Writers are traditionally very bad singers. Their voices shake from insecurity and malnourishment, and even the ones with a velvety-smooth reading voice couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But Scott McClanahan is an exception to this rule. If you’ve ever seen him in person, you know there’s something different in his bones. I’ve watched this West Virginia boy silence a whole bar full of drunkards by belting out a spontaneous a cappella number more than a few times. Then, while the crowd is busy scraping their jaws off the floor, he likes to slip out the back before anyone can ask for an encore.

Now McClanahan’s musical prowess has found a home alongside his growing library in the form of a 7" record from one of the most respected independent labels around. This month, Fat Possum Records and Tyrant Books will release a limited package featuring Scott’s two-man folk band, Holler Boys, along with a copy of his latest novel, Hill William. The record/book combo is available in an edition of 300, signed and numbered, as well as an audiobook narrated by McClanahan himself for those who buy online.

I got together with Giancarlo DiTrapano, publisher of Tyrant Books, to learn more.

VICE: How did Tyrant get hooked up with Fat Possum?
Giancarlo: Fat Possum is based in Oxford, Mississippi. I had been down there a few times with some Tyrant writers on reading tours through the South, and we always stopped in Oxford to read at Square Books. Michael Bible hosted us in Oxford and kept talking about these music-label guys he said I had to meet. I met Steven Bevilaqua (who works at Fat Possum), and we became fast friends. Through Steven, I met the founder and head of the label, Matthew Johnson. They come to New York a lot, so we started hanging out when they were in town. Matthew is a big fan of Scott's writing, and when I played him this one Holler Boys song that I like, he had the idea to do this package thing.

You were one of the first people backing Scott McClanahan, who has all but blown up everything over the past year or so. You guys are both from West Virginia. Do you remember the first thing of his you read? What is it about him?
One day I hit play on a YouTube clip of Scott reading “Kidney Stones,” turned the volume up, and walked away from my computer. As soon as I heard his voice I knew he was from where I grew up, so I paid attention. And I was blown away. So I heard him read before I ever read him on the page. Then the first time I read him I remember thinking that he was really great. He had something kind of special, you know? But I also thought that he needed a fucking editor—and, more specifically, that he needed me as an editor. We work incredibly well together. I imagine that being as close of friends as we are helps because we are always honest with each other.

But what is it about him? Hm. Tough question. I think Scott's gift is being so educated and well-read without letting any of it influence him as a writer. His writing, like any good writing, has that thing that when you read it, you just know no one but him could have written it. He really bleeds into his writing. And even though he says he plagiarizes a lot, he knows exactly who and how to plagiarize. Being a good thief and knowing what to steal (or appropriate) is just as rare a talent as knowing how to write.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone gets into writing or selling or publishing books at all. Can you remember what it was that got you? Do you still feel it?
I put on a good show in public, and am considered kind of gregarious and carefree. Truth is, though, I have a pretty grim outlook on life. Sometimes I think I am only into literature because it's the thing that I hate the least about the world. Or that it's the one thing that just may wind up mattering somehow. But other times I still feel it, the excitement that was there when I first started publishing. When I think about how I got books like Eugene Marten's Firework or Marie Calloway's What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life into so many people's heads, then I feel it. To me, the books I publish are beautiful (both inside and out), and by printing and selling them, I'm disseminating beauty. There is not a bad thing about that.

I recently calculated that I've published/printed somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 books. Small potatoes for some, but besides the occasional intern and hired freelancer, I put out those books alone. I busted my ass, lost a lot of money (even sold my house in New Orleans), and still happened to have a good time doing it.

But most of the time, yeah, it sucks. I just wish the writers today were a little more carefree and less reserved. It's like, I'm not even that big of a fuck-up at all—at least compared to a lot of people I know—but I'm forever known as the "bad friend" who wives/girlfriends don't want their husbands/boyfriends staying out with late at night.

What's lined up for the future of Tyrant?
Got the debut novel from Atticus Lish coming out in fall 2014. It's called Preparation for the Next Life, and it's going to do incredibly well. Atticus strikes a note in the very first line and then holds it, never letting it falter, for the next 270 pages. Do you know how hard that is? (Well, I'm sure you know, but most others don't.) In all seriousness, I'd be surprised if it doesn't win the National Book Award. The heart and mind of Atticus Lish are without parallel, and the story he tells in this novel is wholly unique. This sounds like a heaping platter of cliché nachos with extra cheese, but reading Atticus's book made me a better person. It awakened a part of me, and my worldview has been altered permanently.

Tyrant Books also recently acquired Scott McClanahan's next two books. The first one is coming in spring 2015 (tentatively titled, The Sarah Book), and the second will come soon after that. We’re also reissuing Stories V! by McClanahan and publishing a collection of his interviews. I'm just kind of tagging all of his shit with the Tyrant logo, pretty much. I’ve got some other things in the works too, just can't talk about them yet.

----------

I also caught up with Scott McClanahan to ask him a bit about the jump from literary waters to his debut musical release with one of the most respected indie labels around.

VICE: I think that every time I've seen you read you've managed to incorporate music into it, either by recordings or singing yourself. Have you been writing music for a long time?
Scott: Yeah, Chris Oxley and I have been doing this music thing for a while now. We even tried to do a black magic ritual a few years ago by burning a bible (on our way to see you, actually), but I don’t know if it worked. We did it because we wanted to be pop stars. But then our wives left us, and we got kicked out of our houses, and we lost our families. We had suicides in our families and car crashes, and I almost died from the swine flu. So maybe it worked. It’s nothing to mess with, that’s for sure.

It’s like what Anton from the Brian Jonestown Massacre says: I would have sold my soul to the devil, but the line was too long.

What's the story with this song, your debut with Fat Possum?
It’s a melody we stole from the gospel singer Washington Phillips. And then we came up with some new lyrics. I think it has all the key elements that make up a good song—sucking, fucking, pregnancy, praying, and God.

We even put out a homemade album called Holler Boys’ Greatest Hits a few years ago.

We found out that if you call something greatest hits—then you don’t have to worry about it actually being a hit. It’s like how parents could save a shit-ton of money for a college education if they just named their child Doctor instead of giving them a first name like William or Eddie.

Of course, we’ve always loved that homemade sound. Maybe it’s the West Virginia in us. You know Daniel Johnston and Hasil Adkins are from here? Hasil even died because somebody ran over him in his front yard with a four-wheeler. I can’t think of a more West Virginia way to die.

On another note, you recently tried to quit the Morning News Tournament of Books, and yet Hill William won the first round anyway. What makes that kind of promotion feel so shitty?
I figure it’s a bunch of different things. I think I’m just sick of me. I’m sick of my voice. I’m sick of my face. I’m sick of what a scoundrel I can be. Sometimes I’m just a mouthy little punk who needs to keep his mouth shut. But these ToB folks were ruining my Goodreads score.

Click here to buy the Hill William/Holler Boys package

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MATTE magazine is a photography journal I started in 2010 as way to shed light on good work by emerging photographers. Each issue features the work of one artist, and I shoot a portrait of him or her for the issue's cover. As photo editor of VICE, I'm excited to share my discoveries with a wider audience. 

Issue 22 of MATTE features the work of NYC-based photographer Luke Libera Moore. A graduate of Cooper Union, Luke now makes a living on his technical accumen, photographing products and still lifes in a very exacting way for blue-chip clients. His personal work is an outlet for darkly psychological scenes that relate masochicm to fantasy. There is a long tradition of successful commercial photographers doing freaky things after hours, like the violently sexual nudes of Paul Outerbridge Jr. But Luke's work is unmistakably current. Themes of stunted vitality and death pervade the work, conveyed through athletic and mechanical motifs. A slick gloss lures the viewer in, inviting him to delve infinitely deeper and deeper into these hyperreal images, until his nose hits the glass of the computer screen.

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Temp labor is one of the fastest growing industries in the US. Increasingly, temp workers are part of a business strategy to keep costs down and profits high. From mega-retailers to mom-and-pop shops, temps are hired to do some of the hardest and most dangerous jobs. While more and more of the American workforce comprises temporary workers, they're largely hidden from public view. Many of these workers stay silent, often having their livelihoods threatened if they speak out. Wanting to get a glimpse of this invisible workforce, VICE News traveled across the country, scouring warehouses, temp agencies, and temp towns in search of the people who make our world of same-day delivery possible.

For more on the plight of the temp laborer in the US, read "A Modern Day Harvest of Shame" and "Permanently Temporary."

This story was developed in collaboration with reporting by Propublica.

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In part seven, Simon is back in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, where both pro and anti-Russia demonstrations are dividing the region. Pro-Russia protesters believe that the country's strong economy will help Crimea, while anti-Russia protesters feel that their land has been taken over by bandits.

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Lindsay Lohan, who claims to have had sex. Photo via Flickr user Joel Kramer

Have you ever created a list of all the celebrities you’ve fucked while playing Scattergories with your homegirls? Us neither! But as we all know, none of us are Lindsay Lohan—the perpetually scandal-ridden tabloid star (allegedly) wrote a list out at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and because Lindsay is Lindsay, she forgot the list at the hotel and it found its way to InTouch magazine. The list (which some people think is fake, and Lindsay could always be lying about some of the names, but whatever) resembles the Hollywood Reporter’s power rankings, except, we couldn’t help but notice, they’re all out of order. (Also, for some reason Lindsay has excluded her teen love, Aaron Carter. Maybe Lindsay doesn’t consider Aaron a celebrity?) Here’s the list of names from most impressive conquest to least impressive.

1. Heath Ledger (legendary actor, now dead)
“After I win an Oscar, I can start thinking about love,” Lindsay said in 2012 during an interview to promote the Lifetime movie Liz and Dick. Lindsay has clearly done more lovemaking than acting in the last few years, which hasn't helped her quest for a tiny golden man, but that doesn’t really matter: She. Fucked. Heath. Ledger. Who needs an Oscar, or love, when you have that Academy Award–winning, tragically dead notch on your belt?

2. Justin Timberlake (actor/singer/Britney Spears’s former boyfriend)
There’s a theory that if two girls have sex with the same boy they become “vagina sisters” and feel each other’s emotions for the rest of their lives. Considering Lindsay banged pop-star-turned-Tennessee-Williams-character Britney Spears’s first kiss, it’s no wonder her life fell apart! You’d be crazy too if you felt what Britney felt when recorded “personal” songs with Will.I.Am.

3. Colin Farrell (actor/hot Irish drunk)
That encounter must have been like two drunken, insane, attention-starved ships passing in the night. By the way, have you seen Colin Farrel’s dick pics?

Colin Farrell: NOT A VIRGIN, sez LiLo. Photo via Flickr user GabboT

4. Joaquin Phoenix (Oscar-nominated actor/performance artist)
I can imagine Lindsay fucking Joaquin while thinking that he was in love with her—or, at least, that the relationship would help her get cast in a P.T. Anderson film, but I can also imagining them meeting while Joaquin was stumbling around Chateau Marmont in a dirty suit, rambling about rap music, in the name of performance art.

5. Adam Levine (singer/judge on The Voice)
He’s a tough one to rank. I mean, no matter what you think of The Voice,  LOOK AT THESE FUCKING ABS.

6. Zac Efron (former Disney Channel star)
Yes, he’s the most attractive man in the world. But is Zac Efron’s career more depressing than Lindsay Lohan’s? After thrusting his pelvis while throwing sand in the air in High School Musical, he starred in a string of Nicholas Sparks-inspired romantic flops. Nobody cared when Zac entered rehab for a coke addiction last year, and this week he said he wants to star in a High School Musical reunion, which is not a good sign. It’s off brand for Lindsay to fuck such a failure, I thought, but then I remembered Zac wearing wet white briefs in The Paperboy, and reconsidered. Oh, and she misspelled his name on the list :(

7. Max George (B-list version of Harry Styles)
Fucking a guy from the Wanted, a poor man’s One Direction, is not something to brag about to your girlfriends. It’s conceivable, however, that Max George, unlike Justin or Heath, bragged about it to his buddies afterwards—in fact, I think his appearance on this list bumps his Q score up a few points.

Did Max George (second from right) really... have sex?!?! Photo via Flickr user Joella Marano

8. Wilmer Valderrama (That ‘70s Show star)
He had sex with Lindsay when she was a teenager and he was 24, and he had the fucking chutzpah to insult her after they broke up, reportedly saying her vagina was “the Ellis Island of Hollywood,” in that everyone passed through it. He sounds like such a piece of shit he’d rank lower on the list—except hasn’t everyone had a fantasy involving Fez from That’s ‘70s Show?

9. Garrett Hedlund (Friday Night Lights actor)
He’s not really an A-lister, true, but if you’re ever given the chance to have sex with someone who is famous for being really, really good looking, you have to take that shot—evolution just hard-wired the human brain that way.

10. Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey actor)
This is the dude who is playing billionaire Christian Grey in the movie adaption of E L James’s S&M-erotica-for-aunties megahit, which means he’s the guy giving flesh to millions of bored middle-aged women’s fantasies. It seems weird to actually have sex with someone like that.

11. Ryan Rottman (TeenNick star)
Now we’re in the territory of people who aren’t even really famous—as in, if you told your friend, “I fucked Ryan Rottman!” she’d be like, “Who?” and you’d go, “Uhhh, he’s an actor, most known for his role as Joey Colvin on the TeenNick series Gigantic, which premiered October 8, 2010.” Then she’d go, “Wait are you just reading his Wikipedia page?” and you’d have to admit that you didn’t know who Ryan Rottman was either.

12. Nico Tortorella (Scream 4 actor)
Even lower on the totem pole than Rottman is this dude, who got shot in the groin in Scream 4. He’s hot and all, but not like Zac Efron hot.

James Franco is an artist, writer, and actor, but is he also... a haver of sex?! Photo via Flickr user Alice Barigelli

13. Evan Peters (American Horror Story actor)
Dude looks like the kid at the private high school who sells acid. Normal people could bang this guy, I bet.

14. Jamie Burke (singer/model)
Every single woman in New York City ends up having a brief relationship with a long-haired singer/model/actor/whatever/usually also a bartender. There’s normally a bunch of cocaine and cigarettes and disappointingly shitty sex—years later, the woman’s friends will be like, “Remember [man’s name]? I mean, come on.” The woman will respond either by saying, “I was 22! I had a drinking problem!” or pretending like she doesn’t even remember the guy’s name. I wonder what strategy LiLo uses.

15. Paul Charles "PC" Valmorbida (a “photographer turned entrepreneur”)
On shows like Celebrity Rehab, there is always a mysterious douchebag trust-fund kid whose only claim to fame is his rich dad, grandpa, or uncle’s fortune, which he's squandered while attending parties with celebrities like Paris Hilton in an effort to get famous himself. It turns out that occasionally that guy has sex with Lindsay Lohan.

16. Lukas Haas (Leonardo Dicaprio’s best friend)
The only thing more depressing than considering a “photographer turned entrepreneur” a famous sexual conquest is considering Leonardo Dicaprio’s best friend a famous sexual conquest.

17. Guy Berryman (Coldplay bassist)
The hot guy from Coldplay is still, at bottom, a guy from Coldplay.

18. James Franco (VICE columnist)
Having sex with some dude who writes for VICE isn’t that big of a deal.

Mitchell Sunderland and Harry Cheadle have never had sex with anyone. Follow them on Twitter here and here.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Lyubov Petrovna Orlova is one of Soviet Russia’s great actresses, and the first real Soviet film star. Although she died nearly 40 years ago, her legacy lives on, with an asteroid and a ship named after her. The asteroid can be found on the far side of Mars, 12.86 light-minutes away. We don’t know where the ship is (though earlier this year, some people were convinced that it was infested with rats and heading for the coast of England).

The M/V Lyubov Orlova probably sank months ago, when red lights started flashing on panels around the world as her emergency transmitters contacted water. After all, nobody has seen her since she was spotted a few hundred miles from Newfoundland a year ago, a ghost ship drifting eerily across the North Atlantic.

But I don’t like to think of her slipping under the ocean, alone, in an unceremonious end to her glorious escape from the scrap yard. Instead I imagine her victoriously charging up on some Irish shore, unleashing her payload of cannibal rats upon the unsuspecting island.

But that’s just me. We sort of have a history.

I have an awkward memory of sitting across from my mother at one of my first meals onboard the M/V Lyubov Orlova. I paid the ship what I thought was a compliment: “You know, my mom always said this ship was a dump,” I remarked. “But I think it’s really nice.” She kicked me under the table as the passengers tried to gracefully move on; they had paid thousands of dollars to be there. With my more refined manners and larger brain, today I see why it was inappropriate for a staff member to call the ship a “dump."

My mom was right the first time, though. Unlike her namesake, the ship was an ugly old lady. 90 metres long and 4,251 gross tonnes, Lyubov Orlova was a rugged beast, built for withstanding light sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. Despite a new refurbishing job, she was cramped and unflinchingly utilitarian. The tiny crew quarters where my brother Euan and I slept reeked of diesel fumes, and a rogue spring in the mattress gave me a scar on my left knee that I can still see. But she got us where we needed to go, and her crew taught me to ask for more ice cream in Russian.

Orlova off St. Mary's. Photo via the author.

This was 2001, and I was 13 years old. My parents were working as naturalists, lecturing about the history of the Celts as we steamed up the outer coast of Great Britain on our way to Iceland and, eventually, some magical iceberg called Greenland. It was an expedition cruise, meaning that the food is worse and there’s no casino, but you actually get to go places. We never made it as far as Iceland.

We were on the tail end of a force nine gale in the middle of the North Atlantic, so things were already bad enough when we found out that the company chartering the ship had gone bankrupt for the second time in two years. It was a fly-by-night operation called Marine Expeditions, and it owed money—lots of it. The company didn’t own the ship, but rather leased it from its Russian owner, Oleg Abramov. He was pissed that he wouldn’t get paid, so he instructed the captain to get money from us: $20,000, or we wouldn’t dock. He ordered the captain—his employee—to set sail for the Black Sea, several days away.

I didn’t know any of this at the time, really. I knew there was some far-away Bond villain shaking us down, and that I’d never find out what Greenland is. I also knew that it was officially an adventure, and that I got to raid the Marine Expeditions storeroom for M&Ms and T-shirts with puffins on them. Euan gave me a beer. Like I said, adventure.

The view out of Jimmy's porthole. Photo via the author.

Meanwhile, the passengers and my parents were trying to figure out how they were going to get home from Gibraltar; the plan was to drop us off in inflatable boats while the ship kept chugging toward its home port. Although the crew continued to be hospitable, even apologetic, and kept us fed, they refused us access to the ship’s phone or fax. My dad’s satellite phone—a gadget his archaeology firm had given him to field test—had thus become our only means of communication to the outside world. In the middle of the night, with the wind still howling off the last of its gale, he sneaked up onto the top deck with my mother and the expedition leaders. They called my uncle, a retired spy living near Toronto.

According to family lore, the call came at 2AM, waking my uncle. He flicked on the light and turned to my aunt, asking her to “get my red book.” The red book, a holdover from his former life, held contacts in London and Dublin where, embassy workers quickly got to work.

They tracked down an investor of the now-defunct company, who ponied up what people onboard had started to refer to as “ransom.” After five days of uncertainty, frustration, and M&Ms, the captain agreed to let us disembark in Dublin.

Lyubov Orlova’s engines never stopped. An American embassy worker came aboard wearing shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt. He explained that we were cleared to enter Ireland temporarily, and that we would be responsible for finding our own way home.

As soon as we were clear of the gangway, Orlova threw lines and made for the Black Sea. I thought I would never see her again.

Eleven years later, though, I did. I had grown up, but time hadn’t been kind to her. She languished at the pier in St. John’s, Newfoundland, rusting and abandoned. I was getting ready to board a ship as a staff member myself, following in my parents’ footsteps as a naturalist. She had been passed from company to company over the years, running aground once and being impounded several times due to deadbeat owners’ nonpayment of fees.

The latest time she had been let down by her owners was when Cruise North, another Canadian company with ties to Marine Expeditions, had gone bankrupt, stranding her Russian crew in St. John’s. The famous Newfoundland hospitality saw the crew provided with food and smokes, and eventually repatriated. Orlova did not receive the same treatment. Abandoned by her owners, she decayed alone, tied to the dock in a foreign country and held ransom over their debts.

Months later she would finally get her revenge.

She had been sold for scrap. She would be towed to the Dominican Republic, then stripped and dismembered, pried apart until the valuable steel hull and frame were gone and she was reduced to a pile of worthless Soviet-era fittings, the only reminders of her glorious past.

She had no such plans, however. While they dragged her to her death on January 24, 2013, a storm blew up. Among the three-metre waves and foaming sea, she saw her chance. Orlova slipped her bonds and drifted to her freedom, disappearing into the storm.


@j_ws_t

A Kurdish Syrian woman outside a women's meeting in Arbat, Iraqi Kurdistan. All photos by James Haines-Young

Saturday March 8th was International Women’s Day, a commemoration of the rights of women that each year focuses the world’s attention on the continuing struggle for women’s equality. Outside the small Iraqi Kurdish town of Arbat lies a small tent city that serves as the makeshift home to 513 Syrian Kurdish refugee families, who celebrated the day with tentative hope. The camp's women participated in workshops led by NGOs and planted olive trees near the site of a new refugee camp being built on the outskirts of town that will hold up to 50,000 people. The Syrian civil war has thus far displaced over 2.5 million people, nearly half of whom are women.

According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, dislocation presents a unique challenge to women—namely the increased likelihood of gender-based discrimination and violence. We spoke to a few women gathered in the small tent city in Arbat about what it’s like to be a woman in conflict, and what their hopes are for female refugees in the next year. 

HERFETA MOHAMMAD HUSSEIN, 64

We want to eat and dance, we want to have a picnic and wear nice clothes. We want to talk about women’s rights. We want to make our own decisions, and we want our homes. Everything is harder as a female refugee—psychologically, physically. We want all our mothers to be happy on this day, and for their children and families to appreciate them and be happy beside them. We used to have fences, walls, faucets, roofs. Now all the women carry their own water. It’s breaking my knees. I’m just tired. In Syria, when there were no celebrations anywhere else in the Middle East for International Women’s Day, we had them in Syria. But they were only for Arab women. As Kurdish women, we couldn’t even wave our flags or wear our traditional clothes. 

KHALAT, 26

Today, we get appreciation. We get appreciation from all the men and the children. They say women are 50 percent of society, but I don’t believe that. A woman is all of society. We are 100 percent of it. Who else raises kids? Women are the ones who suffer the most in their lives, and heaven is for mothers. We’re tired as refugees, so we’re happy we get one day of appreciation. In Syria, we had our houses and all our things. This is a new life, and we’re still not used to it. I can’t sleep from the pain in my back after carrying water back for my family. It’s hard, but we have to carry the burden. We have no choice.

RABIHA QASSEM MUHAMMAD, 43

This is the worst life. Only today, because we left all of the cleaning, the dishes, and the cooking, it’s an enjoyable day. I don’t have my rights. What am I missing? Everything. I felt like a stranger even in Syria, and I was poor. Now I’m here. I demand from everyone to at least respect women. In our eastern culture, it’s very rare for men to respect women—even pregnant women get beaten by their husbands. Awareness isn’t just for women—it’s the men who need it. There’s no point in me going to a seminar and then telling my husband, because it’ll go in one ear and back out the other and he’ll still beat me.

MNAWAR, 42

It’s better here. The tents are right next to each other, so our husbands can’t beat us because our neighbors will know. In Syria, there were walls, and they can beat us all they want. Now, my husband comes in to the tent, gets angry at me, but can’t beat me because the neighbors will hear him. Do we want a free Syria so we can all go back home and get beaten? This tent is a safe space. The women trust each other, and we can tell each other what happens to us.

SANAA, 40

I hope, one year from now, that every woman can celebrate together in Rojava [free Syrian-Kurdistan]. I hope there’s freedom and education for every human being, equal with our brothers. Women’s rights should be exactly the same as men’s. We are strangers here, even though people treat us well. My sister… she is still in Syria. I haven’t heard from her in weeks, I don’t even know if she’s alive. On the next International Women’s Day, I hope I’m with her. They are our hearts. 

BUSHRA

She [points to another woman in the group] keeps saying we want a free Syria. We really just want a free Rojava. We're Kurdish, and that's our region, so we want a free Rojava. Who cares about a free Syria.

PIRWIN HASSAN ELIAS, 31

[Refused to have photo taken]

We’re not used to it. We’re tired, and we hope one year from now on International Women’s Day that we’ll be back in Syria. I hope I’m back there tomorrow. I’ve been here almost a year, in this camp. I can get as far as the main door without a man, but after the gate [to the camp], I can’t go anywhere alone. But there are even fewer rights in Syria now. If you are at a checkpoint, with your hair uncovered and without a man, Jabhat al-Nusra will cut off your head.

For parts 1, 2, and 3 of Band for Life, click here, here, and here.

Check back next Friday for part 5.

Mining Watch Romania are mapping out all of Romania's mining projects

Transylvania is a toxic wasteland waiting to happen. The region—which makes up a large chunk of central Romania—is rich in gold, and a bunch of mining companies are keen to lock down their share of the action. Unfortunately, once they get started, their methods of mining aren't exactly ideal, in that the majority use cyanide to extract the precious mineral from the ore that lies underneath the area's towns, villages, and mountains.

Clearly, pumping cyanide into the earth isn't going to do the local ecosystem much good—as proved by the Baia Mare disaster in 2000, when four rivers, including the Danube and Tisa, were contaminated with the poisonous chemical after it leaked from a nearby gold mining site. However, that slip up doesn't seem to have taught anyone any lessons, as mining company Romaltyn Mining now want to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place.

There are 12 more similar projects in the region awaiting approval by Romanian authorities. A new law that would have given them all the go-ahead wasn't passed last December, but, of course, that's just a mere hindrance. The government—that also want to receive their share of any future mining profits—are now trying to amend the law so that the mines become "public interest projects," claiming that razing villages and pumping toxins into the earth beneath them would somehow benefit the local population.

Mining Watch Romania (MWR) is a network of groups that keeps an eye on the mining companies' plans, and attempts to stir opposition against them. I got in touch with Roxana Pencea—an MWR participant and member of the Save Roșia Montană Campaign (an area that's long been exploited for its mineral reserves)—to find out more about the situation.

A protest against gold mining in Roșia Montană (Photo by Mircea Topoleanu)

VICE: Ștefan Marincea, the former executive of the Romanian Geological Institute, has said that "Romania has the most gold deposits in Europe." That's a good thing, right?
Roxana Pencea: No. Gold extraction is a dirty industry; it ruins the landscape, pollutes the air and the water, corrupts authorities and impoverishes communities. Romania has 68 gold deposits that could be transformed, over the course of a few years, into dead zones, full of craters, tailings ponds [filled with cyanide and heavy metals], sterile slurry dumps and acid leaks. The agreements between the Romanian state and the mining industry are made for the companies' profit—open pit mining wouldn't even be an option if the companies paid the real price. The citizens are left with the risk of pollution, as well as the closing costs.

There are 13 mining projects awaiting approval. What would happen if they all started at once?
In Transylvania, the mining projects are 20 to 30 miles apart, most of them in the counties of Hunedoara, Alba, and Maramureș. The environmental damage is hard to estimate. The lives of the local community and the landscape would be the first things to be affected. Forest areas are cut down, and above-ground constructions are demolished. Huge blocks of stone get blown up with dynamite; the healthy soil that the vegetation needs gets polluted; and the perimeter eventually turns into a desert. The extracted rocks are ground up and turned into a toxic sludge, containing cyanide and heavy metals, which is deposited in tailings ponds. The wind blows and spreads toxic and poisonous vapours all around.

What can be done before these projects become a real issue?
Those responsible for stopping the projects are the people who are directly affected by them. From fishermen, who would end up with lifeless rivers, to the local producers, whose profits would plummet. Nobody wants vegetables, milk, or meat from a polluted area. The rest of us should rise in solidarity with them and keep in mind that the government will pay for these damaging projects with our own money. Instead of investing in schools, hospitals, or highways, they're taking risks on these projects—stuff like public health issues, environmental repair costs, and paying compensation if the mining operation fails.

A banner at a protest last year against the proposed new mining law

The bill for the new mining law, which would allow all these operations to take place, didn't pass in December. But the government is still trying to modify it so it could turn any mining project into a public interest project. What would happen if those regulations were passed?
The human right of private property would become uncertain. You might find that the house you're paying a mortgage for is on top of an ore deposit. That could result in you having your house taken away by a private company in a matter of weeks. And if you were unsatisfied with the compensations, you'd have to file a lawsuit against the company.

But not all the projects overlap with inhabited areas.
Indeed. And not all areas are lucky enough to be near a mountain like the Cârnic Mountain, which more than 1,000 archaeologists worldwide are fighting to save. It could only be destroyed if there was an exception made to the cultural heritage preservation law. But this doesn't mean that open-pit cyanide mining is an acceptable practice in places where there's no heritage to preserve. At Rovina [in Hunedoara county], there were never any mining projects, but a gold exploitation is being planned that would be the size of the Roșia Montană operation—approximately 400 hectares for the mine itself, and 300 more for the cyanide-filled tailing pools.

Mining Watch suspects the National Agency for Mineral Resources (ANMR) of hiding “very serious fraud.” Why's that?
The ANMR gives the companies the right to explore, exploit, and lease ore deposits. But these rights are “sold” in an un-transparent manner. The explanation they give is that underground resources are a national security issue. This is how we found companies that drill without construction permits, but are able to get environmental permits by the dozen. This kind of decision affects tens of communities.

Over the past 15 years, ANMR gave over 120 permits and mining licenses. But the ANMR website isn't functional, and their employees' attitude is obtuse, so the information about permit holders is a well-kept secret. We only know details of the mining operators that are running exploration activities, like Samax Baia Mare in Rovina, Romaltyn Mining in Baia Mare, and Eldorado Gold in Deva, Certej and Brad. And, of course, about Gabriel Resources in Roșia Montană.

Who's being held accountable?
Unfortunately, the officials aren't personally held accountable for breaking institutional transparency laws. And the institutions, when found guilty for not sharing public information, are only fined about 200 dollars. There should be a policy that demands transparency with official decisions, and I hope we'll be able to establish this before a big part of Transylvania turns into some nightmarish apocalyptic scenario.

Tons of fish from the Săsar, Lăpuș, Someș, Tisa, and Danube rivers died after the 2000 cyanide spill in Baia-Mare.

Romaltyn Mining want to start cyanide mining in Baia Mare again. The cyanide spill there in 2000 became known as "the second Chernobyl." Is the new project basically just the same thing again?
Yes, it's a crude copy-paste of the same operation. But we doubt the environmental authorities learned anything from that incident. That incident was responsible for a record-breaking cyanide leak, although the company that ran the project boasted about using the world's safest technology. The assumption that the polluter will be held responsible in an accident is an illusion. If a company admits to being responsible for leaks, spills, or mining accidents, it's not allowed to make decisions that would fix the problem. Instead, the Romanian government call all the shots. The incident at Baia Mare showed that the authorities were incapable of managing the project or regulating the company's activity.

How could the new cyanide gold exploitation project in Baia Mare end up being approved?
It took five years to repopulate the rivers, and 10 years for all the plants and wildlife to be restored there. The new project has been trying to get approval since 2006. It's absurd how they want to set up such a dangerous project in the middle of a city. The processing plant is built in an inhabited area, and the pipes transporting the waste water would cross the city of Baia Mare over a distance of 14 km. The tailings pond is only 2.8 km from the city, and the dam surrounding it is supposed to be upgraded every time the tailings pile up.

"The well-being of citizens" and "investments in the area" are generally the mining companies' main justifications for starting these projects. What do you think of their reasoning?
It's nonsense. Really, the community gets forcefully displaced and replaced by minimally qualified workers for a small period of time. Modern mining has nothing to do with the idyllic image of the underground miner. Now, there's only chemical processing on inconceivably large areas, which leak toxic substances into the earth, putting them in contact with the groundwater. The cyanide mining industry presents all the newest technologies as faultless, so the authorities rarely question this “minimal risk” and the real risks are never properly evaluated. There are no preventative measures or suitable financial guarantees in place; it's just a matter of time until an accident happens.

Alright, alright, alright, as of last SundayTrue Detective is over. The finale was the last time we’ll see Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the roles of detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart. It has been a great eight weeks of watching these two swinging dicks mix it up against a sweaty backdrop of Louisiana, faith, and murder. The anthology series (which, in essence, frames each season as its own miniseries), written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed in its entirety by Cary Fukanaga, is a great study in literary adaptation to the small screen’s longest of forms.

Although True Detective is not based on a book, its characters, ambience, setting, and submission of women are taken straight from the Pizzolatto fiction playbook. Rather than an adaptation of a particular story or novel, it is quite literally an adaptation of his writing. Meaning, the artist has switched mediums, which is why the series feels so literary (exemplified by references to Friedrich Nietzsche and to Robert W. Chambers’s supernatural story collection, The King in Yellow), and also why the show is not really about solving the crime as much as it is about the bromance between our White Kings, Rust and Marty.

Generally speaking, I don’t think it’s particularly easy for novelists to write screenplays. They tend to write in too much damn dialogue. Now, maybe, if we want to get more nuanced, we should distinguish teleplays from screenplays, and even miniseries/anthologies (especially those made for HBO) from long-running series, because there is more room to experiment on television. Compared with film, there is a lot more narrative time to fill, so the stories can handle more plot development without imploding and still have character development on par with the best movies. And the miniseries, as a form, inherently creates the expectation of long-form story development, whereas a normal series is more episodic. I’d argue that our favorite TV series nowadays, like Breaking Bad and The Wire, took on the narrative connectedness you find in a miniseries. Their popularity helped forge an audience for immersive anthology shows like True Detective and American Horror Story. This anthology format gives True Detective the shape and structure of a book more than a film or a conventional episodic television show.

How many film directors would love to have their characters and stories live beyond the tacitly agreed-upon two-hour time limit? If you look at The Wolf of Wall Street, a film Martin Scorsese extends to the three-hour mark, you realize that increased time is really about a director in love with his characters and their world. Scorsese is a director with the impetus to explore all aspects of such a world instead of crafting a tight dramatic arc. Every person who said The Wolf of Wall Street was one hour too long would be singing a different tune if the material were presented as a miniseries. No one has said, “True Detective is one hour too long,” or “I wish True Detective were only four episodes instead of eight.” In fact, the eight-episode arc almost feels too short compared to the hundreds of episodes it took to cover Walter White’s rise and fall as the meth king of Albuquerque. Because there are different expectations of these different forms, the creators are able to give us more of that good, deep material that we often complain is lacking in films. But this is because, when we see it in films, we complain that it lingers on the characters too long and we want it taken out!

Pizzolatto’s first novel, Galveston, which was published in 2010, begins in the same Louisiana backwaters as True Detective, where Pizzolatto was born, before transitioning to the Texas town where the book gets its name. At Galveston's center is a gun-toting thug who’s running away from Louisiana to Texas with a hooker with a heart of gold and her three-year-old sister after his former mob boss steals his girlfriend and tries to kill him. I hear that, thanks to True Detective, Galveston will be turned into a film, but some things may have to change. The protagonist has the very Walter White–esque handicap of terminal cancer, by this point a proven strong narrative device that allows the character to commit desperate acts with the audience’s implicit approval and prompts a deep soul search within the character. We’ll see how they handle that narrative twist in the wake of everyone’s favorite drug-dealing cancer victim.

The greatest similarity between Galveston and True Detective is the stories’ use of prolepsis, or flash-forward. The beautiful narrative structure in True Detective, in which the first half of the series is a recounting of the significant backstory by our duo ostensibly because of a virtually unexplained, vaguely defined internal-affairs probe into the case by two African American officers, has its precedent in Galveston, where we find that our cancer-ridden hero is actually recounting his adventures from 20 years in the future (a strange twist that actually undermines the ticking clock of the terminal cancer mechanism set up at the beginning of the story). Pizzolato, if anything, is a master of layered, subtly self-referential storytelling, where the varying perspectives of time give different, often erroneous accounts of the main action—see the True Detective episode where the boys cover their hasty murder of two suspects, or when Marty’s wife lies to the officers about her affair with Rust in “present” time, while the images jump to the past and we see that they actually did screw standing up in a kitchen for all of 10 seconds (unfortunately, there are no McConaughey dick shots).

The detective stories that I love the most are incredibly engaging, but in hindsight many of their most mysterious plot elements don’t hold together so well. This is probably because of the storytellers’ inclination to bait the audience with red herrings. Emerging on the other side of the story, the herrings are revealed to be empty. On the other hand, I guess it could be argued that this is like life, where many questions are left unanswered in the end. This would be a problem if mysteries were actually about the whodunit, but the best ones are usually about getting to know the protaganists as characters and meeting all the crazy fuckos they encounter along the way. For instance, the famous six-minute tracking shot in episode four, where Rust goes undercover as a biker and is an accomplice to a gang shootout, makes little narrative sense to me: They are investigating a single murder and Rust finds it necessary to be an accomplice in the murder of half a dozen Black gang members by a White biker gang in order to gain access to a possible suspect? It’s kind of stupid when you think about it. Still, none of that matters because the story has true characters. With McConaughey’s compelling portrayal of a nihilistic detective, we are just in awe of the filmmaking. How many bodies are lost along the way, or whether they are ultimately successful in finding the killer, is not our concern. Our concern is for Marty and Rust, as humans, which is what all good stories are about at their core.

In fact, I wish they hadn’t found the spaghetti-faced dude. We could’ve potentially had another season with our boys. Pizzolatto has a lot to live up to. 

John Hickenlooper, Colorado's governor, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2012. Photo via Wikimedia Commons 

Before entering politics, Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado amassed a small fortune by getting his most loyal customers seriously fucked up. Something he should probably keep in mind now.

While I'm sure most of the craft-beer enthusiasts that once frequented his pioneering brew pub in Denver imbibed responsibly, surely some significant percentage must have hoisted a few too many and wound up diseased, violently ill, or just plain violent, among other adverse side-effects of alcohol.

No wonder Mason Tvert—co-director of Colorado's successful campaign to legalize marijuana—took to calling Hickenlooper a “drug dealer," as a way to point out the nagging hypocrisy of Hickenlooper's staunch support of pot prohibition despite having personally profited off a potentially more dangerous, if socially acceptable, substance.

“The voters have spoken, and we have to respect their will,” the governor at last acknowledged in November 2012, after Coloradans legalized it by a wide margin. “This will be a complicated process, but we intend to follow through. That said, federal law still says marijuana is an illegal drug, so don’t break out the Cheetos or Gold Fish too quickly.”

Har-de-fucking-har.

Forgive me, but after a couple decades spent watching people I know get surveilled by the government, raided by armed agents, arrested, jailed, intimidated, impoverished, separated from their families, denied life-saving medicine, and made to live their lives in fear—all for growing or providing an incredibly safe, beneficial plant—I didn't really appreciate one last lame-ass joke at my expense. Still, of all the stereotypes used to denigrate cannabis users, getting the munchies does at least have the rare virtue of being both fairly benign and rooted in actual science.

So by the time the governor got around to playfully posing with a bag of Cheetos and some Gold Fish, all felt forgiven. Particularly since he has indeed made good on his promise to create a workable system for the cultivation, distribution, and retail sale of marijuana to adults (unlike Washington State, where legalization implementation has reportedly been completely screwed up).

In fact, Hickenlooper's system produces tax revenue so efficiently that he's sitting on a pile of money. This week, Colorado's Department of Revenue released official numbers showing licensed marijuana vendors sold $14 million worth of recreational pot in January, the first month of legal sales. And according to the governor's latest budget forecast, the state will take in a whopping $134 million in total marijuana taxes and fees in the next fiscal year. The first $40 million of that weed windfall must go toward school construction, but that still leaves a $94 million surplus.

Unsurprisingly, everybody's got their hand out, including all the assholes who used to make a mint off oppressing pot smokers and now want to cash in on the backend as well. The first among these are, of course, the fucking cops, who actually want more money to enforce laws that no longer exist.

"Many of our local law-enforcement agencies have diverted staff from other operations into marijuana enforcement, leaving gaps in other service areas as a direct result of marijuana legalization," the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police wrote in a somewhat Orwellian letter to the governor.

Meanwhile, Hickenlooper's proposed budget calls for dropping $85 million over the next 18 months on substance-abuse treatment and prevention programs. This sounds OK in theory, but in practice it will mean a huge diversion of taxpayer money into the pockets of America's incredibly shady $34-billion-a-year addiction-recovery industry, which, for nakedly self-serving reasons, continues to push for pot prohibition by spreading shameless lies about marijuana.

After all, they need customers. And according to the federal government's own research data, fewer than 20 percent of marijuana users in rehab end up there voluntarily. The majority are coerced, typically by the criminal justice system. Perhaps that's because marijuana's not really addictive when compared to other drugs, at least according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which once produced a chart titled “Comparing Dangers of Popular Drugs” that ranked cannabis as safer than caffeine in terms of dependence, withdrawal, and tolerance.

“It's not marijuana use per se that's driving these treatment admission rates; it's marijuana prohibition," according to Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “These people are not 'addicts' in any true sense of the word. Rather, they're ordinary Americans who've experienced the misfortune of being busted for marijuana and are forced to choose between rehab or jail."

Reefer Mad Men

The governor's budget also proposes $5.8 million over three years for a “statewide media campaign on marijuana use,” including $1.9 million on advertisements to discourage driving while high. Again, in theory, sounds good. But instead of a clear explanation of Colorado's new 5-nanogram active THC limit, or a reality-based public education campaign on the confusing science of stoned driving, or a rule or thumb for how long law-abiding marijuana users must wait before getting behind the wheel, the state's herb smokers (and herb-smoking tourists) get a stinging slap in the face, paid for by an exorbitant tax on weed:

Again: har-de-fucking-har.

Meanwhile, more than two months after Colorado's pot stores officially opened for business, there's still no place in the state to legally light up, except for private property and the rare weed-friendly hotel. Sure, a few BYOC (bring your own cannabis) “coffeeshops” operate in the shadows, and activists in the small mountain town of Nederland just announced local approval to open a tiny, smoke-friendly private club, but otherwise, John Hickenlooper's idea of cannabis customer service involves selling really expensive legal pot to tourists, raking in their tax dollars, putting ads on television making fun of them, funneling huge sums to companies trying to force them into rehab, and then leaving them out in the cold with no place to blaze.

Look, Governor, it's not like we expect a 4/20 parade through the streets of Denver—or for you to attend the city's annual Cannabis Cup and sample the offerings, the way you do at the Great American Beer Festival every year. It's just, after everything weed smokers have been through, it sure would be nice to think of all our tax money going to something a little more worthwhile. Like perhaps researching the amazing medical potential of this plant. Or just, you know, feeding the many children who go to bed hungry in your state every night.

Welcome to the "Hard-Knock Life" edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–Like millions of people around the world, I can't wait for the new Annie movie that's hitting theaters this year. The new film takes the Depression-era character into modern times, dropping the titular plucky orphan into post-Bloomberg, gentrified Manhattan. The above trailer promises singing, dancing, lavish production design, gratuitous helicopter shots of New York, balloons, Cameron Diaz trying to make herself look broke, and a lot of Black people. Yeah, Annie's Black now. I guess I buried the lead on that, eh? 

The film stars famous Black people like Quvenzhané Wallis, Jamie Foxx, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje—or, as my White friends call him, "Ummmmmmmmmmm." 

As soon as the trailer hit YouTube, I got a bunch of texts from my friends in the Race-Baiting Black Writers' Club—not to be confused with the Babysitters Club or the Boxcar Children—alerting me to the impending hatestravaganza that was about to rain down on the internet. 

On cue, a new front in the tedious dick-measuring contest known as the "culture war" opened up right next door to Miss Hannigan's orphanage. The questions raised ranged from "Why is Annie Black?" to "Why is Annie not a redhead?" This same fruitless argument slithers up to the surface whenever the film industry casts a minority actor in a traditionally White role, or vice versa. Michael B. Jordan, cast as the Human Torch in the new Fantastic Four remake, was criticized for playing a white character. Rooney Mara is playing a First Nations character in a remake of Peter Pan, and people are up in arms about that too. This is all after Will Smith played a white cowboy named Jim West, and Eddie Murphy played the Nutty Professor. And don't forget M. Night Shyamalan basically wrote the book (and the screenplay adaptation of the book) on how to change a character's race and annoy everyone.

This happens all the time now, because it's one of the most dependable gimmicks the film industry has at its disposal. The one thing that all of the above examples have in common is that the movies in question were remakes or adaptations of existing source material. Sure, you've seen Sherlock Holmes a million times, but what if he was Black? Might that interest you? Could a gay James Bond convince an otherwise untapped market to see a movie featuring that character? If you think Hollywood is above that, then you've never heard of Zorro, the Gay Blade. If the words "gay Zorro swordfighting" don't immediately have you reaching for your wallet, then I have no idea what will.

The studios are doing this precisely because they know they will get a reaction from both the people who identify with the race of the actor and the people who are irritated their favorite character's race changed. The avalanche of think pieces, tweets, morning news segments, and racially focused news-aggregator columns is just the kind of free press that sells tickets. A musical with a predominantly Black cast about an orphan is unlikely to get made, but call that orphan "Annie," and the nation is forced to take notice. 

Hollywood is trolling everyone, and it's working. There's hardly anyone online writing about how moviegoers are being fed yet another version of a one-dimensional comic-strip character, since everyone's distracted by the lead actor's race. I've written this and giving this movie yet more free press, and for that I apologize. I'm sorry, Earth. I messed up and gave in to the pressure to "weigh in on a hot topic." I'm obviously not mad about this casting, but I'm not throwing a ticker-tape parade either. Let's move on to something that matters, eh? I give the casting of Annie a 1, but the reaction a RACIST.

Before we move on, I just want to say that if you remake the Cash Money Millionaires movie, Baller Blockin', and recast Lil Wayne as a White guy, I'll be pissed.

Photo via Flickr User Gage Skidmore

–Back in the real world, Black orphans (and White orphans... and Hispanic orphans... and Asian orphans) aren't nearly as charming as Annie and certainly aren't as prone to bust out a tune at the drop of a hat. While mass culture turns poverty into a musical number, American politicians are grappling with the growing number of people here who can't afford basic life necessities. Congressman Paul Ryan has made fighting poverty his new raison d'être after severe budget cuts, his refusal to raise the debt ceiling, and entitlement reform all ended up making him look like a regular ol' Scrooge McDick. He said the following to Bill Bennett on his Morning in America radio show:

We want people to reach their potential, and so the dignity of work is very valuable and important and we have to re-emphasize work and reform our welfare programs, like we did in 1996. We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

Jamelle Bouie of the Daily Beast took Congressman Ryan to task for laying the blame for inner-city poverty solely at the feet of a perceived cultural deficiency. Not only is Ryan's idea of the root cause of economic malaise myopic; as Bouie points out, it's also beside the point. If there are no jobs, even motivated people won't be able to work. If those people can't get jobs, then what hope do disadvantaged inner-city citizens have?

We live in a culture where fictional characters like Annie are plucked out of poverty and given everything just for being cute. There's no way around that. Simultaneously, our society is full of people tweeting disparaging comments about an actor because of his or her race. There are systemic barriers to self-esteem and success for minorities that Paul Ryan and others of his ilk have to address. Of course, Paul Ryan could just be trolling us too. 5

The Stupidest Tweets About the Annie Remake:

They made Annie (the white ginger) into a curly haired nigger!!

— Shit Matt Says (@MattHatcherSaid) March 12, 2014

I'm not racist, but I have a SERIOUS question. They're remaking Annie and making her black. Annie's signature thing is her red hair..

— THE Country Princess (@countryhotmess) December 9, 2013

They're making a new lil orphan Annie, and here's the twist.. she's black.. Not racist.. But FUCK NO! FUCK! NO!

— Wyatt McMinn (@WyattMcMinn) March 13, 2014

not to be racist, but i thought that Annie wasn't black. she is white and red headed.

— Thropp (@chomsky_yuwono) March 13, 2014

They're making a new Annie but this time Annie is a young black girl. I'm no racist, but I don't know about this..........

— Haydn #nice (@haydnbow) March 12, 2014

So there remaking Annie and she's black #shehadredhair

— Andrew Erickson (@AndyEricks) March 12, 2014

But yeah. Filming black Annie's life is akin to filming white Tupac's death. Okay, America.

— Trillibuster (@WontonTweets) March 12, 2014

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The latest episode of Ford Nation takes aim at Kev Spacemeister.

If you’ve been paying any attention to Ford Nation, Rob and Doug Ford’s super-official YouTube show, you’re probably already familiar with their trademark aesthetic: two large men in suits, rambling in front of a wrinkled backdrop. Putting aside for one moment that the Fords own a printing company (so you’d think they’d be able to print out a backdrop that doesn’t look like it was unfolded from the size of a business card), Ford Nation provides a glimpse into the sovereign state of Fordlandia, whether you consider yourself a citizen or not.

Today’s thrilling installment of Ford Nation covers a new vendetta that Doug Ford has conjured up against none other than Kevin Spacey. Yes, the same Kevin Spacey who saved Lakutis, rapper and friend of VICE’s music site Noisey, from getting beat up in a New York City nightclub. Highly obscure Kevin Spacey references aside, it appears Doug Ford is annoyed with Kevin Spacey’s reluctance to take photos with his fans—because as we all know, Doug Ford is now a Hollywood insider. This all started when Doug and Rob were hanging out backstage at the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and some unnamed party advised Doug that Kevvy would not be able to pose for pictures with any of the mouthbreathers lurking in the green room.

In the video, before Doug launches into his exquisite takedown of Kevin Spacey (a man who has been paid, in a previous life, to watch rose petals explode out of Mena Suvari’s chest), a deep, concerned exhale from the congested sinuses of Rob Ford is can be heard off camera. It’s almost as if Rob Ford is trying to say, “Please, Doug, you’re going to ruin my chances in Hollywood,” but he's too disappointed to formulate a sentence. Dougie ignores Rob's grunt, and lets loose regardless: “When Jimmy Kimmel was backstage there, he’d take a picture with everyone and anyone, some folks were with us… he’d go up and take pictures. And then there was this Kevin Spacey, OK? I want to start off by saying Kevin Spacey is an incredible actor. He is.”

After hearing about the acting prowess of Mr. Spacey, Rob has to interject: “I’ve never… I don’t watch movies. I wouldn’t know him if I ran over, but anyways...” Clearly Rob is trying to maintain a neutral, Switzerland-esque position amidst this tense, one-sided, war of words between K-Space and D-Fo; while reminding the audience he’s cinema-illiterate, and capable of vehicular violence. This comment is, of course, in wildly poor taste considering the unspeakably awful hit and run at SXSW yesterday that has left two dead and many more injured. Especially considering Rob Ford has promised to make Toronto more like Austin, when it comes to the city’s embrace of live music, which is a project that's arguably failing. Classy.

Anyway, after hearing about Rob's indifference towards film, Doug quickly counters: “In my opinion, he’s an arrogant S.O.B., and I’ll tell you the reason why...” This is met with another deep Rob Ford sigh, which I have isolated thanks to Infinite Looper—a forensic YouTube analysis service designed for examining such slight, yet stunning, on camera moments as this.

He continues: “Who does this character think he is? He thinks he’s God? He goes on the show… and changes on a dime! It’s unbelievable. You know, Kevin, why don’t you get off your high horse and be real, and take pictures with people.” In the nation of Fordlandia, taking pictures with people is an immaculate deed of the highest magnitude. Where would Rob Ford be without all of the photo-taking he does? Without his love of the camera, we simply wouldn’t know how sweaty he gets, or how much he likes sports cars.

The issue now, of course, is whether or not Doug Ford is correct about Kevin Spacey’s distaste for “commoners.” After spending a bit of time on the guestbook of a Kevin Spacey fan page called "Driving Mr. Spacey," an ancient website which is at least 14 years old (and looks like it was designed within the first week that GIFs were invented), anecdotes about Kevin Spacey’s warm, approachable attitude are plentiful.

The following are a couple of choice quotes from said guestbook; [sic], of course: “i just received a reply letter from kevin and i am beside myself,” “I met Kevin and the fact that Iwas too shy to speak properly. Ladies he is FAR TOO HANDSOME in the flesh!!!!” and so on.

Another post that I was able to dig up was written on a message board for vacation cruise fanatics, called “Cruise Addicts,” it describes a chance encounter of a meeting with Kevin Spacey that sounded incredibly pleasant: “After the movie, he held a Q&A. I spoke actual words to Kevin Spacey and he spoke actual words back! Sigh, excitement. . . . . . . Then he favored us with a song.. . . . Sigh excitement.”

While Kevin Spacey has so far not answered VICE’s request for comment, it’s clear that several unidentified people on the internet disagree with Doug Ford’s slanderous rant about Keyser Söze, I mean, Kevin Spacey. While no one wants to defend a holier-than-thou jerkoff who’s not interested in interacting with the public, if Kevin Spacey doesn’t want to take a photo with a local politician from Toronto and his crack smoking brother, that’s his prerogative. Given the immense popularity and reach of the Ford Nation series, however, it’s only a matter of time before Mr. Spacey addresses these allegations head on to clear the air. VICE will be there to follow-up on this controversial feud once the press conference is announced.

@patrickmcguire

Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that affects a person’s ability to tell the difference between what is reality and fantasy. It affects an estimated one in 100 people.

Basically, schizophrenia makes living a normal life extremely difficult. Those afflicted with it often hallucinate, think others are controlling their minds, or are plotting to harm them. Even after drugs and therapy, most sufferers have to deal with these symptoms their whole lives.

Sadly, it’s an illness that not only ruins lives, but takes them too. We all know the story of Vince Li, who decapitated his seatmate on a Greyhound bus because the voices in his head told him to. On top of this, an estimated 40 percent of schizophrenics will attempt suicide at least once. Prescribed drugs help keep symptoms at bay, but a quarter of schizophrenics see no change after medication.

Oddly enough, the solution to all this may lie in yelling at your computer.

Five years ago, retired psychiatrist and professor Dr. Julian P. Leff had a radical idea. 12 years into his retirement, he decided that the best way to get rid of hallucinated voices was to meet them, and tell them off. Using patented 3D facial imaging software from Toronto, he constructs avatars with the face and voice of the patient’s tormentor. He sits in with the patient during sessions and encourages them to verbally confront their avatar on a computer screen.

Dr. Leff is now using avatar therapy to treat patients in a 1.2 million pound study over the next three years. If he can replicate the positive results from an initial pilot study, it will mark a huge advance in psychotherapy. I reached out to him over the phone to talk about schizophrenia, avatars, and yelling at computer screens.

VICE: Hi Dr. Leff. Tell me about this project, in your own words.
Dr. Leff: We allow schizophrenic patients to interact with the voices in their heads as a form of therapy. Using patented 3D facial imaging software from Toronto, the being in the patient’s head comes to life on a computer screen. I encourage my patients to confront the avatar during sessions with the hope that they can gain control of the voices, or even eliminate them completely. The project started in 2009 with a small group of patients and has since grown to a much larger study with the 1.2 million pound grant we were given.

How did you think of this? What inspired the avatar aspect?
I was seven years out of retirement, reading books, and relaxing when the idea came to me. It was a complete shot in the dark, but I thought, Why not try this? One out of 100 people are affected by schizophrenia and one out of four people affected by schizophrenia experience no improvements with medication. So I wanted to do something, I wanted to offer treatment to these people who have their lives controlled by this devastating illness. What other forms of therapy don’t offer is the ability to put a face and a being to their voices, and I’ve found that interacting with the tormentor can have a profound impact on getting patients’ lives back on track.

What have the results been like so far?
The first study was a randomized control trial from 2009 to 2011 that involved 16 patients who had had no improvement with drugs. Out of the 16, three lost their voices altogether, and the others showed promising improvements. The effect size (a measurement of the strength of treatment) for other therapies treating auditory schizophrenia is between 0.2 and 0.4. For my avatar therapy, the effect size was 0.8. This means that my treatment is at least twice as effective as any other non-pharmaceutical therapy. I was not expecting such extremely effective results. I had hoped for a minor improvement, so this came as a very big surprise.

What does a typical session look like?
Once we’ve designed their avatar, the patient is seated front of the screen, face to face with it. I am in a separate room from the patient, and the two rooms are connected with a cable. At the first meeting with the patient, I ask what the voice habitually says. I warn the patient that in the first session the avatar will say those things, but reassure them that as the therapist I will support them against the avatar. During a session, I switch back and forth from my two voices to mediate the conversation. As the therapy goes on, I progressively allow the avatar to yield to the patient's control and eventually to cease abusing the patient and instead to offer to help and support the patient.

How do your patients react when they first see their avatar?
Typically they are very timid at first. A few of my patients were sexually abused so naturally the treatment was very difficult for them. We have a panic button that the patient can press at any point if they feel overwhelmed, at which point the screen changes to a beach scene and Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons" is played to relax them. It’s tough at first to look at the thing that has been controlling their life, but it very rarely gets to the point where they have to use the panic button.

Tell me about the patients who were cured altogether.
The one’s whose voices disappear have their lives changed. I had one patient who was tormented by a devil inside his head who controlled him and got him to make bad decisions with his money. He took the devil’s advice and lost all of his money. In the first session he came in furious and just shouted at the devil. “Go to hell and leave me alone!” he said. In the second session he came back more relaxed, and when I phoned him for a third session he said, “I don’t need it!” He thanked me for giving him his life back, and for feeling clear in his mind for the first time. He now works as a successful financial analyst in Europe.

What does the future hold for avatar therapy?
Right now we’re conducting a much larger study using 140 patients over the course of three years. Up to date the statistics are outstandingly strong for the treatment, and if the results of this next study compare to the first trial, this kind of thing will become applicable all over the world. We’re not yet sure how the treatment will work in other languages, so there is still a lot of work to do. But if the first study can be replicated, this is a huge advance in psychotherapy that will change lives.


@keefe_stephen
 

St. Patrick's Days bros, courtesy of Flickr user istolethetv

According to ancient Irish tradition, St. Patrick’s Day marks the annual veneration of the island’s patron saint. In Ireland, it has become a day of parades, family feasts, and celebrations of Irish cultural heritage over a pint or two down at the pub. In more recent American edits to the Celtic holiday, the United States version of St. Patrick’s Day is an annual celebration of getting fucked up—a day of slurring “Erin go Bragh” at your green-covered bros while floating in a Guinness- and urine-fueled sea of drunken chaos. 

And when I say fucked up, I mean exceptionally fucked up. While drunk-driving deaths in the United States dramatically increase on St. Patrick’s Day in the same way that they do on other alcohol-driven holidays (such as New Year’s Eve or the Super Bowl), there's a slew of morbid statistics out there surrounding this "Irish" celebration: 80 percent of all drunk driving deaths on St. Paddy's involve drivers who are nearly twice the legal limit. The day immediately after the bro-infested event is one of the primary American business days when employers are on the lookout for absenteeism and hung-over employees, a side effect that costs the US economy an annual $160 billion in worker productivity.

With more people of Irish descent living in the United States than the current population of Ireland—but with less of an awareness of what it actually means to be Irish—our separation from the holiday’s religious roots has bastardized St. Patrick into the patron saint of anarchy. At the epicenter of this destruction, the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s annual “Blarney Blowout” party attracted some 4,000 revelers last weekend. During the revels, an off-campus apartment complex had a gathering that resulted in 73 arrests, “violence and fights, injuries, severe alcohol intoxications, sexual assaults, excessive noise, property damage, and violence toward the police and community members.” To describe it using official statements, the day-long partying was “extremely disturbing and unsafe.” 

Photo via Flickr user MarkScottAustinTX

A similar chaos descends each year in Champagne, Illinois, where the annual “Unofficial” St. Patrick’s Day celebration draws an estimated 14,000 visitors from nine states, 15 cities, and 47 colleges, bringing with them similar extremes of illegal behavior. 

But the St. Patrick’s debauchery isn’t just a thing for college students. During the late 2000s, Hoboken, New Jersey, was the epicenter of St. Patrick’s mayhem. In 2011, the last year of the parade, 34 people were arrested, and 136 were transported via ambulance. Police reports cited citizens holding up various residents of an apartment building at knifepoint, attempting to steal bottles of Grey Goose from a bar, and being beaten to a pulp by “men wearing green T-shirts and jeans.” After the city released a statement about the “inability to protect their spectators, bands, and participants,” the beloved parade was canceled.

Further south, in 2012, Baltimore's version of the celebration was marked by hundreds of teens “swarm[ing] downtown, keeping one step ahead of police while battling from corner to corner, mostly with fists, sometimes with knives… Dozens of officers called in from across the city scrambled to keep up with the attacks, shutting key intersections and trying to push the youths away from the center of tourism.” 

With massive police forces steeling themselves for ragers in parts of peaceful Canada, one can’t help wondering why St. Patrick’s Day in America has transformed into an occasion of extreme drunken violence. While I don’t think our forefathers planned for this much vomit when they held the country's first-ever St. Patrick’s parade, in Boston, in 1737, evidence seems to indicate that this epic disorder has deep historical roots. 

According to an 1867 report in the New York Times, police and a “truckman” were assaulted during “the St. Patrick’s Day Riot,” during which “swords and spears [were] in use again.” Put more succinctly by an 1874 headline, “Death Rate Increased by the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.” 

Photo via Flickr user MarkScottAustinTX

But what makes today different from our nation’s past is that even non-Irish-descent Americans are getting in on the action. In its early years in this country, the celebration was primarily limited to Irish enclaves in Boston and New York. In 2014, 97 percent of us plan to celebrate the holiday in some shape or form, meaning a lot of noobs are going to get far too tipsy when the bars open at the crack of dawn on March 17. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, excessive alcohol consumption costs the U.S. economy $224 billion a year. On your typical day, about three quarters of this comes from the just 15 percent of the US population that is prone to binge drinking. But on your typical St. Patrick’s day, when everyone decides to be “Irish,” we all become the 15 percent, and the damage to property and persons increases proportionately. 

What is fundamentally harder to trace is how the celebration of Irish pride became such an international drinking phenomenon. Aside from revealing much on the celebration’s ties to a groundswell of Irish social and political strength during the 19th and 20th centuries, when more and more families came to the US and sought a sense of community and place, I uncovered very little as to why we drink to horrifying excess on this holiday. 

Still looking for answers, I turned to my anonymous friends on the internet. According to one thoughtful Yahoo! Answers contributor, Americans celebrate St. Patricks Day in this way “Because getting drunk is lots of fun :) And it’s a good excuse to do so haha.” In explaining our particular Yankee twist on the holiday, another commenter claimed that “many Americans are proud of their roots and St. Patrick’s day gives them a chance to celebrate that,” therefore making it “an excuse to party and get drunk.” But even deeper insights on the connections between this holiday and life can be gleaned from an anonymous Irish man lurking on different page of the interwebs: “Who needs Saint Patricks Day. It’s Saturday night.. Go get rat arsed. Sure you’ll be a long time dead.”

Maybe we’re all just a bunch of alcoholics.

This week, as per usual, there was some truly horrible sexist shit in the news. But I also noticed a very clear silver thread of decency and bravery stretching through the mire—people aren't having it. Activists in Toronto protested Harper's refusal to conduct an inquiry into all of our missing and murdered Indigenous women. Students at St. Thomas University in Fredericton are sick of the fact that abortions are out of reach for so many in New Brunswick, so they started a petition to change it. And trans women in the spotlight are fighting all out wars for one another's rights to be successful and awesome. Change is in the winds, and it's because people are standing up and denying systems designed to ensure their oppression. Let’s choose to share in a bit of hope this week, friends. 

Screenshot of the website of New Brunswick's sole abortion provider.

Need an abortion in New Brunswick? Too bad!

In my home province of New Brunswick, it’s next to impossible for many women to get an abortion. Women can only get health care coverage for abortions done at a hospital by an ObGyn. And the abortion has to be approved by not one, but two doctors, in writing, as medically sound. Because, you know, a woman’s choice is apparently moot in this scenario. Further, only one hospital in the province will perform them. As a result, many who go through with abortions in New Brunswick wind up having to pay between $700 and $850 at the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton. And they often have to fight through throngs of anti-choicers to do it.

These strict stipulations, which have been in place for 25 years, violate the Canada Health Act, which mandates full funding of abortions at clinics and hospitals. They also violate the Morgentaler Supreme Court decision of 1988. That decision ruled that enforcing this kind of bullshit on a woman’s choice violates women’s rights. What a novel idea!

If this concerns you, there’s a petition that’s gaining steam on change.org started by a group of students at St. Thomas University, to fully fund abortions at the Morgentaler Clinic and repeal the provincial law that restricts abortion payment. Sign if you give a fuck!

Photo via Facebook.

Justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women

On the somewhat brighter side of things, I’m pleased to see a resurgence of activism, as our government becomes less and less caring toward the aboriginal people of Canada. This week, activists in Toronto formed a blockade over the tracks at DuPont and Spadina in protest of the government’s refusal to conduct an inquiry into the cases of over 800 missing and murdered Indigenous women in this country. The Harper government refused to do so last week, so these wonderful folk are not taking that negligence and hate sitting down.

By refusing to conduct an inquiry, the government has sent a message that it does not matter if these women went missing or were murdered. If they were white women, I bet the message would be different. For the government to stubbornly ignore the murders and disappearances of 800 human beings within its own country is truly alarming, and goes right along with the rape culture that’s poisoned so many other factions of Canadian society. It makes me ashamed to be Canadian.

Screenshot via YouTube.

Shut up and let Chloie Jonsson compete

Transwoman Chloie Jonsson has sued Crossfit for telling her she can’t compete in its annual competition, and trans model Carmen Carrera (who I was lucky enough to interview for VICE) has jumped in to stand up for her. All I can say is: Get it girls.

At this stage, I honestly don’t know what people are thinking when they make a discriminatory move like this. One look at Jonsson and it’s clear she’s a woman. Carmen Carrera made that perfectly clear to the utterly stunned interviewers on TMZ

Carmen explained that after taking steps to physically transition, it’s hard to tone up again, and you lose muscle mass. So, if anything, it could be harder for Jonsson to bulk up and compete to the best of her ability. She elaborated further on her Facebook page: “I know from experience how the body changes once you transition and given that Chloie is only 5’4” and has worked so hard on her body, she deserves to be treated equal.”

Even if she wasn’t only 5’4”, she should still be treated equal! I don’t care if she’s seven feet tall. She’s obviously not a man, but if Crossfit won’t see her as a woman, she can’t compete at all.

The company claims people have to compete according to their “birth gender.” Which begs the question: Why are we still even defining people by only two genders? It’s so unnecessarily restrictive and basic.

To top it all off, the TMZ bros told Carrera they “know she was born as a male,” which is untrue. She was born a woman who just happened to look differently from the way we think women should look. Further, they asked if Victoria’s Secret was open to having her model. Her response makes me adore her even more than I already did: “Well, yeah. They haven’t told me they’re not open to it. We’ll see when I come knocking on the door.”

God I love you Carmen Carrera. And Chloie: Don’t worry. I’ve got your awesome, superfit back.

Photo via Facebook.

Women: Psych! Now, you’re not allowed in the kitchen

I have to say, these gender wars are becoming quite wearisome. This week, Top Chef Canada ran this sexist ad.

The imagery suggests that the kitchen is too fierce, too dangerous, too competitive for a woman. She better stay out, where it’s safe!

What kind of trickery is this? Are they trying to play a reverse psychology tactic? Also, who the hell is vetting this shit? Does the Food Network not have PR people? HR people?

Gender segregation: not cool. How long will it take for this information to trickle down to the lowest common denominator? Will I be dead by the time that finally happens? Fucking probably, due to either drinking away my sorrows surrounding this very issue, or being shot by a rogue male supremacist.

Screenshot of the Circles and Support Accountability website.

It’s OK. Keep sexually assaulting women!

The feds have cut funding for a successful Edmonton program dealing with high-risk Canadian sex offenders. At the end of the month, the funding will be swept from under the program’s feet, even though there’s a 70 to 83 percent reduction in sex crimes committed by those who complete it. The funding dries up completely in September.

That government cash would have helped rehabilitate future, high-risk offenders once they’re let out of jail. Andrew McWhinnie is a Corrections Services Canada special advisor to the group, which is called Circles of Support and Accountability. He told the Edmonton Journal: “The community can assume they are less safe on April 1 than they were March 31.”

“The community” can be loosely summed up as “women.” Shocking. We’ve got to write our MPs and MPPs and say this isn’t cool. We’ve got to do things like camp out on Parliament Hill, letting our wandering wombs take over and make us get all crazy until they cease these shenanigans. Wandering wombs, for the record, were coined by one of the first sexist assholes, Aristotle, who philosophized that women behaved irrationally because their wombs would travel to different parts of their bodies and confuse them.

“Hysteria” sound familiar? Yeah, thank Aristotle.

Goodnight.


@sarratch

Photo via Wikimedia user Jdlrobson

“Hope you’re OK! There was a crazy accident,” my phone flashed at 2:47 AM on early Thursday morning. I was walking out of South by Southwest's Warp x LuckyMe showcase, high on life and other things. “2 killed, 21 injured…” came next. Around the corner a drunk driver had rammed right through a barricade into a street as busy as Times Square. That's when the willful frenzy of South by Southwest—the interactive, film, and music festival held in Austin, Texas—stepped out of everyone’s control.  

A drunk driver trying to avoid a mandatory DUI checkpoint veered into a gas station, drove the wrong way down a one-way street with the police chasing him, and then wildly turned onto Red River Street, the home of legendary venues like Stubbs, the Mohawk, and Cheer Up Charlie’s. There, he took out a massive crowd trying to get into the Mohawk for Cities Aviv and Tyler, the Creator.

I woke up to texts and emails from friends, family, and co-workers. “Are you safe?” became the new “Happy South by” and “So fun!” within hours. Artists and raving tourists who felt invincible—their biggest challenge dealing with static lines—were now thinking and talking about a crime scene, a speeding car, and the sight of dozens of people mowed down or flung into the air right next to them.  

“I’m not from New York, so I don’t want this to come off the wrong way, but it felt like 9/11,” a girl I met at a late afternoon Little Dragon set said. She’d been at the Mohawk waiting for Cities Aviv to start when everyone started rushing to the window and the venue shut down sound check. “The street was covered with people lying on the floor, friends giving friends CPR,” she said.

Earlier that day, I interviewed Bishop Nehru and the first thing he brought up was the Crash. He had been at the Mohawk too, hoping to attend his first Tyler, the Creator show. “I saw people running, and I thought it was because Tyler came on,” he said, lowering his head, his eyes losing focus. “It turns out people were dying and stuff. Terrible.”

Austin during SXSW is a town of rules and regulations, with the city attempting to maintain some sense of control as tens of thousands of guest residents descend upon it. The first day I arrived, my little brother was stopped by a police officer and got a warning ticket for jaywalking. Just about every show is “at capacity” when the venue looks half full. The fire marshal will shut it down, they say. Instead the heightened security causes a massive pile of frustrated bodies overflowing out onto the sidewalk and street. Everyone thinks this is what’s safest for the city and it’s residents. That’s when the utter chaos of it all sets in. 

In 2012, for the first time in six years, drunk-driving deaths in Texas increased—and by almost 5 percent, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. That year 10,322 died in drunk driving accidents. That’s 28 people a day throughout the state.

The murderer, now identified as Rashad Charjuan Owens, was caught and taken into custody Thursday morning. He’ll face two counts of capital murder, a crime worthy of the death penalty in Texas, and 23 counts of aggravated assault, according to a spokesperson for the Austin Police Department. He’s actually a rapper named KillingAllBeatz or K.A.B254. According to the Austin American-Statesman, he was scheduled to perform that night in East Austin. Instead, he killed potential new fans and pissed on the community spirit of the music festival, leaving a great deal of sadness and mourning in the performance's place. 

In the wake of the accident, all the journalists, musicians, promoters, and PR agents attempted to walk the paradoxical line of respecting the dead and injured while getting on with their jobs at the festival. At 12:15 AM on Friday morning, almost 24 hours to the moment the drunk driver chose to ram through the barricades, after a full day of concert hopping and general ruckus, the MC at an A3C hip-hop showcase grabbed the mic and silenced the crowd. “I know you all heard about the tragedy around the corner,” he said, turning all the way down. “I want us to take 30 seconds of silence to just reflect and remember.” People, who'd been raging on the days before, sat down their beers and tucked away their phones and started quieting down. Up until that point, this year's South by Southwest for me had been defined by its cacophony, from the disparate tunes of musicians and the pounding of journalists' keyboards and iPhones to the haunting of sirens and screams that faithful night. But for a full 30 seconds, every person in the bar retreated into his or her own mind and fell completely silent, together. Thirty seconds later, the MC announced the next act.

Follow Lauren Schwartzberg on Twitter.