This is one fucked-up movie. There's no other way to say it, really. As fans of director Nicolas Refn and his alter ego Ryan Gosling have surely heard by now, their follow-up to Drive was pretty badly received at the Cannes Film Festival last month. How bad? Well, there was booing, maybe some hisses, and plenty of people who left the press screening well before the credits—and certainly after more than a few eyes—had rolled. Booing, as has been reported before, is a sort of spectator sport at the festival, and over the years plenty of films have been unceremoniously jeered. Among them, Taxi Driver, Wild At Heart, and Crash, which puts Nic Refn in stellar company. Even his fellow Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, the great master of highly charged silence and glacial pacing, was given a clamorous reception for his final film, Gertrud, at Cannes in 1965. So you could say that this is indeed a long tradition that carries on to the present day. That said, Only God Forgives is not exactly the Taxi Driver of our time, and opinions about Refn's film, so divided now, may not be destined for revision.

While I wasn't at Cannes, I was in France that week, and almost immediately after the press screening had concluded, theaters in Paris began showing the film. I just couldn't pass up the chance to go. It's not scheduled to open stateside until July 19, which was too long to hold out. And now that I've seen the film, I have to admit that while it's well worth seeing, it wouldn't have been worth the wait. Only God Forgets? Although the film doesn't need to be retitled or retooled before it comes to a theater near you, it's likely that whatever expectations you have will probably not be met. Refn may have intentionally worked against expectation, not willing to roll Drive 2 off the assembly line, especially with Gosling at the wheel, and for this he is to be admired. And yet when you left the theater after seeing Drive, you were thinking about when you would see it next, the friends you would excitedly share it with. I had felt this way about Refn's previous films as well—Pusher and its sequels (1996, 2004-05), Bronson (2008), and the incredible Valhalla Rising (2009). The stories they tell are viscerally engaging, by turns brutal, comical, and hallucinatory, with Refn mapping a canvas in which figures both physically and enigmatically inhabit a brooding, unforgiving landscape, or cityscape—a kind of heathen earth. Drive sent many viewers back to those earlier works of Refn's, and made them believers. Only God Forgives is something else entirely, a film you're not in a hurry to revisit or turn anyone on to.

So what exactly went wrong? Every film starts with the writing, with the story and the characters. Michael Haneke has said that a director has one of the most overrated jobs in the world, that it's the writing that’s difficult, that the story and the characters are at the core of any film. A friend who read an advance copy of Refn's script, who said that it was really promising, hasn't seen the film and was genuinely surprised by the critical thrashing. Obviously something happened between the time that Refn sat at his desk to imagine this story, and when he got behind the camera to set his characters in motion. For one thing, he's said that Gosling wasn't originally meant to play the part, so he didn't know they were going to be working together again until after the script was finished. This may be true, but actors and directors have been known to rewrite material before production begins, and even when they're shooting. Something can happen on the set that's impossible to predict on paper, and once the Refn/Gosling team was back in the saddle, don't you think they would have gone for more of a ride?

Refn certainly made the right choice not to attempt anything even remotely close to a Drive 2. At the same time, he seems as much to have purposefully thrown a spoke in his own wheels as he's freely indulged himself. While Refn may have been able to strike a balance between preening and pandering, it might have been wiser to set Gosling out on at least a half-hearted ho stroll. This may be nothing more than pervey, unwanted expectation rearing its head, but isn't this a big part of why we go to the movies in the first place? Refn knows this very well. Simply put, the character that Gosling plays is so hollow—and like his predecessor, "Driver," almost a silent film actor—so emasculated and impotent, that the star of this film doesn't seem to be its star at all. In one scene, Refn sticks his camera directly in Gosling's crotch and in the dim light we see no package, no payoff, and he does this not once but twice, as if to push the point limply home: this character is so emotionally bankrupt that there is no possibility for a "money shot." He's a ghost, as the original script called for, as Refn's story is predicated upon, and yet if the movie doesn't deliver, even if Gosling's character doesn't haunt us when all is unsaid and done, then the fault is neither with the casting nor the performance, and only somewhat to blame on the unmet desire of an audience. It rests somewhere inside that narrative, something the director probably can't acknowledge. After all, he wrote the story he wanted to film, and then put in on the screen, remaining true to his vision.  

In Cannes, Refn was interviewed just after the film endured its negative reception, and the exchange went like this:

"I’m not sure if you’re aware, but at the press screening this morning, there was a smattering of boos and some walkouts."

"Oh, cool."

"You’re excited about that?"

"I mean, how can I expect someone to not react like this when on one hand you are dropping what you do in everyone’s face and at the same time saying, 'Love me, please,' you know? You’re going to get that. You know, great art—horrible thing to say—but art is meant to divide, because if it doesn’t divide, it doesn’t penetrate, and if it doesn’t penetrate, you just consume it." 

It's possible that an even worse move for a filmmaker, rather than rushing headlong to happily meet expectations is, conversely, to turn 180 degrees away from them. It's quite possible that a murky, highly-stylized pastiche—and for Euro critics this would certainly be perceived as arty pretension from an "Americanized" director—with a de-sexualized leading man to boot, would never go over well in Cannes. In that rarefied, some might say biased, environment, journalists breathing in the salt air would also smell blood. And yet something tells me that Refn can't be too sanguine about the film's reception stateside, despite its cerebral/sensational dynamics. After all, in a more populist setting, an audience ultimately wants to be entertained, to get some bang for its buck, as well as for the movie to continue in their heads after they've left the theater. If this is the case, Refn can't confidently expect a much more enthusiastic reception than he's gotten so far. As for penetration, there is one moment in the film that is absolutely guaranteed to get under people's skin, not only on an incestuous level, but for the fact that it is also poignant and slightly necrophiliac. It made me wonder: in the face of seductive abandonment and abuse, how far will humans go to insert themselves into the lives of unloving loved ones while the body is still warm? 

So why did Refn make what seems to critics, though not to his longtime followers, such a big U-turn? Maybe to be taken seriously as an artist? To offer no other recourse than for us to acknowledge his seriousness and artistry? Is that why the film was booed? That’s only part of the reason. Add in the fact that the story is just not that well staged, that there aren't enough interesting characters who move fluidly and unexpectedly in and around Gosling's character to really animate him and the proceedings. In Drive, the film was populated and choreographed in exactly this way. In Only God Forgives, a near-lifeless character surrounded by a pervading mood of inertia cannot be saved by all the thrilling, sadistic violence—and vengeance—in the world. There is, however, one great character, Gosling's viperous, poisoned mother, Crystal, who is played bitch- and pitch-perfectly by a totally transformed Kristin Scott Thomas. The description of her character that has been making the rounds can in no way be improved upon: Donatella Versace meets Lady Macbeth. And it's an image that she herself is in many ways responsible for, from conception to performance.

In one great scene, when Gosling improbably takes his prostitute companion to meet his mother at a sedately expensive restaurant, the exchange between mom and his "date" politely goes down like this:

"So Mai, what do you do for a living?"

"I'm an entertainer."

"And how many cocks do you entertain in your cum dump?"

Gosling, for his part, is left with nothing to say. Scott Thomas, even more so than the avenging angel played by Vithaya Pansringarm, is the central compelling character in this film. Injected with "Crystal meth," it comes to scary, visceral life whenever she is on screen, no less than when she recoils and becomes almost human. Even the great Anjelica Huston in The Grifters doesn't come as close to the high-pitched game of maternal cat-and-mouse that the Scott Thomas character seems to have invented and serves up cold on the stage. When Crystal says that she wanted her revenge as a head on a platter, she is most certainly not speaking metaphorically. And when she casually discusses the sizes of her two sons' dicks, it's as if she has seen them much more recently than when she last changed diapers. Only Mom Forgives?

The violence will make some uneasy, and it underscores part of what's wrong with this film by placing the problem with Gosling's character in very stark relief. When he takes a merciless beating, you don't care at all. You don't root for him, you don't want to see him get up and fight back. It's somehow satisfying to witness him take such punishment, and then to see him in the following scene with one of his eyes fused shut. (And hard not to be reminded of the character "One Eye" from Valhalla Rising, and the astounding performance of Mads Mikkelsen.) You could say that when Gosling's character gets his ass kicked, there is a conflicted libidinal thrill. Just as in the boxing ring, one guy will be turned into a piece of meat by another, a punching bag, down on his knees—with all that implies—and then lifelessly laid out, flat on his back. 

The self-styled God of this film, a sadistic chief inspector who has appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner, is also a family man who improbably seeks refuge in the profound, plastic sadness of a karaoke bar. Like Gosling's character he is also mostly speechless, except for here, as he becomes his own ventriloquist. (It is one of the film's most perversely unexpected scenes, and pure Refn.) This conception of the "punisher" is nothing new. From Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry to Takshi Kitano and Violent Cop, it's a toxic formula that has been perfectly distilled over time, a poisoned well to which we still go back for a sip now and then. Lines that were once clearly drawn are now routinely crossed, and the anti-hero has become the only believable hero in our time. But despite all the severed limbs and emasculation in Only God Forgives, neither of the central characters fulfill this part.One blade is sharp and another is dull.With the portentousness of the inspector and all he is meant to represent on one side, and the flimsy cipher that is Gosling's character on the other, both the battle between them and the climax of the film are anticlimactic and unsatisfying. How could it be any other way? The story is so seriously skewed that in a sense it has no center. As Refn would have it, you can't fight God, or you can't fight and win. The counterargument, of course, is that there's simply no reason to fight something you don't believe. Shadowboxing may turn out to be the least of Refn's transgressions, though miscalculation is probably a better term. Because in the end, his Big Problem is that Gosling and his character, for the two are intimately entwined, serve neither as our antihero nor an object of desire. And for this—in a story of vengeance that lures so many into its web—no director should be forgiven.

Previously by Bob Nickas - Why. I Hate. Graffiti.

The author's students pose with a Michael Jackson impersonator, the rapper Lucky Lou, and their finished book.

Since Katrina hit New Orleans, I’ve been teaching English after school in some truly forsaken public schools. In the past, I’ve helped kids from kindergarten to eighth grade hone their writing schools by composing and recording original rap songs. This year, however, I was placed in a language immersion school with writing-oriented students, so we attempted a more challenging project: a book of their writing and artwork about music from their hometown of New Orleans and elsewhere. Five months in, as we were editing the book and digitizing it, all of their handwritten work was stolen from my car by some jerk who just wanted my laptop. Sure that the kids would have no interest in redoing all of that work, I took a few days off school to lay in bed and moan and wonder how I’d break it to them.

But the next Monday the kids were entranced by my true crime story. To my surprise they got right back to work. (Also, I promised them a lot of candy.) During the last two months of school they rallied and in the end published a 46-page, full-color book. Though the final book consists of first drafts from the last two months (the stolen writing had gone through one or two rewrites), the kids’ intelligence and humor is nonetheless readily apparent, and the book succeeds in providing some insight into how children feel about music, musicians, talent, and fame.

For the book’s first section, the students listened to albums by unique local musicians, described the music, and told the reader whether or not to buy the records. They were asked to describe instrumentation, the vocals, the production, and the mood of the music, among other traits. Along the way they learned the difference between facts and opinions, and how to apply both to a piece of writing. The book features reviews the kids had published earlier in a New Orleans zine, plus few new ones, like this critique of longtime local reggae and dancehall DJ T-Roy:

It sounds like New Orleans is playing funny stuff
 on one album. It has all of the instruments. Like piano and saxophone and Hawaii. The second song sounds the same as the first except more like a rockstar. It sounds like paintings walking around. A guy walks on stage and plays the drum. And it’s funny. It’s fast and loud. It’s soft then it’s loud. It sounds like the movie “The Yellow Submarine.” 
It sounds like people playing music on the street. It sounds like piano and drums. It sounds like rockstars playing New Orleans style. It sounds like everybody is running away from something. It sounds different. Like people dancing. Good music with rockstars taking over the planet with weird hair. Music everywhere. It’s real fast and soft. And good. And long. Aliens taking over the planet with lasers. And there’s electric guitars. –Byron

For the benefit of their parents, the students then compiled facts and opinions about their favorite famous musicians, and then turned those lists into essays. So that these wouldn’t just be gushing fan letters, they were encouraged to also criticize their favorite artists and give them career advice. The section opens with this dope pencil drawing of Nicki Minaj by Starr:

My fifth graders wrote in praise of mostly adult-oriented music, including several pieces on Lil Wayne:

Hi did you know about Lil Wayne? Lil Wayne is from New Orleans. He gets his stage name from his father. Wayne says he doesn’t like his father. Because of that he decided to drop the D from his name. His music sounds like a girl/boy. Lil Wayne is the current CEO of YMCMB. He divorced my god sister, Toya Wright. He has a lot of tattoos. He should not have so many tattoos. He is a former Hot Boy, a group consisting of six people: Lil Wayne, Turk, B.G., Birdman and Ronald “Slim” Williams, Birdman’s brother. Wayne is the son of Birdman, because he says that. He records numerous tracks with Birdman. He doesn’t like NOLA, but he is an avid Lakers fan. He should come back and live in NOLA. –Brian

Lil Wayne is a rap artist. He loves fame, money and girls. When he was 11 years old his mom left him home and he saw a gun and accidentally shot himself close to his heart. Five days later he went to school and everyone was asking, “Can I see your chest because I’m going to be a doctor.” I think he’s cool because he’s a rapper. He is really funny. He’s not an ordinary rapper he’s a crazy artist. He has a child, a little girl named Rejaney. My favorite song from him is “Love Me.” Some people say he is a bad artist. Some people say he just wants to make money. –Wayne

The third-grade ladies focused on more age-appropriate music:

Do you know who is my favorite music artist? Mine is Katy Perry. She was in a movie called “Katy Perry.” She used to have a husband called Russell Brand. I read her book called “Katy Perry’s Life.” I have read all of them. The three things I don’t like about her are that she put whip cream on her chest and the second is that she left Russell Brand. And bad words in her music. She is 20 years old. She wears a blue wig. And wears wacky outfits. –Alyx

My favorite artist is (drumroll please) Justin Beiber! Justin B. is so cute his hair is too. My favorite song by him is “Maria” because in the beginning it sounds like he is on an interview and they are asking about a girl named Maria H. His voice sounds like a girl and I wish it sounded more like a boy. He sings pop mostly. He is from Ontario, Canada. The first song I listened to by him is “Baby.” He once dated Selena Gomez. I wish his head was smaller and that he was taller. Thank you for listening. Have a nice day. Hope you enjoyed this. Hope you learned a lot. –Claire

Jacklyn, another third-grade girl, not only surprised me with her choice—the house artist Deadmau5—she turned her essay into a fictional TV report:

Reporter: We asked local kids what they think about Deadmau5 and they said this!

Kid 1: My favorite song is “Ghosts and Stuff” because it is digital.


Kid 2: I love his mask because it glows, it’s cool.


Kid 3: I love his song “Some Chords.”

Reporter: Then we saw his manager.

Manager: Well, first, he doesn’t write enough songs. Second, he needs more concerts. And third...oh no, time is up!

Reporter: So we will now go see Deadmau5, OK!


Deadmau5: Well, I will tell you most about me. I was born in Ontario Canada.

Reporter: Well, let me stop you, I have a question. I’ve never heard a song of yours before, may you explain them to me?

Deadmau5: Well, they don’t have words so I don’t want to bring your expectations up. They just sound digital, no words unless it’s a remix. I use DJ equipment.

Reporter: My daughter first saw you on the internet.


Deadmau5: Well, about me again, my birthday is January 5.

Reporter: Well Deadmau5, life review is over!

To break up their regular writing sessions, we would take a day here and there to jam on the drum machine and write some raps. Most of these two-couplet rhymes simply but humorously described their authors:

My name is Nya and I like guitar

 It’s so cool that I hang on the monkeybars


I have two dogs that I love

 the one Sachel’s so cute it’s like he’s from above

 –Nya

 

I love chickens dead or alive

When I was in kindergarten I was five


I like to be silly with all of my friends

In my chess class there’s not lots of men

–Renee

 

My mom and dad play music on the streets

My Birthday’s on Halloween I give out treats

Everything’s delicious, but I love meat

But every time I eat, I don’t eat neat

–Dorian

 

My name is Kamri, just like the car

And I shine, just like a star

I’m from the hood and my house is made of wood

Can I just quit? Do you think that I should?

–Kamri

I also put my students to work helping me a bit with NOizeFest, a small festival of nontraditional music that I help host each May in Bywater. This year my students participated in a contest to draw a design for the NOizeFest 2013 T-shirt. Valiant won first place and his family received NOizeFest T-shirts featuring his drawing:

The students’ favorite assignment invited local artists to the school to perform and hold a press conference. While the artists played, the students wrote down five insights and opinions about the performance, and also five questions. The students then got to interview the artists. One of their favorites was Ratty Scurvics, who, along with fronting several rock bands, also plays the keyboards with his hands while pounding the bass and snare drums with his feet in his ferocious one-man band, Singularity. The kids were lucky enough to witness this amazing feat, and even got the chance to play Ratty’s strange musical setup themselves after this round of serious questioning:

Q: What is your favorite food?
 
Ratty Scurvics: I am a big fan of sushi. I also like steak tartare. Which is raw red meat with spices in it.

Q: How did you start playing music?
 
RS: My dad’s a musician. He’s a working professional musician. So I grew up in a household where... That’s where my birthday presents came from, from his playing shows. But I taught myself to play, mostly. I always wrote my own songs. The instrument I started on was the drums.

Q: What do you like better, the keyboards or the drums?
 
RS: My favorite instrument is keyboards because you have so much potential. So many notes you can play at the same time.

Q: How do you play two instruments at the same time?
 
RS: Well, as a drummer you have to play four things simultaneously, and try to put it all together. Whenever I started doing the one-man-band thing it felt pretty natural.

Q: Why do you have a [mannequin head] inside your bass drum?
 
RS: Oh, Lucile! Lucile serves a purpose, because with a bass drum, you want to have something in there to dampen the sound a little bit. Some people use a pillow but I thought it would be funny if I put in a mannequin head. Her hair is stuck and I can’t take her out.

Q: Do you know how to play other instruments?

RS: I play several different instruments. 
I do a lot of solo records where I
 go into the studio and I just overlay instrument on top of instrument on the songs that require a full band. So I play cello, flute, drums of course, piano.

Q: All at the same time? 

RS: Not all together. That’s kind of hard 
to do. The first one-man band that I saw was at a state fair and was playing an organ, and he had drums on his back, and somehow he had a fiddle that was shot through his side that he played with his elbow. That was pretty cool.

Q: How did you start doing the one-man band?

RS: I was in a circus band and we were on tour, touring the country, and everybody in the band quit. I was the musical director, composing all the music, and I had to figure out how to play all those instruments and be a circus band myself for one show. The pressure was on and I learned how to do it.

Q: Did you ever mess up?
 
RS: Absolutely! Mistakes happen all the time. The trick is to be able to push through the mistakes and catch yourself. That’s where the art is.

Q: What is it like when you play the drums and the piano at the same time?

RS: How about you find out in a minute?

Ratty Scurvics performing for the kids

The book closes with the students imagining themselves in the future as rich, famous, and (most importantly) talented musicians. They created stage names for themselves and listed their genre, their instrument of choice, and what they would wear while performing. They discussed their biggest hit song, and gave some sample lyrics. After letting their imaginations run wild verbally, the kids then drew pictures of their famous selves performing on stage, LIVE!

My name is the “Jewish Saint.” I am in the band “Leo the Tiger” with John “Game Master” and Lail “Super Bassist.” I am the singer, guitarist, and sometimes drummer. While John is main guitarist and Lail is the bassist and sometimes drummer. Our genre is pop rock. On stage I wear a blue shirt and white pants. –Hudi

Hey my real name is Jose Cairo. Everyone knows me as DJ From the West. I love to rap and that’s why it’s my genre. I use a very, very high amount of auto-tune. My inspiration comes from my very close friend Clarence Henry aka “Frogman.” I love to be shirtless sometimes. Wear a very distinct pair of shorts, very brilliant and bright Jordans, long socks and Miami Heat snapbacks. My biggest song is “I Love My People.” This is the chorus: “I love my people and they love me so I show them hospitality with the money cause I on one (?).” My favorite city to perform in is Miami because of the beautiful beaches and restaurants. One of my fans gave me a good review, 
he says, “It has a lot of people and very electrifying.” I love to give the fans a concert. –Brian

On May 28, each student who participated received a copy of the finished book. They were as excited as their teacher hoped they would be. Their book release party featured miniature cupcakes and a performance by family-friendly rapper and dancer Lucky Lou, who’d earlier in the year performed and held a press conference for the kids. Lou so looks the part of the rapper in his snapback hat and indoor sunglasses that the students had lined up for autographs even before he performed that first time. This time Lou brought his killer dance troupe to the book party, which included the impressive young Michael Jackson impersonator MJ of NOLA. My student Alex, who wrote the book’s essay on Michael Jackson, nearly lost his mind.

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.  

Previously: On the Death of a Dog I Should Have Loved Better

Photos from a sex workers demonstration in Montreal this past weekend, by Joel Balsam.

I always thought legalizing prostitution was the right thing to do. It would bring everything out into the open, making sex workers safer. They'd be able to hire protection and if a john tried to hurt them, they'd be able to report it to the police. It's sort of the stock response for young, liberal-minded people whenever they're asked this question.

But the debate surrounding prostitution laws in Canada isn't simple and two-sided; decriminalization and criminalization aren't the only two options, and both have as many flaws as they do merits. At the Supreme Court hearing on prostitution laws on June 13, a coalition of women's groups will be arguing for a third possible solution—decriminalizing the women in prostitution, but upholding the laws targeting pimps and johns.

The Women's Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution is one of ten groups that have been granted the status of intervener, a group with a unique perspective to be heard by the court before they make their decision. 

Since the 1970s, prostitution has been legal in Canada, but almost any activity related to it has not, making it unnecessarily hard for prostitutes to work openly, in a safe space. In 2012, the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down the section of the Criminal Code that bans brothels (the Canadian government is now appealing this decision), but reaffirmed the ban on communication for the purposes of prostitution and the ban on living off the avails of prostitution. 

The Coalition, which includes groups like the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Frye Societies, the Native Women's Association of Canada, along with several others, will argue laws that stop men from buying, selling, and making money off of prostituted women should be upheld, while laws criminalizing prostitutes should be removed because most enter the profession as a result of economic, social, and racial barriers.

Prostitution is by no means an institution of equality. Let's put aside for a minute the idea that being able to sell sexual services means we, as women, are empowered to do as we please with our bodies. Most women in prostitution start out as kids after being sexually abused. Penniless and alone, they're easy targets for pimps and johns. Are they “choosing” this? Are these girls, most under the age of 18, equipped to make a decision that's very likely to put them in harm's way? Right from the start, power is on the side of the party with money. The prostitutes in these cases, and there are many, are powerless.

“Prostitution is a very effective form of exploitation of women – we don't think it's a coincidence that most people in prostitution are women, and that most pimps and all johns are men,” says Hilla Kerner, a spokeswoman for the Coalition. 

But Terri-Jean Bedford, one of the three women arguing for the complete decriminalization of prostitution, tells VICE Canada that continuing to prosecute those who buy these services and “those who help sex workers” would still endanger sex workers themselves.

“The idea is a scam, and is just done when the state wants to pass moral judgment on selling of sex, whatever that means,” says Bedford, adding that if the existing laws are struck down for good and nothing replaces them, other existing laws can be used to control the mistreatment of women in the sex trade and in other occupations.

Bedford, a former dominatrix who was arrested in 1994 for operating a bawdy house, is arguing along with former and current sex workers, Valerie Scott and Amy Lebovitch, that laws surrounding prostitution violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Removing all of these laws and allowing bawdy houses to run openly, for example, will “allow sex workers a safe place to operate and not punish landlords who offer such a place,” says Bedford. 

Bedford v Canada reveals some fundamental divisions between groups who work with and fight for the rights of sex workers; many of them disagree on whether or not most sex workers were forced into the profession.

The Coalition, on one hand, argues that most women don't willingly start selling their bodies, and that the rights of the very few who choose to do so don't override society's responsibility to protect the majority of women who don't.

The Coalition's model isn't entirely new and has been proven effective in other countries. It's been in place in Sweden for over a decade, and was more recently introduced in Norway and Iceland: all countries known for their commitment to gender equality.

Since Sweden criminalized pimping and buying sex, and introduced housing, detox, job training and education to women who wanted to exit prostitution in 1999, street prostitution in the country has dropped by half. Public support of the law has only increased since then.

The French National Assembly also passed a resolution to this effect, although a law has yet to be enacted. Overall, the trend seems to be towards an asymmetrical criminalization system.

So what happens to those women who chose to enter sex work by choice, who would lose business if men were criminalized? Janine Benedet, the Coalition's lawer, says she's always found this to be a strange question. “We don't normally say we shouldn't criminalize that because somebody chose to do it. We often say the opposite of it – we shouldn't criminalize people for things that are not their choice.”

Whether or not it's a woman's choice to become a prostitute is often a complicated question; Aboriginal prostitutes, who come from poverty-ridden reserves, where economic opportunity is limited, are one example of where the answer isn't crystal clear. I find it hard to believe these women chose prostitution, risking disease and rape, because they were bored by their day jobs. It's really the only alternative that allowed them to get by.

Of course it's condescending to assume that not a single woman in the sex trade has a clue what she's doing, that she's being exploited and doesn't know it. But there are way too many women who were cornered into this, or who desperately want to leave, for there to be no protection in place for them.

The Coalition wants to provide women with an alternative to sex work. “What the members of the Coalition hear over and over again is that women would rather be earning their income in some other fashion.”

The Native Women's Association of Canada is worried brothels will follow jails and residential schools as the next exploitative institution to house Aboriginal women in the country, says Benedet, who represents the organization. “They want something better and are worried that a system in which completely legalized is going to make it much harder for them to get there,” she says.

This is why the coalition's model works. Their goals extend beyond curbing the violence in the sex trade and making abuse easier for prostitutes to report; they want to see prostitution abolished for good, but that’s easier said than done. Many sex workers would need detox, education, childcare, livable welfare, and housing, says Benedet. “There's a lot of interlocking supports. The government should go at it from the other end and that should be the first priority.”

Such a complicated problem deserves a less simplistic solution than decriminalization. There are no easy answers to such a multi-faceted issue—where women are inarguably dependent on a profession that is harming them in a variety of ways—but it deserves a more thorough conversation than simply discussing whether or not it should be completely legal.


Previously:

A Sex Worker Breaks Down Why Ontario's Prostitution Laws Still Suck

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

The E3 video game expo is a yearly celebration of the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. It’s also super fucking boring. As the largest video game trade expo in the world, it’s both overly stimulating and stultifyingly corporate. Imagine taking a walk down the Las Vegas strip, with all the lights, sounds, and annoying carnival barkers yelling at you, then accidentally stumbling into a TED talk. Yeah, that sounds shitty to me too.

While hanging around there in spite of myself, I heard about a Christian gaming organization called Gamechurch with a booth on the ass end of the convention center that was supposedly giving away free beer to anyone desperate enough to talk to them. I figured my E3 had been saved. Could it have been a sign from God himself that I should get a taste of the gospel and also get drunk on cheap keg beer? 

To my surprise, there was no beer left when I arrived. I suppose everyone else at E3 had the same idea, but much earlier in the day. All that was left for me to do was read their material until more beer showed up.

I fingered through their pamphlet titled “Jesus, for the Win!” long enough to realize that this whole operation was serious. A condensed version of the Book of John was interspersed with essays justifying mixing the New Testament with the latest Call of Duty game. Those just seem naturally compatible, right?

They also had a table of free Gamechurch branded merchandise. Anyone could walk up and grab the standard expo swag (stickers, pins. etc.), but to get the primo freebies like shirts and votive candles, you had to join their mailing list. 

I signed up so I could get a candle. Joke's on them though, as I actually have a spam filter for the word “Jesus.” 

I had hoped to learn a bit more about Gamechurch in an analog fashion, so I spoke to Mikee Bridges, fedora enthusiast and the founder and owner of Gamechurch (and also xxxchurch.com, an anti-porn site designed to look like a porn site, which is a pretty clever trick at 3 AM when I have my pants down), who assured me prior to our interview there was, in fact, no more beer coming. 

VICE: How did you get into Christian gaming?
Mikee Bridges: I've been a Christian all my life and I don’t like American, Western Christianity. I don’t like the way we’ve portrayed Jesus, which is surrounded by guilt, shame, and judgment. Nowhere in (the Bible) does it say any of that stuff. I went from being a musician to being a promoter, and because of promoting, I had music venues, and in these music venues, I’d have a café or a lounge. I’d put some computers in there, and kids started gaming. It was a lot more fun to hang out with the kids who were gaming than the musicians, because the musicians were babies. So I stopped doing music, and I started doing gaming. We run a 7,000-square-foot gaming facility in Ventura, about an hour from here. All we do is game, all day, all night. Gamechurch.com is an extension of that.

How can you combine gaming, which is often this overly aggressive, misogynist-laden entertainment medium, with your message of peace and love?
We don’t. I’m not the morality police. What you play at home is never going to affect me. We [as Christians] so badly want something to judge. They did it with music, with movies, with books, now with video games. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like my brothers and sisters and what they’re doing. I think it comes down to two things: good parenting and self-discipline. If you’re an alcoholic and you don’t want to be around beer, don’t go to a bar. Don’t go to that rated R movie if you can’t handle it, but I’m going to go and I’ll tell you about it. I’m not shaken by violence, sexuality, gore. Nothing really scares me. I’ve been around the block a few times. 

Do you think gaming causes people to behave differently in the way that socially conservative interest groups claim? You’ve dealt with sex addiction with your other site, xxxchurch.com, and you say that porn changes people. Do violent, sexually gratifying games change people the same way you say porn does?
Everything affects us. Walking down the street affects me. When I see a restaurant, it affects me. I really think it comes down to self-discipline, self-control, and good parenting. I’m sad at the video game industry, because we are over-sexualizing women and there is a problem there. I think it’s getting addressed now, which is cool, but unfortunately, I’m not the police. So, for me personally, I look at it and I would step in and say, “Yes, we’re oversexualizing stuff.” Not every woman in video games needs to have tits and ass. For you, I don’t know you. I don’t know you to judge what’s OK for you.

Why do you think Christians are historically known for being so judgmental about personal choices?
Two hundred to 300 years ago, we became a feared, fearful group. I’m going to find whatever it is that makes you feel dirty, so that you come crawling to “the Lord,” and it was all fear-based, and it sucks, and it’s not true. It has nothing to do with the gospel I know of. It’s a bummer.

If Jesus was at E3 or Comic-Con, would he cosplay as himself or as another character?
Himself. Absolutely, himself. What I want to do is throw a party, and have someone cosplay as Jesus and have him be the DJ. Can you imagine an open bar, a tiny little club that fits 200-300 people—Jesus gets up to the tables and everyone is freaking. That’s what he would be like. He was famous. He was a rock star.

@dave_schilling

More about video games:

My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict

How Awful Are the Free Porn Games on the Internet?

North Korea's First Racing Video Game Is Terrible

Good afternoon, ladies and germs. We'd just like to borrow your attentions for a moment to let you know our TV show, VICE, has been renewed for a second season on HBO. It took a lot of work, some of us almost died a bunch of times, there were many sleepless nights, high points and low, and now we're gearing up to do it all over again and can't wait. According to our co-founder, Shane Smith, "We learned a lot over the course of shooting season one, and are insanely excited over our story selection for season two. Now that our various parasites, hernias, and virulent rashes have been treated, we are ready in mind and in body to go out there and get the gold." Here, here.

This is the part where we're supposed to thank you guys for watching, we think (we're kind of winging it here—never had to write one of these before). And although it's a cliched sentiment that people in sparkly clothes at fancy awards shows like to wax on about, it's true that we wouldn't be getting a second season if you people weren't watching our show and enjoying all the weird crap we get ourselves in to. So thank you.

Don't forget to watch tomorrow night's season finale, which is entirely devoted to our recent trip to North Korea, and we'll see you next year.

Belfast, Northern Ireland. Riots. 1985.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a pretty grueling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

One-time Magnum president Stuart Franklin is probably best known for his photo of an average-looking man with some groceries defying a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Yet, as I discovered when I spoke with Stuart, that photo was not the instant sensation people might expect it to be. He talked me through art school's effect on his work, the difference between approach and style, what "news photography" really means, and getting caught up in the Heysel Stadium disaster.

VICE: Unlike some of the people we have spoken to in this series, you were classically trained in the arts.
Stuart Franklin: I studied drawing, painting, and photography on a degree course at what used to be called the West Surrey College of Art and Design.

Do you think that influenced the way you work?
In terms of photography, it gave me a better sense of lighting and urged me to not be afraid of anything—formats or technical hurdles. On the postproduction side, I was able to go straight into setting up my own darkroom in London, processing my films and functioning as an editorial photographer, which was quite useful.

Manchester, England. Moss Side Estate. 1986.

I feel that maybe your styles and subjects have been more varied compared to those of most other photographers. Do you attribute that at all to your lack of concern about formats and techniques?
I believe there are two things to consider: one is style and the other is approach. I think the approach I take to photography is quite consistent across the board. It’s a considered, gentle approach that I have to working in almost any context. The tools that I pack in my bag to take on different assignments or projects vary enormously. They become a localized and temporary style, but I think that underneath everything there is the thumping bassline of the work, which is about my approach attempting to be quite graceful, to be quiet. The tools are whatever I pick up on the day—it could be a pencil, it could be a camera.

You became well-known after covering the famine in the Sahel in the mid-1980s, directly after you studied art. How did you transition into photojournalism?
In the beginning of the 1980s, I did a lot of work in Mexico City, supported by the Telegraph Magazine. I also did lots of work in the north of England looking at the decline of the manufacturing industry, as well as similar stuff in France, the Pas-de-Calais and areas around Metz. Those were my early bits of work. I joined Sigma in 1980, and over a period of five years they mainly sent me to cover breaking news. The first major story I covered was the 1983 bombing of the US barracks in Beirut, where I think 285 US soldiers were killed. [It was 241; a further 58 French servicemen were killed in a separate blast nearby two minutes later. Six civilians and the two bombers also lost their lives.] I covered the civil war in Lebanon in a wider context, too—those things all happened before I went to Sahel to cover the famine.

Beirut, Lebanon. 1983. American soldiers sift through rubble in the aftermath of a devastating truck bomb in Beirut.

How did those early assignments compare to the expectations you had? Was photography as a job something of a shock?
I remember one of the first assignments I had with Sigma was the IRA bombings in Hyde and Regent's Parks in 1982, down near Horse Guards. Sigma rang from Paris and asked me to go and cover it. I got there to see police tape, miles from what had happened. I couldn't really see anything, so I went back home. They rang me later furiously asking what I had got. I told them that it didn't look very interesting. I learned then that, in a news situation, anything visual is valuable—even if it's only a photo of the police tape with something blurry in the background a mile away.

The materiality of any war or news story overrode the aesthetic potential for a while, and that was quite a shock to me. I was expecting to make powerful, striking photographs and often I was actually just expected to photograph anything I could.

On the subject of striking photos, I was wondering about your photo of the man in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. First off, do you ever feel that one image overshadowed the rest of the work you did during the student protests there?
Well, it didn't actually happen that way. When I got back from China, I went into Michael Rand's office at the Sunday Times Magazine. He was laying out one of my photos on the cover of the magazine, but it was another of the photos from my trip —a topless guy with his arms raised. That became equally well known for a while. The "Tank Man" picture grew in importance over time, but it didn't actually stand out far from the body of work immediately after the event.

But yes, in more recent years people talk about that photo a lot. Does it annoy me? Well, you can't really be annoyed about it. I am just glad I was there. All I know is that I did my job and I think I did it well.

Beijing, China. Tiananmen Square. 1989.

What happened immediately after that moment, to you and the protesters? I can't imagine it was easy getting these photos out of the country.
It was all very uncertain. The police and security people were going from room to room in my hotel, searching for journalists and confiscating films. That atmosphere was very worrying. I remember packing my film into a box of tea that was supplied in the hotel room and asking someone who was going back to Paris to take it for me. I was left in China without my film. I wasn't worried about it once the film was out, and I didn't mind if I lost a couple of cameras. It wasn't easy—we were shot at, at times—but I was lucky.

Brussels, Belgium. Heysel Stadium disaster. Liverpool fans en route to the stadium. May 29, 1985.

I guess the way photos are used in news has changed since then. What other stories in that era were important for you?  
The Heysel Stadium disaster was, at the time, a huge story. It was bigger news in Europe than Tiananmen Square was. Paris Match dedicated 22 pages to it. In the age of photojournalism, before TV or the internet took it elsewhere, photography was responsible for in-depth coverage of the world around us. Now, if you look at all the papers, they more or less tell the same stories and use the same pictures. That wasn't the case in the 1980s. Every magazine you picked up had a different story.

At the time, I was covering football hooliganism, which was a growing story in the UK. We weren't really sure how to cover it so we thought we'd travel down to Brussels with the Liverpool fans, and it happened to be the European Cup Final. We weren't expecting anything to happen, it was just a way of getting into the life of football fans, seeing how they related to each other and the world around them. It was meant to be a quiet story. I went into the stand with them and of course it turned into something different. What that exemplifies is a form of in-depth photo-reporting that is very rare to see these days. That was the norm back then.

Brussels, Belgium. European Cup Final. Heysel Stadium disaster. May 29, 1985.

Moving onto your more recent work, how do you feel about cities? We spoke to Jonas Bendiksen recently, and he has a very definite view. He thinks slums have to be seen as functioning and important parts of our cities, not black spots to be glossed over. Do you have an overpowering feeling about the state of our cities?
Well, on the subject of slums, as I said at the beginning, my first photographic engagement with cities was working in some of the poorer parts of Manchester, the Moss Side estates, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle and then Mexico City. I think when I got to Mexico City and saw the slums, or barrios, of that city, I thought of American anthropological theorists like Oscar Lewis who had said that the poor are in the slums because they deserve to be there and that nothing will ever change. Of course that was complete rubbish. Anybody who moves anywhere, whether to a mansion or a cardboard box, is aspirational.

I have returned year on year to one particular barrio in Mexico City. Over time, window boxes appeared, gardens were created, roads were better maintained. I think slums are often the beginning of a move from urban wasteland to normal and regulated parts of a city. It’s like an informal economy; people start selling in instant markets and over time those people own shops and start paying taxes.

Narcissus, 2009-2013

A bit of a jump here, but how did Narcissus fit in with your previous work? It’s remarkably removed from a lot of your other work.
I suppose there were several things that influenced Narcissus. I had become frustrated by the notion of "global photography," the idea of a meta project, of showing the "greatest places on Earth," or the "worst hellholes on Earth"—this global stuff. It’s all quite grand. And I have done so much of that stuff already: Dynamic Cities was shot, I think, in 40 cities around the world. I thought that I was perhaps missing something. For me, Narcissus was a bit like going back to playing scales if you were a musician. Just trying to sharpen one's vision and address one's focus.

I had started to reflect on the notion of landscape photography, the nature of photography in general. And actually, landscape is like anything, what was drawing me to it was abstraction, cutting something out of the cloth of what's in front of you. I wondered, if there were no expectations placed upon me—as there are, of course, when you shoot landscapes for National Geographic, for example—then what would actually draw me? It turned out that what drew me to landscapes were things that were resonant of memories I had, the very human social life I had led. The forms I recognized in the landscape were human forms, shapes that were semi-human or zoomorphic. I think Freud, when talking about photography, connected it far more to the function of memory than of vision. It was completely different, yes, and I won’t be doing it again, but I learned a lot from it. I learned to work in a small place and limit my needs. It was Spartan in itself and very coherent.

Click through to see more photography by Stuart Franklin.

Great Britain. Unemployment office. 1986.

Yokahama, Japan. Nissan Cars. 1987.
 

Kabul, Afghanistan. Women soldiers in militant groups participate in a support rally of the PDPA and parade in front of their president, Major General Najibullah. 1989.

Honduras. Civil War. El Capire. Bodies of Nicaraguan Sandinista troops on display for international press. The Sandinistas were allegedly killed during a cross-border incursion directed against the contra camps. 1986.

Honduras. Civil War. 1986.

Sudan. Famine refugees. 1985.

Narcissus, 2009-2013

Previously: Jonas Bendiksen Takes Photos in Countries That Don't Exist

More from Magnum:

Peter Van Agtmael Won't Deny the Strange Allure of War

Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

Thomas Dworzak Has Photos of Sad Marines and Taliban Poseurs

Journalist Tim Pool is streaming live from Istanbul today where anti-government protests have been ongoing since last Friday. What began as a campaign against the city's plans to construct a mall in a public park has escalated into a massive display of anger over the ruling party's neo-Islamist social agenda and religiously driven laws. Riot police have moved in with brutal force, using tear gas on tens of thousands of protestors. It is the largest civil uprising in the history of Turkey.

For more on the situation in Istanbul:

Watch our new documentary, Istanbul Rising

Occupiers Faced Down Cops in Istanbul's Taksim Square

Turkey Is Waging an Invisible War Against Its Dissidents 

Turkey's Weekend of Street War, Jubilation, and Bulldozer Joyrides

It's time, once again, to roll our eyes at some people who are scared of the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Holy Trinity School

(via)

The incident: A school found out that one of their employees was in an abusive relationship.

The appropriate response: According to the website dosomething.org, you should follow these steps: Speak up, be sensitive, listen, be there for them, connect them to resources, stay with them. 

The actual response: The school fired her. 

Back in January, second grade teacher Carie Charlesworth was forced to call the police three times on her abusive husband, after what she described as a "very bad weekend" with him. A temporary restraining order was put in place against him.

When she returned to her job at Holy Trinity School in San Diego the next day, she told the principal what had happened, and confided in her that she was being abused. 

Later that day Carie's husband showed up in the school's parking lot, prompting a lockdown. He was arrested and jailed on two felony charges. 

As a result of this, the school put Carie on indefinite leave. They also pulled her four kids out of the school. 

After three months on leave, Carie received a letter from the school, telling her she was fired:

"We know from the most recent incident involving you and Mrs. Wright (the principal) while you were still physically at Holy Trinity School, that the temporary restraining order in effect were not a deterrent to him. Although we understand he is current incarcerated, we have no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve and we understand from court files that he may be released as early as next fall. In the interest of the safety of the students, faculty and parents at Holy Trinity School, we simply cannot allow you to return to work there, or, unfortunately, at any other school in the Diocese."

According to a report on NBC 7 San Diego, several parents were planning to remove their children from the school if Carie was allowed to return.

In an interview with the station, Carie said, “I mean that’s why women of domestic violence don’t come forward, because they’re afraid of the way people are going to see them, view them, perceive them, treat them.” Adding, "they’ve taken away my ability to care for my kids. It’s not like I can go out and find a teaching job anywhere."

Caries (now ex) husband is due to be released at the end of the month. 

Cry-Baby #2: Escambia Academy High School

(via Reddit)

The incident: A Native American girl wore a feather in her cap at her high school graduation ceremony, despite being warned not to. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Or telling her off if you really care. 

The actual response: The school are refusing to let her graduate until she pays a $1000 fine. 

Chelsey Ramer, a 17-year-old, is a member of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. She, along with several other Native American students, were planning to hang a traditional feather from their mortarboards at their graduation ceremony.

The school, Escambia Academy High School in Atmore, Alabama, found out about this, and warned them not to. They also asked the students to sign a contract that stated, “students and staff shall not wear extraneous items during graduation exercises unless approved by the administration.”

According to Chelsey, she didn't sign the contract. 

On May 23rd, the day of graduation, Chelsey ignored the warning and took to the stage with the feather hanging from her hat. The school refused to hand her her diploma and transcripts.

They are now saying that, in order to get them and graduate, she must pay a $1000 fine. 

In an interview with her local news station, Chelsey said, “I don’t think it’s fair at all. I feel like it’s discrimination.” 

A former teacher of Chelsey's, who is also a Native American, was interviewed by the station, and said, “Being honored with a feather for graduation is a wonderful experience. It’s a lot more than showing off your culture. It has ties in to our spirituality as well.”

Chelsey is planning on taking legal action against the school.

Which of these schools is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll:

Previously: The guy who made his son quit the Scouts vs. The guy who murdered three people over a prank

Winner: The (alleged) murderer!!!

@JLCT

I am no longer a hoarder. As a child I amassed thousands of comic books. In my teenage years it was Star Wars toys. In my 20s I began seeking out and buying up old, classic skateboards. Then I turned 30, got married, had kids, and realized I don’t really care to have heaps of crap cluttering up my life. But there is still one thing I can’t help but stockpile: celebrity sex tapes.

I’ve got them all. From the original sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, to Paris Hilton’s night vision fuck, to the only worthwhile thing Kim Kardashian has ever done in her entire existence, to Saved by the Bell’sScreech giving two girls a dirty Sanchez in a Vegas hotel room, to the unearthed 8mm threesome that may or may not be Jimmy Hendrix, and all the other D-Listers that hoped to become B-Listers by selling their “stolen” sex tapes.

Up until recently my personal favorite was the Tom Sizemore tape. I already knew how awesomely insane he was from friends who had worked with him prior to watching him try to have sex with two prostitutes in a hotel room with a coked-out wet noodle, but the level of raw, unscripted depravity in his sex video took his legend status to new heights. At the time of filming Sizemore was in and out of court with the trial of LA madam Heidi Fleiss, and his relationship with the pimpess was paraded all over the evening news. In his porno we got to see just how affected Sizemore is when he says, “Fuck the LA police department. Fuck them. I hope 22 cops die tonight and they all have a lot of children.” (You can read my review from seven years ago here.)

As sexy as Sizemore’s sweaty, slovenly body was I got the seven-year-itch and found a new favorite celebrity sex star: TV’s Teen Mom, Farrah Abraham. Prior to this tape I’d never heard of her, but she is hands down the best person to ever do a celebrity sex tape. Her body is flawless. She goes straight for butt sex. She squirts. She masturbates in the back of a limousine. The male talent, James Deen, is an actual porn star and so the cinematography is top-notch porn quality; the best we’ve ever seen in a celebrity sex tape. Is it an actual personal sex tape or just a straight up porno made for resale? Who cares? She takes it in the can with a zeal that even most seasoned porn stars don’t exude on screen.

(This is neither here nor there, but I’m a HUGE fan of the phrase, “take it in the can.” This is perhaps one of my favorite 80s lines ever.)

Most of the “celebrities” who make these tapes shun the porn industry. They’re happy to get the sexposure and capital gains of being in porn, but they pretend like they’re not in a porno. Farrah Abraham, on the other hand, is embracing the porn industry, going so far as to make a signing appearance at the Vivid Booth at the recent Exxxotic Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So I flew down to get some face time with Farrah and try to get her to give me a PSA on the PMA of anal. (As well as get some porn girls to give back to the Oklahoma Tornado victims.)

To watch Farrah’s backdoor foray into porn go to http://farrahsuperstar.vividceleb.com/.

Previously - Porn Stars Auction Their Bodies for Oklahoma Tornado Victims

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

When I heard the title The Rambler, Calvin Reeder’s 2008 short film, my mind shot to the familiars: Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, and Davy Crockett. I thought of someone who braved new frontiers and was a badass. Even with its ramshackle opening sequence—in which the eponymous Rambler, who is played by Reeder, hitchhikes out West with a guitar and shades—I still believed my first impressions were on the right track. But with each passing minute the film becomes more and more bizarre. Almost right away the Rambler with an unknown past, mysterious aurora, and deadpan demeanor is thrown smack dab in strangeness. The first man to give him a lift is a mummy-fancying mad scientist who invented a device to record dreams to VHS. Reeder climbs in the car, answers evasively, never removes his sunglasses, never removes his hat, and keeps rambling on while the peculiarities unfolds.

The Rambler is shot on expired 16 mm film stock, which makes the landscapes lush and the gore gross. Like I said, with each passing minute the storyline unravels and plays into excess. At the end of the day, this Rambler isn’t all that different from the other ramblers. But unlike their world, his tries every bat shit thing to shake his cool, including one of the longest and most bizarre sex/vomit scenes ever.
 

Director Calvin Reeder’s work is a mix of underground shock horror and existential atmosphere. He made a name for himself with the short films Piledriver and Little Farm, which screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The Rambler appeared at the Festival the following year. His feature debut, The Oregonian, divided Sundance Film Festival audiences in 2011 just as his shorts had before. Reeder specializes in turning lo-fi splatter pics into art films by meshing high-concept thought and design with genre story lines. His newest film is a feature version of The Rambler starring Dermot Mulroney as the titular character. The feature played Sundance and SXSW this year and is out now in limited release and on DVD/VOD on June 25.

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

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Sins of the Nude'

Artwork by Marilyn Minter

S

he met Jack at a party her stepmom was throwing for her dad. She was sitting alone in the corner, bored, when Jack sat next to her. He was wearing a suit without a tie and nice shoes. His eyes were a deep, obvious blue, like hers, and his hair was light brown. He looked young and tan and handsome.

They talked for 20 minutes on the couch, and by the phone after that. He was helping her with the SAT. When she got a 1400 on a practice test, he took her to dinner. He ordered mussels. When she said she had never had them, he plucked one from its shell, swirled it around in the bowl, and held the fork across the table. She thought about leaning forward and eating it off his fork, but instead took the fork from him.

“You know, I tried out for cheerleading in middle school.”

“Really?” Jack said.

“Mmhmm.” Marie nodded and sat up in her chair. “I didn’t make it the first year, so I never tried out again. I really regret that. I don’t think I’m really the cheerleader type.”

Jack insisted they share a dessert, and outside he opened the door for her. They got in his car, and she flipped through the stations until she found a Biggie Smalls mash-up.

When Marie and Jack pulled up in front of Marie’s house, Jack turned to look at her. She was sitting in the passenger seat with a cigarette between her fingers, her bare feet on the seat.

“You remind me of a little kid,” he said.

“Oh no.”

“A little smoking kid.”

Marie exhaled. She said, “Wanna come in for a second?”

“Won’t your parents mind?”

“No, they’re asleep, anyway. As long as we don’t wake them up, they won’t care. We can climb in my window.”

It took a bit of talking, but she thought it would be worth it. Or, she wouldn’t let herself hope it would be worth it, but she would be let down if it weren’t.

They climbed up the tree next to the house. It had thick branches and plenty of places for feet, but Marie’s dress kept getting caught, and Jack didn’t have as much experience climbing trees as Marie would have guessed. But she liked him more because of it. They both made it to the branch next to the roof. Jack scrambled over Marie and onto the roof, brushing her legs with his. He opened her window, and then held out his hand for her. She grabbed it and stepped onto the roof, and then half fell into her bedroom, headfirst. She laughed and turned around to help Jack, but he was already in.

He sat on her bed, and she sat down next to him. He lay down on his back. She did, too. They were quiet for a minute. Marie felt self-conscious every time she blinked, and worried about the sound of her breathing.

It started to rain. It smelled like rain, and reminded Marie of Seattle. But this rain is more of a Texas rain, she thought.

“Jack?” she asked. “How do you think of me?”

“As a friend. A peer.” 

“Good.”

Marie turned on her side to face him. “Jack, if I ask you something, will you promise to answer honestly? You won’t hurt my feelings if you’re honest. I just want to know.”

“OK.”

“Do you think I’m pretty?”

“Yes.”

“Really? You don’t have to say that, you know.”

“Really, Marie, you’re very pretty.”

“Thank you,” Marie said. “Jack?”

“Yes, Marie?”

“Are you attracted to me? And answer honestly, please. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

“Yes, Marie.”

She smiled. She wanted to reach over, so she turned over on her other side. She closed her eyes and focused on slowing down her breathing so she could pretend to sleep. She said, “I feel like you’ll fall asleep and I won’t, and then I’ll be alone.”

Jack sat up. He saw a book on her nightstand and picked it up. “I love this collection,” he said. He opened it and read a couple lines out loud.

“Yeah, I love that part,” Marie said. She sat up. “Even though it’s about religion.”

“I don’t think it is. I know that’s what people say. But I think it’s about just what it says. It’s about a girl washed up on a beach.”

They were sitting next to each other. She wanted to drape her legs across him or put her head on his chest. “Do you still want to be friends with me?” she asked.

He wrapped her in his arms, like a dad or an uncle.

“Would things be different if I were 18?” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, do you like me?”

“Yes, Marie.”

“Would you lie to me?” She couldn’t let herself get excited yet.

“No, Marie.”

“If I didn’t run around town telling everyone, why would it matter that I’m younger? Couldn’t this be a secret? Why does age even matter? Everyone is different. How did we even decide on 18, anyway? I know 18-year-olds who should not be considered adults. We should judge that person by person, if it wouldn’t be so difficult and time-consuming.”

“You’re right about some things,” Jack said.

Marie tried to look serious, but she was too close to beaming. She pressed her face down into the pillow and then turned and looked up at him. Her shoulders were pushed down, slightly uncomfortably, and she thought it must be very unflattering. “Like what things?”

Jack just smiled at her and then looked away. This was the first time Marie had seen him act shy.

“If I were 18, would you kiss me right now?” She felt a little pushy, but at this point, how much did it matter?

Jack lay down, exhaled into her hair, and said, “Yes, Marie.”

He turned her face toward him and traced her lips with his finger. She smiled with her mouth closed. He pulled his hand back. Then he ran his hand through her hair, slid it under her neck, pulled her face toward his, and kissed her. From that moment on, Marie was a high school dropout. 

More from this year's Fiction Issue:

Miami

Forked River Roadside Shrine, South Jersey

A Ghost Story

Photos by Harjinder Atwar.

If you haven’t heard already, wearing turbans in Quebec soccer leagues is now strictly prohibited. Given that FIFA has just come out to say they truly do not give a shit whether people wear turbans or not, the soccer illuminati in Quebec are looking pretty silly right now. I guess, to them, turbans are really really dangerous for everyone on the pitch and maybe even the spectators, because presumably the turban might fly off and land in someone's mouth and choke them to death.

The Quebec Soccer Federation (QSF) recently announced they would maintain the decision made last year to ban turbans from the soccer pitch, thus dveout Sikh men and children, yes, even four year-olds, can’t play in a soccer league. This decision was initially based on an ambiguous FIFA law about dangerous equipment.

The decision has sparked response from political, sporting, and religious groups across Canada. The Canadian Soccer Association (CSa) have stepped in, banning any Quebec teams from playing in competitions outside of Quebec leagues until the QSF reverses their decision—meaning no international, national, or inter-provincial games can take place, even if they’re suppose to happen in Quebec.

For some reason Pauline Marois, the Parti Quebecois leader and Premier of Quebec, has chimed-in in support of the QSF. She basically thinks the CSA should mind their own business, even though the national organization has always been in favour of turban wearing soccer players. Because, why wouldn’t they be? Of course, Marois’s support is not really a surprise, given that her sole purpose is to preach the autonomy of Quebec.

But this isn’t the first time the Quebec government has caused a stink over religious garb. The provincial government banned kirpans form the National Assembly in 2011; meanwhile a soccer referee was told she couldn’t wear a hijab while refereeing a soccer game. Last year, a nine year-old girl was sent off the pitch for wearing her hijab despite a FIFA ruling that a sport-friendly hijab could be worn.

The QSF’s ruling is based on the possibility of danger that a turban presents during a soccer game despite no sport-related injuries involving turbans were ever reported at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. But are there really no situations whatsoever where a turban could be dangerous? To really get to the bottom of this turban turmoil, I called up Harjinder Atwar, the President of the Sikh Soccer Association in Brampton, Ontario and asked to ask him what he thought about this scandal.

VICE: So how long have you been involved with the Sikh Soccer Association?
Harjinder: I've been running the league for 13 years.

Have you ever had any difficulties with wearing a turban during a match?
No, not at all.

What kind of incidents could arise? 
I haven't seen anything happen. But sometimes people have difficulty heading the ball.

Right. That’s a problem—but you’re only harming your own ability to execute a sweet header. How can you work around that?
Well, we can put on a smaller turban, then there’s no problem at all. I have some boys who play in the Ontario provincial leagues and they have no problems with heading or anything.

Could it be an unfair advantage? I mean, it could give the player a bit of extra height when going up for a header, no?
No. No not at all because you're heading with you forehead, not with the turban.

What about instances where the turban unravels? Couldn't that get caught around someone neck and choke them out?
No. Never, like I've been running the club for 13 years and I've never ever had any difficulties or anything.

What about the turban getting caught in the goalie’s net? Ever seen that?
Never.

How is the turban tied down? Is there a pin or anything? Could the pin be dangerous?!
No it's tied at the back. There's no pin.

What if a player had really long hair that didn’t fit under his turban so when he ran around his hair whipped around and hit people in the eye?
No, no, not at all. A lot of kids who play soccer have long hair and they use a headband and that's allowed.

So this is probably obvious, but what's your opinion on what's happened in Quebec?
I never see any problems or difficulties from turban wearing soccer players. I don't know why they banned turbans. Soccer is probably the cheapest game. Immigrant people can play. If you play hockey or something it's so expensive, a lot of people can't afford it. That's why soccer is the best game and everyone should be able to play it.

What would you do if you were living in Quebec right now?
In my opinion? I would open my own club and Sikhs can come play better soccer than everyone else, to prove my point.

Is there any situation whatsoever where a turban could cause problems on the pitch?
No I don't think so. You might have problems with the big turban. There are two kinds of turbans, if you're wearing a big turban then yeah, you might have problems. But, the small bandanas, you will have no problems at all because if you wear a big turban you can't even run. All the soccer players just wear a small turban.

So no one would play in a big turban?
No not at all.

I wonder if someone who's inexperienced, playing in a house league would wear a bigger turban?
No. In my experience I've never seen a person wear one. It's too hard; it's hard to run, because it can fall off.

The turban could?
Yeah, the big turban.

Want to talk about it? Reach Ken on Twitter: @kjrwall

More on Quebec's problems:

The Murderer Who Escaped in Montreal Is Still Missing

Teenage Riot: Montreal - Part 2

Joey Ramone, Arturo Vega, and me in the studio in 1978. Photo by Tom Hearn

“Really Arturo, ABBA?” I shake my head in disbelief as I enter his loft, where the Swedish rock band is blaring from the record player. The record player is on a table, and next to it sits the Ramones' entire silk-screen operation—one long counter weighted down with a wooden silk screen, cans of white acrylic paint, and stacks of black T-shirts. Arturo is busy making another pass with the squeegee over the latest model of the new Ramones logo, the one with the names of Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy encircling an American eagle clutching a baseball bat in one talon and an apple-tree branch in the other. It will become their most famous design ever.

“Aren’t they wonderful?” Arturo beams at me, looking up from the T-shirt. I can’t tell if he’s talking about the music or the T-shirts, since he’s never been self-conscious about his musical guilty pleasures. Let’s face it: even though ABBA is spectacularly popular, no one would ever accuse them of being hip or guess they'd be on the stereo here at the epicenter of punk, the Ramones' loft at 6 East Second Street. Arturo Vega lives here. 

That was the beauty of Arturo. He would combine elements that didn't fit, and sometimes the end result actually worked. Though, back in the late 70s, I wasn't so sure about the whole ABBA nonsense.

“ABBA is like some satanic bubblegum that you can’t stop chewing, ya know?” he explains, noticing my displeasure. “Es like what you think happiness should sound like, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” I say, considering his theory. The Swedish pop music was way too loud.

“You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen / Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine / You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life / See that girl, watch that scene, diggin' the dancing queen!"

“That’s happiness?” I scowl, “Give me the fucking alternative..."

“Happy, happy, happy!” Arturo chuckles, mimicking a line from the Ramones' “Gimmie Gimmie Shock Treatment” as he pulls a freshly printed T-shirt out from under the screen and replaces it with another. The song's lyrics are “Peace and love is here to stay / And now I can wake up and face the day / Happy, happy, happy all the time / Shock treatment I’m doing fine.” It’s become a sort of mantra around the loft whenever things aren’t looking too good for the band, which is quite often. Arturo would smile that inviting smile of his and, overflowing with irony, say “Happy, happy, happy!” Then everyone would kinda snicker, suck in their gut, and keep on going. Sometimes a line from a song is all you have to go on.

Arturo holds the freshly screened shirt up for me to inspect. “Isn’t it beautiful! Es so… so… so majestic! Like, rigid militarism combined with that 'Beat on the Brat' honesty, right?” 

He isn’t just pleased with his new design, he’s thrilled. It really is an iconic symbol. “Wow, really cool,” I say admiringly. “Can I have one?”

Arturo rolls his eyes. “Donchoo ever have any money? Doesn’t Holmstrom pay you? You know, Legs MucNeil, maybe you should be looking for another job?”

“Doing what?” I mope, knowing that now isn’t the time to hit him up for a pack of smokes and a tall boy of Bud. I only have three Marlboros left. Shit. At least the ABBA album finished, and Arturo didn’t restart it, like he usually does.

“I don’t know. There’s gotta be something you can do.” He thinks hard before breaking out laughing at the absurdity of his own words. “Nevermind! Of course you can have a shirt, but you gotta wait until we get back from London, these has to last us the whole time!”

“Why are you guys going to England, anyway?” I gripe, not seeing any benefit to the Ramones' upcoming weekend in the UK. I know about Malcolm McLaren and the cool rock 'n' roll fashions coming out of the King's Road, but other than Dr. Feelgood and the Flaming Groovies there isn’t much happening music-wise in London. And while those bands are OK, they don’t sound like the future of rock 'n' roll to me. At least not the way the Ramones do. Besides, who was I gonna hang out with over Fourth of July weekend? 

Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the English punk-rock explosion is waiting for the Ramones to show them how to detonate the bomb. It will only be a matter of days before the shit hits the fan. I continue griping. “Come on, England sucks. There’s nothing going there! I mean, warm beer—you call that civilization?”

"You’d rather we stayed here and played My Father’s Place?” Arturo deadpans. He's referring to a shitty nightclub out on Long Island that’s a hangout for the mullet set, and quickly becoming a Ramones staple. He had a point. There aren’t many places that welcome the Ramones outside of Max’s and CBGBs. It’s a pretty desperate situation all around, even if none of us can understand the resistance to the world’s greatest rock 'n' roll band.

“No, I think we should take over a radio station,” I offer, growing excited. “We could, like, barricade ourselves inside the station and just blast the Ramones for 24 hours until everyone realizes how great they are! You know, like that DJ did in The Buddy Holly Story, how he just barricaded himself inside and played 'That’ll Be The Day' over and over."

Arturo just smiles at me. “You’re such a child, arenchoo? You know, they do have SWAT teams now, hahaha! You’d be dead before 'Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World' even finished.”

“Well, at least it was an idea,” I mumbled, defending myself. “There’s gotta be someway of getting the music out there.”

I’m interrupted by Joey Ramone bursting through the door, happy and excited for his upcoming weekend in England. He's gushing and fires out a machine-gun greeting: “Hey Legs, what’s happening? What’s going on? Where’s the party?”

He’s carrying a few packages, and he dumps them on the kitchen counter before joining us around the silk-screen operation. His enthusiasm for England only makes me sadder and lonelier.

“Hey,” I nod to Joey. “Where were you?”

“My mom had to take me shopping,” Joey explains. “I had to get some shit for the trip, but when we went to get my vitamins, there was like this crazy homeless lady inside the health-food store who was screaming at the cashier. I thought she was gonna murder somebody, she was like really nuts. So we had to wait for the cops to come. I thought they were gonna pack her off to Bellevue, but all they did was take her name and address—and then they just left her there to continue her tantrum, man. The cops probably went back to get more donuts. So it was taking like hours, and it turned out all she wanted was a birthday card for her nephew. So I helped her pick one out, a real funny one.”

“You shoulda mailed it for her,” Arturo joked. “I can just see the headline: '27 Massacred at 14th Street Post Office, Little Boy Says His Aunt Never Forgot a Birthday.'”

“She wasn’t that bad, for a nut, yaknow?” Joey smiles as he loops a strand of hair around his index finger. He never stops playing with his hair. Ever. “And she even paid me for helping her, she gave me a quarter!”

“Save it for her legal defense fund,” Arturo quips as he runs the squeegee over another T-shirt. “She’s probably one of these eccentric millionaires who es gonna leave all her money to her cats.”

“Maybe I can get Paul in her will, too?" Paul is Joey's cat. He grabs a shopping bag off the kitchen counter and pours over it, looking for something. Whatever he’s looking for, he can’t find it. He’s even worse than me, and I lose everything immediately. Most of Joey’s mornings at the loft are spent searching for shit—scraps of paper with girls' phone numbers on them, articles of clothing, a pair of sneakers—anything. Searching for Joey’s stuff was a daily ritual.

“Yeah, she probably had millions stashed under her mattress,” Joey laughs, abandoning the shopping bag. “That cheap bitch, she probably had thousands in cash on her. I shoulda frisked her, but she wasn’t smelling too good.”

And then we’re all in hysterical laughter.

“So whatta we doing tonight?” Joey asks, as he stares at some of the finished T-shirts hanging out to dry. “And why does John’s name always have to come first?”

Arturo ignores the question. He knows better than to open that can of worms.

“Johnny says he can’t afford to pay me to go to England,” Arturo explains, dodging Joey’s query. He's become an expert at navigating the Ramones' internal politics. “He said I can keep all the money I make selling T-shirts, so I thought I’d make a bunch of 'em to pay for my airfare and expenses. John said he didn’t know why anyone would want to buy a Ramones T-shirt, but I was welcome to try and sell em."

“Yeah,” Joey snorts again. “Always the optimist, isn’t he?” Joey was already tired of Johnny Ramone taking all the enthusiasm out of the Ramones' creative possibilities with his excruciatingly practical approach to band business.

“I think they look really cool, yaknow?” Joey says, admiring the T-shirt design, pretending to get past the order of names on the shirts. But Joey can never let anything go. “It’s like one of those presidential things, yaknow? That they hang on his desk whenever he speaks? What are they called? Emblems?”

“Presidential seals,” Arturo corrects him as he puts the ABBA record back on.

“Uh-oh,” Joey cracks. “I feel a 'Dancing Queen' about to rape me! You know this is crap, right?”

“Es happy music!” Arturo laughs, singing along with the record. “I was telling Legs, es what happiness is supposed to sound like!”

“No one was ever that happy,” Joey cracks. “Except maybe you, Arturo."

”Oh go on and be your big punk rockers,” Arturo tells us, glowing. “It makes me happy, and es all that matters, right?”

“Happy, happy, happy!” Joey laughs, mesmerized by Arturo’s assembly line production as he silk-screens the shirts. Arturo falls into a faster pace, bolstered by the Swedish pop music. We just stand over him, watching him work.

“It would be really cool if we actually sold some shirts, yaknow?” Joey muses, looking at me and dreaming. “And then maybe we can afford to eat breakfast, hahaha!”

And then we’re all laughing again.

Previously - David Bowie Stole My Suicide Record So I Ripped the Hubcaps off His Limo

Legs McNeil founded Punk Magazine back in 1975, which is part of the reason you know 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

Nothing is ever new. The NSA’s monitoring of the internet and the phone records of millions of Americans surprised some people, and made the public as a whole fairly pissed off, but it’s not the first time US government has taken an Big Brotherly interest in its citizens. The feds have been tapping into the private lives of Americans without warrants and with the help of communication companies for nearly a century. Here are some of the more significant spying programs:

Black Chamber

Herbert O. Yardley, the head of Black Chamber, who later revealed its secrets. 

What many consider a predecessor of the NSA began in the 1920s, when a group of Army codebreakers working under the friendly-sounding moniker “Black Chamber” began a project to spy on other nations’ communications. Black Chamber’s chief was Herbert O. Yardley, considered to be one of the greatest cryptologists of all time. The idea was to monitor international telegraphs as the were sent to and from the US in search of anything that could affect national security—but first they had to get those telegraphs, so they asked the presidents of the major telegraph companies if they could see them.

Turns out, companies like Western Union were happy to comply. According to journalist James Bamford, who has reported widely on the NSA, Yardley later wrote: “After the men had put all our cards on the table, President Carlton [of Western Union] seemed anxious to do everything he could for us.”

The Black Chamber program set the template for a now-familiar story: a group is put in charge of monitoring communications in the name of national security and gains access to those communications through the cooperation of the private companies that own the communication infrastructure. It was Western Union telegrams back then; it’s Facebook messages now.

Funding for this program ended in 1929, and Yardley would go on to write a book titled The American Black Chamber that exposed the group’s activities. Quite possibly the first whistleblower in the American intelligence community, he is now disparaged on the NSA website and official histories, where he's described as a “disgruntled” employee who wrote the book because he was “unemployed and accustomed to luxury.” The NSA calls the book itself a “monumental indiscretion” that put America in danger. But this exposure didn’t stop future spying programs.

SHAMROCK

Screencap via The Daily Show

Operation SHAMROCK began as an Army program in 1945. During World War II, the Army had legal access to the cables of the three major communication companies of the day (RCA Global, ITT, and Western Union). But with the war over and won, that access was considered illegal, though apparently the government didn’t want to just stop listening in. According to The Lawless State: The Crimes of the US Intelligence Agencies, the Army Signals Security Agency asked the companies to continued to let them monitor international cables. The companies agreed, but there was a twist. As the authors of The Lawless State wrote, “The government apparently never informed the cable companies that its activity was not limited to foreign targets but also analyzed and disseminated the telegrams of Americans.”

In 1952, the NSA was created and took over SHAMROCK and soon the agency—which the vast majority of Americans had never heard of—was intercepting 150,000 messages a month.

During the Church Committee hearings in 1975, which publicly revealed the existence of the NSA in the process of looking into misconduct of America’s intelligence agencies, Lew Allen Jr., the the NSA’s director at the time, said that Congress passed a law in 1959 that “provides authority to enable the NSA as the principal agency of the Government responsible for signals intelligence activities, to function without the disclosure of information which would endanger the accomplishment of its functions.” In other words, it could pretty much do what it liked.

The NSA used that freedom, according to a Congressional investigator who discovered SHAMROCK, to establish secret facilities in several cities, including New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, and San Antonio. In each city, NSA employees would go to the major telegraph companies and copy telegrams, with the companies’ permission but without warrants.

As Bamford describes it, agents would “bring [the telegrams] to an office masquerading as a television tape processing company. There they would use a machine to duplicate all the computer tapes containing the telegrams, and, hours later, return the original tapes to the company.”

This program, conducted illegally yet with full cooperation with the US government and the communication giants of the day, went on for 30 years. It didn’t end until 1975, when the secret finally came out thanks to the Church Committee.

MINARET

A UNIVAC system purchased by the NSA in 1963. Photo via Motherboard

Project MINARET, often described as a sibling to SHAMROCK, was a reaction to the social movements of the 1960s. This was the program the NSA used to target “domestic enemies,” a.k.a. those involved in civil rights and antiwar groups.

Around this time, the NSA had become a sort of tool for other federal agencies, like the FBI and CIA, who would supply names of “subversives” to monitor. The NSA didn’t need warrants to tap people’s phones and was more than happy to comply. The agency also worked with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the precursor to the DEA) to target suspected drug traffickers; this was the dawning of the war on drugs and the beginning of the federal government’s obsession with using controlled substances as an excuse to watch and arrest Americans. During the Church Committee hearings, Allen often mentioned “drug trafficking” in the same breath as “terrorism” when describing the objectives of his agency.

It took the Church Committee to expose the fact that both SHAMROCK and MINARET were blatantly illegal and in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That led to the passing, in 1978, of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the law that established procedures for surveillance of communications. After FISA, if the government wanted to spy on suspected foreign agents within the US, they had to go to a secret court and get permission.   

That may have slowed down the NSA’s surveillance programs, but it hardly stopped them.

ECHELON, Stellar Wind, and a Decade of Whistleblowers

Image via 

“The average person doesn’t have a concept of the massive capability that is available to the National Security Agency,” said former NSA analyst William Weaver in a 2007 interview with Frontline. “Forget about the idea of a guy with earphones on listening to something. That’s not what happens. The calls are being sucked up by the millions and you’re engaged in data mining.”

Programs like SHAMROCK established the NSA’s model of using communication companies’ infrastructure to spy on Americans, but project ECHELON was the beginning of the government’s compulsive need to gather as much data from as many people as technologically possible.

ECHELON has never been formally recognized by the NSA; the agency’s official history doesn’t mention it. But it has been covered by many journalists around the world, including Nicky Hager, whose work led to an investigation by European Parliament. And now that we know what we know, it’s quite possibly the midwife of the now-famous PRISM program.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, ECHELON is “a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for preprogrammed keywords or fax, telex, and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched.” This far-reaching operation is reportedly as a collaboration between the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand governments

ECHELON probably has its roots in the 70s, but could have started earlier or later, since it’s still officially a secret. What is known is that once the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, the NSA got busy becoming the world’s largest data miner—and that technology wasn’t created overnight after 9/11.

Information about the NSA’s capabilities has been coming out in bits and pieces for years. In 2005, Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm and NSA analyst Russell Tice blew the whistle on the spy agency by telling the New York Times about a warrantless surveillance system being used to data-mine millions of phone calls and emails. This operation had been going on since 2001.

In 2006, AT&T technician Mark Klein exposed the NSA’s massive data collection operation in the AT&T building in San Francisco—a joint venture between the telecom giant and the spy agency. The operation became widely known as “Room 641A,” named after the roomful of supercomputers the NSA built to collect and analyze phone calls and internet traffic.

Also in 2006, NSA employee Thomas Andrews Drake talked publicly about Project Trailblazer, described by the Baltimore Sun as an attempt to create a system to analyze the “2 million bits of data the [NSA] collects every hour—a task that has grown increasingly complex with the advent of the internet, cell phones and instant messaging—and enable them quickly to identify the most important information.” The bloated program cost $1.2 billion and was a gigantic failure, proving that the government's spy agencies sometimes make costly mistakes.

The NSA needed somewhere to store all this data it was gathering, of course. William Binney, a mathematician who worked for the agency, told the public exactly where that was when he gave the media information about Stellar Wind, a terrifyingly massive data-storage center in Utah where all your calls, emails, texts, and Facebook messages collected by PRISM are probably filed away.

While discussing the mass surveillance systems set-up after 2001, Binney told Wired: “[The NSA] violated the Constitution setting it up. But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way.”

Judging from the agency’s history, that should be the NSA’s official motto.

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

More on the NSA:

Yes, the NSA Can Spy on Every US Citizen

The NSA’s Data Collection Habits Are Trickling Down to Cops and Credit Agencies

A Photo History of the NSA, from Its Once-Secret Archives

Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim. Photo courtesy of Abdiaziz

Everyone’s talking about Somalia’s future. They’re talking up foreign business investment, they’re talking up the new government, and they’re talking up the Islamist militia al-Shabaab. Something that hasn't come up quite so much is the precarious existence of journalists in the Horn of Africa nation. Eighteen journalists were killed in Somalia last year and a number have already died this year in the capital, Mogadishu. Journalists are being harassed, threatened, and imprisoned—and not just by al-Shabaab, but by a Somali government keen to cover the tracks of any nefarious activity they don't want the rest of the world hearing about. 

One reporter, Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, was thrown in prison for having the gall to interview a woman, Lul Ali Osman, who claimed to have been raped by members from a militia wearing government uniforms. Unwilling to acknowledge that their soldiers might be raping people, the government and police accused Abdi of spreading “propaganda.” He was eventually released, found not guilty of doing something that isn’t even a crime.

The government was also forced to admit that they knew some of their troops were raping and torturing women in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. It’s a difficult situation for the fledgling government, who is struggling to control the clan-oriented militias that are meant to be keeping the peace under their auspices. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has made the right noises about improving the situation for journalists, but real progress will take time. I spoke to Abdiaziz about his experience.  

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. Photo via

VICE: Can you talk about Lul Ali Osman and what she told you when you interviewed her?
Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim: She lived in an IDP camp in Mogadishu. People in the district had told me about her, and I’d been following her case. Rape cases have been increasing in southern Somalia in the last year and I had been investigating that. The president released a statement saying that anyone who violated human rights in that way might be killed. I interviewed her and she told me men in a militia wearing government uniforms raped her. She told me they tortured her and took her into another place near the camp. That was where she was raped and tortured.

Was the article published before the government found you?
No. I interviewed her on January 6. On the same day, Al Jazeera English published an article about the rise in rape cases in Mogadishu. The police started to investigate some of the cases based on the article. They found the name of the lady and her telephone number because she had spoken to the police after she was raped. They asked her who had interviewed her and that’s how they found me. I didn’t write the Al Jazeera article and I was never able to publish my own article.

What happened when the police first came to you?
The head of criminal investigations called me through Lul Ali Osman’s mobile. He asked me my name and told me he knew me and that he wanted to see me. He told me it was a simple inquiry. I went to his office and, after a couple of minutes, he told me I was under arrest. He showed me the report from Al Jazeera and asked me if I’d written the article. I told him I hadn’t but he didn’t believe me. Lul Ali Osman confirmed that I’d interviewed her, so they arrested me. There was no official letter, or anything. They told me that I’d made up the article for Al Jazeera, that it was propaganda and that they were going to search my home and my office. They searched both those places and then kept me in a cell at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for a couple of weeks while they carried out more investigations. They didn’t find anything when they searched my house and office, but they sent me to the central prison in Mogadishu anyway.

Somali militia preparin for inspection. Photo courtesy of Rolf Helmrich

At this point, was Lul Ali Osman also in prison?
She and her husband were arrested, as well as the woman who put me in touch with Lul Ali Osman. Lul Ali Osman had a young child and was breastfeeding, so she wasn’t sent to the central prison.

Can you describe the conditions in the central prison?
It’s very close to the Indian Ocean. It’s an ancient building and it’s very crowded. There are more than 1,000 people in the prison. There’s food and water shortages and when you're sick you aren’t treated quickly. People often die in the prison because they don’t get any medical assistance. When I was there, there was a cholera outbreak and people were dying of that.

How many people are there in a cell?
In my cell there were more than 45 people. The cell wasn’t more than 23 feet long.

Shit. What do you do all day? Just sit in the cell without moving?
You can’t do anything. People are there—they don’t move, they can’t go out, can’t see the sun... So you keep yourself in the cell for 24 hours. It’s very difficult to move in the cell—you can imagine, 45 people in one cell doesn’t make it easy to get around. You have a very small space in the cell where they tell you to sleep. It’s not big enough—it’s about the size of one hand and five fingers. You have to sleep on your side.

Is it a violent place? Do people fight there?
My cell was much more quiet than other cells. It was full of very different kinds of people: policemen were in the cell alongside al-Shabaab fighters. I could hear fighting going on in other parts of the prison. Sometimes the guards would come and beat inmates.

Somali technicals on the move. Photo courtesy of Rolf Helmrich

I can't believe that policemen and al-Shabaab fighters were in the same cell. It doesn't seem like they'd get along.
Absolutely! Guys from al-Shabaab would come up to me and tell me things that weren’t good for me to hear. One of them told me, “If I was out of this prison then I would never let you live in this world.” When I was in the CID prison, the officials there threatened me as well. They said, “Well, we can release you, but where will you live?” Which meant that they wouldn’t let me live.

That’s a little unpleasant. And, of course, you were in prison for no good reason—just for doing your job. What was your lawyer like?
I had two very good lawyers—human rights lawyers. Very respected in Mogadishu. They thought about journalism and human rights and how to defend those things. Unfortunately, they were killed in a suicide attack on April 14. Before then, I had been sentenced to a year in jail. We appealed and it was reduced to six months. Then we appealed again and I was found not guilty and was released. 

Since you’ve gotten out of prison the government has all but admitted that their troops have carried out attacks and raped women in IDP camps. This supports what Lul Ali Osman said to you, doesn’t it?
You, as a journalist, understand. You have credible sources and you trust them to give you good information. I knew that these things were happening in the camps in Mogadishu. It was not just one case. A lot of women were raped and tortured. All these violations against human rights have been increasing in southern Somalia. As a journalist, I was aware of that and I had been focusing on human rights issues. For the case of Osman, when I met her I asked her a lot of questions to confirm that what she said happened really happened. I backed that up by going to the hospital, to the police, and interviewing other sources. For doing these things, for doing my job, I was arrested. It was clear to me that she was raped.

Do you feel angry about what happened?
I didn’t do what they accused me of doing and that’s why international organizations got involved with my case. I was very unhappy with what happened—it was painful. To be put in prison for doing my job was very difficult, and to see her put in prison alongside her husband was also very hard.

Are you worried that it’s getting harder to be a journalist in Mogadishu?
You have to understand that I live in permanent fear because of what happened to me. It’s always better to respect the freedom of exploration in the country. There are a lot of problems for journalists in Mogadishu. We are being killed. You see a lot of constraints and difficulties. We don’t have the freedom to travel widely across the city. Everyone is confined to small parts of the city. We need to find a safe place where every journalist can do his job freely and the government needs to help us find that place. The government, with the help of international investigation experts, should investigate the killing of my colleagues and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Thanks, Abdiaziz.

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

More stuff from Somalia: 

Somaliland Is a Real Country, According to Somaliland

Rapping for Peace in Somalia

Can Britain Handle the Rapes, Killings and Clans in Somalia?

A Free Syrian Army unit receiving medical supplies coordinated by the Syrian Support Group. via Facebook.

Louay Sakka is a co-founder of the Syrian Support Group, which was set-up to help promote democracy and support the moderate members of the Free Syrian Army to eventually help them topple the Assad regime. Although Sakka left Syria in 1997 and has only been back once since he left, he has become a key-player in the successes of the FSA, helping rebels find each other on the ground and to communicate with the US State department. And he does this all from the comfort of his basement in Oakville, Ontario, using Skype, Viber, and his android phone. He is also working hard to get the FSA funding they need, and part of that funding comes from a Paypal account that has been set-up where ordinary civilians from all over the world, can contribute. So far they have raised over $150,000 this way. Essentially, the SSG is helping to crowdsource a war. And now, with Stephen Harper stating publicly he agrees Assad used chemical weapons against the rebels, the SSG will only be getting busier as this terrifying situation unfolds.

I met with Sakka in downtown Toronto, where he works as an IT specialist by day, to discuss how this all works.  

VICE: I understand you’re based out of your home in Oakville, how does that work?
Louay: Well, I have a network of thousands of people in Syria. They all know how to reach me and if I can’t help them directly, I will put them in touch with the contacts who are operating in other areas, such as Aleppo. I’m from Damascus, so that’s the area I focus on- but I oversee all the communications. Every day I am working to connect rebels and activists on the ground in Syria, to help them understand their situation and each other. It’s important to understand their backgrounds, like who they are and what their needs are. 

And you do this through Skype?
Yes, mainly through Skype, but also Viber and my phone.

So from home, you are helping rebels and activists in Syria to organize?
Yes, basically. Initially we played a very historical role using Skype: For example, when you make multiple conference calls, Skype requires you to have a good Internet connection. If you want to do a conference call with ten different people, which you often need to do in these circumstances, you need someone with a very good Internet connection, and that’s one reason why they need me. I can do that from home.

How much else can you do from your home?
It is very important that they have understanding of each other. Basically we can break Syria down into provinces to better understand the different people from different backgrounds in order to help unite the Free Syria Army, the rebels, and the activists.  They don’t always understand each other. For instance, people from Damascus are very different than people from Aleppo, and we help create awareness. We are involved in the structuring and in the chain of commands in Syria. The FSA is made up of 80 per cent civilians and 20 per cent of military defectors, so we help unite them all because there has always been a historical mistrust between those two elements.

How many rebels and activists do you communicate with daily?
Well it depends, in the beginning I would talk to hundreds daily, and now that we have a leadership in SMC (Supreme Military Council), I talk more directly to the leaders daily, which lessens the amount.  But I still talk to many, many people each day.

It seems like almost every day there is breaking news from Syria, what is the most recent crisis situation you’ve had to help deal with?
Well, probably the most recent incident happened in Qusayr. 50,000 people were living there and now they have zero because we had to evacuate it to save civilians from the surrounding Hezbollah.

How were you able to help with this?
On May 28^th I received a call from the General Idris asking if we could find a way to escort the civilians out of Qusayr because it was surrounded by Hezbollah. He called me at 4 AM. to tell me how bad the situation was and so I quickly reached out to the State department to explain the urgent situation. From there the State Department promised to work on it and they talked to the UN who talked to Russia, who could put pressure on Iran and Hezbollah to cease fire, to allow the civilians to exit safely. On the 29^th the civilians started to evacuate the town.

via.

That’s intense. Were you successful in evacuating everyone?
Well, I can say, when the city fell into the hands of the Hezbolloah, it was empty because we were able to get them out. 

So why do they need to call you and not the State Department directly?
General Idris needs to call me because there is a much faster response time and I am in a position to communicate better with people here. If he calls the State Department it will take a long time and it’s much faster to deal with me.  But the SSG now knows many people within the state department. For the day-to-day operations in Syria, I will relay what is important to the right people.

Do members of the FSA stay in touch with you while something like a ceasefire is going on?
Yes. I get constant updates and then they will let me know when everyone has been evacuated.

Have you ever lost communication with someone while fighting is taking place?
Yes, there have been many times where I’m talking to people who have been disconnected because their area has just been bombed. Once I was talking to someone from Damascus, in the South neighborhood of Kadam, who was trying to give me an update of what was going on. Artilleries started to hit them and they had to cut and run out.  From there, at that moment, it’s really tough, because there is really nothing I can do but wait.  I had to wait a week to hear back from them and I didn’t know if they were dead or alive.  

There are pro-Assad Syrians.  Do you ever worry about your safety just living in an ordinary home?
No, because they are such a minority that they would not dare support him now. All the things Assad has done, from using chemical weapons against his own people to air attacks wiping out full towns, I doubt anyone would stand by him now. There is so much disaster he has caused.

Are there other people like you working from their home?
We have people like me all over. In the UK, Turkey, France and many North America such as Chicago and Washington.

I understand there is an SSG fund. Could you explain the Paypal account component?  How exactly does that work?
Yes, we set the account up last summer after we got our license from the US Treasury Department in order to give people a chance to donate money. There are many people who want to help the Free Syrian Army but couldn’t, and now there is an easy way for them to do it.

So, people from anywhere in the world can go online and donate funds through Paypal that will go towards this cause?
Yes. And then we use this funding for many things, such as our administration work and some of the FSA projects, media awareness centers, and internally distributing non-lethal aid. Also, we use that funding to assist in our bigger donations. Like when the US government wants to give them [FSA] food—we need money too move the food supply—we would use the money from the fund for such an operation. 

Are there any restrictions on who can donate?
Yes. There is a blacklist set up from the US government that we are not allowed to accept money from. It’s a list of exclusion, not inclusion. 

Who is donating to the fund?
There are Americans, many people from France, Eastern European countries too interestingly enough, and also Canadians. Sometimes people give what they can, like $10 or $20 dollars, but it’s very helpful. We have monthly donors who contribute as well, and then there are many bursts [of donations] to the account when the media gets talking about it. We see the Paypal account get more money when there is a lot reported about it in the news because it creates awareness. 

Because the FSA is working alongside some extremist groups, how are you preventing the money from going to terrorists?
This money is not going to terrorists or extremists, because they are part of the same cause, but they are separate from the SMC. They follow their own leadership and get weapons from their own channels and leadership. When people say they don’t want to give money to the FSA they are missing something. They say that it is going to al-Qaeda, the associated group—but they neglect the fact that there is already a lot of support going to the extreme groups and by not supporting the moderate members (of the FSA) who only want democracy, we will allow the extremists to win. 

Are you concerned with the continued alignment the FSA has with al-Qaeda and other extremist groups?
Yes, of course I’m worried about this. I’m worried that the extremists will takeover; part of the reason the Syrian Support Group was set up, was to help the moderate members overcome this possibility.

Is the FSA Chief of Staff, General Salem Idris, concerned also?
Yes, Idris is very concerned. But at this point he is in no position to push them [the extremists] out because he needs them to help fight. We are very worried about places like Aleppo and they are very effective in helping to topple the Assad regime, which is the main goal right now. But, he is aware that they are a threat for the future stability of the country and also wants to ensure they won’t takeover as they did in the eastern provinces, taking control of the oil and gas fields. 

What are some of the main issues in Syria that people in North America need to understand at this point in time?
They should know that the lack of support is causing people to be recruited to the wrong fight. Staying out of the problem is not going to help it. I am very concerned with Aleppo right now because I know many people from Hezbollah have gone there after Qusayr and are wanting to fight there—we could not evacuate Aleppo because it has a population of four million people, so we are just watching this very closely. I am in constant communication with my contact who watches over Aleppo and he will let me know immediately any important updates.

What should people who are thinking of donating money through the Paypal account know?
That they will look back at these donations with pride that they helped. We are very thankful for the help and support and sympathy. And also we get many nice postcards that show support. It means a lot.

Follow Angela on Twitter: @angelamaries

Want to learn more about the conflict in Syria? Read:

The Syria Issue

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

I don’t deserve nice things. I don’t feel comfortable in nice places. The only time I feel safe is when I’m surrounded by desperation and mediocrity, which is why I love chain restaurants. That's why I decided to include a visit to Chuck E. Cheese’s in my spiritual quest to find comfort in the bosoms of the worst restaurants in the world.

Because I’m just like you. I know you, bro, because you’re me. You’re young. You’re shitty. And you’re proud of it. Your entire persona is predicated on your degeneracy. You spend your days either suckling at the teat of your long-suffering parents or toiling at a low-paying job where the majority of your productivity is wasted on creating Facebook event invites. 

Your nights are spent in a drunken stupor, punishing your body with piss-weak American macrobrews and sucrose-laden foodstuffs while you ironically watch Home Alone 2: Lost in New York on Netflix. You haven’t felt a sincere emotion since you were nine.

So why aren’t you at Chuck E. Cheese’s? It is, after all, where “A Kid Can Be a Kid,” and the last time I checked, your maturity level would place you thoroughly within that demographic. Did I mention it serves beer? It serves beer.

I read online that the branch of Chuck E. Cheese’s I was about to visit was rather brutal. I looked forward to reveling in the madness and enjoying the schadenfreude of watching stoic parents, resigned to a life of tedium and mediocrity, passionatelessly eat pizza while their progeny ran amok. I looked forward to the desperation, to the ignorance. I fantasized that a fight would break out. I wanted to delight in the worst humanity had to offer. I, like you, am a piece of shit.

And there it stood, an oasis in the middle of a food desert dotted with liquor stores and gas stations. It was situated next to a Dollar Tree and a Panda Express. It looked bleak. I prepared to let the sweet, sweet irony of what I was about to experience wash over me like a neon-colored tide.

I, like you, am not capable of having fun without the aid of some sort of intoxicant. As such, the first thing I did upon entering (after, of course, getting my hand stamped by a borderline suicidal teenager) was order a large ($3.99) beer and an all-you-could eat salad bar ($5.99 with coupon). The mediocrity of both the beer and the salad was unquantifiable. But they were so cheap! Wine was also available, and equally cheap, but the fact that it was: 1. Blush and Chablis only and 2. situated on draft next to the MGD and Miller Light taps disturbed me. 

Granted, not all Chuck E. Cheese's locations serve alcohol, but this was the sort of neighborhood where no one would raise much of a fuss about it. Actually, the vast majority of parents—sporting sagging pants, sagging flesh, and saggier frowns—seemed to need it to tolerate the aggressively annoying surroundings.

My beer was served in a translucent plastic cup, the kind fast food restaurants give you when you ask for water. I drank it with aplomb. I smothered my salad in ranch. Now, logic would dictate that a salad should taste savory. Not at Chuck E. Cheese's. Here, it tasted like corn syrup. Everything tasted like corn syrup. The buzz of the beer, coupled with the sugar high I copped from the ranch, made what I was witnessing feel magical.

High, I stared transfixed at a ten-year-old girl as she provocatively danced in front of the green screen situated to the left of Chuck E.’s animatronic carcass. A Bon Jovi parody track blared. A kid who was probably around seven attempted to look “tough” in the photo his mother was taking of him next to the animatronic Chuck E.—the possessed rat kept robotically jerking from left to right, repeatedly hitting the scowling, cross-armed kid in the head. The seven-year-old refused, however, to move. He was either sincerely tough, sincerely stupid, or both. I put my money on both. I got another beer.

Suitably juiced, I re-entered the stage area and became entranced by a monitor. A music video of M.C. Hammer’s “U [sic] Can’t Touch This,”  featuring the shockingly competent dancing of a man in a Chuck E. costume, blew my mind. A scene from an episode of Fraggle Rock followed. I surveyed my surroundings. Why the fuck was I the only 20-something, childless loser in this place? It should have been packed with dipshits in acid-washed jean jackets and skintight bodysuits. The beer was unethically cheap. The food was atrocious. The entertainment was irony incarnate.

Photo-taking opportunities abounded. Millennial narcissists who needed new profile pics could stand in front of the green screen, pay a quarter for a dot matrix printout of themselves, or download an iPhone app that made it possible to get their picture taken with a crudely animated Chuck E.

Prizes include Tech Decks and ThunderCats action figures. It was entirely possible to drunkenly yell, “I wanna ride the plastic horsey!” and then do it.

Did I drunkenly ride the plastic horsey? You’re goddamned right I did. I played skeeball. I rode in a child-sized car. I, a grown-ass woman, crawled around in plastic tubes that reeked of vomit. I regressed to infancy. And no one stopped me.

Why would they? I was young. I was white. I was American. I was shitty. I was you. 

@bornferal

More tales of pure, unvarnished sadness:

The Worst Restaurant in the World

Horse Racing: The Sport of America's Lower Class

I Got Saved at San Diego's Creationist Museum (Just Kidding, It Sucked)