divine intervention, Yakov told me, “One thing is for sure: We won't be serving in the Israeli army.”

Follow Daniel Tepper on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr

The University of Ottawa just suspended its men’s hockey team for an alleged gang sexual assault on a lone female victim in Thunder Bay. (It’s worth noting that, hours before, four University of Ottawa student politicians resigned after a leaked Facebook conversation showed them discussing the finer points of sodomizing the student president). The allegation, although unproven in court, is a shocking development akin to the Steubenville incident. To me, it has the all too familiar hallmarks of an atavistic ritual hockey players are known for where I’m from: road trips and gangbangs.

Like anybody from a Canadian suburb or small town, I knew enough hockey players to figure out that Tim Horton’s propaganda sanitizes real hockey culture. Instead of toothless grins and hot chocolates before practice, think beer bongs and misogyny. Typical junior hockey players I knew liked chewing tobacco, puck bunnies, and “lamb roasts,” (also known as building “The Eiffel Tower”) the alias for barely-consensual group sex. Evidence of these conquests is in forgotten headlines and lists of rapes and cover-ups that have left broken girls all over Canada.

The chronic problem of sexual predation in junior hockey dressing rooms lies at the root of a damaged junior hockey system. At present, players are drafted at sixteen into major junior leagues all over the country, forcing them to leave their parents at a crucial and hormonal age to live in billets in small towns. Veterans on their team are partially responsible for socializing fresh faced teens into men, meaning it’s a free-for-all in places where players are local gods, school is for pussies, and women are only good for “gummers.”

During the early 2000s, hockey players obsessed over what started as an email chain between junior players across Canada and the US, exchanging war stories about their shared experiences playing a game that became the sideshow to a sexual circus. The emails have been compiled into a twisted document now known as The Junior Hockey Bible, which offers the clearest window into a hidden subculture and the universal artefact guiding player behaviour.

Dripping with vitriol and offensive, reductive imagery, The Junior Hockey Bible reads like a sexual assault guide book. It contains a variety of gross terminology like  “Swamp Donkey,” which in pervy junior hockey speak translates to a “species [that] lurks in the depths of the bar scene and in rezes across the nation.”

The Bible is rife with dehumanizing descriptions like that, and it goes on and on for pages. It also provides insults for junior hockey players to tear each other down with on the ice, like this definition for “Shit-Teeth,” which is used in conversation as such: “Nice Shit-Teeth, buddy. It looks like your tongue is in jail, faggot.”

The Bible is hosted on a blog called “Top Shelf,” a site that links readers to the Disney Channel if they can’t “take a joke” and advises its readers to “take this wisdom wisely, boys.” The Junior Hockey Bible provides the basis for an alternative hockey language providing outlandish names for blowjobs, different sex moves like the Tony Danza, the Mystery Hand (grabbing the breasts of an unsuspecting victim who is being doubly penetrated by teammates), along with a sickening alternative known as the “Chili Dog.”

The sinister wit of the text provides a striking indictment of junior hockey culture: I’ve seen hockey players who were freshly drafted into the NHL or toiling in Junior C, knowingly or unknowingly, make reference to The Junior Hockey Bible. Besides degrading teammates known as “Dusters” (players who collect dust on the end of the bench) and coaches, the Bible’s clearest targets are unsuspecting females. The narrator calls on players to sexually eviscerate women with bonus points for filming the act or “sharing” her with a teammate. There are oblique references to a “wife,” amounting to a stereotypically masculine fantasy of a girl that’s pure and untouched by teammates. Other than that, women are considered to be tradable sex objects; fodder for pleasure during the beer soaked mayhem in local bars after hockey games.

The common thread here is a malignant air of invincibility corrupting the team mentality: players police each other, forcing others to comply with the values of the pack. In this context, team culture breeds rape culture, and the Junior Hockey Bible provides the framework, glorifying what amounts to actual crimes. In a world where gang rape is redefined to be an extracurricular activity, some of these players view serious crimes as a team building experience—while dehumanizing the victim is simply a rhetorical trope. Instead of asking serious questions about hockey culture, we reduce hockey to jingoistic ads, and the pattern continues: NHL players’ slut-shame women, sex-assault runs rampant in the OHL, and upsetting stories like the alleged University of Ottawa assault continue to emerge.


@BMakuch

Congo. An FARDC soldier poses for a portrait by Lake Kivu.

Photographer Michael Christopher Brown documents places and people in transition—occasionally eschewing a camera for a camera phone. From Libya, to Russia, to Broadway, to his current base in Goma, eastern Congo, Brown said he explores the “relationship between distance and honesty.” To paraphrase, Brown believes that as we are pushed to our limits, we become more honest.

His work in Libya in the aftermath of the fall of Gaddafi was the subject of the HBO documentary Witness: Libya and will appear in his forthcoming book Libyan Sugar, to be published in 2014 by Twin Palms Publishers. With the phone lines failing us, I caught up with Michael over email.

VICE: What do you think of the work that you do? Do you see yourself more as an artist or a journalist?
Michael Christopher Brown: I always made a living from photojournalism but ultimately it was too rigid in structure to allow for much growth. I never identified with photojournalism and was always more inspired by street or documentary photographers. Then, a few years ago, I found that I could express things better while writing than taking pictures, and through the writing realized the photography lacked definition. I entered a transition that continues to this day, aiming to use photography more as an individual, a citizen, than just a photographer working to illustrate or report something. It was a big shift, from solely documenting the outward to documenting and analysing the outward and inward.

How did your career as a photographer begin?
The photojournalism career really took off after I was given an internship at National Geographic magazine. Partially thanks to those jobs at NG, I was able to begin getting consistent work soon after moving to New York City in the winter of 2006.

When you are working in conflict zones, do you worry that your photography will end up being dominated by pictures of guns and injuries? How do you find art in conflict?
Well, I live in east Congo, which is an active conflict zone, but I'm not covering the frontlines of armed conflict. I have the itch but avoid it because it is more related to addictions than beliefs. I need to identify with whatever is happening before planting myself on a frontline. I need to feel involved to a great extent—as if I were a participant. I felt this in Libya but not since then, except briefly at the beginning of the Syrian war. Not in Congo however, because although I am beginning to understand it, it is a conflict based on ethnicity and power and I cannot strongly identify with race or with the powerless or powerful. At the end of the day, I am just an average white boy from the Skagit Valley—an alien.

Rwindi, Congo. 2012

OK.
Finding art in conflict, as you say, seems to be about finding a way to identify one’s situation with the situation on the ground, and to do it in a personal way that others can identify with. That is what makes work inspiring, because it is about more than just great pictures. It is about having a vision, which seems to be, beyond adding to history, all we really have to share with the world. We can enable viewers to leave this type of work feeling inspired, not shitty, about what they have just seen, even if the work contains brutality. Maybe this is far-fetched, but I think that it's tough for say, the average American to look at pictures of foreign conflict and identify with them. But that's what we are hoping to do with the Libya project.

How did you hope to accomplish that? It's a tough ask.
Libya was about having an experience and recording it using the same tool the Libyans used during their revolution—a mobile phone. But the complete work is more than that. There is a lot of writing and more than 400 pictures in the book, as well as a 20-minute installation of my videos from 2011, being put together by some friends at screenprojects.org. I hope to exhibit those items, along with dozens of artefacts, in New York later this year.

Kashgar, China. 2009.

How do you feel about the Arab Spring now?
After Libya, I was not interested in following the rest of the Arab Spring, though in early 2012, I did seriously plan a trip to Syria. I had just returned from Lebanon, was following the news every day and emailing folks to figure out a way in, until Remi Ochlik and others were killed. Then the questioning began again: Why am I doing this? I decided to wait and was glad I did. Though it appeared to be like Libya in the beginning, it quickly became nasty in all sorts of ways, into something that for me, as an outsider, is now unrecognizable.

Can you tell me about being kidnapped in Benghazi?
I was kidnapped briefly after the war was over. It was bizarre. We were filming drifters in Benghazi and then hopped in a pickup that drifted and flipped. A big crowd surrounded us as we crawled out and the mood shifted when some militia saw the driver pull out his AK-47 and fake a shot into the air to scatter the crowd. He drove off without us but they thought we were his crew, or at least that was their excuse to take us at gunpoint. According to another driver who was with us, they had plans to drive us out of town to their base and steal our equipment, perhaps more. There was a gun to that driver's head, several militia vehicles involved and they confiscated our phones.

It was months after the official end of the revolution, and the mood was sketchy and unpredictable as the frontlines were not as clear any more. Eventually, as our vehicle moved through traffic, I was able to break out of the door at an intersection, walk through standing traffic and yell for help until people got out of their vehicles and came to our aid. The militiamen sped off.

Kashgar, China. 2009. Street life in Kashgar's Old City.

Jesus, that sounds stressful. In some of your series, particularly the one based on the old city of Kashgar in China, I've been struck by recurring colors. With the Kashgar photos, it was blue and red. Is this something you are conscious of?
Not really, those were just the colors of the place, whether during the day or at night. With some of those images the colors were tweaked by the camera, due to noise, because they were made in minimal light.

What brought you to Congo?
I proposed a story on conflict minerals in Congo to TIME magazine in 2012, for their wireless technology issue. I stayed on after the story and have made several trips since then, up to now where I have been living in Goma since November.

Rwindi, Congo. 2012.

Your Olympics photos seemed to show a different side of your work. Did you approach sports photography differently?
I went to Beijing for ESPN magazine and I was their only photographer, so there was a big responsibility to try to capture everything and often with longer lenses. I did not sleep or eat much and lugged around a big glass for the first week before the editor finally told me to just do what I wanted. Which was to wander and do what other photographers were not doing, though the access was tough. There is a reason why photographers from say, Getty or Sports Illustrated or AP get all the best pictures: They have the best access, called pool access. If you don’t have pool access you’re stuck on the sidelines. So I walked around the crowd and tried to focus behind the scenes.

Many of your series—particularly Kashgar and Alaska—deal with remote places. Is there a particular attraction to these places?
There is no longer an attraction, but at the time it was either just for assignments (Alaska for National Geographic magazine or Kashgar for Smithsonian), or because I was looking to photograph some aspect of people in transition. Sometimes they blended together, which was the case with both Alaska and Kashgar.

The Alaska piece was about a young adventurer, Andrew Skurka, and his solo trip through the wilderness. But it was really about a young man facing nature while totally exposed to the elements. Humans are so disconnected with the natural world; we don’t live in nature any more. And nature becomes very scary when one realizes they are no longer in control. With Kashgar, it was about a city initially of Uighur people that was being dominated—or one could say "occupied"—by the Chinese. It was about the transition of the Uighur existence, which was vanishing in certain ways and being modernized in others.

Andrew Skurka and Roman Dial on a four-day hike through Alaska in 2010

Do you think the rise of citizen journalism is endangering your profession? Are you worried at all that people can just record what's happening on their phones?
As Chuck Close said, “Photography is the only art in which there are accidental masterpieces.” Anybody, at the right place and time, is able to make a great picture and even mechanized photography like Google Street View is able to capture great street scenes. But consistency is important if it is to be a profession, so the random great images Joe Public takes will never add up to the legacy of good pictures left by a professional.

What is endangering photojournalism are hardline photojournalist attitudes. But I think the more imagery, the better. Sure, more editors and curators are needed to comb through this vast trove of information (thank God for hashtags?) but really, perhaps we are entering the golden age of photography because it is finally and instantly available to nearly everyone.

Thanks, Michael.

Click through for more of Michael Christopher Brown's photographs.

Kashgar, China. 2009. Day and night, convoys of Chinese soldiers continually circle Kashgar's Old City. The poster on the side of some of their vehicles says (translation may be rough): "Police and people join forces as close as brothers." 

Kashgar, China. 2009.

Kashgar, China. 2009.

Kashgar, China. 2009. Street scene in Kashgar's Old City, located in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China.

Kashgar, China. 2009

Goma, Congo December 14, 2012. Abandoned planes are a common sight at airports in Africa. At Goma Airport, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, planes left due to wars and volcanic eruptions over the past two decades have become a playground for street children, some of whom sell the parts which are made into stoves and other items to be sold on the streets of Goma.

Congo. 2013.

Rwindi, Congo. 2012. In Rwindi, a savanna located in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the DRC military occupy a defunct, Mobutu-era safari hotel, called Hotel Invest. In 2012, with the permission of several DRC colonels, Michael spent ten days at and around this decrepit hotel, documenting the daily lives of soldiers during a lull in fighting the M23 rebel forces.

Congo. 2013.

Alaska. 2010. Andrew Skurka skis up the Tatina River and into the Kichatna Mountains.

Image by Sam Taylor

Last summer I went to Ibiza, Spain, where I was catcalled, sexually objectified, and treated like a piece of meat by men the entire week. And it was absolutely awesome. It got to the point where I couldn't even be bothered to follow any of it up. Every time some hot guy got fresh with me, I just thought, OK, I could fuck you, but there might be some even hotter stud serving it up later. I guess it’s like when I used to live by the sea and never got around to going swimming. It was just always there, you know? You forget to get wet.

So forgive me, looking around this misery we call London, England in March, for feeling a little sad that I’m not in Ibiza, Land of Sexual Objectification. I love catcalls. I love car toots. I love random men smiling “Hello beautiful!” like my mere presence just made their day. I like being called "princess" and ignoring them as I giggle inside. I like being eye-fucked on the escalator and wondering if I’ve just made him spring a boner. That eye-fuck, by the way, is an age-old mating signal. I live for it.

So yeah, I’m a bit of a slut. I also used to be a prostitute. And before that, well, a boy. Uh-huh. And I’m a total attention junkie. So I may not represent all women. Who does, though? I’m a feminist because I don’t like men telling me how to think or behave or experience the world and I don’t like women doing it, either. Laura Bates recently wrote an article for the Guardian called “Women Should Not Accept Street Harassment as ‘Just a Compliment.’” I truly admire the work Laura does with Everyday Sexism to highlight some horrendous abuse, and you should visit the site and check out some of the shit people have had to deal with. It’s awful. And she’s not wrong. No one should accept harassment. Harassment, by its very nature, is unacceptable. But is catcalling always harassment?

The Independent's social media editor Felicity Morse loves catcalls and I’m guessing she gets loads because she’s freaking hot. Even though I’m probably not supposed to say that. She told me: “If I'm dressed up in a sexy little something, I’m sashaying down the street and I'm tossing a head of freshly washed hair like I think I'm Beyoncé, I find a catcall rather appreciative. But if I'm out jogging or running to the bus stop, huddling past a building site in the rain, I find it intrusive.” It also depends on the number of men and what they’re doing: “If they are working on a building site or something, well they can't really leave their work, it’s almost traditional to wolf-whistle and pretty meaningless, so I don't feel threatened. But a big gang of young men in the dark? I wouldn't even acknowledge I'd heard them.” Would she give her number to a guy in the street? “Probably, but I wouldn't have high hopes for a relationship! That's not harassment, it's flattering. If he doesn't go away? That's harassment.” She’d still ban catcalls on the basis that they upset many women, though.

This is kind of my problem with the debate around street attention. It’s part of a culture that infantilizes women and teaches them to be constantly afraid. I wasn’t brought up that way and I don’t feel frightened when some spunky dude comes and talks to me. I hate this idea that all men are rapists-in-waiting and that all women are victims-in-waiting. It’s patronizing and doesn’t help anyone. Many women are sexual and like to look and feel and be seen sexual. I’m one of those women. But if I smile next time a man wolf-whistles at me, does that make me a bad person? What if the next person he wolf-whistles at is a woman who’s been raped? What if he ruins her day?

Nichi Hodgson, author of Bound to You, Men's Health sex columnist and director of the Ethical Porn Partnership, said there’s a certain kind of middle-class woman that finds catcalls particularly galling: “There’s a sense of being sullied if an uncouth or lower-class kind of man—a white van man, for example—heckles. But if it's a Roger Sterling type who can just about pull it off with a certain retro-sexist panache, the offense isn't experienced the same.” Laura said that growing up in working-class West Yorkshire learning to hit back with witty repartee was a kind of rite of passage. The same is true where I come from, although it’s the blokes who need the comebacks. Let’s just say Nottingham girls aren’t shy.

Speaking of which, I wanted to hear from some regular women, not professional feminists, so I called my sister. She’s super hot and cool and gets loads of attention from guys but apart from that she’s pretty "normal," whatever that means. She’s a Property Services Officer in Nottingham, she’s 28, college educated, mixed race, and describes her sexuality as “straight but open minded.” Here’s what she had to say.

Me: Sista! I’m doing an article on catcalling, what do you think about it?
Natti: I don’t find it offensive, I find that it can be a compliment and I also think that the guys are brave because they’re just there in broad daylight, shouting down the street.

Me: Have you ever hooked up with a guy in the street?
Natti: No, no, no, no, no! I wouldn’t do that. If he’s that sure of himself… well, it’s arrogant, isn’t it?

Me: Do you ever find it sexy?
Natti: Yeah of course, sometimes.

Me: Would you ever wear something sexy to catch men’s attention in the street?
Natti: Wouldn’t every woman if they can?

I phoned my mom after and she said catcalls are like periods—she hated them when she was younger but feels sad now they’re about to dry up. Wow, mother.

One woman who emailed me in response to an enquiry I put out on Facebook—one of many who preferred to remain anonymous because they don’t want you to, you know, judge them—takes catcalling as a compliment, too: “I have friends who say they feel powerless and objectified when being catcalled. I think they made a choice about how it makes them feel, and I choose to feel empowered.” She once hooked up with a guy from the street, but the sex was “Ehhhh,” so don’t get too excited. Still, how many of you reading this wouldn’t exist had one of your parents not made a pass at the other in the street?

The Guardian’s Ellie Mae O'Hagan said it doesn’t surprise her that some women like catcalls: “One of the ways patriarchy sustains itself is by convincing women that their worth is determined by the approval of men along a strict set of terms. Getting wolf-whistled at is a small confirmation that a woman is meeting the terms patriarchy demands of her.” Couldn’t you say that about pretty much anything, though? Like, if a woman tells another woman “Great dress!” is she letting her know that she’s meeting the expectations of capitalism and the fashion industry and beauty culture? Or is she just telling her she likes her dress? Or is it a bit of both?

I’ll be honest: Ideology bores the shit out of me, but Ellie does have a point about catcalls being an expression of power. There’s a power imbalance, for example, between those who feel entitled to express their sexuality in public (straight men) versus those who don’t (like gay men, older people, and lesbian women). Ellie goes further and cites studies that suggest sexual violence is "to an extent rooted in ideologies of male sexual entitlement,” though I struggle to see any real connection between rape and the guy who wolf-whistled at me this morning. As Nichi puts it: “I think it's a misnomer to draw a continuum between street heckling and the paltry rape conviction rate. Street hecklers don't go on to become rapists any more than readers of lads mags do.”

I don’t want feminists to stop campaigning against the terrible abuse girls and women face every day in Britain and I’m grateful to anyone raising awareness about feminist issues. And men, for the record, I haven’t spoken to anyone yet who likes being told “I’d like to fuck you up the ass” as you drive past them in the street. So stop it with that, you shitheads. I just wish we could make a distinction between harassment like this and harmless fun.

Because whether you like it or not there’s a big difference between “Hello gorgeous” and—as Laura Bates was, abhorrently, told—“I’d hold a knife to that.” I don’t want to make other women feel pathetic if they don’t enjoy street attention but I also don’t want to feel pathetic for enjoying it. I don’t speak for all women and neither do you. I’ll leave you with the words of 86-year-old Jinx Allen Craig, the woman in catcalling’s greatest portrait, An American Girl in Italy: “It’s not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!” Jinx, call me. We need to book our flights to Ibiza.

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Kiev's EuroMaidan protesters used fire to their advantage. With fire, the protesters were able to defend their barricades, extend their lines, and fortify their positions. They were mobilized throughout the city to collect as many bottles as possible, and thousands of Molotov cocktails were used to set fire to tanks, other armored vehicles, and buses. These little bombs were the only real weapon protesters had against the government's well-armed forces. 

Donald Weber spent this February in Kiev photographing for VICE. Follow our coverage of breaking events in Kiev on VICE News.

All photos by Donald Weber/VII Photo

Screencap via.

Ed's note: Barrett Brown is an activist-journalist who VICE has covered (and interviewed) extensively that is awaiting trial in an American jail—he is also, slowly, creeping into mainstream consciousness. His newest book, "Keep Rootin for Putin’" skewers various American mainstream media pundits and it was reviewed for VICE Canada by Douglas Lucas last week. Below is an excerpt from "Keep Rootin' for Putin’’ that will be available on the official Free Barrett Brown website soon. UPDATE: Earlier today, the US government filed a motion to dismiss 11 of the 12 criminal charges against Barrett Brown.

I learned a few things from William Bennett's book The De-Valuing of America. Did you know that Prohibition was a resounding success? Neither did I. Actually, I still don’t, because it’s not true. So, I guess what I really learned is that some people still think that Prohibition was a resounding success, and that at least one of these people has gone on to help shape American drug policy.

During a wider discussion on the merits of federal fiddlin’, Bennett drops the following bombshell, almost as an aside: “One of the clear lessons of Prohibition is that when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol, less alcohol-related disease, fewer drunken brawls, and a lot less public drunkenness. And, contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime.”

This is a pretty incredible statement to just throw into a book without any supporting evidence. Bennett hasn’t just expressed an opinion on an ambiguous topic, like, “Gee, the old days sure were swell” or “Today’s Japanese role-playing games are all flash and no substance” or something like that. Rather, Bennett has made several statements of alleged fact that can be easily verified or shot down by a few minutes of research. But Bennett didn’t bother to research it, and I know this because the federal government has a tendency to keep records, and the records prove Bennett wrong.

“Less alcohol-related disease”? In 1926, a number of witnesses testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the ongoing effects of Prohibition; several New York State asylums officials noted that the number of patients suffering from alcohol-related dementia had increased by 1,000 percent since 1920, the year after Prohibition had gone into effect. Also in 1920, deaths from undiluted alcohol consumption in New York City stood at 84. In 1927, with Prohibition in full swing, that number had swelled to 719.

But those are just snapshots in time. A look at the larger picture shows that Bennett is not just kind of wrong, but entirely and unambiguously wrong about every single thing he’s just said.

In 1991, the Cato Institute commissioned a retroactive Prohibition study by Mark Thornton, the O.P. Alford III Assistant Professor of Economics at Auburn University. Citing hard data gleaned mostly from government records, Thornton concluded that Prohibition “was a miserable failure on all counts.”

Despite Bennett’s assertion that “when we had laws against alcohol, there was less consumption of alcohol [italics his],” a cursory glance at the federal government’s own data shows that there was not [italics mine, thank you very much]. Now, per capita consumption did indeed fall dramatically from 1919 to 1920, but then increased far more dramatically from 1920 to 1922—after which it continued to increase well beyond pre-Prohibition levels. So, when Bennett says that “there was less consumption of alcohol,” he’s right about a single one-year period, but wrong about the next dozen or so years—or, to put it another way, he’s entirely wrong. If I decided to reduce my drinking for a week, and I drank quite a bit less than usual on Monday but then drank the same amount I usually do on Tuesday and then drank more than I usually do on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if the average alcohol consumption on my part during that week was much higher than my average alcohol consumption in the previous week, then one could hardly say that “there was less consumption of alcohol” in my apartment that week. Or, rather, one could say that, but one would be wrong. In this case, though, one could be excused for being wrong, because I don’t usually keep exact records on my alcohol consumption, and neither does the federal government (I think). But in the case of Prohibition, there is no excuse for ignorance, and even less for spreading it around. That allegedly noble experiment may not have been the cause of increased alcohol consumption, but it clearly wasn’t the cause of any overall decline, no overall decline having actually occurred.

Not only didn’t alcohol consumption decrease during Prohibition, the American taxpayer was at that point paying quite a bit of extra coin to enforce the decrease in alcohol consumption that they were not getting. From 1919 to 1922—a period, which, as mentioned above, saw an overall increase in alcohol consumption—the budget for the Bureau of Prohibition was tripled. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard was now spending 13 million dollars a year, Customs was blowing all kinds of cash, and the state and local governments, which had been stuck with the majority of enforcement issues, were throwing away untold amounts of money to boot.

Beyond the easily calculable nickel-and-dime costs of running an unsuccessful nanny-state boondoggle, the American citizen was being screwed on other fronts, too. Unlike those umbrella-twirling, petticoat-clad temperance harpies of the time (and their equally insufferable apologists of the present day), Thornton considers other social costs of a massive government ban on non-coercive behavior. Of the alcohol consumed under Prohibition, hard liquor made a jump as a percentage of total alcohol sales that had not been seen before, that has not been seen since, and that will probably never be seen again. The sudden ascendancy of whiskey over beer can be easily explained (and could have easily been predicted): If one is smuggling something above the law or consuming it on the sly, it makes more sense to smuggle or consume concentrated versions of the product in question than to deal with larger, more diluted concoctions. A similar phenomenon occurred in the cocaine trade under William Bennett’s watch as drug czar.

So alcohol consumption was up, and the alcohol being consumed was now of the harder, more brawl-inducing variety. But what about the savings? The aforementioned busybodies in petticoats had predicted great social gains for Americans—money spent on alcohol would now go to milk for babies, life insurance, and, presumably, magical unicorns that grant you three wishes. Of course, this didn’t turn out to be the case. Not only was alcohol consumption up, but records show that people were now paying more for it, too. Of course, they were also paying higher taxes to aid in the government’s all-out attempt to repeal the law of supply and demand. And don’t even think about approaching one of those unicorns to wish for more wishes. That’s against the rules.

What about crime? Apparently, there are some wacky rumors going around to the effect that crime actually went up during Prohibition. But Bennett clearly told us that “contrary to myth, there is no evidence that Prohibition caused big increases in crime.”

Pardon my French, but le gros homme possède la sottise d’un enfant humain et la teneur en graisse d’un bébé d’éléphant. And if you’ll indulge me further by pardoning my harsh language, Bennett is so full of horse shit on this one that he could fertilize every bombed-out coca field from the Yucatan to Bolivia. The idea that “Prohibition caused big increases in crime” is not so much a myth as it is a verifiable fact. Again, believe it or not, the feds tend to keep records on such things, and again, believe it or totally believe it, Bennett has failed to consult these records before providing his sage commentary on the subject.

In large cities, for instance, the homicide rate jumped from 5.6 per 100,000 residents in the first decade of the 20th century to 8.4 in the second, during which time 25 states passed their own localized Prohibition laws in addition to the federal government’s implementation of the Harris Narcotics Act, which in turn paved the way for the then-nascent drug war. And in the third decade, during which Prohibition was the law of the land not just in rural states governed by puritanical yahoos but in every state of the union, that number jumped to 10 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the rates for other serious crimes increased on a per capita basis by similar leaps and bounds, despite an environment of booming prosperity for which the 1920s are known to this day.

Now, a particularly stubborn statist of the William Bennett school of disingenuous argumentation might try to counter by claiming that this increase in serious crime could have been attributable to other factors, such as increased immigration; Bennett himself might be tempted to remark that things would have been different if only we had aborted every Italian baby in the country or something like that. But this hypothetical counter-argument would not hold up, because the crime rate continued to soar until 1933, when it saw a sudden and dramatic decline.

The year of 1933, of course, was when Prohibition was repealed.

So, William Bennett to the contrary, Prohibition did indeed lead to “big increases in crime.” But Bennett is incapable of recognizing this, because he’s already made up his mind. After all, Bennett advocates the federalization of private conduct, and, as the nation’s first drug czar, acted to implement this vision. And because Bennett is a possessor of both “moral clarity” and “moral courage,” his views must be both morally clear and morally courageous. And because America’s failed experiment with Prohibition was an early and dramatic example of the federalization of private conduct, and thus an early version of Bennett’s chosen ideology, Prohibition must have logically been a success, rather than a failure.

Indeed, Bennett was enthusiastic about the possibility of replicating the glorious Cultural Revolution of Prohibition. “This is one issue, Mr. President, where I, a conservative Republican, feel comfortable in advocating a strong federal role,” Bennett reports telling Bush senior in 1988. Putting aside the question of whether or not this is how Bennett really talks—and if so, he’s certainly more eloquent in private than he is in public—this is a telling remark, and it’s unfortunate that Bennett doesn’t explain why a strong federal role would be merited here and not elsewhere. Something about the criminalization of private conduct scratches an itch that social assistance programs just can’t seem to reach.

“Often it seems that any idea that fits the zeitgeist, that can be linked to a ‘need’—anyone’s need, anywhere, anytime—is funded,” he writes at one point. “Frequently, it is funded at the costs of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars without the slightest regard to whether the program will work, whether it will be held accountable, whether it is appropriate for the federal government to fund it, or whether it is something people can or ought to do for themselves.” It does not occur to Bennett that he has just described the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Elsewhere: “I know of no other group in America that is more cocksure of its right to full entitlement to the United States Treasury than the leadership of higher education.” Bennett must believe the drug war to be funded by voluntary subscription and perhaps further offset by vouchers, and seems to have seen nothing “cocksure” in demanding that the military bomb more of Bolivia at his command. And during his no doubt Marcus Aurelius-inspired treatise on the education of children found elsewhere in the book, he tells us that if “we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: ‘No, I submit to the decree of Athens.’” Perhaps they should also understand why Socrates was sentenced to death by the mob in the first place. The answer, of course, is that he was found guilty of “corrupting the youth.”

Like the Athenian mob, Bennett is also opposed to the corruption of the youth by way of such things as marijuana and favors the death penalty for those found guilty of it. At one point in the book, he recalls an appearance on Larry King Live when a caller suggested that drug dealers be beheaded. The moral clarity of the proposal seems to have excited Bennett. “What the caller suggests is morally plausible. Legally, it’s difficult… morally, I don’t have any problem with it.” But the moral plausibility of this was, as usual, lost on the nation’s intellectuals while being perfectly understood by the common folk, who like the Russian serfs before them are in eternal adoration of their drug czar (and it is also understood by the totalitarian Chinese, who have been executing drug dealers for quite a while, no doubt due to the inherent moral clarity of its communist dictatorship). “Many of the elites ridiculed my opinion. But it resonated with the American people because they knew what drugs were doing, and they wanted a morally proportional response.” Bennett’s evidence of this, seriously, is that then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, Lee Atwater, called him from South Carolina and reported that the people he had spoken to there seemed very keen on the idea. Meanwhile, as Bennett points out, the elites had the audacity to run headlines like “Drug Czar: Beheading Fitting” to describe an incident in which the drug czar had said that beheading is fitting. “The reaction was illustrative,” he writes.

Indeed, much of the book (and much of Bennett’s public career since) follows a familiar pattern. Bennett says something wacky, the “elites” criticize him for it, and then Bennett either sticks to his guns or pretends he didn’t mean what he obviously meant. Weirdly, he sometimes manages to do both at the same time. Speaking to a Baptist group during his tenure as drug czar, Bennett told attendees the following: “I continue to be amazed how often people I talked to in drug treatment centers talk about drugs as the great lie, the great deception—indeed a product, one could argue, of the great deceiver, the great deceiver everyone knows. ‘A lie’ is what people call drugs, and many, many people in treatment have described to me their version of crack, simply calling it ‘the devil.’ This has come up too often, it has occurred too much, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored.”

This time, the reaction was not simply “illustrative,” as had been the case with the beheading thing. Rather, “The reaction was absurd but illustrative.” I should have pointed out that the Bennett Pattern described above invariably ends with Bennett describing the situation as “illustrative.” Anyway, the reaction was illustrative of the media’s tendency to report things that government officials say when they say something unusual, a practice to which Bennett seems to be opposed, no doubt on moral grounds. The San Francisco Chronicle’s story was headlined “Bennett Blames Satan for Drug Abuse.” Bennett reminds us that he was simply “reporting what I had heard from people in drug treatment and speaking of drugs in a moral context,” but then immediately goes on to refer to this as “my view.” Nor would he have been very likely to report all of this and describe it as having “come up too often, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored” if he didn’t believe it had some sort of merit.

If Bennett had, for instance, gone to a number of drug treatment centers and been told that crack was invented by the CIA under the direction of George Bush, Sr. in order to exterminate the black population, which is another popular piece of theology among certain drug addicts, Bennett probably would not have gotten up in front of several hundred people and began “reporting what I had heard from people in drug treatment” and then noted that Bush, Sr.’s alleged black-op narco-genocide “has come up too often, it has occurred too much, too spontaneously, too often in conversation, to be ignored,” because Bennett would not have agreed with such a sentiment, or, if he did agree, he would not have said it because he would have known all of this to be true as he had in fact helped to launder the drug money by way of his casino mobster connections, and at any rate he would not find it prudent to talk about all of these things in public. 

I miss the days when the things I do were portrayed positively in the media. Things like being rebellious, drinking to excess, throwing caution to the wind, and smoking until my lungs gave out. Now, it's all: Fit in, drink responsibly, safety first, smoking kills you. How do I fight the good fight in this world full of fear and fascism?

First, they told us not to smoke inside. Now, we can barely smoke outside. I can’t even impress strangers by smoking three cigarettes at once—they just sneer at me like I'm a dick, as if smoking hasn't been cool in 50 years. It makes no sense. Smoking used to be soooooo cool.

Thankfully, we’ve got a martyr in our midst. His name is John Wilson. Over the last who-knows-how-long, he’s meticulously put together a video guide on how to keep smoking. Through rambling, ramshackle insights, points are formed and abandoned, but one thing is for sure—you'll want a cigarette after seeing the film.

The short is three smoked cigarettes long, so you can really get a good buzz going if you watch it right. Also, be sure to check out my equally informative interview with the filmmaker, John Wilson, below.

VICE: What's your favorite type of cigarette?
John Wilson: Any cigarette that isn’t taxed in New York City. 

What does you mom think of this movie and your dirty, nasty habit?
Oh, I don’t smoke. My mom also doesn’t really watch anything unless my dad is watching it. 

Well, what does your dad think of your movie?
I’m pretty sure my father would be able to relate to the film, although he’d never admit it. I haven’t really shown it to any family yet because it might make them very sad.

Your video is chock-full of helpful tips, but if you had to choose one single takeaway for the audience, what would it be?
That you really need to commit to something, if you want to do it well.

Is there a single clip in the movie that you can't believe you captured? I laughed out loud when I saw the stylish bachelor and the convertible full of smokers. 
I really knew I had a movie once I got that convertible shot. Things like that just started appearing once I decided to take this idea seriously. The bachelor moment was actually captured during a low-budget film shoot that I stumbled upon in Bushwick. It’s really interesting how acting looks in real life when you remove the production.

You seem to shoot constantly. Do you have an idea of the film you're trying to make when you start? Or are you just gathering footage for a bunch of films at once? 
I always have a little camera on me whenever I leave the house. This project actually began over a year ago, as a film called Midtown Cigarette Break. It started mutating once I tried to quit smoking.

I ended up shooting other people smoking whenever I wanted a cigarette and fleshed out the rest of the film with daily observations. I’ve been using the same camera for a while, so it’s easy to dig up footage from three or four years ago, if I need to. 

How do you organize your footage? John Baldessari has a huge collection of images organized by subject. Do you do something differently?
I organize all my footage by the date it was shot, and then arrange everything in a timeline once I begin a project. I also keep a meticulous daily log. That makes it a little easier to search by keyword when looking for a specific event. 

What's next?
I want to make New York Post: The Movie. It’s about a man who wakes up one morning and finds that he’s trapped inside a copy of the New York Post.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall, mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super-fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Follow Jeffrey Bowers on Twitter.

Click here for Blobby Boys - Part 1

Click here for Blobby Boys - Part 1

Keep your eyes peeled for new installments of Blobby Boys every Wednesday from here until the end of time. Or until Alex gets sick of working with us.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss announced today in a blog post and tweet that they've bought a Virgin Galactic flight to space, and they paid for it in Bitcoin—of course.