All photos of the author

Young love is a business. Adult women are sold it in films like Twilight, The Notebook, and Romeo + Juliet and buy into the fairytale for two hours while putting themselves in the shoes of Kristen Stewart, Rachel McAdams, or Claire Danes, or whoever is falling deeply for the boy promising her everything. The disconnect between what's happening on screen and what happens to them in real life never appalls them. Men may watch different movies, but their perspective on love and relationships is no better. Though they often feign cynicism and pretend young love barely even exists, that's merely a stance that allows them to deny they've been hurt by their early relationships.

It's in this period of young love that many of our wounds and insecurities are created—the same wounds and insecurities that keep us from finding a present-day love to make us happy. Perhaps if we found it easier to look back, we'd find it easier to heal those wounds and move on with our lives. We don't because we're afraid to—but why? Is it the memory of what some boy or girl did to us? Or is it the memory of having once been so earnest—of having promised the world not just to these boys or girls but to ourselves, before work, money, and real commitments came along to crush us?

Is it young love we're afraid of, or having once been young? I decided to retrace my first clumsy romantic steps in an attempt to find out.

K – 1997-99

1997. Ireland is utter shit. Our social services are collapsing, unemployment is sitting at 10.3 percent, and the abuses of the Catholic Church dominate the media. In the general election, Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern is made prime minister after promising tax cuts and the abolishment of the residential property tax. Suddenly, it's much cheaper to own land and houses.

I am a fat ten-year-old who, despite getting the best grades in class, can't claim the dominant social position he desires. Our class is hormonal. Every boy seeks a mate but only wants the same few girls everyone else wants, and K is one of these girls. By luck I get to sit beside her. I am conversationally retarded—a sweaty, stuttering mess—but when the planets align the right way, I can crack a joke and make her laugh.

What her laughter gives me is a taste of the social position I yearn for. I look around me, see all the other boys staring, and like it. What she gives me is a sense of hope—hope that my future will be different from my present, and that I'll no longer be bullied for being fat. And because of this, I tell myself I love her. It's both an act of appreciation and a pledge that I won't allow what she is giving me to end.

I pursue her in a roundabout way for two years. Then, on the last day of primary school, the whole class goes to the cinema to celebrate. I’ve given everything my shyness has allowed to her and feel it's time to be rewarded with a kiss. Needless to say, I don't get one. She kisses one of my thinner classmates instead and I sit there in the dark of the theater utterly devastated.

It is, up to that point, the worst moment of my life. But I'm just getting started.

M – 2001

Even at an early age, we crave love not just for its transformative powers but also as a replacement for the physical attachment we had with our mothers. This is called "contact comfort." At birth we seek bodily intimacy with our mothers to trigger the release of the pleasurable hormone oxytocin, and as we grow older we seek to replicate this trigger with someone else. And only love will do—studies have found that casual sex doesn't trigger the hormone's release, whereas “romantic” sex, with lots of holding and touching, does.

When I'm 14, M begins hanging out in my circle of friends—actually, she goes out with three or four of my friends before getting to me. Why she even gets to me, I don't know—I haven't gotten any skinnier, I'm still conversationally inept. But we text each other constantly. Communicating that way allows me to express myself without my shyness getting in the way—when we meet in person, however, I'm still the same stuttering fool. This causes me no end of frustration. I can visualize myself being more confident but something, I can't understand it, is holding me back.

Every week my mother gives me £10 (about $16), which I immediately spend on phone credits. Texts are so pricey in 2001 that I burn through those credits in hours. M is pretty and knows the power she has over me; she uses it to elicit compliments and thus feel validated. She never compliments me and doesn't push for us to meet up—I have to assume that, at heart, she's embarrassed by my fatness.

I tell her I love her but it feels more like blackmail—something I'm saying to dissuade her from cheating on me. But cheat on me she does, and then blames me for being so awkward and “not a normal boyfriend.” I'm relieved it's over but after a while—to spare myself—I construct a different narrative in my head: She is heartless, I was a great boyfriend, and she fucked me over simply because I'm nice.

I begin wondering if all girls are cruel, because it's starting to seem like it. All I want from them is for the love I'm giving to be returned.

S – 2002-2006

S has sex with a lot of men. Being faced with someone so sexual frightens me but at the same time I can't help but feel attracted to her. She is everything I fear and yet, because she's fucking everyone else, my need for validation requires that she fuck me, too.

We begin a friendship and even after five or six rejections, her openness with me never eliminates the possibility in my head it will finally happen. But the years pass and I get nothing but heartbreak. I grow older and long for her more and more but still, nothing. She's one of the only girls I know, and she takes on an outsized position in my head because it seems like I'm the only guy she's rejecting. It drives me crazy. Is she telling the truth when she says she doesn't want to ruin a great friendship or am I really that defective?

During this period, Ireland is on the rise. The property market is booming under Ahern's leadership, developers are borrowing billions to build housing developments in every town, city, and village, and though social services remain shitty, no one is worried as the value of their houses is up 266 percent. Even ordinary schmucks, freed by cheap credit and a low tax rate, begin taking out second and third mortgages to flip houses and make a quick buck—buy one, wait a day, and it'll inevitably be worth more. The future is paved with gold.

Never one to swim with the tide, I drop out of school early due to what is turns out to be an undiagnosed nervous breakdown. I spend my days texting S, professing not just my love for her but my depression too, as if it’s some act of martyrdom done for her benefit. I pin everything on her. Though I'm a secondary-school dropout with an interest in nothing, I believe I'll be OK because her love—when I get it—will guide me through.

S, for her part, always listens but at 19 she is too young to understand my feelings, as am I, and the weight of my insecurities get too much for her to bear. We grow apart: I drift toward possible suicide and she drifts toward a cycle of promiscuity and misery that has nothing to do with me.

F – 2007

I lose weight. I run through the town at night with my iPod on, lost in beats, the cold wind on my face, thick sweat dripping down my lower back. I meet F through a friend. She is S’s antidote: a respectable university-going member of society.

As she goes to school on the other side of the country, I see her only on weekends, getting to know her slowly and over the course of many months, ingratiating myself as best I can given my social awkwardness. Then I go see her, a trip I undertake in my mother's Honda with all the deluded romanticism of my then-hero Jack Kerouac. I feel like I'm driving to my destiny on that hot May day.

We begin boozing as soon as I arrive, exploring each other’s personalities, and it’s to my great shame that I lie about a lot of things. I feel I have to—I’m a no-hoper with what is then only a small, far-fetched ambition to write, and she is going places I'll never get to. We are hammered by nighttime. We leave her apartment and stagger down the hill to the city below and in a nightclub sit yawning, desperately wishing to be back at hers. That night we sleep together, and in the harsh, hungover sun of the morning I wake up and walk around her apartment, a victory lap, soaking in whatever it is I’m feeling. When she wakes we make plans to see each other soon, and then I’m back in the Honda, roaring toward home with a smile on my face.

F proves a good distraction from my mother’s recent diagnosis: She is terminally ill with cancer, yet when the dotors repair her broken hip and zap the tumors on her spine with radiation, she appears almost as good as new. She's delighted when I tell her about F—I have never mentioned a girl to her before and she figures, I suppose, there's hope for me yet. She makes jokes about how I'll be “off" soon.

But nothing happens. F stops answering my texts and, though she continues to come to my town, it isn't to see me. I hear from my friend about an ex-boyfriend. I pretend to take it in stride and mention nothing to my mother, who continues to make jokes, which kill me. I know she is dying but that any hope I have of making her proud is dead already.

I read more voraciously than ever, revelling in Kerouac’s dark period—the pathetic self-affirmation of Big Sur and Satori in Paris—before going deep into Zola, Celine, and Dostoyevsky. I am blackened, bored, and on the verge of suicide. Meanwhile, Ireland has reached its peak. In every sector jobs are plentiful, a record number of people are going to college—for a time Ireland has the sixth-largest graduate percentage in the world (44 percent)—yet, for me, it might as well be 1982. I have no job and no appetite for higher learning, and spend my days in a haze of alcohol, writing down things on paper before ripping them up and throwing them away.

Every night, no matter what, I run. I leave the house and speed through the town for miles, taking the road past F’s house in the hope she’ll be there, see me, and change her mind. I even run while drunk, my heart pounding out of my chest, sometimes crying and letting the tears mix with my sweat. Am I in love with F? No more or less than I was with the others. I am in love with the future they promised.

Then, in the autumn of 2007, I hit bottom. My mother dies.

B – 2008-Present

Even I, wallowing procrastinator that I am, must admit it's time for a change. I refuse to continue as I am—I must either kill myself once and for all or move the fuck on. I begin approaching women in bars, and though I make a fool of myself and get nowhere, it feels good to be leaving my comfort zone and trying something constructive.

Ireland, meanwhile, returns back to the toilet from whence it came. After 11 manic years the property bubble finally bursts. Mass unemployment reigns again, 11.8 percent, and those housing developments built in every town, city, and village must be torn down or else lie empty with grass growing up to their windows. Town centers are full of boarded-up shopfronts and For Let signs and hundreds of thousands of people flee to Australia and Canada.

Bertie Ahern resigns as prime minister and is replaced, temporarily at least, by one of his cronies. In 2010 he admits that if he “had one regret,” it was the abolishment of the residential property tax in 1997. But people have no time for regrets—their debt is suddenly real, the IMF is at the door, and the mood is one of sadness and panic. The only thing that remains unchanged are the dire public services.

And yet I sleep through the fall of my country the same way I slept through its rise. I want nothing—and have never wanted anything—except that which money can’t buy. I meet B on December 23, 2008. She is like F only more so, somebody going places, but I’m so damaged by the rejection of F and the others that, in a ridiculous reversal, I resist her where she doesn’t need to be resisted, play games where no games need to be played. I think I know what will happen: She’ll abandon me and leave me to suffer like every other woman in my life, my mother included.

The proof of her divinity is that she stays. She sees something in me and sticks around to coax it out. She urges me to talk about my past—my mother, the heartbreaks, the depression—and after months of resistance, I finally give in. I reveal more of myself than I ever thought possible, and she to me, and the love I’ve sought all my life is suddenly right there in front of me.

I enter life, meeting new friends and her family, at one point even following her to a new country to work a job I hate. I know all I have to offer are my thoughts—if I even have those—and so every free hour I write, piling up pages and pages of utter shit but which I know, because B tells me so, will one day lead somewhere. And there is struggle, still—life sometimes weighs us down so that not even the hand of the other can lift us up—but our relationship can always be relied on and the other is always there to push us forward, past the transparent, petty bullshit that’s so intrinsic to life.

To say I’m surer what real love is today might be kind of presumptuous. But the purposes it serves now compared to those it served earlier in my life are certainly much different. Back then, when I was going through great pain in my life—fat, bullied, depressed, my mother dying—I gravitated toward and became obsessed with girls I knew would spurn me. What else were they going to do when I was so fucked up and awkward? Thus I used them and their rejection as magnets for my pain; I was spurned and so would go into mourning over girls I barely even knew because the grief there—no matter how bad—was almost manageable compared to what would’ve awaited me had I really thought about, and confronted, the dire state of my life.

I was punishing myself with these girls, both out of laziness—it suited me not to move forward—and because I wasn’t the boy, and then man, I wanted to be. I knew I could lose weight and be more confident—and, most importantly, be free of my stupid obsessions—but I could never make the effort and take the final step to put these beliefs into action. I hated those girls because they rejected me but, really, I hated myself more because I rejected life.

Did my mother dying affect my idea of love? Probably. Because when she died it seemed like she’d already been dead for a while. I was so wrapped up in my own puny suffering that I didn’t give due attention to hers. Her dying made me realize, though not at first, that the people in my life who did give me love, even family and friends, weren’t to be overlooked simply because their love didn’t serve my ego. It’s cliched, but I learned that, one day, they and their love would be gone.

To romanticize or be cynical about young love is a form of self-protection. We guard ourselves from the horrible (and sometimes ecstatic) truth of what went on because we believe, deep down, that we don’t deserve to learn from this period and liberate ourselves from our wounds and insecurities. We punish ourselves because we think we’ve failed our potential and gone back on the promises we made to ourselves when younger. How did I possibly think I could find love back then when I didn’t even know what it was? How can we expect anything but dissatisfaction from our present-day love when we deny our past suffering and what we’ve learned from it?

I could’ve gone on as I was, resisted B forever and fucked things up with her, and fucked things up with other women and on and on until I was so tired that I either resigned myself to being alone or settled for someone I wasn’t completely satisfied with. I wonder if that sounds familiar to you?

If it does, try to remember. Force yourself to recall how pathetic and painful it was to be in love back then—and maybe even write it down—and see if your life doesn’t improve. Because what’s worse? The pain of looking backward while moving forward, or the pain of standing still?

Follow James Nolan on Twitter.

The Arena Amazonia in Manaus, Brazil. All photos by the author.

The World Cup will begin in Brazil in less than 100 days, when the host country takes on Croatia at the Arena de São Paulo, a lavish yet-to-be completed 64,000-person stadium in the rising South American power’s biggest city. You can almost hear the samba already. The Arena de São Paulo is one of 12 newly built or refurbished venues the Brazilian government promised when it won hosting privileges of the biggest sporting event in the world. While the exact numbers have yet to be tallied, the whole operation will likely run around 300 percent over budget and sport a $4 billion price tag. Chump change to Vladimir Putin and his $50 billion Sochi Winter Olympics, but still quite a load for a country where 16 million people earn less than $30 per month.

So what’s going to happen to these football palaces once the Cup is over? Although some of the 12 cities where World Cup games will take place have first-division professional soccer teams, like São Paulo where the legendary Corinthians squad will call the Arena de São Paulo home, people in other cities complain that they are stuck footing the bill for white elephants. Neither Brasilia, the nation’s capital, nor Cuiabá, a city in the center of the country, have first-division teams, but the cries of foul in those cities pale in comparison to what residents of Manaus, a city of two million in the middle of Amazon jungle, are facing.

In Manaus, the state government ripped down a perfectly functional stadium that was home to the city's fouth-division (think Single-A baseball) team, to build $290 million arena full of luxury skyboxes. But the real absurdity of the Arena Amazonia, as the 42,000-capacity stadium is called, lay in its process of construction.

Most building materials for the Arena Amazonia came from a city in Portugal called Avieto. Manaus, being so remote and surrounded by millions of square miles of jungle, has no roads capable of being the route for tons and tons of steel and other heavy equipment. So that meant that millions of dollars worth of materials had to be shipped across the Atlantic and 800 miles up the Amazon river. Among the materials shipped include special plastic chairs that can withstand the Amazonian heat, and lasers that were used to perfectly level the field before the imported grass was laid in. The fact that all of this was done for only four world cup games played over the course of three weeks has led some people to compare the project to the lavish Manaus Opera House, the quizotic building of which was the inspiration for the Herzog movie Fitzcarraldo. The United States will play Portugal in Manaus on June 22.

The center of town

I traveled to Manaus for a few days earlier this month. It is a friendly city full of great fish, good bars, and lousy traffic. I stayed at a friend’s house on the outskirts of town. He invited me to come with him to his job at Manaus's city hall to take advantage of the air conditioning and wifi access. As I sat there working an alderman named Waldimir José walked in. I asked what he thought about the World Cup in Manaus. He cited a few positive economic indicators about Brazil, such as the 4.5 million new jobs created in the last three years. “A lot of people are complaining about the Cup,” he said, “but you have to look at the economic benefits. The government stimulated the construction industry over the past decade to generate jobs and the strategy worked. This arena here in Manaus generated 3,000 construction jobs. Unlike most building projects that end relatively quickly, this one took three-and-half years. That had a big effect on the local economy. There is also the question of tourism. We are hoping that the spotlight on Manaus during the World Cup will result in more foreigners coming here afterwards.”

Later, I visited Cicero Custodio, president of the Amazonas State Construction Workers Union (Sintracomec-AM). I asked him what he thought about the benefits of the stadium for the local economy.

“It was a terrible experience,” he said. “First of all, most of the workers weren’t even from Manaus. Somewhere between 60-70 percent of them were brought in from other states like Bahia, and they were sold a load of goods by the company. Many of them didn’t even get a ticket back home. Our union ended up buying return tickets for hundreds of them. You would think that with all the money spent on this thing and all the talk about job generation they would have paid something higher than average, but the company paid the lowest possible salary they were legally allowed to.  They told the workers they would have a nice place to stay when they got here but they were crammed in 12 to a room. Working conditions were terrible. They were forced to do unpaid overtime and were constantly harassed by the foremen. There were big issues with worker safety. Three people died in on the job accidents. Each time that happened we stopped working. When the last guy died we went on strike again and the government finally started listening to us. Conditions improved but it was too late, the damage had already been done. I will say this though: the deal we got for building the visiting teams’ training facilities is nearly perfect. They took our complaints into account for this project - too bad it’s so much smaller.”

After eating a lunch of fried pirarucu filet in a shack on the edge of the two-mile wide Rio Negro, I walked through the port district. It is mind boggling to think that here, 800 miles up into the middle of the Amazon jungle, the river is still so deep that ocean-going cargo ships can dock. Manaus turned into a city during the rubber boom of the late 1800s and there are funky old mansions and warehouse buildings scattered within the crumbling downtown hi-rises. It is weird and fascinating to sit there, sweating in the jungle humidity in the middle of a big city and look across to the other river bank to see absolutely nothing but trees. I met my friend at a bar called Armando’s. “This is a legendary bar where poets and radicals used to hang out during the military dictatorship,” he said, “It has its own Carnaval group. It’s gotten a bit touristy but it’s still one of my favorite bars solet’s have a beer. I invited my friend Vasco.”

A view of the Rio Negro, which even 800 miles inland is still deep enough for cargo ships.

It turned out that his friend, Vasconcelas Filho, is one of the members of the Manaus People’s Cup Committee. The Cup Committees are horizontally organized groups of social movements, academics, and activists from the 12 cities where the Cup is going to take place who have spent the last several years monitoring FIFA and government activities related to the World Cup. They were an important actor in last year’s street protests. They are not anti-World Cup, per se, but they don’t like the way FIFA and the Brazilian government are organizing it. Their motto is, “World Cup for Who?” and they complain about forced evictions and the huge rises in ticket prices that are driving poor people out of the stadiums and the surrounding neighborhoods. I ask him what the Committee thinks about the current situation in Manaus.

“First of all,” he said, “the thousands of forced evictions that were supposed to take place here in Manaus didn’t happen. Normally this would make us happy, but the reason that they didn’t happen is because the governor didn’t keep his promise to build new transportation systems for the World Cup. We were supposed to have a new monorail and a BRT (bus rapid transit) system by now. One third of government spending on the World Cup was supposed to go towards transportation improvements and you can see that none of that happened here. The traffic is still terrible. So, what is the legacy of this whole thing going to be for us? They are only going to play 4 games in this new arena and it will all be over. We’ll be stuck paying 500,000 Brazialian reals (about $215,000) a month in maintenance fees and the government still hasn’t come up with a plan for how to use it after the Cup. It was a huge amount of money to spend when there are so many other important problems that could have been taken care of.  

"Another problem is that 500 million reals was borrowed from the BNDES (Brazilian National Economic and Social Development Bank) and the citizens of the Amazonas state will spend the next 30 years paying it back. We have another very serious problem with sexual exploitation and are worried that with all the tourists it is going to get even worse. There is a huge problem in our state with child prostitution and human trafficking. Federal investigations are going on that seem to implicate top members of our state government in this. We welcome tourists but we don’t want our city to turn into an international sex-tourism destination.”

Manaus is a unique and fascinating city, and I hope that more people get to know about it. The government spent a lot of money, but Brazil’s economy is doing well and it can probably afford it. Even so, the Arena Amazonia looks like a colossal waste to me. In South Africa there is a growing cry to demolish stadiums built for the 2010 World Cup in cities that don’t have first-division soccer teams because of high maintenance costs. I wonder if a year from now people won’t try to do the same thing in Manaus. 

On Saturday, six columns of unemployed people who have been marching on Madrid from all corners of Spain for the last few weeks finally arrived in the capital. Tens of thousands of people joined them for a rally to mark the end of their "March for Dignity" against the high level of unemployment, which currently stands at a bracing 26 percent—meaning 5.9 million people are out of work. The marchers were also joined by thousands of riot cops and the day ended in a mess of tear gas, rubber bullets, and broken glass.

After hours of noisy protest, the rally held in Plaza Colón was still going strong when the cops began to yell warnings through their loudspeakers. “This is the police speaking. Please leave the square peacefully,” they said. Demonstration organizers started yelling through their loudspeakers, too, asking the police not to break up the rally.

It was too late. Scuffles had already started and people were running away in a panic. Families with kids in buggies rushed to take refuge from the hail of stones and rubber bullets that were being exchanged between some of the protesters and the 1,700 riot cops who had been deployed for the event.

The police were unable to cope with the hundreds of hooded protesters who responded to the police’s attack with cobblestones, sticks, and flares. At times, groups of police ended up being cornered and had to resort to tear gas to fight their way out. There were makeshift barricades burning intermittently along the mile-long avenue that separates the Atocha train station and the rally point. People took the opportunity to smash the windows of banks and businesses and scrawl left-wing slogans on them.

No pasarán—“They shall not pass”—proclaimed a banner on Paseo de Recoletos, next to an Occupy style camp that was being hastily set up. The banner proved to be erroneous—a group of riot policemen trampled over the protesters holding it, making their way through with batons and rubber bullets. Before long, the roles were reversed. After the police had stomped another 20 yards up the road, a raging column of protesters managed to push them back by throwing sticks and stones at them.

By the end of the day, more than 100 people were injured, 67 of them police officers, some of whom even had their teeth smashed up. Twenty-nine people were arrested.

The marchers may have wanted dignity, but they also wanted to vent the rage they'd bottled up over five years of economic crisis.

Scott Asheton was the greatest thug-rocker who ever lived. As the drummer for Iggy and the Stooges, Scott, who passed away just over a week ago, at age 64, was a third of the best punk band that ever existed (his brother Ron, who passed away in 2009, was its guitarist). As Iggy said of Scotty, “The record company must have thought, ‘These guys are maniacs: The singer attacks the audience. They’re all loaded. They don’t communicate nicely with us. The drummer won’t even talk to us; he won’t talk to the manager.' [Scott would] grunt, say, ‘Uh-huh,' like a juvenile-delinquent kid: ‘Don’t talk to me… grrr… grrr…’”

Scotty was the ultimate hoodlum, who stood outside Discount Records, in Ann Arbor, spitting on cars. When Gillian McCain and I conducted the interviews for Please Kill Me, we knew we had to include Scotty, since he was such an iconic figure in the history of punk. His brother Ron usually did the talking for the Stooges' side of the story, and after we exhausted Ron, we set our sights on Scotty. This is one of the few times he ever sat down for such an extended interview. We were honored that he did.   

SUITS AND TIES

Actually, the way the whole thing began was with me and Dave Alexander and my brother Ron, before we even knew Iggy. We had a band, but we weren't players yet. We liked the idea of playing in a band, but we weren't up to being able to play on stage. Mostly, we would sit in the basement and sing along with records. We almost got one song semi-down, and that was “The Bells of Rhymney” by the Byrds. And we called ourselves the Dirty Shames.

We used to go uptown to the record store, Discount Records, and there was a spot right on the corner or Lilly and State Street and we’d hangout there. Everyone would have to come through there, so we’d check everyone out and be checked out by other people.

It's a kid thing—that's why you wear purple hair, and that's why you put a ring in your nose, 'cause you want people to look at you. So we were wearing leather and boots and Levi’s. Pointed shoes were what you wanted—the more pointed and longer, the better. They were mostly used in fights—that’s why guys used to wear big, pointy shoes, and originally the idea of leather was to protect you from knives and stuff. And we were already wearing that stuff; you know, we were the first to do it.

All the bands—the Beatles and even the Stones—used to wear suits and ties. Mitch Ryder wore a suit and tie; the Rationals wore sports jackets. Everything was dressy, dressy, dressy. The MC5 used to have girls to make em clothes—make 'em these big silky outfits, you know? And we used to say, "Well, they're a great band, but man, those clothes!”

We didn't like the way those guys dressed. We thought they were too overdressed. The idea of everyone wearing suits and even ties just didn't seem to fit—it was just so square, you know?

The thing is, when you had a good pair of good-fitting jeans, and they got a hole in the knee, most other people would say, “Well, I can't wear 'em...”

We'd say, “Well that's a good pair of jeans; I don't care if it has a holed knee.” It was mostly me and Iggy who started that. And then the T-shirt thing—we'd be sitting around, and everyone would have their own individual little hash pipe, and after sitting and smoking it for a while, something would get funny, somebody would laugh, and we'd blow out a chunk of hash, and it landed on your T-shirt and burned a hole in it.

And we’d say, “One of my favorite T-shirts, it's got a hole in it now, but I don't care, I’ll wear it anyhow!"

So that's where the whole holey T-shirt fad came from, and we wore kinda ripped-up clothes, with holes in our T-shirts.

BAREFOOT GIGOLO         

Iggy was in this blues band, the Prime Movers, and they were the hottest band in Ann Arbor. They used to do all the frat parties, and there used to be this old blues club, in the Black part of Ann Arbor, on Ann Street, called the Quince Club. And the Prime Movers would go down there, play to an all-Black audience, and later beatniks and early hippies would come down there too.

Iggy was playing drums before that, in the Iguanas, which is where he got the name Iggy—but he kinda fell outta that because they also wore shirts and ties, you know; they had that Young Rascals look. And the guys in the Iguanas were wanting to go to college and stuff. Iggy ended up going for a semester and a half to University of Michigan, but he started hanging around older people, like Michael and Danny Erlewine, who were the Prime Movers. And that broke up the Iguanas.

I became friendly with Iggy when he was in the Prime Movers. I'd walk right up and talk to him because he was a good drummer. Iggy, he had this style of playing where he could, like, get real low and droop his tongue out, and he'd be doing pretty elaborate bell and snare checks—with his tongue hanging out and his hair hanging in his eyes. He’d be wearing short pants and be barefoot, just kind of like this little wild man, and he was great. The girls used to just love him, man. It used to amaze me to watch the girl’s reaction to him. He could walk down the street and have five girls following him—and convince them all to come with him at the same time.

The Prime Movers did mostly Paul Butterfield covers, and they'd do some Otis Rush and some Little Walker. The Prime Movers were what the college crowd was listening to at that time, so many people would be out there dancing. The house would be jam-packed, people hanging out the windows, beer all over the floor, and the place would be shaking, man. You thought they'd fall through the floor.

The Prime Movers had this bass player, but he couldn't make some gigs, so my brother, Ron, was playing bass with them—and that’s how we got to know Iggy more. I’d go over to the Erlewine brothers' practice house and start talking to Iggy. But Dave Alexander and I were kind of mad at Ron, because he'd left our band to join the Prime Movers. My brother had the real gig, and we weren’t doing anything, but then the Prime Movers eventually broke up.

So Iggy moved to Chicago to take drum lessons from Sam Lay and had some experiences there, and then came back to Ann Arbor after a couple of months. Iggy was taking some asthma medication, which he admitted loving, he said it made him feel good—and I think he was starting to get pretty far out, started doing stuff like lying down on the sidewalk and counting the cracks. And it would just blow the minds of the people walking by. Iggy was also listening to this guy called Harry Parch; I think he got it outta the library. It was this music that was totally non-music—like things slamming, and someone banging on gongs or a piano, and then Harry would moan, just moan, a whole album like that—and Iggy thought it was great. He’d go, "Listen to this stuff…"

And we'd go, “What the hell is that?”

He’d say, “It's Harry Parch. I really love it!”

You know, there was nothing to love—it wasn't music; it was just a bunch of wild maniac stuff. Iggy also liked Cab Calloway and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, two Black guys that were great entertainers, and very big influences on him.

THE FIRST STOOGES SHOW

I was kicked out of my house by the time I was 17, which was fine with me. I was living at the SRC (Scot Richard Case) band house, over on Broadway. I had drums set up over there, and I was jamming with those guys when they weren't playing. And one day my brother and Iggy came over, and Ron said, "Wanna start a band? Iggy wants you to play drums. Wanna do it?"

I said, "Yeah, sure."

Even though we loved the Yardbirds and Stones and MC5, we couldn't play that shit, you know? And we just wanted to do something totally different—I think LSD helped shaped our style. I wasn't a big acid fan myself; I’d taken acid about ten times. Iggy took it more, and Dave took it a lot more. But after we first tripped at the Forest Court House, we started liking and feeling good about playing.

Our first gig, at the Grande Ballroom, was when we were living on that farm, and I didn't sleep for three days, I was so nervous about the first gig. The night before, Iggy had shaved off his eyebrows. We had a friend that had a nervous condition and lost his hair and he had no eyebrows, and his name was Jim Pop. So I looked at him and said, "You look like Jim Pop."

So we started calling him Pop, and that's were Iggy Pop came from.

At the Grande Ballroom, Iggy took a woman's bathing cap and stuck all these strips of aluminum foil around it to make a wig out of it. Then he rubbed his face with baby oil and took glitter and just threw it on his face. He had a tutu on with black tights and a metal plate on the floor with a microphone on it, and he’d stomp on that with the one golf show he was wearing. It was real hot in the ballroom that night, and he started sweating—and that’s when realized what you need eyebrows for, 'cause everything on his face just started running into his eyes. We only played for 20 minutes, but at the end, his eyes were swollen up and totally red and puffy—'cause all that oil and glitter went right in his eyes. It was nasty.

Iggy was playing a Hawaiian guitar, my brother was playing a fuzz bass, and Dave was playing an amp at full volume with the reverb so it was making huge explosions. I had two 50-gallon oil drums with DayGlo paint all over 'em, with two wooden bass-drum beaters with contact mikes on the drums, and every time I had to hit that drum—it was the loudest, most outrageous, obnoxious drilling sound you'd ever heard in your life. It was driving people crazy—Iggy stomping on the metal with his golf shoe and Dave crashing the amp and the fuzz-tone Hawaiian guitar—people didn't know what to think.

There was just silence at the end of the show.

Oh, man, people didn't know what to do. John Sinclair, the manager of the MC5, was just standing there with his mouth wide open. A lot of people didn't like it—and those were the people who started showing up at every gig. They'd love to start yelling stuff to get a response, 'cause Iggy would tell 'em to fuck off. And they'd sit out there, going, “Hey, man, this is great. We're having fun; we're being entertained!"

This was not like coming to see a band wearing suits and ties, you know?

PEANUT BUTTER AND HAMBURGER

I liked the way the band was, before the Stooges got “discovered” by Danny Fields and Elektra Records. Nobody knew what was gonna happen; nobody knew how it was gonna end. That's the way we played—until we got this little riff, and then we’d go, “OK, that's it. Let's play it…”

We never tried to make it sound like a song at all. To me, that's the band that was the greatest, before we got so-called "discovered," because after that they told us, "We love you guys, but we can't put out an album of this stuff. There's no way that we can convey to people what you are, on record…"

Basically, what they were saying was that we had to write new songs. And those songs that were written for Elektra Records—it wasn't the band. The band that people found out to be the Stooges had totally changed at that point, and to me, it wasn’t for the better. If we had a chance of being who we really were, I think it would have been much different, man. But like my brother says, "These songs have made you a lot of money."

If we ever have a chance to do a reunion thing, I would like to have the band be more like we originally wanted it to be. To this day, no one has ever come close to sounding like we did when we first started. The songs we’d written for the first album were written at the Chelsea Hotel, in room 100, which was the same room where Sid Vicious supposedly knifed Nancy Spungen. We wrote “Little Doll,” “Not Right,” and “Real Cool Time,” and I had my drum sticks on the bed, and my brother had his little pig-nosed amp with his guitar, and we were just sitting there playing it—until it sounded OK. We wrote the lyrics right there on the spot, and we went in the next day and recorded them, and we never even played them in the band room before that.   

After the first Stooges record came out, every time we'd go to New York, we'd play Max's Kansas City. When Iggy cut himself, I think we were doing a week and a half at Max’s, and Iggy picked up some broken glass and cut himself. I'd broken a drumstick, and he found it on the floor and he scraped himself with that too—but that wasn't the first time that he'd done something like that. It started at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, where that famous photo comes from—where he's walking on the people's hands. He had taken two jars of peanut butter and a couple pounds of hamburger on stage with him—and he broke out the peanut butter and started smearing it all over himself. And then he started tossing the hamburger out in the audience.

That's where he got into doing stuff to himself, and I think the first time he actually cut himself, he must have thought, "Oh, shit, I forgot to bring something. I don't have anything to do, I gotta do something now, I gotta do something…"

So he picked up a drumstick and scratched himself. He didn't open it up, but scratched himself deeply, to where you would go, "Oh, no, look at that! Oh, wow!"

RECORD CONTRACTS    

After the first album, we didn't get much recognition, and sales weren't going great either. We felt like we were not really getting much push. And the MC5, who signed with Elektra Records at the same time we did, felt the same way. They were saying, “Electra is just lying on their butts; they're not promoting it.”  

So they got a buyout deal; they split Electra to get signed with Atlantic Records. We were contracted for three albums, so after the first one, Electra decides we're gonna do the second album in their LA studios, so we head out there. We rehearsed for months, working on material, and then got in the studio and did it. Everyone played live. Iggy sang the same time the band was playing, and I'm not sure if we even did much overdubbing on it at all. The producer was good, Don Gallucci, from Little Donnie and the Sweethearts, or Little Donnie and the Dynamics, or Little Donnie and Something.

It was real nice to be out West. We started playing the Whiskey, and we were starting to get more people come to the shows. So we head up to San Francisco, and we play all the big West Coast concert halls—we did the Fillmore, the Avalon—and we start selling more records. The shows are getting bigger, and we're getting more money. 

So we’re contracted for one more album with Electra, but Iggy got it in his mind, 'cause he always used to look up to the MC5 guys, that he didn't want to do any more with Electra. And instead of having someone ready to buy the band's contract out, Iggy decides to break the contract, which really screwed stuff up. All we had to do was one more album to complete the contract, but when we signed the contract, Elektra asked that there be one member of the band that could speak for everybody, and when we signed, we didn't realize we were giving Iggy “power of attorney,” so without consulting me and my brother or Dave, Iggy decides to break the band up. We had nothing to say about it, you know?

We didn't know what was happening.

So after the second album, we went back to Michigan, and that's when the band actually broke contract—and that's when James Williamson came on the scene.

JAMES WILLIAMSON

James was the original guitar player for the Chosen Few, Scott Richardson’s first band, and that’s how I first met him. But he had girlfriend problems or problems at home, so he couldn't play in the band, so they got somebody else, and he disappeared for a while. James was a cool guy, but he really got into that DET crap that was around, you know; he used to smoke that chemical shit that was real nasty.

Anyway, when we came back to Michigan from LA, we moved into the Packard House, which was the mansion with all the different apartments in it. We called it “Stooge Manor,” and this was the pad, man! Everyone had their own apartment—a complete apartment in the house. And we had a big rehearsal space and four-car garage—it was really nice. But then James moved from Birmingham to Ann Arbor; he’d gotten an apartment, and we were going over there now and then to see him.

So James was in town, and, sorry to say it, I was the one who suggested that we have him play some guitar in the band, to kinda liven things up. Eventually James was the downfall of the band. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

James ended up taking over as guitar, and because we were no longer under contract and we weren't doing that many gigs, the band sort of staggered for a couple months, and then our manager split, and the business end started coming undone.

I can't remember how it all happened, but there was a new interest from Columbia Records. See, Iggy had gone over to England with David Bowie and then called me and Ron up and asked us if we wanted to play with him, but he said it would be Ron playing the bass and James playing lead guitar.

I just viewed Iggy’s offer as a sign that the the band was back together, you know?

I wasn't thinking, “Hey, I'm not signed. I'm just a side man,” you know?

Anyway, we went to England and had a real nice place on Seymour Walk in South Kensington. I remember the first time we met David Bowie—he came over the house, and he had two chicks with him, a White chick and a Black chick, and he was just so nervous, so freaked out. We were all sitting around smoking hash, drinking some wine and just relaxing. And Bowie, he came in like a wild animal in a cage, just totally flipping out! Really, really nervous—and later we found out that he was afraid of us, ha, ha, ha!

We saw Bowie at the Main Man office; sometimes we’d go up there and just hang out and talk to the secretaries. I actually got one of Bowie's secretaries—she scratched the hell outta my back. And I got a waitress down at the pub, and the cook. That was about it.

And Bowie would come through there now and then. He was touring, pretty big-time with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars band, and that was a smash hit, man. They played the hell out of that album when it first came out, before he even got to America.

So we left England and went to LA, and we got this place on top of the Hollywood Hills, a cool house with a swimming pool on Torreyson Drive. I'd say, when we got to LA after England, the dope situation was getting out of control. I think I did it twice over there—it was really good—but I didn't really start getting bad until LA. But we were doing a lot of touring to promote Raw Power, and we were getting a lot more money, and that’s when James got into the, "I'm James the Star," thing, you know?

It wasn't like that bothered me; it was that it was really hurting the band. I mean, it felt, to me, like everyone was getting distant from what was going on in reality. Everyone was finding their own escape, and the drugs didn't make it any better—Iggy would get too high and fall off the stage, instead of jumping off the stage, you know? And sometimes he would not be able to sing and stuff, so it started getting really bad. If it wasn't for my brother, probably everything would've fallen apart, ya know?

One of the worst things about drugs is they start to take over your life, and then that's your life, and other things are put aside that should be the important things. And then James started coming up with contracts that he wanted me and my brother to sign, saying that he and Iggy would get the lion's share, and that we would be paid as side musicians. That was actually in print, in the contract—and that's when my brother and I kinda decided there's no sense carrying on.

I also felt that the drugs were just getting too bad and I had to get away. I had to get off 'em; I had to change my life. I couldn't continue, and so the band broke up.

After that, I guess Iggy had had a nervous breakdown; he just finally collapsed from massive amounts of drugs. I mean, you can't take acid and Quaaludes at the same time; it just doesn't work...

BEER BOTTLES AND EGGS

When we got back to Michigan from LA, we did a few more gigs until the infamous night that ended up recorded as Metallic K.O., our last show. The night before the show, at the Michigan Palace, was the show at the Funny Farm, on US 12, which happened to be an unnamed motorcycle gang's neighborhood bar. Iggy was into his "I'm a bad motherfucker" trip, and he started singing, "You motherfuckers think you're bad. Come on and get me; I'll kick your ass." He wasn't meaning for the bikers to be taking him seriously. Iggy was just being mouthy, and the bikers were taking offense. 

So as Iggy left stage, I looked out and just saw the crowd split wide open—and out stepped this big, burly dude, with a big glove on, with spikes sticking out of it. The big guy just walked up to Iggy and bop! He just popped him and opened up a real nice cut on Iggy's eyebrow, and blood started to come out. Everybody else was starting to get uptight, and there ended up being a lot of fights, with a lot of people getting hurt. 

But I didn’t have to fight my way off stage. I just kinda slipped back in the dressing room and got my stuff and my sticks and found my way out.

So the next night was the one at the Michigan Palace, when they started throwing beer bottles. The throwing-shit-at-us thing had already started—that wasn't the first time that had happened—because Iggy used to egg people on, you know, "COME ON!"

They'd throw something, and he'd go, "Yeah? Think you're bad?"

So it evolved into people going, "We're going to see Iggy and the Stooges tonight—what can we take to throw at him?"

I remember we played at Halloween on Long Island or Staten Island, and the tradition was that everyone brought eggs, and on the opening chord of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” SPLAT, SPLAT, SPLAT, it just rained eggs.

I used to put a cymbal right out front—I had two on the side—and I’d tell Iggy, "Don't stand in front of me!"

But he would anyway—he'd always come back and stand right in front of me—and I'd see the stuff coming out of the lights. And if it was coming at me, I would just duck.  It would hit my cymbals, but it was all aimed at him.  

See, that was a good part about the band. I felt like I was in the audience every night, watching Iggy, and I was as entertained as much as everyone else was, because you never knew what he was gonna do. It was always gonna be a surprise, and it was always gonna be something that was either gonna gross you out or be bold or something crazy, or some kind of shock, you know?

It’s like what Malcolm McLaren did with the Sex Pistols—make all the money from people hating the band, hating those disgusting boys.

But we were the originals, or Iggy was, anyhow.

Back in 1975, Legs McNeil co-founded Punk magazine, which is part of the reason you even know what that word means. He also wrote Please Kill Me, which basically makes him the Studs Terkel of punk rock. In addition to his work as a columnist for VICE, he continues to write for his personal blog, PleaseKillMe.com. You should also follow him on Twitter: @Legs__McNeil.

Previously: Question Mark & the Mysterians - The Making of "96 Tears"

Jerry Lewis is, in spite of it all, still alive. Whether the 88-year-old wants to be is another story. At 2 PM on a recent Saturday in the sleepy suburb of La Mirada, California, he sure as hell wasn’t acting like it. Sitting, perturbed, in a director's chair embroidered with his own signature, he waited for the screens flanking him to jump to life and play a 60-year-old a clip of himself pranking his former comedy partner Dean Martin. Said screens, however, weren’t jumping fast enough for his taste. "Jeff, what the hell is going on?” he yelled. “We've only been rehearsing this for seven days, for Christ's sake." Jeff, suitably shamed, rolled the clip; Lewis watched it in silence, his hand covering his mouth. As the crowd surrounding him burst into riotous laughter, his face remained expressionless.

An hour earlier, an enormous bus filled with members of the Greatest Generation had rolled up; a woman pushing a walker was the first out, followed by others of similar mobility. The theater slowly filled with canes, walkers, wheelchairs, antiquated hairstyles, and bedazzled pantsuits no doubt purchased at J.C. Penney. As the audience took their seats, a CD of mediocre ballads played overhead. "Is this Jerry Lewis singing?" my friend Jeff asked. "Yes," I sighed.

The afternoon’s “Evening With Jerry Lewis” began, as to be expected, with a highlight reel, 75 percent of which involved scenes of Lewis mugging into camera. Once onstage, Lewis cracked mediocre, race-based jokes; again, this was to be expected. A wrench, he explained, was where Jewish cowboys lived. Have we heard about the Mexican firefighter who had twins, he asked? One was named “Hose-A, the other Hose-B." The Polish were comically eviscerated, the implication being that they hadn’t been through enough. A rabbi and a priest were—wait for it—on a plane. Hilarity ensued. “Do you know what mixed emotions are?” he asked. “Mixed emotions,” he explained, “are a man watching his mother-in-law drive off a cliff in his new Lincoln Continental." The Lincoln Continental was discontinued in 2002.

In between off-color jokes, he played dozens of clips from his 83 years in the entertainment industry. In one, introduced as "one of the most important dates in television—September the 16th, 1976," an extremely intoxicated Frank Sinatra reunited the extremely intoxicated Dean Martin and questionably intoxicated Jerry Lewis on stage in front of a room of equally intoxicated people. The two hadn't spoken for 20 years. A group of elderly folks in wheelchairs in the back of the theater loudly, confusedly, talked throughout the clip; they were told to “Shut up” by no less than ten people.

A Q&A eventually began, a welcome respite from the endless montages and ethnic jokes that had preceded it. A heartbreakingly sincere woman approached the stage. "Thank you for giving me so much laughter growing up," she told Lewis. With tears in her eyes, she confessed that there "wasn't much to laugh about" in her childhood. “How old are you?” Lewis asked, apropos of nothing. “I'm 51," she replied. "You look every day of it!" Lewis quipped. After cracking the fuck up at his own insult, he then gave the woman a fake hotel room number. ("You'd probably show up," he said, shaking his head.) "You look like Barbara Crawford, anyone ever tell you that?" he asked. (According to the internet, the only Barbara Crawford of note was the first woman to earn a bachelor's degree in general engineering from the University of Illinois in 1946.) After calling the woman an "oversexed broad," he then moved on to the next paying customer.

An excitable young woman named Terry hit on him. He asked if she were gay. A woman reminisced, "I ran into you in 1976 at the Sunset Gower Studios... I'll never forget that moment. You were such a gentleman, as you always have been." As she gushed, he began to mock snore. “Are you done?” he asked, cutting off her praise.

Everyone, it seemed, had a personal anecdote involving Lewis. One asked if he did something "on purpose" during a concert in 1951. Another asked, "Why did you call me Veronica Schwartz on your Jerry Lewis Show about forty years ago?" "I have no idea what you're talking about," he replied, before putting an entire water glass in his mouth for a cheap laugh. Yet another, crying, asked if Lewis would sign a book for her father's 88th birthday; after all, he was “so nice” to the two of them on the set of The Bellboy. He refused. "Does this mean I'm not getting an autograph on this fabulous book of yours?" she asked, still crying. "That's about right," he replied.

The Q&A was a shambolic mess, yet beautiful to witness. With the exception of the people who made a reference to the tropps or the "Korean conflict," Lewis raked absolutely everyone over the coals for loving him. After each zing, he’d throw in a disingenuous “thanks for coming.” He was relentless. Cantankerous. Jerry Lewis.

One woman, after dishing out requisite praise, asked how Lewis got his start in the business—he told her to read a biography. "Have you always been a son of a bitch?" he asked her. As a woman, she was confused by this inquiry. "Am I a...son?" she confusedly replied. Another praised him for how much he genuinely cared for the kids he helped via his MDA Telethon. Zoning out, he rested his head in his hand. "When somebody puts their head in their hand,” he told her, “that means you've been on too long." He then disingenuously thanked her for coming.

A woman, near tears, begged to shake his hand. "This is an opportunity I'll never get again,” she cried. “May I, please? Please?" Shaking his head no, he told her, "Don't come any closer, you could be catching.” After a chuckle, he sarcastically told her, “I hope we can get together again sometime, because this was very meaningful." Mean, dismissive, and insincere, he was a force of nature, a sight to behold. No matter what he did, nor what he said, people hooted and hollered and applauded like mad. At times, he even got the crowd to turn on each other. When an autistic-lookin’ guy holding a VHS tape—sans case—of something Jerry did in the early 50s asked him to sign it, the entire audience began to boo. "Uh, you have someone behind you that might be interested in what you're talking about," Lewis told the man, gesticulating at the borderline elderly female usher he sent to do his dirty work. As she led him away, the man muttered obscenities under his breath.

After a touching performance of a song from Cinderfella (the film he had to quickly run up 64 steps for... it put him in the hospital!), he began his dismount. "All of the wonderful things people had to say in the Q&A,” he said, “I appreciated very much. Having to make jokes and kibbutz with the people, sometimes it becomes insensitive. But in order to get the laugh, sometimes we have to be a little insensitive. But I thank you for understanding." With that simple line, he absolved himself of guilt for the atrocious way he had treated his fans. And they forgave him. The show’s program was right—Lewis was "HOLLYWOOD'S TRUE KING OF COMEDY."

Wrapping up with a "God bless you, and God bless the United States of America," I thought, No. God bless you, Jerry Lewis. You incorrigible sack of shit. Never die.

Follow Megan on Twitter.

All images used with the permission of the Edmonton Public School Board. 

Alberta’s Ministry of Education is performing a sweeping rewrite of the province’s public school curriculums, and they’ve invited corporations to suggest what they should teach. For their redesign of kindergarten to grade 12, the Ministry’s list of key education stakeholders includes oil sands operators, tech giants, and textbook publishers. Proponents of corporate involvement, like Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson, say this initiative will benefit children and prepare them for the workforce. Parents, teachers, environmentalists, and opposing politicians have argued that Alberta is offering corporations free subliminal advertising, for a captive audience of children.

Although corporations stand to benefit from this arrangement, they aren’t actually the driving force behind it. This initiative originated with Alberta Education and has been promoted in government by Minister Jeff Johnson under the leadership of Alberta’s recently-resigned Premier Alison Redford. Participating school boards are approaching the CEOs and presidents of large corporations like Cenovus, Syncrude, Suncor, Apple, CISCO, and Microsoft for curriculum advice, though some have not yet accepted the offer. This is a non-monetary arrangement where influence is awarded for free.

Corporate input is part of a curriculum overhaul that is costing the province $55 million per year. Parents have become suspicious that lobbying from education companies could explain the rapid and all-encompassing curriculum rewrite, which comes at a time when the quality of Alberta’s public schools are declining, and money is needed to alleviate overcrowding. This debate has been extensively covered by David Staples of the Edmonton Journal, who poses the question: “Could the Alberta Education Industry be driving radical change, partly to justify its own existence?”

Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies, a family physician and mother of three, seems to thinks so. After recent changes in the math curriculum caused a sharp decline in grades, Dr. Tran-Davies started a petition that gained over 10,000 names to have the previous math program reinstated. She was surprised that the government responded with inaction, and believes they are listening to “other stakeholders… who take precedent over the children.” She thinks Alberta Education followed the advice of “textbook publishers and new math consulting gurus, who are paid tens of thousands of dollars to go around and advocate for the new approaches,” though a representative of the Edmonton School Board denied this. Minister Johnson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“The fact that Syncrude and Suncor, corporations and industries, are now connected to curriculum design—it only affirms that there are complexities to the making of a curriculum, which are not in the best interest of our children,” she said. “My concern is that education should be independent. It shouldn’t be guided by industries and according to what they want the children to be moulded as.”

Prior to leading Alberta Education, Jeff Johnson worked as the Minister responsible for the Oil Sands Secretariat and helped build public infrastructure to service tar sands projects. He has no experience in teaching or education, unless you count coaching hockey.


Prime Minister Harper at Kensington Elementary School, in Edmonton.

With thousands of parents signing petitions against corporate influence in the classroom, Minister Johnson and the Edmonton Public School Board have offered assurances that corporations can help students achieve their creative and academic potential. In an open letter, for instance, the Minister wrote: “The modern economy demands creativity and problem solving, the application of critical thinking and an ability to collaborate and communicate. These skills lie at the heart of Alberta's curriculum redesign process.”

The Minister has also said that corporations can help get kids excited about math and science, but parents and political opponents told me they are skeptical of this reasoning. “The skills that are expected—the problem solving, the critical thinking skills, collaboration, being creative—all those are things that we require of our children today. There’s not anything new that they are speaking of,” said Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies.

@JeffJohnsonMLA @AlbertaEE Jeff, tell me, what value do corporations like suncor or pcl bring to the kindergarten curriculum? #ableg #abndp

— Deron Bilous (@DeronBilous) March 13, 2014

@DeronBilous @AlbertaEE Pretty simple Deron. They advocate for science, math and engineering.Want to get kids excited early. Very important.

— Jeff Johnson (@JeffJohnsonMLA) March 13, 2014

@JeffJohnsonMLA @AlbertaEE No idea how we've taught math & science without industry all these years. Seriously Jeff? #abndp #abed #yeg #yyc

— Deron Bilous (@DeronBilous) March 13, 2014

@DeronBilous Socialists like the NDP may loathe the private sector but we recognize the need to develop skills demanded by employers.

— Jeff Johnson (@JeffJohnsonMLA) March 13, 2014

@JeffJohnsonMLA @DeronBilous Minster, I RTd your jaw dropping response. So sorry my 3-year old isn't more focused on AB economy. #ableg

— Jonathan Sharek (@jsharek) March 14, 2014

However, it is Minister Johnson’s suggestion that the curriculum should be redesigned according to what “the modern economy demands” that requires the most scrutiny, especially at a time when Alberta’s economy is driven by an oil boom. The Harper Government expects that by 2030 the oil sands will have tripled in size, though indigenous rights and legal challenges or the direct interventions of environmentalists could hinder or halt this rapid expansion. Graduates of the new curriculum will leave schools in 2030, just in time to join this hypothetical economy.

“I’m just concerned that in Alberta our industry is oil and gas, and if we’re going out into the future, you should not dovetail everybody into that industry because that isn’t the future. Fifty years out, that is not our future. Why would we pigeonhole all these children into this one industry?” Wanda Laurin, a teacher from the Peace River area, asked.

Five oil sands companies and zero environmental agencies, with the pseudo-exception of Alberta Parks, have been invited to give curriculum input. Defending these invitations on the legislature floor, the Minister offered a contradictory statement: “This isn’t about oil and gas, this is about being relevant. It’s about the economy. It’s about entrepreneurialism. It’s about making sure that our kids have the skills coming out of it to be employable. And there’s nothing wrong with working, or working for oil and gas. We can’t all work for Greenpeace.”

“I’m concerned about corporations infiltrating our education system, dictating what is taught, how students are taught,” said Deron Bilous, the NDP’s education critic. “What is the purpose of our education system?” he asked. “Is it to give students a well-rounded education, to teach them how to think critically, and to prepare them to go into any field down the road? Or is it to start training them to be a worker for Corporation X, and start them in kindergarten so that by grade 12 they’ll be a great worker for the rest of their life?”

“Part of the future is what we do to create the future. So if you’re only teaching people how to do one task, and not teaching them how to think critically and innovate, then I think we’re actually hampering ourselves,” Bilous clarified.

In defence of the program, a spokesperson for Edmonton’s Public Schools, Jane Sterling, assured me that corporations are “just going to be giving us some input. They’re not going to be building the curriculum at all.” The curriculum itself will be written by just under a hundred teachers following a broader consultation process that Jeff Johnson wrote: “is being led by parents, employers, teachers, students and school authorities, all of whom will be working together.” These public assurances also stress that First Nations and representatives of Treaties 6, 7, and 8, which largely protect First Nations land rights, will be asked for curriculum advice.

Yet parents and teachers alike told me that they have been excluded from the curriculum design process. This is supported by the head of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, who said in a recent statement that: “the consultation process is not where we’d like to see it.” Corporate involvement, one teacher told me, was kept “under the table until it was exposed. And I think that’s important to note—that it was exposed.”

“There’s arguments over how much influence [industry] would have, but I think that’s not the point. I think the fact that there’s even an opportunity for this is alarming,” said Dustin Blumhagen, a teacher with two kids in public school. He has many unanswered questions, like if schools are“going to get courses designed to only work on Macs? How far is this going to go once they get their foot in the door? And there’s specific companies—why is CISCO on there, why is someone else not on there? Why are textbook companies at all involved?”

As Blumhagen’s questions show, the worst fears of parents and teachers are still speculative. The finished curriculum is years away, so it is unclear how corporate input will actually impact students and if there will be positive or negative outcomes. Will Apple, for instance, advocate for teaching children how to program computers, or will they just try to sell schools and students their own products?

Ultimately, the NDP’s Deron Bilous argues, companies will do whatever makes them the most money. “[Corporations] are legislated or governed or obligated to act in the best interest of their shareholders. When they go out and do something nice, maybe donate or want to participate in something, it still has to go toward the bottom line of profits.”

Bilous clarified that he is pro oil-sands, though he doesn’t think corporations should be allowed to directly influence the curriculum. He told me that the coal lobby in the US attempted to write a curriculum unit for grades 4 and 5, and the unit was rejected because it “was completely biased, only spoke of the benefits of using coal, ignored any of the environmental consequences or harmful or negative effects whatsoever.”

This fossil-fuelled rewrite of reality is the greatest fear of the parents and educators that I spoke to.

“When I was going to school, and that was very long ago, we talked about greenhouse gasses and non-renewable resources and we looked at them very clearly as coming to an end,” Wanda Laurin said. “It was really clear to the children coming out of schools, or in schools in Alberta, that we had non-renewable resources that were creating greenhouse gasses—it was all very scientific. I am worried that the science is going to take a hit, because science is not on the side of fossil fuels. This is anthropogenic climate change, I mean, it’s brought on by mass activity. Are they going to deal with that? I highly suspect that they would like to shove that under a rug somewhere.”

One of the corporations that Alberta Education has invited into classrooms, Syncrude, owns two of the world’s three largest dams and uses them to hold back the enormous and poisonous tailings ponds that it has created, which leak millions of litres of toxins per day into the Athabasca watershed. The youth of Alberta will be left with the herculean tasks of surviving runaway climate change and cleaning up this toxic mess, along with the other catastrophic by-products of bitumen extraction—like the 7,300 square mile ring of mercury that surrounds the oil sands. This is, inarguably, a part of Alberta’s future.

What remains to be seen is whether or not students will be given the tools to deal with this new reality, or even to recognize it. Envisioning a world of continuous oil sands growth, Minister Johnson’s letter concludes: “At the end of the day we must ask ourselves, are we preparing our children for their future or for our past?”

@m_tol

(Illustration : Zelda Mauger)

I've always felt that losing the Battle of France and letting the Germans turn Paris into a Nazi vacation camp might have dented the French military's credibility a little. But recently Barack Obama praised the efforts of French troops in Central Africa and Mali, and I figured maybe we'd redeemed ourselves somewhere along the way.

Of course, that could have just been our American "protecters" talking us up in the international media. Because everyone likes praise, and being told we're doing a good job might tempt us into siding with the Yanks the next time they want to occupy a load of oil fields in the search for weapons of mass destruction.

To get to the bottom of whether we're actually a legitimate military force or not, I contacted Admiral Alain Coldefy—Research Director at IRIS and a defence strategy specialist—and asked him what would happen if the rest of the world tried to invade France.

(Photo via)

VICE: Hi Admiral. What's France's nuclear capability?
Alain Coldefy: We've had a 24/7 operational nuclear submarine with 16 nuclear warheads since 1972. We are able to operationalize a second submarine in a few days, so that's 32 heads multiplied by six, which is 192 missiles of 125 kilotons.

What does that mean?
As a reference point, little guy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was 15 kilotons.

OK, so it sounds like we're relatively safe.
Yeah. A nuclear submarine is roughly 1,000 times Hiroshima, and we have four of them, as do the English. The Americans have 14, the Russians a dozen and the Chinese two or three.

Oh, so the Chinese are lagging behind?
We're in the second package, with England and behind the United States and Russia. France is part of the five nuclear powers in the world, the permanent members of the Security Council. So, if we faced a big attack, we could destroy the equivalent of France—no more, no less. Nuclear power has contributed to what has been called the "balance of terror." This is why you'll never see a war on French territory. Never.

How could other countries disarm or neutralize our nuclear equipment?
You cannot disable a submarine with nuclear propulsion. That's why great nations have chosen them. Submarines lurk in what makes up 75 percent of the globe, the oceans, and are undetectable.

So how would a foreign military undermine ours?
We've had an airborne component on permanent alert for 50 years, equipped with Dassault Rafales [fighter jets] in the air force and navy. They're all equipped with ASMP missiles, supersonic missiles with a power similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima. So if other countries wanted to block our air force, they would have to drain their oil or try to dismantle them. I don't see any other solution.

Submarines are almost all of our power of deterrence, aren't they?
Yes, they are 99 percent of our assets. Apart from that, we have the air force on aircraft carriers.

So, hypothetically, we'd be invaded by earth and air, right?
If a country wanted to conquer France, it would be a land-sea invasion, with air and naval support. But there is no hypothesis, chief; if they move, we kill 65 million people. Nuclear deterrence 16,000 times as powerful as that of Hiroshima can be sent in 30 seconds if the president decides it should be. And if the international situation is really rough, it's 32,000 times that of Hiroshima. Nobody can attack France. There can be no attack on French soil because the backlash would be terrible.

(Photo by Mychèle Daniau/AFP)

But if our historical enemies—the crooked-teeth-roast-beefs in England, who have the same nuclear power as us—decided to send their army into France, who would win?
It wouldn't happen. But if it did, there would be 65 million deaths on each side.

OK. What if the same scenario happened with the States?
We could kill 65 million Americans. We could destroy all major US cities on the east coast.

So what's the point in the Yanks having a defence budget of $600 billion (about £365 billion) and all these submarines if they can't prevent 65 million deaths?
American power must represent a threat proportional to the richness of its territory. Although US military power in conventional arms and manpower is ridiculously higher compared to the other forces of the world, nuclear power equalizes everything. We live in a world where the number of soldiers are almost redundant. Remember this number: there are 111 people in a nuclear submarine. These are the 111 people who work with something that has the same power as a nuclear power plant. Our security relies on those soldiers and their very high level of technical skill.

Combat conditions have completely changed—only, the folly of men has not, and this is why we need to have a strong army. We must not let down our guard, otherwise we'll find ourselves obliged to follow our "protecters.”

Are these "protecters" the Americans?
Yes. They manipulate European countries, but not France. They impose their foreign policy throughout Europe, except on us, because we are autonomous in nuclear power.

But don't you think the States could get past all our deterrents?
Not militarily, because we have the same means of destruction. The United States are dissatisfied with our military strike force—they are our allies, not our friends—because we don't follow them like dogs, like the United Kingdom does. They bribe a number of movements, including Greenpeace, to discredit the nuclear forces. The Americans would love to be the only Westerners with nuclear power.

Should we fear any other forces?
In order to not be attacked by tyrants, we must first control nuclear proliferation in countries like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Then we must remain informed about terrorist organizations. But a terrorist attack never changed the systems or the institutions of a country, even after the 9/11 attack.

(Photo via)

Then what are our weaknesses? 
Given that half the imports into the European Union are taken in on boats, the destruction of ships—or maritime embargoes—are possible threats. France also imports 100 percent of its oil by boat. Sinking a tanker—one day of gas for France—would therefore disrupt our business, even if we have 90 days' worth in reserve on French soil.

Pure military threats are over. But threats can come from pirates who plunder platforms of oil and gas, or Colombian drug cartels. There are also weapons against which no one can fight: biological weapons. With just a few millilitres, terrorists can kill many people—in the subway, for example, like in Tokyo. The scale of the damage is reduced, but each civilian life is a priority.

There are also threats that don't know borders, like the cyberwar. These attacks are becoming increasingly important. The opponent is anonymous. Hypothetically, a large army of hackers could completely immobilize France.

Then there's space, which also presents a new form of war. Other countries could attack our satellites in space if they have the technological capacity. Our communication and observation satellites have already been disturbed. Countries can damage our satellites to blackmail us. This is an important current issue. A decade ago, Americans disrupted our satellites after we refused to go to Iraq. We didn't follow them in the battle because we knew that it was a shitty call and that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The Americans also knew it, but they wanted to go there to satisfy their geopolitical goals.

We fought Uncle Sam in space?
In the name of peace, we had to make them understand that we could disrupt their satellites, too. And as you can imagine, it happened several times.

Cool. Thanks, Admiral!

Will M. and Cal M. All photos via Will M and Cal M.

Urban exploration, better known as “urbex” is a fairly self-explanatory activity. In every major city around the globe, there are communities of people who have formed a culture centered around—you guessed it—exploring the urban landscape. This includes everything from abandoned factories and buildings all the way to bridges, tunnels, drains, and much to my mother’s horror: cranes.

About a month ago, I was introduced to the concept by a friend’s younger brother. I was initially skeptical of this ostensibly ogue activity, but I was soon convinced that like most things worth writing about, it was something I had to try once.

My fearless guides in this adventure were Will M. and Cal M., both students who have been involved in Montreal’s urban exploring scene for about five years. The first time the boys offered to take me urbexing with them, my mind immediately flashed to the viral YouTube videos of those ballsy Russian teenagers scaling various buildings and cranes without any safety equipment. I was quickly assured that the sites we would visit however, would be fairly safe and I didn’t have to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with. The guys promised to take me on two excursions: an abandoned site (typically a historic, old building) and a live site (something under construction, like a bridge or crane).

Trip number one was to an abandoned site in Old Montreal called Silo 5. It's massive building with a history spanning over 100 years. A quick Google search revealed that the silo (which is almost half a kilometer long) houses 206 individual silos and measures 66.4 metres tall. It was daunting and humbling even just approaching the massive structure, which had once served as a cornerstone of the city’s industrial roots.

My excitement was quickly stifled by the -20 celsius weather and the realization that I had to enter the building through a jagged ground-level window. After surveying the site for security, the three of us skirted across a sea of ice before making it to the window. The boys scooted me in quickly and before I knew it, I had popped through into the main floor of the building. I watched them set up their equipment while there was still light pouring in through the dirty windows. They adjusted their headlamps, camera settings and smartly added extra layers of black clothing. I looked down at my own attire and realized how woefully unprepared I was: I had goofily donned red pants and a red toque for a mission which solely relied on our ability to blend into our surroundings. I worried I had already secured my status as urbexing’s greatest flight risk.

All of my fears subsided once we began moving. I stayed in between the boys when we entered areas that were less well-lit. I was told to be hyper-vigilant of my surroundings and to only step on parts of the floor that were visible. A wrong step on a snow-covered area could mean tumbling down a hidden hole that could be stories deep and leads to god knows where. A staleness hung in the air and there was an eerie silence that was only broken by intermittent quiet instructions from the boys. We stopped a few times to take photographs before reaching the staircase that would eventually lead us to the roof of the silo. The stairs were massive and industrial so I felt fairly safe traveling up them. We took the time to explore almost every floor we reached because each one was completely different from the last. Some contained chambers full of old electrical equipment while others housed massive conveyor belts and tanks. The strangest part was that many of the machines were still filled with decades-old grain. It was as if the workers simply failed to show up to work one day and everything suddenly froze in time.



The author's subtle attire. 

The rooftop of Silo 5, after sunset.

I noticed that the guys were very careful to neither disturb nor change anything in our temporary environment. Cal described the most important code of urbex as “Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.  Unless you’re trying not to get caught, then don’t leave footprints.” It became obvious though, that others before us had been slightly less principled. Some left messages on the walls, personal tags or less inspirationally, piles of garbage.

After about 13 stories of climbing, I began to lose sensation in my toes. And after eighteen stories, we finally reached the roof. We flew by the building’s only security sensor and with some effort, cracked open the door which lead us onto the expansive rooftop. My senses were overwhelmed with the heavy wind, frigid air temperature and the sight of the sun setting peacefully over the city’s downtown. We were the only three people in a city of millions with this kind of view. The boys snapped away with their cameras while I watched in dismay as my iPhone shut down due to the insane cold.

Our descent was far less strenuous minus the sharp burning sensation making its way throughout both feet. On our way out of the building, we spotted a security truck patrolling the perimeter but we moved quickly and were able to make it out the jagged window without any trouble. Still, the risk of getting caught had been quite real and I was relieved to make it safely back to the car in my red pants.

Exploring Silo 5.

A week later, we set out on our second expedition. When I first found out about the guys’ plan to bring me up a crane, I was resistant. They explained that although the height would be greater than Silo 5, cranes are secure and well maintained because they’re accessed by dozens of workers every day. I agreed to go along and judge the risks for myself.

Like the last time, we surveyed the site before entering it. The crane Will and Cal selected was in the center of downtown near a popular concert venue. Just to keep things conveniently edgy, it was also half a block from a police station. I felt much more nervous but sure of myself, seduced by the idea of being a pioneer for every non-outdoorsy girl with a fear of heights and breaking the law. After narrowly missing a potential sighting by a police car, we slipped easily through a fence and onto the construction site.

The crane was remarkably easy to access and scale. It was set up as a series of platforms, each connected by a secure ladder attached to the core of the structure. It seemed like a surprisingly simple feat, but I immediately anticipated the biggest challenge not being physical. After a few dramatic texts to ensure close friends knew my whereabouts, we began.

The first few levels were easy to ascend. I was told to be quick because the greatest chance of detection is near the base of the machine. As we progressed up each story, the sheer height of the structure began to sink in. I purposefully refused to look down through the thick metal mesh separating me from certain death. Logically, I knew the potential for injury was low. Even if a person were to slip off of one of the ladders, they would only fall about ten, maybe 15 feet onto the corresponding platform beneath it. The real danger, I was told, existed only at the top once the central structure meets the arm of the crane.

The feeling while we climbed higher and higher was completely unique and different from the time before. Each step away from the earth brings your body a heightened sense of awareness. It’s amazing to watch your body work in complete sync. I’ve never witnessed my hands and feet coordinate with such ease and aptitude. I was faster, more limber, and each move felt more purposeful and designated. It was as though my body was functioning on some sort of survival autopilot. I was processing everything quicker than normal but my movements were still very cautious.

The top of the crane brought on a whole new feeling. I remained comfortably on the T-junction platform while the boys ventured onto the different parts of the arm. I definitely held my breath a few times as they expertly navigated around dozens of metal barriers and pillars.

"Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints." 


The top of the crane. 


Cal M. exploring the most dangerous part of the crane.

We stayed at the top for a while, each experiencing our surroundings in mostly silence. It was a warmish night at just above freezing and there was virtually no wind. As Will and Cal took turns climbing up to a more precarious platform known fondly as the “widow’s peak,” I sat cross-legged on the only part I felt truly safe: the heavily bolted platform which was part of the crane’s main structure. It sounds much scarier than it is but I would be lying if I said I ever truly felt at ease up there. The sheer altitude of the experience produced a feeling of detachment from my surroundings. It was borderline meditative and oddly calming to be randomly atop a 20-storey crane. I was able to find a sense of calm amongst my discomfort. My guess is that this is the body’s best method of coping without disintegrating into a state of absolute panic.

Our descent was painless but the high from the top stayed with me for several hours. Since that night, the earth seems so much more benign from the height of five feet two inches.

Cal told me that urbexing is a completely different experience when done alone. And while both guys are experienced and cautious, it still seems much safer to urbex in pairs. I liked watching the way the guys operated together, in a sort of rough kind of harmony.

Despite my positive experience with urbex, it’s necessary to acknowledge that it’s still a fairly risky thing to do. Many sites are poorly maintained (if at all) and conditions can also be extremely fluid. A shortcut that may have been safe on Monday could be deadly by Friday if the correct fluctuation in temperature occurs. It also doesn’t help that much urbexing occurs at night. And just like any other activity, there’s also the tendency for people to get overconfident in their pursuit of the next mind-blowing photo. Perhaps the greatest risk though, is the potential consequence of illicitly entering or tampering with a restricted site.

Despite the inherent dangers for Will and Cal, urbexing is simply a way of life that has defined much of their transition into adulthood. Their urbex pursuits are photographed and shared through Instagram and Flickr and the guys are even working on filming a short documentary about their passion. The community in Montreal is small but well-known. People travel from all over the world for the chance to explore the city’s unique urban fixtures.

During my brief stint as Canada’s Least Qualified (But Most Enthused!) Urban Explorer, I never got the sense that urbex was driven by a clichéd sports-like competitiveness. Actually, it was refreshing to see athletic guys doing something that wasn’t another elaborate excuse for a dick-measuring contest.

And while urban exploration is likely not something I’ll be trying again anytime soon (I’d like to be on good terms with my parents until at least 30), I walked away from my experience engaged with Montreal in a new way and even slightly better connected to myself.

What I discovered is that urbex is a celebration of the present. It’s an acceptance and exploration of spaces and structures without wanting to change them. Or make them cooler, more “purposeful,”more marketable. I sense that in many ways, it’s actually a reaction against the pattern of insidious gentrification affecting most of Montreal’s neighbourhoods. Urban exploration is hardly some fringe resistance movement, but its culture certainly points to the growing social engagement within the city.

It goes without saying that we don’t all need to take big risks if we’re looking for a slightly anarchist hobby or some sort of spiritual awakening. But if someone like me can experience ultimate tranquility at the top of a 270 foot free-standing structure, maybe there’s something there.

@nehaplease

The Central African Republic's capital of Bangui has seen its Muslim population drop from 130,000 to under 1,000 during the past few months. Over the past year, thousands across CAR have been killed, and nearly a million have been displaced. The United Nations recently stated that the entire Western half of the country has now been cleansed of Muslims.

CAR has never fully recovered from France's colonial rule, and it has only known ten years of a civilian government—from 1993 to 2003—since achieving independence in 1960. Coup after coup, often with French military involvement, has led many to refer to the country as a phantom state. The current conflict has now completely erased the rule of law, leaving the UN and international community looking confused and impotent.

In March 2013, the Séléka, a mostly Muslim rebel alliance, rose up and overthrew the corrupt government of François Bozizé, while bringing terror and chaos across the country—pillaging, killing, and raping with impunity. In response, mostly Christian self-defense forces, called the Anti-Balaka, formed to defend CAR against Séléka attacks.

Clashes grew more frequent throughout 2013 as the Séléka grew more ruthless. In December 2013, French and African troops went in to disarm the Séléka and staunch the bloodshed. The Anti-Balaka, seizing on a weakened Séléka, then went on the offensive.

CAR had no real history of religious violence, and the current conflict is not based on any religious ideology. The fighting, however, turned increasingly sectarian in the fall of 2013, with revenge killings becoming the norm. And as the Séléka's power waned, the Anti-Balaka fed their need for revenge by brutalizing Muslim civilians. 

"Too few peacekeepers were deployed too late; the challenge of disarming the Séléka, containing the Anti-Balaka, and protecting the Muslim minority was underestimated," Human Rights Watch said in a recent statement.

The bloodshed has not stopped. The UN is still debating whether or not to send peacekeepers. Even if a peacekeeping operation is approved, it will take six months for troops to be assembled. 

Illustration by Cei Willis

The internet may be great for you, what with its Movshare links and fascinating "Which Game of Thrones character are you?" quizzes, but please spare a moment to think about those poor souls in the corporate PR and lobbying game, the flacks who get paid fat wads of cash by some of the worst people in the world to make sure that governments see things their way. In the old days, these champions of murderous dictators and big polluters were able to talk politicians round to their way of thinking over boozy lunches in opulent private members' clubs. Nowadays, they're forced to do the devil's work in the harsh glow of a laptop screen rather than the more persuasive atmospheres created by soothing candlelight and expensive whiskey.

In recent years, the lobbying game has changed thanks to social media websites, citizen journalism (described by one lobbyist as “a major irritant”), and online petitions capable of getting millions of signatures in a matter of hours. Among the lobbyists affected by this shift is James Bethell, whose firm, Westbourne Communications, is in the business of fighting back against what it calls the “insurgency tactics” of online campaigners ("insurgency" here meaning "having a negative opinion and a blog/Twitter account" rather than actual guerrilla warfare). Their current clients include the oil and gas company Cuadrilla, the frackers who have been trying to convince people in Lancashire and Sussex to get behind the idea of pumping a load of poisonous water under their houses. Westbourne also led the campaign to defend HS2, a propsed high-speed rail line, from English communities who'd rather there weren't trains roaring past their homes at 125 MPH. Whether you're trying to get a $60-billion railway expansion, you need approval from the UK government—which means hiring a firm like Westbourne to keep a lid on protests.

Unfortunately for lobbyists, “Now, almost everyone in the country has become a self-appointed campaigner,” as Bethell said in a 2011 interview. “Everybody's seen The West Wing and has a Google account, and therefore has both the intelligence and the strategy, plus the technology, to put together a kitchen-table campaign."

So how do you go about fighting this scourge of democratic, grassroots activism?

“You’ve got to fight them on every street corner,” advised Bethell. “You can’t just sit and watch your opponents run around doing what they like. You’ve got to get out into the bush, using their tactics and being in their face.”

If we’re sticking with the over-the-top military analogies, it's obvious that the internet is a crucial battleground. It's also a useful tool for lobbyists when it comes to them finding out who they're up against. While their surveillance techniques might not be in the league of the NSA, corporate monitoring of citizen-activists has become a common tactic and there's been a significant amount of investment in this area. Today, commercial lobbyists operate sophisticated monitoring systems designed to spot online threats. It you bad-mouth a large corporation in 140 characters, chances are the corporation's social media peopel will find it. Their job then is to sift through the sea of online malcontents and find the "influencers."

“The person making a lot of noise is probably not the influential one,” Mike Seymour, the former head of crisis management at PR and lobbying giant, Edelman, told fellow flacks attending a conference across the road from UK Parliament in November 2011. “You’ve got to find the influential one, especially if they are gatherers of people against us.” His point was eloquently made by events happening across town—as he spoke, Occupy protests were creating headlines around the world. Seymour explained that once these influencers are identified, "listening posts" should be put out there, to “pick up the first warning signals” of activist activity.

Once they have this intelligence, lobbyists can get to work. Part of Westbourne’s response to its HS2 critics was to “zero in” and counter “inconsistent” press reports, as Bethell explained to high-speed rail advocates in the US. More broadly, Westbourne advised US lobbyists of the need to “pick off” their critics with “sniper-scope accuracy”—to “shit them up,” as he explained to an audience of distinguished guests at a conference in 2012. Westbourne engages in aggressive rebuttal campaigns, which involves creating a feeling among opponents that everything they say will be picked apart. This is an “exhausting, but crucial” part of successful lobbying, says Bethell.

That kind of nastiness is necessary, but it is also generally accepted in lobbyist circles that the only way to combat activists’ “negative information” online is with positive information. This is not as nice as it sounds.

Reputation Changer Demo from Simplifilm on Vimeo

There are now hundreds of companies offering to manipulate Google search results to make finding negative information about them all but impossible. A promotional video for one such company, Reputation Changer, promises to make criticism “disappear.” This is done by creating new, positive content that fools search engines into pushing the “dummy” content above the negative, driving the output of critics down the Google rankings (relying on the fact that few of us click beyond the first page of results).

BP, for example, was found to have been manipulating Google in the wake of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the company appears to have been attempting to get its message (“Learn more about how BP is helping”) at the top of Google searches relating to the spill. NGOs and affected communities without the resources of the oil giant were therefore blocked from getting their message (“Look how badly BP has fucked us”) across.

Lobbying firms are in the search engine optimization business, too. They will create phony blogs for clients that are made to appear as if they've been created by outsiders. Press releases that no journalist will ever see are pumped out just so there’s something else to read on Google when a client faces hostility. “Online, you should constantly be coming up with new content that can help push negative information down,” a lobbyist from global agency Burson-Marsteller advised colleagues in 2013, during a debate on winning the “kitchen table conversation.”

“Of course we do it as well,” said Tim Bell, the head of PR firm Bell Pottinger and a master at killing stories, Tim Bell in interview. “Everybody wants the best information to appear at the top of the page.”

Another favored technique of lobbyists is the doctoring of Wikipedia, a site that is widely loathed in the industry for its phenomenal reach and for the fact that a tiny community of editors is able to decide whether a corporation has a "controversies" section on their wiki or not. “A ridiculous organization... created by a bunch of nerds,” is Tim Bell’s take on the site. Accounts associated with Bell Pottinger were caught scrubbing the profiles of, among many others, the arms manufacturer and client the Paramount Group, at least two large financial firms, and the founder of libel specialists Carter-Ruck.

“It's important for Wikipedia to recognize we are a valuable source for accurate information,” Bell told PR Week. This from someone whose company has famously spun the reputations of dictators, repressive governments, polluting oil firms, and arms companies facing bribery charges—it even won a contract from the US-supported government in Iraq to promote the concept of democracy.

Attempts by lobbyists to manage information like this are nothing new. What has changed is the sophistication of the technology, which has given PR firms and others a host of new tactics, like fake blogs and online "front" groups. The reach of so-called "astroturf" campaigns—where lobbyists manufacture fake grassroots support—is also magnified thanks to the web.

According to another of Britain’s leading lobbyists, Peter Gummer, lobbyists are on a quest to make the digital space their own. He assured delegates of the 20th Public Relations World Congress in Dubai in 2012: “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t. This is our moment.”

Tasmin Cave and Andy Rowell wrote a whole book about this kind of thing. It's called A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain. You can buy it here.

We probably can't say that cops in Honolulu want to have sex with prostitutes, but they definitely want to be able to have sex with prostitutes, at least. Photo via Flickr user yoshinari

Cops usually can’t break the law, even when they’re undercover, but police departments in Hawaii recently lobbied state lawmakers to carve out an exception to what is a pretty good rule. Last week, when the state legislature was considering amending an anti-prostitution law to prohibit undercover officers from having penetrative sex with prostitutes, the police were like, “Actually, we need the flexibility to have full-on intercourse or we can’t do our jobs properly. Third base doesn’t cut it.”

Hawaii’s House passed the bill, thereby saying “you can have sex with prostitutes if you really need to,” but, understandably, a week’s worth of headlines like, “Hawaiian Police Want to Have Sex with Prostitutes Real Bad” and “Haha Dude Wasn’t This Exact Thing in The Wire?” caused legislators to have second thoughts about the rule now that it’s hit the state Senate.

Sex trafficking victim’s advocacy groups are horrified by the prospect of the cops having sex with people who are being forced to perform these acts, and some former sex workers dispute the frequency of “cop checks,” where suspicious prostitutes start performing sex acts to determine whether their john is really an undercover officer. But Honolulu cop Jerry Inouye argued to the state House judiciary committee that the police need this statue in place just so that pimps and sex workers don’t know cops are barred from sleeping with prostitutes while on duty. The Honolulu Police Department’s written statement likewise pleaded that not letting cops engage in full-on sex would be “preventing officers from enforcing prostitution laws.”

On the other hand, technically just agreeing to participate in a sex act for money counts as prostitution in the state of Hawaii. It seems like it would be easy for cops to bring someone in without having to, y’know, do it. And, according to the Washington Post, prostitution—a petty misdemeanor—made up a whopping 0.7 percent of the arrests in Honolulu in 2012. It doesn’t seem like a priority for their officers, so why exactly is this right to unrestricted sexy time with sex workers so important? And why does the rest of America seem to be doing fine without such a law?

It’s almost as if Hawaii cops just really, really want to believe that having sex with a woman, then arresting the woman for accepting payment is a vital part of their jobs.

Now on to the rest of the week’s bad cops:

-On Friday, the city of Oakland, California, agreed to pay $4.5 million dollars to Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, who suffered a skull fracture and a traumatic brain injury during an Occupy Oakland protest on October 25, 2011. Olsen was hit in the head by a beanbag round fired by police, and officer Robert Roche threw a tear gas canister at a group who rushed to aid him as he lay on the ground. Olsen was unable to speak for some time after the incident, and he says he still has memory loss. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Roche has been involved in three fatal shootings in his career, and he is currently fighting agaist the city’s effort to fire him over the Olsen incident. The city paid out $1.17 million to a dozen other protesters who said police engaged in excessive force that same day.

-On December 6, 23-year-old Cameron Redus was fatally shot after drunk driving home to his apartment in San Antonio, Texas. The shooter was Christopher Carter, a campus police officer at the University of Incarnate Word, where Redus was enrolled. Redus—who had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit and was driving erratically—was reported by witnesses to have sarcastically said “Oh, you’re gonna shoot me?” moments before Carter did so five times in the left eye, the upper chest, the back, the left elbow, and the right hip. An autopsy confirmed this week that the back shot, which was fired at extremely close range, killed the student. Carter was wearing a microphone on his uniform, which recorded Carter telling Redus to put his hands behind his back 14 times, and to stop resisting 56 times. Carter also said that Redus hit him with his own baton. Carter got his baton back, then shot Redus when he charged at him, but the dashcam in Carter's cruiser didn't record the encounter, so it's difficult to sort out what happened. Carter remains on administrative leave, and some questions have yet to be answered, namely: Why do campus cops need guns again?

-According to the Associated Press, police may be using a cellphone tracking device called a Stingray a lot more often than anyone realizes. The Stingray is a small gizmo that tricks phones into thinking it’s a cell tower, allowing police to intercept information from phones. That's all I can tell you. How exactly it works, which departments have used it, and how often, is mostly a giant question mark, because cops are not interesting in spilling that secret. Neither is the Stingray’s manufacturer, Harris Corp., which signs private contracts with police departments. We don’t even know what rules the cops follow when they use these things, which is arguably a problem.

-On February 22, four National Forest Service officers (reportedly clad in SWAT gear) arrived at a ski resort in Taos, New Mexico, to issue citations for marijuana use, reckless driving, and even cracked windshields. The so-called “saturation patrol” even searched cars and people, making many uncomfortable in the name of “safety.” Saturation patrols are normally deployed to areas known for drinking or drug use—the object is obsensively to prevent impaired driving, though obviously the tactic can be pretty invasive in many cases. Now former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (who ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2012) is full of righteous anger about the incident—he even used the term “jack-booted thugs” in an interview with a local TV station. The Forest Service says it is reviewing the procedure and making sure everything was proper. I’m sure everything was in accordance with various guidelines—which doesn’t mean those guidelines shouldn’t change.

-Back in May of 2013, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit asking for Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data from the LA County Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD. These two agencies have been jealously guarding most of the the details of their data collection operation, including who they share data with and exactly what a week’s worth of it looks like. Scanning license plates seems like a relatively minor thing for the police to do, but in the words of an EFF lawyer, it allows the police to track “where you work and live, what doctor you go to, which religious services you attend, and who your friends are.” In response to the lawsuit, lawyers representing the LA County Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD filed a brief that argued all of the data is “investigatory” in nature, meaning it is exempt from the relevant public records statute—that's the case even when the data in question is for license plates of ordinary people who haven't been accused of any crime. The lawsuit is ongoing, with EFF filing a response brief on March 14, which disputed the law enforcement organizations’ definition of “investigatory.”

-Our Good Cop of the Week is the Broome County, New York, sheriff’s deputy who saved a woman from a heroin overdose with the much-touted wonder drug Naloxone. On Thursday, March 20, sergeant Thomas Williams took a call from a woman who said her daughter was unconscious. When he arrived at the home, Williams administered the drug, and then took the woman to the hospital. Our other Good Cop of the Week is Williams’s boss, Sheriff David Harder, who just a month ago announced that all his deputies would begin carrying the drug in order to up the chances of survival for people who overdose. That’s how you save lives, Sheriff. Good job.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

Photos by Scot Sothern

1985

I’m somewhere on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest and someone has opened the gates to the loony bin. A three-day shindig for alternate religions: witches; warlocks; Satanists; doomsday Christians; Unarians from space; ghosts and goblins; psychedelic druggies; wizards and elves; young kooks looking for something outside the boredom of the Holy Trinity. I’m here with my friend Stephen who is conducting interviews. I’m taking pictures and I just ingested a hit of mescaline I scored from a guy with finger cymbals and blond dreadlocks.

Drifting around the area taking pictures I come upon a naked guy who has no legs and walks with his hands. His long dusty dick and scrotum drag the ground like a sandbag leaving a trail in the dirt. I don’t take his picture and I regret it for the rest of my life. It’s about 90 degrees and people are running around naked. Down a wide path where merchants have set up to sell magic potions, lotions, scents, and handicrafts, I find a spooky pale-blue-eyed redhead hawking homemade jewelry. I don’t feel a wind, yet her hair is kinetic like heat waves across her face. I’m feeling the edge of the mescaline and my digits are abuzz. She smiles and pulls back her lips like a growling tiger. Her canine teeth have been permanently capped with acrylic fangs. She’s a practicing vampire. “This is not a Halloween thing,” she explains. “We have numbers and we’re serious about what we believe. We drink real human blood.”

I’ve never had sex with a vampire so I tell her I think she’s hot and she tells me she's never had sex with a guy who has a tan. She says she's from San Francisco and gives me her phone number letting me know she may or may not respond to my calls.

I wander off to find Stephen, who needs me to photograph a ceremony that involves a topless girl with an ax and a faux human sacrifice.

When I tell Stephen about my vampire girlfriend he reminds me it’s 1985 and she lives in San Francisco and drinks blood and maybe I should give it some thought. The mescaline is rushing into my system and it feels like a toilet is flushing in my gut. I have an urge to go skipping and puking through the flowers while pushing aside anything associated with common sense. Everywhere I look people are naked.

After the ceremony I go to Stephen’s car, which is where I’ll sleep tonight, and take off my clothes except for my watch, shoes, and camera. I like being naked and stoned in the woods. I’ve been working out and look as good as I’ll ever look, so I go swinging my dick down the trail.

At a clearing, at the hub of activity, a hot Amazonian Wiccan in a fringed rawhide g-string is at one with the cosmos, sitting cross-legged at the opening of an orange and white nylon teepee. I flex my muscles and butt cheeks and ask her "Hey hey, how’s it goin’? Is it OK if I take your picture? I’m supposed to get pictures of different people here, though I’m mostly drawn to attractive women. What’s your name? I’m Scot.”

She has straight white teeth and caramel skin. She’s in her mid 20s with a body like a surfer-girl goddess. “My name is Sappho,” she tells me. “You can go ahead and take my picture. Should I look into the camera?”

“How about if we go into the teepee. The sun is all spotty out here and the light inside should be really nice.”

“I thought you just wanted to take a picture. We’re not making a centerfold.”

“We could, you know, make a centerfold.”

“No, we couldn’t. Let’s just go ahead and do this.”

She goes into the tent and I follow and she tells me nothing personal but she doesn’t trust me and wants me to not come any closer than the door flap. I tell her I understand and I’ll stay where I am, across from her on my knees with my backside outside in the sun, catching some rays. She poses sideways like Cleopatra on a chaise lounge. I’m getting excited and I’m really loaded and I start my automatic patter, saying that’s good and that’s great, just like that, look at me, lick your lips. She stops all motion and sits up covering her breasts with her arms. “You’re a pig,” she says. “No more pictures.”

I don’t blame her. I’ve got a bare-naked erection telescoped the same direction as the camera lens, and she’s neither a girlfriend, a wife, a model, or a whore. I’m trying to think myself flaccid and I tell her, uh, OK, sorry, I don’t mean to be lewd, thanks for the pictures and if you give me your address I can send you a couple of prints.

“That’s fine, thank you. I don’t want any prints.”

The mescaline is now full tilt, the teepee is breathing in great sighs and I’ve got purple ghost-lights at the periphery of my vision. I crawl back into the open on all fours and a few yards away is the guy with no legs and he’s not naked anymore, he’s wearing a T-shirt and a duffel bag. He’s just sitting there looking at me. I climb up to my feet and I still have a boner. A ceremonial group has gathered close by and they include an inordinate number of plus-sized women. No one is naked except me. I’m inside my own recurring nightmare of being naked and hard as a pinecone in a forest of women who are not here in praise of men. My stoned brain is telling me they were never naked and I just imagined it. Now I’m in a hurry to get the fuck out of here. I start walking a busy trail back to the car.

Around a curve I see a woman wrapped in black like she’s a walking coffin. She kind of freaks me out but I take her picture anyway and then jog the rest of the way to the car. When I get there I light up a Kool King and check my camera. I only have one exposure left so I take a picture of my dick then roll up the film and spool in another.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

Guatemala City's massive dump as seen from above. All photos by author

In early January 2014, a fire broke out beneath the festering mountain of garbage that is Guatemala City's dump. The fire department half-heartedly tried to extinguish the inferno with water and suffocate it with bulldozers full of dirt, but it refused to go out, fueled by the chemical waste and toxic refuse deep below the surface of the trash pile. Seen from an airplane approaching the impoverished nation's airport, the acrid smoke billowing from the ugly gash in the center of the city looked like an open volcanic fault or the gates to hell.

Although the blaze on the surface of the trash heap was eventually extinguished and there are no open flames today, those who work in the dump say there are fires continuously burning deep within the trash pile, and while the firefighters continue to attempt to extinguish them, according to observers and residents they don’t have the right equipment to completely extinguish the chemical-soaked piles. The fire technically only burned for two days in January, but I've been told it smoldered within the garbage pile for a month before then.

Some 7,000 people work from dawn to dusk, 365 days a year in the dump—whole families spend their lives collecting plastic, metal, and old magazines from out of the trash heap to sell to recyclers. Around 1,000 of these guajeros, as the trash-pickers are called, are children, according to residents.

One elderly guajero told me he has worked in the basurero (Spanish for dump—it’s also the name of the neighborhood where the guajeroslive) for 50 years, but in recent years there has been an influx of people coming here to join him. Many families have been driven to the basurero by poverty brought on by the global economic crisis coupled with mismanagement on the part of the Guatemalan government.

The work they do is incredibly dangerous, and the pay is terrible. At the end of the day, the guajeros go home across the street from the dump to a warren of garbage-choked alleyways and shacks made from corrugated metal and old tarpaulins. Because of the barrio's proximity to the dump, the air is always thick with the foul smoke of the garbage fires. Even at noon on an otherwise clear day, the sky over the basurero is white with thick smoke and dust.

There are no current estimates of the level of air contamination in the neighborhood, but a 2012 survey by the University of San Carlos found that the average annual amount of particulate contamination in the air at a testing station less than two miles from the dump was 94 micrograms per cubic meter of air. By comparison, the EPA recommends a maximum annual level of just 75 micrograms per cubic meter. In other parts of Guatemala City, air contamination averages around 45 micrograms per cubic meter, and even that seems dirty to most people from the US. Residents of the basurero complain of chronic congestion, constant headaches, and high rates of asthma and respiratory problems.

“Our health is always worse,” said José, a local community leader, his eyes glassy and bloodshot. The only creatures that seem to thrive in the basurero are the thousands of vultures that constantly circle above the neighborhood.

One of the alleyways where residents of the basurero live.

The danger to the guajeros and their families is not limited to dirty air. People die from accidents in the dump “all the time,” one worker told me. Many of the guajeros are addicted to crack or powder cocaine, and there’s little in the way of formal authority. Portions of Zona 3, as the surrounding area is called, are reputedly under the de facto control of competing groups of narco traffickers, which can create a certain level of order and security, but the basurero itself is in a kind of no-man's land. “The government controls nothing” was how José described it.

“We asked for medical help, it didn't happen. We asked for security, it didn't happen. We asked for ambulances, it didn't happen,” José told me. He said that although there’s a clinic with doctors who visit regularly, there’s never any medicine there, and added that the community's single greatest need is new roofs for their huts.

Many adults working in the basurero cannot read or write, including Jose, and most families are illegally squatting on the land they live on, but the grimmest thing about the current situation in the slum is that for many of the people who came to the neighborhood from the countryside, moving here was supposed to be a step up from their former lives.

“Most of them have no school or very little school, maybe some elementary,” said Andrea Marroquín, the head of PR for Camino Seguro ("Safe Passage"), an NGO that works to provide education to children of guajeros. “They're looking for new opportunities here.”

The last major migration to the basurero occurred in 2009, shortly after the world financial meltdown. The crash came at the beginning of a process of land consolidation by the sugar plantations, and many poor people who had previously been tenant farmers found their livelihoods swallowed up in land deals. Moreover, those from the south of Guatemala generally have fewer relatives living in the United States, and so received less money from family members working abroad compared to the rest of the country.

Direct investment in Guatemala dropped 20 percent between 2008 and 2009 (it recovered the following year), and the bottom fell out of the economy. At the same time, the price of basic commodities began to skyrocket—the cost of providing food for a family in Guatemala grew 50 percent from 2007 to 2011. The construction jobs that many poor people had relied on disappeared, and remittances sent to Guatemalans from friends and relatives abroad plunged 10 percent from 2008 to 2009. Guatemala's rate of GPD growth dropped from 6.3 percent in 2007 to a low of just 0.5 percent in 2009. By then, the entire world was suffering the effects of a recession, and poor Guatemalans were hit especially hard.

“In 2009 and 2010, the economy was very slow, and these people probably rely on day-to-day labor,” said Araceli Martinez, an anthropologist at Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. “What they have left is the city, and where in the city? The slums.” Once they arrived in the basurero, recent migrants found themselves without skills and community networks they had previously relied upon to get work. Migrants tended to cluster together with others from the same town or region, further reducing their ability to access labor markets in Guatemala City. As a result, the only work they can find is picking through the dump’s immense mounds of garbage.

For those who have moved to the basurero, the work is a way “to live the day,” Andrea said. “It's all about perspective. They don't see the health problems, and for them [trash picking is] an income.”

Yet once people arrive in the basurero, they rarely find a better life. Lacking an education and never earning enough money to save a nest egg, families get stuck in the slums, where they don’t have access to the city’s social services.

“Even if you move from a beautiful, clean town in the country… the perception is that moving to the city, even to a slum, is moving up,” Araceli said. “But it's only an illusion.”

It falls to private charitable organizations to provide basic services in the neighborhood. Camino Seguro tries to help by providing education to children and food to families in addition to adult tutoring, but it doesn’t have nearly enough resources. “After they finish school they come here… we try to keep them in a safe space,” Andrea said. The children receive tutoring, regular checkups, and meals. “None of our kids have malnutrition,” Andrea told me, “and that's a success for us.”

Men rest outside the walls of the dump.

Guatemala City's notorious street gangs, the maras, have far more power than NGOs n the basurero. On a good day, a guajero earns around 40 Quetzales ($5). However, the gangs regularly extort the workers for about half of their daily earnings, often leaving them with as little as $2.50 for an entire day of back-breaking labor.

The maras also prey on unattended children, recruiting them into extortion schemes and other illegal activities. “This is a red zone,” said Andrea. “It's called a red zone because there is a lot of crime down here and gangs. And so, if you live in another zone, you don't want to come here for anything.

“A lot of people know what's going on… but there are more who just don't have any idea,” she added. In general, people simply try to avoid getting in trouble, and “even when they know what's going on, they don't do anything.”

The police have a presence here, but they do little to maintain order or protect the community. Rape, theft, and child abuse are extremely common, according to people in the neighborhood.

“The police are bandits,” José told me when I visited him. He pointed to a patch of dirt near a dingy tienda selling chips and soft drinks. “A man was killed right there,” he told me. Police officers with shotguns stood barely 50 yards away. “They did nothing,” José said, indicating the cops.

The officers stationed at the enormous green gates of the basurero are ostensibly there to prevent unlicensed workers and children from entering the dump—they have clipboards with lists of ID numbers—but large gaps in the wall and the thundering parade of garbage trucks allow guajeros to sneak in and out relatively unhindered.

“There are no records of how many people work there,” Andrea said. “We have had reports of kids still working there.”

Children inside the door of one of the basurero's shacks.

When I visited the dump in an attempt to document conditions there, I was turned away at the gate by police and told I couldn’t take pictures without a special permit from the city—a predictable result given the way the authorities have stopped information about the basurero from getting out.

Guatemala's press has largely failed to cover the humanitarian crisis in the neighborhood. What coverage there has been focused on the efforts of the fire department to control the blazes that periodically break out there—and reports do not mention, as José did, that the fire smoldered for a month prior to the arrival of the fire department. There’s very little attention being paid to the ugly conditions of day-to-day life in the basurero. José believes that “the government pays journalists not to write about the dump.”

In any case, it wasn’t very difficult to dodge the police at the gates. I was able to photograph the gates of the dump from a moving car, and the city's public cemetery is perched precariously above the cliff wall of the dump—the vast hell-scape can be hazily seen through the smoke.

The public cemetery is where the vultures perch in between dives into the pit. It’s a massive city of mausoleums where families rent shelves for the bones of their ancestors. In the past, if a family failed to make the annual $25 payment to the cemetery, the bones of their relative would be exhumed by the graveyard’s management, and, according to some, chucked off the edge into the dump.

When I was there leaning out over the edge taking photos, I saw a relatively new SUV with “Social Services” blazoned on its side was parked at the cemetery gate. Vans like that are relatively common all over the city, but not in the basurero. Even the dead have better access to services than those laboring in the dump below. The scale of the dump is immense, and the pit is surrounded on all sides by cliffs, creating a suffocating, enclosed feeling. The effect is of a fetid mass grave, and the guajeros lurching from garbage pile to garbage pile look like the living dead.

Follow Benjamin Reeves on Twitter.

Definitely haunted. All photos by Jon Manning.

As about 45 percent of us know, ghosts are definitely real and casually walk among us. Some have a post-life agenda of stealing our socks or manifesting as apparitions on burned toast; others prefer to spend their time banging around abandoned children’s hospitals for Syfy Channel reality shows. But there’s one ghost who has taken an industrious approach, choosing to operate a creepy Coca-Cola machine on an innocuous corner in Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Like an endless Encyclopedia Brown story, the machine has been an ongoing source of curiosity and fear from locals for decades due to its weird location, outdated appearance, and reputation for being continuously and strangely stocked by a seemingly non-existent operator. It brings to mind the famous line from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that gave entire generations of children the heebie jeebies: “Nobody ever goes in, and nobody ever comes out.”

With its sun-bleached buttons and charmingly antiquated Mountain Dew logo, the Mystery Coke Machine has been spitting out sodas on the corner of John and Broadway for upwards of 15 years, but no one seems to know exactly for how long—or who re-stocks, maintains, or collects money from the thing. It’s as though it fell out of a wormhole and landed free-standing onto this lonely corner. From the get-go, its 70s appearance evoked a sense of cheery yet ominous nostalgia, as if Matthew McConaughey’s character from Dazed and Confused would fit right in with it, leaning against its side while he’s busy winking at you. Prior to encountering it, you may not consider how unusual and even intimidating a vending machine looks standing alone on a sidewalk. It’s almost as though it’s forever waiting for something, or someone in particular, to show up. 

Unlike its contemporaries that are characteristically flanked with buttons down their right-hand-side, its offerings are presented in horizontal rows at eye level. And here comes the creepy kicker: it has the standard offerings—cola, root beer, “Dew”—but also a whimsical, circusy-looking, fear-of-clowns-conjuring “? Mystery ?” button that results in a random selection. And that doesn’t mean a random selection from the other drink choices; it means beverages so random that you couldn’t even think of them if you were playing Scattegories. Upon recently bestowing the machine with three dollars, I received a Mountain Dew White Out, a raspberry-flavored Nestea Brisk, a Hawaiian Punch, and a Grape Fanta. It has also been rumored to birth Vanilla Cokes, Black Cherry Frescas, and Sunkist Cherry Limeade, among many other libationary oddities. 

Seeking answers, I looked to Broadway Locksmith, the establishment nearest to the machine. Merely a patch of grass and a handicap ramp away, I felt certain that they must have seen someone enacting some evidence of responsibility over the MCM, but they either genuinely have no clue or are feigning ignorance. “I’ve honestly never seen anyone open it,” offers Mickey, the locksmith business’s earnest-sounding general manager. “Do people get soda out of it frequently?” I ask him “Oh yeah, all the time. All day long,” he said. “ And yet in a decade-and-a-half, you’ve never seen anyone tampering with it or refilling it?” I asked. “Nope,” he shrugged, “He must come in the middle of the night on a weekend or something.” Or, as our theory states, the soda emissary could be a restless, undead spirit able to transcend the laws of space-time in order to supply an endless assortment of carbonated drinks.

Unconvinced that Mickey and his locksmith mignions had nothing to do with the machine, I pressed him for knowledge. “Are you sure that you’re not the one who collects money out of it?” “No, ma’am,” he insisted. “I think they run on the same power as our address, but that’s it.” Mickey also claims that people often gather around the machine to stare at it with frightened wonder, or put entire rolls of quarters into its bowels in hopes of decoding its mystery-button logic. Where can you even get Brisk iced tea in a can anymore? Supposing that the operator of this mystifying appliance is a flesh-and-blood human being, it’s truly admirable that he or she could evade the eye of the masses for decades. 

Or perhaps the operator of the machine isn’t the ghost, but the machine itself. Where can we go anymore to receive something spontaneous  and unexpected, rather than painfully customized, curated, tailor-marketed, and tech’d to death? Coke’s newest vending machine model, dubbed “The Coca-Cola Freestyle,” claims to offer more than 100 quote-unquote made-to-order beverage choices, ranging from Caffeine-Free Diet Coke to Seagram’s Cherry Ginger Ale to Powerade Zero Fruit Punch, even boasting an integrative app that allows you to find the nearest location, save your digital suicides, and check in to earn “badges.” But all of this for soda personalization? Does this seem preferable to stumbling upon an aged vending machine on an unexpected curb and letting the powers that be choose your beverage fate? Surely, there is something to be said for the spirit of a good old-fashioned gamble—at least if the people of Seattle have anything to say about it, as they prostrate to the boxy idol with their loose change year upon passing year. Like a forgotten love song on the radio, an aluminum vial of Hawaiian Punch could never carry quite the same weight unless bestowed upon you by chance. 

But one notable amendment is that the price of the sodas in the mystery machine recently rose from 55 to 75 cents. 

Looks like even ghosts aren’t exempt from inflation. 

Photos courtesy of the White family

The night Victor White Sr.’s son died in the backseat of a cop car in New Iberia, Louisiana, he called the local sheriff’s station to figure out where his boy was.

“I asked them if he’d been apprehended, and they told me no,” he said to me. It wasn’t until the following morning, March 3, that Victor Sr. found out his son, Victor White III, had been arrested and died while in police custody. But he didn’t receive the news from the New Iberia Sheriff's Department—he got the call from his son Leonard, who also lives in New Iberia and had been questioned that morning by police in connection with the death of his brother.

Immediately, of course, Victor Sr. made the two-hour drive from his home in Alexandria down to New Iberia to find out what the hell was going on. But the cops refused to tell him anything about the circumstances surrounding his 22-year-old son’s death, citing an ongoing investigation by the state police. At that point, Victor Sr. had no idea his son's death was caused by a gunshot to the back while he was still in handcuffs in the backseat of a patrol car. Every official he talked to was cagey.

“They wouldn’t even let me see the body,” Victor Sr. told me over the phone. Eventually, when they realized he wouldn’t take “no comment” for an answer, they brought in the coroner and allowed Victor Sr. to take one look at his deceased son—but even then, they had conditions. “They told me I couldn’t see his lower body,” he told me. “I could only see his face.” 

Still completely in the dark about what had taken place, Victor drove back home in utter shock. “It wasn’t until I got back and looked on the state police's Facebook page that I found out what had happened to my son.” Even then, the official version of events opened up even more questions than answers.

Here’s what is known at this point: On Sunday, March 2, Victor White III walked down to a convenience store with a friend to pick up a cigar. When he got there, a fight broke out—it's unclear if Victor and his friend were involved, but in any case the cops arrived on the scene shortly after the fight ended, stopped Victor a couple blocks from the store, and discovered that he had some unidentified narcotics on him. They cuffed his hands behind his back and put him in the back of their cruiser—and that's where the story stops making much sense.

The sheriff's deputies who arrested Victor III allege that when they arrived at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office, Victor III wouldn't leave the car and became “uncooperative.” They say he pulled out a handgun, while his hands were cuffed behind his back, and shot himself in the back.

I called the state police and the local sheriff's office to ask questions about whether Victor's last moments were caught on video, who the officers in question are, and how a suspect in police custody could have had a gun after being frisked, but no one would comment anything of substance since the shooting was being investigated. (This is standard operating procedure at police departments.)

Lieutenant Anthony Green, however, was willing to give his take on New Iberia's response to the shooting, stating, “The community is not really up in arms about this. I don't sense any large unrest.” 

This isn’t the first time the Iberia Sheriff's Department has been suspected of brutalizing the people of New Iberia. Last year, a group of officers were caught on video beating a handcuffed man at the town's annual Sugar Cane Festival, an incident that led to a deputy’s firing. And at least a few activists are upset by this history of mistreatment. On March 11, Reverend Raymond Brown, a fast-talking New Orleans preacher, hosted a small rally in New Iberia and called for the US Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Victor's death.

“We believe they murdered him," he told me over the phone. "They shot him in the back and then drove him to the sheriff’s office. We don't buy the police’s story. If he's handcuffed around the back, it would be impossible for him to reach down and grab a gun like that.”

To those close to Victor III, the claim that he would try pull out a gun and shoot himself while in the custody of police is just absurd.

“He was a respectable person. He went to church. It’s so unusual for them to say he was ‘uncooperative.' And for them to say he shot himself, that’s just unbelievable,” said Victor Sr. “I saw his face. I know they beat him before he arrived at the station, because those who were with him before he was arrested said he didn’t have a mark on him.”

According to his father, Victor III's previous run-ins with the law were minor—the kind you'd expect of a young man: He was caught once with pot, he got a traffic violation for making a U-turn a while back, and when he was 16 he broke someone's window. Local police officials, however, would not elaborate for me on Victor White III’s criminal record, once again citing the ongoing investigation. But Victor Sr. said that at the time of his death, Victor III was getting his life on track: He’d moved down to New Iberia in November to be with his girlfriend and his six-month-old daughter and was living out of a hotel called the Cajun Inn with one of his brothers, his girlfriend, and his baby. He’d taken a job at the local Waffle House, but his long-term plan was to go to vocational school for welding. The day Victor III died, he told his dad over the phone that he was planning on using his $800 income tax refund, which he was carrying around that night in cash, to get a permanent home for his girl and his baby. Everything seemed to be falling in place. 

Outraged and dissatisfied, Victor Sr. and his family have banned together to try and get to the bottom of what happened to Victor White III. They’ve hired attorney Carol Powell Lexing, who gained statewide recognition for her work on the Jena Six case. Severely skeptical of the state investigation and the local police, Victor Sr. and the White family have also created a campaign to raise funds for an independent autopsy and crime-scene tests. Simply put, they're tired of waiting to hear from the police.

"My family has no closure, because there are all these questions still looming over us," Victor Sr. said to me in a moment of reflection and lamentation. "I'm just in disbelief. I still call out his name. I still think I'm going to wake up from this nightmare."

Follow Wilbert L. Cooper on Twitter.

CAN-FAP leader Glen Callender. All photos courtesy of James Loewen, via.
The majority of the Western world has already come to the conclusion that female genital mutilation is bad. It’s brutal, invasive, and causes children unbelievable amounts of pain for no reason. But male genital mutilation, or circumcision, is actually hailed as a great way to prevent everything from venereal diseases to cancer. Medical associations refrain from condemning or supporting circumcision for the most part, and generally leave the decision up to a child’s parents. But plenty of anti-circumcision activists want the procedure banned altogether, like the Canadian organization called CAN-FAP.

CAN-FAP, or the Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project organized a protest last week in Vancouver during a TED Talk featuring Bill and Melinda Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been donating millions of dollars to programs that offer circumcision in Africa as a preventative measure against HIV, and CAN-FAP has dubbed Bill Gates, “Foreskin Enemy #1.” I caught up with Glen Callender, the founder of CAN-FAP, to ask him what he was thinking when he named his organization, among other things.

VICE: First off, what’s with the name, CAN-FAP?
Glen Callender: Well, a lot of people seem to think it’s a mistake. But of course it’s deliberate, and it’s a reference to the history of circumcision in the Western world. It began as a non-religious surgery in the 1800s to primarily prevent boys from masturbating. The foreskin is, of course, a built in masturbation aid and that’s the way nature intended it.

So, tell me how CAN-FAP got started?
I started CAN-FAP in June 2010. The main motivation for it was that I have a really enjoyable foreskin. My foreskin actually has its own orgasms and it feels fantastic every day of my life. When I was a kid and I learned about circumcision for the first time, I already had a very good relationship with my foreskin and the idea horrified me. That horror has never left my system, just knowing that little boys are being strapped down and having this valuable, enjoyable part of their penis cut off. The men who have foreskins know that it’s a good body part, it’s valuable, and that there aren’t bad parts of the penis. This is an ancient, religious superstitious idea. There are no bad parts of the penis, there are no bad parts of the female vulva, it’s all good, and we shouldn’t be tampering with the sexuality of children and the adults that they grow up to be. We understand, because we’re not accustomed to it, that female genital mutilation of any kind is child abuse. You’re taking a sharp object and you’re deliberately causing pain and bleeding and amputation to a child’s genitals. Well, we do the same thing with boys, and we need to stop doing it. Knives and genitals of children should have nothing to do with each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl, or you cut a little or a lot, taking a knife to the genitals of a child is sexual abuse.

Are there any health benefits to circumcision?
The circumcision rate in some countries is less than one percent, so if circumcision improves men’s sexual health, we would see men getting sick in Europe because of their foreskins. But it turns out that the sexual health of intact European men and their female partners is as good or better than their circumcised counterparts. It’s really bullshit. It’s all about making parents scared so they’ll hand over their babies to be circumcised so doctors can make their money. They know if a boy grows up, when he’s 18 years old there’s no way he’s going to want a knife near his penis, because any man would be crazy to want less penis.

It’s like, if you saw them plucking out a kid’s eye, you would be horrified because you have an eye and you know how wonderful an eye is. But then you have the parents saying: “No, no, no, we come from a religion that believes that there’s one evil eye and you pluck that eye out! And it’s fine having one eye, you can still see.” And you go: "Shut up! You’re plucking out a kid’s eye and taking away a sense organ from him. You’re taking away part of his body that he uses to interact with the world and enjoy life." I feel the same way about my foreskin. I have a foreskin, and frankly, that makes it clear that all the arguments for circumcision are bullshit.

Can you tell me why you’re calling Bill Gates, “Foreskin Enemy #1?"
Through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Bill Gates has committed over 145 million dollars to circumcising as many African men and boys as possible. And there are hints that they might actually be prepared to spend up to a billion dollars on this, as these programs scale up in different countries. That makes Bill Gates personally responsible for more unnecessary circumcisions than any other individual in the world. He has exterminated more foreskin than anybody else, and that is why he is Foreskin Enemy #1. It’s just an embarrassment in the 21st century, the idea that we should be making up reasons to cut off healthy, normal parts of peoples’ bodies is insane.

The studies that Bill Gates uses as basis for this funding really make circumcision look good. The results show 50 to 70 percent reduction in HIV transmission over a short period of time, and that’s the thing in some cases: even if it works, it’s over a short period of time, not long term. The bottom line here is that real world populations don’t reflect that data. If circumcision really did prevent VDs, population data would consistently show that circumcised populations had less VDs than the intact, but that’s not the case. The United States proves this within its own borders. They had the biggest HIV epidemic in the western world there among an almost completely circumcised male population.

Why did people start messing with penises in the first place?
It started out as a preventative measure against masturbation, because they believed in Victorian times that masturbation caused all sorts of health problems. Then it became used as prevention against venereal diseases, then cancer, they always make it whatever the scary thing is. Today, it’s HIV so lo and behold, circumcision prevents HIV! And in the future, if a new venereal disease emerges that we haven’t yet heard of, well, they’ll say that circumcision prevents that too. But really, for cultural and religious and financial reasons, they want to cut off your foreskin. It is a billion dollar industry in the US, about 3,000 boys a day are circumcised and that earns pediatricians over a billion dollars a year. And there’s billions more in hospitals and the fact that foreskins get sold into the biotech industry and get used to create skin grafts and used to create collagen and other ingredients for beauty creams. The bottom line here is that this is not an ethical industry.

And what a coincidence that the part that’s being cut off is on the most enjoyable part of your body. You know, God doesn’t want a knuckle, or the index toe off of one of your feet, or a bit of your earlobe, no. He wants part of your penis. You know, your genitals are supposed to be your happy place and religion wants to make them your unhappy place, your shame place.

You do something called the Foreskin Pride Salute, can you explain it?
Explain it? Well, first of all, you can’t have a circumcised t-shirt. You’ve got to have a long-sleeved shirt that goes all the way down to your wrists. And you make a fist with your hand, which symbolizes the head of the penis, you tuck that fist away into the sleeve of your shirt and heroically extend your arm skyward and pull back that sleeve to reveal the fist. And that is very symbolic. I hope that intact men around the world will adopt the foreskin pride salute to show the world that intact men are proud of our foreskins and we love them. The problem is in your head, not on my penis.

Anything else to add?
I’d like to add that black foreskin is beautiful.

@LindsRempel

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003–2013), will be published this spring.

Lara Shipley studied journalism at the University  of Missouri, and photography at Arizona State University. Currently a lecturer at the University of Kansas, Lara also is co-publisher of Search Party Press. 

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