This week on the VICE podcast, Reihan Salam sits down with Michael German, a 16-year veteran of the FBI. German recently joined the Brennan Center, where he'll focus on law enforcement and intelligence oversight and reform, in the center's fight to advance effective national security policies. Today, Reihan and German chat about how the FBI has changed since 9/11.

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Welcome to the #CancelColbert edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking racial jokes on a scale of one to HILARIOUS, with “one” being the least hilarious and “HILARIOUS” being the most hilarious.

-If there's one thing I believe the human race can totally agree on, it's that comedy only gets better the more you dissect it. For instance, the classic joke, "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side," surprises the recipient of the joke with its literal, non-punchline. It's a pure form of anti-comedy, the "Nick Cannon in whiteface" of one-liners. Isn't that joke so much funnier now that I've explained it? I thought so.

Last week was a real golden age of comedy, thanks in no small part to the #CancelColbert controversy. Like with all the best art (textbooks, CliffsNotes, the Transformers movie series), the meaning needs to be super clear, or it's not good. That's not a suggestion. That's, like, a rule.

Writer/activist/excellent comedian Suey Park and TV personality/white person Stephen Colbert both learned this powerful lesson through the course of last week's controversy over Colbert's joke about the Washington Redskins' Native American outreach foundation. The Twitter account for The Colbert Report tweeted an out-of-context quote on the subject that contained a racial slur against Asians. That caused Park to create the #CancelColbert hashtag and blow up the internet for a few days. Conservative pundits, often the ones getting accused of racism, jumped at the chance to give their hybrid-driving competition a taste of their own medicine. You go, Michelle Malkin! You've really earned it.

Eventually, Colbert went on his show and explained that what everyone was upset about was a joke, specifically a satirical dig at Redskins owner Dan Snyder's insistence on his football team having a racially insensitive nickname. At that point, the joke took off, growing from a mildly amusing larva of social commentary into a full-blown comedy butterfly. And yet... something was missing. What if there was yet another layer of sarcasm at play here? What if... Suey Park was just kidding the whole time too? 

Shit's about to get real.

In an interview with popular comedy blog Salon.com, Suey Park explained—in agonizingly funny detail—how she's actually a fan of Colbert and that she was merely trying to point out how white people are allowed the benefit of context, but minorities don't receive the same privilege. Allow Ms. Park to explain further:

"A lot of white America and so-called liberal people of color, along with conservatives, ask, “Do I understand context?” And that’s part of wanting to completely humanize the oppressor. To see the white man as always reasonable, always pure, always deliberate, always complex and always innocent. And to see the woman of color as literal. Both my intent behind the hashtag and in my [unintelligible] distance, is always about forcing an apology on me for not understanding their context when, in reality, they misunderstood us when they made us a punch line again. So it’s always this logic of how can we understand whiteness better, and that’s never been my politics. I’ve always been about occupying the margins and strengthening the margins and what that means is that, for a long time, whiteness has also occupied the margins. Like, people of color get in circles with no white people in the room and we see that whiteness still operates. So I think it’s kind of a shock for America that whiteness has dominant society already, it also seeps into the margins. What happens the one time when the margins seep into the whiteness and we encroach on their space? It’s like the sky is falling."

I'm not sure who's being misunderstood, who's lacking context, or what "margins seep into the whiteness" means (maybe a Sarah McLachlan lyric?) What I do know is that the above block of text is very, very funny. I encourage comedians everywhere to explain themselves more. Based on the media's fixation with this story, it seems like a sure way to up your Klout score. HILARIOUS

Photo via Flickr User Bob B. Brown

-Paula Deen's restaurant Uncle Bubba's Oyster House closed its doors after 10 gut-busting years of serving the citizens of Savannah, Georgia. Uncle Bubba's was at the center of the lawsuit that destroyed Deen's reputation as a health-conscious, considerate southern granny. Now, the world knows Paula Deen enjoys casually using the n-word, which potentially led to the shuttering of Uncle Bubba's. I give this a 7, only because I wish I could have eaten there before it closed.

-Speaking of comedy, below is a major missed opportunity for artistic synergy from Nick Cannon:

Game face on. @NickCannon is all set for halftime at the @NYKnicks game tonight - we're filming for #AGT Season 9! pic.twitter.com/u7j1jAJBjC

— America's Got Talent (@nbcagt) April 2, 2014

Instead of "Game face on," what if it said "White face on," and Nick resurrected his Connor Smallnut character? The answer is we'd probably all be begging him to run for President of Comedy right now, but he chose the wrong path and "dropped the ball"—pun intended, obviously. Nick Cannon can really do nothing right! 2

-And finally, In order to really sell this article and take my own advice, I guess I should explain myself too:

I googled "racist jokes" just for fun today and found a site called "Niggermania." It is, as you would expect, a treasure trove of awful shit. These are jokes that don't have to be explained, because the meaning is pretty fucking clear. The same is true of the knuckledragging comments from the boys at Top Gear regarding Asians, Mexicans, and Romanians. These jokes are just not funny, and they are not funny because they are blatantly racist.

Humor is one of the only tools at the disposal of civilized people. Global warming is real, the worldwide economy is stubbornly stagnant, corporations are "people" now, and one day I am going to die and someone will applaud just because of the color of my skin. Maybe I should be allowed to laugh at it all without also getting a critical theory lecture at the same time? If all our society ever does is constantly explain everything, then why even bother trying to be subtle? Subtlety separates that which is creative from that which is purely didactic. If all you want to do is tell the world how you fit within the socio-economic context of 21st century-American patriarchy, then stop calling yourself a comedian. Does that mean comics can't be political? Certainly not. Any artist can be political if they so choose, but art is not the same as criticism, and it never will be. NOT FUNNY

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Allan Kaprow. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Who the Fuck Was Allan Kaprow?
Don’t you mean, “Who the fuck WASN’T Allan Kaprow?” He was an everyman—a real meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. First of all, he was born in New Fucking Jersey like five minutes before the Great Depression. Oh, I’m sorry, Damien Hirst, you were born wearing gold-fleeced diapers from a jade vagina? Get real.

Kaprow’s influence on contemporary art is pretty intense. Dude started out in New York for a minute doing action paintings because he liked jazz. But for Kaprow, painting wasn’t the right vehicle to totally make art all about life. Paintings are constructed, right? I mean, what if there was an art form that didn’t rely on things like composition, color, aesthetics, or talent? In 1958, Kaprow wrote an essay called “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” You might remember Pollock as the alcoholic character Ed Harris played in the movie Pollock. Contrary to popular belief, he was a real person. Anyway, Kaprow demanded in this essay that the way that art was made be changed. He thought it should include things from everyday life that we don’t normally associate with art. The new mode of making art that Kaprow proposed was called “Happenings.”

The works Kaprow would do in the following years had a profound effect on art-making in general and later influenced millions of movements. You can blame Kaprow almost entirely for performance art, relational aesthetics, social practice, and net art. He died in 2006 in San Diego after a long career, numerous published works, and a lot of teaching (teaching helps pay the bills when you don’t make objects and are kind of a bitch about documenting ephemeral works).

Household, 1964, Women licking jam off a car. Happening. Presented for Festival of Contemporary Arts at a city dump, Ithaca, New York. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo © Sol Goldberg

What the fuck is a Happening?
Don’t you mean, “What the Fuck ISN’T a Happening?” Maybe reading this right fucking now is a Happening. It’s “happening,” isn’t it? What I mean is the idea behind this new kind of art was, like I just fucking said, to incorporate elements of everyday life. Fuck a maker. Fuck an audience. The nice thing about being an artist today is that because of Kaprow, you don’t need to actually possess any technical skills whatsoever. The fuck outta here, Powhida.

Do you have a room? You’ve got a venue. Do you know how to talk? You’ve got exchange. Do you like to do silly things even though you’re an adult? You’re an artist. Anybody, literally anybody, can do a Happening. That’s the whole fucking point. For centuries, artists trained long and hard, apprenticing under masters for years before they could make real art. Thanks to Kaprow though, all you need now is the privilege to go $90,000 in debt for your MFA, plus cursory knowledge of how to create a Facebook event.

Basically, to create a Happening you invite a bunch of people to some place. Give them suggestions of things to do. None of the tasks should require skill, or you’ll alienate them. I’d suggest telling people to maybe walk backwards for a little bit and then sit on the floor folding paper. It doesn’t matter if they’re having fun, it just matters that they’re there. Kaprow didn’t document his stuff much, but if you’re going to get a grant, you’re going to need to get photos of your Happenings. DO NOT document them with video. Participating in a Happening is boring; think about how much more boring it’d be to watch on a computer. Photo documentation works great because you can also make up lies about what occurred. Notice something weird in a pic? Like maybe a participant had their eyes closed? THAT’S YOUR ART. You fucking authored that, man.

What you need to realize is the game has changed. Get off your high horse and get on the Ephemeral Train. Ride it through the Exchange Tunnel and get off at Hangout Station. If you like friends, games and taking credit for the experience of others, Happenings are for you. To help y'all figure this out, I translated Kaprow's 1966 essay, "Notes on the Elimination of the Audience" into language someone living in 2014 could understand.

Allan Kaprow. Yard, 1961 with artist. Environment presented for Environments, Situations, Spaces sculpture garden, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063) Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: © Ken Heyman

Allan Kaprow's "Notes on the Elimination of the Audience," Translated from English to American by Sean J Patrick Carney

When artists started doing “Happenings,” they used tricks of the trade originally made up by other artists. They liked to borrow from Assemblages, which is when you glue garbage on a painting so it’s 3D (this was unusual for a painting). They also borrowed from Environments, which is where somebody who is not an architect builds something you stand in. Assemblages and Environments were kind of jazzy. Artists who did them made shit up as they went along. People who care about this shit will tell you that this hippie approach was a political act because it challenged talent. Who cares. A big issue I see with artists who first used Happenings was that the pieces (right?) tended to use standard things you see in performance art. This makes them not as “happening,” if you catch my drift. ;)

Happenings happened in places where you’d be like, “You’re doing art here?” Examples include apartments, classrooms, or school gyms. Some were in galleries, but always those galleries that nobody had heard of and all the people in the neighborhood saw them and said, “Here comes the gentrification.” Artists moved shit out of the way in the rooms so they could do activities—like Circle Time at preschool, but with more wine. People who came sat down and watched an artist and his/her friends do stuff. What exactly they were watching isn’t easy to describe because lots artists do lots of things, but most of it was bad. Once in a while, artists “broke the fourth wall” and involved the audience in games or whatever. Audience members got out of their chairs, or looked at shit, or stood in groups. A couple of times, artists even moved through the middle of the audience, forcing them to move around also. Wow.

BEEF: it didn’t matter how wacky and crazy artists were because even with those silly games, what happened was still an audience watching a show. That’s what I meant when I said Happenings used lots of shit you’d see in performance art. The audience and the performers were separate.

This made them not very fun/spontaneous. Think about this in the same way art galleries put restrictions on Assemblages and Environments. White walls are a prison. Let the art “breathe.” Play tag and have a good time. The weird thing though is that in Happenings, everybody was in a prison, too. The rooms or gyms boxed them in hard. Since this art was new and people didn’t know what to think about it, it felt like theater. But can you blame the audience for that? No. They weren’t included and that made them feel like they were just watching stuff happen, not making stuff happen. Every time a Happening went down, no matter how kewl and OMFG it seemed, it was just bad theater. And we all know theater isn’t art. What it REALLY ended up looking like was a nightclub act, circus routine, cock-fighting show, or theater made by poor people for poor people. It was like entertainment without content. I don’t mean a nightclub act can’t have content. I like getting drunk.

This sucks: Most artists doing Happenings missed the fact that making Happenings awesome was really hard. Even now, people who do this type of shit always promote it in “acts.” I mean, OK, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be radical (in the political way) or radical (in the bodacious way). Luckily, some motherfuckers knew something sucked. They worked at it for years and obviously made some dumb pieces because there’s always a big gap between how cool something is in theory and how cool something actually is when you do it (like sex in the shower). Finally though, artists started to understand what was NOT gonna suck and made one rule:

KILL THE AUDIENCE

Not like by murdering them, but by totally murderlizing the space between them and the performance. Think about it: Every fucking thing in the room can art: chairs, people, air, time, the ROOM ITSELF. See how Happenings relate to Assemblages and Environments? It’s like collage on mescaline. Once you realize this you transcend theater and make real art. If you paint (no), you know how hard it is to paint shit and make it look natural together. A group of people in a room who don’t move around and play with the artist are like poorly placed trees in landscape painting. Like a big splotch of some stupid color on an otherwise kewl painting, audiences that don’t do anything are dead fucking space. Movements cause movements (true in painting and Happenings). If you do a Happening and your audience just fucking sits there, it’s theater, dick farmer.

Let’s talk a bit about actually getting people to participate. You have to trick them into it because participation sucks. When artists ask for participation, the audience response is weak (if they respond at all), or it could get really violent. But when people do respond violently during a Happening, it’s because the artist was mean to them. But after a few years of antagonistic work being popular, audience responses got totally generic. If you are serious about Happenings being rad, you should not let this happen. (Happen. LOL.)

I gotta calm down. I just mean good Happenings work when they’re respectful. Let your audience know you’re gonna include them. They’ll be more likely to participate. Don’t be sneaky. Let everybody know what games you might play. On the Facebook event, post a schedule of things and what people can bring to the party. Happenings aren’t that different from what somebody does to prepare for a parade, football game, wedding, or church. And I know I’m fucking the dog here, but they’re also not that different from theater. I know; bear with me.

What sets Happenings aside from things that involve skill like sports/theater is that while it’s important to know what’s going to happen, nobody should be good at it. Happenings are like life (awkward, terrible). If you try hard to make a Happening look good, you’re missing the whole fucking point. To make sure your Happening is totally shitty looking, avoid inviting anybody with a background in theater, sports, or who has had a job. The best participant for a Happening is a complete jabroni. Participants should be unskilled, uneducated, and overly appreciative for being included. Keep this in mind because if for you are paid money to do a Happening at a biennial or something, you sure as fuck don’t want to split all that money with jabronies.

Still, you don’t have to only have willing participants. Something wild about this work is you can actually do it right in the street (“street art"). On a busy street, people walking by will totes stop and check it out—just like if a building exploded. I know you’re thinking, “But Allan, you said an audience who isn’t participating makes the work fucked.” OK, here’s the curve ball: People on the street are doing what they normally do. They’re different than somebody seeing a play on purpose. You never know what they’ll do. They could totally start participating, or not. Whatever they decide, though, they are real parts of the environment where the Happening is taking place, so they’re better than regular audience members.

One really neat thing that happens when you’re doing art on the street is that one of these motherfuckers walking by joins the piece without even knowing it. Example: a Happening about how fucked up meat is. You go into a butcher shop and buy meat from the butcher who never knows that he just participated in a fucking artwork—the butcher’s part of your art because you are better than him. Leisure rules.

Lastly: You can even design a Happening WHERE NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS. It’s totally legitimate to set up Happenings where people do nothing but sit there and watch each other sit there. This can take place anywhere except for a theater or a sports or music venue. If you take it seriously, it’s like meditating. One really fun thing to do is mix it up and have your Happening sometimes have people moving around and then sometimes not. Everybody runs around a bunch but then they sit down really seriously. When the people in your Happening stop moving, they are NOT being audience members. They’re more like a Greek chorus (they are an audience who is in a play). It doesn’t matter if that makes sense, it’s just important that you make sure to think everything in your Happening is important. I think you could also do something where like half of your participants are sitting doing nothing and the other half are all doing shit. Then they’d all switch and the people doing shit would stop doing shit and the others would start doing shit. The whole idea of watching would be like way more meaningful. They’d be like part of something big that was important.

Sean J Patrick Carney is a concrete comedian, visual artist, and writer based Brooklyn. He is the founder and director of Social Malpractice Publishing, and since 2012, Carney has been a member of GWC, Investigators, a collaborative paranormal research team.Carney has taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Virginia Commonwealth University, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and New York University. Follow him on Twitter here.

This week, my lady-column is all about the dudes.

We’ve got a dude who elicited some very strong feelings from me by posting a video called “Rape is Hilarious.” Never have I been so prepared to hate a total stranger, but it was actually one of the more teachable moments in my week.

Then, shock abounds not only on the internet, but in the courtroom as well, where an heir in Delaware raped his two babies and was let clean off the hook. Apparently raping babies isn’t really a crime in Delaware?

Oh, and a couple of male RCMP officers have revealed themselves to be the kind of guys who think domestic abuse is funny, after they accidentally left a mocking voicemail for an alleged victim in Nova Scotia.



Screencap via YouTube. 

Rich Delaware Man Rapes His Two Toddlers, Gets No Prison Time

This week in shit is fucked, because ladies and children don’t matter in the courtroom: Robert Richards IV, also known as the Du Pont heir, was given mere probation after raping his own three-year-old daughter. You heard right: not a day of prison. He got out on $60,000 bail.

The female judge’s reasoning? The six-foot-four, 250-280 lb man wouldn’t “fare well” in prison. Jan Jurden ruled he should receive treatment instead, and he now has to stay away from all children under 16. In what kind of evil being’s mind is this adequate?

Allow me a brief aside: For the record, I do think we could come up with a more effective way to treat criminals, even ones who commit heinous crimes like Richards. Treatment is probably much closer to the answer than incarceration.

But Delaware is hardly a state that makes a habit of treatment as prescription for crime. Rather, the state has one of the highest incarceration rates in the U.S. This guy clearly got off with nary a slap on the wrist, because he is a filthily loaded white guy.

In Delaware, white people constitute 56 percent of those arrested, but when you look at the amount of those arrestees who actually get sentenced, 64 percent of them are black. Out of those black criminals, 86 percent of them have been put away for drug offences—which is extra rich, given that black people only make up for 20 percent of Delaware’s total population.

Lucky for Richards, he didn’t commit a serious crime (like being black and/or carrying around a baggie of pot), he just sexually violated two toddlers.

Who gets to be a judge? How much privilege must one have in this world to climb to a position of lording over others? What are the systems in place that ready that person for their position to do so? And who do those systems benefit?

We need to change the answers to all of these questions in order to make the punishment fit the crime.



Screencap via YouTube.

Rape Is Hilarious

Okay, rape is not hilarious. But this man says it is, and takes time to tell us in this video: “Why Rape Is Sincerely Hilarious.”

As much as I try to love humans, sometimes it is just so goddamned hard. But I adore this man, Andrew Bailey, very much. He’s one of the only men I’ve ever heard speak of sexual assault against men in a way that didn’t involve a fangs-bared, frothing retaliation against the fact that the vast majority of people who are raped are women.

“Men are raped too!!” they cry. Not Andrew.

“I myself was violated by my grade 8 socials teacher… At first it felt really good, and then it felt like the worst thing that could happen to me. Like I was less than human.”

He introduced himself as “Will” in the video, but whether it’s his lived story or not, I don’t care. He’s a beautiful person for posting this.

Hope you enjoy.



Screencap via the CBC.

Nova Scotia RCMP Discredited a Woman’s Tale of Abuse

You know when you start talking shit about someone and then get paranoid, stop, and check your phone to make sure you haven’t accidentally pocket-dialed the subject of your hatred? Yeah, well, the RCMP could stand to do a little more of that. This week, RCMP officers in Nova Scotia were outed as abuser apologists and sexist pricks after leaving an accidental voicemail on the phone of a woman who filed a domestic assault complaint.

In the voicemail message, one cop says the woman “seemed very nonchalant about the whole thing.”

“So did she deserve to get hit?” another wonders, later on, and laughs.

The woman, who lives in Parrsboro, a tiny, rural Nova Scotia town, reported to police that she went to her partner’s house to get a cell phone that he had taken from her. She said her partner forced her to leave the house and assaulted her.

“She’s like, ‘well you know, I was on the floor, and I was scared for my life!’” the first officer goes on to say. He repeats her words in a light, silly tone.

“Like, you don’t sound very scared.”

So, because she’s not bawling her eyes out in hysterics, her allegation aren’t credible? I bet if she was that emotional, the cops might be inclined to dismiss her for being too emotional, and having disparities in her story as a result of her human reaction.

Former female Mounties have made no secret of harassment of women being ingrained in the RCMP’s culture. It’s been going on for a long time within the ranks of such a powerful old boys club, and it will continue unless we speak against it. 

Cops need better, mandatory, rigorous training on how to treat women like human beings. And yes, this is a message I’m okay with leaving to the public, unlike the accidentally published, derogatory comments from two choice members of the RCMP.

@sarratch

An honor detail carries the remains of Sergeant Amy Kreguer, one of the 13 people killed in the November 5, 2009 shooting at Fort Hood. Photo by U.S. Army photographer John Byerly.

Details are slowly starting to trickle out about what went down Wednesday afternoon at Fort Hood, where a 34-year-old soldier went on a shooting rampage that killed four people and injured 16 others. We know that the shooter, Army Specialist Ivan Lopez, was an “experienced soldier” and military truck driver who served for four months in Iraq and was one of the last troops to come home in 2011. We know that he was being treated for depression and other mental health issues, and had been evaluated for PTSD. But military officials said Thursday that they still don’t know what motivated Lopez to smuggle a .45-caliber automatic pistol onto a US base and start shooting at troops before turning the gun on himself.

It’s a horrifying and senseless tragedy, made all the more horrifying and senseless by the fact that we have been here before. Wednesday’s incident was the third major gun attack on a domestic military installation in less than five years, following the deadly shooting spree in September that killed 12 people at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC. The latest attack bears a number of sad resemblances to the 2009 massacre at the same base, in which Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan walked into a soldier processing center and opened fire on a group of troops preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. That attack, which left 13 dead and more than 32 others wounded, remains the deadliest mass shooting ever to take place on a military base in the US.

“We are heartbroken something like this could happen again,” President Obama told reporters after hearing news of the shooting Wednesday night. “Obviously that sense of safety has been broken once again. We need to find out exactly what happened." Speaking to reporters in Hawaii, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel similarly struggled to explain how another shooting could have happened at Fort Hood. “When we have these kinds of tragedies on our bases, something’s not working,” he said. “We will continue to address the issue. Any time you lose your people to these kinds of tragedies, it’s an issue, it’s a problem.”

At this point, it is not clear what, if anything, the military could have done to stop Wednesday's shooting. In the aftermath of the 2009 Fort Hood attack, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered sweeping review of security procedures at military facilities, which recommended a series of policy changes to help commanders identify potential "insider threats," focusing largely on individuals who had been radicalized and could pose a terrorist threat. Just two weeks ago, Hagel announced another set of new security measures in response to the Navy Yard shooting, including more rigorous screening of personnel working on military bases. But it is not clear yet whether any of these measures should have been able to stop Lopez, an active service man with a clean military record. Taken together, the three shootings prove that there probably is no silver bullet solution that will stop unhinged people from shooting up a military base—or a movie theater, or a shopping mall, or a school.

Already, theories have started to emerge about what may have caused the latest tragedy at Fort Hood, and what might have been done to stop it. Just hours after the attack, Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul was on Fox News warning that the incidents at Fort Hood—including the 2011 arrest of a 22-year-old Army private charged with trying to detonate an explosive device at a nearby restaurant—could be evidence that the base had become a target for “jihadists,” and that it was another reminder that soldiers should be allowed to carry concealed weapons. “Al Qaeda and terrorists and jihadists are targeting our military bases,” McCaul told Megyn Kelly. “That is a fact. […] The problem here, and with Fort Hood, the prior Nidal Hasan case, was that they couldn’t defend themselves because they were not allowed to carry weapons.” By Thursday morning, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had taken the other side, saying that the attack proved the need for stricter gun control. On the crazier side of the spectrum, the conspiracy theory mill wasted no time churning out stories of false flag attacks and psychiatric brainwashing.

Military officials have indicated that mental health was a factor in Wednesday’s shooting, although it is not clear yet to what extent it played a role. According to officials, Lopez had seen a psychiatrist as recently as last month, and was prescribed a cocktail of medications to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. He had also self-reported a traumatic head injury after returning from Iraq in 2011, although officials said that he never saw combat and that there was no record he had ever suffered a combat-related injury. But Army Secretary John McHugh told a Senate committee Thursday Lopez had a clean record and had shown no "sign of any likely violence either to himself or others.”

The fact that Lopez had sought out psychiatric help indicates that he knew something was wrong. But military mental health experts said that it wouldn’t be surprising if Lopez fell through the cracks of the military’s outdated and underfunded mental health system, which is struggling to deal with an influx of soldiers returning from the decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past two years, data has shown that service members are suffering sky-high rates of depression and PTSD. A report published last month in JAMA Psychiatry found that almost 25 percent of nearly 5,500 active-duty, non-deployed Army soldiers surveyed tested positive for a mental disorder of some kind. The studies, which were the most expansive ever conducted on active-duty military personnel, found that rate of major depression is five times as high among soldiers as civilians; intermittent explosive disorder, which results in episodes of extreme anger, is six times as high; and post-traumatic stress disorder was nearly 15 times higher than among civilians. Suicide rates have also spiked in the military, with 349 service members killing themselves in 2012, up from 301 in 2011, according to Pentagon data obtained by the AP. At Fort Hood, the largest active-duty base in the US, the number of soldiers who committed suicide jumped to 19 in 2012, up from ten the year before.

A report released earlier this year by the Institute of Medicine found that the military has been woefully unequipped to handle this influx of mentally vulnerable soldiers. The study, commissioned by the Pentagon, found that the military relies heavily on unproven mental health screening and treatment methods, and that bureaucratic dysfunction makes it difficult for different agencies to effectively communicate with one another.

“The struggle is that this is a very complex and difficult issue,” said Craig Bryan, the executive director of the National Center for Veterans Studies. “The reason why we have not made better inroads is because people have been looking at this…as if it's one singular unitary universal problem that affects all individuals equally.” In reality, he explained, there are multiple profiles for service members who suffer from mental health disorders, many of which contradict long-held perceptions about who is likely to be at risk.

“We’re now learning that we're going to have to be a little more customized based on the unique needs of these subgroups,” Bryan added. “What's going on is not necessarily combat related. Suicide is related to a number of life stressors—relationship problems, financial struggles. These are just problems of life—there is nothing that's unique to the military. Oftentimes what we see are these more proximal triggers for suicidal crises.”

Of course, the problems surrounding Wednesday's shooting aren’t limited to the military. A report released by the FBI in January on so-called “active shooter” incidents—attacks where a gunman tries to kill multiple people in a confined area— found a steady increase in attacks between 2000 and 2012, as well as an increase in the number of people killed and wounded in the shootings.

“This is a growing problem across the United States, and military bases certainly aren’t immune to the threat,” Rick “Ozzie” Nelson, a former official at the National Counterterrorism Center, told me. “When someone decides to become an active shooter, it's almost impossible to stop it…It seems like in this case, it was almost impossible to determine that this was going to happen.”

“Determining the root causes for what makes someone an active shooter is very difficult,” Nelson added. “But at the end of the day, you have an individual who is running around a military base killing people. It's very hard to minimize the damage that someone can do with a loaded gun.”

Sherif Farag

On a Thursday in mid March, an Egyptian architecture graduate student named Sherif Farag found himself defending his master’s thesis in prison. Wearing a white prison jumpsuit and his chunky black-framed glasses, he and several other students were led into a drab library in Alexandria’s Hadara Prison.

The show trial’s presiding officer, Colonel Hassan, sat puffing and sighing during the presentation, a sure tell he was unable to follow the abstractions of Farag's thesis—a theoretical tract on the application of topology, the branch of mathematics that deals with the properties of space.

Farag is among the growing number of students who have been detained as part of the Egyptian government's vast, ongoing crackdown on political dissent. In an attempt to rouse patriotic fervor and establish political dominance, the government led by Abdel Fattah al Sisi (who recently resigned from the military in order to run for president), has targeted any and all enemies of the state under the guise of quelling political unrest.

Wiki Thawra, an initiative of the watchdog Egyptian Center for Social and Economic Rights, estimates that 21,317 were arrested between June and December of last year.

The real numbers in Egypt, however, are impossible to determine. Since the military coup in July 2013 that removed the elected but unpopular Brotherhood-backed government, security forces have arrested so many people that the actual number of detainees is not publicly known.

Human rights groups have been simply unable to document every arrest, and the state-backed National Council for Human Rights is reportedly not keeping record of detentions. As a result, any figure will be both an estimate and a matter of dispute. Human Rights Watch reports in its annual world survey that 3,500 “Brotherhood supporters” were arrested in “the months following” the July coup, although it's not clear from the report what exact period this covers. Individual news reports suggest that the cumulative number of detentions could be staggering. On a single day last August, Reuters reported that more than 1,000 people were arrested.

Farag was arrested and taken from his home in November of last year and has since been charged with a litany of other ludicrous crimes including murder and bank robbery. However, the state has presented no evidence supporting this claim to Farag or to the public.

Many of those arrested are Brotherhood members and sympathizers, other Islamists, and protesters who joined demonstrations against the coup. Others are non-Islamist activists, including the January 25 revolutionaries—mostly young people who toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak and denounced the 2012–2013 Brotherhood government. Other detainees are bystanders, ordinary people scooped up by the gaping maw of the Egyptian security state.

Farag is likely of the second kind—a protester targeted for his politics. After protesting alongside the youth movement responsible for ousting Egypt’s authoritarian regime, Farag turned his attention to what might be called humanist causes. He co-founded Save Alexandria, a group of urbanists campaigning to rescue the city’s architectural gems from fast-paced development.

As a graduate student and member of the university's teaching staff, Farag was also an activist for higher pay for teaching assistants—the position that led him to meeting his fiancée, Noha Mansour. The two were in the process of purchasing furniture and preparing to buy a home together when he was abruptly arrested.

“He was focused on his master’s thesis and our life, our home,” she said.

In fact, the specific crimes Farag is accused of (murder and bank robbery), according to Egypt’s Homeland Security Agency, took place on the days immediately preceding and following his engagement party on August 15. August 14 and 16 were days of violent clashes throughout Egypt following the dispersal of pro-Brotherhood protest camps in Cairo. “We were together the whole day, especially those days,” Mansour remembers.

Why Farag was selected for arrest remains something of a mystery, but his close confidantes suspect it was related not to his urban and academic activism but to his opposing the policies of the government that formed after the coup.

In November, when the government announced a draft law that would criminalize all street protests other than those taking place with a government permit, Farag organized a small protest at the Faculty of Fine Arts. It was this protest in particular that probably attracted the attention of the security services.

No hearing or other trial has taken place in the case. Since November, Farag's detention has been renewed repeatedly by the public prosecutor. Farag's lawyer, Ramy Eid Saad, of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said there is “no evidence” for any of the charges, other than the word of Homeland Security. “They can label any activist a terrorist,” he said. “The issue, at its foundation, is political.”

Meanwhile, as many as 21,000 other political prisoners are sitting in jail cells, and Egypt’s criminal justice system is struggling to deal with the influx. Some of the detainees are well known, such as the four journalists with Al Jazeera whose arrest was denounced even by the White House, or Alaa Abdel Fattah, the famous blogger and revolutionary activist who was released on bail in March after 115 days in jail. Most of them are anonymous, unknown to the public, facing an ordeal that is unimaginable (to the rest of us) in terms of its sheer tedium and trauma.

All photos courtesy the author. Watch Thomas hang around the Kurdish front of the Syrian civil war tonight at 11 PM on VICE on HBO.

As of today I have spent roughly an hour and 20 minutes in war, and you know what? That’s all the war I’m doing. Don’t care if you start waging the noblest, most legitimate war imaginable—you could be battling literal Nazis in defense of my mother’s house. I’d still tell you, “I’m out.”

Right now, the Kurds in Syria have one of the best wars going. (The Kurds, in case Wikipedia’s down, are a group of very pleasant mountain folk who live in the overlap between Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, and want this horrible piece of real estate to be its own country called Kurdistan.) They are fighting al Qaeda for women’s rights. I’m simplifying a bit, and technically al Qaeda is fighting the Kurds because they hate women’s rights, but still, how good is that? If you had to pick a current war, this is the one you’d want to go with. I would have, too—shit, I did go with this war. This is the exact war I was at when I realized war is not my thing.

I was with a film crew in Qamishli, which is a big dusty city smooshed right up against the Turkish border, like a Syrian Tijuana. Even though Qamishli is under Kurdish control, the Kurds allow the Assad regime to keep a thinly staffed party headquarters there and run unarmed patrols a couple times a day. So basically, every morning and afternoon four Syrian soldiers without guns have to drive a truck flying the Assad flag around this city that hates Assad, like they’ve been given the worst frat dare of all time.

The reason the Kurds treat Assad’s soldiers with such weird gloves is that they’ve more or less been able to sit out the Syrian Civil War simply by not picking a side. They’ve got no love for the Assad government, which refused the Kurds basic civil rights while its was in power and would arrest them for teaching or carrying out business in Kurdish. But they’re also not sold on all the rebel militias lumped together as the Free Syrian Army, especially since they’ve shown a tendency to turn into fundamentalist al Qaeda affiliates who hate cigarettes, whiskey, and women the second they’re done fighting Assad. So when the two started duking it out in 2011, the Kurds just shrugged a little, brought a bunch of their gun-toting cousins down from Turkey and Iran to shore up their border against the rest of Syria, and focused on making Syrian Kurdistan a peaceful little oasis of niceness in the most fucked-up country of the Middle East.

Which they did! The Kurdish territories are downright quaint. They’ve got ice cream stands and regular electricity and little kids running around. It doesn’t just feel like they didn’t have a war there—it barely feels like they had a Syria. The only drawback to the Kurds’ whole semi-neutral tack is that their good living has led Syrian al Qaeda rip-offs like ISIS and the al Nusra Front to declare fatwas against all Kurds for indulging in such vices as holding elections, not enforcing Sharia law, and letting women walk around with their hair out. So that’s their war. Jihadi-ing with those creeps.

We drove from Qamishli out west, past Ras al Ayn, to a little farming village that had just been reclaimed by Kurdish soldiers from al Nusra a couple days earlier and looked like a set from Three Kings. Bullet holes, chewed-up walls, distant smoke, the works. As our truck pulled up, the Kurdish commander who’d taken us to the front lines and was supposed to be our chaperone bounced off somewhere and left us to our druthers. Inspired by his relaxed attitude, we started tooling around the battlefield like Joker and Rafterman filming stray cats and turkeys and the like, just chill as pickles, until we found a little clutch of soldiers taking a soda break by a foxhole.

The soldiers were kind of hunkered down around their two-liter behind a stand of trees, which they explained provided shelter against al Nusra snipers across the way. When we asked them where the rest of their unit was, they tossed their cups and started leading us down the treeline to a big concrete building surrounded by a little wall. Then the trees stopped, and they all sprinted across a completely open field for the wall.

The first step I took as I started running for cover behind them was also the last time I thought anything remotely positive about war, which was something to the effect of “Ha, dodging sniper fire, classic war stuff.” By the second step my brain had turned into a schizophrenic choir of black-metal vocalists screeching, "RUNFASTERWHATTHEFUCKAREYOUDOINGTHISISWHEREYOUDIEAREYOUAFUCKING
MORONYOUWILLGETSHOTINTHENECKANDDIESPURTINGBLOODWHYTHEFUCKDIDYOU
COMEHEREBLOOOOOOOD!”

I know I’m not stepping out on a major limb by saying "nope a la guerra," but when Culture Club declared that “war is stupid” and Edwin Starr called it a good for nothing, they each left out the part where war is also the scariest fucking thing on Mother Earth. Not just scary in an abstract, “What if that was here?” sense. Physically scary. You know that half second of chest-constricting terror that happens when you see the demon’s faces for the first time in The Devil’s Advocate? That’s apparently how war feels, constantly.

Obviously, I hadn’t gone into an active combat zone without considering the possibility of fear. As someone who startles often, and with embarrassing volume and tremolo, I fully assumed I would at some point have the living shit scared out of me, most likely via loud noise. What I did not anticipate was that this startle would prolong itself indefinitely, like an infernal gong at the base of my crotch that crashes with Bonhamesque fury and keeps on reverberating until each next peal.

As we continued filming around the bombed-out village, I tried to swallow back the fear and comport myself like someone whose insides weren’t screaming to get out. Every time I got it down to a nice baseline level of mild panic, however, something would happen to tip it back into the red. A dog barking, a stray bullet whizzing past, a car being turned on, a car being turned off, my memory of the sound a gun makes, someone firing up the anti-aircraft cannon for a lark—each of these things had the power to produce an instantaneous cascade of sweat from my forehead and armpits. The other guys I was with seemed to be doing all right, speaking without yips and voice cracks, walking without breaking into an agitated Chaplin shuffle. By “guys” I don’t just mean “guys,” mind you. The Kurds are a fully gender-equal fighting force, and the female soldiers at the front were every bit as eerily laid-back as their male counterparts. Just a-traipsing between peeking holes in the wall like they were at the grocery store.

After we’d finally beaten a path back to town, it took me about five hours to get my wits back together. That’s definitely an easy recovery in the scheme of things, but remember, I was only there for an hour and change. Is that five hours a flat rate? Or does a one-year tour of duty equal a five-year bout of nerves? I kept thinking about how chilled out everyone was at the front and how much mental yoga it must have taken to get there from sheer, immediate terror.

One thing I considered is that maybe the chill ones are just all adrenaline junkies, and maybe adrenaline junkies, like regular junkies, level out after a while and can take in a massive dose of fear while still feeling normal. But what happens when that dose drops back to zero? There are people—not reputable people, but people—who dispute the existence of PTSD in the better part of our soldiery. Having spent a pube’s length of time not even really in a war, but sort of around it, I don’t know how everyone doesn’t return from war with full-blown shell shock.

How can anybody touch that part of his or her brain for so long without coming back at least a little fucked?

This is frightening enough to consider when we limit it to a few guys we let carry guns and refuse permission to attend their mothers’ funerals back here, but what about those poor schmucks guarding the Kurdish border from al Qaeda? They’re basically stuck being sniped at by Islamists until they get tired of it or Turkey stops granting them safe passage across the border. If my ratio holds at scale, what’s going to happen when they’ve built up 15 to 20 years of waking nightmare?

When we were in Qamishli the night before, I accidentally tripped over a former commander in one of the Kurds’ guerrilla armies who was sleeping fully clothed, shoes on, on the floor next to an empty bed. I asked our translator what his deal was, and he told me it looked like Gabar syndrome, which is a Kurdish version of PTSD named for a Turkish mountain that Kurdish guerrillas have been fighting over for decades. Choosing to sleep on the ground over a bed (when I asked the old commander why he did this, he said “Beds feel like a trap”) is just one symptom in a whole suite of maladjustments to regular life whose overall gist is that you’ve mentally never left the battlefield. But how fitting of a national disease is that going to be for the Kurds? A whole generation of sleepless permasoldiers. No thank you.

Follow Thomas on Instagram @babyballs and Twitter @babyballs69

All photos by Willow Garms

Remember Clayton Pettet? The 19-year-old who, six months ago, said he was going to publicly lose his virginity in the name of art? After I spoke with him at the end of last year, the news of his live performance piece was greeted with a mixture of admiration, disgust, and confusion. That confusion became more pronounced when he disclosed that his partner would also be a guy, because straight sex in public is one thing, but gay sex in exactly the same scenario is clearly a whole different ball game.

As if this wasn't enough to put someone off the idea of publicly losing their virginity in the name of art forever, Clayton's also had to contend with someone claiming his idea was plagiarized from a conversation they’d had four years ago (something Clayton denies). He also came under fire from The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, whose spokesperson said the most damning thing any artist could hear from a Christian organization, “I’m not quite sure how [having sex in public] is art.”

But all that publicity obviously paid off, because Clayton's virginity proved to be one of the most in-demand virginities ever. He had to sift through around 10,000 applications to whittle the audience down to the right 150 people he wanted to attend.

(Photo by Dan Wilkinson)

The “right people” range from standard St Martins students with black tunics and green hair, through to middle-aged art critics and a few people who—shockingly—look like they don't care about art or Clayton's concept at all, and are only there for the butts and dicks. Someone making a documentary about the event works their way down the line, asking the same kind of questions that everyone else is already asking each other: “Is this actually art?” and “Is the ‘art’ actually just getting people to stand in a line for hours in the hope that they’re going to see some anal sex?”

We’re eventually ushered into the venue and have to hand over our phones and any other recording devices. The security team seem perplexed: “It’s all a bit odd if you ask me, but art’s art at the end of the day,” says one. We end up in a large room with a bar in the corner and seats laid out in front of a screen showing a looped video of bananas in a basket. Before long, the video changes to Clayton surveying a mountain of bananas that’s formed around him. “I wonder what the bananas are supposed to mean,” I say out loud. “They’re penises, obviously!” replies someone behind me, helpfully.

Suddenly, Clayton emerges, wearing just his underwear and flanked by two topless people with sheets over their heads, usually a tell-tale sign that the art is about to begin. The henchmen hold signs that read “ANAL VIRGIN” and “LIVE FUCK BUTT VIRGIN SEX SHOW," and Clayton has various tribal markings drawn all over his body. He gets down on his knees and scrubs himself with a red liquid, before someone else comes over and starts cutting his hair.

The audience are giving him their full attention—mostly because he took away our phones, but also because what’s happening in front of us looks like someone in the throes of a full-blown anxiety attack. (Later, he tells me how this process represents being purified and the fetishisation of the young virgin.) After the hair cutting, one of the masked people picks out 20 random audience members and sticks them next to each other, until everyone is split into groups. This is followed by another long wait, in which one of the middle-aged art critics tells me, “I don’t really understand the meaning yet, but I want to at least give him the chance.”

It doesn’t take long to work out that all this waiting and anticipation probably has something to do with all the waiting and anticipation we experience before we lose our virginity. It’s a clever device, but it’s then that the audience starts to realize they’re probably not going to see any penetrative sex. Nobody seems too upset though and in truth that would be a weird thing to throw a strop about.

Following our guides downstairs, we’re led into a room that’s covered in graffiti. Everything Clayton has sprayed on the walls is supposed to represent the public’s various perceptions of the show, so there’s stuff like “#trendingvirgin” and “young, dumb, and full of cum.” All 20 of us are standing in front of it, feeling kind of disorientated, which is presumably the objective here. 

Clayton in his box of banana dicks

One by one, we’re then taken away to a large pink box. I get down onto my knees and enter the rabbit hole, to find Clayton alone, in his pants, surrounded by bananas. “You’re going to take my oral virginity,” he says, with the manic, cranked-out look of someone who hasn’t slept for a fortnight. “Put the banana in my mouth eight times.”

I want to make a joke or smile at him or, really, do anything to detract from the awkwardness of a guy you’ve known for quite a while telling you to mouth-fuck him with fruit. But I’m frozen by how vulnerable he looks, and how focused he is on me. So I oblige, not really knowing how else to handle the situation.

“Go now,” he says after. I leave feeling like I’ve done a bad thing. I’d wanted to see him lose his virginity, and it was me who ended up penetrating him. We as an audience have kind of half got what we wanted, but I don’t feel any better for it.

I leave the box and I’m confronted with the physical art associated with the project, which ranges from the cartoonishly grotesque to some pretty nice portraits of people, most of them including text that satirises how we view the virgin, as well as the whole wanting-to-have-sex-for-fame thing. I see a man who looks slightly out of place among all the art school kids. He introduces himself as Peter and tells me he was “on the reserve list for tickets, so just popped by to see what was going to happen.” I ask him about the art, and he says he feels that “the pictures are too simple, but I guess that's the point."

I ask someone else what they thought and she says that the bananas remind her of “putting condoms on them for sex education. My mom taught the class, so it was very awkward.” I ask her how it differed from her own experience of losing her virginity. “Well, that lasted eight hours. He couldn't really get it up,” she grimaces.

(Photo by Dan Wilkinson)

After everyone’s had a go in Clayton’s box, he emerges again to strip off ceremoniously, before running off, followed by the two people with the sheets over their heads. I catch up with him later and ask him what the performance was really about. He tells me: “You had to penetrate me, and you felt pressured to do it. This was what I felt when I was younger—the pressure and the waiting for it.” I ask him if he’ll have sex physically now that he’s done it mentally. “I never want to have sex; my art is my sexuality,” he replies. “That was enough for me to last a lifetime.”

I say that some people might have been disappointed by how the performance turned out, and ask what the reaction was like from various members of the audience when they stuck their head in the box. “There was enjoyment, hate, and sometimes amusement, but in a, ‘Ha ha, look at you,’ way. It was quite sadistic. There was one guy who shoved my head back and stuck the banana down my throat really, really hard.”

I ask if this is the end of his performance art career and he laughs. “I want to die making performance art.”

Follow Dan Wilkinson on Twitter.

People are fucking stupid. Despite the fact that anyone, anywhere, regardless of actual knowledge or credentials, can be a blogger, some maroons still believe everything they read on the internet. Case in point, last week I wrote a tongue-in-cheek list of things that Darren Aronofsky’s Noah got wrong. My inbox was suddenly flooded—like, I needed an ark—with people attacking me for implying that it was Noah, not Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale. I was shocked at how gullible the average internet surfer could be.

As luck would have it, the next day, when I had all but given up hope on humanity, I came across a comedy troupe called Blogologues and my faith in our species was restored. I was googling Jackie Robinson and searching for dildos when their website, blogologues.org, popped up. The idea behind their show is simple—founders Allison Goldberg and Jen Jamula cruise the internet looking for any manner of silliness on people’s blogs, tweets, yelps, etc. and act them out once a week at The Cow on Clinton Street in Manhattan.

The theme of each season varies and their latest show focuses on things like dolphin sex, My Little Pony sex, masturbating to Paul Ryan, and the list goes on, with the common thread being fuckin’. I reached out to them to see what their ties to Jackie Robinson were and find out more about their show.

VICE: How did you meet up with civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson and convince him to join your sex comedy troupe?
Blogologues: Well, Chris, we’ve always been big fans of Jackie’s work, and we thought there was an obvious synergy, because, you know, he was the first African American player in major league baseball, and we often dress as pioneers while fucking. No, but seriously, Jackie ReneeRobinson is one of our Blogologues actors. Yes, that’s her real name. Yes, she’s from Florida.

Tell me about the Blogologues crew. What’s the goal and where do you find your material?
In spring 2011, Alli was reading out loud to Jen from the internet, as we sometimes do, because we’re romantic. The post was called It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. At one point, she turned to Jen and said “Jams,[this is one of Alli’s many pet names for Jen] this is a monologue!” Then Jams said those fateful words that would change our lives forever, or at least for the next three years: “It’s a blogologue!” The rest is history. And by history, we mean we started a Google doc, began throwing in weird blog posts we found, and rented a theater.

Our material comes from anywhere on the vast world wide web: Craigslist, Yelp, tweets, online community forums, Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers… you name it. We choose material that’s initially funny, or we take material that just strikes us because it’s so damn strange or interesting. Then we sit around the table with our ensemble and brainstorm weirdly fitting characters and scenarios. A few sketches per show will be fairly straightforward, but most take an unlikely form. In our current show, we’ve taken an OkCupid profile called “ThreeGuysOneBabe” and—without changing a word—we’ve turned it into a game show with audience participation.

We have an ensemble of about ten actors who rotate through, and there are usually 5 actors total in each production, with everyone playing 7 - 10 different characters.

Your performances focus on different themes, and this latest show centers around the best topic: sex. Did you have to go outside of your safety zone to discover fodder for the bits? We’re glad you recognize sex as the best topic, Chris. We’re OK with going outside of our safe zone, because we usually have a safety word. (In this case, “dat ass.” OK, fine, that’s a safety phrase.) We ventured into a strange, hypersexual ether of internet content for this show. For instance, the creator of a site called isitnormal.com, Udi Falkson, told us to turn off “safe mode” on searches to find the best stuff. We soon learned that sex with a variety of non-human things is not an anomaly at all. The best we found, that was at least somewhat palatable, we stuck in the show: “Is It Normal to Have Sex with Plants?” It’s a heartfelt story about a person who enjoys using a cactus as her dildo.

What’s the worst sexual bit you’ve come across in your research?
Well, the saddest (in our opinion) is the phenomenon of technosexuality. We suppose that’s really judgmental of us to think it’s sad, since the people we’ve read about seem happy with their situation. But there also seems to be a real struggle to make this relationship acceptable to the other actual humans in their lives, and ostensibly it can be very isolating. Basically, there are people who are creating robot girlfriends and “marrying” them. There are some really fascinating stories out there.

What are some of the silly sexual niches you’ve discovered? And how much research do you do on the subjects? Like, do you attend brony orgies to really understand the characters?
We cannot disclose if we have attended a brony orgy, but let us just say they are really fun.

On a related note, furry fetishes are really fascinating as well. We do end up doing a fair amount of “research,” because we’re trying to find the piece(s) that will translate best onstage, which can sometimes mean that we splice together multiple posts on a subject into one sketch. We also look to see if there are additional jokes that we can work into the scene that are based on reality. Something particularly enthralling is all the lingo that is created internally within these groups. For instance, when bronies masturbate to My Little Pony, it’s calling “clopping.” When furries have sex, it’s called “yiffing.”

Where do your sexual interests lie? And have you been seduced into trying some of the new things you’ve learned on the web?
We began introducing each other as our business partner, but often people just hear partner and think that we’re lesbians, not that there’s anything wrong with that. So now we call each other NSP, short for “non-sexual partner.” We have sexual partners, too, but they’re not in Blogologues.

In terms of incorporating things we’ve learned on the web, ABSOLUTELY! Alli will often make Jen put on her Severus Snape costume, and then we go to town. We also do a lot of Hitler-Jesus role-playing and we have really sweet armadillo costumes that we like to wear when we yiff.

You have a bit about sex with a dolphin. Was that erotica source material written by one of you? Have either of your had sex with a dolphin? If not, do you want to? They say dolphins are very rape-y.
Well, the piece is anonymous, so you’ll never know. MAYBE!

But our whole gimmick is that we don’t tend to write anything. The entire show is verbatim and we create the characters, scenarios, staging, and (in some cases) stories. We had the dolphin piece in our back pocket for a while. Our company member, Andrew Ash, came to our office one night and asked if we’d heard about this phenomenon of “dolphin sex.” Naturally, we were already familiar with the topic. Anyway, this was one of those amazing times where we knew we had struck gold when we found this particular post. If you click through, the piece is super long and not necessarily funny. But sometimes we just see how something could be played out onstage. We edited the post down for length considerations. Then, speaking of rape, we thought the sketch would be too uncomfortable if we realistically performed it with a dude and these two dolphins. So we actually turned it into a consensual love story, and cast three women in the piece. By making it three women, it became less disturbing, plus gender bending is fun.

One thing that really caught my attention about Blogologues isthe offer of free sex toys with the purchase of a ticket. Are they new or used?
LELO donated tons and tons of NEW sex toys. Every single audience member gets one. We also have lube from WET, condoms from Lifestyles, spanking paddles from The Pleasure Chest, and the first 25 ticket buyers to each performance receive a Pleasure Pack from Babeland. (Just to clarify: “receiving a Pleasure Pack” is not a sexual act; it’s more swag you can take home with you for funsies.)

Also of note: If you’re chosen to participate in the show, you get a prize. And the prize is one of those really realistic dildos that you can suction-cup to the wall. Or floor. Or your windshield. It’s courtesy of Vixen Creations. So it’s safe(sex) to say that the sex toy industry is super generous.

So pony up people and buy your tickets. All puns intended.

Follow @Blog_ologues or go here to buy tickets to this weekend’s annual sex show

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

On Chicago's West Side, there is a school for the city's most at-risk youth—the Moses Montefiore Academy. Most of Montefiore's students have been kicked out of other schools for aggressive behavior, and many have been diagnosed with emotional disorders. VICE News takes viewers inside Montefiore's classrooms and into the homes of students who are one mistake away from being locked up or committed to a mental hospital.

In the first episode of the eight-part documentary, we meet two 14-year-old Montefiore students, Cortez and Crystal, who were sent to the school after violently attacking teachers. Cortez's mother blames the boy's father, who is serving a life sentence for murder. Crystal has stabbed her classmates and has been caught shoplifting since she arrived at Montefiore, which has left her mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though the task can be overwhelming, the Montefiore staff never stops trying to reach the city's most difficult and volatile student population.

Photo via Flickr user Paul Scott

The New York State Parole system is so fucked that I didn’t even know I was off paper—that finally, after a decade, I was free of the government’s fucking shackles—until I looked it up online myself. Not telling me my status had changed was a final act of apathetic dick-fuckery, but why should they stop with the maltreatment now? I gotta admit my parole officer for my final year was a sweetheart who miraculously didn’t bother me or even threaten to lock me, but it wasn’t like she gave me a gracious send off, congratulated me, or informed me of my freedom. I spent January, February, and the first half of March calling her and leaving messages, wondering why she hadn’t stopped by the apartment and asking when I would have to report to splatter my stinky piss in her cup, but I received no answers. But now—hallelujah!

Without a donkey-fisting doubt, the newfound easy-breezy feeling is beyond the beauty of bonerdom. For the past ten years I’ve had to look over my shoulder—I’ve been the property of the state of New York, and that's been beyond nerve-wracking, it’s been nerve-wrecking. I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of routine things like driving or drinking booze, but I did them anyway, so I always felt like a miscreant—and I got into some seriously illegal things on top of that, and came close to catching another felony on several occasions.

A couple times when cops pulled me over, ran my name, and saw on their computer that I was on parole, they set off their cocksucker gene pork chops possess that makes them want to ruin people’s lives so they can get a promotion. Or maybe they really think that by getting drugs off the streets they are doing the right thing. (They searched me sometimes, but I used some devices you can buy at head shops to hide my stash, and I don’t want to go into detail for all kinds of reasons, but those things work.)

Anyhow, here I am, a somewhat normal citizen of society. There are still some restrictions upon me that kinda blow balls: I can’t carry a gun, vote, be a peace officer, obtain certain certificates, and of course there's the most relevant restriction: I can’t peep at strippers munching each other’s kitty-kats in Montreal and Toronto. Canada doesn’t want scum-sucker motherfuckers like me to enter that pristine country, which really is a bummer. I hear that it’s possible to contact the embassy ahead of time and ask for special permission, so maybe I’ll get to see Isabella put in work on Monique’s oiled-up oyster for 15 loonies at Club Super Sex at least one more time.

The type of jobs I’m working right now aren’t affected by my changed legal status, but I feel different. I acted like a serious jerk-off while I was on parole, and I’m still unfortunately on a roll of doing dumb shit now. But it’s amazing not to be getting nervous every time I get a phone call from an unknown number and not to be sharting my drawers when there’s someone at the door ringing the bell. That feeling was so indescribably terrorizing. Plus, I had a number of parole officers over the years who found it necessary to visit at five in the morning. When I lived with other people, I felt awful for them having to put up with that shit.

And goddamned-mothersucking-turd-on-a-stick-in-my-face did I loathe going to the parole office and sitting there for three hours waiting to piss in a cup and lie about my life. Often I was trying to cleanse my system of the drugs I’d been taking, so my bladder was full of liquid and on massive explosion status while I waited. And I knew it was a very real possibility that I wouldn’t come out, ‘cause I did illegal shit every day and there was always a risk my officer would find out.

So no more waiting rooms, obscenely early visits from the Man, pissing in cups, and, most importantly, I can breathe again. I’m still extremely stressed out, but at least I’m just a normal guy without a bullseye on my back. Or at least not a huge one—I’ve just got a little red flag hanging off my arm that they really have to try hard to grab. I’m not a criminal owned by the state of New York anymore, and I’m allowed to travel freely without getting a travel pass, which I will be taking advantage of shortly.

I used to leave the country fairly frequently, but thanks to parole I haven’t gone for the past ten years. I’m saving money to take advantage of that privilege very soon. I’m now engaged to the most bonerablessed babydoll I’ve ever met, and when we get married we can take off and travel to other countries… finally. I’ve been waiting for this for what seems like forever, and now it’s a reality. I’m now basically just your average tax-paying American living life without being supervised by psychopaths. It feels great.

Bert Burykill is the pseudonym of our prison correspondent, who has spent time in a number of prisons in New York State. He tweets here.

The Ebola virus has ravaged Guinea in the past two months. According to Guinea's Ministry of Health, there have been at least 134 suspected cases and 84 deaths, with additional cases reported in neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. In response to the outbreak, about 60 international Doctors Without Borders staff members have been working alongside additional Guinean medical workers in Conakry, Gueckedou, and Macenta, trying to end the crisis. 

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Steve Winton

In the south, no one says “little person.” Most people—especially Minor League Baseball fans—prefer midget, or, if they’re really drunk, elf guy. This is something I learned in 2010, when I spent the summer interning for a Minor League Baseball team in Tennessee. 

Although I had never played baseball, I dreamed of working in a Major League Baseball team's front office. I thought I’d crunch numbers and horse around with Billy Beane, like Jonah Hill did in Moneyball. That was the plan. After one day in Tennessee, I realized that was not going to happen.

At the end of May, I drove 14 hours from my house in Brooklyn to Tennessee. The team wasn’t going to pay me (a red flag I ignored), but the owner promised to cover the cost of my apartment for the summer. The team set me up in a $200 studio at the River Hills Manor, which sounded like the home of a Disney villain.

It wasn’t a nice place to live. The exterior of the “Manor” was mud-brown. It had light-brown trim and brown-brown highlights. It was two stories tall and remains, to this day, the longest building I’ve ever seen. It stretched about 200 yards and looked like a funeral home but sadder.

I pulled into the parking lot and noticed a man in his 50s wearing a mustard-stained polo, boxer briefs, and pink Crocs. Sitting in a folding chair, he watched me park, and then he shuffled over to where I was unloading my car.

“I live down the hall,” he said, slurring his words. He smelled like bourbon and McNuggets.

“Okay,” I said. (Technically everyone at the River Hills Manor lived “down the hall.” There was only one hall.) He reached for one of my bags. His right index finger was missing the nail and—though I’m no doctor—looked infected. “Oops. No, thank you!” 

“I live down the hall,” he said again, motioning for a bag. I figured I’d let him help as long as he didn’t touch me. We got to my door, and then he dropped my luggage on the floor. “Welcome to the building,” he said, as he touched my shoulder with his gross finger.

The summer wasn’t off to a great start, and it was about to get worse. On my first day at work, the team's owner (let's call him Charlie) asked me to make repairs around the stadium. I’ll never understand why he thought this was a good idea. I don’t know how to change a tire, and I get light-headed on those small stepladders people use to remove cereal from a shelf. No one has ever looked at me and thought, I bet that guy is good with tools. People look at me and think, Woah! Is that Ellen DeGeneres? She looks awful. 

I tried to explain this to Charlie, but he wasn’t listening. “You ever seen this before?” he asked. He passed me a tabloid called Just Busted. “It’s wild.”

Just Busted is a publication that prints mugshots of everyone arrested in the area each month. It’s like Us Weekly but for drunk drivers instead of celebrities with strollers. The first pages of each issue have about 16 pictures—these are the lesser offenses (domestic disturbances, DUIs, assaults) that are common fare for many small towns. As I flipped through the issue, I noticed the mugshots got bigger and the crimes more troubling—or, as Charlie put it, “more awesome!”

After a few minutes, I realized that Just Busted also published each suspect’s full name and home address. “How is this allowed?” I asked Charlie. Then I froze. On the last page, next to a picture of a man arrested for manslaughter, was my neighbor with the pink Crocs and gross finger. His crime: aggravated child molestation.

“Charlie,” I said, horrified, “this guy lives down the hall from me. That’s my address.”

He laughed. “Really?”

“This guy knows where I live! He touched my shoulder!”

Charlie ripped the paper out of my hand. He laughed so hard, he could barely breathe. He grabbed his radio. “Everyone come to my office!” he shouted. “Dorris lives with a child molester!”

 Employees flooded into the office. Charlie cried with laughter.

“It’s alleged,” I reminded everyone, aware that even at 19, my skinny, childish body was in my neighbor’s alleged molestation wheelhouse.

“Alleged my ass!” Charlie yelled.

Eventually Charlie realized that I was an incompetent repairman and put me on mascot duty. In Minor League Baseball, mascots and promotional giveaways are vitally important because what’s happening on the field is terrible. (There's one main difference between Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball: Major league players have enormous houses, drive fancy cars, and have supermodels for wives, while minor league players aren’t good at baseball.) It was my job to walk around the stadium with the mascots and make sure they didn’t fall down the stairs.

The team had three main mascots who had enormous fuzzy red heads with oval eyes. The eyes’ pupils were little black beads that rolled around and occasionally got stuck, making the mascots look disturbed and unpredictable. The only difference between the three mascots was that one of them was four feet tall. 

The mascots were the most family-friendly aspect of the team. A couple of teenagers played the two tall mascots. Between innings they snuck underneath the bleachers to smoke pot and give each other handjobs, sometimes with the mascot suits still on. The short mascot was everyone’s favorite, mostly because people loved arguing about who was inside the costume. One night I heard two fans arguing about this hot-button issue in the stadium concourse. A guy wearing a trucker hat that said “FUCK YOU” stood toe-to-toe with a man who wore a shirt that said, “I’M NOT FAT, I’M PREGNANT.” 

“He's a child!” shouted the fat guy who wanted to make sure you knew he wasn’t pregnant. “It’s a little kid!”

“It’s not a child. He’s a midget!” screamed the guy wearing the “FUCK YOU” hat. “Look at how he walks—it looks like he’s on a boat!”

For those keeping score at home, the guy wearing the “FUCK YOU” hat was right: The short mascot was a surly little person. (Let's call him Jimmy.) I was terrified of Jimmy. He bragged that he was a celebrated porn star with a huge internet following. He routinely rattled off credits I pretended to recognize. I couldn’t believe that JImmy wasn’t in jail or dead. He drove a dented blue pickup truck with a Breathalyzer attached to the ignition. Since his car wouldn’t start without a 0.00 reading, Jimmy must have used some sort of fucked-up buddy system, because I can’t remember seeing him sober.

Miraculously, Jimmy’s alcoholism didn’t cause any problems until one night at the end of the summer—Used Car Night, the biggest game of the summer.

I’m not sure when Used Car Night began, but I can say it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. The premise of the night was simple: Every half inning, a random fan won a used car from a nearby dealership. Although some of the cars barely ran, others were pretty decent. For some reason, people went ape shit for Used Car Night in Tennessee.

The team had a ticket-selling policy that upset a lot of fans on Used Car Night—the policy was to sell more tickets than the stadium had seats. Ten minutes before the game, hordes of angry fans stormed the ticket office. A woman with a see-through tank top pressed her face against the box office glass. “There’s no more room!” she shouted.

“I’ll find you a seat, ma’am,” I said, repeating the line Charlie fed me a few hours earlier. “There’s always more room.”

Though part of the stadium was set aside for reserved seating, there was also a large general admission section with bleacher-style seating. The team sold GA tickets until angry fans complained that the section was full. Then they sold another 300 tickets.

I found a sliver of space for the woman and then watched a sunburned man wearing fake Oakley sunglasses throw a plastic cup full of beer at our box office manager, retrieve his cup, and demand a free refill at the concession stand. Another woman, who held a baby in her right arm, tried to hit a 65-year-old usher with her left hand, and a curly-haired old lady called me a faggot.

As the game went on, the crowd became more barbaric. With each passing half-inning, more and mores fans realized, Shit, there are almost 7,000 of us here, and they’re only giving away 18 cars. I might not get a car!

The universal response to that revelation was to drink more beer.

After the game ended, I walked the mascots through the concourse to the main gate. It was my job to stand next to them while they signed autographs for fans. On most nights, people were patient and respectful, but this was Used Car Night, goddammit, and folks were not going to be on their best behavior.

Five minutes into the signing, I noticed a ten-year-old fan who kept bumping into the short mascot. Jimmy, like most alcoholics I’ve met, has serious issues with personal space. Before I could tell the fan to step away, JImmy grabbed the kid by his shirt and pulled him up to his mascot head.

“If you don’t back off,” shouted Jimmy, “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.”

Everyone heard. The kid started crying—his hero had said a no-no word to him through the creepy smile of the mascot mouth. The mascots were not allowed to talk. They were really not allowed to threaten to fuck anyone in the ass.

The kid’s mother was not thrilled. “What did he just say?” she shouted at me.

It was one of those questions that doesn’t have a right answer. “Look, what do you want to hear?” I asked her. “Both answers are wrong.”

I walked the angry mother to Charlie’s office. She complained that a mascot had threatened to “fuck her son in the ass.” Charlie thought her complaint was fair. He refunded her tickets and apologized.

I walked her to the stadium’s front gate. “If you come back,” I suggested, trying to be helpful, “maybe avoid Used Car Night.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said. “I’m gonna get me one of those cars.”

“Good luck,” I said. And I meant it.

Follow Greg Dorris on Twitter. 

Photo courtesy of the author

At my last job, I worked at an office where everyone smoked weed throughout the day. We were the creative branch of a corporation, but the parent company's corporate structure rarely affected us. In our domain, there was no hierarchy, and we had no bosses. Three of the photographers were under 21 when I started working with them, and they smoked more weed than I did—they even smoked at work. Every morning, they started work on the fire escape with coffee and a blunt. I had never smoked at my previous jobs, but after a day or two, I adopted the office culture and started following protocol: I came in early, checked my emails, planned my day, and then at around 11 AM hopped onto the fire escape to smoke a spliff. I hated the fire escape, but our building was in a busy area, so it was the only place we could smoke freely. The photo guys always looked so relaxed on the fire escape, chilling on a tenuous metal frame that hung above the pavement. While they screwed around and held onto the bar, daringly dangling their bodies four stories over the ground, I stood against the wall, smoking quickly so I could hurry back inside through the window.

I never became comfortable standing on the fire escape, but I did get used to being high at work. On some days, smoking helped me relax and focus on doing one task at a time. On other days, weed made me struggle to concentrate, and I spent three hours on reddit instead of working—it evened out because I consistently had great ideas when I was stoned. As long as I could soberly hash out my ideas, I was able to blaze early in the day and get all the creative stuff done before handling the grunt work. It went well until winter came, making the fire escape an inhospitable place to smoke. At first we braved the cold and carefully walked on the frozen metal bars, but as soon as we hit our first 20-degree day, we gave up and started smoking inside, realizing that no one was making us smoke on the fire escape. There were no bosses, so we could smoke at our desks.

When several potheads share a small space for ten hours a day, they all end up smoking more. At any given time, at least one person will want to smoke, and everyone will hear this and then will abandon their work for an undeserved break. For several weeks, our office was a melee. Other companies’ employees came in for meetings and couldn’t believe what they saw. A few times, I rolled a joint and then lit it in the middle of a meeting to see if I could get away with it. Smoking at work became such an ordinary practice that I unconsciously started breaking up a bud with one hand while I typed with the other—that’s what I was doing when the landlord walked in one Tuesday.

The landlord was a middle-aged white guy who desperately wanted to appear like he was on our level. After some awkward chitchat, he said that it smelled great in our office, but he requested that we stop smoking indoors. He was friendly about the whole thing, so we didn’t see any cause for alarm. He must have changed his mind pretty quickly, because we got a call from HQ almost immediately. The CEO had heard from the landlord and was finally bringing the hammer down. Looking back, the reprimand was probably long overdue—there’s a moderate level of weed-smoking that can make a creative workplace function better, but it’s easy to overdo it. We cleaned up our act long enough for HR to inspect our operation and give it their stamp of approval. There was no way we would withstand another run-in with the landlord, so we went back to smoking on the fire escape. By now, winter was well underway, and it was cold as shit outside.  

Snow started falling one morning when I was standing on the fire escape smoking a spliff with Spills, another editor. As usual, I had my back against the wall, while Spills stood in front of me facing the window. We were halfway through the joint and both laughing when I saw his eyes widen. He saw something behind my head and looked terrified. Before I could ask, I heard the window shatter, and I was showering in shards of glass. I looked down and saw pieces of glass fall through the fire escape and smash onto the sidewalk, startling some passers-by. Spills told me to hold still as he pulled glass off of me. I stood still, trying not to shake any glass onto the sidewalk. He pulled a giant shard out of my hair and handed it to me. “You can thank your hair bun for keeping that out of your scalp,” he said. I was unharmed. I lost the joint, but I’m sure someone found it on the sidewalk and smoked the rest of it.

Later I found out that someone from HQ had delivered a life-size puppet of our CEO to our office that morning, probably to strike a little fear into us. One of my coworkers found it and figured he would scare the crap out of us. He snuck over to the window and slammed its head a little too hard onto the glass behind me. Yeah, I was the one standing in a dangerous spot when our coworker pulled the prank, but Spills had to witness our boss’s angry puppet head smashing through a window toward him. It was a bad omen. The experience scared both of us back inside for the rest of the winter. Unable to smoke freely, I switched to edibles, and that’s how the Great Weed Cookie War of 2013 began. 

Follow T. Kid on Twitter.