A tombstone for Internet freedom. Photo via Flickr user DonkeyHotey

The open Internet may soon become a thing of the past.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal dropped something of a bombshell with leaked news that the Federal Communications Commission is planning to abandon so-called “net neutrality” regulations—rules to ensure that Internet providers are prevented from discriminating based on content. Under the new proposed system, companies such as Comcast or Verizon will be able to create a tiered Internet, in which websites will have to pay more money for faster speeds, a change that observers predict will curb free speech, stifle innovation and increase costs for consumers.

Emelia, Harry, Jacqui and Grace, who said, "Baby George is so cute"

If it weren't enough that Australia has knights and dames again, we've now had a Royal Visit. Prince William, Princess Kate, and Baby Prince George just left our fair country after a busy tour of Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Uluru to the delight of hundreds of Australian monarchists and thousands of women's magazine columnists. If it wasn't clear before that we technically still have English overlords, now it is.

Crowds were as excited to see Mel from Channel Seven.

In Australia, past visits from the Royal Family have generally been a big deal, with the streets completely blocked with people dressed in hats and gloves waving flowers and flags. The visit of Kate and Will was slightly more subdued. In fact, it was kind of embarrassing. Of the couple of hundred people who were waiting to welcome the royals, about half were foreign tourists and of those, about half had no idea there was something going on and were just there to see the Opera House.

A small group of republican protesters were on hand to say bad things about the British.

The Queen doesn't have a practical impact on the lives of Australians—she's never vetoed a government decision, and likely never will (we don't know if her successors will go mad with power, but they probably won't). We don't pay any money to the Royal Family like taxpayers in the UK do, we just pay for a governor-general who has a nice house and clothing and butlers; it probably would cost the same if we replaced that office with a president. In the end, the difference between being a republic and being a monarchy is, for most of us, nothing but a symbol. The Australian Republican Movement says it's just common sense that we become a republic—why should we have a foreign head of state?—but the public at large seems to actually prefer to have someone with a crown thousands of miles away running things. 

Thai tourists.

In both Sydney and Melbourne, around a quarter of all people are from non-English-speaking backgrounds. In some parts of these cities, more than half of residents are from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Overall, the proportion of Australians with a family connection to the UK continues to drop. Yet according to a recent poll, more than half of Australians support the monarchy, with only 42 percent favoring a republic, the lowest number in 35 years. The age group with the highest proportion of monarchists—60 percent—was 18- to 24-year-olds. That might be attributed to the kids not really thinking about the monarchy as something that can affect their lives—the last time the monarchy mattered was in 1975, when the governor-general sacked our elected prime minister.

Lisa and Kia from Quakers Hill.

When I talked about this stuff with Lisa and Kia, a pair of sisters from Quakers Hill, Sydney, they weren't sure what a republic was, but they were pretty happy with keeping things the way they are.

"We just came to see the royals because it's free and we were bored,” Lisa said.

Vince from the Northern Beaches was critical of the idea of a monarchy. “They're basically just born into it,” he said. “They don't have any real-life experience. They've got it easy.” He was there because his mom was a fan of Charles and Princess Di, and even has a plate with Diana's face on it, but he seemed not to mind the pomp and circumstance. “It's fun,” Vince said. “It keeps generations going, knowing the royals.”

Gabrielle Hendry and David Taylor from the Young Monarchists.

Other young people I met were more thoughtful in their approach. Gabrielle Hendry and David Taylor are from the Youth Monarchist movement (as well as the Young Liberals), and were handing out Australian flags. “It's about stability,” said David. “The Republicans haven't outlined the sort of republic they want to be.”

Gabrielle said the royals were about more than their names. “Kate and William have been brilliant, they're role models for all young people,” she said. “Sure Kate's a princess but even if she wasn't, she's a strong, kind, beautiful woman—you don't need a title to set an example for others.”

Follow Carly on Twitter: @carlylearson

By the time I get to Pangani police station in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, the clean-up is well underway. What's left of the taxi has been towed into a corner, leaving a large dark stain marking the spot where it exploded, right in the middle of the entrance to the car park and just yards from the door of the police station.

“You should have been here a couple of hours ago,” says Wilson, an engineering student and one of dozens of Nairobi residents who are crowding around the police station. Wilson tells me that he was on his way into the center of town when his bus had to stop due to wreckage blocking the road. “It was a real mess,” he says. “There were bits of car everywhere, and bits of people.”

“There was a man's head lying right here,” he says, taking me along the edge of the road and pointing to a hedge growing about 25 yards from the spot where the bomb went off. “The distance shows you how powerful the explosion was,” he says.

Another man joins us. He tells me his name is Amos and he sells heating systems for houses. “I didn't see the head, but I did see bones,” he says. “Bits of meat were lying all across the road like chicken.”

The taxi that exploded was stopped by police officers at 8:00 PM on Wednesday night on a highway about a mile away from the police station. According to the police, the taxi was stopped because it was driving on the wrong side of the road. Two policemen took control of the car and escorted it and its driver and his passenger back to the station for questioning, with another police car following behind. When the taxi got to the police station the bombs inside it were detonated, killing the two police officers and two suspects inside the vehicle.

Two improvised bombs were used in the suicide attack, according to Joseph Mutoa, a spokesperson for the police. “It's not confirmed yet, but looking at the facts it must be the work of al-Shabaab. It's obvious. No one else would do it like this,” he says.

Outside the police station the crowd buzzes with speculation as to who committed the attack and why. Some in the crowd say the attack targeted the police because many radical Muslims blame police officers for the extrajudicial killing of Makaburi, a preacher who promoted al-Shabaab. He was found shot dead on April 2, a couple of days after he publicly defended the Westgate terror attack.

Some point out that al-Shabaab had threatened a terror attack just a couple of days before, posting a video online that said "Westgate is not enough" and boasting that there are "hundreds of men who are waiting to be part of a similar operation." Others argue that it can't be al-Shabaab, as the group normally claims all of its attacks.

Many of those in the crowd are preoccupied by the ongoing heavy-handed crackdown on Somali migrants and say the attack is retaliation for police brutality and deportations. According to the interior ministry, almost 4,000 people were detained between the 2nd and 9th of April as part of the anti-terror Operation Usalama Watch, with hundreds held in the Kasarani football stadium in conditions described by the UN's refugee agency as "overcrowded” and “inadequate."

The police claim the continuing operation is targeting suspects regardless of race, but human rights organizations are critical and say police officers are systematically detaining Somalians, many of whom have no connection to terrorist activities. Over the last month police officers have been accused of conducting raids without proper documentation, looting, beating people up, and extorting bribes.

On April 11 the police station that was bombed in Pangani was highlighted in a Human Rights Watch report as a location where officials were abusing prisoners. The organization said it found “hundreds of detainees packed into cells designed to accommodate 20 people. Detainees had no room to sit, and the cells were filthy with urine and excrement.” Officials from Human Rights Watch witnessed police officers “whipping, beating, and verbally abusing detainees” inside the police station. They also said they found detainees who had been held in the cells for up to eight days without being taken to court—far longer than the country's 24-hour legal limit.

“It was a trap,” says Tony, a taxi driver who lives near the Pangani area. “Why else would the taxi have been driving on the wrong side of the road? The driver wanted to be stopped by the police so he could try to blow up the police station.”

The bombing is the latest in a string of unclaimed attacks in Kenya, and it's the second time in two months that police have accidentally escorted a large bomb to one of their police stations. The first was on March 11, when a Toyota 4x4 was confiscated from a Somali man and parked outside a police anti-terror office in the port city of Mombasa. Over a week later the vehicle was searched by foreign counter terrorism agents who found that six pipe bombs were welded to the vehicle's back seats. According to Kenyan police the bombs were already attached to a mobile phone detonator and contained enough explosives to destroy a multi-story building.

As the crowd mills around waiting for something to happen outside Pangani police station, a black 4x4 rolls up containing the local MP for the Kamukunji area, Hassan Yusuf, who proceeds to give an impromptu press conference.

His theory about the true intentions of the bombers differs to Tony's. During his press conference he says the attack's true target was a live television debate about national security due to take place in the Eastleigh area, that was going to be attended by senior political figures including Kenya's top policeman, Inspector General David Kimaiyo.

“The car was deemed suspicious and was stopped,” he says. He goes on to applaud the police for taking action and says that, although two officers died, their actions prevented a major terror attack that would have claimed many more lives. “This is what we want. We want terrorism to be prevented by the police and this is a good example of what they can do,” he says.

Though the crackdown on Somali migrants is popular with Kenyans who are increasingly encouraged to associate Somalians with terrorism, outside Kenya Operation Usalama Watch is exacerbating concerns about a widening divide between Somali Muslims and Kenyan Christians.

Cedric Barnes, project director for the International Crisis Group's Horn of Africa project, says continuing persecution is likely to ultimately benefit al-Shabaab, and that the government should focus on unifying the two communities. “Blanket actions that look like collective punishment of a particular minority and faith group can only marginalize and radicalize,” he says.

As we poke around the bits of car that have been swept to the corner of the police station parking lot, Wilson and Amos argue about how the threat from terror attacks should be countered. Both agree that security is getting worse in Kenya and expect increasingly frequent attacks in the future, but they can't agree on how the attacks should be prevented.

“The Kenyan military needs to withdraw from Somalia and increase security in Kenya,” says Wilson. He says the attacks only started to pick up pace after the Kenyan army began operations in Somalia back in October of 2011.

“This won't stop if we pull out of Somalia,” Amos counters. “Somalia is our neighbor, and as long as al-Shabaab is allowed to use it as a stronghold we'll always see attacks in Kenya.”

@bilgribs

Image via Youtube user chevyrideronly

Sizzurp is being pulled from shelves, yes, but don’t panic. Not all candy-flavored cough syrups are being taken away from us, and it’s not becoming illegal. Not moreso anyway.

The only syrup being taken away, and the only true “Lean,” or “Sizzurp,” is the one manufactured by Actavis, known as "Prometh," a variety of promethazine codeine syrup that is purple, usually with an orange label. Sometimes it came with a purple label, and I know hindsight is 20/20, but that purple is much better for branding.

The FDA still allows promethazine, a regulated, prescription only, un-scheduled drug. So if you can get a prescription for it, and then you mix it with codeine, which is also still legal, you can make genuine and by some accounts legal, though extremely sketchy, dangerous and inadvisable Lean of your own. If you do, you did it of your own accord, not because we told you to, but feel free to let us know how it went.

So while it's still legal, Actavis nonetheless removed their Syrup from the market. They released a weirdly masturbatory statement explaining their actions:

"Actavis has made the bold and unprecedented decision to cease all production and sales of its Promethazine Codeine product. This attention has glamorized the unlawful and dangerous use of the product, which is contrary to its approved indication.”

Such a brave pharmaceutical corporation. I’m sure it has nothing to do with fear of litigation. They have to pick their legal battles, and fight the ones they can win, like last month’s victory over Pfizer. 

I’m reminded of methaqualone, also known as Quaaludes, and its long path to nonexistence. Rorer, Inc. who had sold the Quaalude name to Lemmon in the 1970s commented that because of their double duty as a sleeping pill and a club drug, “Quaalude accounted for less than 2 percent of our sales, but created 98 percent of our headaches.” After being renamed, and rebranded, they were finally taken off the market voluntarily in 1985, something that makes Actavis’ decision seem a little less “bold and unprecedented,” right?

Unlike methaqualone, which faded away when Quaalude, its brand name counterpart, ceased existing, promethazine as a generic is popular in other forms. Phenadoz, for instance, is a suppository version of promethazine you can still get a prescription for. 

Image via Soulja Boy's Instagram

Is promethazine so popular that it will endure after its most convenient form was pulled from pharmacies? Will Justin Bieber resort to sticking it in his butthole now that he can no longer drink it? I asked an anonymous user to give me his account of a Lean experience. Funnily enough, it sounds a lot like Quaaludes, as described by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street:

He told me, "You get really sleepy but if you fight the urge to sleep its a really crazy high. It didn't work for me, but the guy I did it with was a pizza delivery driver and he would always keep a 2 liter of 7up in his car during his shifts. He would put about 1/4 of a bottle of cough syrup in the 7up with a handful of jolly ranchers and drink that all night. Then he would basically show the symptoms of a drunk person but with more slurred speech. I don't know how he's still alive.”

Much like Jordan Belfort hoarding discontinued Quaaludes, Soulja Boy has reassured fans that he still has sizzurp. He wrote on Instagram, "Soulja got the juice. They say the streets dry. I say you gotta be kiddin me. I serve everybody."

So sizzurp, with its newfound position as an exotic novelty, is poised to become the new Quaaludes. Despite not being all that great, it'll go for exorbitant prices, and only the rich and well-connected will be able to get their hands on it. TMZ (for what it’s worth) says "one prominent rapper has already offered his dealer up to $100,000 to get whatever he can.” 

Image via Flickr user Joe Loong

But for all I know, online retailers are still stocked up. Sites like actavispromethsyruponline.com are still running, although judging from the snowflake-intensive graphic design, they haven't updated their site since the holidays. What's more though, the kids can still get into plenty of trouble on dextromethorphan cough syrup, which is available over-the-counter.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Magnus Carlsen: not as polite and well-mannered as he looks. Photo via WikiMedia Commons.
It was 8:55 AM Montreal time—1:55 PM in Oslo. I sat in VICE’s Montreal office 15 minutes before the interview in a freshly ironed shirt, nervously thumbing my coffee cup. I tried not to think about how this was the culmination of a four-year obsession, about how I was about to look into the eyes of the man who had mastered the game I had become obsessed with.

When I first saw Magnus Carlsen being interviewed, my fascination blossomed into full-on man crush. At age 20, the Norwegian was one of the highest-rated players of all time and on his way to becoming World Champion. He was charismatic but not arrogant, elegant but deadly. The way he ‘strangled’ his opponent’s position, tying their pieces in knots until they were forced to resign was impeccable. On top of this, he was cool; he didn’t shy away from media, and he had the cheeky smile of a young superstar athlete.

I started playing chess four years ago when my internet went down and it was the only thing left to do on my laptop. It grew into an obsession that blossomed into addiction—online chess accounts, chess books, chess lessons, chess documentaries, chess-themed dreams. I watched the world’s best players battle in a viciously contested strategic dance, with the excitement that most people save for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Other grandmasters tried, but nobody was as good as Magnus. They threw superhuman brainpower and centuries of strategy at him, and he consistently came out on top. He had the ability to turn seemingly drawn positions into victories, as if he had a deeper intuitive understanding of the game. In November 2013, he challenged the former World Champion in India and officially took the title in front of a record-breaking TV and online audience.

I watched his fame grow with his success—he had become a household name in Europe and had achieved rockstar status in Norway and India. He had a lucrative G-star modeling contract alongside Liv Tyler, his own iPhone app, and interest from almost every major media outlet in the world. In the wake of the World Championship, he was named one of Cosmo UK’s Sexiest Men of 2013 and made TIME Magazine’s top 100 most influential people in the world in 2013. This strange intersection of chess genius and sex symbol seemed the perfect excuse to finally bag an interview with my hero.

I set it up as quickly as I could and was scheduled for a Skype call, on a Wednesday morning in March. Compared to some of the other people I’ve interviewed, we actually seemed pretty similar, so I hoped we would get along well. We were both born in 1990, like to play soccer, and share a passion for chess. In another life we probably would have been best buds.

Incoming Call: Play Magnus

I answered and it was Kate, his managing director for the media day he was running. She was friendly and disarming, and told me that Magnus was getting lunch but would be back soon. Our conversation was settling my nerves, and I was feeling good about the interview. I saw her eyes flick up from the screen as Magnus walked into the room. My heart leapt into my throat in anticipation.

 “Magnus, this is Stephen from VICE,” she said.

The laptop spun around to show a disgruntled looking Magnus hunched in his chair. He looked at me like I was a bowl of soggy cereal he had recently forgotten.

I tried to be chipper. “Hi Magnus, how are you doing?”

“I’m OK.”

“How was lunch?”

“It was OK.”

He went on to tell me that he had just had a really bad interview and that it may cause him to have a chip on his shoulder. His robotic, droning voice was filled with apathy and exhaustion. But I understood. He probably had done a lot of interviews already, and wanted people to ask him about his actual craft—not his marital status or underwear preferences.

Confident that we’d hit it off, I assured him that I was a real chess player and I planned on asking him real chess questions. Suspicious, he asked what my rating was. Someone who just understands the rules of the game might be at 1000, I told him mine was 1600, knowing that his was the highest of all time, at 2881. He seemed satisfied enough, and we carried on.

“I think it’s great that you agree to do media days like this.” I said, trying to stay positive. “Why is it that you’re so media-friendly when grandmasters in the past have shied away from this sort of thing?”

“Who says I am?” His voice was deadpan with the aloof aggression of a nightclub bouncer.

A thin film of sweat was forming over my body. I felt like I was drowning out at sea, so I tried to swim to familiar territory: chess theory. I wanted him to open up, to see the logic or passion behind his genius, so I asked him what he likes about the Ruy Lopez, a well-known opening that he plays often. But his answer was brief and uninspired. He kept glancing around. He seemed annoyed.

I wasn’t getting anything out of him that hadn’t been said before. I asked him about chess as an art, as opposed to a science. Then in an attempt to make it interesting, I tiptoed towards asking about his fame and the related female attention, but he was uninterested. “It happens, but I will not go into detail.”

I asked what the worst decision he’s ever made was. He told me he hadn’t really made any. In desperation, I asked him based on my rating how many beers he would have to drink for us to be an even match. His media panel erupted in laughter but Magnus remained stonefaced.

“No, it’s not like that. My play is based on intuition, no matter what state I’m in.”

He was refusing to relate to me on any level. I had annoyed him and wasted his time, just like all the other magazines that day. He shared some hurried words with Kate before telling me I had one more question left. I felt like a total dick.

I asked him about the future of chess, but it was too late to generate anything at this point. Despite sharing a love and rough understanding for the game he plays, I had managed to piss off one of my heroes. I signed off by telling him I admired him, and wished him the best of luck.

I got out of my chair feeling thoroughly defeated.

“That was rough,” said a colleague who overheard the whole thing.

“Yeah I know…”

“He really didn’t need to talk to you like that.”

What? But he’s the greatest chess player ever. It can’t be his fault. I’m the loser that asked stupid questions and embarrassed myself in front of my hero, right? I was so embarrassed I wanted to punch myself in the face or tie a belt around my neck and choke myself out (but not in the sexy way I usually do it). Then I started to think about it. What if we had just been two people, forgetting all labels and their associated expectations? Well, then he’d be a dick. Sure, I am probably one in a long parade of nosey people who want to pry into his life. And maybe he’d just spent most of his morning fielding dumb questions, but does his mastery and fame give him the license to be dismissive and antagonistic? Probably not.

I had made the mistake of holding Magnus to a higher personal standard just because he is famous and good at chess. There’s no reason that he should be any better at handling a bad day than the rest of us. He was a dick to me, just like we all are sometimes.

We worship public figures, wanting them to be perfect, but when we find out Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong have flaws, we’re shocked. We place a society-wide halo effect on famous people, assuming their excellence applies everywhere. We don’t see them for who they really are: regular people who are extremely good at one or more things.

I had seen my idolization turn into a rare look at a misunderstood dude whose tragedy is being a genius in something most people can’t relate to.

Magnus, you are an inspiration to chess and your influence on the game will be seen for centuries. I still love you. But I’m not afraid to say that as a person you were kind of a dick, and have no problem compartmentalizing the two.


@keefe_stephen

We open on the living room set of Three’s Company. A couch is in the center of the room, facing out toward the audience, with a 70s-era television in front of it. Doors lead off to the non-existent kitchen, bedrooms, and outdoor areas. All action outside of the living room set will take place downstage. JACK, a bachelor in his late 20s, sits on the couch watching TV. A screen hanging at the back of the stage displays what Jack is watching on the TV.  The opening credits for Three’s Company appears on the screen, and the theme song starts, “Come and knock on our door…” The volume is lowered a bit, but the images continue to play. It’s an episode called “Home Movies.” Eventually this will start be intercut with recreations of three episodes.

JACK
[Laughing at the TV]
Oh man, they don’t make television shows like they used to.  [Laughs some more.  Then he notices the audience] Oh, hey. I guess you’re here for a show. [Pause. He looks around] Am I the show? I guess you don’t want to watch me watching television.  But, damn, this was a good show. Three’s Company, you ever watch it? I know, you’re probably thinking, that sexist show about a sex-crazed man and two bimbos in short shorts and tight tops, one dumber than the other, sexual content, homophobic jokes, nagging wives, and stupid physical comedy? EXACTLY. It was the sitcom that defined all sitcoms, because it didn’t shy away from our favorite subject—sex! We want the boys and girls to chase each other around.  From Jane Austen to Entourage, relationships have always been important in entertainment. Television may have eroded our standards by forcing shallow love down our throats, but it’s also done wonders.  “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”— thanks, Oliver Stone. Back in the days of George Eliot you couldn’t get the number of marriage plots you can now, because you only had novels and plays. Now you’ve got hundreds of channels, movies, memes, blogs, videogames—this could go on for a while. Our representations of ourselves have been exhausted. That’s the difference between television and—I don’t know—movies or books or plays; television shows can take a genre and run it into the ground.  Just look at cop films now and how they struggle to become something more than just a special episode of NYPD Blue. You look at how movies have reacted to television over the years and the impulse is to always go bigger, louder, more blood, bigger budgets. Let’s add aliens, say “fuck” or “cunt.” Let’s make those people naked, if it had nothing to do with the plot. But it all runs together on the internet anyway, and soon enough—it’ll just run through our bodies.

JANET
[Walks in. She is dressed in short shorts. She sits on the couch next to Jack.]
Who were you talking to?

JACK
Oh, no one. 
[Winks at audience]
I was just watching Three’s Company.

JANET
What are you talking about?

JACK
Three’s Company?  With John Ritter, Susanne Summers, Don Knox as Ferley and the brunette, um, what’s-her-name. . .

JANET
Joyce DeWitt!

JACK
Oh, that’s right!  Sorry, Janet.

JANET
So, why the heck are you watching Three’s Company, we’re in Three’s Company.

JACK
It’s my favorite show! I think it’s fucking hilarious. That idiot guy that trips all over the place trying to screw those bimbos all the time.

JANET
Jack. That idiot guy is you. And that bimbo is me.

JACK
Janet. You shouldn’t talk about yourself that way. I know you just work in a flower shop, but you are more than just a bimbo.

JANET
I know you blockhead! I don’t think I’m a bimbo, you and the rest of the male species does because of shows like the one you’re watching. I’m not saying that I’m really a bimbo, I’m saying that that’s us on the show.  Don’t you recognize yourself?

[Jack looks closer at the screen.]

JACK
Holy Shit. That is us.

JANET
Doi-hicky. 

JACK
What-the-fuck? I’m so funny.

JANET
You’re not, that’s John Ritter. He plays you. He was the funny one, or pretty funny. Now you’re being played by _____________[First and last names of actor playing Jack]. You’re not so funny.

JACK
Hey, ____________[first name of actress playing Janet] slow down; don’t switch personalities on me. I just found out that I’m watching myself on television.

JANET
I’m clarifying.

JACK
By calling me by my real-real name?

JANET
You do know you’re in a theater, right?  That people are out there watching you?

JACK
[Looks out at the audience as if for the first time]
[Whisper]
Yes, I fucking know that _____________[first name of actress playing Janet], I mean Janet. But I don’t want to think about that. Stop thinking about that. You need to focus, react to me.

JANET
What did they teach you that in acting class?

JACK
Actually, yes. “Work off the other person.” You should only be focused on me, forget the audience.

JANET
Well, I think you’re full of fucking shit, because I heard you talking to someone, and I think you were talking to them.

JACK
[Feigns shock]
_____________ [Name of actress playing Janet], I mean Janet! Watch your mouth. You can’t swear.

JANET
You swore.

JACK
No, I didn’t.

JANET
___________ [Actor paying Jack), you fucking swore!

JACK
That was before I knew we were on TV. I just don’t want our show to be pulled off the air for vulgarity.

JANET
____________(Actor paying Jack), we’re not on TV, we’re in a fucking theater.  We can swear as much as we want.

JACK
I know where we are. We ALL do. I do, you do, the audience does. You’re not being special or crazy by being all Meta, Joyce? We are all aware, but in this space, we are creating magic by all playing by the rules. That’s how this works—suspended disbelief. Would you like it if the audience stopped playing by the rules, if they threw beer bottles at us or just came on stage and started “acting.”

JANET
You called me Joyce.

JACK
[Looks confused]

JANET
Just a second ago, you said, “You're not being special or crazy by being all Meta, Joyce.”  I’m not Joyce. Joyce DeWitt was on the original show and is still alive.

JACK
What the fuck do you expect? You screwed up all levels of reality, or smooched them together, and now you expect me to figure out what to call you? 

JANET
Whatever, Jack. I’ll play along, but you gotta tell me why you how you’re watching yourself on television.

JACK
It was just on. I guess we just all watch ourselves now that it’s the 2000s.

JANET
Yeah, you’re right. Back in the 80s, I used to think about this set we’re in, a living room with a couch facing a television looking toward an audience that was also in the same set, a living room with a couch facing a television. It was like a fucked-up mirror. Did they just sit around and watch us be stupid, then turn around and do the same thing. Well, except we didn’t have consequences.

JACK
Or pussy.

JANET
Jack!

JACK
Well, we didn’t.  It was so frustrating. You and Chrissy walked around offering the goods on a platter. Larry and I got nothing. Not once.

JANET
Well, that was the appeal of the show.

[CHRISSY walks in wearing a revealing outfit, holding a video camera.  She is beautiful and blonde, acting ditsy. blond and pretty and acts ditsy.]

[Canned applause.]

CHRISSY
What was the appeal of what show?

JACK
You. Your boobs.

CHRISSY
Jack! 

JANET
Jack, don’t be mean.

JACK
I’m only telling the truth

CHRISSY
Why would you say something like that?

JACK
Your boobs and legs are the only thing anyone is looking at right now!

CHRISSY
Oh, duh, I know that. That’s why I wear this.  I’m saying that you’re a liar because I’m not on any show.  Why would you say something like that?

JACK
Chrissy, you are. Look!

CHRISSY
[Looking at the TV]
What the heck is that?

JACK
It’s us, it’s a TV show about us.  It’s called Three's Company.

CHRISSY
No, that outfit I’m wearing. It’s so 80s.

JACK
Yeah, it was the 80s, early 80s.

CHRISSY
What the heck are you talking about Jack?  And who is “Three” and what’s his company make?

JACK
Huh?

CHRISSY
You said it’s called Three’s Company, who is Mr. Three?

JANET
No, Chrissy, the apostrophe-s is not possessive, it’s contraction for “three IS company.” Meaning the three of us.

CHRISSY
Why don’t they just say that then?

JACK
It’s just a play on the saying:  One’s fun, two’s company, three’s a crowd. Three isn’t a bad thing, and maybe we should’ve all been boning. Laying pipe.

CHRISSY
We’re a sex company?

JANET
No, Chrissy. Company, as in companionship. Well, Jack thinks it means menage a trois.

CHRISSY
A massage company?
[They roll their eyes.]

JACK
Yes, a massage company. Now let’s get started.
[He spreads his legs.]

JANET/CHRISSY
Jaaack!

JACK
Actually, I shouldn’t do that.  There was a famous episode where you could see Jack’s balls because his shorts were so short.

JANET
And they aired it?

JACK
They had two versions, one where they kept it and one where they edited it out.  “Sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don’t.”

CHRISSY/JANET
Jack!

JACK
Tell me I’m wrong.

CHRISSY
No, he’s kinda right.

JANET
Yeah, I guess so.

CHRISSY
OK, but I’m still confused.

JACK
That’s a first.
[Janet hits Jack playfully.]

CHRISSY
Tell me what this TV show is about.

JACK
It’s about us. In the first episode, I came over for your old roommate’s birthday party and I fell asleep in the bathtub.

CHRISSY
You were so drunk!

JACK
You needed a new roommate, but back then I guess guys and girls weren’t allowed to rent an apartment together.

JANET
Back in the prude eighties. 

JACK
Exactly. Silly premise, but that’s why I pretended to be gay, because the Ropers wouldn’t let me stay otherwise, and it opened the door for a bunch of homophobic jokes. It was great fun back in the 80s when people still thought it was funny to say “fairy” and “Tinkerbell” and even “faggot,” but I don’t think it really flies today.  Especially now that we’re in a theater and not on the TV. 

CHRISSY
What do you mean?  Gay people don’t watch TV.

JACK
But straight people don’t go to the theater.

CHRISSY
Wait a minute. You’re not gay?

JACK
NO! I was just pretending.

CHRISSY
But there is a little bit of truth in every joke, Jack, even I know that.

JACK
But I wasn’t joking! I was pretending, so that I could stay here and try to screw the both of you. Maybe we should just move on.

JANET
So, what do you think we’re supposed to do now? We can’t just keep talking about the meta aspects and post-modern aspects of our situation. I mean we’re in a theater, with an audience, watching us, waiting for us to entertain them.

CHRISSY
Wait! We’re in a theater? Like an old-fashioned theater, where the actors act on a stage and there are real people out in the audience?

JANET
Yes.

CHRISSY
Like in elementary school, when I played Eeyore?

JANET
You played Eeyore?

CHRISSY
Yeah, my tail kept falling off and those boys all wanted to keep pinning it back on.  They were so helpful.

JACK
I guess Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, TIgger, and Christopher Robbins decided not to be gay after all.

JANET
Wait, what?

JACK
All those characters. They were gay as hell.

JANET
Why do you say that?

JACK
Just look at them, they all look super feminine and cuddly, rolling around in the grass together, fucking, and bouncing, and playing with butterflies.

JANET
Because you look like a girl doesn’t mean your gay. And those boys were attracted to Chrissy dressed as a boy, so what does that say? They wanted Chrissy to use a strap on?

JACK
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are we going to talk about ball gags next?

JANET
You’re the one who called imaginary talking animals gay.

JACK
Yeah, but Eeyore with a strap-on?

CHRISSY
And how the heck did you know they had to get me an extra strap for that costume?

JANET
No, not an extra strap, a strap . . .

CHRISSY
My costume kept falling off because the boys were putting that tail on so hard, my costume kept ripping off.

JACK
Fine. And my point is that if all actors are gay, so are all cartoon characters, and children’s book characters. And I’ll tell you another thing,
[His voice gets louder]
I hate fucking screenwriters, playwrights, and directors of all sorts, film, television, theater, or otherwise.

[The girls take a step back.]

JANET
Ummm...

JACK
[He composes himself.]
I’m just saying. You want to talk about what’s primary in entertainment, it’s the fucking performers. We are the life! Writers that get all hung up about their words or directors that get all hung up on their blocking, fuck ‘em. An actor can convey a world of emotion in a five seconds that would take a novelist pages to describe. And TV writers are even worse, they underline words and italicize them, and if the actor doesn’t emphasize that word they cut the take. What the fuck is that? Why don’t they just work in animation?

CHRISSY
There are words italicized in this script.

JACK
Shut up. Did I stop you when you fucked up those lines back there?

CHRISSY
Which lines?!

JACK
We were supposed to be talking about the audience by now. Back when you started talking about Eeyore and strap-ons.

CHRISSY
Sorry! It was the only play I’d ever done, I thought it was important. Especially because it was the first disguise I wore when my mom and I started robbing banks.

[Silence.]

[Jack and Janet look at each other.]

JANET
You and Mrs. Snow robbed banks?

CHRISSY
Oh yeah, it was so fun. I’d go in first dressed as Eeyore, or Snoopy, or sometimes Scooby Doo and I’d walk in all innocent and everyone would think it was a big joke and then I’d walk right up to the guard and shoot him right in the balls. It was like a game.

[Silence.]

JACK
Right. Well, maybe we should get back on script. [Pulls a script out from between the pillows of the couch]. It says right here [Jack reads from the script] Chrissy moves to the foot of the stage and looks out at the audience.  She peers into the darkness. Chrissy says, “Hello?” The audience titters. Chrissy peers more. Then she sees them. She gasps, “Oh my God.”

CHRISSY
OK, OK, OK! I remember. Sorrr-eeeeeee.
[Chrissy moves to the foot of the stage and looks out at the audience.  She peers into the darkness.]
Hello?

[The audience titters. Chrissy looks back at Jack.]

CHRISSY
Isn’t the audience supposed to titter?

JACK
Don’t worry about that part. It’s interactive. It’s also a way to let them know we’re thinking about them. Whether they titter or not doesn't matter. We’re just letting them know that they are playing roles too.

JANET
I thought you forgot about the audience when you acted.

JACK
Yeah, but not when I’m the playwright.

JANET
You wrote this?!

JACK
Shhhhhhhh. You’re interrupting Chrissy.  [To Chrissy] Go on, Chrissy, sorry we interrupted.

[Chrissy peers more. Then she sees them.]

CHRISSY
[Gasps]
Oh, my God!
[She points out at the audience and looks back at Jack.]

CHRISSY
[Whispers]
They’re out there.

JACK
[Whispers]
I know!

CHRISSY
[Whispers]
Well, what are we supposed to do?

JACK
[Whispers]
They want to be entertained. They want to laugh. They want to think.

JANET
Don’t get carried away.

JACK
[Whispers]
OK, they want to laugh; they want you to entertain them.
 

[Chrissy turns back to the audience. She tentatively waves.]

CHRISSY
Hi.

[The audience waves back.]

CHRISSY
[To Jack]
Aren’t they supposed to wave back?

JACK
I told you, don’t worry about that.

CHRISSY
OK, but I’m just trying to entertain them.

JANET
I’m sorry, but Chrissy just waving at the audience isn’t entertaining.

CHRISSY
It might be. All they want is a little attention. That’s all that Marina Abromavic did when she sat across from everyone in the MoMA; she gave them a little attention, and everyone treated her like a goddess.  

JANET
You’re saying you’re like Marina Abromavic?

CHRISSY
Yeah. Performance art.

[Chrissy keeps waving.]

CHRISSY
Except that I’m bringing the sexy edge to performance art.
[She cocks sexy poses and waves. This continues for a while.]

JACK
Chrissy, that’s enough. They're ready for some ENTERTAINMENT.

CHRISSY
Well, I’m not stripping if that’s what they’re expecting.

JACK
That’s a good idea, but I’ll do the stripping. If a girl strips it’s pornographic, if a guy strips it’s artistic.

JANET
Um, I guess.
[Jack stands and pulls his shirt off.]

JANET
Jack! Cut it out.

JACK
Why?

JANET
Because. We need to get serious, we have a whole theater full of people here. We have to DO SOMETHING.

JACK
What do you think I’m doing?

JANET
Acting like an ass.

CHRISSY
I thought he was stripping.

[Jack and Janet look at each other. Chrissy walks over to the couch and sits.]

CHRISSY
Well, what do you want to do?

JACK
Let’s think.

[Jack and Janet join Chrissy on the couch, all of them thinking.]

JANET
Well, at least this is new. No one has ever thought on stage for such a long time.

CHRISSY
I have an idea.

JACK
Uh oh.

JANET
Shut up, Jack.

CHRISSY
Yeah, shut up Jack. I’m not dumb. When my first boyfriend called me dumb I stabbed him in his sleep, cut off his cock, and left it in his mouth.

[Silence.]

JACK
That’s great Chrissy. I don’t think you should really be talking about all that stuff.

CHRISSY
I thought you said you wanted drama.

JACK
Yes, but that’s just creepy backstory, we need something to happen now.

CHRISSY
Well, I have this video camera.

JANET
Where did that come from?

CHRISSY
I walked in with it. I sorta thought it could be like the Checkov thing with the gun, like don’t introduce it unless you are going to use it. Like in The Seagull.

JACK
Now that’s a brilliant fucking idea. Fuck, YES. Let’s make a video and then we can show it to the people. They’ll love it! That’s all anybody wants to watch nowadays, videos!

CHRISSY
Ooh, ooh, ooh, let’s do a musical number! Let’s do a musical number.

JACK
This isn’t a musical.

JANET
Who cares, Jack? You said it yourself, these people want to be entertained. Let’s entertain them. They all pretend to be into high culture and into the theater but they just want a bunch of song and dance and celebrities. Let’s do a play about the making of a video.

JACK
That’s it? That’s all you want to do?

CHRISSY
Yeah, I’m a good singer and a good dancer.

JANET
Me, too! Me, too!

[Jack picks up the camera.]

JACK
You’re sure?

JANET/CHRISSY
Yes!!!!!

JACK
OK! I have the best fucking song!

[He turns on the stereo. SELENA GOMEZ & THE SCENE’S “LOVE YOU LIKE A LOVE SONG” comes on. The GANG SINGS ALONG and DANCES. As they do so Jack moves about them and video tapes them. The video stream plays on the screen.]

GANG
[To the music sings and dances “Love You Like a Love Song.”]

JACK
That was FUCKING GREAT!

CHRISSY/JANET
Yeah!

JACK
Let’s do it again, and turn up the heat!

[More screens descend and more dancers come out on stage. JUSTIN BIEBER’S “BABY” plays and the gang sings along. Now there are multiple cameras and a fancy light show that are projected on the screens. The new dancers do a choreographed dance.]

GANG
[Sings “Baby.”]

[After the song is over, there is a big orgy on the stage behind the couch.  It can’t be seen from the audience but parts of it are displayed on the screens.]

THE END

Have you ever smoked weed with a group of friends and spent an inordinate amount of time making stereotypical “we’re stoned, bro” jokes centred around completely cartoonish and unrealistic inventions? If you have, you may be familiar with the part of the conversation when some dude invariably says, “You know what’d be great? A robot that gives you blowjobs,” and the game ends because you’ve reached the pinnacle of the ridiculous and stupid and far-fetched and comically weed-y. Well, thanks to a new product called the Autoblow 2, you’re going to need a new dumb weed joke zenith.

The Autoblow 2 bills itself as the world’s preeminent “realistic robotic oral sex simulator for men.” It comes equipped with a motor built to last for over 500 hours, a removable mouth-shaped sleeve made from artificial skin material, adjustable speeds so that if you’re covered if you're fast thrust machine-gun sensation enthusiast or more of a I-got-the-Isley-Brothers-playing slow stroker, and is "super easy to clean." The Autoblow 2’s website specifies (emphasis theirs): “The feeling of having your penis inside of the sleeve while the spring-loaded beads stroke up and down can best be described in 2 words: surprisingly good.” 

Earlier this year, Brian Sloan, a former lawyer and the creator of the Autoblow 2—as well as other adult entertainment products like the original Autoblow, Mangasm, and Ladygasm—realized that despite investing over $100,000 into creating and testing the product, he was still $45,000 short of the funds necessary to complete the project. This led him to launch an IndieGoGo crowdsourcing campaign, which has something of a viral success. With 16 days left in the campaign, the Autoblow 2 has raised over $40,000.

I found the concept and crowdfunding success of the Autoblow 2 fascinating, so I decided to give Brian a call in China (where he’s based) to discuss what his law school buddies think of his new career choice, the other names considered before settling on Autoblow, and why sex toys should work like kitchen appliances.

VICE: OK, let’s start with the most obvious question: why?
Brian Sloan: [Laughs] Why not?

I think that if you asked men what their ideal masturbation improving device would be, many would say, “Something that does it for you and you don’t have to do anything.”

I’ve just always had this idea that it would be the ultimate fetish toy. In a way, it can improve people’s lives, you know?

Ever since I started making toys, I always thought the Holy Grail would be an awesome, automatic machine.



The Autoblow 2 sleeve. Photos courtesy of Autoblow 2.
You were a lawyer before going into your current gig. Do you remember the moment that you decided, “This is nice, but I should quit and start making sex toys in China”?
During the summer between my second and third year of law school, I had a job in a fancy law firm. On the weekends, I would make up a map of garage sales at six in the morning, then I would hit this route of sales during the day.  I was making more money buying and selling garage sale goods than I was in my fancy law firm job. I came to China because I was trying to see if I could pay for my trip by solely buying antiques and selling them on eBay. I tried it once and it worked. Then I started meeting more and more people here…and I figured, Wow, I just want to move here and start a business.

I fell into the Adult market because I was a bit obsessed with eBay and I knew what sold well in different categories, and there wasn’t really many people selling latex fetish wear and bondage equipment. I found out in China where I could get rubber suits made, and then it took off from there because I was able to make custom sizes—especially for bigger people—for a much lower price than they were used to.

What is the Autoblow 1 like?
The Autoblow 1 is a stroker. There were similar strokers to it before it, but it’s battery-powered. It’s on our original website, RoboticBlowjob.com. With the Autoblow 2, the concept is the same but the execution is much different. Basically, other people sell similar products to the original Autoblow, but no one ever went all out and made something that’s the quality of a kitchen appliance that’s a male stroker, like we have for The Autoblow 2.

I mean, if you bought a sex toy and it broke a few months later, you wouldn’t say, “Aww, I can’t believe it. That’s outrageous,” because you sort of expect it to break. But if you bought an espresso machine for your kitchen, you’d expect at least a year or two of functioning.

There are female toys built that are built at the quality level of a kitchen appliance. But, until now, I think, there are no male toys that are an item that you would consider a home appliance, not a toy.

Autoblow is a fantastic name. What other names did you guys bandy about before you settled on it?
Good question. Whenever I’d mention this product to some old-timers in the industry, it reminds them of a product that existed in the 80s called RoboSuck. The old-timers told me the RoboSuck was a machine that plugged into the cigarette lighter in your car that was popular with truckers.

But basically, we were considering names that had to do with robots and sucking. That’s why we originally named the website RoboticBlowJob.com. I wasn’t big into domain names at that time and I probably wouldn’t have named it such a funny name if I could do it over again. It’s so ridiculous—and maybe that’s why it’s good—but I would never do that again.

Oh, and we considered using the name “Suck It,” but ultimately decided against it.


The Autoblow 2, without the inserted sleeve.

Why should people use an Autoblow 2 over, say, a Fleshlight?
I think there’s two considerations about male sex toys. There’s how it feels on your penis. And there’s, ‘Does this feel real?’

These are related but separate concepts. I don’t think anyone would say, Oh the Fleshlight doesn’t feel good. The Fleshlight feels really good. And it replicates a pretty good, sex-like feeling. But because it’s not automatic, you’re still sitting there, jerking off with your hand. You’re just improving the feeling part. You didn’t improve that much on the realism side. I think that toys—especially for men—are going to move towards a direction where products don't just feel good on your penis, but they feel like the real sexual act.

The difference with the Autoblow 2, is that it’s automatic so you can just put it on your penis. You can either hold it or leave it there, and I think the sensation is totally different, since you don’t use your hands. You can watch your movie or do whatever you’re going to do, and it really feels like someone’s giving you oral sex you because you’re not touching yourself. It’s kind of a surprising experience.

I can’t say that the feeling on your penis is so much better than the Fleshlight’s, but I can say that it feels good like a Fleshlight, but it’s also different because it’s realistic. You’re not jerking off.

You’ve done really well with this IndieGoGo campaign, raising $40,000 of your $45,000 goal. What kind of messages are you getting from the fans of the Autoblow 2?
Interestingly, I’m getting messages from disabled people and people with MS. I'm also getting a lot of emails from a bunch of Iraq War vets, who have various mobility problems who have been looking for an automatic device. Vets tend to email. And we’ve received word from other people who are just giving us support, telling us that they think the concept is cool.

And there are people from the industry reaching out about doing some kind of projects together. So, it’s been really interesting. A lady reached out to me whose friends with a lot of porn stars and cam models and she wants to do a product together. So many things are happening that I thought would never come from the IndieGoGo.

How does the Autoblow 2 compare to real thing?
The real thing is different. The feeling is very similar to the real thing because with the real thing, you don’t exactly use your hands. But you also don’t have to talk to the Autoblow 2 when you’re finished. You don’t have to form an emotional bond with the Autoblow 2, and there are many guys that that's a benefit for.

I think a lot of guys who actually use it are married and don’t have sex with their wives anymore. Or they’re single and the emotional part isn’t important to them.

Physically, it’s different. I mean, it’s a machine. But for some guys I think that has some benefits.

Last question: Do you use the Autoblow 2?
I would say that I have tested the Autoblow 2, but I’m not a diehard masturbation toy user. I mean, I think of it in the same realm of thinking as, ‘Should an alcoholic run a bar?' Maybe not. I've made the Autoblow 2 as good as it could possibly be, and frankly, the only way to do that was by testing. When I see friends who do a business because they love something about the business, they always pick the wrong business for themselves because they’re blind to the realities of the industry. I can’t say that I’m like the biggest personal user of masturbation products, but I can say that I understand exactly what men want. And I think I’ve delivered it to them.

To donate to the Autoblow 2 IndieGoGo, click here. To learn more about the Autoblow 2, visit Autoblow2.com

@jordanisjoso

Photo via the We Support Cliven Bundy Facebook group

By now, you have no doubt heard about Cliven Bundy and his fight against the Bureau of Land Management. The Nevada cattle rancher’s armed standoff against federal agents turned him into an overnight Fox News folk hero, embraced by freedom Republicans like seantors Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and branded a “domestic terrorist” by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. You are also probably aware that Bundy has revealed himself to be a grade-A racist who thinks black people would be better off in slavery.

Sermonizing on his desert homestead, Bundy gave supporters—and New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney—a taste of his crackpot worldview, leading with the always-inauspicious phrase “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro…” As Nagourney reported Thursday, that “thing” was that one time Bundy drove past a public housing project in Las Vegas, and saw a few black people sitting on the porch. Here’s what Bundy said:

“They didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? [...] They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

I really wanted to like Cliven Bundy. I really did. As I wrote earlier this month, the showdown at Bundy Ranch was part of a long-running—and very relevant—fight over the federal government’s control of land and resources in the West. In Bundy’s case, he and other ranchers got shortchanged in the 90s, when the government decided to use the land in question to protect the endangered desert tortoise, ending cattle grazing in exchange for allowing private developers to destroy other tortoise habitats. (Yes, you're right, that does sound shady.) Bundy stopped paying federal grazing fees in protest, and for the past two decades has been illegally feeding his cattle on public land, racking up $1.1 million in unpaid fines in the process. It’s worth noting, though, that even if Bundy had paid, the government still would have forced him to remove his cows from the land, as they did with all of his rancher neighbors. Framed in those terms, it sounded like he had a legitimate beef.

Of course, any sympathy I had for Bundy evaporated somewhere between “they put their young men in jail” and “they never learned to pick cotton.” It turns out he is just another government-hating bigot with a big gun. You can watch the whole sad spectacle in the video below:

There is nothing inherently racist about thinking that federal government shouldn’t control nearly 50 percent of the land in Western states. Nor, for that matter, is there anything inherently racist about opposing gun control laws, or wanting to audit the Federal Reserve. But wherever these issues arise, there is invariably a white guy with an American flag and a sidearm that wants to tell you what he knows about “the Negro.” And what could have been a meaningful, important debate about the size and scope of the federal government turns into yet another rant about black people on welfare and open borders. (Curiously, Bundy doesn’t seem have a problem with “Spanish people.”)

The conservative push for “state’s rights” and “property rights”—and the more extreme "county supremacy" ideas espoused by Bundy and his ilk—have always been racist dog-whistles, dating back to the fight over slavery, when “property” was code for “enslaved black people,” and leading through the Civil Rights Movement, when opposition to desegregation policies became a cornerstone of the modern conservative movement. While the state’s rights rallying cry has taken different forms over the years, the laws that conservatives have opposed have almost always been related to race.

In the Obama era, absent any real racial policy agenda from either party, virtually every political issue—from health care reform to the federal budget deficit—has taken on racial undertones. A recent piece by New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait delved into this new political reality, citing a 2009 study by political Michael Tesler and David Sears that found that, under Obama, people’s feelings about race had bled into everything: If you knew how someone felt about racial politics, you pretty much knew how they would feel about health care reform, a correlation that was stronger in 2009 than in 1993, when Bill Clinton was trying to push through his own health care bill.

That doesn’t mean, as MSNBC frequently suggests, that white racial resentment and small-government libertarianism are one and the same. But the conservative movement—and particularly the Tea Party coalition that came out to fight for Bundy Ranch—is rife with explicitly racist imagery and rhetoric, from signs depicting Obama as a witch doctor to the less subtle “Put the White Back in the White House” T-shirt that appeared at a Mitt Romney rally in Ohio in 2012.

Photo via Flickr user Andrew Aliferis

So pervasive is this bigotry, in fact, that according to this 2012 Stanford University study, the longer people are enmeshed in the Tea Party, the more focused they become on their “white identity.” That’s not particularly shocking when you consider that activists tuning in to Rick Santelli’s Guerilla Media Network for Bundy Ranch updates were also treated to a particularly abhorrent rant on “Jewish extremism” and “Zio-globalism” from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“From the beginning, racism has always been part of the Tea Party, starting back with the birther movement,” said Devin Burghart, vice president of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which has been tracking the Bundy Ranch fiasco. “And it's gotten worse, rather than gotten better. You can’t say that everyone of them is racist, but the movement is awash in racist rhetoric, and that affects its membership.”

What makes Bundy’s casual racism so treacherous—apart from all of its obvious terribleness—is that it's put an end to a legitimately relevant and important policy debate about the federal government’s control of land and resources in the West. No one wants to talk about land policy—or anything for that matter—with a guy who thinks that black people were better off as slaves. (Besides that, "Cliven Bundy Is a Terrible Racist" is a much sexier headline than "Let's Talk About Land Use Policy.")

There are no obvious reasons why black people couldn’t support Bundy’s position against the federal government. As UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler explains in his book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, the modern guns-and-property rights movement has its roots, at least tactically speaking, in the1960s Black Panther Party. Driven by the suspicion that the federal government was unwilling to protect the property rights of African Americans, the Black Panthers taught new recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” And while the showdown at Bundy Ranch has frequently been compared to the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, an equally apt comparison can be made to the 1985 police bombing of a Philadelphia row house occupied by members of the black liberation collective MOVE.

You can make the argument that certain libertarian positions might appeal to some black voters—for instance, the government's mass incarceration of young black men is at least partially to blame for the problems faced by those communities. But despite the GOP’s new push to broaden its support among minority voters in the wake of the disastrous 2012 elections, Republicans didn’t do much to help themselves when it came to Bundy. Eager to respond to Sean Hannity’s cause célèbre, Paul and Cruz, along with Nevada’s Republican Senator Dean Heller and Governor Brian Sandoval, jumped on the Bundy bandwagon, but were shocked, shocked to find out that the longtime county supremacy–supporting rancher doesn’t like black people. This is particularly unfortunate for Paul, who has put in some very real efforts trying to win over minority groups on school choice and mandatory minimum sentencing reform, but can’t seem to shake his associations to fringy racists.

In an ironic twist, Glenn Beck has been the conservative voice of reason on Bundy. The Tea Party media mogul, who recently expressed contrition for his role “in helping tear the country apart,” has been warning his talk radio listeners about Bundy for weeks.

“It is hard, because we believe the government is out of control,” Beck said on his program Thursday. But, he added of Bundy, “if he really thinks… that slaves had a family life, just that shows you how unhinged from reality this guy is! You’ve got to distance yourself. You must know who you are standing next to at all times.”

Unless Republicans start taking Beck’s advice to heart, Bundy probably won’t be the last racist rancher they find themselves standing next to.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

Crystal runs away from home leaving her mother to fear for the worst. Augustine visits the doctor to discuss a potentially life-threatening surgery to fix a deformation in his face, but makes progress back at school dealing with his anger issues brought on by bullying from other kids.

Peruvian artist LU.CU.MA spent 27 years in jail for the murder of his brother, among other crimes. After his release, LU.CU.MA—short for Luis Cuevas Manchego—swore to turn himself around. He traded the machine guns, hand grenades, and knives that he once used to ambush buses for art supplies.

VICE traveled to Lima, Peru, to talk to LU.CU.MA about his life, how he uses art as a way to repent, and why all his paintings involve things like corrupt politicials being beheaded by snakes.

Disclosure: James Franco writes a weekly column for this website. In fact, his latest piece came out today, like ten minutes ago. It's a fictional script of Three's Company that ends in a big orgy and you can read it here.

James Franco hadn't planned on playing a role in Gia Coppola's Palo Alto, the film adaptation of his book, Palo Alto: Stories. Originally, his role was as producer, but when Gia needed someone to play Mr. B, a pervy gym teacher with eyes for April (played by Emma Roberts), an introvert teen on his soccer team, James stepped up to the plate.

Coppola's debut feature is based off of three stories from Franco's book. Parodying coming-of-age classics, arming characters with smartphones and 21st century slang, Coppola's treatment of Palo Alto doesn't bring to mind the mid-90s iteration that Franco initially wrote about in his book. But that doesn't matter, because the underlying theme of the book, and what comes across on the screen, is the dizzying awkwardness of being a kid in a generic Bay Area suburb with no patience for the future.

"To have a completely loyal adaptation without doing anything new would be bizarre," Franco wrote in a recent article on this website discussing Danny Boyle's adaptation of Trainspotting for the screen. He went on to explore how sex is being approached by new cinema in films like Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac and Steve McQueen’s Shame. The topic has surely been on his mind while working on Palo Alto, a project that has forced him to watch characters based on his teenage memories come to life to fuck and emotionally torture each other on the screen.

I met up with Franco at a press junket yesterday. Walking into the building felt like wandering Frankfurt's red light district, but with an appointment confirmed by e-mail. PR girls in matching leather jackets escorted me through dark hotel hallways under low ceilings. I was seated outside of Franco's room while another interviewer whittled away at my time slot. "It looks like you're only going to have ten minutes at this point," the PR girl said. "That's fine," I said, and she let me in. Here's how James and I spent those ten minutes.

VICE: You had a pervy gym teacher, right?
James Franco: Well, there was a guy at my junior high who the character Mr. B in the movie and the book is loosely based on. So, yeah, I knew a teacher who had a relationship with a 13- or 14-year-old girl. At the time, we were not aware—it came out after.

You've played the jackass rebel kid before, in Freaks and Geeks. Did you decide to play the teacher this time see the other side of things?
Honestly, I did not intend to play the teacher. I wrote the character, but she [Gia Coppola] selected the stories, so she selected that whole storyline. It didn’t necessarily need to be in there. I was the producer, so she would run casting ideas by me. She was running a lot of different ideas for that role by me. I would say, "Oh, yeah, he would be good," that sort of thing, but in the end she asked me to do it. So, I'm really only in the movie because Gia wanted me in there, and I wanted to do whatever I could to help the movie.

James Franco as Mr. B. and Emma Roberts as April

It's not a role I was dying to play. In fact, I much prefer playing Daniel Desario in Freaks and Geeks to playing the teacher. But I did it to help the movie, and once I committed it was like, well—I can't wink at the audience and say, "I know, this guy's a fuckin' creep." I had to commit to it and play it so that it would be a genuine portrayal. That being said, I didn’t like playing that dude.

Do you cry more as an actor, or did you cry more as a teenager?
Weird [laughs]. That's a good question. I'm sure I cried a lot as a teenager in private, but there are certain roles that call for some tears, and I guess I’m just used to drawing on those. If you really want to know, it's not hard for me to cry—if the material's right. If the material doesn't feel genuine, it’s so hard for me to cry. But if it's genuine, and it feels honest, like, I can cry like that.

I've got to shoot my friend every night in Of Mice and Men. It's this guy I've grown up with, Lenny. I cry almost every night. Not because I'm trying to, it's just because the material pulls me in, and I hook in emotionally so the tears just come. You know, if you had to shoot your best friend… so, I probably cry more now. I mean, I cry every night. [laughs]

You've taught before, right?
I still teach. I don't teach high school. I teach at college. I teach at UCLA, USC, and Cal Arts. I teach graduate film; I teach undergrad writing; I teach a weird kind of performance class at Cal Arts, and it's great for me. I get to work with very talented people. If students are in those programs, they're already very accomplished, to a certain extent. So I get to work with very good students and it's nice to kind of help other people with their work, to not worry about my work, and to get off of myself for a minute. It's sort of a relief, and it's a purer space than the professional world. The academic and school space has very little of the business side of things in it. So I like working on projects in a pure space like that.

The art teacher in Palo Alto seems like a cool dude you knew.
The guy in the movie (Mr. Wilson, played by Don Novello)—I think Gia played him a little goofier than the guy in the book, and then the guy in the book is loosely based on an art teacher I had. His name was Jim Smith. He didn’t teach at high school, he taught at this art league outside of Palo Alto. And yeah! Here was somebody who lived as an artist and was a very accomplished kind of figurative painter, but he certainly wasn't in the contemporary art scene of New York or LA, or something like that. So I think he was making a lot of his living as a teacher, but it was still impressive that there he was, living as an artist. And that was very influential.

Did you feel like you were properly inside of your book? Like, do you feel like you were in your book?
Well, it’s based on Palo Alto in the mid-90s, which is when I was in Palo Alto as a teenager. So a lot of it is based on experiences that I had, or that other people had, and some of it is made up or fictionalized. But there are a lot of things where I've had friends who have gone through it, or friends' parents who have gone through it and been like, Did that really happen? Is that you?—that kind of thing. There’s enough material based on real things that you could play that game.

But it’s fiction. So, like any writer, I've repurposed things, I've re-contextualized them and have used them in ways that are different than how they impacted everyone when they really happened. So yeah, I think I’m in there. Of course I’m in there. There’s the character, Teddy, who Jack Kilmer plays that'd I'd say is the most based on me.

Nat Wolff as Fred and Jack Kilmer as Teddy

What about Fred, the crazy rebel character?
That's interesting that you bring that up. So Fred, played by Nat Wolff, is a character in the book. But whereas with other characters I can point to people and say, "Oh, she's based on her, she's based on her, and he's based on him." With Fred, that's not the case. There is nobody. Fred wasn’t based on anyone. Fred came out of my imagination, and once he was on the page, I realized, oh, he's another side of me. And I basically created him when I was writing the story so that these two sides of myself could talk to each other. So, yeah, in a sense Fred is sort of based on me too. What Gia's done, is she’s combined the Fred in the book with another character in the book, this guy Roberto, so Fred's a little sleazier than I think I ever was. But yeah, you're right. I think Teddy and Fred are two sides of me. Generally speaking.

Well, I think they’re making us wrap up. Let's take a selfie?
Yeah, let's do it.

Follow Dan on Twitter

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week we explore Russian President Vladimir Putin's warning that the internet is secretly a “CIA project,” the London police campaign for women to discourage Brits from fighting in Syria, the fights in Syria's Aleppo province, and the rising death toll from West Africa's Ebola virus outbreak. 

Photo courtesy of Blue Rider Press

Deborah Feldman came of age in Williamsburg when it was known as the coolest neighborhood in the world, but she didn't spend her teenage years partying at warehouse parties or eating overpriced Earl Grey-flavored ice cream. Feldman was born into Williamsburg's Satmar Hasidic community, a sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews known for both their extremism and their segregation from the outside world, and spent her youth preparing for an arranged marriage.

After she gave birth to her son, she broke with tradition, fled home, attended Sarah Lawrence College, and wrote Unorthodox, a memoir about her escape from Brooklyn. The book revealed the secretive sect's customs and sexist traditions and sparked controversy throughout the Jewish world. In one notorious chapter, Feldman's husband came home and told her about a Hasidic father who cut off his son's penis and slit his throat after he caught him masturbating. According to the story Feldman says her husband told her, the Hasidic community covered up the crime. They subsequently denied the event occurred and attacked Feldman and the journalists who wrote about Unorthodox. 

Unfortunately for Feldman's haters, her story won't be disappearing from the media anytime soon. Unorthodox became a New York Times bestseller, and Blue Rider Press recently published Exodus, her memoir about being an outsider trying to join mainstream American society, which Joan Rivers called “a moving and honest memoir of one young woman's capacity for reinvention.” This month, I called Feldman to discuss her new book, the Satmars' secrets, and the time she fell in love with a German who was a descendent of Nazis.  

Why do you think the world is so interested in Satmar Hasidic community, considering it's so small in proportion to the rest of the world?
I actually think what’s most interesting about this community is that it thrives in New York City. They run all the businesses out of the 47th Street Diamond District and they own all the real estate in Brooklyn, so they interact a lot with the New York community, yet they have these amazingly sheltered lives. I think it's just absolutely stupendous for people to comprehend that they can remain so sheltered in New York, which is the least sheltered place in the world.

What stories from your books stick to people the most?
In Exodus it’s the German fetish. When I was attending Sarah Lawrence, I met a dominatrix who said, “All these Hasidic Jews come to my dungeon and ask me to dress up as a Nazi and beat them. What’s up with that?” And I was like, Wait a second. Do I have that? I’ve always been weirdly fascinated and obsessed with Germans, but mostly just afraid of them. I ended up traveling through Europe, retracing my grandmother’s steps through the Holocaust, and I fell in love with a German who was descended from Nazis at the same time. It was completely psychotic, but also completely therapeutic.

What was it like watching the Satmars interact with the artists who moved to Williamsburg in the late 90s and early 2000s? 
I was about 13 or 14 when all of this became an issue. When the Satmar community took residence in Williamsburg in the 1940s and 1950s, Williamsburg was a slum—it was mostly wetlands, and it was just a real industrial wasteland. They decided to establish their idealized version of a ghetto there because they felt it was the perfect spot, and nobody would try to live there except them. And then, lo and behold, Brooklyn transformed. All of a sudden landlords who had buildings that were previously worth almost nothing now had goldmines.

There was a tremendous controversy in Williamsburg at the time because the rabbis were so concerned that these Hasidic landlords were so tempted by the money, and would start renting out like crazy in the community next to us, and that all these cool youngsters who partied and drank would come in and steal our women and corrupt our men, and the whole community would collapse. I have a lot of friends who live in Williamsburg right now who rent shitty apartments, and they’re always complaining about their Hasidic landlords. I read an article a few months ago about a Hasidic landlord who was murdered. The question was “Who did not hate this man?” All his tenants hated him!

Did they ever find out who did it? 
It was really crazy. They found him in a dumpster. 

I have to ask you about the masturbation story in Unorthodox. That was really horrific. 
What I was trying to explain in the book was here I was at a moment when a lot of abuse was surfacing. I had a young son who I was losing influence over because mothers are not considered worthy of having a say in a son’s upbringing [according to Satmar tradition], and my husband comes home and tells me about this horrible murder he claimed his brother had witnessed. It was the conversation and the way he reacted to it that made me realize I would never be able to ensure my son’s safety, which was why I included the story. A lot of people heard that conversation and believed that I was accusing people of committing that crime—the only thing I can attest to is that I had that conversation. I don’t believe that it’s ever been conclusively resolved. Whether or not it’s been covered up, we don’t know.           

How do you handle the backlash against you for speaking about events like this?
I live in the middle of nowhere; no one knows where I live. I have no cell phone service, so I feel safe. I have a lot of conviction in what I’m doing—I’m following in a tradition of Jews throughout history who demonstrated conviction, and talked about inconvenient ideas or pointed at hypocrisy and inconsistency in the Jewish community, and were summarily ostracized and excommunicated from the community as a result. You’re either a hater or a thinker. I think that because the Jewish culture is so vulnerable in greater society, we feel like we have to present a unified front to cover up our squabbles, but I think instead of having squabbles, we can just have open and honest conversations and not come from such a traumatized place.

To learn more about Deborah Feldman's story, check out Exodus and follow her on Twitter. 

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

On “Draft Day,” a new track by Drake, the actress Jennifer Lawrence (a.k.a. JLaw, which sounds like an online law degree) receives a gloating endorsement from the Canadian rapper: “Jennifer Lawrence you can really get it / I mean for real, girl, you know I had to do it for yah.”

This is enormous praise. It’s so big the Daily Mail had to ask, “Will She [Rihanna] Get Jealous?” If Rihanna is jealous of Lawrence, she isn’t envious because of her boyfriend’s Dylanesque lyrics. The only reason she has to hate Lawrence is the universal pearl clutching over the plucky Kentuckian. The world will never love Rihanna the way they love Lawrence. Where girls sing along to Rihanna, both grandmas and horny 14-year-old boys, two totally different demographics, love Lawrence.

Anne Hathaway is Lawrence’s closest contemporary. Like Hathaway, Lawrence’s career good fortune started when she was in her 20s. Lawrence was barely legal when she became famous for starring in Winter’s Bone, the movie that allowed her to crawl out of the indie slime and get in front of Ryan Seacrest, Hollywood’s groundhog, and Hathaway was rounding out her teen years when The Princess Diaries came out, making us forget about Audrey Hepburn for three minutes.

Hathaway’s 2000s winning streak continued through groundbreaking work like Ella Enchanted, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, The Devil Wears Prada, and Becoming Jane. Things got weird in 2008 with Rachel Getting Married, a generally forgettable piece of angst that was Hathaway’s first “take me seriously, dear members of the Academy” role. The movie landed her an Oscar nomination, yet ever since then we’ve hated Hathaway. Do we hate her lack of sincerity, or her breathless eagerness? Do we find her pathetic, or are we simply sick of looking at her and her shtick?

Whatever it is, it is enough. Hathaway winning Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars for her role as Fantine in Les Misérables felt like a mercy move by the Academy so she would leave us alone. (And don’t worry—she returns to the movies this year in Song One. She plays a PhD candidate in archeology who strikes up a relationship with a folk musician after she returns to Brooklyn to see her ailing brother, who is also a folk musician. Take my eyes!) But Hathaway got her Oscar, and that’s all, let’s be honest, that really matters at this point for such a two-dimensional actress.

Lawrence, however, topped Hathaway’s Best Supporting Actress statue with an Oscar for Best Actress. “JLaw for the win!” everyone said. She was 22, not an ancient relic like Hathaway was when she won a measly Best Supporting Actress trophy at age 30. This year the Academy nominated Lawrence for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in American Hustle. Shockingly, she lost to absolute upstart Lupita Nyong'o, but that’s OK—Lawrence already won an Oscar, so this year's nomination was for fun and so she could pose in that selfie with Portia de Rossi’s wife.

After all, we love Lawrence when she falls down, stands up, and laughs like an adult baby. (Oh, Jennifer!) We love her when she talks about her butt plug on Conan and discusses her uneven breasts on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Oh. And how could we forget Lawrence's unruly middle finger? As she told Empire, “It's so funny how much I freaked out when I realized that happened [flipping off Oscar photographers]. I told my publicist, saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God...’ and now I am like, ‘That's probably my proudest moment in my entire career.’”

The persona Lawrence and her publicist have chosen for her—the Calamity Jane girlfriend, the embarrassing yet talented daughter, the personification of the self-aggrandized millennial generation—certainly sells tickets and merchandise. It also smacks of the same phoniness that made Hathaway a pariah. Lawrence’s acting ability is more caricature than originality; she drops one-liners effortlessly. She’s believable, but she's not ageless or transformative as an actress—and that’s her downfall.

Of course, Lawrence is a jokester and someone you’d want to sit with as you wait to file your taxes. The fake screw-ups and mouth diarrhea make her a likeable, approachable star, but her talents don’t go much further than that. Her range, like Hathaway’s talent, is limited. Hathaway does best when acting mousy and desperate; Lawrence delivers bravado and incredible sass. Neither shtick is enough to carry an entire career that spans more than ten years, though it does beg for a sisterhood road movie starring the two actresses.

Lawrence is having her moment right now. She is Hollywood’s darling, America’s foul-mouthed sweetheart. She’s one of us—laughing, farting, and drinking all the time. She's keeping it real, folks! But her approach to her persona will eventually melt like it did for Hathaway and even bigger actresses, like Sarah Palin. When you gamble with a public persona that draws more attention to you than your actual work, you won’t lose gigs. You’ll just lose the status that grants you the right to be taken seriously by anyone other than your rabid fan base.

And yet this appears to be the path our actress of the people has chosen for herself. Bon voyage, JLaw!

Bert Burykill as a kid

Last week, the man VICE readers knew as Bert Burykill, the pseudonymous author of the Pen Pals column, died from injuries sustained in a car accident. He was 33.

Bert’s death was a freak accident, a tragic and sudden end to a life that, for the past decade, had been spent either in parole or behind bars. It was only a couple months ago that he became “free of the government’s fucking shackles,” as he put it in his final column, and he was finally getting his life back on track: He had gotten engaged to his girlfriend and planned to use his newfound freedom to travel outside the country for the first time since his initial arrest.

In a long magazine story on his life behind bars, Bert wrote about his fairly normal middle-class upbringing—he played hockey, attended prep schools, and went to Skidmore College, where, as many kids do, he dealt drugs as a side job. His life changed in 2004, when he was arrested and, thanks to the harsh Rockefeller Drug Laws (which have since been repealed), faced a potential 12 to 25 years in prison; he wound up pleading out to a reduced sentence of three to nine years. Thanks to the hyper-vigilant criminal justice system and his own occasional missteps, Bert spent more than a quarter of his life under some kind of government supervision, even though he never committed a violent crime.

For the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure of being Bert’s editor. I met him first through the letters he sent me from prison and then in person when he finally got out. Whatever stereotypes you have about someone who had been in prison for drug dealing, Bert fell into none of them. I found him to be disarmingly goofy, soft-spoken, and earnest—a grown-up slacker with a heart of gold who was trying to figure out how to navigate his post-prison life.

He had one big thing going for him: He was hilarious. The voice he wrote in was a profane stream-of-consciousness mashup of invented slang, musical references, sexual daydreams, brutally honest self-reflection, and rage at the system he found himself stuck in. It was often very funny, sometimes incomprehensible, and occasionally hit on emotional truth.    

A documentary about Bert's life VICE made in 2013

In the past several years, there’s been an explosion of writing about the prison-industrial complex. Countless academics, activists, and journalists have documented the inhumane conditions inmates live under, the racist policies that fill incarceration facilities with poor black and brown men, and the urgent need for massive structural reform. Bert’s writing occasionally touched on topics also covered by the anti-prison discourse, but he was really separate from all that. His best pieces were intensely personal accounts of his time in jails and medium-security prisons, stories that could be funny or tragic or cruel but were rarely political—they were frequently about not the overarching architecture of the system but about his own feelings, which could swing from hope to confidence to self-pity to rage to regret in the span of a few sentences. The prison-industrial complex he inhabited was a brutal, bad place, but it was also funny and boring and absurd.

I think that if he had one day managed to sit down and wrangle the pages and pages he had written in prison into some kind of order, he could have one day produced a humane, hilarious novel, something along the lines of A Fan’s Notes but written about and inside prison. I’m sad that he’s gone; I’m sorry we’ll never get to read that book.

“I feel like a moron 'cause I didn’t get more accomplished,” he once wrote of his time in prison. “I penned dozens of songs and wrote enough to fill up a couple books, but in the outside world I’ve failed to translate what I created in there into something worthy.”

I know he didn’t get as much accomplished as he would have were he given more time, but he left a lot behind, and much of it was, as he’d say, pretty damn bonerable. A sampling of it is below. RIP buddy, you will be missed.

On doing time in the (now-defunct) Shock boot camp program:
“I remember largely being concerned with the sad fact that my girlfriend, too ashamed to give me a proper dismissal, stopped visiting and writing me after only three or four months. Later, I received a letter from a friend describing how he walked in on her slutting it up with a dude I thought was a lowlife who probably had a case of explosive herpes. It doesn’t seem as devastating today, but for three or four months I spent at least ten hours a day in a fury over this broad. I couldn’t get it out of my head. All my plans down the drain—a for-the-most-part-excellent two-year romance, my first true love, was now unraveling while I was powerless in prison. Shock ruined a lot of relationships. We were only allowed ten minutes of phone time twice a month, whereas in a normal jail you can pretty much talk whenever the phones are free. All I had was a pen and paper. The three or four letters a week my baby got from me definitely would’ve made her cry—but I still don’t know whether she ever bothered to read them.”
-From “Don't Get Caught”

One of Bert's prison ID cards

On what his problem is:
“I’ve always suffered from an unfortunate condition that my father used to call ‘the Superman Bulletproof’ problem, meaning I never think I’ll get caught. I reckon he might have suffered from something similar once upon a time but snapped out of it and grew up, while I languish. I think part of the reason my father has always loved me unconditionally through my dozens of MEGAHUGE fuckups is that he kinda liked having a tough kid with an ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude, but hot damn have the positive parts of that attribute been obliterated by the overwhelming pain it has caused.”
-From “Pissin’ Out the Pain”

On making himself pretty:
“In prison, my face is very important. It must look very mean and hard, but also surprisingly intelligent. Therefore, I tweeze my whole face, but also use a mayonnaise mask bedazzled with a ketchup splash. The egg whites in mayo activate positive proteins to make me look fierce while ketchup secretes sugars that extract poisons, which culminates in the look of a sweet and weathered young gentile who’s ready to murder whoever for a single rollie.”
-From “Jailhouse Grooming”

On gambling:
“I saw my buddy Gary the Retard get busted and do three months in the box for simply running a friendly poker game. He had poker chips and a master sheet with how much money everyone owed, which meant he got time for orchestrating a gambling ring or some dumb shit. COs gamble right in front of us all day and night too, so lots of them let us do our thing, but certain COs solely exist to fuck with an inmate’s already shitty day. I always had to keep everything stashed someplace safe out of my cube just in case a dickhead CO decided to do a random search. It makes me puke to remember the look in some of these hypocritical fucker’s eyes when they find some ‘contraband.’”
-From “Getting $$ in the Clink Clink”

On Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York:

-From “Prisons I’ve Known and Yelped”

On his diet:
“Eventually, it got to the point that canned salmon almost made me puke, but that was after ingesting maybe 80 to 100 cans of the funk. The wild Alaskan was really the healthiest thing I could find at the commissary. Canned octopus just tastes good and only costs 80 cents for a can. The jail’s brand was from Morocco, so I was feelin’ it like feelin’ tits. Occasionally I foxed with tuna, mackerel, clams, oysters, sardines, or whatever other canned shit appeared before me, but my go-to grubs for almost two years were salmon and octopus. I don’t want to eat those at all now, unless it’s some super mega-bone grilled octopus from a fancy-pants Mediterranean restaurant.”
-From “Cooking in the Cooler”

On the job he once had burying inmates who had died in prison:
“The coffins were shoddily made pine boxes with broomstick pieces that served as handles. We carried them out of the shack and placed them next to their holes, then, with two men on each side, lifted them into their graves. I wish I could say we were cracking jokes and taking it lightly, but really the funny thing was that the only person who showed up to perform the last rites for the dead (a Muslim, a Jew, and two Christians) was an imam. One alpha-dog inmate thought it necessary to chime in with his inane two cents and said, basically, ‘Bless these men in the next life,’ like that really meant anything.”
-From “Burying the Dead and Unloved”

On the military:
“While me and some of my boys walked circles around the yard, we used to romanticize the days when criminals got arrested and were offered the chance to serve in the military rather than go to jail. I would have joined the military in a heartbeat if I were allowed to. I truly don’t understand why that option isn’t available for nonviolent offenders. All I ever did was fuck with drugs, so let me join the military and drug test me so you know I’m clean, and then I’ll be a normal soldier. I’ve had dreams about this before, and I’m quite sure I woulda been one monster asset to our first-world security. My name would be MadDog Burykill and I would eviscerate the bad guys with unadulterated rage. VIOLENCE! VIOLENCE! VIOLENCE! It’s what criminals do best, right?”
-From “Uncle Jamm Wants Yous!”

A drawing of Bert in prison

On Christmas:
“There are a bunch of inmates who love to celebrate Xmas faux-lavishly and embrace their fellow convicts with brotherly love to the max. They use the holiday as an excuse to have fun, basically, and I reckon that's OK, it just makes me miss the outside more. They try to make a fancy Xmas dinner in the microwave at 4 AM so they don't have to fight for the microwave during the day. Maybe they'll take drugs, or drink a specially prepared batch of holiday hooch, whereas I just think about getting free.”
-From “Christmas in the Can”

On the guys who act insane in prison:
“I empathize deeply with guys I meet in the system who have nothing, and it’s not hard to understand why they behave like lunatics who are ready to die with absolutely nothing to lose. What’s more difficult to comprehend is why someone like me, who has everything to gain and so much to lose, would ever play with his freedom. That’s why a lot of heads would observe me from afar assuming I suffer from some severe debilitating mental illness, and be like, ‘Get that boy some Ritalin, Prozac, Lithium, Trazodone, Levitra Cocktail Sauce, STAT!’ But I’m too crazy to even know if I’m crazy.”
-From “Prison Makes You Crazy”

On crackheads, a.k.a. “thirstbuckets”:
“I think lots of people who don’t have much in the real world try to hold on to everything they can when they get locked up. Sometimes I’ll give a thirstbucket some cornbread off my food tray and then he’ll turn around and sell it or trade it. They call this a hustle. Or they’ll sit by the garbage collecting everyone’s leftovers and then try to cook later by combining resources with someone with real food. That’s just the way some people survive. Even if it’s cheap, petty, greedy, and pathetic it’s an accepted way of life in the stinkin’ clink-clink.”
-From “Thirstbuckets”

A portrait of Bert taken while he was in prison

On going to rehab:
“When I got into the 12-step program, there were a lot of things that bugged me. The religious aspect rubbed me the wrong way, and the group’s doctrine goes back to 1939, which made it seem seriously dated. Basically, you’re supposed to relinquish your will and give yourself fully to Him. I can’t tell you how many meetings were completely hijacked by some chick who was pissed off about being sober and sat in the circle for an hour yelling about how it’s sexist that she had to succumb to Him. ‘Who says God is a man? You misogynist-spoke-in-the-wheel-of-patriarchy motherfucker!’ Then some smarmy douche-lick (me, for instance) would say, ‘Hold up. How do we even know there’s a God, and why would He care if we’re doing drugs or not?’ Then the counselor would say, ‘Fine, fine. Things have changed. It doesn’t actually have to be the Christian God. It can be anything. You just need to give yourself over to something that you think is greater than yourself. You are not God. Your higher power can be that chair over there if you want.’ Great. So lots of us ran with that one. Eventually, I settled on Johnny Law as my higher power, which was hard to argue with. No doubt the police and the prisons were more in control of my life than I was.”
-From “Drug Court Addiction 12-Step Blues”

On how most people end up in prison:
“I know that most people don’t want to think about who’s in jail, let alone the effects that mass incarceration has on its victims, but just go there for a minute... Imagine your dad was locked up for most of your life. You’d grow up poor, probably full of anger, likely in a louse-filled neighborhood with unseemly influences, and you’d have a great chance of becoming a whore or a thief or a drug dealer and following dear old Dad into jail.”
-From “Prisons Punish Families Too”

On what inmates do for entertainment:
“Our new thing right now is exploiting ignorant white guys by making them do Jackass-type shit for peanuts. This old drug addict named Jim-Bob from Peekskill (who has a tattoo of a naked broad getting a big dick up in her on his forearm) has been eating water bugs from the dirty bathroom, sniffin’ Ramen noodle seasoning packets, and boofing Atomic Fireballs then doing jumping jacks. He gets some soup or Honeybuns for his troubles and now we have some new white kid in here doing the same stuff. It’s sad because they have no dough and they just want some friends so they’ll do whatever to entertain us. It went to a new level last night when one of these honkys put Magic Shave on his eyebrows for ten Honeybuns. He’s an ugly kid anyway—he looks like a meth addict and weighs about 120 pounds. Without the eyebrows, even the COs are making fun of him, to the point where he basically hides under the covers all day. Kinda sad.”
-From “Lockup Crackup”

Another photo of Bert as a kid

On how it feels to be free:
“It’s difficult to compare getting released from prison to anything. The first time I got out was only a day after I was locked up. I remember smoking a cigarette and drinking a margarita, thinking profoundly about how blessed I was to be free. The second time I got out was after eight months inside. I was floating on air. My dick was singing, and the outside smelled like a good lovemaking suckfest. The third time I got out wasn’t so sweet. I was on work release and had to go back into jail a few hours later, but I think my scrotum still tingled slightly.”
-From “Sweet Release”

On interviewing for a job as a janitor:
“As we got my hours straight and agreed that I would be paid $8.25 an hour for the first few weeks, while it was established that I could properly mop a floor and dispose of gym members’ discarded sperm socks, the manager received an email from HR—the background check came back, and I was not fit to be a lowly fuckin’ janitor, thanks to the time I got caught with an amount of cocaine that was above the arbitrary cutoff that makes me a felon for life. The manager told me he was sorry, but absolutely nothing could be done. I was not janitor material.”
-From “The Trials of Job”

On what happened when he was out of prison and his coworkers found out he had done time:
“I kinda wish I had just told everyone at work about my past right off the bat, but some of them would’ve been freaked out so I figured it was best to keep it on the diggy-lo. In any case, they started cutting my shifts and I overheard some rude comments that made it clear they were talking shit about me behind my back. I think they assumed that since I was a convicted criminal that I was untrustworthy, because everyone except me had keys to the place.”
-From “My Search Engine Results Are Wrecking My Life”

On finally getting off parole:
“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.”
-From “Off Parole and Free at Last”

One of the many ways he signed his name in his letters from prison