The author at his leaving party, the night before he left Ireland for Germany

October 4, 2010: In Iraq, a journalist for the US-owned Alhurra TV station is assassinated on his way to work by a bomb placed under his car. It is the latest in a long line of over 230 journalists murdered since the US-led invasion of 2003. 99 percent of these killings have gone unpunished. In Iraq journalists are killed with impunity, the bloodstained cost in their quest for truth.

October 4, 2010: On my MacBook in southeast Ireland, I'm tapping out the opening page of what I've decided will be my first novel, having logged the date first in the brown Moleskine notebook that I use for a diary. I'm 23 and have been writing for a grand total of three years. Although probably not qualified to write a novel, I assume that if I sit at my desk long enough—and rub my eyebrows often enough—it'll happen. So far I've written poetry and short stories, and been published in a couple of small journals. Despite this, I fear I'm just a pastiche of other, better writers.

I'm trying to fictionalize my childhood—by which I mean make it more interesting—because the writers I'm obsessed with are mainly autobiographical: Jack Kerouac, Geoff Dyer, Henry Miller, Marcel Proust, James Joyce. I maintain that the only way to express oneself in literature is through first-person narrative and use of the word I. All other styles bore me, and are avoidances, I feel, of the writer's foremost inspiration to write: his insecurity. I also hated my childhood and think writing a book about it will help settle scores and justify the trauma of having lived it.

I am in a long-term relationship with a wonderful girl but, beyond this, have no interest in anything except books. I read day and night, and simply cannot fathom doing something with my life other than writing. Because I lack the enthusiasm for anything else, I'm afraid to take a regular job, because I know self-loathing will eat away at me until I commit suicide. Spending my life doing something that—no matter what—I'll take no pride in just doesn't seem logical.

Planning the book's pacing

I have no money, live with my father, and spend the majority of my days locked in an airless bedroom surrounded by balled-up sheets of paper, empty coffee cups, and books I'm trying not to rip off. It's October 4, 2010, and on June 11, 2011, my girlfriend will graduate from college and go on to have what, I suspect, will be a hugely successful career. She's smart, driven, and everything I'm not, so I must catch up on her by finishing the novel and selling it. The deadline I give myself is obvious: June 11, 2011.

All my friends call me a cynic, but I choose to be optimistic about one thing—I believe all the stories I've read about first novels and what they sell for. Since the late 1990s, it seems $500,000 is normal for a writer perceived to have “hot prospects.” Daniel Mason received $1.2 million for The Piano Tuner, Hari Kunzru got $1 million for The Impressionist, Arthur Phillips pulled $475,000 for Prague, and Jonathan Safran Foer got $500,000 for Everything Is Illuminated—plus a further $925,000 for paperback rights. I've also read that, at 26, Foer's advance drew so much attention that publishers now see them as marketing tools—the bigger the advance, the more books they hope to sell.

I ask myself what the difference between those writers and me is, and though it's obvious—they're either graduates of renowned universities (Harvard, Princeton) or, in Kunzru's case, the editor of fucking WIRED—I delude myself into thinking there isn't any. If it happened to them, it can happen to me, too.

Writing the novel proves torturous. Each day brings with it wrong turns, deletions, lacks of energy, depression, and the constant threat of destruction. How often I dangle the file above the Trash bin, how often I rip up pages and then ruefully piece them back together, how often I stand over it all—the pages, the books, the coffee cups—and ask myself, “What the fuck am I doing?”

I vomit out a first draft in five months, then spend the next few days pacing around my bedroom, not sleeping, coming to the conclusion, finally, that what I have is utter shit. It's a confused and self-congratulatory mess, and if I have anything to say at all, it's buried beneath so many bad jokes and pointless tangents that it's impossible to see. I must edit it ruthlessly.

The first night in Germany, sitting on furniture we borrowed from the landlord

The plan to have the book completed by the time my girlfriend graduates is obviously out the window. She then goes and fucks me up by, two days after graduation, getting a job in Germany. I'm terrified and see everything that can go wrong flash before my eyes in a cavalcade of insecurity—we'll get lost, go broke, be taken for tourists 24/7. I begin a campaign of tears and shouting, one that I abandon after a few days when I realize that. no matter how much of a pussy I am, I couldn't live with myself if I stayed behind or stood in her way. We pack up our shit, four giant suitcases, then there they are skidding towards us on the carousel of some German airport—one of them full with the books I think I need to finish my own.

Money is a real concern now, so I'm forced to take a job teaching English. The pay is good, but I resent doing something with my time other than writing. Our bank account balance builds, we feel more safe and secure, but at heart—now that it's January and I'm waiting on a tram in sub-zero temperatures, the sun barely up in the sky, on my way back to the airport to teach aviation engineers the interminable difference between “due to” and “because of”—I'd rather be back in Ireland, an unemployed, penniless weirdo, if it means I can write more.

In Ireland, I had dreams of fulfilling the writer's myth. Drinking, drugging—I wanted to live in the day and unload it onto the page at night. Like Miller, like Kerouac. The only problem, besides confusing living with drinking and drugging, was that I didn't have the cash to do it. I existed in a cage, forever in doubt as to what this kind of life could bring me. Now, though, I can afford all the drink and drugs I want, except—between teaching and the book—I have no time to do them.

The author on a night out with his girlfriend in Germany

More than ever the novel seems a way out, a push back against what's a real, or realer, state of oppression. I'm a writer only in increments, in the time between one class and the next, in the space between dinner and passing out from exhaustion at 10 PM. I'm less an artist than an empty shirt and tie, hauling around a beaten-up satchel and drilling verbs with businessmen so that they can conduct smoother international deals and improve relations between branches of giant trans-global corporations. I've also read more Mann, Nietzsche, and Böll than all these Germans put together.

Though I try not to be, I'm painfully aware of what has been written before, so many great books throughout history, thus I'm afraid of producing something mediocre. Desperate for originality, I overhaul the novel four or five times, splicing in photographs, quotes from my diary, song lyrics, and extracts from the books littering my desk. I also compose a 50,000-word essay about my novel, novels generally, social media, friends and family, life and death, and the desperation I have to sell it, which I weave into the fictionalized story of my childhood. I am sick of the pretence in contemporary literature and want to break down the wall between reader and writer, exposing the artistic mind and process completely so that a deeper emotional connection can be made. Why hold anything back when, with work taking over my life, it's possible I'll never get the chance to write another book?

Writing it teaches me a lot: restraint, pacing, how to compose a clear sentence, how to stop being so fucking clever. In the summer of 2012—nearly two years after I began—it's almost finished. I feel like my life is moving forwards at last, like a wave is building that I'll ride to inevitable victory. To enhance this feeling even further, my girlfriend then gets a job in Dublin, a better one, to where we'll now be moving. Everything seems perfect—we'll return to Ireland, I'll quit my job, sell the book, and after two years of struggling with it, not to mention a lifetime struggling with everything else, fulfilment can finally spring forth.

I complete it the day after we move back, July 29, 2012, and spend the next two months sending it out to hundreds of agents and any publisher I can find that accepts unsolicited manuscripts. Dropping over a grand on ink, paper, and postage, my days now consist of checking my email, walking to the post office, and scanning the internet for details of any agency that has an address, never mind a respectable client-list.

A random page of manuscript

I receive dozens of rejections but mainly non-replies. Those that do get back to me all say the same thing: love it, just can't see it selling. After a few months back in Ireland, I'm forced to accept that my book won't be bought, for neither $500,000 nor the price of a battered second-hand paperback. I'm devastated. What becomes of me now that my failure's confirmed?

I believe that the book is decent and somewhat original, and if not deserving of the massive advance I crave, then at least of a place on someone's shelf or beneath the leg of a wonky table. I'm in debt to the classics—however, when it comes to contemporary literature, other than with a handful of authors like Dyer, Jonathan Lethem, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner, I'm not that impressed. Scanning the prize lists I see nothing but boring, whimsical, two-dimensional, mostly historical shit.

My book isn't given a real chance, which isn't a shame because, objectively, it's probably shit too. Anyway, better books must get rejected all the time for not seeming commercial. People say that literature is dying, technology being to blame—TV and the internet cutting our attention spans in half—but isn't this explanation kind of insulting to those of us who try to read but can't, who're simply bored by books, who need a deeper emotional connection than the ones that are published are capable of giving us? Maybe literature is dying not because of technology, but because the contemporary strain of it is crap, an industry of hacks writing only what they think their publishers will sell.

The author after a night out in Germany

It's early 2013 and, after a lot of looking out of windows, I'm ready to move on with my life. “Be proud of yourself,” I say, “two years ago you had no expectation you'd even finish it, much less to a standard you're happy with. Despite achieving nothing, maybe you have achieved something: you've learnt how to write a book, albeit an unsellable one.”

A lot changed when I was writing the book. I left behind Ireland, moved to Germany, and then moved back again. But, despite all this, my attitude towards life remained constant. I saw Germany, teaching, and the bitterness I felt for them the same way I saw Ireland, poverty, and the alienation of spending all my days locked in my bedroom. I saw a life that, because it was painful, gave my work credibility. I was optimistic about two things, then: not only did I believe all the stories I'd read about first novels, I actually thought that, when a publisher read my book, they'd take into account how much I'd suffered to write it.

Only with it dead and buried did a change in my attitude finally occur. I accepted, firstly, that it didn't matter if I had suffered—publishers didn't give a shit—and that, secondly, writers like Kunzru and Foer weren't only exceptions to the rule but also holders of credentials that the term “first-time novelist” didn't necessarily imply. Writers without reputations or educations from renowned universities simply weren't going to be gambled on except in extraordinary circumstances. It was paramount, then, that I devised a solid plan so that, when my next book came across a publisher's desk, they would already know who I was.

What was this plan? To write articles like this one and publish them on the internet.

April 29, 2014: My next book is halfway done.

Follow James Nolan on Twitter

2013 was a bad year for the Syrian rebels. While the mainstream rebels struggled to defend their frontlines from the resurgent Assad regime, a renegade al Qaeda offshoot—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—launched a series of assaults on the formerly-dominant FSA brigades from behind, capturing their strongholds in rebel-held northern Syria and executing their commanders. Now the rebels are fighting back. 

A coalition of former FSA brigades, funded by Saudi Arabia and rebranded as the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (or SRF), launched a surprise offensive against ISIS in the spring of 2014, in a campaign supported by both the Saudi and US governments.

VICE News was the first western TV crew into Northern Syria for six months, embedding with the SRF as they reimposed their rule over the country's northwestern Idlib province. What we witnessed was a brief window into a complex and morally ambiguous conflict with no end in sight.

Spencer Barasch. Photo by James Nielsen/AFP/Getty Images

Two years ago, Spencer C. Barasch, a former high-ranking Securities and Exchange Commission official based in Fort Worth, Texas, paid a $50,000 fine to settle civil charges brought against him by the United States Department of Justice for allegedly violating federal conflict-of-interest laws. The Department of Justice had alleged that Barasch, as a private attorney, had represented R. Allen Stanford, a Houston-based financier who was later found to have masterminded a $7 billion Ponzi scheme. Barasch had done so even though he'd played a central role at the SEC for years in overruling colleagues who wanted to investigate Stanford’s massive fraud. Federal law prohibits former SEC officials from representing anyone as a private attorney if they played a substantial or material role in overseeing the individual's actions while in government.

In part because of that episode, Barasch, rightfully or wrongfully, has served as an example for critics of the SEC who say that it—and the US government as a whole—has done too little to hold accountable those financial institutions responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and other corporate wrongdoers. James Kidney, a respected trial attorney for the SEC, recently drew attention when he asserted in his retirement speech that the agency’s pervasive “revolving door” has led to a paucity of enforcement actions against seemingly untouchable Wall Street executives. More than two dozen current and former SEC officials that I have interviewed about these matters largely agree with Kidney on the takeaway: Quite simply, American investors can no longer expect the protection they once did, and powerful Wall Street executives who have violated the law will continue to go unchecked.

A three-month investigation by VICE has uncovered evidence of numerous similar instances of misconduct and potential violations of federal conflict-of-interest regulations and law by Barasch since he left the SEC. And while Barasch’s legal representation of Stanford might have been the single most consequential and egregious example of such misconduct, the new information shows that Barasch’s actions in representing Stanford were hardly an anomaly. The new disclosures serve as further ammunition for those who argue that the SEC has been tepid in its enforcement of such regulations and its punishment of those who would violate them.

David Kotz, who served as the SEC’s inspector general from 2007 to 2012, investigated the agency's regulatory failure in pursuing Stanford’s Ponzi scheme and wrote a scathing report criticizing the actions of Barasch and other officials. Information that Kotz uncovered during that investigation led to the Justice Department’s charges that Barasch violated federal conflict-of-interest laws by representing Stanford.

After examining the new information and previously undisclosed documents uncovered for this story, Kotz said: “Based upon the documents and information you provided me, and given the record of Barasch’s previous actions, I would say that there are questions about several matters in which Barasch had conversations about while he was at the SEC—during the same time that he was engaged in discussions for prospective employment—that should be scrutinized further to determine whether there were violations of conflict-of-interest statutes and regulations.”

Barasch, through his lawyer, Paul Coggins, a former United States attorney for the Dallas-Fort Worth area, declined to comment for this story. “Neither Spencer nor I will be commenting for the story,” Coggins said in an email. 

The broad findings of my investigation are as follows:

• Inspector General Kotz concluded in 2010 that Barasch may have violated federal conflict-of-interest rules through his legal representation of a Plano, Texas–based electronics company, Microtune. Barasch represented Microtune as a private attorney even though he had earlier investigated the company while working as a SEC enforcement official. According to previously confidential SEC records, Barasch escaped any punishment as a sole result of the SEC’s then general counsel setting aside Kotz’s recommendation that evidence about the alleged wrongdoing be referred to two state bar associations for further investigation.

• During his final days at the SEC, Barasch was being courted by Houston law firm Andrews Kurth, where he is now currently employed as a partner who leads the firm’s corporate-governance and securities-enforcement team. According to confidential internal emails from Andrews Kurth, the firm apparently considered using Barasch to learn inside information about a potential civil fraud lawsuit that, at the time, the SEC was considering filing against the law firm. The potential lawsuit concerned legal work Andrews Kurth did for Enron, the Houston-based energy and commodities company, before it went bankrupt in December 2001 and following the discovery that the company’s leadership had engaged in one of the largest accounting frauds in US history. Confidential Andrews Kurth emails suggest that the firm's partners were eager to learn what action if any the SEC might take against them, and hoped Barasch, still with the SEC, could find out. Any discussion by Barasch with anyone at the SEC regarding Andrews Kurth’s representation of Enron would constitute a violation of federal conflict-of-interest laws, SEC officials and outside experts told me in numerous interviews. 

• Less than three months before Barasch and the principals of Andrews Kurth began discussing the possibility of bringing him on as a partner, Barasch settled a foreign bribery case with an oil-and-gas services-and-equipment company, BJ Services, which was being represented in the matter by Andrews Kurth. Barasch supervised the SEC’s investigation of BJ Services, negotiated directly with Andrews Kurth partners to settle the case, and settled on terms favorable to the company, according to confidential records. “I like him and as I mentioned had some really good dealings with him in connection with resolving BJ Services FCPA [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] problems,” one Andrews Kurth partner emailed another, as the firm was trying to recruit Barasch in December 2004. While by themselves Barasch’s talks with Andrews Kurth about taking on a job after his employment at the SEC might have been technically within the confines of the law, former colleagues he worked with at the SEC say they believe Barasch should not have discussed employment with a law firm with which he had only recently been negotiating to settle a case: “It is not just optics. What he did creates an appearance of impropriety,” a former SEC official who had worked with Barasch said.

This story is based on more than 1,000 pages of confidential records from inside Andrews Kurth—hundreds of emails, personal notes of partners of the firm, and billing records. Hundreds of pages of previously confidential SEC files, as well as public court records and public SEC records, were also reviewed. And more than two dozen former SEC officials and private attorneys who have worked with Barasch or Andrews Kurth spoke with me.

R. Allen Stanford. Photo by F. Carter Smith/Bloomberg via Getty Images

From 1998 to 2005, during his tenure as the chief enforcement officer of the SEC’s Dallas–Fort Worth regional branch, Barasch overruled examiners in his own office who wanted to investigate Stanford. Year after year, and with increasing urgency, they warned Barasch that Stanford was likely running a “massive Ponzi scheme” and also engaged in international money laundering. But each time the examiners sought to open a file, Barasch quashed any potential investigation.

The SEC examiners weren’t able to persuade their superiors to investigate Stanford until 2005—exactly one day after Barasch left the agency to become a partner at Andrews Kurth. By then, investors in the US and overseas had lost additional billions of dollars. When Stanford was eventually arrested and charged, in March 2009, he had stolen more than $7 billion—the second largest Ponzi scheme in American history. Only Bernard Madoff stole more.

To date, no concrete evidence has surfaced that Barasch’s suppression of the various potential probes of Stanford was anything more nefarious than bad judgment. Stanford ran his Ponzi scheme from his offshore bank, the Stanford International Bank, on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Barasch and others at the SEC said they did not believe that the SEC had proper jurisdiction to investigate, and that it would be difficult to obtain the necessary records from overseas. The SEC’s bungling the investigation of the Stanford Ponzi scheme is considered by many to be one of the worst—and most costly—regulatory failures in the history of the US government.

But more so than quashing the potential Stanford probes, it was what Barasch did almost immediately after leaving the SEC that deeply angered many of his former SEC colleagues: He briefly represented Stanford as a partner with his new law firm, Andrews Kurth. Barasch appeared to be cashing in on his own missteps as a government official.

Moreover, federal law explicitly prohibited Barasch from representing Stanford: Former SEC officials are barred from representing as private attorneys individuals or corporations about whom they have made substantial or material decisions while in the government. This resulted in the Justice Department bringing civil charges against Barasch. On January 13, 2012, Barasch agreed to a $50,000 settlement. The Justice Department alleged that Barasch’s “supervisory position at the SEC,” during which he engaged in the “oversight of the investigation of Stanford Financial Group… restricted him from future private representation of Stanford Financial Group before the SEC."  Barasch had chosen to defy the lifetime restriction on representing Stanford.

Besides the $50,000 fine, Barasch also agreed to a one-year ban on practicing before the agency as punishment for his representation of Stanford. In agreeing to settle matters with the Justice Department and SEC, Barasch was not required to admit to any wrongdoing.

Asked by then SEC inspector general Kotz why he was so determined to represent Stanford, Barasch candidly responded: “Every lawyer in Texas and beyond is going to get rich over this case. OK? And I hated being on the sidelines.”

A former Andrews Kurth employee told me that Barasch informed his law partners that the firm stood to earn $2 million or more from representing Stanford: “There is lot pressure for a new partner just walking in the door to prove themselves. And the way to do that here was to bring in a new client who could pay high fees. It’s not surprising that some corners were cut.”

Barasch’s behavior in attempting to get Stanford’s business for Andrews Kurth is strikingly similar, my investigation found, to his involvement with another client he helped bring to the firm: Microtune, the Texas electronics firm that specialized in manufacturing semiconductors. 

At the SEC, Barasch had overseen a 2005 securities-fraud investigation of Microtune. At Andrews Kurth, Barasch represented Microtune when it came under a second investigation for an entirely new and separate matter, during which time Barasch met with former colleagues at the SEC without conferring with the SEC’s ethics counsel. The role that Barasch played in representing Microtune is detailed in hundreds of pages of internal Andrews Kurth records.

Former SEC inspector general Kotz concluded in a 2010 memo that Barasch potentially violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by meeting with former colleagues without prior ruling from the SEC’s ethics counsel that it would be legal or ethical to do so.

The inspector general recommended that his findings be forwarded to the state bar associations of Texas and the District of Columbia, where Barasch was licensed to practice law. Previously confidential SEC records indicate that no action was taken because the SEC’s general counsel at the time, David Becker, did not believe that Barasch’s alleged wrongdoing was strong enough to warrant such action.

Two sources—one of whom is a former Andrews Kurth employee—say that Andrews Kurth earned $1.5 million from the firm’s representation of Microtune. One of these people explained to me: “Why would you put your reputation or livelihood at risk? Why would you put your law firm at risk? Because there is so much money to do so, and unfortunately little down side if you are caught.”

Barasch and Andrews Kurth jumped at the chance to represent Microtune. In 2005, Microtune settled a civil case brought by the SEC alleging accounting fraud. Barasch supervised that investigation of Microtune, according to government records and interviews.

In 2007, the SEC opened a new inquiry as to whether Microtune had engaged in securities fraud by misstating to its stockholders the backdating of stock options to some of its top executives. Microtune wanted to get out in front of the investigation and tasked Andrews Kurth with conducting its own internal investigation of the allegations Microtune was facing. (Increasingly, corporations conduct internal investigations of their own conduct to gain leniency from the government by disclosing their own wrongdoing and, critics say, to sometimes deflect attention and protect senior corporate executives by laying blame on subordinates.)

Because Barasch had overseen the earlier investigation of Microtune, he was required by federal regulation to seek permission from the SEC’s ethics counsel as to whether he could represent the company in private practice. Because he did not do so, the SEC inspector general concluded that he had violated federal law by meeting with former colleagues at the SEC about the matter without obtaining such approval. 

Retaining Barasch and Andrews Kurth to advocate their case paid off for Microtune. On June 30, 2008, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit alleging that Mictrotune and two of its highest executives “perpetrated a fraudulent and deceptive stock option backdating scheme” in which they “awarded themselves” and their colleagues millions of dollars in compensation not properly reported to stockholders. On the very same day the SEC’s charges were filed, Microtune settled the case on highly favorable terms. In settling the SEC’s lawsuit, Mictrotune was not required to admit any wrongdoing or even pay a fine.

Two former executives of Microtune, however, did not fare so well. The firm’s former chairman and CEO, Douglas Bartek, and its chief financial officer and general counsel, Nancy Richardson, fought the charges. Both of them were cleared after a federal appeals court ruled in August 2012 that the SEC had not filed the charges against the two executives until the statute of limitations had expired.

Unsurprisingly, this raised some eyebrows among Barasch’s former colleagues at the SEC, as the internal investigation he participated in had largely exonerated Microtune and laid blame squarely on Bartek and Richardson who had both been made wholly expendable by leaving the company.

And some of Barasch’s former colleagues I interviewed thought he held a personal vendetta against Bartek. During the initial SEC investigation of Microtune, which Barasch had supervised, he originally sought to bring charges against Bartek, but other enforcement officials at the SEC counseled that they did not believe they had a viable case against him. And as the then CEO of his own company, Bartek had the financial resources to fight any possible charges. According to one of Barasch’s former colleagues at the SEC, Barasch was told by Bartek's legal team, “If [the SEC] bring this case we are going to fight tooth-and-nail.” Barasch begrudgingly backed down.

Another former SEC colleague of Barasch’s told me, “Spencer believed that Bartek unjustly escaped the noose the first time… He was still smarting from [not being able to charge] the first time. Now he had a second bite at the apple.”

Even though Kotz concluded that Barasch likely violated federal conflict-of-interest laws, the SEC did absolutely nothing. It did not refer Kotz’s findings to the bar associations, as per his recommendation. Nor did it take any disciplinary action against Barasch. This was because the SEC’s then general counsel David Becker overruled Kotz. As Becker saw it, even though Barasch had overseen the earlier investigation of Microtune while at the SEC, the new options-backdating case was different enough to conclude that Barasch had not violated conflict-of-interest regulations, according to previously confidential SEC files. Because, in Becker’s view, there was no conflict of interest, Barasch did not deserve to be punished for having circumvented the SEC’s ethics counsel. Another former senior SEC official told me, “What harm could have come from someone simply examining the evidence? Becker’s decision foreclosed even that possibility.”

Six former SEC officials told me in interviews that it was suspicious that Barasch had never sought the advice of the SEC ethics counsel. “It is the first call that I make—that any of us make—when we are considering a representation,” one official put it succinctly. “It takes a few minutes to make the call, and you are in the clear if you get approval. It’s necessary to do if you want to cover yourself. There is just too much downside to your reputation, your career, and, most of all, your firm.”

Another former SEC attorney, who worked with Barasch, told me, “The only reason that you would not check is because you thought the answer might be no and you wouldn’t be able to do the representation. The only reason you would not check with the ethics office first is if you were trying to get around the system… Barasch agreed to represent Microtune without talking to the [SEC] ethics office. He represented Microtune without asking the ethics office. He didn’t in the first case because he knew the answer would be no. He didn’t in the second case because he knew there was a chance he would be told no.”

Barasch’s actions in regard to his representation of Microtune were strikingly similar to his alleged illegal representation of Stanford. In the case of Microtune, Barasch never contacted the SEC ethics counsel at all. In the case of Stanford, shortly after leaving the SEC in 2005, Barasch had sought to represent Stanford and sought out guidance from the SEC ethics counsel about whether he would be allowed to do so—only to be told by the counsel that he could not represent Stanford. Barasch complied. 

In 2006, the SEC would intensify its investigation of Stanford, and in turn Stanford sought out Barasch to represent him. This time, however, Barasch simply began representing Stanford without seeking consent from the SEC’s ethics counsel. Barasch’s representation only ended when he called a former colleague to discuss the case, causing an uproar among several of Barasch’s former colleagues in the SEC’s Dallas–Fort Worth office. Barasch ended his representation of Stanford only when the ethics counsel told him that to continue to do so would be flat-out illegal.

But Barasch’s alleged ethical lapses were potentially profitable (in the case of Stanford) and actually profitable (in the case of Microtune, Andrew Kurth earned $1.5 million). Barasch told his law partners that he stood to make as much as $2 million or more if Andrews Kurth defended Stanford before the SEC, according to a former firm employee.

“People ask why corporations are given a slap on the wrist,” a former SEC litigation attorney told me in an interview. “Well, look at the regulators—and how they are regulators. If the SEC gives a slap on the wrist to someone powerful on Wall Street, look at the slap on the wrist for the regulators. Spencer Barasch and Andrews Kurth stood to earn millions if they represented Stanford. Barasch’s punishment: a $50,000 fine. You tell me they made $1.5 million from Microtune. Nobody even got in trouble for that one.”

Many enforcement attorneys who still work for the SEC, or have since left, feel similarly. But those who continue to work there are not allowed to voice their criticisms publicly. And many of those who have left the SEC are loath to publicly make such comments, because once in private practice they have to represent clients before the Commission.     

Thus, it was left to one of the SEC’s most respected trial counselors, James Kidney, to say what his colleagues could not and cannot. Kidney worked as a lawyer for the SEC but never went through the revolving door, making him one of the rare enforcement officials who is able to speak freely. After a long and distinguished career, Kidney gave a poignant speech at his retirement party on March 27 of this year, in which he inexorably tied the SEC’s tepid response to bringing cases against the powerful to its conflict-of-interest revolving door. Kidney told his former colleagues:

The revolving door is a very serious problem. I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses, whose names we all know, who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket. They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the Commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances… Don’t take risks where risk would count. That is not the intended message from the ticket punchers, of course, but it is the one I got on the occasions when I was involved in a high-profile case or two. The revolving door doesn’t push the agency’s enforcement envelope very often or very far.

The attitude trickles down the ranks… It is no surprise that we lose our best and brightest, as they see no place to go in the agency and eventually decide they are just going to get their own ticket to a law firm or a corporate job punched. They see an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors. On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement—risky enforcement—is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.

As the "revolving door" spins, investors lose.

Just as Barasch was preparing to leave the SEC, Andrews Kurth was facing legal problems of its own. The firm was under investigation by the SEC for legal advice it had given to the failed energy giant Enron. The firm’s partners were anxious for any word as to whether the SEC might bring charges.

Barasch told his soon-to-be law partners that before he could formally accept their offer, he wanted to go to Washington, DC, to visit with his superiors and see whether they were fine with his leaving. According to confidential emails, Barasch worried that some at the agency might think he was simply too valuable to leave. If told so in DC, Barasch informed his suitors at Andrews Kurth, he might just have to stay.

Several of Barasch’s former SEC colleagues told me that this was a bit of puffery at the expense of truth: “There is nobody at the SEC who doesn’t leave whenever they want. There is no such thing as anyone, even the chairwoman, who is not free to leave.” Another said, “Nobody was going to tell Spencer Barasch that he was too important to leave. That's just not even close to reality.”

According to the same batch of confidential emails, Barasch then informed his soon-to-be colleagues at Andrews Kurth that one of the persons he was seeing in DC—to ask permission to leave the agency—was Linda Thomsen, the then deputy enforcement chief, who also happened to be the head of the SEC’s Enron task force. In other words, she was the single person who not only knew but would make the final decision as to whether the SEC would sue Andrews Kurth for its Enron work.

Just as Barasch was about to leave for the capital, Jerry Beane, a senior partner at Andrews Kurth, who had been working to lure Barasch from the SEC, sent Barasch an email detailing various litigations against the firm under the heading “Update Concerning Enron Litigation—ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE.”

Beane wrote in the email: “As we have previously reported to you, the Firm is a defendant in two Enron-related lawsuits pending in federal district court in Houston…” At one point in the email, Beane bleakly reported that Enron stockholders were alleging that Andrews Kurth assisted Enron in transactions that allegedly allowed Enron to distort its financial condition. Beane wrote: “Although we hope otherwise and firmly believe that the shareholders have not plead a cause of action under federal securities laws, it may well be that [the federal judge hearing the case] rules… that the pleadings in the… case sufficiently allege a course of action against us.”

The following day, Andrews Kurth managing partner Harold Ayers—who had been copied on Beane's email to Barasch—sent a two-word email to both of them, simply asking, “Any word?”

Ayers’s question suggests that he and others at Andrews Kurth might have been asking about whether their law firm was going to be sued for their Enron work. Or it could be interpreted as asking whether Barasch had been given the go-ahead by the SEC to leave and join the firm.

A subsequent email suggests that Ayers believed that Barasch might learn something about the SEC’s plans as to whether or not to sue Andrews Kurth over its Enron work.

On February 27, Ayers emailed several of his law partners, writing: 

I talked to Spence this evening. All systems are go for him leaving the SEC and joining AK. He will be in DC on Wednesday thru Friday of this coming week. He will be telling the SEC folks that he is leaving to go to AK. One of the people he will be talking to is the head of the Enron task force. Spence had some questions about the upcoming meeting between AK and the SEC. I told him that Ross [another Andrews Kurth partner] was the best person to provide the details. There is no problem with Spence. He just wants to respond if there is any question of comment. Ross, can you call Spence at his office on Monday or Tuesday to discuss?

Ultimately, the SEC did not sue Andrews Kurth for its Enron work.

But in January 2007, Andrews Kurth agreed to pay Enron’s bankruptcy estate $18.5 million for alleged malpractice committed by the firm. Earlier, Neil Baston, a court-appointed examiner responsible for distributing money to Enron’s creditors and defrauded investors, stated in a report to the court that an examiner he retained “concluded that there is sufficient evidence from which a fact-finder could determine that Andrews Kurth committed malpractice” and violated Texas bar-association rules while representing Enron.

Under terms of the agreement to settle the civil Enron litigation, Andrews Kurth did not admit any wrongdoing. At the time, Harold Ayers was quoted as saying, “We have continuously denied wrongdoing and culpability with respect to our work for Enron… We felt, though, after the passage of five years, that it was expedient to enter into the settlement to put this matter behind us.”

Hello Young Comic Lovers,

This is the premier of VICE's new weekly comic, Flowertown USA, by Rick Altergott. Rick is best known for his series Doofus, which is one of the funniest comics about two creeps who are part of a men's masturbation society and steal their neighbors underwear for their bizarre "naked games" ever created. Get it from Fantagraphics, you won't regret it.

Right around the time that a lot of Rick's comic peers were striking it rich Rick kinda receded from the spotlight and focused on his domestic life. I've been trying to lure Rick back into comics for years and have finally succeeded. Flowertown USA is about a quaint American town populated by the most repulsive oddballs you can imagine. It's a lot like an early John Waters movie. I hope you love it, 

VICE's Art Editor,

Nick Gazin

Are all the men in town really such creeps? Check back next Tuesday for the next installment of Flowertown, USA.

Photos by Giles Clarke/Getty Images

Earlier this year, I met Dr. Jorge Chiu at a murder scene while I was documenting the Bomberos Voluntarios, the volunteer paramedics of Guatemala City. A man had been shot dead on the street, and a plastic tarp had been placed over the body as blood slowly pooled in the cracks of the pavement.

While we all waited for the cops to arrive and secure the scene, Chiu came over to me and introduced himself. He told me that he was the only fully qualified doctor going to scenes like this with the volunteers, which, given the extreme violence in this city, is a job that most people would expect to get paid for. Chiu, who is obviously not most people, is out here risking his life nightly for nothing.

A body lies on the pavement in Guatemala City.

Guatemala City’s metro area is the largest in Central America (population estimates vary widely, but there are somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million people here), and the nation is one of the most violent on Earth. According to the US State Department, in 2012 there were about 100 murders a week in the country of 15 million, and as many as 60 percent of Guatemalans own a gun. Put a heavily armed populace together with a region where gang warfare and drug trafficking are rampant, add a corrupt, incompetent police force and the problems that come along with widespread poverty, and you get a lot of corpses in the streets. Chiu is a very busy man.

The doctor offered me a lift back to the fire station where he was based. As we drove, another call came in, and we rushed to another scene. Thus began my journey into Chiu’s gruesome, adrenaline-fueled world, and for the next ten days I followed him and recorded his harrowing work.

Chiu, a native Guatemalan, went to medical school at Francisco Marroquín University, in Guatemala City, and eventually became a thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon. He did a couple stints at the famed Cleveland Clinic and lived in the US from 2003 to 2007 and from 2011 to 2012, along the way picking up training as a firefighter. Three years ago he returned to his homeland, where he spends his days as the head of the cardiovascular department at the Guatemala military medical center and his nights as the subdirector of the country’s volunteer EMT service, an unpaid position that has him responding to calls and training volunteer medics, many of whom come in with little to no medical experience.

A man being treated for injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident while his mother looks on.

On the evenings I spent with him, we drove around in his battered Land Cruiser, which was rammed to the gills with medical gear, most of it from donors overseas. Chiu’s radios were tuned to frequencies used by paramedics, firefighters, and the police. There was a cacophony of chatter crackling over the lines at all times—there are way too many assaults, accidents, and murders for the government-funded emergency services to take care of, so it falls to volunteers, to pick up the slack.

“Much of our work happens before the police arrive at the scenes,” Chiu told me. The medics get there as early as possible, and much of the time there’s a chance that the violence isn’t over yet. “We just have to pack and run, as the killers are still in the area,” Chiu said.

There are 13 Bomberos Voluntarios teams in the Guatemala City area. Chiu tries to teach them new skills on quiet nights, though there aren’t many of those—he estimates there are 10 to 15 gunshot wounds in the city every weekday, and that’s on top of the fires, car wrecks, and cases of fatal drunkenness they have to deal with. On weekends, there can be as many as 30 shootings a day. He personally responds to 20 to 30 calls in a typical week.

A volunteer medic takes a brief rest on his break.

When I asked about the dangers of the job, Chiu told me about the time two years ago he pulled up to a crime scene on the outskirts of the city.

“It was a mess. There were bodies everywhere,” he recalled. “Dispatch had told me that it had been a multiple shooting, and units from all over town were responding. As I got out of my truck, I heard a loud crack, and the next thing I knew, I had blood pouring down into my boots. I’d been shot. This is the shit we deal with here in Guatemala City!”

For more on Chiu and his teams of medics, check out the next episode of the series VICE Profiles, premiering on VICE.com this summer.

See more of Giles Clarke's work on his website.

Larry Tamblyn is one of the original members of the Standells, a group that recorded what many consider to be the first punk song, “Dirty Water,” a 1965 ditty about how Boston is a shit hole. Larry is a great guy who grew up in LA in a showbiz family—his brother Russ was a movie star who appeared in West Side Story, The Boy with Green Hair, Gun Crazy, and alongside Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride. Russ also choreographed Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock, which led to Larry obtaining the King’s home phone number, making him extremely popular with the girls at school.

In honor of the Standells spring 2014 tour, Larry and I chatted on the phone about band’s roller-coaster ride of a career. If you’ve never seen the Standells live, write down the tour date that’s closest to your house and then go see them play. You’ll be glad you did.

THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA

I was a graduate of Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, California, and shortly after I graduated I was introduced to a couple of guys, Tony Valentino and Jody Rich. We formed this group. I came up with the name Standells because we were hitting a lot of booking agent’s—and doing a lot of standing around, ha, ha, ha, and that’s how the name arrived:

So we finally found a booking agency and the first major gig they got us was at the Oasis Club in Hawaii. It was me, Tony, Jody, and a 15-year-old kid named Benny King. It was my first time away from home really. I was 19 at the time and it was quite an experience. The Standells alternated with a complete Japanese floor show that had comedians, musicians, dancers—and the Standells came on right after the stripper.

The stripper’s name was Mickey Moto—they brought all the entertainers in from Japan, and I learned years later that that they were using the girls as hookers. The club would lock them into their apartment and we would sneak them out and get them into our rooms, ya know? It was really a high for us to be able to sneak the girls out [laughs].

We were over at the Oasis Club for four months. During that time we went through a lot of transformations—the most dramatic one being that Jody, who was this little guy and the brains of the outfit—turned into this Napoleonic type of character.

Jody was about eight years older than the rest of us, and he was married. He was really jealous of the three of us because we had a lot of girls running in and out of our apartment on Waikiki Beach. Jody didn’t have a lot of the freedoms that we did, and he seemed to want to punish us. So he clamped down on us and implemented a curfew for us to be in at a certain time every night and he made us spit shine his shoes. It was awful!

Tony and I roomed together and Jody and Benny roomed together, and we used to bring girls up there all the time—but the problem was is we found out we had another tenant there—a rat. And he’d always make his appearance when we had girls over, and I’m not exaggerating—he’d always come right out when the girls were there—and they’d scream and run out of the apartment. So you can just imagine how pissed off we were at this rat, ya know? Not so much for eating our food, but for scaring the chicks away.

We finally named the rat Fred, because Fred rhymes with dead, as in, “Fred you’re gonna be dead.”

Anyway, this went on for a good month where Fred would make his appearance and just chase the girls away. So one night, at about two o’clock in the morning, I came back and turned on the radio and Fred must have thought we had girls over there because he kept running out. But this time there was no distraction—and I proceeded to chase him around the apartment and finally he runs into the bathroom and he gets to the tub and he can’t go anyplace—so he turns around and I am kneeling down, in my skivvies with a butcher knife and I’m looking at this rodent and all the sudden he flashes his incisors at me and I go, “WHOA!”

So I back out, and I leave the door cracked open a little bit so I can watch Fred while I’m rethinking my strategy. So there’s a Kleenex box next to the toilet and he jumps inside the Kleenex box—and I go running in, grab the Kleenex box with Fred in it and throw it in the toilet. Now I’m looking at him and saying, “Have you suffered enough or what? Hasn’t this been a great pay-back? We’ve tortured you, like you’ve tortured us!”

Well Fred looked up at me with these really sad eyes and I’m thinking, “You know what? As much as he’s done, I can’t do this—I can’t kill ‘em.” So I grabbed a towel and went in and grabbed Fred and took him a good distance from the apartment and let him loose. I never saw him again, but boy, I could sense his presence on several occasions when we had chicks at the apartment!

Anyway, as time went on, Jody just started going crazier and crazier—he would take amphetamines and stay up all night and come up with these insane ideas about doing songs and they didn’t jive, ya know? So what happened was—Jody was high on Bennies and he had long since just intimidated the poor drummer, really browbeat him until he went home to his parents. So we had to get a drummer and actually we got the drummer from the Japanese show, he did double duty. And as Jody was getting more and more difficult—he was just impossible—and one night he blew up and he fired Tony and me.

So we said, “Okay,” ya know?

Basically, what he was doing was firing himself, because he no longer had a band. So what was he gonna do? Jody got back with us, but he didn’t apologize or anything, he just said, “Well let’s just stick it out…”

And we did, but as soon as we got back in the States, we parted ways with Jody.

THE MUNSTERS

When we got back to the States, we reformed the group and brought in Gary Leeds and Garry Lane to replace Jody Rich and Benny King. Then we started playing in this nightclub in Hollywood called the Peppermint West. The club was kind of a franchise of the Peppermint Lounge in New York, and then Gary Leeds left us—he gave us some bullshit story about how he was trapped and was going into the army. But that was nonsense—he formed a bunch of groups before he became “Gary Walker” in the Walker Brothers.

So when Gary left, we auditioned drummers, but none of them were quite the right, until this young punk came walking by the name of Dick Dodd. Dick was with a couple of surf groups and he heard about Gary leaving the Standells and he came in and auditioned for us. We’d heard he was a former Mousekeeter, ya know, on the Mickey Mouse Club on TV and he really got razzed about that. But then he sat down behind the drums and just blew us away with his drumming. Then he sang—and that even blew me away more! I just said, “WOW!”

Dick had all of two weeks to catch up, learn our material and he did a great job. But he was kind of a young punk; he had a bit of an attitude, with a lot that punk style, before there was even a name for it. But we razzed him about being a Mouseketeer before we heard him play, and he was pretty embarrassed about it, but he wasn’t a regular on the Mickey Mouse Club. Interestingly, there was another guy on that show by the name of Jimmy Dodd and people thought he was a relative, but Dick wasn’t. They just happened to have the same last name. Coincidently, I also became friends with Cubby O’Brien—who was a regular Mouseketeer on the Mickey Mouse Club—and was also a great drummer. Cubby sat in with me one night and played drums way back when in the 50s—so the Mickey Mouse Club provided the world with a lot of drummers, ha, ha, ha!

So we razzed Dick about being a Mouseketeer until he sat down behind the drums and man, did he kick ass, our mouths dropped open. He was so good!

Dick was such a good singer that that he kind of overshadowed me there for a little while, but that was okay. I was always looking out for what was best for the group. I did almost all the lead singing on our first album, The Standells in Person at PJ’s, and Dick sang a couple of songs on that—“What Have I Got On My Own,” and “Help Yourself,” which got some airplay as well, ya know?  

We did The Munsters back in 1965 before we were ever had a hit record, and, by then, the Beatles had hit big and the producers were looking for a group like the Beatles to be on the TV show. For me, doing The Munsters was the biggest thrill ever, cause I was a fan of The Munsters, I used to watch it every week! I loved that show!

Originally were gonna have us be a fictional group, but then decided that they’d just use the Standells name. It’s probably one of the most famous Munsters episodes ever and we played ourselves and we got more notoriety from that show than “Dirty Water,” cause it’s just constantly coming up.

The plot of the episode was this big rock group, “The Standells,” wanted to find a place to get hide from our fans, so we picked the Munsters home on 1313 Mocking Bird Lane because it was already run-down and we were getting charged too much money for destroying hotel rooms.

So the Munsters rent their place out to our manger and go check into a hotel for the weekend—and we move in and decide to throw a party with a bunch of hippies—but of course, they’re a bunch of beatniks really, they made them look more like beatniks than hippies, ha, ha, ha! As I said, this was 1965, and hippies weren’t as well defined then as they would later become.

One guy was playing the bongo drums, and they’re doin’ poetry; I mean, that was beatnik, rather than hippie!

So Munsters get worried about their home and decide to come back and check on us, they find there’s this big, wild party that’s going on and they’re outraged! The Munsters come in and are really going to let us have it—but they’re welcomed instead of frightening everybody. That was the twist—that everybody loved ‘em and Herman was referred to as “The Jolly Green Giant.”

So Herman Munster was asked to get up and do a poem and he got up and it was just the most ludicrous thing you’ve ever heard, since he made it up as he went along. But they had the camera on us and we had to all look like we were just really into what Herman was saying.

Actually both Herman and Lily Munster were asked to contribute something to the “hippie” party, and Lily actually sang with her own voice. Yvonne De Carlo, who played Lily, was a big Broadway star and she had a great voice. Both Herman and Lily, played by Fred Gwynne and Yvonne De Carlo were just really wonderful. Fred Gwynne was terrific, you find that a lot of established actors are really good people, ya know?

But we did not pick out the songs on The Munsters, they told us what songs to sing, and a lot of comments were made about the fact that we did, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” but that was their decision, not ours! Although we loved the Beatles dearly, it was just an odd thing to do another groups song, but we did it—plus another song that was written by Pat and Molly Vegas, “Everybody Ringo,” another song that referenced the Beatles, cause everyone was crazy for them.

I had a speaking line on that episode where I was meeting with our manger and they wanted me to eat a banana for some reason at the same time. Somehow the banana and me just didn’t jive, and I just couldn’t get through the lines. It got so to where I was putting the banana, not in my mouth, but on my nose, ya know? I probably went though at least half a dozen bananas before we finally got that scene done and I was really sick that night.

I'M GONNA TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT MY TOWN

When we met our producer, Ed Cobb, he really seemed to have a feel for what we were into, so he collaborated with us. Ed had this song that he wrote and he presented it to us, but we weren’t too impressed with it. It was called, “Dirty Water,” and it was just a standard love song, ya know, a 32 bar blues song.

I never heard directly from Ed what the song was about. He was very private and didn’t talk a lot about personal things, but we heard though a lot of people that he had actually gone to Boston and gotten mugged there, as the story goes, and he wrote about it, so that’s what “Dirty Water” was about.

So we said, “We’ll tell ya what, Ed: let us take it and work with it and rearrange it.”

And so we came up with all these things. What really made it a hit was the guitar riff that Tony came up with that starts the song off—that famous guitar riff that everybody knows. And Dick Dodd actually wrote a lot of the lyrics—he wrote all of the famous asides like, “I’m gonna tell you a story about my town, I’m gonna tell you a big fat story baby…” He wrote all that—but none of us got any writing credit!

Then Ed Cobb listed his friend, Lincoln Mayorga, as doing the musical arrangements on the record, and didn’t list us! And Lincoln never set foot in the studio! Except, back then, it wasn’t a studio, it was a garage. It was Armon Snyder’s first studio that he built in his garage, and it was a funky place with fiberglass on the walls that weren’t covered. We recorded it on three track and we ping-ponged all of the instruments. You know what ping ponging is?

Ping-ponging is when you play back one track and you record along with it onto another track, so all the instruments were doubled. And the second time though, Dick actually played mallets on the bass drum, so that’s why we had that wonderful base drum sound. Then we added the background vocals and the lead vocal so it was all done on three tracks, in a garage and thus, “garage rock” was born. Armon Snyder had more hits out of that garage—Paul Revere & the Raiders early stuff was done there and a bunch of other 60s groups.

About a month or so after we finished recording the single, Dick Dodd left the Standells. I can’t tell you why he left the group, I guess he wasn’t too happy with the way we sounded, and he was always complaining about Tony Valentine’s guitar playing. I don’t even think he even told me he was leaving. He told one of the other guys, I don’t remember him telling me directly. He joined some other rock group called the Ravens, and whatever they were doing was where his head was at.

See, after we recorded it, we completely forgot about “Dirty Water,” we just thought it was going to be another recording. We had no idea it would take off like it did and it wasn’t until months later—about nine months later—that the song really started getting action. It was sometime around late 1965 or early 1966 that the song started getting radio airplay—and as soon as it started getting attention, of course Dick wanted back in the group.

I’d brought Dewey Martin in to replace Dick Dodd, and Dewey had a great voice—a real ballsy voice. Dewey would later become famous as Buffalo Springfield’s drummer, and I really liked him, but the other two guys in the band didn’t care for him that much. So the other guys were happy to have Dick back because they didn’t like Dewy. But I wasn’t happy to have Dick back because there was all this kind of animosity between him and the guitar player and I didn’t wanna be in the middle of it anymore. And Dick always seemed to have an attitude about something. Even though later Dick became my very good friend, back then it was kind of tough, because he really had this punk attitude—so I wasn’t really glad to see him back.

I had to tell Dewey that Dick was coming back. I said, “You know Dick’s on the record, and “Dirty Water’s” starting to happen,” and that he was out of the group. Dewey was pretty cool about it. So he left and Dick was there the following night. So it worked out.

We were playing at a nightclub in San Jose when all of this went down, the club was a biker bar and it was kind of a wild place—there would be fist fights every night. And the president of the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels in San Jose was in there every night with his fellow gang members—and he and I became friends. Believe it or not, the president’s name was “Fuckup,” and how I happened to become friends with him is that I saved him one night from getting hit over the head with a beer bottle. There was a fight one night—there were fights there every night—but on this night I got Fuckup’s attention before this guy was going to hit him over the head with a beer bottle.

So Fuckup and I became friends and he gave me his business card that actually said, “Fuckup, Hell’s Angels,” and he said if you ever get into any trouble you just show this card. So I put his card in my wallet and forgot about it. Well, years later, I was standing outside of a recording studio and a couple of these biker chicks came up and started hassling me. I thought they were going to roll me, they were big chicks—they were tough biker chicks and I didn’t know what to do, ya know?

So I pulled out Fuckup’s card and I showed it to ‘em and they just bowed down; they were in awe! Fuckup, he was a legend to other bikers! So instead of instead of mugging me these girls became my friends! That was my “Get-Out-of-Jail-Free” card!

TOURING WITH THE STONES

I think we were in LA we heard “Dirty Water” the first time on the radio. No, I take it back; we were on tour back east when we heard it. See, it went to Number One in Florida—in Orlando and then straight from there to Miami and that’s where it started getting noticed. It wasn’t even on the charts yet, hardly. So we went from playing the Esquire Club in Seattle, ya know, we went from playing gig to gig—to arriving in Orlando on a plane with a screaming mob of teenagers waiting for us.

You talk about a shift, I mean, we went, “WOW! Are they here for us?”

They were all screaming, tons of kids and disk jockeys waiting for us and that was quite something. We toured up and down Florida: Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville—I mean all over the place. The highest “Dirty Water” showed on the Billboard Charts was Number Eight, but there were other magazines at that time that showed it higher, like Cash Box showed it as Number Eight too, but Record World showed it as Number One. They all just had different ways of measuring sales.

The single of “Dirty Water” was recorded in 1965 and the Standells album, Dirty Water, was recorded in 1966. See, when “Dirty Water” started rising on the national charts—it broke in Miami, and then spread from one state to the next, so it was then decided that we had to have an album to capitalize on the success of the single.

So Ed Cobb flew up to Seattle where we recorded the Dirty Water album. We hadn’t recorded with him since the single, so we were glad to see him. We went into Kearny Barton’s Audio Recording Studio in Seattle, the famous studio where some of the Sonics records were recorded. We did the Standells first album in about three days and it was probably a four track studio. We were presented with a lot of the songs by local artists like Jim Valley, who wrote “Little Sally Tease” and eventually joined Paul Revere & the Raiders.

Once “Dirty Water” became a hit, we toured with both Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rolling Stones—and the Stones were a great group back then and one of my favorites. We flew in this charter airline with the Stones and the plane could have flown without the engines because they were so high. The Stones really lived up to their bad-boy of rock ‘n’ roll image, especially Mick Jagger, I’m surprised he’s lived this long.

On one of those flights we were up around twenty thousand feet, in a two-engine jet, and the pressure window on the plane cracked. You never saw a bunch of guys that were so stoned sober up so fast! The pilot put the plane into a steep dive, at about a 45-degree angle, because the air pressure dropped—and I wasn’t frightened as much as amused—as I watched the Stones sober up real quick.

We did some concerts in stadiums with the Stones where the kids just went wild. In fact, they had riots at the Boston concert that we did with them. The Stones were up there playing and the crowd started rushing he stage and the security people fired tear gas at the kids and it was pretty scary. That was probably scarier than when the plane went into that steep dive.

And we were caught right in the middle of this riot!

We had to cut the concert short and we were on the bus—the Stones had a limousine—but the rest of us were on buses. It was the Standells, the McCoys and the Tradewinds who were on that tour with the Stones—and we had to drive through that tear gas—and I wanna tell you that was pretty potent stuff. It was like a warzone.

When the Stones flew, they were just alone with the roadies. They never brought along girls, but they certainly had a number of them waiting for them at the different stops. There were literally thousands of groupies running around the halls of our hotels—and, as a matter of fact, we used to call it the “Groupie Stampede!” You could here their little feet running after us, like “Chhhssssss,” so getting girls for anybody was not a problem cause they pretty much threw themselves at the groups. So there was never a case where they took one of those girls with them on tour.

I was invited to dinner with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones one night and they ordered these London steak dinners, but I was still in my 20s and I used to pour ketchup on everything. So we’re all sitting around their hotel room and they brought the food in and I asked for some ketchup and poured it on my steak. Mick Jagger just looked at me and said, “Fuckin’ Yank!”

But the three of them pretty much kept to themselves. I was a lot closer to Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. And I was a lot closer to the McCoy’s, who had a hit with “Hang On Sloopy.” One time when we were on tour, we went to New York and we thought we’d buy some new outfits at this store in Greenwich Village. So we went into the store and we said we’re looking for some outfits, and the clerk grabbed some suits and said, “I have the perfect thing, these just came in.”

And we said, “Did any other rock group get these suits?”

The guy said, “Oh no, you’ll be the only ones. These are all we have.” So we bought them and we board the plane and in walks the McCoy’s with the same suits! I was good friends with Rick Derringer and Randy, so we arranged for a schedule where we’d wear the suit jackets one day and they would wear them the next.

It was on that Stones tour, where we went from rioting, screaming crowds, with teenagers running up on the stage and trying to grab at you—and then we played in Salt Lake City, Utah, and as radical as those wild shows were, this was completely opposite. The Stones were met with polite applause and Mick Jagger started cussing the audience, saying, “Fuckin’ Mormons!” Yeah, he was really pissed off about it, because his whole act was very sexual. I know that he would put something down his pants to make him look like he had a lot more equipment than he did.

TRY IT

“Try It,” was about our fourth recording, it was right after we did “Riot On Sunset Strip” and Billboard Magazine had picked it to be our next big hit. We thought for sure it was going to climb the charts, but right about that time, this man from Texas, by the name of Gordon McClendon, who was the owner of radio station KLIS and a big company that programmed for a number of radio stations, decided to form this committee to judge record lyrics and for some reason he picked out song “Try It” for being obscene and encouraging young girls to have sex.

Gordon was very conservative, and a born-again Christian, I believe, and he went on national campaign about our record “Try It,” saying, “This record is a classic example of what we call obscene, and we’re not going to play it on any of our stations and we advise other radio stations not to play it as well.”

That stopped the record dead cold, it mean it was number one on a lot of markets and all the sudden they refused to play it anymore. In Los Angeles for instance, it was number one on KLRA, and KHJ refused to play it—so it stopped our song dead in it’s tracks. I mean, it was probably no more encouraging to a girl to have sex than “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” ya know? The lyrics were, “By the way that you look I can tell that you want some action / Action is my middle name / Come over here pretty girl I’ll give you satisfaction / But two are needed for this game / I’ll give you sweet love you’ve never had before.”

How tame is that?

At this time, Art Linkletter had a TV show called House Party and he had a segment on it called “Let’s Talk,” where he’d have on different factions debating each other on issues and had the Standells on debating Gordon McClendon. We were really pissed, to say the least because we thought it was going to be a hit record, and so did everybody else and we were just beside ourselves. Anyway, Art Linkletter heard about him banning our record and decided to have us on the show debating McClendon and we were pretty well prepared and we went on the show. They had this debate at the Hullabaloo Club, which was a big teenage nightclub that was very popular back then and later became the Aquarius Theater, and we used to play there with the Buffalo Springfield and other groups.

The place was chocked full of teenagers; so you couldn’t ask for a better audience for the Standells. Word got out to all those kids, I don’t know how, maybe through our manager about some of Gordon’s misdeeds and during the debate, somebody would shout out, “What about the baseball games, McClendon?”

And his face would get all red because it was known that his radio station did “live” broadcasts of baseball games that the announcer’s didn’t even go to. So we massacred him in this debate, and literally made him look like the fool that he was, because it was so ludicrous. We brought up the fact that the Rolling Stones had “Let’s Spend The Night Together,” what does that mean, ya know? But I really got him when I said, “What about the song ‘Birds Do It, Bees Do It’? What does that mean?”

Immediately everybody roared, and I said, “What are they referring to, ‘Birds do it, bees do it, let’s fall in love?’”

He couldn’t answer that, of course, but they cut that out in the editing, but everyone who was in the audience knew we massacred him. I mean his face was red throughout most of it. He came marching in the building with what looked like Secret Service Agents surrounding him, all these guy dressed in suits with the ear pieces, an army of bodyguards.

But it was all for naught, the record was destroyed—people just wouldn’t play it even though it was selling, and, I think, that was probably the beginning of the end for The Standells.

Catch the Standells on tour this spring:

4/27- Tremont Music Hall – Charlotte, NC 
4/28 – Local 506 – Chapel, Hill, NC
4/29 – Black Cat – Washington, DC
4/30 – BB King's – Lucille’s - 2 shows – New York City, NY
5/2 - Open Arts Stage - Bordentown, NJ
5/3 - Brighton Bar - Long Branch, NJ
5/4 – Iron Horse Music Hall – North Hampton, MA
5/5 – Brighton Music Hall – Boston, MA
5/6 - Cafe Nine - New Haven CT
5/7 - The Brickhouse - Dover, NH
5/8 – Lovin Cup – Rochester, NY
5/10 – Beachland Tavern – Cleveland, OH
5/11 – The Magic Bag – Ferndale (Detroit), MI
5/13 – Mayne Stage – Chicago, IL
5/14 – Shank Hall – Milwaukee, WI
5/16 – Knickerbockers – Lincoln, NE
5/18 – Herman’s Hideaway – Denver, CO
5/21 – Cheyenne Saloon – North Las Vegas, NV

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

Previously: Scott Asheton, Iggy Pop's Brother in Noise

The WIPP team surveying the conditions of the Salt Shaft Station. Photos courtesy of WIPP.
Canada’s federal government is in the process of reviewing a proposal by the Ontario Power Generation to build a deep geologic repository (DGR) where they can stash a bunch of radioactive nuclear waste. The planned DGR would house low and intermediate level waste like contaminated mops and irradiated components from nuclear reactors 680 metres below ground at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. The facility would reside in the municipality of Kincardine, ON, which is situated a mere 1.2 kilometres from Lake Huron. The proposed nuclear dump's proximity to a major water supply is causing quite the stir, as organizations, individuals, and local governments are rallying against the plan.

The issue, say those against OPG’s proposal, is not local or regional, but international: 40 million Americans and Canadians in the Great Lakes Basin would be affected in the event of an accident. Beverly Fernandez, spokesperson for Stop The Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, one of the many environmental groups opposed to the DGR project, says that people on both sides of the border need to be concerned. “It’s incredibly important that this issue reaches as many people as possible. The fact that this thing is located right on the shore of the Great Lakes means that the community involved is the US and Canada. This is a national and international issue, and probably one of the most important issues of our time.”

The late William Fyfe, geologist and professor emeritus in the department of earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario, also had concerns about the location of the site. Fyfe, who was widely regarded as one of the world’s eminent geochemists and an international consultant on nuclear waste management, was one of the first experts to denounce the project.

"It is universally acknowledged that nuclear waste must be kept away from water circulating through the environment of living things,” Fyfe acknowledged before his death last November, “since water is seen as the main vehicle for eventual dissolution and dissemination of radiotoxic pollutants."

A recent release of radiation detected at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, afflicted 21 workers, all of whom tested positive for internal contamination. The incident had the effect of underlining concern for OPG’s DGR project north of the border. The OPG has since backed away from claims its plan was in part modeled after the New Mexico site but, says Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Safety Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center, it did initially boast of the similarities between the two.

“OPG referred very specifically to WIPP as similar to what they were going to be doing. They said that the facility that exists in the world most similar to what they were doing, and the facility they’ve learned a lot from, is the WIPP site.”

The facility, if approved, would be only the world’s fourth deep geologic repository. The other three have not created a culture of confidence around the concept of burying nuclear waste. In fact, it’s just the opposite: WIPP and two German-based DGRs have brought about disaster with radioactive leaks and structural deterioration costing billions of euros in remediation.

“It’s troubling that of the three examples in the world, all three have failed,” says Hancock. “That should raise significant concerns about OPG being confident that, based on the international experience, their facility would work just fine. The international experience is not the way OPG describes it.”

OPG’s plan involves a site that will house 200,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste over 40 or so years. Though there is no precedent for burying nuclear waste in limestone, and the ability of shale rock to block or slow radionuclides from the repository is unproven, the waste would be placed in caverns carved out of limestone. The dump would then be sealed with a mixture of sand and clay and concrete, and not be monitored for leaks after a decade of its closure. Some of the radioactive intermediate waste would remain active for over 100,000 years.



Members of the WIPP team, discussing their undeground excurison.
While the OPG seems to believe it can predict the future with their plan, experts who have nothing to gain from the project are skeptical. When dealing with radioactive waste and its potential impact on geological structures over time, no scientist on the planet has the expertise to speak in absolutes.

Stranger still is that rather than use measurements from real-world nuclear facilities, the OPG instead relied on theoretical models to assess the potential levels of the radioactivity of material to be stored at the DGR site. As a scientist, Dr. Frank Greening’s contention with this point is palpable.

“I’ve asked OPG why they chose to calculate these numbers rather than look at the analyses that have been done. Dozens and dozens of these [pressure tubes surrounding uranium fuel in a nuclear reactor] have been analyzed in great detail, and they chose not to look at those numbers. They chose to calculate them, and they got it wrong.”

A PhD in chemistry and former employee of Ontario Hydro, then OPG, for over 30 years, Greening lends an insider’s wisdom to the many groups, governments and people rallying against the DGR. In a 16-page letter recently addressed to the government panel reviewing the project, he pointed out that the estimated levels of radioactivity in the waste to be buried at the proposed facility were, “seriously underestimated, sometimes by factors of more than 100.”

Many of the claims that have been reserved for OPG are also being leveled at the Nuclear Waste Management Organization. Like the OPG plan to bury low and medium level radioactive waste, the NWMO’s proposal for a deep geologic repository to store high level nuclear material is being met with vehement opposition.

Brennain Lloyd, project coordinator for Northwatch, a Northern Ontario-based coalition of environmental groups, believes that if the federal panel approves OPG’s DGR, the NWMO’s so-called DGR2 will not be far behind.

“We really think the industry’s interest in burying the low and intermediate level waste is to get a precedent for nuclear waste burial. And getting an approval to bury low and intermediate level waste will pave the way in their thinking for the burial of high level.”

The language being used to describe the relationship between the NWMO project and municipalities who could play the role of host is contestant. As highlighted in a recent Toronto Star article, the aura of competition is thick.

The organization has also been accused of filling the coffers of cash-strapped communities with astronomical economic incentives to invite an insidious threat into their communities. Most of the municipalities being studied for DGR2 are in mostly poor Ontario towns that have little choice but to put people at risk if they wish to stay afloat fiscally.

“There is no scientific basis for these site selections,” says Lloyd. “These are small communities. They’ve got big infrastructure challenges, a dwindling tax base and the industry is changing, so talk about enticement.”

The NWMO’s Michael Krizanc, communication manager for the organization, disagrees. He admits some of the communities that have agreed to learn more about the DGR2 project have economic challenges, but believes others, like those in Bruce County, are affluent.

“Many of these are communities that have been involved in the natural resources industry that is subject to the commodities market, and so their economies have had ups and downs. These communities should not be out of pocket for their participation in the process. The moneys that are extended to people are all part of the ‘Learn More’ process.”

Chris Peabody, town councillor for the municipality of Brockton, a Bruce County region where DGR2 could land, believes buying support for the project is sleazy. His region has been receiving payments from OPG and the NWMO in exchange for council’s cooperation.

“Our municipality receives $45,000 a year, but the money does come with the attachment that you need to support all things nuclear waste. We don’t have a big tax base and I don’t agree with an agreement that offers cash to a municipality in return for testimony. Ethically, it’s not right in my mind.”

Though Peabody doesn’t see the selection process as a competition, he believes Brockton is one of the preferred communities for practical reasons—its proximity to the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. Again, it seems, the two projects are inextricably, troublingly, tied together. For better or worse. 

The NBA finally applied sanctions to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Sterling has been fined $2.5 million (the maximum he could be fined) and banned for life for the racist rhetoric his former girlfriend recorded and released to TMZ as retribution for a lawsuit brought against her by Sterling.

The scandal, which has diverted attention away from one of the most exciting, competitive NBA Playoffs in modern history and potentially ruined the Clippers' run at the Finals, might finally recede from the public consciousness now that Sterling has been punished. Of course, as long as he owns the team, there will still be the question of how long he'll remain a part of the league and who will take over when he's gone. 

As has been pointed out by Grantland editor-in-chief and ESPN NBA analyst Bill Simmons (and everyone else in the media), the NBA created this problem by allowing a known racist, slumlord, and asshole to be a member of their exclusive club. Not only did they do that, but former NBA Commissioner David Stern gifted Sterling the most valuable asset a basketball team can have: a star.

By vetoing Chris Paul's trade to the Los Angeles Lakers and pushing him to the Clippers, the league blessed Sterling and his franchise in an unprecedented fashion. Until these revelations, the Paul trade seemed as though it was in everyone's best interest (except for my beloved Lakers). Paul got to escape the sinking ship in Lakerland, and was paired with fellow young superstar Blake Griffin. The league also created a new marquee franchise to further milk revenue out of America's second-biggest TV market. It was win-win for the whole league, except the owner of the Clippers is a next-level piece of shit.

Photo via Flickr User Keith Allison

Now, the NBA has an embarrassment on par with finding out the piece of paper you spilled your frappacino on was the Magna Carta. This, like any other sports or entertainment scandal, is ultimately ephemeral. It will go away. Professional sports leagues like the NBA, NFL, MLB, and the NHL have weathered numerous storms and thrived anyway.

The Marge Schott racism controversy that's been referenced many times during the last few days hit baseball hard in the 1990s, and for a time seemed to sully what was considered "America's Pastime." In fact, baseball is something of a magnet for media firestorms. The 1994 players' strike wiped out the whole second half of the season and the playoffs.

The steroid troubles of the second half of that decade appeared to be a devastating hammer blow to the entire game's credibility. Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, and countless other Hall of Fame-caliber players will forever be tained by their association with performance enhancing drugs. And yet, Major League Baseball is still a multi-billion dollar industry.This too, shall pass.

Clipper Darrell at Staples Center. Photo via Wikipedia Commons.

Why am I so confident that the NBA and the Clippers can move on from this? It's because Donald Sterling, for all of his transgressions, will die one day. As harsh as that sounds, it's the truth. The man is 80 years old and looks like a bag of mashed potatoes that got run over by an ATV. If this scandal doesn't kill him, sheer inevitability will. Biology will shut his body down, and cultural evolution will kill his poisonous ideas.

Some will say the NBA's punishment was too harsh, and some will say it wasn't enough, but it really doesn't matter. Had anyone uttered the name "Marge Schott" outside of a cop bar in Cincinnati in the last 20 years until this week? How many Little League baseball players are even aware of the systemic racism that defined Major League Baseball for the better part of the 20th century? I would hazard a guess that most sports fans can't even tell you the name of the white man who owns their team.  

Fans root for teams, not owners. Clipper Darrell, the LA superfan above, doesn't wear Donald Sterling hats to Staples Center. He's a Clipper fan. Even though the Clippers won't remain the trendy club they have been the past three years, guys like Darrell will keep going to the games.

It was never about Donald Sterling. It wasn't even about winning or the "cool factor" for fans like him. Darrell was around when the team was the laughing stock of not just the NBA, but the entire sports world. Despite his dismay at Sterling's comments, he'll remain a Clipper fan because the day Donald Sterling is no longer the owner of his favorite team is closer than you'd think.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

A sperm whale shitting in the ocean. Photo by Strange Ones; all other photos by Christopher Kemp

Between 7 billion human asses and countless bird, fish, and animal butts, our planet pumps out an ungodly amount of poop every day. Few of those turds—if any—are as valuable as the mysterious and rare fudge dragons dooked out by sperm whales.

In late January, a British man named Ken Wilman found a six-pound lump of sperm whale shit (also known as ambergris) while walking his dog on the beach. Afterward, a French dealer offered him $70,000 for what was, in all seriousness, a piece of crap. Wilman's story has a precedent. In 2012, an eight-year-old boy walking with his father along a beach in England found some sperm whale butt chocolate worth $63,000. Before that, in 2006, a couple in Australia came across a 32-pound log that reportedly netted them almost $300,000.

What the fuck is going on? What makes sperm whale ass ham so damn expensive?

The reason for the price tag is that for generations, ambergris has been highly sought-after by the high-end perfume industry. Houses like Chanel and Lanvin covet this extraordinary caca for its unique bouquet and ability to bind scents to human skin.

Of course in the modern era, the use of whale byproducts for industrial purposes is widely pooh-poohed. In 1973, the United States banned the possession and trade of ambergris under the Endangered Species Act; Australia passed a similar measure in 1999. All of which has driven the ambergris market deep underground.

In order to find out more about the furtive and wildly lucrative whale-shit market, I reached out to two international dealers—one in France, the other in New Zealand. Both refused to be interviewed, with the French dealer responding, “We do not want to give any information which could reach some competitors or create new ones.”

So I did the next best thing and called the man who literally wrote the book on sperm whale butt butter. Christopher Kemp is a molecular biologist who was living and working in New Zealand in 2008 when a mysterious object washed ashore near the country’s capital, Wellington. “No one knew what it was,” Kemp told me over the phone. “Some thought it was a big block of cheese. Others said it may have been a meteorite.” But after someone suggested that it might be whale shit, crowds flocked to the beach, carving out chunks of the log with garden tools and taking them home until nothing remained.

“I was so interested, confused, and compelled to try to find out what ambergris was,” Kemp said, but the more answers he found, the more questions he had. The biologist chronicled his quest and in 2012 published Floating Gold: A Natural (And Unnatural) History of Ambergris.

I recently called Kemp to get the scoop on the numbe- one number two in the world and how you too can become a whale-shit treasure-hunter.

VICE: What’s the best way to describe ambergris?
Christopher Kemp: Ambergris is a type of whale poop. It’s not quite poop, but it has a lot in common with poop—mainly in that it comes from the same place as poop. It’s produced solely by sperm whales, and only a small percentage of them. It’s estimated that maybe one percent of the total population of sperm whales produce ambergris. Basically, sperm whales live almost exclusively on a diet of squid. Some of the large sperm whales are ingesting up to a ton of squid a day. A squid is almost completely digestible. The only thing that can’t be digested by a wale is an inner quill, called the “pen,” and the beak, which really resembles a parrot beak—very hard and durable. Now, a normal whale will digest a squid and regurgitate all the non-digestible bits into the ocean and swim on. But there’s a very small percentage that produce ambergris. Some of those beaks make it through the whale stomach, into the small intestine, where they irritate the delicate lining. In these instances, the whale’s intestine produces this fatty, cholesterol-rich secretion to bind up the beaks to prevent them from chaffing the intestinal lining. That is what will eventually become ambergris.

That’s basically the production cycle. It’s passed the same way feces would be, and then it floats around in the ocean. When it comes out, it’s black, sticky, and very fecal- and unpleasant-smelling and not really worth a great deal of money. But it starts this journey where it’s broken down by seawater, and it undergoes a molecular degradation to become something that’s really valuable. It matures and transforms over time to become a white, waxy lump that is then worth $1,000 a pound or $5,000 a pound, depending on its quality [though some reports suggest pieces can be worth much more].

Has anyone ever seen a sperm whale excrete ambergris?
No. In many respects, sperm whales are still a total mystery. Because they spend so much time a mile beneath the surface, we don’t know about lots of aspects of their lives. We don’t know how they mate, where they travel, how they get there, or when they go there. We don’t know how they communicate with one another. We don’t know how they manage to capture that many squid, and whether there’s a particular hunting technique they use. And we definitely don’t know if they pass ambergris naturally, or if it always kills them. We definitely know that it kills them sometimes, because there have been instances of whales washing ashore and a necropsy finding that the cause of death was a total obtrusion in the gut by this big boulder of immature ambergris.

How long has ambergris been in demand?
It’s clear that from written records it’s been used for at least 1,000 years, but probably well before that. There are records from the eighth and ninth centuries of it being traded by Arab traders. We know from history that it’s been used almost for every purpose. As recently as the 1700s and the early 1800s, it was used as a medicine. It was used as a tonic, a treatment for pregnant women, or as a cure for impotence and headaches. It was burned as incense across the Middle East; it was used as an herbal remedy in China. And in many cases, it was used just as a display of wealth: monarchs in Europe used to celebrate the birth of a child by presenting each other with pieces of ambergris.

Can you describe what makes ambergris so appealing?
When it first comes out of a whale, I don’t think it is that appealing. It has a sheep-dung smell to it. But as it undergoes that transformative aging process—that curing—the more aggressive fecal tones of the profile tend to diminish and more complex odors begin to come to the forefront. The older a piece of ambergris, the more different molecular compounds you get. So if you have a really aged piece of ambergris, it’s a whole bouquet of different molecular compounds you’re smelling. You start to get some pleasant aspects to it. [It smells] like old wood, or ozone—like the air that you get after a lightning storm; it smells grassy; it smells marine-y. Every piece of ambergris smells quite different because it’s been on a different journey.

There’s one piece that I remember smelling—it fit very comfortably in the palm of my hand; it was sort of the size of a small apple. It smelled almost completely like an embodiment of the sea. It was like distilling the ocean into a solid thing. You got the smell of the air around the ocean; you got the smell of the brine in the sea. It was really, really peculiar—it was an unusual experience for me. If I’d been wealthier, I would’ve purchased it.

How widely is ambergris used in the perfume industry today?
It was used previously much more than it is today. Whether or not the big perfumers like Chanel, and other big, France-based companies, still use it is sort of a mystery. They will tell you that they don’t use it. But in my book I managed to contact a French trader who buys ambergris all around the world. He won’t get on a plane for less than 45 to 50 pounds. He claimed, on the record, that he then sells to middlemen who work for Chanel. So it’s very mysterious. The perfume industry itself is a very clandestine world because they’re trying to protect their formulas. And then there’s this stigma of (A) using natural products, (B) using products from whales, and (C) using products that are poop—so you just tend to meet this stone wall. Ambergris is still sold for enormous amounts of money, so someone must be using it.

Are there professional ambergris hunters, or is it something you simply have to chance upon?
There are people in New Zealand—they’re fringe people who live on the edge of society. Because ambergris is so unpredictable, I don’t know if you could ever really say that you know you’re going to make enough money to support your family and pay your mortgage with it. But there are definitely people for whom ambergris is an important revenue stream. There are quite a few of those people, but they’re very surly. Typically, if you’re going to find a piece, it’s going to be a small piece, though there are definitely instances of people finding 200-pound boulders worth half a million or a million dollars.

If someone wanted to go out ambergris-hunting, where should they look?
If someone wanted to look for ambergris, they would start by identifying beaches that tend to accumulate a lot of other flotsam because, after all, ambergris is just very valuable flotsam. The best times for finding ambergris are after periods of sustained onshore winds and high seas, or after storm systems have passed over. You should look after high tide and walk along the high-tide line where the lighter objects have ended up. Ambergris is slightly less dense than seawater, so it floats, but mostly submerged, a little like an iceberg.

Is there any country in particular where a lot of the stuff is cropping up?
New Zealand is a hotspot. And then anywhere in what Melville called the watery part of the world: the Maldives, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, the Philippines, etc.

Follow Michael Zelenko on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Zorba, "the Veiled Male"

A few years back, a young man walked into a dance studio in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan and started offering belly dancing lessons to women. The turnout was respectable, but the reaction from some of the town’s other residents was chillier. Male belly dancers are rare in China—as in the rest of the world—and word spread about the man with the sexy dance in Taiyuan all the way to the offices of the People’s Daily in Beijing, which last year sent a photographer to shoot a spread on the nameless instructor. The photos lingered on the man’s bare, toned midriff, his shirt tied above his ribs, and his pants sagging down to reveal the ‘V’ of his upper crotch region. Although the captions were positive and praised the dancer’s elegance and joy, the underlying message was loud and clear: This is odd. This deserves to be photographed, because this is not just a man doing some general activity that’s traditionally feminine—it’s a man doing a dance specifically designed for women.

Andrus Ramir

That’s the traditional way of thinking, at least. When most people think of belly dancing they think of hippy, busty women with dangling jewelry shimmying and sashaying. To the layman’s basic and tired understanding, says Miami-based male belly dancer Andrus Ramir, “It’s made for women who are beautiful and have great bodies.” So it would be illogical—or at least physically impractical—for men to participate. Even within the dance community, there are many who see belly dancing as a sphere that should belong solely to women. Some believe it stems from ancient birthing rituals (without much evidence), some believe it requires an inherent feminine energy that the essentially warlike and less sensitive average man does not possess, and some just believe that it’s necessary to have creative spaces and art forms where women can interact and collaborate strictly with other women. No boys allowed.

Yet there are male belly dancers in this world. There have been for quite some time, and there are more and more of them experimenting with their first hip thrust every day. And according to Tarik Sultan, New York City’s own and only professional performing male belly dancer, if anyone thinks otherwise, it’s because the kind of belly dancing that was popularized all over the world was an especially limited and objectifying sort. “The version we know comes from the 1920s and 30s nightclubs of Cairo,” says Sultan. “They had a mostly male clientele, and so they naturally wanted to see women.” As the nightclub dance spread, it carried with it the expectation of and demand for solely female dancers and helped create a field more dominated by women than might have been the norm if audiences had been introduced to another tradition.

Even as the world of belly dancing has evolved—incorporating new styles, interacting with and learning from dancers coming from vastly different cultures and histories, and inventing a bit of its own Western tradition—the belief that it’s a woman’s realm never faded. The belly dancing forums on sites like bhuz.com are filled with tales of surprise, confusion, and frustration from women encountering male dancers and men trying and failing to break into the world. The men talk about their fear of being pegged as feminine when they want to retain their masculine identities. They talk about the snickering and shaming of audiences who assume they’re some kind of joke. One male dancer going by the handle “Zorba” writes of feeling like he was invading some kind of feminine refuge, where not even the trained and professional teachers felt comfortable with him.

For Ramir, when he was just starting out a decade ago, this meant he was turned away by the instructors and the registrar when he tried to sign up for a belly-dancing class at his local community college. They felt his presence would be too uncomfortable for all the women in the class. He was rejected from several other introductory classes before he finally found a studio that was willing to entertain the thought of his hips moving alongside theirs.

Photo of Zorba by Carl Sermon

To Ramir, Sultan, and others this feels like being locked out of something that should be accessible to everyone. In Sultan’s interpretation, belly dancing started as a social dance in which men and women alike participated for the love of music and the expression of pure joy. That’s how Ramir got into belly dancing as well—during high school, he got swept up in it and decided to pursue the dance out of simple fascination and passion. It was only by chance that he discovered other men were doing the same thing.

Physically, there’s nothing stopping a man from learning to dance alongside women and performing publicly with equal skill and talent. The variations in the male body mean that certain motions will look different—narrower hips are better for pelvic thrusts than hip tucks. And in actively trying to strip away any hint of femininity from the dance, some male dancers choose to focus more on the abdominal strength, agility, and flexibility of slow, isolated movements.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Historically, there’s precedent for male belly dancers. The diehards try to argue that hieroglyphs on ancient Egyptian monuments show men shaking their hips, but the stylized and androgynous figures are ultimately unclear. The first clear evidence of male belly dancers is from the Ottoman Empire, where strict gender divisions led men to hire male dancers for their social gatherings. Koceks, as the most common of the dancers were called, worked hard to look feminine. They wore drag, grew their hair long, and were often selected from a crop of boys for their inherent androgyny and trained in highly sexualized dances from a young age. When the first bit of stubble came in they were booted out of the troupes, and in 1856 the Turks banned the male dancers entirely. Still, similar men appeared in the works of Gustave Flaubert and W.E. Lane in Egypt, and at the 1893 Chicago World Fair in the Egyptian and Syrian pavilions.

The historical examples of male belly dancers often feed into the impression that there is something definitively genderqueer about the whole affair. Writers have interpreted male belly dancing as the realm of androgyny, suppressed homosexual urges, castration, and niches for transgendered people in societies with harsh gender norms and barriers. But most of those impressions are fueled by the wide-eyed ramblings of chubby 19^th-century white, elite intellectuals riding the back of colonial exoticism. So while there probably has been a good deal of overlap between belly dance and non-binary or fluid sexual identities, the notion that that’s the only way men have ever participated ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

Accept it or not, though, that’s the perception that’s trickled down to many modern-day audiences in the West and elsewhere. Hence cases like that of Mousbah Baalbaki, Lebanon’s premier male belly dancer, whose parents tried to stop him from pursuing the dance because it was seen as something not just feminine but whorish and unacceptable. And even in outwardly, self-projecting liberal cities like New York, Sultan says, “When a man comes into it, there’s a lot of anxiety amongst certain people. I guess there’s no way to sugarcoat it… there’s a lot of homophobia whenever a man enters a female-dominated field.”

Although some men want to put on a drag show and bring out the feminine aspects of themselves, many seem to find success by making sure to present themselves as masculine, straight, and dominant. A few forum writers try to justify the very existence of male belly dancers historically as patriarchal protectors who fiercely watched over the safety and purity of female dancers on stage. A number of dancers in Turkey and Egypt, where male belly dancing seems to be increasingly common, give off this sense of control. Others, like Ramir, don’t want to give the impression of masculinity or femininity. “I include many feminine moves like the shimmy,” he says, “but it’s not feminine-feminine or masculine-masculine. I think for me it’s just a style, and people get that.”

Within the American dance community, male dancers have always been present, if only in pockets and rarely in the visible foreground of public performance.  As far back as the 1960s, some of the first teachers to come to the US were men, like Ibrahim Farrar of Lebanon, whose male pupils helped to spread the dance around. The familiarity of the dance community with men in New York and elsewhere means that, as the internet and YouTube have helped spread awareness of male belly dance, there have been clusters of studios willing to take them in. Over the past decade, that’s led to a greater presence of men as teachers, in seminars, and at festivals around the world. International awareness of male belly dancers in the Middle East and America is also softening some biases and opening up spaces like the London dance community to men.  

Photo courtesy of Zorba

But in the end, whatever openness there is within the community, male belly dancers probably account for only about one percent of dancers in America. Despite the size of the entertainment markets in Miami and New York, Ramir and Sultan don’t know of any other professional male dancers performing publicly in southern Florida or the Tri-State area. Mainstream venues like clubs, restaurants, and party planners, have been slow to pick up male dancers, meaning that unless one’s really looking, they’ll never see the few male instructors, choreographers, and hobbyists taking a class or two and performing for family and friends.

There are still a number of practical barriers on men making it as professional performers. Mainly, says Sultan, it’s just that people don’t know men can or do belly-dance. When they hear of it, he says, “they think it’s going to be a tasteless spectacle.” For a man wanting to get involved, that’s a big barrier to surmount—it took him years of networking and self-promotion to secure a niche in New York. Ramir still makes most of his money teaching rather than professionally dancing (and had to sink almost all of his free time and income into learning to dance just to reach that barrier) just because people don’t think to look for men to hire and it’s often a hard sell to club owners. And men often have to go it alone as well, since many female-dominated troupes worry about including a male dancer as any weakness in his style will draw the most attention or, some fear, confuse audiences.

Of the pool of men willing to put in the time and effort to develop their craft and aggressively market themselves to a confused and disinterested public, there’s still the barrier of self-regulation within the community on anything that’s not outwardly straight, masculine, and comfortable for mass audiences. Sultan “can count on one hand the number of negative experiences” he’s had with audiences or within the dancing community, but that’s in part because his act is all about carrying himself in an expressly masculine way and avoiding any traditionally feminine props and trappings. But anyone who wants to express more femininity, or even has a neutral style that incorporates traditionally feminine movements, is in for an uphill battle.

“Instructors do it to help you out and they try not to do it maliciously,” says Ramir, “but they do tell you to try to dress more masculine.” They also crack down on limp wrists and other traditionally homosexual or feminine movements. “You have to make sure that your image contradicts the fears a lot of people have,” says Sultan. “If you want to act gay, that’s fine, but the backlash is going to put people off.” He cautions that an overly stereotypical and feminine persona was what caused Eduardo and Rodrigo, New York’s one-time other male belly dancers, to fail and go home. Sultan says he once lost work at a club in the Bronx just because men felt uncomfortable with Rodrigo’s androgyny, and so the owner booted Sultan out as well just to avoid any future discomfort for his patrons. Needless to say, Sultan’s got an interest in perpetuating masculinity among male belly dancers within the community as well.  

For the men who want to wear their straightness and/or masculinity on their sleeves, feel confident in their ability to project masculinity while using traditionally feminine movements or props, or perform in a gender-neutral style, it’s a decent moment to get into belly dancing. The women in the dance community, say Ramir and Sultan, do their best to talk up a strong dancer and get their clients to consider taking them on. And an established dancer can pick and choose in the sparsely populated world of male belly dancing these days, and even establishing a niche within one community can be enough to sustain you. But for those who want to show some degree of femininity, genderqueer identity, or even just stress traditionally feminine moves with no other intention, it’s still next to impossible to get over the historical baggage and assumptions about belly dancing that many of people have. “They just want beautiful and tall,” says Ramir of the female stereotype people want to consume. “And I am not that.”

If you've ever been clinically depressed or have attempted suicice, the US may refuse you. Photo by Chris Connelly via Flickr.
Ellen Richardson was enroute to her dream vacation when her world came crashing down around her.

Richardson, 49, is a paraplegic and uses a wheelchair to get around. In 2012, she organized her dream vacation—an all-inclusive, fully accessible Caribbean cruise—with a group of about twelve others through March of Dimes Canada’s accessible travel services program. Her cruise left from New York City, so Richardson, a resident of Weston, Ontario at the time, set about the first leg of her journey which would take her to the US.

The plan was that she would travel abroad from there. All told, Richardson put six thousand dollars of her own money towards her vacation plans.

But when Richardson arrived at Toronto’s Pearson airport, a US Customs and Border Protection agent—working under the department of Homeland Security—informed her that she would not be permitted to enter the United States. The reason? Richardson had been hospitalized for clinical depression in 2012. Previously, in 2001, she attempted suicide. All of this was apparent to the Customs officer, who was able to see her private medical history on his computer screen.

Richardson was told she would not be crossing the border without clearance from one of three doctors pre-approved by Homeland Security back in Toronto.

Unsurprisingly, Richardson’s case and several others like it caught the attention of Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian. Cavoukian’s office recently released a report detailing her office’s investigation into just how and why the private, sensitive health information of Canadians became openly accessible to US Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security, and even the FBI.

The key takeaway from the report is that the federal government of Canada maintains a database called the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) through the RCMP and the private mental health information of Canadians is routinely entered into it. The database is accessible to branches of the US federal government as well, so people often discover they are a part of CPIC when they try to travel internationally.

“I learned that there is currently a Memorandum of Cooperation between the RCMP and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), providing the FBI with access to CPIC. I also learned that the FBI grants access to the CPIC database to the US Department of Homeland Security, which includes US border officials,” Cavoukian explains in the report.

In her investigation, Cavoukian defines CPIC as “a national law enforcement and public safety repository” that contains a great deal of information. Though her office’s report focused solely on suicide attempts which were entered into the database, when we spoke by phone, Cavoukian explained that, unfortunately, tangentially related activity (e.g. hospitalization for depression) may also potentially be uploaded to the database.

“You could mean someone's really depressed, it could be dozens of things, they don't categorize it in terms of attempted suicide, it's much broader than whatever the exact number is, which no one knows,” she told VICE.

But at the press conference where Cavoukian released the report, she gave a rough figure of just how many people were impacted in the city of Toronto, including those who fall under the broader category of “mental health episodes” that involve attempted or threatened suicide. These still get uploaded to the CPIC database.

“With respect to the Toronto Police, the figure we got was 4.1 percent of their cases. And what we got from the Police Services Board was that equalled roughly 19,000 cases,” Cavoukian said.

The Toronto Police Service appears to stand alone in exercising minimal discretion about the private, sensitive health information of Canadians and uploading all cases of threatened or attempted suicide to the database. According to Cavoukian’s report, after consulting with police services in Waterloo, Hamilton, Ottawa, and even the OPP, it became clear that all other police services exercise some sort of discretion to determine whether a suicide attempt will be entered into the database. What’s more, they are open to the Privacy Commissioner’s recommendation that a four-part test be administered to determine whether the disclosure private health status is warranted by a legitimate public safety concern.

As published in Cavoukian’s own report, “this test requires that one of the following four circumstances exists before any suicide-related information is recorded in the SIP repository of CPIC:

1. The suicide attempt involved the threat of serious violence or harm, or the actual use of serious violence or harm, directed at other individuals;

2. The suicide attempt could reasonably be considered to be an intentional provocation of a lethal response by the police;

3. The individual involved had a history of serious violence or harm to others; or

4. The suicide attempt occurred while the individual was in police custody.”

The Toronto Police have outright rejected Cavoukian’s proposed four-part test.

VICE was able to speak with Mark Pugash of the Toronto Police who insists that Dr. Cavoukian is wrong about the lack of discretion in automatically uploading attempted or threatened suicides to the database. When we spoke by phone, he claimed that in her capacity as provincial Privacy Commissioner, Cavoukian has singled out the Toronto Police to pick on because she doesn’t have the federal clout to influence CPIC, the RCMP, or the Memorandum of Cooperation.

But the problem isn’t necessarily that Canadian law enforcement is providing access to the CPIC to American authorities, it’s that too much information is being recorded in the CPIC to begin with.

In our conversations, Cavoukian referred to a practice of “data minimization”—basically minimizing the amount of sensitive information that leaves your control—that is central to this particular intersection of policing and privacy. Uploading all cases of attempted or threatened suicide to an international repository accomplishes the opposite of data minimization, and is arguably in violation of the municipal “Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act”and its provincial equivalent.

Cavoukian also provided me with an email chain between herself and the Toronto Police’s legal counsel that transpired before Cavoukian’s report was publicly released. In that chain, there is an extended explanation of why the TPS didn’t accept the privacy commissioner's recommendation: “The (Toronto Police) Service could not support the recommendation because information is entered onto CPIC for the purpose of public and officer safety. However, the Service does exercise discretion after the entries are made when the disclosure of information is for the purpose of police clearance letters and vulnerable sector screening.”

This explanation seems to indicate that there isn’t much discretion when it comes to entering private information to the CPIC on the front end, i.e. when incidents occur, but rather there is more careful consideration taken once the information is entered into the CPIC. But again, this isn’t about being sensitive to clearance checks or vulnerable sector screenings—it’s about keeping the information in the database to begin with. Plus, this is contradictory to what Mark Pugash insists is occurring within the TPS, when it comes to how careful they are about putting information into the database.

While she expressed disappointment with the Toronto Police’s rejection of her recommendation, Cavoukian is not giving up. She feels she needs to fight for people who are already facing tremendous stigma and adversity in life.

“I'm not leaving it alone, I'm going to pursue this. There has to be a way. Because all the other police services: Waterloo, Hamilton, Ottawa, the OPP, said yes, we already exercise discretion and we're happy to follow the four-part test that you created. And they thought it was reasonable, they didn't think it was unfair and they didn't think it was putting anybody's life in jeopardy, [or threatening] public safety,” she said.

If you live in Toronto, it’s important that we ask ourselves: what public good does this policy serve? Who, for example, is made more safe because the Toronto lawyer cited in Cavoukian’s report as calling 9-1-1 for an overdose is now afraid to cross the border into the US on business in the event that he is detained in front of his clients, colleagues, and peers?  

Cavoukian has made it clear that public safety is a priority for her. She believes that some information does belong in the database, it’s simply a matter of determining which cases are justified, hence her recommendation that a four-part test be administered. But public safety at the expense of privacy, or that directly harms a vulnerable demographic is something she’s not interested in.

“What concerns me about the Toronto Police's decision is that it will serve to actually victimize individuals who put themselves in harm's way by attempting suicide. And once they're past that traumatized experience, they usually get the help they need, they get better, you're going to retraumatize them again when they go to the border and they get turned away. And the effect that might drive people underground, not to get the help they need.”


@muna_mire

For 20 years, the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Center in Hollywood, California, had its own all-singing, all-dancing children's pop group called Kids on Stage for a Better World.

The group existed with a revolving cast of members from 1992 to 2012. Obviously their videos are quite old now, and I'm not their target demographic, so it's difficult for me to judge whether or not they were on-trend at the time—but like all things created by a religion and aimed at young people, they appear to be almost overwhelmingly uncool. 

The group's matching outfits, choreographed dance routines, and wholesome rap breakdowns seem to be the work of adults trying to emulate inoffensive, family-friendly (i.e., boring) kids' stuff like High School Musical and the Mickey Mouse Club.

About 90 percent of the group's lyrics relate to how they are (A) young and (B) going to be the leaders of the future. The remaining 10 percent is made up of references to Scientology. The band also filmed a couple of episodes of a series based on the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard. 

Embedded below are some of my favorite Kids on Stage for a Better World cuts. Think of it as a greatest-hits collection.

"Don't Pass Me By" (2000)

Most appallingly generic lyric: "When I decided to learn about you / I saw the world from a new point of view" (3:52)
Most Scientology-ish lyric: "Prejudice is not just a word / It's a fact, it's a fact / If we're all created equal / Why do we face this horrible act?" (1:57)
Video highlight: The kid in the orange shirt almost tripping as he attempts to exit the convertible in a cool way (0:37)

"Joy of Creating" (2003)

Most appallingly generic lyric: "Force yourself to smile, and you'll soon stop frowning"  (3:10)
Most Scientology-ish lyric: "A being causes his own feelings" (This is a line from a poem by L. Ron Hubbard) (3:57)
Video highlight: The repeated use of the phrase "Splurge on it!" which I'm pretty sure is something I've heard in porn. 

"Vitamin R" (2006)

Most appallingly generic lyric: N/A—all of the lines are pretty out there.
Most Scientology-ish lyric: "How come you can't sit still/ It's time to drop another pill" (Scientologists are super against psychiatric medication) (1:18)
Video highlight: The Britney-inspired dance routines with folding chairs

"Starts with Me" (1993)

Most appallingly generic lyric: "Let's get busy today / Our dreams can shape the future" (2:47)
Most Scientology-ish lyric: "We're setting our goals / Makin' our plans" (0:54)
Video highlight: "Come on guys, let's kick it!" (roller-blader freeze-frame) (2:07)

"Kids of the Future" / "Bad Drugs" (2008)

Most appallingly generic lyric: "We're the kids! / We're the kids! / We're the kids of the future!"
Most Scientology-ish lyric: "Why do we think drugs are so bad? / According to The Way to Happiness / Our trusty common-sense moral code..." (3:56)
Video highlight: "Dealers out on the street at night (they're walkin')" (4:22)

"Neighborhood of the Heart"

Most appallingly generic lyric: "Children learn to love and hate in the neighborhood of the heart / But in the neighborhood of the heart / A song is a place to start" (1:10)
Most Scientology-ish lyric: N/A
Video highlight: One of the pieces of fake graffiti they've made for the video just says "tag" (0:53)

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

Youree Dell Harris AKA Miss Cleo. All photos by Kadeem Ellis.
If you looked at or were ever near a television in the late 90s or early 2000s, you'll remember buoyant and boisterous television psychic, Miss Cleo.

Born Youree Dell Harris, Cleo was the ostensibly Jamaican frontwoman for the Psychic Friends Network who became a cultural touchstone thanks to colorful outfits that exuded Afrocentricity, her occasionally questionable patois, and her memorable “Call me now!” exhortation. Miss Cleo's commercials were outlandish and oozed kitsch (Cleo: “He’s getting frustrated with this [relationship].” Caller: "He told me that.” Cleo: “Well, [that’s] because you have sex with your eyes closed. You’re scared to death, mama.” Caller: “You hit the nail on the head, perfectly”), but were always powered an overwhelming feeling of warmth and levity. Cleo became a ubiquitous mainstay of early millennial television.

Then, in February of 2002, the bottom fell out. The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Cleo and her parent network, the Psychic Readers Network, alleging that they made over $1 billion by employing a host of shady tricks, including deceptively misrepresenting the nature of the “free” readings offered, falsely representing failing to make required cost disclosures in ads, and threatening to report negative information to credit bureaus should a caller refuse to pay, among other misdeeds.

Much of the resulting media attention focused on Cleo, though she was little more than an employee and spokesperson for the company and was quickly dropped from the suit. (PRN’s owners, Steven Feder and Peter Stoltz, later settled the suit out of court, to the tune of $500 million.)

Save for her appearance in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and coming out of the closet to the Advocate in 2006, Miss Cleo has stayed away from the spotlight in the past decade. After several years away, she’s re-emerged as a key component of an intriguing new documentary called Hotline, which examines the history of hotlines, and what role they play (or don’t play) in our increasingly digital world.

I met up with everyone’s favourite hotline psychic in Toronto earlier this week to discuss her history with voodoo and mysticism, what actually happened with the Psychic Readers Network, and the tricky business of her controversial accent.

VICE: Were you into hotlines before you start appearing in those infomercials?
Miss Cleo: I was a very well known psychic in the United States on a hotline for two years out in public, and about two to three years just on the hotline itself.

How did you get into the business?
I come from a family of spooky people. I don’t know how else to say it. I come from a family of Obeah—which is another word for voodoo. My teacher was Haitian, born in Port Au Prince [a mambo] and I studied under her for some 30-odd years and then became a mambo myself. So they refer to me as psychic—because the word voodoo scares just about everybody. So they told me, “No, no, no we can’t use that word, we’re going to call you a psychic.” I said, “But I’m not a psychic!”

Then they would take me somewhere to do an interview and as soon as I’d say, ‘I’m not a psychic and I don’t own the company,’ and the handlers would say “No, no, no. Tell her to shut up.”

Tell me about the mechanics of the operation. Did you work in a call centre?
Well, most of us worked from our homes, it’s not one big room. I was doing television, they had me touring everywhere and I was always bothered by the fact that, you know, people took the “Call me now” quote very earnestly.

I was at Best Buy one day and a gentleman said, “Miss Cleo, aren’t you supposed to be on the phone?” I said, “Honey, do you really think that I do that while I'm travelling and doing press?” I said, “You have a better chance of talking to me right here than you do if you called.” I still remember my extension number, though. My extension was 16153.

When they had you doing all this television and press, were they paying you well? Were you seeing any of the wild profits that they were making?
Let me tell you, I’m going to quote you a number from the FBI. They were pulling down—[using] my face, my talent—$24 million a month, for two years straight.  For the first 30-minute infomercial I did for them I made $1,750 for the two and a half days on set. I had a bad contract. But everybody else thought I had more money than God, and my response to that usually was, “Well, God is a poor son of a bitch.”

And still now, people believe what they want to believe. So they say I still have money? I want to know where it’s at.



In Hotline you mention that your old bosses tried to make you seem more “fresh off the island.” What kinds of things did they do?
My parents were not broke; I went to a very high-end boarding school. The [people I did the hotline with] did not want people to know that about me. People Magazine actually insinuated my parents were drug traffickers in an article they did on me… The people I used to work for didn’t want people to know that I was an accomplished playwright. They didn’t want people to know anything. They wanted people to think I just came fresh from Jamaica.

So I had some Jamaican people who were angry with me, saying that I was a bad representative of theirs. I've always said, "it's not my company." Then they would do this stuff to punish me. I was in Grand Theft Auto and I wasn’t able to use the Miss Cleo name. I had to use my full name in order to get my credit.

They spent a lot of time trying to make me into something that I completely was not. I speak perfect English. When you grow up in America and you’re Carribean, your parents beat it into you that the only way to succeed is by dropping the patois. My mother was very deliberate about that and so was my father.

Prior to working on this documentary, did you follow any of the news about you in the media? There was a BuzzFeed article and something on XOJane. 
It’s hard not to, you know? I have children, I have a family. My family took it very hard because there’s a lot misrepresentation. According to some articles, I’m still in jail. I never went to jail; I didn’t own the company. It’s taken ten years for me to move through all of that because in the Jamaican culture—especially with the way my father was—all you have was your word. So it hurts for people to go around and be able to tell a lie to the point where it becomes fact on a [computer] box. So I struggle with it.

Most people were making 14 cents a minute doing the calls. I was on the high side of the equation, making 24 cents a minute.



Cleo, "Hotline" director Tony Shaff, and the author. 
Do people still recognize you when you're out in public?
Unfortunately, yes. I live in a little town and everybody there knows who I am. But I’m just another neighbour. But there are places where I go and people are like, “Yo! Miss Cleo!” and I try to run. I’ve had people come up to me—there’s a big controversy about "Miss Cleo is not Jamaican," right?

Yeah.
So one day I’m in line to pay my phone bill and there was Jamaican woman there and we were chatting, and she goes [heavy patois accent] “You know who ya favour?” I say, “Who?” She say, “Miss Cleo.” I say,“ I said “Ya mon, but me hear she not Jamaican.” And she say, “Yeah, me hear that, too.”

[Laughs]
And I went about my business. She had no idea. So for me, there are little places where I can feel like I get a jab back. Now that I’m older, I don’t get recognized as much anymore, but just enough for my discomfort.

Do you have a lot of clients now?
Oh yeah, my clients are international, sweetie. I have clients in New Zealand, Australia, a few here in Toronto, a bunch all over the US, Jamaica, obviously. Honey, that’s how I make my living still. I’ve got kids and grandchildren, I like being able to help.

You’re speaking with an accent now. Is the patois just back in your system?
Look, I’m old and I’m tired, my speech is loose. My kids are always like, “Mom, you get worse every day.” I have a niece who is an attorney for the state of Florida and we’ll go out somewhere and she’ll say, “Mama, they can’t understand you, speak English… your English is, you know…hurting.”

But as you know, we do that [code switch]. We only chat like that with family. In other situations, I can put on what they call a “little valley girl accent.” If I have to pay a bill or make an arrangement, honey, I don’t do it in patois.

Hotline is playing at Scotiabank Theatre 4 in Toronto on Friday, May 2^nd at 9:45 and Sunday, May 4^th at the Isabel Bader Theatre at 6:30. For tickets, go here. To view the trailer, click here.

  
@jordanisjoso

Photos via Wikimedia Commons

Abortion is often treated exclusively as a women’s health issue. Most of the research on the topic deals with the female party involved in an unwanted pregnancy. This is in part because, let’s face it, the women’s perspective is more important, as it’s ultimately her body and her choice, but also because the female party involved in the abortion is the patient seeking medical intervention. So doctors and researchers can reach out to them directly for feedback, surveys, etc. with greater ease. Contacting the so-called “impregnators” is not so simple.

There is precious little research into the male experience of abortion; Google mostly coughs up pro-life fear-mongering sites about men manipulated by liberal she-devils into agreeing to abortions, who now live haunted by visions of the blessed angel-children they cruelly murdered. While thankfully devoid of that kind of thing, academia doesn’t fare much better, information-wise. A 1999 study by psychiatric and obstetric researchers at University Hospital in Umeå, Sweden outlines why: “Most studies of legal abortion are focused on the women and when abortion and contraception are discussed, attention is mostly centered on the role and responsibility of the woman. Hospital staff often meet only the woman and not the man in cases of legal abortion, which can result in the risk of abortion being regarded solely as a female issue. Thus, the participation of the man remains largely invisible.”

Abortion is one of the last great taboos in Western society. Because of this (and more direct campaigns of misinformation from right-wing and/or religious groups), misconceptions surrounding the topic abound. We don’t want to talk about abortions, so women who have experienced them are discouraged from speaking about it. Men are never even asked—at least, not usually—so we asked some.

For this piece we spoke with six men who had experienced the termination of a sexual and/or romantic partner’s pregnancy. All of them now in their late 20s and early 30s, they were a median age of 25 at the time of their abortions. Most of them were in long-term relationships with the woman they impregnated; one had been on two drunk dates. About half of the men accompanied their partner to the clinic. One was not told about the abortion until after it had occurred. All of the men said they deferred to their partner’s choice and would have respected whatever she chose, but recalled an intense feeling of relief when the women involved decided to abort. None of the men felt ready to be fathers at the time of their respective partner's pregnancies.

Although six men’s stories can hardly be seen as a representative sample, the similarities between their experiences and those reported by the men in the Swedish studies were striking. Because some of the only times we hear about abortion is in Very Special Episodes or emotional magazine true stories, it’s easy to conceive of it as a massive event, life-altering in its trauma; the memory of it and What Could Have Been rippling into the future for both parties. As with many major life events, the reality is a lot more mundane.

Perhaps because of the lack of research, there’s a pervasive stereotype that women often go through unwanted pregnancies without—if not abandoned by—their male partners. Abortion clinics on television and in films are presented as a refuge for fallen women, there alone or with a supportive female friend. However, of the 250 women seeking terminations in the Swedish study, only 29 did not feel comfortable giving the survey to their (somewhat jarringly termed) “impregnators,” and more than half were accompanied to the clinic. Indeed, 89 percent of the 75 male respondents were involved in stable, satisfied relationships with the women seeking abortions. The men tended to be in their late 20s, a few years older than their pregnant partners, and of a comfortable socio-economic background. The men I spoke to ticked these boxes as well.

Paul, now 28, was at drama school when his girlfriend—a classmate—got pregnant. He said the experience was “a bit like being painted out, unintentionally."

"She wanted to keep it quiet, so only a few people knew she was pregnant anyway and then when it came to the termination, it was equally quiet," he told me. "She wouldn't let me go to the clinic with her or anything, and also didn't want to speak to me for a bit around the time it was happening, so having no one to talk to about it while being acutely aware that a possible child was exiting the world was very very strange. When she came back to school, I had to pretend she’d been ill. The experience was very much about bottling something up. But the knowledge of it was really upsetting to me for a very long time. Emotionally, I think it's much harder on the guy than people are aware.”

This concern was echoed by all six interviewees. For more than a few, our conversations marked the first time they’d spoken to someone about the experience who wasn’t their partner or close friend. They all said they didn’t really talk about it with friends or family, at the time or after.

Matthew, now 31, was 25 when he found out the girl he’d been on two dates with was pregnant. “I've barely talked about it, which is one of the reasons I was eager to discuss it with you. It's a significant event in my life but I've hardly felt like there were any appropriate times for me to bring it up.” 

Matthew was in a rental car on the way to his hometown in Northwestern Ontario when she called. He was in a dead zone with no cell reception. “Her voicemail message was simple, just 'you need to call me back.' I've done that drive many times since then, and I always seem to notice the little side road I pulled into, somewhere near Sudbury, to return her call. She explained she’d tested positively, twice, and her cousin was going to take her to the clinic the next day. I remember deliberately pressing my voice down into a calm, reassuring tone but my blood was pumping in big, scared gushes. I told her that, of course, I'd respect any decision she made and that if she wanted to wait a bit before making up her mind, or if she wanted to decide to keep it, I would support her. I felt a surge of guilty relief when she reassured me that she had made up her mind already.”

While the male experience of pregnancy and early parenthood is an area of research that is growing, information and statistics on this subject remain sparse. In the few studies regarding men’s reaction to the news of a desired pregnancy, their responses mirrored one of the most common (and better-documented) responses of newly-pregnant women: ambivalence. Pride combined with fear, happiness combined with dread—both men and women tend to feel a mixture of angst and excitement upon the discovery of a hoped-for pregnancy. Perhaps more surprisingly, according to the Swedish study, these feelings are almost exactly the same as those reported by both men and women confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. Men and women’s reasons for wanting an abortion were also the same: wanting children later, wanting to be able to provide for their family at a level they felt comfortable with, being too young, or the more abstract “it’s not the right time.”

What little research there is regarding male experience of full-term pregnancy serves to highlight the similarity between men’s experience of that process and what my interviewees had to say about abortion. One UK study found that prospective fathers “frequently spoke of their desire to be 'involved' with their partner's pregnancy and yet reported difficulty in engaging with its reality,” a common strain throughout the stories of all the men I spoke to.

Paul, 29, and his partner, now 26, discovered they were pregnant two years ago. He says: “I felt especially stupid because even though we were both tacitly agreeing to that lack of caution, when we found out we were pregnant it became a reality for one of us physically in a way I couldn't ever understand so I immediately also felt powerless. Throughout the wait for the procedure I tried to treat my emotions as secondary and just play a support role. I felt lucky that there was never any disagreement on how to proceed so we could just basically work out together how to cope in that time. I felt guilty because I got to enjoy all the things that were inevitably hilarious or heartwarming in such a serious situation, but when reality felt heavy and difficult it didn't land on me the same way it did for her because it wasn't a part of my body and a scary procedure I had to go through. Trying to empathize almost felt patronizing.” Recalling the day of his girlfriend’s abortion, Matthew similarly recalled a feeling of detachment concurrent with a desire to be closer to the experience: “I didn't feel guilty or scared that week, just separated from reality by one degree.

Photo by Frankie Roberto

Isolation—from reality, their partner, and a network of support—was a common theme in the stories I heard. All interviewees reported staying silent or relatively quiet about the experience at the time, and found themselves attempting to process it years later, some going to therapy, others finally confiding in close friends. One said an early-20s abortion led to him discovering MDMA. Another ran into his former partner at a bar two years after the procedure; they left their friends, walked around the city for a few hours, and cried together about it for the first time. I was again struck by the amount of overlap in experience from such a small sample group. For instance, more than one interviewee had had an intense, contemplative experience in front of plastinated fetuses at the Body Worlds exhibit. Said Matthew: “The month [of the abortion] I went to Body Worlds at the Ontario Science Center. I spent ten minutes looking at a month-old fetus, trying to decide if it was meaninglessly tiny or not. It looked small but not that small.”

In studies of the male role in full-term pregnancy, new fathers often report feeling “helpless” or detached from the experience. Paul describes waiting for his girlfriend at the Morgantaler Clinic in Toronto: “I had waves of concern and self-reassurance from when I found out up until and including the day of, trying to keep perspective without discounting the seriousness of what we were going through and how that reality was more inescapable for her second to second. In the waiting room I flipped back and forth, reminding myself that this was the right decision, that we had arrived at together, supported by professional opinion, then worrying horribly the longer it took knowing that it must feel horrible, that I'll never understand really what was happening to her and that it wasn't fair that I sat in a room with reading materials while her body went through that.”

Most of the men reported still thinking about the experience years later, largely due to a failure to process events at the time they occurred. Said Matthew, “I think about it less now, but when my fiance and I talk about starting our own family and having babies, my mind moves pretty quickly back to that summer. I wish I had talked about it more, because I carried some serious unfocused guilt around for a good few years after, and it definitely changed the way I dated and behaved with new partners. I'm not saying that I kept it quiet because it's a gross, shameful secret. I just think that men, especially when they're not especially intimate with their partners, aren't afforded much space to articulate their feelings. That's fine because our experience is comparably very different from the woman's, but it's still a strange emotional limbo.”

The Swedish study and my conversations with these men paint a picture of couples separated by the very feelings, concerns, and sense of isolation that make them mirrors of each other. Much of the contemporary academic research surrounding pregnancies completed or terminated suggests that while women and men often feel disconnected from their partners during the experience, the emotions leading them to feel disconnected from each other are almost exactly the same. While the men involved in abortions often feel isolated from their partners due to an inability to relate to the physical reality of the pregnancy, many pregnant women report feeling the same way from conception right through to the birth experience. Wanting to help but being unable or ill-equipped or unsure how to do so, both parties stay quiet, stewing in their own ambivalence, stunting both their and their partner’s ability to process what is occurring.This lack of communication can hardly be considered the fault of the prospective parents (or non-parents, as the case may be). Rather, it is one of many troubling symptoms of a culture that wants abortion done quickly, quietly, and in shame, if it must be done at all.

Men struggling to help their partners through a termination or finding themselves unable to process the experience themselves is not the most important or critical abortion-related problem today, but it gestures toward a pressing need for more frequent and more public conversations about abortion, from more perspectives. Unwanted pregnancy is not a topic that should be discussed only behind closed doors in Planned Parenthood between women and doctors. Equipping boys and girls with an education that explains pregnancy and contraceptive responsibility as an issue for both genders (with deference always to a woman’s right to choose) is crucial, as is the establishment of adequate counseling options for couples and individuals of both genders facing abortions. Pregnancy and abortion doesn’t happen to women alone, and we need to be equipping both genders with the tools to talk about and deal with it.

Follow Monica Heisey on Twitter

Check back next Wednesday for the next episode of Blobby Boys!