Rick and Morty's clever writing staff is known for hiding secret messages and stories inside the show's jokes—remember the Truth Tortoise?—and yesterday, through the sale of a seemingly innocuous item on the online retailer Witchsy, comes another.
In one of the most random jokes in one of the darkest, most absurd season two episodes, "Total Rickall," a parasite causes Rick to remember a money-making scheme based on buying marked-down limited-edition Zelda Nintendo DS's and then selling them later at a hugely inflated price. "We can flip these sons of bitches for $230 a piece, easy!... Hurry, hurry come with me!" Rick shouts after bursting into the living room and explaining his scheme to a stone-faced Smith family. In one of his more memorable fourth wall-breaking moments, Rick leaves, and then pops back on-screen and says, "Nintendo, give me free stuff!"
Before now, fans were left to assume this was fake memory, even within the made-up universe. Turns out, no. The joke, Rick and Morty co-creator (and Witchsy investor) Justin Roiland has now revealed, is 100 percent autobiographical, and "actually true."
"OK, so here’s what’s important re: the 3DS systems," Roiland wrote in a text message to Witchsy co-founder Kate Dwyer, which she provided to VICE when asked about the backstory. "All the stuff Rick says in that scene in the episode was actually true. My plan was to sell them off here and there over the years but I just had so many that I still have them. It’s also important to know that I felt bad after I bought them all so I went and purchased 15 2DS systems and a bunch of games and donated them to the children’s hospital of Los Angeles. I became part of the problem that day. I became a scalper. CHA-CHING."
Now, fans of the show can benefit from Roiland's underground scalping trade. He's selling one of the Zelda 3DS's, which he told Dwyer he purchased at a Walmart just days before the Rick and Morty pilot first aired, signed with little drawings of the duo, on Witchsy. "Justin said he'd provide some sort of certificate of authenticity with it but who knows that dude is busy and certificate might just be drawn on a dominos napkin," reads the helpful sale's description. "This is an actually limited edition Zelda Nintendo. Frame the box and play the game? Or maybe just seal in a vault as invaluable nerd collector's item?"
Here's the thing with pranks: They're almost always mean. More often than not, they're just vehicles to laugh at someone else's expense, to terrify your neighbourhood or feed toothpaste Oreos to unsuspecting victims or whatever. So when the rare prank comes along that doesn't hinge on hurting someone else, said prankster should be applauded for doing a funny without fucking up another person's day, right? Take, for example, the high school seniors who recently staged that brilliant fake car crash at their school—everyone from the principal to the cops gave them props for that one. But unfortunately, not everyone can take a joke.
Presumably inspired by that viral prank story, Missouri high school student Kylan Scheele hatched a plan to pull a seemingly innocuous and "laid back" prank to cap off his senior year: by putting his high school up for sale on Craigslist for the low, low price of $12,725. "Huge 20+ room facility," Scheele's prank post read, praising the school's "newly built football field," "huge parking lot," and close proximity to Walmart "for convenience."
Scheele's school administrators were significantly less chill than he expected, though, and he's been suspended and banned from walking at graduation—all because of the post, FOX 4 reports.
"I decided to say the reason we’re selling this is because of 'the loss of students,' because the senior class is graduating,” Scheele told FOX 4. The school, though, read the line as a potential threat and reported it to the cops. "They tried to relate it back to all the recent school shootings and everything," he continued, "but I don’t see how it was a threat at all."
The local police investigated and concluded that Scheele wasn't a potential problem, though they asked him to delete the post for good measure, which he did. But even then, the school refused to walk back on the graduation ban.
"Out of an abundance of caution, administrators and police investigated and determined there was not a credible threat," the Independence School District wrote in a statement. "A student who makes a real or implied threat, whether it is deemed credible or not, will face discipline."
"A three-day suspension, sure, but denying me the ability to walk? That’s a lifetime moment," Scheele told FOX 4. "I think they’re overreacting."
Now, there's an online petition with more than a thousand signatures asking the school to reconsider the punishment. As of now, though, it doesn't look like Scheele's going to get his cap and gown experience. If nothing else, at least the 18-year-old can feel great pride in his ability to craft the rare prank that doesn't hurt anyone, save for a few cautious school administrators.
“Stallion?” the guy behind the check-in desk says in a thick German accent.
I nod and he hands me a garbage bag for my clothes. I don’t have to be naked. But I don’t want cum and shit all over my jeans, so I strip to my underwear. And since the mares will be au naturel, being fully dressed would feel weird, even though they won’t even see me.
After collecting my garbage bag, the Stablemaster leads me to the basement. It’s a typical cruise bar—black walls, low lighting, deep house playing in the background, jars of condoms on the bar. About 50 guys are standing around, mostly naked, a few in underwear or jocks. Roughly half are bent over, hands on the wall, ass in the air, a bag tied over their head. Welcome to the Fickstutenmarkt.
Also known as the Horse Fair, it’s a concept sex party where attendees enter as either a stallion (top) or mare (bottom). Mares arrive 30 minutes early, check their clothes and are led to the “stable” after being blindfolded. Stallions then arrive and have their pick of available holes. Originating in Germany a decade ago (because only Germans could invent something like this, sorry Germany) parties have been popping up around Europe with increasing frequency.
I’ve been curious about going for a while. A mare I know who attended in Munich gleefully told me about the bruises he still had a week later. Another friend, who’d been to the London edition said one particularly ravenous bottom had a sharpie for stallions to leave tally marks on his back after fucking him. By the end of the night, he’d accrued 47.
Most sex parties have a dress code (jocks, leather, naked) or a theme (watersports, fisting, spanking). Beyond that though, you can kind of do whatever you want. But here, the rules are more numerous. Beyond the strict entry times and dress code (for the mares at least), you’re limited to certain partners (no stallion/stallion or mare/mare coupling) and you can only have sex a specific way (no kissing, no sucking, definitely no cuddling).
Image courtesy of Fickstutenmarkt
I have no idea what’s about to unfold. But right now it’s just a bunch of mostly naked guys, looking bored sipping beer from plastic cups. Ten minutes in, my feeling is closer to ambivalence than arousal. I decide to walk around to see if I can get in the mood.
There are three slings next to the stairs, all of which are occupied; one inhabitant is getting pounded by a short, stocky top, the other two lying back with their legs in the air. I start pulling at my dick, trying to get hard.
After a few minutes, the top pulls out, steps back and gives me a little nod as if to say, “He’s all yours.” I slide a condom on and enter him easily, his ass already wide open. I have had plenty of anonymous sex but even in a dingy basement like this, I’ll usually give prospective partners a once over to decide if I’m into them (at least based on available light). Right now though, I’ve just stuck my dick inside someone without even really looking at him.
The hood combined with the low lighting means I can’t really tell how old he is, but he’s slim and probably medium height with a patch of dark hair on his chest. As we start to fuck, he grabs my rib cage, pulling me closer and presses his face into my neck; an oddly intimate gesture given the enforced anonymity of the environment. It’s nice. But it’s not hot.
After a few minutes I can feel myself going soft inside him. I pull out, grab a handful of paper towel from the dispenser on the wall, pull the condom off and give my dick a wipe. He does a hit of poppers and adjusts himself in the sling, waiting for the next one.
Back in the main room, the action is picking up. A bottom with a particularly luscious ass is perched on a bench at the edge of the room, a cluster of guys around him standing by for a kick at his can. I sidle up to the group and whip it out, waiting for my turn.
Sex is always kind of about the bottom. Here that’s clearer than ever. We’re all waiting to get our dicks wet. But the person who’s really getting what he wants is on his knees. Since five of us are taking turns it quickly gets boring, so I back out of the circle to explore other options.
On the opposite wall, a young guy with milky-white skin and a star-shaped tramp stamp kneels on a bench, a few strands of blonde hair poking out from his hood. I walk up behind him and rub my crotch against his ass. He arches his back and presses into me. I bring him to his feet and guide him to the row of cubicles opposite the sling room. I’m probably two minutes into fucking him, when a flashlight shines over my shoulder, illuminating my dick.
I pause thrusting to give the Stablemaster a look. Satisfied, he continues on. Since the mares can’t see whether you’re using a condom, the staff walk around to check you’ve wrapped up.
It’s a practical measure to ensure consent. But it also makes the party feel like a junior high dance, with safe sex guardians checking for latex like teachers holding rulers to see whether you’re far enough apart.
It’s not a strictly safer sex party though. Mares have the option to flag themselves for barebacking. In most cases, that means a different coloured hood (red for bare, white for safe). For this edition, “bare mares” sport a red armband, though there are only a handful, which is surprising.
With the advent of PreP, condomless sex is increasingly the norm in these kinds of spaces. Usually sold under the brand name Truvada, it’s a combination of two drugs in a single pill taken daily to prevent HIV infection. As it’s become more widely available, barebacking in on the rise. Ten years ago, you had to say something if didn’t want a condom. Now you have to specify if you do. But here anyway, most attendees aren’t looking to exchange fluids, though maybe they’re more concerned about other STI’s, which PreP doesn’t guard against.
After a few more minutes fucking my faceless bottom, I depart with a playful slap to his ass and continue my journey through the bar. I fuck three more guys; two suspended adjacent to each other in the sling room and a third back in the cabin area.
Back in the main room, most of the bottoms are leaning against the walls getting pounded from behind. Moans echo around the space, occasionally drowning out the music. At the same time, the whole thing seems a bit more civilized than I’d imagined. No holes dripping cum. No visible bruises. No prolapsed rectums.
The clock above the bar indicates there’s more than 30 minutes left. But sex fatigue is kicking in so I decide to throw in the towel and head home. Even I have a limit on the amount of ass I can take in one night.
Like every sex party, Fickstutenmarkt has rules that set it apart. While the anonymity is a unique twist, the event didn’t live up to its debaucherous promise. What was supposed to be a balls-out fuckfest, was just a regular old sex party with a set of weird restrictions. I’d thought the rules would be a turn on. But eventually I just got bored. Turns out I don’t like a third party dictating who I can do and how I can do them.
Maybe that’s because the party is really all about the bottoms. Even though they give it up without seeing who’s getting it, they’re still ultimately the ones in charge. Maybe it’s fun for them. But as a top, it gradually started to feel like a retail sales job—constantly surveying the floor to see who you can service next. I guess I want more control than that. Maybe next time I should come as a mare.
In the past few years, the body positivity movement has finally begun to have an impact on American culture—but it too often fails to actually center on or benefit plus-sized people. The podcast “She’s All Fat,” hosted by April K. Quioh and Sophia Carter-Kahn, aims to change that. The show, which has attracted several thousand subscribers since launching last year, unpacks the unhealthy and ultimately exploitative way that fat people are represented in popular culture, answers questions from listeners, and gives concrete advice on subjects like “going to the doctor while fat.” They do this within the framework of their different life experiences—Carter-Kahn is a “nice wealthy white lady from the Southwest,” Quioh told me, while Quioh herself is the daughter of African immigrants who grew up poor in the Midwest—in conversations that are both casual and raw, intimate and explicitly political.
I got coffee with them and chatted about their challenges with a world that doesn’t make space—for their identities or physical space for their bodies—and the goals they have for their podcast and the body positivity movement in 2018. Here's how the interview went:
Photo from She's All Fat
VICE: How did you two come up with the idea for “She’s All Fat”? April Quioh: Sophie always looks at me, and I feel that it was a collaboration.
Sophia Carter-Kahn: It was your idea first. April and I both were looking for a way to talk body positivity—right now, we’re not seeing many intersectional conversations. It’s not about just fat bodies, because you can’t divorce fatness from the other marginalized parts of your identity. Those other identities are just as integral to body positivity, and we want there to be healthy discussion in the culture in general. When we sat down the first day to make a list of topics, it was three pages, just off the top.
What qualms do you have with the mainstream representation of body positivity? Quioh: You know how the conversation about body positivity is sort of “buzz-y” right now? It’s not intersectional and it’s very surface-level. It freaks me out a little bit, the way body positivity is used as a marketing tool. You’ll see phrases like “love yourself” printed on pink mugs in glitter being sold at an exorbitant price. Victoria’s Secret was marketing a “body positive” lingerie line that featured no actual fat people. To me, these are examples of corporations completely missing the point of body positivity but attempting to co-opt the language in order to seem “woke.”
The reality is, body positivity is about more than loving yourself. It is a political movement about dismantling the oppression people face because of the bodies that they live in. It’s important to us that we do not conflate the two. I think it would be easy for our brand to be like, “We want to seem inclusive”—look, there’s a chubby white woman and a chubby black woman, and I just put them on my page and it looks like I care about all bodies and all sizes! But we try to be active about what we align ourselves with. What do we truly want to stand for?
Carter-Kahn: People will also still say, “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful,” and they think that that is body-positive. And it’s like… you’re missing [the point]. Body positivity is about dismantling oppressive systems, not about "not saying mean words." Until it's truly neutral to say "I'm fat," the movement isn't done. We get a lot of fetishization, too. My unread messages aren’t even explicit, they’re lazy. “Hey, hey you’re fat and beautiful. I love fat girls.”
Quioh: What did someone write to us today? “You’re abundant.” You’re not fat, you’re an abundance. We get a lot of problematic “fan mail” in our Gmail right now. Especially with fatness in general, it’s easy for women to feel desexualized.
Carter-Kahn: I don't want to be hypersexualized or desexualized; I just want to be afforded the same neutrality as other bodies existing in space.
What makes “She’s All Fat” different from existing resources? What are your goals for you listeners, yourself, and the body positive movement at large? Quioh: We have three major goals for the pod. First, that listeners who are fat feel seen and heard by the show. Second, that listeners who are not gain a better understanding of our unique experiences and some tools on how to be a better ally. And third, to do our part to encourage the body positivity movement at large to be more intersectional and continue to uplift the voices of the most marginalized voices among us.
Carter-Kahn: Centering fat voices is a pretty radical act, and our show and community is explicitly for and about fat people—our “Fatmily,” as we say. That doesn't mean "don't listen if you're thin"— we have a lot of straight-size listeners and community members! It just means that our focus, as a podcast, is fat positivity as a worldview, as a lens, similar to how other podcasts might use other identities as their lens. There's tons of different resources for body positivity and fat positivity that are also doing great work—we have a resource page on our site and we often shout different people out on the pod or in our Patreon posts.
Photo from She's All Fat
How have people responded? Quioh: We get emails all the time from people who say, "Hey, I learned from your podcast, and I talked to someone in my life about it," or "I used something I learned in a class I'm teaching," or, "I stood up for a fat friend after listening to this," and that really makes it all worth it for me.
Carter-Kahn: We love that so many people have found us at the beginning of their body-positivity journey, but our core mission is creating our very own space that centers fat voices. Many people expect the marginalized to educate people on the ways in which they are oppressed—but usually that comes down to explaining why your humanity is important, which is taxing. Not only do we need more intersectional voices in this space, but we need more allies interested in doing their own work on figuring out how to be a part of this movement. Fat positivity isn't trying to put thin people down - it's saying, "my oppression hurts you, too." The same way that feminism is good for men, or dismantling white supremacy is good for white people as well. Taking down the barriers that hold some of us back allows us all to be lifted up.
Last week 10 people were killed at Santa Fe High School in Texas, just months after a shooter killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This pattern has become all too familiar in the United States, which has suffered 102 mass shootings to date this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Skeptics of post-massacre gun control efforts often point to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting as a watershed moment in the left’s losing fight against the NRA and gun rights activists: If 20 small children being slaughtered in an idyllic Connecticut community can’t lead to change, perhaps nothing will.
But there is room for hope after Parkland. Since that tragedy, we’ve witnessed the birth of the #NeverAgain movement and the #MarchForOurLives, both of which have led to small policy changes. The Republican-led Congress recently voted to reinstate funding to the CDC for gun violence research; state governments like Florida have already passed laws banning bumpstocks while raising the age (from 18 to 21) for buying a firearm; companies like MEC have severed ties with brands that do business with the NRA; and multimedia giant YouTube recently announced that they would prohibit people from posting DIY gun-making videos. Even if these motions don’t lead to drastic reductions in gun violence, they represent small symbolic steps toward sensible gun control laws. They show that people on both sides of the aisle don’t want to sit idly and wait for another mass shooting to happen.
But, in spite of these developments, the conversation about gun violence remains narrowly focused on mass shootings, which account for about three percent of the annual homicides committed with firearms in the US. Lost in all of the news coverage is a sustained discussion about gun violence in black communities, who are disproportionately at risk of getting injured or killed in shootings. African Americans account for roughly 50 percent of the gunshot victims in the US, even though they only account for 12 percent of the US population.
This is a familiar omission, one that we see after nearly all mass shootings in the US. This disparity is shaped in part by the fact that scholars of color—who have been doing research on the frontlines of America’s gun violence epidemic—are often relegated to the sidelines of this conversation. This is a shame, as many of us have a lot to offer.
Luckily, two of my favorite gun violence scholars, Desmond Patton (Columbia University, Social Work and Sociology) and Joseph Richardson Jr. (University of Maryland, African-American Studies and Medical Anthropology) were up to chat more about this. The following is an abbreviated and slightly edited (for readability) version of a discussion we had.
Jooyoung Lee: So, to get things rolling, what do you think is the most critical part of your work that’s been ignored in media coverage of gun violence? Desmond Patton: When I listen to discussion about gun violence, they tend to gravitate towards immediate causes and outcomes. That is to say, why did this person commit this murder right now. And of course we want to understand why a specific shooting happened, but I think as researchers we need to also focus on pathways to violence. I’m usually very uncomfortable when we start talking about communities of colour because we seem to never talk about how institutions and policies shape violent contexts that may lead to violent behaviours. When we talk about Parkland, I hear a structural analysis that leads to additional resources and attentions. I don’t hear the same things when we talk about urban-based gun violence, in which communities that have some of the highest rates of gun violence go untreated. Parkland becomes the narrative we uphold which further marginalizes those communities.
Joseph Richardson Jr.: There is no discussion about structural violence regarding the preventable harm associated with gun violence that disproportionately affects black boys and young black men. We have to acknowledge that structural violence leads to interpersonal violence yet with black boys and black men we tend to blame the victim instead of the structures that reproduce violence.
I direct the Capital Region Violence Intervention Program, a hospital based violence intervention program at the University of Maryland Prince George’s Hospital Center. We are the second busiest trauma center in Maryland and treat on average 700 victims of violent injury per year, that’s almost two people per day. The overwhelming majority of survivors of gun violence we treat are black boys and young black men. If you spent a week in our trauma center with our trauma surgeons and nurses it would be crystal clear the gun violence is a crisis in the black community and for young black men in particular. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for black boys and young black men. It has been the leading cause of death for this population for decades. Not a few years but decades. But, imagine if gun violence were the leading cause of death for young white males for decades? It’s impossible to imagine because it wouldn’t have ever gotten that far.
The question America should ask itself is why so much attention to gun violence now?
Jooyoung: For me, the discussion has also veered away from taking on larger racist stereotypes about black men and other young men of colour—who, as we all know, are the most vulnerable to getting injured and/or killed in shootings. It’s great that the Parkland kids have reached out to young folks from Chicago and other communities of colour where gun violence is happening on a much more routine basis, but I haven’t really seen anyone in this movement taking on the larger stereotypes that shape how society sees gunshot victims from places like Chicago, St. Louis, Philly, Compton, and other communities of colour left out of the spotlight created by Parkland. Harmful stereotypes about African Americans still persist. There’s still this underlying belief that if you are black and you got shot, you must have been doing something to get yourself shot. This is something that John Rich shows brilliantly in his work and something that has stayed around even when the Parkland kids are being intersectional about their activism.
What about grief and the broader impacts of gun violence? How does your work address these issues that have emerged in the aftermath of Parkland? Desmond: I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which social media shows you how trauma impacts an individual’s life. Through posts, emojis, hashtags, images, etc you’re able to observe how a person moves through a grief cycle. For example, a person may describe how they’re not sleeping or that they remain in disbelief because of the loss of a loved one. As time progresses, it becomes clear that social media may also hinder their ability to move through through a grief cycle as others comment and interact with their grief; at times making upsetting or disrespectful comments.
In new research published in Digital Medicine my research team found a pathway to threatening and aggressive tweets that starts with responses to trauma and grief for gang associated youth and young adults in Chicago. In fact, there was a two-day window between a response to loss and an aggressive post. This tells us that social media can be used to cope with violence in a way that run counters to how young black youth are depicted in media.
Joe: We have neglected to address the effects of gun violence on caregivers. Our program provides counseling services not only for male survivors of violence, we also facilitate, caregiver support groups because the caregivers often suffer in silence. In fact, the vicarious trauma suffered by caregivers in many cases is more severe than the trauma suffered by the person who was injured. Everyone suffers. You cannot just inoculate the person who was injured by providing them with mental health and social support services and send them back to a network and environment where violence is contagious.
Jooyoung: And the other thing is, calls for more access to mental health care services forgets that many folks of colour don’t have the same relationship with formal therapy. In my work, I met lots of young people living with injuries who were skeptical about formal mental health care services that were available to them. Some thought they were going to get hypnotized and others were resistant to the idea of talking about their innermost fears and vulnerability with a complete stranger. So, part of the mental health picture requires a new way to think about social and emotional support as something that people find in their everyday relationships with family, friends, and even people who are in religious institutions.
What are key policy discussions that aren’t happening right now? And how does your work inform a more nuanced discussion on these issues? Joe: There are a number of policy issues. For example, Maryland (which is where we run our hospital-based intervention) is trying to pass a bill SB 122 that would provide significant funding for violence prevention across the state. However, that bill includes mandatory minimums and increasing prison sentences for various crimes. So on the one hand, you get violence prevention funding that is desperately needed, but at what cost? Sending more poor black Marylanders to prison who live in neighborhoods that have been impacted by structural violence literally decimated by high rates of unemployment and the effects of mass incarceration. As a gun violence researcher of colour, I cannot support that kind of legislation, despite the funding for violence prevention.
Desmond: I think we have to contend with the role of social media in gun violence. We’ve been quick to utilize social media to monitor urban areas and Black Lives Matter activists, but we’ve missed white mass shooters who have left dark messages on social media. We need to have critical discussions about the very real concern that what people say or do on social media may lead to offline violence.
Jooyoung: The other thing, to go back to Joe’s point, is that this movement hasn’t really addressed the ongoing problems of police shooting and killing black men and other folks of colour. We’re having a discussion about raising the age for people to buy firearms and encouraging people to give up their firearms, but many people don’t want to do this because guns represent a means for self-defence. This is where there’s a lot of overlap between people in communities like West Philly and those in red states who own guns and concealed carry. People get guns because they don’t feel safe and have lost faith in the police. So, there’s this terrible irony that we’re talking about regulating guns, which is important, but also not addressing the underlying reasons for why Stephon Clark is getting shot and killed by Sacramento Police. Police violence against black men hasn’t gone away and yet that type of police violence has been swept under the rug in this whole #NeverAgain moment.
Joe: What’s interesting to me is what determines when we decide as a nation what constitutes a public health crisis? In the 80s and 90s we criminalized crack by creating draconian drug policies that sent millions of black people to jail and prison. The irony is Joe Biden framed a lot of those policies yet he is the vice president of the first black president. Policies such as the Anti Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 and the Crime Bill of 1994 under the “first” black President Bill Clinton devastated black inner-city communities and families for generations. We can even go further back to the 70s when heroin ravaged urban communities, it was criminalized. It’s how we arrived at the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York which served as the blueprint for mandatory minimums. The gun violence that was associated with crack markets in inner-cities was criminalized as well. So the black community has been suffering from a drug and gun violence epidemic for a long time yet it was never considered to be a public health issue. There was no public health approach for crack or gun violence. The approach has been lock them up, build more prisons, hire more police.
Only recently have we discussed criminal justice reform, which is interesting now that crack use has waned considerably. Now that heroin and the opioid crisis is literally killing white Americans at extremely high rates, we have approached it as a public health crisis, which has commanded resources, research funding from NIH and the CDC and considerable media attention. Where are all the visuals of SWAT teams and DEA using battering rams on the doors of white middle class homes in the same way they barreled into crack houses? Clearly someone is selling heroin as well right, particularly if most drug transactions are intraracial this means that there are a lot of white heroin and opioid dealers out there killing a lot of people. But there is no discussion about a war on drugs now because the faces suffering from it are white.
Conclusion
Our conversation continued for the greater part of a half hour. As we talked, it struck me how we often go round and round about gun control policies in the aftermath of mass shootings, but almost always fail to address what Desmond refers to as “pathways” into violence, or what Joe calls “structural violence.” In all of the talk about gun control—which is a positive thing overall—we lose sight of the bigger picture, the root causes of violence that propel young people, and particularly black youth, into gangs, drug dealing, and other risky behaviours that amplify their risks of being shot and becoming a shooter.
The internet has blessed and cursed us with an infinite pool of people to make fun of, whether they have it coming or not. This week’s star, an unemployed 30-year-old man named Michael Rotondo, was sued by his parents after they made many unsuccessful attempts to kick him out of their home in upstate New York. They sent him five notices, starting in February, urging him to, well, grow up. In the second note, they were nice enough to offer him $1,100 to find a new place, suggesting that he:
1) Organize the things you need for work and to manage an apartment...
2) Sell the other things you have that have any significant value, (e.g. stereo, some tools etc.). This is especially true for any weapons you may have. You need the money and will have no place for the stuff.
3) There are jobs available even for those with a poor work history like you. Get one - you have to work!
4) If you want help finding a place your Mother has offered to help you.
Rotondo apparently ignored his parents’ repeated warnings to vacate, as well as their offers of assistance, telling the court that throughout his rent-free years at his family home, he "has never been expected to contribute to household expenses, or assisted with chores and the maintenance of the premises." (Public records suggest that between 2008 and 2010, he may in fact have lived outside his parents' home.)
Long haired and bearded with unadorned glasses, Rotondo resembles a sad, twisted version of David Foster Wallace—"infinite guest," one Twitter user quipped—his gaze vexed in an adolescent sort of way, exuding a vague emptiness. A real life iteration of the worst millennial stereotype, it’s no wonder Rotondo’s story was quickly picked up by national and international news sources. He’s every young person’s worst nightmare of how they might end up if they fail miserably, an archetype for Baby Boomer scorn.
After the judge ruled in favour of his parents, Rotondo complained to the press outside the courtroom on video, which was later aired on Jimmy Kimmel Live. "In case you’re thinking of having a kid anytime soon, I want you to listen to this story," Kimmel quipped before explaining Rotondo’s situation. When the clip rolled, the Kimmel audience burst into laughter at the mere sight of the man, who throughout the interview, wrestled with his unruly mane, slowing putting it into a ponytail, as he sputtered to reporters, unable to coherently make the case for why he shouldn’t leave his parents' home. The moment was so inherently funny that Kimmel didn’t even need to offer his own commentary in order to get the audience aroar.
“I do plan to appeal it,” Rotondo told a reporter, “but I’m wondering, you know, 'cause like, how it sounded, you know, I mean, uh.”
“It sounded like he said you need to vacate today,” a reporter replied.
“It sounded kinda like that too, but that’s just so ridiculous,” Rotondo continued.
More laughter.
Rotondo also appeared on CNN, Fox News, TMZ Live, and Inside Edition. His CNN interview was particularly cringey. "There are a lot of people who have read about your story and the thought bubble is, 'What is up with this millennial generation that you guys seem so entitled?' What would you say to those critics?" anchor Brooke Baldwin probed.
"I would say I'm uh, that I'm really not a member of that demographic they're speaking to, of that group, I'm a very conservative. The millennials they’re speaking to are very liberal in their ideology, um," Rotondo said, looking a little confused.
"But you’re 30, so technically I think you are part of the millennial generation. I don't think there's a delineation between..." Baldwin countered.
"Right. You're right, but uh, when people speak to the millennials and the—their general nature as a millennial, they speak to more liberal leanings. In my opinion. Do you disagree?" Rotondo asked, seeking approval.
"I don’t think it’s for me to disagree, I think a millennial is a millennial is a millennial based upon the year you were born, but I think it’s totally your opinion to say," Baldwin said, trying to wrap up the awkward segment.
As she wished him the best of luck with his future endeavors, Rotondo piped up, almost robotically, "I am a millennial."
"Yes," Baldwin said, giving him a heavy dose of side-eye. When he was off the air, she noted, "That was one of the most surreal interviews we’ve taken part of here.”
Rotondo's explanation for why he doesn’t fit the caricature of the entitled, avocado toast-loving brat—his politics—ignores the actual flaws in the stereotype often echoed by right-leaning, curmudgeonly pundits. Complaints about millennial laziness and entitlement fail to take into account the financial burdens unique to the generation—the crippling student debt, the fact that the median income for people 25-34 is 20 percent less than it was in the 1980s, and the lack of the same high-paying job opportunities available to past generations. Census data also shows that as of 2017, almost one in five 25-to-34 year old men lived at their parents' homes, while only 12.5 percent of women in the same demographic still resided with their parents. "The share of young men with jobs peaked around the 1960 Census,” the Pew Research Center reported. “The fall in young men’s employment and earnings since 1970 has likely made living independently more difficult for them, which in turn helps account for the rise in the share of young adults living with their parent(s)."
Rotondo seems fundamentally disinterested in getting a job, vaguely assuring the various reporters who questioned him about it that he was trying—or that he had other stuff going on. "I've been a father for the last few years," he told Business Insider. He also said he recently lost visitation rights due to a conflict he had with the child’s mother.
As laughable of a character as Rotondo may be, his story is a fundamentally sad one. An unkempt man-child—the internet prefers "large adult son"—making a big stink about losing his free housing while passing up the whole work thing is perfect fodder for cable news, television, and Twitter, but relentlessly mocking him is punching down. His story is an embarrassing cry for help, and for whatever reason, he lacks the emotional constitution and life skills he needs to move out of his parents house.
"You only have one mom and dad," Baldwin said to Rotondo on CNN. "I'm sure you’re more upset than you're letting on, but don't you want to reconcile with them?"
"Nnnn-no," Rotondo said.
Rotondo is almost certainly in a crisis of his own making, stubborn and ungrateful to parents who appear to have done what they could to help him mature. But for now, he stands alone in the world, the butt of late-night jokes and relentless internet ire. He's also completely alienated from both his parents and his own child. The temptation to mock him is only natural, but it should also make us uneasy. For the millennial generation, Rotondo is the epitome of who we don’t want older people to think we are.
His story is a warning—never be that guy—but it’s also a tragedy.
Skateboarding loves weirdos and a good comeback story, and in April Jason Jessee exemplified both.
Jessee initially gained notoriety in the 1980s for his powerful style while skating vert, something of a rarity at the time. He garnered sponsorships with Santa Cruz and Speed Wheels, both of whom highlighted his personality as well as his skateboarding. The raw talent exhibited at the peak of his career was such that, in 2012, Transworld skateboarding called him, "Simply one of the baddest individuals ever to ride a skateboard," when naming him 24th on its 30 Most Influential Skaters of All Time list. But in the 1990s, as the skating landscape changed, Jessee started to veer away from the spotlight while remaining a cult hero of sorts. Known as much for his oddball personality and affinity for motorcycle culture as for his skateboarding, his antics were captured in Pray for Me, a 2007 documentary about his life.
Over the last few years he has returned to skateboarding in a bigger way. Last fall the clothing company Brixton created a capsule collection devoted to him called the Jason Jessee Collection, and he has recently been sponsored by or collaborated with (in addition to Brixton and Santa Cruz) OJ Wheels, Independent, Grant's Pomade, Madson Sunglasses, Stance Socks, and Converse. He is featured on the May cover of Thrasher magazine, and in April his first major video part in a decade came in Converse's Purple.
But just two days after the video premiered online, Jessee's past came under intense scrutiny thanks to a post on the Slap message boards entitled, "Jason Jessee is a Nazi and Santa Cruz loves him." Among the allegations and supporting evidence laid out were multiple instances of swastikas in Jessee's clothing and art projects; an anecdote involving a 1987 vert contest, a racial slur, and a fight; a relationship with an alleged neo-nazi band called The Highway Murderers; and some troubling interviews in bothskateboard and biker culture publications in which he used racial and homophobic epithets. In a 1995 interview with Iron Horse magazine, for example, he responded to a question about his age with a rant, saying, among other things, “my mom fucked a n*gger and me and my sisters found out about it—and I’m older than the n*gger!” And, when asked where he lives, replied Santa Cruz, “There’s a lot of militant lesbians here and raw faggots.”
Jason Jessee initially took to Instagram to apologize on May 15, asserting that "what I said in the past does not define who I am today," and that he is "truly and sincerely sorry if I offended anyone." A handwritten letter accompanies his apology. Many in the skateboarding community seemed eager to move on, and his post received supportive messages from prominent figures like Atiba Jefferson, Rob “Sluggo” Boyce, Mike Anderson, and Daryl Angel. Others, however, felt the apology rung hollow. Cooper Winterson, a skateboarder and filmer local to the New York City area, pointed out that it felt more like "a first step" toward potential redemption.
"It takes a lot more than an apology to come back from that level of prejudice, hatred, and bigotry," Winterson told me. "You have to really denounce those beliefs outright, and prove it in action, which is not necessarily a quick and easy thing to do... and the people around him shouldn't just say, 'OK, cool, that's that, all good.' They should hold him to it, to say and do more to show that he denounces white supremacy, nazi ideology, homophobia, and other prejudices."
Reached via email, Jessee didn't attempt to defend his past behavior, admitting it was "ugly and unacceptable" and intended for shock value. "I understand why people are still upset about my words," he wrote. "I deeply apologize to the people who I have offended. I want everyone to know that I’ve evolved and will keep evolving and learning from life’s lessons. I have zero hatred or negativity in my heart for anybody or anything. I hope my actions today speak louder than words. I’m here to uplift people and be real.
"If I could sit down over a cup of coffee and speak to each and every person that I hurt or offended," he continued, "I would do so in a heartbeat. But realistically there’s no way to explain away the lame things I said that have bummed so many people out… I, regretfully, will live with that burden the rest of my life. However, I’m moving forward with nothing but love and compassion for this planet and everyone that’s on it.
"My apology is sincere," he wrote, "and delivered from the bottom of my heart and was meant for anyone that may have been offended or hurt by what I said or did in the past."
Beyond offensive words, one infamous story that has long been circulating in skateboarding’s rumor mill is about a fight that erupted after Jessee allegedly called Ned “Peanut” Brown, an African American skater, the n-word at a skate contest in 1986. Jessee told the OC Weekly in 2006 that the altercation was over Brown being upset that Jessee had been talking to his girlfriend. "I actually talked shit to him, on the top of the ramp. And the next thing I know, I’m on the bottom of the ramp. He socked me in the mouth.”
When asked for his account of the incident for this article, Jessee wrote “We squashed that 32 years ago.”
Photographer Dave Swift talked about the fight between the two in a 2003 Transworld Skateboarding piece about Jessee's contributions to skateboarding over the previous 20 years.
"On the eve of the 1987 Vision/NSA Holiday Havoc amateur finals, Jason was disqualified for instigating a fight with East Coast skater Peanut Brown," Swift wrote. "It was obvious that Jason would've easily won the contest, but he didn't care, thus beginning his professional skateboarding career."
"By the way," Swift added, "Jason lost the fight.”
Jason Jessee apparel for the defunct company Neighborhood in 2009
When asked about his use of swastikas, Jessee replied, "In my past, I used hateful symbols, speech and culture to get a reaction out of people [...] The hateful symbols I have used in the past do not represent who I am and what I believe in. I do not support white supremacy or white power that may be affiliated to any type of club or association that supports those views. I have no plans to ever use any of that negative symbolism again. Period."
Jessee's relationship with the Highway Murderers, a punk band from Santa Cruz described by critics as "violent, misogynistic, and racist,” has also come under scrutiny. Throughout Pray for Me Jessee sports the band's logo on his jackets and in his artwork. One member of the band, Cody Joe Rice, makes no attempt at hiding his beliefs, posing with a Celtic cross tattoo on his hand and taking to Instagram to brag about axes and guitar cases adorned with swastikas. Around the time the documentary hit theaters, Jessee was featured in the music video for their song "Let's Get Murdered." According to Jessee, he's known guitarist Mobby since he was 16, but told VICE he was in the dark regarding the band's beliefs.
"I didn't know about their extreme imagery, nor do I support images that can be hurtful or incite damage or hate to others," he claimed.
Jessee pinned much of his former behavior—“mistakes that haunt me until this day”—on drug addiction, a plague he says he shook at the beginning of the decade.
"On New Year's Eve, in 2010, I was standing in my driveway and I made the decision of changing my life around," he wrote. "I was tired of trying to die and decided to start living."
Asked if he had ever experienced this sort of backlash in his career before, Jessee said no, but that "I believe we should be held accountable for every action and I’m comfortable with that."
Bob Denike, the president and CEO of NHS (parent company of Santa Cruz Skateboards, Independent Trucks, and OJ Wheels, among others), addressed Jessee’s behavior and announced the company is indefinitely suspending its relationship with Jessee in a statement to VICE.
Santa Cruz Skateboards and everyone at NHS clearly and emphatically denounce racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, white supremacy, and Nazi sympathizers. Anyone suggesting that our company supports or promotes these offensive beliefs is simply wrong.
For decades we have worked to build and run a diverse company that creates opportunity for people and gives second chances. Our employees and team riders are a demonstration of our commitment to diversity and opportunity. If a person shows a willingness to change, we try to help.
A bit of history: Jason was one of NHS’ top pro skaters in the 1980’s. We split ways with Jason in the 1990’s. During that period he began abusing drugs and this continued through 2008.
Jason came back to NHS when by early 2010 he was committed to his sobriety. He was healthy, sound in mind, body and spirit. He had changed. We decided to give him a second chance.
However, when NHS recently learned of the Iron Horse Magazine interview in 1994, we immediately called him in and confronted the issue. Jason accepted responsibility and has since issued a public apology. Further, Jason acknowledged he needed to continue to publicly denounce his past statements.
Nonetheless, NHS has decided to indefinitely suspend Jason Jessee.
Similarly, a Converse spokesperson told VICE that, as a result of his remarks, Jessee has been indefinitely suspended from the team.
"Converse and the Cons Skate team have zero tolerance for words or actions of hate towards any human being. Not today, not ever. As a brand, a team and a company, we believe in creating a world that embraces diverse communities, cultures, people of color and genders with kindness, genuine respect, openness and inclusion.
"We have indefinitely suspended Jason from the Converse CONs team. We are also working to better understand Jason’s past and the work he can do to show respect, compassion and acceptance for all people, and use his voice to spread a message of openness throughout the Skate community."
Tony Davis, co-founder of Madson sunglasses, wrote to VICE that "Without speculating on the details, we clearly don’t support behavior of hatred or intolerance. That is not the Jason we’ve come to know. We stand for unifying people which takes love, and the power of forgiveness.”
VICE also reached out to Stance Socks, Brixton, and Grant's Pomade and will update this post if we receive a response.
While the Slap message board and Jessee’s Instagram page are filled with comments from young skaters who don’t find his apology sufficient, Ryan Lay is one of the few pro skateboarders who has publicly spoken out about Jessee. On Instagram, he posted a story saying that, "Jason is not a victim. This is not a political correctness issue. Dropping the n-word (in print) as an adult and wearing/making/selling clothes with swastikas on them into your 30's is fucking wack (and that's just what's documented). I can't fucking believe that even needs to be said.”
Lay goes on to say he "truly believes in rehabilitation and forgiveness," but that he needs to first see serious "work put in.”
Going forward, Jessee told VICE he intends to spread a "positive and inclusive message," though he was vague on specifics.
"I cherish the lessons I’ve learned through my life, and especially through this experience," he wrote. "I’ve learned the power of words, the power of your voice is strong. I know now how to use my voice to spread a positive and inclusive message, and it’s something I am committed to doing."
In 2018, we're seeing more women, members of the LGBTQ community, and people of color skateboarding than ever before. Until the industry starts to reflect and respect this diversity, we're guaranteed to see more allegations of racism, sexism, and homophobia coming out of the woodwork. Addressing one instance of discriminatory behavior is an important start, but it won't fix underlying issues. As Lay put it, "20+ years of that shit with [Jessee’s] enormous influence helped normalize and bake that ideology into our culture… I'm really hoping this doesn't get brushed aside and we can all grow from it and expel some of this toxic shit from skating."
This has been a rumor for some time, and it's an obvious pick for Disney. Boba Fett barely did anything in the original trilogy but stand around before dying hilariously when his glitchy jetpack threw him into a hole with teeth, but for some reason fans took to the bounty character and he became a kind of cult icon. In Attack of the Clones, George Lucas revealed that a dude named Jango Fett was the genetic model for the original Stormtrooper clone army; Boba was one of those clones and got adopted by Jango. Boba also shows up in the Clone Wars animated series and a shitload of Expanded Universe stuff.
Details about the movie's plot or cast weren't revealed, but the writer/director will be James Mangold, director of Logan and The Wolverine, movies about a similar antihero type of dude, and you can imagine this being gritty as heck.
With Solo, the announced Obi-Wan movie, and now Boba, it's clear that Disney execs are slowly working through all the characters featured in the original trilogy, which is good news for everyone who is hoping we finally get to see more of Uncle Owen's life as a Tatooine moisture farmer.
Ronda Rankin was whizzing down a stretch of interstate in Omaha, Nebraska, on Friday night when her daughter noticed something strange about the car next to them. There seemed to be some sort of round, fuzzy blur on the roof of the maroon minivan that was flying down the road at about 60 MPH. When they inched a little closer to the van, there was no mistaking it: The ball of fluff clinging onto the roof for dear life was, without a doubt, a cat.
Side-by-side with the minivan, Rankin waved at it while her husband honked. "There's a cat on your roof!" Rankin mouthed, pointing up at it. "A cat on your roof!"
The minivan slowed down, veered off to the side of the highway, and disappeared behind them, taking the uncertain fate of the daredevil feline with it.
But on Thursday, ABC affiliate KET7 managed to track down the cat's owners, and discovered that—miraculously—the cat, aptly named Rebel, was still alive. And he hadn't even gotten injured. Michelle Criger, the Rebel's owner, told KET7 she had no idea that he had been surfing on top of their van. Apparently the cat likes to hang out around the car, and Criger knows to look under the van and inside of it before she drives anywhere. But she didn't think to check on top of it—until the Rankins flagged her down.
"When I got him off the roof of the van, he wasn't scared at all," Criger told KET7. "He wasn't shaking, heart racing, nothing. We were more scared than him."
And so Rebel the cat lives on, presumably, as his name suggests, gearing up for his next death-defying feat of bravery. Maybe he'll graduate from hitchhiking and move on to scaling very tall telephone poles, or perhaps, feeling bit by the travel bug, he'll try to make his next getaway via plane. And why not? He's still got eight lives left.
As I walked across the stage, I couldn’t believe I was finally graduating. I’d spent the past three years at St. Francis College in Brooklyn finishing my bachelor’s degree in Sociology. My family was in the crowd, screaming loudly. My mom and my grandmother were crying. I kept thinking just don’t trip as all the years leading to that moment flashed through my mind.
I was born in the Bronx to a single mom. My grandmother realized her daughter needed support, so she returned from Haiti to help raise me. At first we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and even though we were poor, my mom never made it seem that way. I always went to good schools, and every Saturday my mom and I would have brunch at IHOP before going shopping. Sometimes we’d see a Broadway play. I’ve seen Les Misérables about 18 times.
When I was 15, we moved to Westchester County outside New York City. It was a tough transition: The schools weren’t as diverse, and I felt like no one wanted to be my friend. Still, I did well in class, graduated, and got accepted to St. John’s University in Queens.
I did terribly the first semester, but started to perform much better during the second. It was around that time—in February—that I got a phone call from an acquaintance who said, “I just saw your mom on News 12 in Westchester.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “I spoke with her yesterday.”
But she insisted, saying my mother had been arrested.
“You are a liar,” I screamed! “Don’t call me again. Don’t you ever say that to me again.”
After I hung up, I googled it, and there she was in a news clip—she had been charged with grand larceny and identity theft. My mom had been stealing credit cards and using them to buy prepaid Visa cards. I couldn’t believe it. I started to cry. I knew she was going through something: She had lost her job, she had to take care of me, and help get me through college. There was so much pressure.
Even though I was close to my mom growing up, she was very secretive. There were lots of things about her past that I didn’t know. I found out much later that, in 1991, she was locked up for nearly eight months. And a few years later, when I was in the fourth grade, I didn’t realize my mom went to prison for a year. My grandmother told me she was away for work.
After my mom was arrested this time, I went home to see my grandmother. The house was a mess because the police had searched through everything. I had never seen anything like it: clothes, jewelry, papers—all our stuff, strewn across the apartment. They had just left it like that.
Without my mom, we couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Soon after, we moved to Yonkers, and I went back to St. John’s. I struggled through my second semester before returning home that summer for good.
I kept the fact that my mom was in prison a secret. Some of my friends knew, but they wouldn’t say anything. When I went home to Yonkers, I felt like no one really understood me.
Then I met a guy who changed my life.
One evening, I was walking to a party in my neighborhood and a voice called out, “Hello, how are you?” Instead of going to the party, I hung out with him. The next day he asked me to be his girlfriend. I soon moved out of my house and into his mother’s home, where he lived.
About two weeks after we met, he told me he had just come home from doing 3.5 years in prison. “I don’t care,” I said. “I respect you, regardless.” At that point, I was in love.
When he lost his construction job, he began selling drugs and stealing. Eventually, he taught me how to rob, too. The first time I helped him rob someone, we had gotten kicked out of his mother’s house. We didn’t have anything to eat, so he called one of his friends, who picked us up and took us to a bar. The friend’s girlfriend and I talked to guys, and danced with them. Then we said, “Let’s go outside and have a cigarette.” Once we got them alone, our boyfriends came out and took care of the rest.
I got caught up in his lifestyle, and soon we were pulling off “honey traps” whenever we needed cash.
When my boyfriend got arrested, I started scamming on my own. I would post on websites as an escort but then take the money and run. That’s how I got arrested the first time: I got charged with petty larceny while working a guy in Hartsdale. My family bailed me out.
A few months later, while out on bail, I decided to join my boyfriend on a scheme in Virginia Beach. A friend of his had been talking to a guy down there. My boyfriend's friend said the guy wanted to spend the evening with three women, and they would each get $10,000 just to “hang out.” So my boyfriend and I asked a friend of our own if she wanted to make some easy money, and we drove down to the beach.
But the guys didn’t know they were talking to federal officers. And I didn’t know the women were supposed to be sold into sex slavery. I knew it was a scheme, but I didn’t know all the elements.
As soon as we started walking on the boardwalk to make the exchange, about 50 cops and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents surrounded us with their guns drawn. It was a set up. We threw our hands in the air.
I told them I didn’t know what was going on, and they said, “You may have not jumped in the water, but you dipped your toes.”
I was arrested and booked into a jail in Virginia. I didn’t call my mom for a week. She had gotten out of prison a few years earlier, and now I’d have to tell her I was following in her footsteps.
What the hell did I get myself into? I wondered. Ultimately, I was charged with conspiracy to transport persons for prostitution.
I went to court, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a year in prison. I had already spent eight months behind bars because they denied me bail, and by the time I was transferred to Hazelton prison in West Virginia, I had already served nine months of my sentence.
When I got home, my mother was getting her master’s degree in teaching with the help of Hudson Link, a reentry program that helps formerly incarcerated people get into school and rebuild their lives. My mom told me about St. Francis and their tuition-free college program for former prisoners. But we still lived in Yonkers, and St. Francis is all the way in Brooklyn.
“How am I supposed to get there without a car?” I asked.
“Find a way,” she told me.
That was three years ago. At first I wasn’t excited to be returning to school because I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to work. But when I got there, everyone was so supportive.
I thought to myself: If I mess this up, I am messing it up not just for myself, but for other people trying to turn their lives around. Getting my life back was tough. I was young, one of the youngest in the program. I violated my probation twice. But school kept me pushing.
By the time graduation day came around, everything was going well. Now I’m working and looking for ways to help kids from disenfranchised neighborhoods find their strength. Meanwhile, my mom is working on a dissertation about intergenerational incarceration.
What I went through won’t ever disappear, but at least I have something to say about it: This is the path my life had to take so I could be strong.
Arielle Pierre, 27, graduated from St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She plans to pursue a master’s degree in social work.
Exactly 100 years ago this month, a wave of lynchings swept through the area around Valdosta, in south Georgia. After the murder of a white farmer, a mob of nearly 300 white people went searching for the perpetrators and wound up killing 13 people—including a pregnant woman named Mary Turner and her unborn child—most of whom had no role in the murder. It was such a horrific event that hundreds of black people fled the area, and yet the atrocity wasn’t remembered with any marker or official commemoration until nearly a century later.
We know about the lynchings today thanks to the contemporaneous accounts collected by NAACP investigator Walter White and a few local newspaper reports. The story that emerges is so horrifying you don’t want to think of it as happening just 100 years ago:
It began with Hampton Smith. An abusive white employer, Smith often had to resort to the debt peonage system as a way to find workers for his farm. Back then, it was common for cops to arrest black people on frivolous charges, then give them fines they couldn’t pay. But employers like Smith could pay off those fines, then force the black arrestees to work off their debt—a system that took the place of slavery in many parts of the South.
It was in this system that after being issued a $30 fine for rolling dice, 19-year-old Sidney Johnson found himself under Smith’s thumb. When Johnson refused to show up to work one day due to an illness, Smith beat him even though Johnson had already worked off his fine. It was incidents like that one that led disgruntled workers to gather at the home of Mary and Hayes Turner, who had a lengthy history of grievances while working for Smith. (The farmer had beaten Mary Turner on several occasions.) During the May 13, 1918, meeting, Johnson supposedly directed the plot to murder Smith, which came to fruition three days later; another employee, William Head, allegedly stole a shotgun from Smith and gave it to Johnson to commit the murder. Smith’s wife was also shot by Johnson, but survived.
The shooting, along with false rumors that Smith’s wife was raped, led to a mob of nearly 300 white people to seek out anyone potentially involved in the crime. One of the mob leaders, an undertaker named Samuel McGowan, claimed that even if the Germans invaded the area (this was near the end of World War I) the lynchings would still be carried out.
The resulting lynching massacre was one of the worst moments in a dark period of American history when black people were oppressed by the threat of organized mob violence. Events such as these have been memorialized in Alabama’s Lynching Museum, but they have also been more quietly commemorated by communities across the country that still bear the scars.
On Saturday a few dozen people, including several descendants of the victims, gathered at the Webb Miller Community Church in Hahira, Georgia, to mark the 100th anniversary of the lynching massacre. The Mary Turner Project, a group devoted to raising awareness of the 1918 events, have organized similar gatherings every year around the anniversary of the death of Mary Turner. The annual commemoration is a place to share and re-tell the victims’ stories and to help heal the lasting wounds.
“I don’t know a whole lot about the story because I was older when we found out about everything.” said Audrey Grant, the great-granddaughter of Mary Turner. “We would ask my grandmother different things. She would just hold her head down and say, ‘Well, they say the white folks killed my mama,’ and she wouldn’t talk about it.”
Head, the mob's first victim, was captured by the mob the day after Smith’s murder. Though the mob initially planned to gather each individual thought to be involved in the crime to lynch them as a group, Head was lynched shortly after his capture. They hanged him on an oak tree five miles outside Valdosta, then fired several bullets into his body. Will Thompson and Julius Jones were captured by separate mobs shortly after and similarly hanged, their bodies left dangling from the trees. Hayes Turner had been arrested for involvement in the murder plot and was being transported from one jail to another when 40 masked men kidnapped him and hanged him, too. Convicts were ordered to cut down the body and bury him two days later.
Eugene Rice, another Smith employee, was accused by the mob of attending the meeting to plot the murder, then captured and hanged. The mob then murdered another three men who were never identified. Chime Riley was hanged and then weighed down with clay turpentine cups and thrown in the Little River near Barney, Georgia. Simon Schuman was pulled out of his home by the mob near Berlin, Georgia, never to be seen again. None of these six men were involved in Smith’s murder but were rather encountered randomly by the lynch mob.
But the worst was yet to come. When the mob approached Mary Turner, the pregnant woman “apparently stated that her husband knew nothing of the plot to murder Smith, was not a party to the crime, that her husband’s hanging was unjust, and if she discovered the identities of the members of the mob she would swear out warrants against them,” wrote Christopher C. Meyers, a professor of history at Valdosta University, in a 2006 article in the Georgia Historical Quarterly. The Atlanta Journal reported at the time that Turner’s lynching was incited by her “unwise remarks… about the hanging of her husband.”
From Meyers’s account:
The mob tied her ankles together and hung her to a tree head down and gasoline from automobiles was poured over her. Turner’s clothing was burned off her body. A member of the mob produced a sharp knife and her stomach was laid open; her unborn child fell to the ground. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into Turner until she was barely recognizable as a human being. Both Turner and her child were buried about ten feet from the tree, the grave marked by a whiskey bottle with a cigar placed in the neck.
“The thing that is most disturbing about the incident of the lynchings is who could be so cold, heartless, and gruesome to murder someone for speaking up for justice and get up the very next day, attend someone’s church, and feel justified in what they did,” said Randy McClain, the great-nephew of Mary Turner. (His great-uncle William Head was also lynched.) “She stood for what she believed in. She fought for what she believed in. She was killed for what she believed in.”
Sidney Johnson managed to elude capture from the mob and law enforcement for a week, thanks to the assistance of a man named John Bryant. But Bryant ultimately tipped off the police. When caught, Johnson opened fire on the officers and was killed in the ensuing gun battle. The mob, dissatisfied with not having a direct hand in Johnson’s killing, tied his body to a car and dragged it through the streets of Valdosta, then transported it to Barney, where he was put on display and publicly burned.
No one was ever charged or reprimanded for any of this. None of the crimes were ever officially documented, even though their impact was such that NAACP investigator Walter White estimated 500 black people fled Lowndes County in their wake, part of the “Great Migration” out of the South that was at least partly a consequence of this kind of racist terrorism.
For decades, the stories of Mary Turner and the other victims were largely ignored, even within the local community. That began to change in 2007, when local resident John Rogers and former Valdosta University sociology professor Mark Patrick George founded the Mary Turner Project. “Even the families rarely talked about it,” Rogers told me. A couple weeks after they discovered the location where Mary Turner was lynched, Rogers and Mark worked together with students at Valdosta University and with descendants of the victims to start organizing historical documentation.
Today, a highway historical marker commemorates the atrocity, though even that effort was difficult. The Mary Turner Project fought with the Georgia Historical Society, which maintains and presides over the state of Georgia’s historical markers, for nearly two years over the text that would be included on the it. According to George, the historical society tried to insist Smith, the murdered white farmer, be named first on the list of victims. Georgia Historical Society Director of Programs Christy Crisp told me the marker text proposed by the society included Smith’s name, which would have happened to come first in discussing the sequence of events. (His name was ultimately left off the marker.)
Bullet holes in the marker.
In 2013, four years after the marker was erected, someone vandalized the plaque by shooting it five times. The Mary Turner Project turned down an offer from the Georgia Historical Society to replace the sign. George told me, “We think those bullet holes reflect something important, it reflects how some people still think about this.”
“Every community has atrocities,” said George. “People need to know their local history... We should tell the truth and have accurate history. The other part of it is we are in a white supremacist nation, it’s in our DNA, it’s 400 years old and hasn’t stopped at all. Donald Trump is the latest visible version of it.”
Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.
TAKE #1:
What's the story? Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump's (now cancelled) summit in Singapore. Reasonable Take: Good if this can happen, long-term, but Kim Jong-un is a certified rotter! Quarter Pounder and Fries: No actually, my dude, Kim Jong-un is misunderstood.
How quickly things change. The central thrust of this deeply inspiring and unbelievably patriotic hot take is already irrelevant, as Donald "Dotard" Trump yesterday announced he was calling off his hugely unexpected meeting with Kim "Rocket Man" Jong-un. Nevertheless, the theory espoused by Fox News reporter Pete Hegseth as to why the North Korean leader wanted to agree to the meeting in the first place is so off piste, it would be churlish not to share.
Things start off fairly ordinarily for old Pete, when he's asked why Kim wants the meeting. He fairly accurately reckons that the sanctions currently imposed on North Korea are strangling the country, and that added pressure from China is compounding this. However, he then says: "And then I think there's probably a point where the guy who wants to meet Dennis Rodman, and loves NBA basketball, loves Western pop culture, probably doesn’t love being the guy who has to murder his people all day long, probably wants some normalisation…" Pete, that's… that's the plot of that Seth Rogan film The Interview. You're describing the plot of The Interview.
You are in the smoking area of a club. You asked Pete Hegseth if you could nick a cigarette and now he's got an arm clamped around your neck, his shirt transparent with sweat, sleeves rolled up to his biceps, his free hand roving wildly with a lit smoke of his own. "Thing is, mate, about Kim, mate, is that people don’t know him," he’s shouting in your ear. "Like, they know him, like dictator-him, but not him-him. Like: you’d actually get on so well with him, mate. All the starving his nation stuff, and the forced confessions, and the gulags, and the hard labour and the blah blah blah, you know? It’s noise, like. He’s actually really excited for the new series of Arrested Development. He follows Timothee Chalamet on Instagram. He really wants to meet you."
The re-casting of Kim Jong-un as a hard-working, misunderstood American patriot is one of the biggest rebrands of the year, and I am here for it. In other words, if I ever do something horrendously fucked up I want Pete Hegseth to defend me on TV and tell everyone that actually, deep down, I’m just an average dude who like shooting hoops.
What's the story? Whether or not the Royal Wedding was boring. Reasonable Take: Yeah, it was boring. I mean, yes, I watched all of it, but only so I could participate in the discourse. Hot Pot: If you don’t like the Royal Wedding you should probably… go back where you came from?
The Royal Wedding was last weekend, and if you’re anything like me it was probably an instructive lesson in how the political, or the rational, cannot hope to over-power the emotional. Or in other words: being a big man and saying the monarchy is a bad thing is all well and good, but actually there’s something elemental about billions of people watching a wedding at the same time. Plus, the cello bit was good, and Tom Hardy was there looking like one of those security guards at festivals who tells you to get down off your mate's shoulders.
That said, not everybody enjoyed the special day. Journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was one of them. She took to Twitter after the ceremony to ask if it was "safe to return" and whether journalists had run out of breath yet, and called the wedding proof Britain is an "infantilized, escapist nation". Which, while a bit of buzzkill, is probably true. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, however, took umbrage to these remarks and told Alibhai-Brown, who was born in Uganda, to "be nice". She continued with the suggestions that she should "appreciate just a little the country and the people" where she has chosen to live, and benefited from. Which is, you know, rank.
Dorries has since tried to defend her comments, saying she would have said the same to anyone who was trying to spoil a day of unity that "crossed racial boundaries". Which would be fine, had she not literally pointedly centred her entire riposte around Alibhai-Brown appreciating the country from which she'd benefitted from. It's that distance – that "you should count yourself lucky" attitude – that marks this out. She's explicitly saying: you don’t really belong here, so enjoy it. It’s sort of the post-colonial equivalent of, "Cheer up, love, it might never happen." Anyway, shouts to Nadine Dorries for watching us take two steps forward and shoving ten steps back.
PRIME CUT: "Probably doesn’t want to be the guy who has to murder his people all day long." Then don't?
National and provincial politicians are speaking out against the actions of Atalante, whose members stormed into VICE's Montreal offices on Wednesday afternoon.
"We must condemn the action and the intimidation, especially in this case towards journalists. We have the right and the duty to answer this nonsense. What these people have done is to undermine freedom of expression," Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said during a press briefing at the C2 Montréal conference on Thursday morning.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said "the incursion into VICE's offices yesterday is something I find alarming and it is an example of intimidation of the media that is absolutely unacceptable."
Several media outlets and journalists have also denounced the intrusion of the anti-immigration group in our offices. Patrick Lagacé, from the daily La Presse,recalled that in September 2000, a member of the Hells Angels attacked journalist Michel Auger, who was covering the organized crime war. The President of the Quebec Federation of Journalists, Stéphane Giroux, saw an attempt at censorship by Atalante: "This is a new step that has been taken, and that worries us a lot. "
Around 4:00 pm on Wednesday, members of the ultra-nationalist group Atalante burst into VICE's Montreal office. After an employee opened the door to a man holding a bouquet of flowers, a delegation of six or seven men, all masked except one, entered playing The Price is Right theme song on a bluetooth speaker. They then walked around the newsroom, throwing clown noses and hundreds of leaflets all over the place. The leaflet featured a quote attributed to Napoleon: the word vice was replaced by the logo of VICE, handled by expert hands using MS Paint.
They specifically tried to intimidate the journalist Simon Coutu—who has reported about the group—gathering around his desk to give him a trophy, which read "VICE media trash 2018."
Raphaël Lévesque, who goes by Raf Stomper, used the visit to thank Coutu on behalf of "all the victims of the war that you are trying to start."
The group was reacting to an article published last week about the incursions of Atalanta in Montreal that are becoming more frequent.
Film posters are invitations. A good film poster is your ticket through the magic door of cinema. To love cinema is to love to share it, and there is nothing that communicates that love as swiftly or as evocatively as an artful poster. If film was the medium of the 20 th century, then the film poster was the middleman: the portal through the magic door of cinema.
Bill Gold, who created posters for Casablanca, Dial M for Murder, A Clockwork Orange, Alien and hundreds of other films, died this week aged 97. His posters popped with a dynamism and motion that wildly distilled the drama, mystery, and intensity of a film with a single image.
His posters adorned marquees from 1942 to 2011: seven decades of work that informed the collective memories of generations of moviegoers.
We live in a time where the large studios have agreed on a think-tank aesthetic: big studio posters are photoshopped templates, crowded with every character who has an adjacent franchise and toy-line. In the age of the rebrand, the reboot, and the retcon, posters can’t communicate much other than “this product is familiar, and will numb you to the outside world for its running time.”
But Bill Gold’s posters, on the other hand, were as bold as their subjects. He mainly worked for Warner Brothers, and later Clint Easton’s Malpaso Productions. His second ever assignment was Michael Curtiz’s Cassablanca (1942). The poster says so much about the film while giving away little: Bogart is colourised, and stands in contrast to the supporting cast who are drawn in foggy blood reds. Somehow, mysteriously, Gold is able to allude to the thing that made Cassablanca so unique: an existential noir, with the grand-scope and excitement of a typical war/adventure film. The gun in Bogart’s hand could almost be considered a spoiler, if Gold hadn’t emphasized the glossy hopelessness in his and Ingrid Bergman’s eyes.
The man himself
After returning from WW2, Gold became art director of Warner Bros New York advertising department. His posters in this period captured the essence of the dread and desperation that defined American cinema of the postwar era. Postwar prosperity was coupled with cynical reality and the otherworldly threat of atomic annihilation. The visual language of film, and thus the film poster, had to shift with the traumatised, disillusioned, and increasingly young imagination of postwar America.
Gold’s posters of this time are eerie in how well they reflect this mood. He produced training films during the war, and his art in the 1950s is almost cynical in how it lifts propagandistic design ideas. His Dial M for Murder poster rings out like a “Reds Under the Bed” paste-up on a brick wall. It oozes knowing menace.
Gold founded Bill Gold Advertising in the early 60s, and along with illustrators like Bill Peak, created some of the most iconic films of the decade. His work became technicolour dreamscapes: the fauvist brush strokes made way for Paisley curls and pop fuzz brightness. His posters for My Fair Lady (1964) and The Music Man (1962) sparkle with the brash energy of the early 60s.
But it was in the new wave of the late 60s and early 70s—when the big studios were merging with the alternative sensibilities of independent American cinema—that Gold’s work merged the moment and the mood, with the movie. His poster for Bullitt (1968) has Steve McQueen leaning rakishly against mondo-cool vertical lines, the image of modernity and the meanness that follows it.
He captured the rabid desperation of late 60s cool with his posters for Cool Hand Luke (1965) and the seminal Bonnie and Clyde. As such, his work was forever tangled with the semiotics of youth culture, as well as future markets’ way of selling it.
His 70s work was stripped back: punkish, efficiency. His poster for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) uses the simple jagged enveloping triangles to tell that this film is horny, violent, and horny for violence.
To me, it is Gold’s translation of unexplainable terror that is the most striking. His Poster for Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) is a simple image of a man standing before a house, under a streetlight, in stark black and white. Yet, in the immediate halt of the shadows, in our uncertainty as to where the man is heading (even facing), there is that same unknowable horror that underlies the film.
We see this also in his poster for Deliverance (1972) if in a totally different style. Burt Reynolds and co ride a canoe out of a bright hyper detailed eyeball—an eyeball that is once stalker, and witness. In his poster for Alien (1979) we’re given just the word as it drops four times down the page to frame the red outlines of the human characters—it’s so simple, but it exudes the same basic dread that makes the film itself so overwhelming.
Gold’s catalogue charts the arc of studio film from its golden age to its decline to its resurgence to its suffocating omnipresence. We see few posters from the big studios that dare to have the flourish and ferocity of Gold’s work. It’s rare that a studio like Warner Brothers will put out a film that isn’t based on an existing property—the PR wonks birth these movies as products, the posters are to be nullifying stepping stones in the vertical marketing nightmare.
Gold was of another time. The way we consume media now is blurred not just by process but by the sheer expanse of content. Gold notched the signage of so many of my key movie memories. I can still remember walking through the isles of Jumbo Video as a boy and seeing the VHS with his poster for Dirty Harry (1971) for a cover. What the hell was this pink snarl of an image? And why could I hear the gunshot?
In Islam, fasting is one of the five basic pillars that every Muslim is bound to follow to help push his cause on the Day of Judgment. Or end up burning in hell for a few thousand years. But in my experience, fellow Muslims can make life a living hell, scorning you for not fasting as you try to clear your WhatsApp history of the zillion “Ramadan Mubarak” messages clogging up your already thin phone storage. I envy werewolves, who aren’t required to fast.
Bursting phone storage is probably Allah’s way of punishing me for gulping down my daily dose of biryani as my friends wait for sunset to resume their regular sinful activities. As qayaamat draws near, VICE spoke to Muslims who stopped fasting during Ramzan to find out why.
Hashim Rasheed, 33, Dublin, Ireland “I come from a family of practising Muslims, originally from Kerala, and work as a business development manager in Dublin. I have stopped fasting because the day just won’t end—it’s 17 hours long in Dublin in the summer. Plus, it’s hard to fast if you are working, as it’s difficult to change your shift according to the Ramadan timings.”
Syed Suhaib, 25, New Delhi “I stopped way back in my 7th Standard because of my inability to bear hunger and thirst. I broke my fast on ‘rosha khushai‘ [the first fast ceremony] secretly when I went to my terrace and drank water to quench my first. I have never fasted since then. I don’t think it’s scientific as people claim it to be. In fact, I think fasting for a month ends up harming your body.”
Afshan Majid stopped fasting after she grew uncomfortable with religious customs. Image: Facebook
Afshan Majid, 32, Pune “My ideas towards religion were shaped by the ideological tug of war that took place between my paternal and maternal grandfathers. My nana was a Deobandi, while dada was a hardcore Communist. I tilted towards my dada and the proverbial seeds of proletarian rebellion were born there—though I was a timid child, a bookworm, a nerd and never toeing out of line.
“Now I don't observe the regular tradition and customs of religion, including fasting. I guess I haven't overthrown the upbringing quite successfully because I fast at times; but because I like it and not as a religious exercise. I have never 'come out' in front of my parents just because I know it will hurt them. I married a fellow agnostic a couple of years back.”
Sameer*, 27, Noida “I am journalist and fasted on the first day of this Ramadan, but couldn’t carry on. I think it’s practically impossible for me to fast for 30 days. I spend at least 12-15 hours of of my day on my shift in office. Moreover, I have to speak on camera on most days, and if I don’t drink water my throat gets dry. Moreover, it’s difficult to pray five times a day in an office.”
Alina Hasan, 29, New Delhi “I work as a brand strategist in New Delhi. My parents have always been liberal in their approach, but you still are afraid of anything which looks ‘sinful’. I stopped fasting when I was a teenager. As a child, I was against this attitude of making people guilty about the normal things. Some said playing Holi will result in devils cutting body parts in Jehannum. Other girls my age were having high school crushes and I was just scared. I was petrified of alcohol because of what I had heard from people.
“My first boyfriend in college was a Muslim rationalist who further strengthened the doubts and helped me move out of that thought. Also, I think I don’t want to wash my hands 10 times a day for the wuzu as I am a lazy fucker.”
Anas hopes to work for changes that society really needs, and not just for a month. Image: Facebook
Mohammad Anas, 24, Aligarh “The question that came to mind before I stopped fasting was the very basic one—Why do we fast? I was told that this auspicious month purifies your soul. The food that we reject during the time fills the hungry stomachs of the poor. All hatred and evil thoughts are 'washed off' from the heart and one devotes oneself meditating higher thoughts. But when I tried to relate all this to our present condition I was left startled.
“When I see the rich filling their ever-hungry sacks with food and grains for them to store, I make up my mind to work for the change that the society really needs, and not just for a month. And yes, now I have decided not to get along with this flow of traditional pull that has long left to serve the purpose it was meant for.”
Furqan Faridi, 27, New Delhi “Ramzan is something that is ingrained in us since our childhood. It is kind of fun, I guess, with all the activities in my mohalla that took place when it came. Though after living on my own for some years, I think I have just outgrown it. I was never the religious kind, but fasted more out of a sense of community and kinship. I and my flatmates still fast, although rarely, but only when there's some ‘scene’, like we are having an iftar party or cooking.”
* Some names have been changed at the request of the subjects.
Between November 2017 and January 2018, at least five adult performers died due to alleged drug overdoses or by suicide—a pattern which many in the industry say they’ve never witnessed before. Now, female performers are calling out for more mental health resources within the adult entertainment industry, while creating their own support groups for sex workers.
Award-winning adult star Shyla Stylez, 35, was found unresponsive in her mother’s house on November 9. Yuri Luv, 31, died in her sleep in early December due to an accidental overdose of the prescription opioid hydrocodone, as reported by the Los Angeles County Coroner. August Ames, 23, was reportedly found asphyxiated from hanging in a park near her home in California on December 5, just days after she was harassed on social media.
In January, 20-year-old Olivia Nova was found dead in a private property in Las Vegas. She died of complications from alcohol abuse, as revealed through an autopsy report carried by the Clark County Coroner’s Office in Las Vegas. On January 7, 23-year-old Olivia Lua, known as Olivia Voltaire, also passed away after she overdosed on a combination of drugs and alcohol at a California rehab facility.
In the immediate aftermath, industry advocates released a statement calling for performers to seek professional counselling if they need it, and to be aware of online sexual violence and harassment. “We ask that our community practice compassion, sympathy, and empathy with one another because there is so much outside of our industry working against us,” reads the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC) statement.
Months after the string of deaths, performers and activists say the long-term fight for sex-friendly mental health support is far from over, as stigma continues to stand in the way.
Los Angeles-based psychotherapist Kate Loree specializes in alternative sexuality issues. Loree has worked with adult industry performers who say they often receive death threats online, and some are mistreated when family or friends find out about their work. While it may be easier for performers who have been harassed on social media to delete their accounts, for most, their profiles are a valuable asset to their business and the reason for landing a new gig.
“I think in our culture we don’t want to blame ourselves; we want to think that it’s the porn industry that does this to these girls. We don’t want to look at ourselves, we don’t want to think we are killing these girls,” said Loree.
Loree says agencies and production companies should provide online resources for beginners to assist their performers with mental health. “The porn performers I talk to—a lot of them get rape threats and death threats daily, and so part of the orientation would be teaching them to manage their boundaries on social media and with our culture.”
Vixen models wearing commemorative August Ames T-shirts. Image via Instagram
Many groups do offer mentorship programs and mental health support resources intended for adult performers, such as APAC. However, Kelly Pierce, adult performer and board member of the Adult Performer Actors Guild (APAG), told Rolling Stone that while the guild offers outreach to members, the multi-billion dollar industry needs a well-established mental health support system.
Ela Darling, performer and co-founder of VrTube.xx, believes the issue stems from the stigmatization that adult actors are “dirty” and “unhealthy” because of how they appear on film. Darling told VICE that performers may face discrimination if they decide to leave porn in pursuit of another career. In November 2016, 38-year-old teacher Resa Woodward was forced out of her classroom by district officials in Texas after they received an anonymous tip that she worked as an adult film performer over 20 years ago.
“People will watch our porn all day long and actually shame and stigmatize us. Dating is really hard—there are plenty of people who are happy to fuck you, but they don’t want to meet you,” said Darling.
There was no shortage of mental health services at this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, where organizations promoted their sex-friendly resources for adult performers. Kevin Moore, Ames’s husband and producer of the porn production company, Evil Angel, also used his speech at the Adult Video News (AVN) awards to announce The August Project, an initiative serving as a support system for adult performers, in memory of his wife. In an earlier blog post, Moore blamed cyberbullying and online harassment for Ames’s death, and called on the adult industry for more discussions surrounding mental health.
“[Viewers are] talking to these girls like they’re not real people... They’re just characters they get to jack off to, and I really want to change that perspective." —Miss Leya
“The performer community does not have adequate access to mental health services. While Mercedes did have professional support that cared about her, it was unnecessarily hard for her to find someone who would treat her,” Moore said in his post.
British performer, Miss Leya, who is also the creator of the performer hotline, Pineapple Support, originally founded the hotline service after learning about the five performer suicides at this years’ awards shows. Miss Leya has already recruited therapists in Australia, UK, Spain and the US to work with performers through Pineapple Support.
“[Viewers are] talking to these girls like they’re not real people,” Leya told VICE. “They’re just characters they get to jack off to, and I really want to change that perspective.”
Moving forward, the industry is witnessing an increase of sex worker-friendly mental health projects and support groups. While STI testing in the porn industry is now regulated by the Performer Availability Screening Services (PASS), Nikki Hearts also told Rolling Stone how performers, both contract and freelance, still lack health insurance or benefits from their employers.
In an article she wrote for Merry Jane, Heart said if there were an instantly accessible sex-friendly mental health care centre to provide performers with therapists, her friends and fellow porn actors wouldn’t have to suffer from depression and addiction alone. She has also opened up her home for those seeking support within the industry.
“I’m one of the few people who went to therapy and is willing to share that advice,” said Heart.
Organizations like The Cupcake Girls and the APAC, however, are expanding their programs to provide performers with referrals to external, sex-friendly care providers, such as therapists, doctors, and financial aid counsellors.
“We’re not OK with people passing away like this. All the five women who passed away, we could’ve helped them, we absolutely could’ve provided therapy, we could’ve provided mental health support,” said Joy Hoover, founder and president of sex worker advocacy group, The Cupcake Girls. Hoover’s organization currently operates out of Las Vegas and Oregon and specializes in connecting all genres of sex workers to community support centres. The group is now in the midst of opening their Community Driven Holistic Resource Center, a secluded space that will provide mental and physical support centres for performers and group partners in Las Vegas.
Adult actress and chair of APAC, Tasha Reign, also hopes to increase the number of performer newcomer support groups. She’s also in support of raising the entry level into porn from 18 to 21, and to regulate more industry-wide programs related to overall health and sexual consent.
While some performer-based developments are in the works, Reign thinks the necessary resources aren’t being supplied to performers and sex workers.
Reign remarks that globally known organizations, such as the Free Speech Coalition, the US trade association of the adult entertainment industry, and MindGeek, which owns many globally recognized porn sites like YouPorn and Pornhub, should provide performers with more resources in regards to mental health and sexual harassment.
“There are things that are happening, but I just feel like there needs to be more,” Reign told VICE. “I feel like they really owe it to step it up to the plate.”
FSC is currently working to identify the types of distress performers are experiencing, whether it be emotional, psychological, or economically, and connect them to sex worker-friendly support centres. The FSC was originally created as an industry defense organization over 25 years ago, and now oversees the PASS Program.
“It can be a battlefield of people who are on a daily basis telling you that you’re worthless,” said Stabile. “This isn’t an industry problem, it’s a societal problem and we need to learn that our words have actions, that sex workers are people, [and] that these things aren’t without consequences.”
It’s noon and I have had Doug Ford’s original campaign song stuck in my head for 24 hours and I’m beginning to think all libraries should have a tanning bed in them.
It’s my fault. As a cable cutting millennial whose only interaction with cable is shouting at muted sports broadcasts in bars while the staff get increasingly annoyed, I had yet to actually hear the music being played under any of Ford’s ads. It was last week that I read about it in the paper and was immediately smitten with the idea that his campaign had commissioned an original piece of music. I’m assuming they did this to avoid that classic conservative pitfall of being told to cease and desist by an artist whose song they used because the artist disagrees with their policy that you should have to salute anytime you see a horse cop. To confirm the deep anti-conservative bias of songwriters, whoever the Toronto composer of this tune has asked to remain anonymous, perhaps worried that they would never get asked to play the Cameron House again.
I was immediately tantalized by the prospects of this song. What kind of song would speak to the peroxide populist Doug and his campaign team made up of the dandruff from one of Stephen Harper’s suits? What is the preferred music of people who think that sex is some sort of dark magic ritual whose taboo rites must be kept secret from the youth?
First, what it’s not. This is not really the music for the common man that I was expecting. Doug Ford and his elite-bashing, sub-common sense revolution seems to demand a Classic Rawk track, a Randy Bachman approved riff-tastic tune that would perfectly soundtrack carpenters smashing their thumbs as they build a brand new deck paid for by a tax cut.
But unfortunately for the PCs, it’s the NDP that have grabbed the classic rock mantle this election, as Andrea Horwath takes to stage to “Feeling Good” by The Sheepdogs. The Sheepdogs, if you are unaware, are a Canadian rock band that won a contest to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and have spent near decade since hoovering up Cancon money and Dragon Boat festival spots. They basically sound like if BBQ sauce wrote a song and it perfectly suits the NDP’s juke to the left and working-class concerns after a foolish attempt to out Liberal the Liberals in the last election.
Speaking of those doomed centrists, Wynne’s walkup music is “Just Like Fire” by Pink. It is the perfect pick, a bloodless top-40 pop anthem with generic lyrics about being yourself, overcoming obstacles and kicking that glass ceiling wrapped around an incredibly awkward rap breakdown. It is the perfect pick for a party mired in the insurmountable muck of voter fatigue, a stench of corruption and some vicious sexism and homophobia disguised as Ontario pride. It is the perfect soundtrack for a party staking its future on a banal pitch of Hey We’re Nice And Will Continue To Be Nice.
All fine and appropriate choices but then there is this bad boy:
Oh my god. Listen to it, listen to this glittering jewel of mediocrity. This is the sound of a million managers being asked for, the sound of of a thousand homeless shelters being kept out of a nice neighbourhood, the sound of a million dishes being sent back for being too spicy.
The style of the song, which my roommate accurately described as anthem pop, is familiar to anybody who has been unfortunate enough to leave the dial on Indie 88.1 for too long. It’s those interchangeable songs trafficked by bands like The Strumbellas, Imagine Dragons, X-Ambassadors and Walk Off The Earth or Moon or whatever the fuck they are called. They are degenerate children of The Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” It’s all simple chord progressions, white-flight guitar riffs, that incessant chug for the rhythm which sounds like the status-quo replicating itself and those gang vocals that sound like the moans of the damned, a generation promised the freedom to chase their most idiosyncratic dreams but instead were trapped in a precariously employed purgatory (or Montreal).
Then there are the lyrics hammering home the point that Ford is for the people. Who are these people? We know who it’s not. It’s not people with addictions, people who work for minimum wage or people who care about the environment. No, the people he’s fighting for are the people who don’t care about other people. He’s for the selfish, the small-minded, the uninterested. The people who think the government doesn’t know what to do with their money and then get in a fight with their wife about why buying a new 4-wheeler is a good idea. He’s fighting for those who find taxes an injustice unlike any other, an abhorrent offense that limits their ability to purchase a nicer trailer for their boat. People who are only comforted by their own myopia, who wish the entire world ended at the driveway of their cottage and are outraged whenever they are reminded that isn’t the case.
And to these people, the ones whose worship of the small business owner borders on the erotic and who think Ford will usher in a political revolution that will finally let all the little guys flourish, I say listen to that song again. In it you can hear the notes of your betrayal. If Ford really was what he says, a brash champion for the rude, crude dudes, the song would just sample Tommy Iommi coughing from a toke in Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” and that part in the “Love In The Elevator” when that woman ask Steve Tyler if, “He’s going down.” Instead he’s campaigning behind a song that is the musical equivalent of latte milk being steamed. It sounds like a song the guy from The Black Keys would write if he had to whip something up last minute for his kid’s private school.
No, if you listen to the corporate sheen of his by-the-numbers anthem you can hear the truth that beneath his stupidity and bluster, Ford is a huckster, a servant of the elites as much as anybody else. His anthem is the sound of bloodless austerity and if it becomes a hit all of us people are going to suffer for it.
Wednesday was an unusual day for VICE Canada. In the morning, our lawyers were fighting in the Supreme Court of Canada to keep one of our reporters out of jail for doing his job. In the afternoon, our office in Montreal was invaded by a bunch of extreme-right thugs pissed off we had the nerve to write about them.
For this, we’ve received a tremendous amount of support from press freedom organizations, our competitors, and many others. It’s truly appreciated. We’ve also received kind words from many Canadian politicians, most notably Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“My government will always support and defend the right of media to do their job,” Trudeau said yesterday. “The incursion into VICE's offices yesterday is something I find alarming and it is an example of intimidation of the media that is absolutely unacceptable."
Absolutely, 100 percent agreed, thank you, JT.
But…your government is currently fighting VICE Canada to access reporter Ben Makuch’s materials that were used for stories about an ISIS fighter back in 2014.
This too is an attack on press freedom that we find “absolutely unacceptable.”
The prime minister says his government “will always support and defend the right of media to do their job” but how is that not a conditional statement, when he’s been silent on Makuch’s case?
As any journalist knows, “I can’t say anything, it’s before the courts” is an easy way out.
This isn't the time for equivocation, the prime minister should have a moral obligation to protect journalists.
If the prime minister truly wanted to support press freedom he could come out and make a much stronger statement and condemn any actions that stop journalists from performing their jobs—including actions taken by the government and its police forces. (Shout out to APTN’s Justin Brake, who is facing criminal charges stemming from a story he was covering.)
To be fair, the Liberal government did pass a bill last fall to strengthen protection of anonymous sources. But also, to give credit where credit is due, that bill came from the Conservatives, Claude Carignan in the Senate, and former journalist Gérard Deltell in the House of Commons.
That bill also came too late for Makuch’s case, which has now dragged on for three years, putting an incredible amount of personal stress on him.
So again, we appreciate the support, Mr. Prime Minister, you’ve said some nice things. But on the other hand, they are empty words if the state is preparing to jail a reporter because police want to use him as a shortcut in one of their investigations.
We’ve been dealing with neo-Nazis for years, but it’s a government-sanctioned attack on press freedom that worries me.
The world is such a dark, depressing hellscape these days that it is easy to forget that there are still a few pure things out there. Children still manage surpriseus, Bill & Ted 3 is actually happening, and every now and then, people get lucky. To add to that joyful list, it looks like everyone's favorite plump, pants-less bear is coming back to remind us that everything hasn't completely gone to shit.
On Friday, the first full trailer for the upcoming live-action Winnie the Pooh movie, Christopher Robin, premiered on The Ellen Show, and if the movie's overwhelmingly sweetness doesn't melt your cold heart, then nothing will.
The movie follows an adult version of Robin (Ewan McGregor) who, like the rest of us, has grown up and lost all sense of wonder under the crushing weight of work and responsibility and whatever—at least until Pooh and the gang return to help him rediscover what he's lost.
Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, and the gang all look wonderfully scruffy and realistic in this new version, and Tigger even seems like he's aged a bit—is he going gray?—though the spring in his tail is still springy, apparently. Yeah, the whole plot is basically the same as Hook except featuring a certain silly-old-bear, and the Hundred Acre Wood standing in for Neverland. But come on, so what? Hook was tight as hell when you were a kid, and Christopher Robin looks equally as magical.
Christopher Robin is directed by Marc Forster off a script by Alex Ross Perry, the guy behind Listen Up Philip and a lot of movies your local barista likes. Along with McGregor, the film brings back 1980's Pooh and Tigger voice actor Jim Cummings, and Brad Garrett as Eeyore. Just watch the trailer and let the utter earnestness of the whole thing wash over you.
Christopher Robin is set to hit theaters August 3.