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Die Antwoord's New Video for "Cookie Thumper!" Will Probably Creep You Out

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Die Antwoord's New Video for "Cookie Thumper!" Will Probably Creep You Out

East End Girls

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PHOTOGRAPHER: RICK INDEO
STYLIST: CHARLIE INDEO
HAIR: RONNIE DAG
MODELS: CLAUDIA & MOUNA


Left to Right

Hat: Milkcrate Athletics
Pants: K-Way
Socks: Stylists Own
Shoes: Nike

Top: Nike
Sports Bra: Nike
Pants: Issey Miyake
Socks and Shoes: Nike

i.

Sweatshirt: Vintage Champion
Shorts: 8ight Seconds
Shoes: Nike

Shirt: Vintage Polo
Shorts: Adidas
Sock and Shoes: Nike

ii.

Shirt: Fred Perry
Shorts and Sock: Stylists own
Sandals: Nike

Top: Polo Sport
Pants: Adidas
Socks: Deisel
Sandals: Adidas


Top: Nike
Pants: Issey Miyake

Top: Fred Perry



Bomber Jacket: NorBlackNorWhite
Mesh Hoodie: Model's own
Shorts: Adidas
Bag: Chinatown

Hat: Nike
Jacket: Catherine Malandrino
Pants: Topshop
Socks: Topshop
Shoes: Nike



Sweatshirt: Itzsoweezee
Mesh Top: 69 Vintage
Spandex Shorts: Adidas
Shorts: Adidas
Pants: Adidas
Shoes: Nike

Hat: Ssur
Hoodie: Nike
T-Shirt: Vintage Stussy
Shorts: DKNY
Socks: Adidas
Shoes: Gucci



T-Shirt: Fuct
Pants: Adidas

Vest: Lululemon
Bomber: NorBlackNorWhite
T-Shirt: Nowhereland
Shorts: Nike
Gloves: Nike


Top: Adidas
Sheer Top: Nowhereland
Pants: Adidas

Hat: Mind Your Own Business
Hoodie: Calvin Klein
Bra: Minnow Bathers
Pants: Adidas

This Massive Waste Water Spill Will Turn an Albertan Forest Into a Dead Zone for at Least a Year

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This Massive Waste Water Spill Will Turn an Albertan Forest Into a Dead Zone for at Least a Year

I Auditioned to Be a Disney Princess

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At the age of 14, I had dreams of being a theater kid. Like all awkward children, I imagined transcending my station in life and being the center of attention. This didn't work out—I only auditioned for one play and was asked nicely by the casting director if I could read my lines as a two-year-old. You can imagine how humiliating that was. Theater people are fucking batshit crazy nuts, but at that age, I didn't have enough life experience to understand that.

Eleven years after that failed audition, my friend Jackie walked into my apartment one day to convince me that I should get back into the acting game. “The only headshot I have is one when I was 13,” I shouted. Her face lit up, and before I knew it, we were on our way to auditions to be Disney characters on the Disney Cruise Line.

Like any living human being, I love Disney stuff: Disney movies, Disneyland, Disney World, all of it. Also, I'm a native Los Angelino, so obviously I’ve been to Disneyland more times than I can count. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t secretly dream about being a Jungle Cruise skipper from time to time. (I would take that job in a heartbeat if I didn’t suspect that would mean living on the wrong side of the poverty line.) So I decided it was time to go to this audition to “lift the veil,” so to speak, and stare directly into the flames (interpret that double meaning as you will).

We jetted over to that jewel of the Nile known as North Hollywood, California. As we pulled up, Jackie leaned in and asked a crucial question: “What if they actually pick one of us?” Good point. It had been a scant handful of years since I did anything resembling musical theater (karaoke doesn't count), and I didn't think I was ready to take the stage on some cruise ship before hundreds of cranky kids. SPOILER: I didn't need to worry.

When we arrived, I immediately noticed that all the Disney employees resembled a first draft of a cartoon character, the ones the artists sketch and then instantly crumple and toss away. Every person who had authority at the audition looked like that, and had this unbelievable amount of pep. They were cheerleaders for the world, life coaches for life itself.

A tall drink of water I will lovingly refer to as Goof-ayyyy (emphasis on the ayyyy) entered the room in a flurry of Pitch Perfect quotes, quickly alerting his fellow auditioners that he was the most fabulous bitch they would ever see. He was greeted by a veritable who's who of drama school stereotypes. The "Geisha Preteen" who had layered on an “Am I Pretty Now, Mother?” amount of blush; the dancer with the thong leotard and tiny shorts that barely covered her rear; the six-foot-two 18-year-old who paced back and forth in front of the entire rehearsal room. Oh, and don’t think I forgot about "Girl Reading a Dog-Eared Copy of Les Miz in the Corner." We all know how she mistakes scenes from A Chorus Line for childhood memories because she's seen it so many times.

A man appeared in front of the auditioners—he must have been from Disney corporate because he was the only one with a beard, and I assume you need to suckle from the bosom of Walt's ghost himself to be granted the privilege of making your own grooming choices. “We’re not looking for dancers,” he said. “We’re looking for storytellers.” That was a relief to hear, because I thought they were looking for dancers. “And you know, sometimes you’ll have to wear a costume and that could be a lot of fur to get your story through!” The crowd literally had a premature stroke. 

A single orb of light walked out and introduced himself as the choreographer. He was Adderall incarnate. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” came on the speakers and the choreographer looked ready to start dancing—then he stopped, stepped to the side, and reemerged with what he referred to as his "special choreography scarf."

The man had no hair, and I don’t think he even had eyelids. We were all taught the routine and separated into groups, and this is when shit got really, really real.

Goof-ayyyy marched out and did a full lap around the rehearsal space before taking his mark. Then the music started and his routine began with about 30 seconds of improvised dancing only to be interrupted by the confusion his own feet had with the dance moves. But Goof-ayyyy had this shit on lock. He proceeded with a flawless Goofy impression and pretended to laugh beneath a four-fingered glove, slappily falling over himself with grace.

I was actually shocked he was able to perform such a feat without an older sibling scoffing at him from his bedroom doorway, as I’m certain that had been the only way he’s rehearsed it thus far.

Finally, it was our turn. I gulped down nervous saliva, stretched my legs quickly behind a girl who looked like goth Lea Michele, and took the stage. This was my moment, my chance to prove that I did have the chops to be “leading lady material" instead of “back and off to the side chorus material.”

Well, that didn’t happen. I danced with a smile plastered on my face, pretended just hard enough to have fun, messed up every kick, and then, anticlimax complete, took my seat again in the back of the room.

As Jackie and I were returning to her car amid the zombie walk of crestfallen hopefuls who smile-cried their way to their stage moms' arms, we were overcome with a sense of relief. We tried, we predictably didn’t get past the first round, and we were the same people as when we arrived, which is to say, pretty OK.

@juliaprescott

More on Disney:

The Magic Kingdom of Syria

Goth Day at Disneyland!

Beauty and the Plague

What to Wear to Your Album Release Party

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What to Wear to Your Album Release Party

Happiness

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Photos by Sorryimworking

M

y mother bought a house with her prayer group. The house was built in the early 1980s, a spacious single story with a wraparound porch. The prayer group hung a banner over the railing that read, HOLY MOTHER RETREAT HOUSE, and underneath,성모 피정의 집. The man who had lived in the house prior was elderly, and his children had been eager to sell for a reduced price because of how long it had been on the market. They left all the furniture and dishes and curtains inside. The family had a carpentry business, and the dining table in particular was especially beautiful—inlaid with strips of oak and sturdy and light. 

My mother envisioned this house as just the beginning of a larger dream she shared with Father Park, a Jesuit priest and scholar—her spiritual counselor. They had organized five other families to purchase the property the week before it was taken off the market, and my mother spoke about it dazzled with all they had planned. It was just a regular house now, she said, but it also came with a separate guesthouse, though without water or heat, and X acres of property that they could build on and develop. My family’s business was in construction and property development. They had built schools and senior centers and apartment buildings all throughout greater Los Angeles and had most recently finished a Korean-style gazebo next to a park on Olympic. The company made its fortune the years before the recession, which it had since been struggling to maintain.

After the house was purchased, the Society of Jesus notified Father Park that he was to return to Sogang University in Seoul. The news was sudden. The prayer group and my mother, especially, were heartbroken. After his departure, the group proceeded as planned, spending every other weekend at the retreat house where they would pray and attend Mass at the church called Our Lady of the Snows half an hour away, up the mountain roads. They rented the house to other church groups for a flat rate each night. 

A few months after the purchase, my mother began to speak of how difficult the house was to maintain, how frustrating it was to distribute work and responsibility among other community members. She spoke about how the water bill was higher than the mortgage, and the land, though in close proximity to the hiking trails and ski resort, was itself essentially landlocked in an unnavigable desert of Joshua trees because of the highway and fenced-off ranches all around. The developments on the property would have to wait for an indefinite number of years, because of a lack of resources. She began considering whether another group of Jesuits could live at the property.

I heard this change in my mother’s enthusiasm during the time I spent living in South Korea. Everything seemed so far away there and then, hearing about all the difficulties over the phone and through a screen, not only of my family, but of my friends, who could not find jobs, the decline and near ruin of the art museum where I had worked, the financial straits everyone seemed to be sagging beneath. When I came back, I noticed how tired the familiar faces had become from maintaining.

I made the mistake of arriving at the retreat house at night. It was winter then, and all through the afternoon, I had driven straight toward the setting sun. I stopped to eat a hamburger and put gas in the truck. When I turned off the highway and trundled up the switchback, darkness fell thick around the beams of headlights. 

The first thing I had to do, as instructed, was to turn on the water meter located beneath a low wooden fence across the street. I opened a garbage bin in the garage shelter and found a flashlight and two metal tools for the job—a short handle to open the lid of the water meter, and a long stick with a claw to turn the valve. The street I had to cross was a shapeless dirt road with a signpost that crossed Twin Pines with Skyridge. There were four boxes where the water meters were located. I opened three; the fourth was frozen shut and bent the short tool until the metal bit splintered from the plastic. I used the claw to turn all the valves, and the pressure gauges looked like clocks and did not move. In one box the arrow did move, though slowly, but when I went into the house the toilet tanks and sinks remained dry. I could not remember how to turn the valve back, and imagined that I would be responsible for making the neighbor’s pipes freeze and explode.

That first night, I walked back and forth from the water meters to the house, each time facing a bust of Christ weeping near the dirt. The statue was small and bleached white, mounted where the cement porch led to the garage shelter and catching the beam of the flashlight each time it swung across the neutral colors of shrubs and dirt. I stood near the sliding doors that led to the kitchen and waited for the bust to look over its shoulder, to turn around with its crown of thorns and head twisted to one side.

There had been a time when I was not able to sit in the quiet and stillness of night. Before I went abroad, I woke up one dusk from a deep nap and saw the sun set red. I was afraid. In the desert, in its endless night, the winter air was silent and cold, and I could look up straight into the stars, and into the past. If there was no God, I wondered who was watching, what my conscious was speaking for. 

***

I moved to Korea alone when I was 21 and lived there for two years. The first city I found a job in was Yeonsu-gu, Incheon. There was a long lit-up bridge that connected the international airport to this factory town that sat on the coast of the Yellow Sea. We could not see the water, though we could smell the salt. I taught English at a terrible school and could have found a much better placement had I not been desperate to leave the States when I did. I stayed for seven months, then quit shortly before the school went bankrupt and moved to the Kangnam district in Seoul for the next year.

When I recount this time in my life abroad, it is difficult for me to remember without anger, and for years after I returned, I was unable to do so without my mind coiling around itself for what had happened there. When I came back, I drank from morning to night the day my brother’s friends and I threw an engagement party for him in our backyard. I found a job faster than I expected when the best man offered to put me in touch with his sister who worked at a newspaper in Koreatown. My brother had his big shotgun wedding at the cathedral, and I lived in my family’s house working and walking the dog and sketching nudes at a night class in the community college. 

Of course, I did not realize then that my heart had closed. I did not know yet the extent of the repair I would have to undergo, or who Jacob would become to me after we met my first day at the paper. The headquarters was based in Seoul, and he and I were among the only four English speakers at the branch in LA. In the beginning he often asked me to translate, and I said I couldn’t. I barely spoke Korean. We had meetings on the roof and sat on cinder blocks in the shade and watched the afternoon haze settle over the Hollywood sign we could see in tiny white letters lining the hills farther away. He told me about a friend coming back from Afghanistan. All he wanted to do, for months, he said, was take a walk through flat fields. I said he should go to Mongolia. It would be very beautiful, but there would be much sadness in the sky.

***

I suppose it was in Korea where I learned to be alone, which was why during the second year at home, I went to the retreat house to return to aloneness there. The house was so cold on the first night that the bottle of olive oil in the kitchen cabinet congealed. I turned the heater on, then set a heat lamp on the carpet in the living room. This was my mother’s home, I reminded myself, and I should not be afraid. On every wall and on every surface, the faces of angels and martyrs and saints lifted their eyes from dust-covered glass. I recognized a painting hung in a gold frame above the sofa, The Painting of Blessed Korean Martyrs, because my parents had hung this same painting in their shrine above the fireplace. 

The living room in the retreat house had windows facing west. It was spacious and connected to every room in the house. There were several armchairs and giant lamps. From the sofa I could keep both the sliding glass door and the front door in my field of vision, in case something came in from one and I needed to run out of the other. The kitchen cupped one end of the living room with two empty doorways. To the north was a wide hallway, with a china cabinet and an oak dining table, which led into the sitting room where a white statue of Mary rose from the corner, three feet tall. There were three sofas facing one another in this room, and many, many chairs stacked in neat rows.

The hallway stretching south from the living room led to a small bathroom on the left, a bedroom on the right, and a door to the master bedroom at the end of the corridor. The door opened in direct line to the foot of the large bed. The hallway light threw my shadow on the carpet thin and long. A crucifix hung in the center of the wall. There was a bureau and a keyboard and nothing else. I went into the smaller room. This crucifix I could see more clearly, Christ hanging emaciated from his hands, limbs as thin and frail as sticks. I climbed onto the bed and took it down. 

Down the hall and through all the rooms I took the statues and paintings and miniature figurines that scared me off the walls, and put them away. I turned them around, placed them in cabinet drawers, and apologized to each one and asked that they understand. I left the statue of Mary, because it was too large, the painting of martyrs, and whatever was left in the master bedroom because I did not want to go inside, farthest away from all the doors. 

I sat in front of the heat lamp with its face glowing red and took off all my clothes to change. I would sleep on the sofa that night with all the lights on. When I lived in Kangnam, all the people dressed up one summer as little devils with red horns and tails. They paraded at all hours through the downtown streets to watch the World Cup. Every night at ten, a young woman walked up and down the alleyways through the shops and apartments and businesses and screamed. I could only make out her long drones as Appa—“Father.” Glossy cards for prostitutes littered marble benches. Businessmen fell asleep in their suits on the street. The summer was humid and hot with monsoon rain, and on one of these nights in my apartment, the devil came into me. We spoke for some time about inevitable death, how I have always known that I would depart from this world by my own volition, it was just a matter of when. The time was not then and it left, and the next morning the sun came up and I walked to work and there was nothing to be afraid of anymore. I never met the devil that same way again. The face of the lamp glowed and warmed my chest.

For years I had nightmares about fucking and woke up sweating with my body tense and sore. 

***

The heater whirred on all night, and in the morning the house was warm. I opened all the blinds to let the sunlight shine through and the sky was warm and blue and welcoming. I put on my boots and crossed the street to the water meters, and the fourth box opened easily since the ice around it had melted. The bust beside the driveway looked smaller than it did before. The master bedroom had the only working shower, but was the only room still cold. I ran through and into the bathroom where I unwrapped a new block of lavender soap. There was a bathtub, and a high narrow window above it, where I could crawl out.

Ostensibly, I had come to the retreat house alone to sketch and write, and for the next week, I slept on the sofa and watched the light travel through the different windows from day into night. I spent the mornings at the oak table in front of a window facing east. I set a drafting board with a sketchbook on the table, and if I woke up before dawn I could watch the sun rise and change colors across the page. Then came that incredible sadness again, swelling out of me and into the sun. I remembered the things I wish I had never known, and the blue deepened near the horizon, and the light that saturated the clouds grew brighter.

If the past does not exist, where does it go? Does it absorb into us, into a place most human and veiled and difficult to touch? There was such a strangeness of remembering that I forced myself to look back and back and back again. I remembered the two weeks in spring when the cherry blossoms bloomed, how storms came and blew all the blossoms away in one afternoon. Snow piled onto the trees and fell that night from branches. By morning, spring returned, and before I began marking the paper with charcoal, I always liked to run my hand down and across the page, to feel the moment where emptiness starts.

I ate lunch and rested, then took walks in the warmest part of the afternoon beside the highway and ranches. There were lumps of snow huddled where the shadows were. Cars sped along the roads and I loved how ugly the Joshua trees were with their hairy trunks and prickly limbs, and how they all seemed to grasp at the sky. There had been a voice going around in a circle in my head that turned into pictures before I fell asleep at night. I could see my body cut up into a thousand perfect squares. Each night the picture sharpened and came more into focus—I could see the cubes of my breasts gelatinous, with red beads of fat tissue spilling out from formless skin.

A friend of mine from college had two handguns—he had shown them to me one night when we were drinking on the back porch near the avocado tree in his uncle’s house downtown. One was a Glock and the other a small revolver. He took them out of their cases and told me the three rules of safety, which I cannot recall now. He loaded the revolver and laid it down flat on my lap so I could feel its weight. I held it for a few seconds, and he took it quickly back from me and unloaded the bullets. I remembered that weight as a reality materializing on my lap, a similar feeling of power I had when shooting a rifle at a range in Vietnam. The soldier there had clasped a pair of broken headphones around my head to protect my ears, but with each shot a high-pitched wail broke through my hearing, and this friend with the handguns was always good to me and gave me the revolver when I said I wanted to go shooting in the desert with my brother.

I felt obsessed and powerful and half crazed with excitement when I thought about the gun, just as I did when I thought about the blood squares. Two dogs barked and followed me up the path where I stood watching a man throwing wood into his truck down near the gorges below. The truck was playing country music and the man was singing, and the dogs licked my hands and their fur was short and stiff like hair. I arrived back onto my feet again, felt the way the dirt rolled and crunched under my shoes, how hot the sun was beaming down on my hair. I lost that powerful feeling, the one that could take me out of the rules of this reality if I wanted it to, and instead came grounded again, in the same way I would when I worked or talked to my friends. I made my way down the path to the house, the dogs racing ahead, then back behind my legs. 

***

My father took a trip to Pyongyang once. He had asked if I wanted to come and I said yes, but he was the president of some kind of association that arranged the trip with the South Korean government, so I doubt that he was ever serious about my coming along. He returned with enormous painted scrolls of the landscape—tiny huts set high in the mountains with roaring waterfalls. He said the trip was very nice and that everyone had been very kind. They had toured around Pyongyang and went to a ceremony where the North Korean and South Korean governments reunited families for one dinner, once a year. I mentioned to a friend from Daegu how sad it was that the country was still split in two, and she said she never thought about it and didn’t really care. “It’s been so long,” she said. “They feel like different people.” My father hung one of the scrolls above the sofa in his office where he liked to take naps after lunch. He hung the other in the dining room in our house, and the painting bothered me very much because the waterfall in the center shot out flat and stiff like sticks with no rocks beneath it, not even imagined, to hold the water up. 

When I came home from Korea I watched my family wring their hands about money quite tensely for months. They actually had been wringing their hands for years, but for much of that time I did not see it, and then I went away. All at once I worried that the business would go bankrupt and we would have to sell everything and lose the house. Three hundred invitations were sent out for the wedding, which soon became five. Most of these guests were for my family, so my father sold their office building to pay for the wedding and moved into a smaller office they rented on Wilshire. The ceilings were low and the walls were salmon pink. On my first visit my mother sat with me and said, “God is with us so everything OK.” 

“I feel sick,” I said.

“Your head hurts?”

“No, I just feel not good. Sad.”

“What do you have to be sad about? You have no mortgage, no big worries. Enjoy your time, rest.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She held my hand. “Then go to Jesus,” she said. “Put your worries and problems in a bag, and give them to Him, and He will hold you.” She clasped her hands on the top of my head and spoke in tongues. I asked what she was saying. “Just whatever,” she shrugged.

I had to go to confession because I had to be able to take Communion at my brother’s wedding, and I hadn’t gone in more than seven years. I went to a youth Mass on a Saturday evening with old friends and then knelt alone in an unlit booth beside a priest whose face was shielded by a screen. When I came out I sat on the pews and imagined how lovely it would be for the statued angels bursting from the rafters to come help me. 

I had learned many stories of sleep from church. When I was growing up, we had our own satellite chapel with priests sent from a South Korean diocese, and the kids and parents went to two separate Masses—English in the morning, Korean in the afternoon. It was during these waiting times I learned that the space between waking and sleep was the most dangerous, the time when our spirits were in between places and most vulnerable to what our bodies had done.

***

I came back from my walk that afternoon, the voice saying in a circle how I should get the revolver from the car and come back and drink a lot. I didn’t have to do anything. I could just sit with it, it with me, here. It was Thursday and a little past three. I went into the kitchen and turned on the radio attached to the coffee pot. Every week Jacob went on air to talk about the Clippers on ESPN. I didn’t follow basketball and never knew what they were talking about, but he and his co-host laughed and debated and fought, and his voice filled the room with that life in him and felt close to me again. They ran through a play-by-play of a game while I opened the windows and cleaned the dust from the tables and lampshades and blinds. A weight from the house lifted. I felt better. 

It had been months since I was fired from the paper. An argument had escalated over a Valentine’s Day issue I wrote for the children’s section, and when I packed up my desk and walked to my car, Jacob asked why I’d done it in the first place—why I would write about murders and massacres and ancient festivities of boys picking girls’ names from a jar and then whipping them with strips of animal hide dipped in blood. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I got sick of writing about penguins and good citizens and crafts and shit.” 

“I think you could have saved yourself even after that,” he said. “What did you in was calling ____ a cunt.”

We slept together shortly afterward and then stopped speaking for months because there were voices again, saying I had done a bad thing and changing the shape of his face. 

I stopped cleaning when his segment was ending and didn’t want him to go and leave me alone again. That is the time when loneliness strikes deepest, the moment right after the voices leave. The night after the wedding, the bridesmaids shared a room in the hotel, and I woke up to find water in the night and walked through the corridors empty and quiet. Jacob kept coming back to me in dreams. I remembered the morning the sun rose from behind the buildings and blinded our eyes. I wrote him letters when I could not sleep, asking if it was difficult for him to live inside himself, if he heard something else speaking to him in silent hours at night. “I have never felt any presence ‘inside me,’” he wrote. “Sometimes I don’t even feel me.”

At four I watched the sky darken from the westward window, and in autumn when the afternoon turned to night, the sun set long and slow for hours, but in winter, the sky darkened quickly, as if someone had blown out a light. There was a chill settling in the outside air again without the sun, and I could feel it begin to settle into the house. I drew all the shades closed and sat back down on the couch. “Dear Jacob,” I wrote. “If you were to guess that I’m writing you from an old house in the middle of nowhere, I’d say you were exactly right. You’d like it here. Come visit. ____ Twin Pine Road Wrightwood 92397.”

***

On the first morning I woke up in my apartment in Incheon, I met a new co-worker and her friend for coffee. The co-worker became a good friend of mine, but she is not important here because it was her friend who told us about the little girl found that morning under a bridge with her innards pulled out. We argued that it was impossible, that even if she were small, the force of sex was not enough to pull her intestines out between her legs. Later, the co-worker apologized to me for that news on my first day. I said I wasn’t worried. She said what had happened was that the rapist used a plunger to extract his semen, which was how the girl’s innards came out. 

***

I received a message from Jacob the next morning. “If you want, I can come tonight.”

To prepare, I would need to leave the house to go to the store and buy things like firewood and wine and good things to eat. I stood in the kitchen, by the long window above the sink. It seemed unbearable, to go out and drive down the switchbacks and through the roads where other people would be. At a distance, up the hill, dogs stood guarding the neighbor’s door. The master bedroom had the only bed large enough to fit us both. The room would be cold. My menstrual cycle had started the day before, which meant that if we were to strip naked, and I was certain we would, then blood would cover the sheets and our thighs. 

“Yes, I’ll be here,” I wrote back. 

I already missed the dawn and sat down at the table without opening the blinds to look at the work I had done.

My mother called Father Park her soul mate. There was a time when she fasted and only wore a brown dress and meditated on the sofa for hours at night. My father said he felt her drifting apart and away from him. He wanted to go to association dinners and play golf and watch movies together. She said she could feel it as well, how she could almost float out of herself. Maybe, she said, she could lift away and never come back.

When we drew figures in class, the bodies were beautiful. For years I could not speak in a way for others to understand. I wanted to reach out a hand and touch all the models—each had to be built from the inside. The next morning at the retreat house, I woke up and saw how one of the walls in the master bedroom was bright. There was a sliding glass door behind ivory curtains I had not paid enough attention to see. I remembered writhing beneath a body with fear like flames. But this room was quiet, and Jacob was asleep. For a long time I watched the way sunlight pooled into shadows and held onto our skin. 

More from this year's Fiction Issue:

The Mare

Jailbait

Miami

A$AP Ferg, Bodega BAMZ, the Underachievers, and the Flatbush Zombies

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Hip-hop is having a renaissance right now in the city of New York, where it seems like every other day a new MC rises up out of the five boroughs with an even more unique style and approach to the music than what we thought was possible before. Motley crews like the A$AP Mob, the Beast Coast, and World's Fair have given us a reason to love rhymes again. We've written a lot about this stuff, but sometimes words don't do it justice. So, we've linked up with scene insider Verena Stefanie Grotto to document the new New York movement as it happens in real time, with intimate shots of rappers, scenesters, artists, and fashion fiends.

For this installment, Verena caught up with A$AP Ferg, Marty Balla, the Underachievers, and Bodega BAMZ. She then shot photos of the Flatbush Zombies during their headlining set on Brooklyn's Summer Stage, where she came across a mysterious pile of one-dollar bills.

Photographer Verena Stefanie was born and bred in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. The small town is not known for hip-hop, but they do make a very tasty grape-based pomace brandy there called grappa. Stefanie left Bassano del Grappa at the age of 17 to go and live the wild skateboarding life in Barcelona, Spain, where she worked as the Fashion Coordinator for VICE Spain. Tired of guiding photographers to catch the best shots, she eventually grabbed the camera herself and is now devoted to documenting artists, rappers, style-heads, and more. She recently directed a renowned documentary about the Grime scene in UK and has had photo features in GQ, CosmopolitanVICE, and many more. 

Check out her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

@VerenaStefanie 

Previously - Joey Bada$$, Pro Era, Bodega BAMZ, Va$htie, and Raven Sorvino

VICE News: Teenage Riot - São Paulo

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Last October, just before the São Paulo mayoral elections, we followed the Free Pass Movement of São Paulo as they celebrated the National Day of the Free Pass. They've been commemorating the day since 2005, when people surrounded City Hall until a bill guaranteeing free public transportation for students was approved.

These days, the fight for a free pass on public transportation is not only for students, but for everyone. Despite large protests occurring all over Brazil, they remain largely unnoticed by mainstream media—but not to the batons of local police.


The Secret Ex-Torture Compound in the Heart of Kensington

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Kensington Palace Gardens, former home of the "London Cage". (Photo via

All things considered, Kensington and Chelsea is probably the London borough that makes you feel most shit about your life. It's not a place for people like you; it's for sultans, sheikhs, oligarchs and people who sit atop other power structures that British people don't really understand. It's a place where the dogs are better fed than you and the cats have their own televisions. It's a place where everyone carries around a thousand of every major currency at all times because they never know which country they're going to go to bed in. But did you know it also used to be home to a gargantuan torture facility?

The London Cage, as it came to be known, was situated inside three buildings that are now used as part of the Russian Embassy, neighbouring the current homes of the Sultan of Brunei and Roman Abramovich. Sixty years ago, it served first as one of several British War World II interrogation centres, then as the War Crimes Investigation Unit’s post-1945 HQ.

Within the walls of Kensington Palace Gardens, the British paid little regard to the Geneva Convention and visited upon captured Nazi war criminals some Gulag-level torment and Guantanamo-style interrogation. That the buildings once held a vast prisoner of war facility that you probably didn’t know about (mainly because, weirdly, that information has been omitted from its tour itinerary) says a lot about Britain and its secretive practices since the Second World War.

Between July 1940 and September 1948, 3,573 enemy soldiers passed through its doors, including several of the war’s most infamous criminals. Fritz Knochlein, for instance – the German SS soldier responsible for massacring 97 members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment in Le Paradis, France – and a Nazi Gauleiter (a leader of a regional branch of the Nazi party) named Sporenburg, who was guilty of systematically killing 46,000 Jewish Poles in 24 hours. His method involved gathering victims by the hundreds from concentration camps, taking them to fields and forcing them to dig the holes that they would fall into after being shot by Nazi soldiers.


Fritz Knochlein of the SS. (Image from The London Cage)

No one’s disputing that most of the people who wound up at the London Cage were there on fairly solid grounds. But the interest here lies in the fact that it remained a secret for so long, despite being less than a quarter of a mile from Notting Hill Gate and Kensington High Street tube stations. In fact, the existence of the Cage went unreported until 2005, when journalist Ian Cobain finally revealed its practices.

In 1946, Knoechlein stated in a written complaint that he'd been stripped, deprived of sleep for four days, starved, forced to run until he collapsed, forced to march in tight circles for four hours, beaten with a bat, forced to stand under freezing cold water after standing beside a large gas stove for hours and forced to run circles while carrying heavy logs. Other inmates corroborated these claims, adding that they had also been threatened with electrical devices. It was later claimed that Knoechlein reached a point of shrieking in a half-crazed state every night, causing local police to call in and enquire as to why such a chilling racket was coming from the Kensington Palace Gardens.

The man in charge, Lt. Col Alexander Scotland – the belligerent, uncompromising head of the prisoner of war interrogation section of the intelligence corps – remained indignant when confronted with allegations of torture. One extract from his memoirs gives a vivid idea of the attitude he took towards this and similar allegations. He recalls an exchange with a lawyer named Dr Oehlert, who was defending Erich Zacharias – a man accused of killing an RAF officer and rumoured to have also ordered the death of his mistress – during a trial of 18 Nazis in 1947.

Dr Oehlert claimed that, “her client had complained that he was several times beaten about the face in London Cage, that food was withheld from him for several days, that on many days when he was interrogated he was not allowed to sleep at night”.

Addressing Scotland, she continued: “Zacharias says that you threatened him with electrical devices.”

To which Scotland replied, “Quite untrue. We have no weapons and no such devices in the London Cage”.

"And so it went on," Scotland wrote in his book, The London Cage, published by the now-defunct Evans Brothers in 1957, “until another defence counsel suggested I had told prisoners in London that they would be hanged with their wives [and] deported to Siberia where they would become common property.”


Lt. Col Alexander Scotland. (Image from The London Cage)

In what sounds more like the move of a schoolgirl bully, Scotland was also accused of pulling prisoners' hair. Again, he met these accusations with a rebuttal and found a bizarre, vaguely ridiculous way of proving his accusers wrong.

“This allegation interested me, because it seemed not only an unlikely form of torture, but possibly an ineffective one," he wrote. "So, in the presence of several witnesses at London Cage, I proceeded to give a demonstration designed to show that it was impossible. One of my own British assistants and NCO [non-commissioned officer] agreed to become guinea-pig for this test. First, he sprawled on the floor and I took a firm grip on his hair. Finally, I dragged him in this manner across the room… with the final result that when I released my hold, only a few strands of hair were seen to be left in my hand… And, as often happens, some of the newspaper headlines were wildly inaccurate, as, for example… 'Gestapo Men Were Not Beaten – But Had Hair Pulled'.”

The stories that emerge from the Cage range from the harrowing to the absurd, like another case that was reported a few years earlier in Scotland’s memoirs; namely, the case of the "Boy Who Wouldn’t Stop Laughing".

One of the few dozen survivors when the German warship Bismarck was sunk in the Atlantic in 1941, “he was brought to the Cage in London, where his interrogation began. His response to all questions, however, was an uncontrolled giggle. Even the simplest and most commonplace queries touched off a burst of laughter. It was as if, for all his childishness, he possessed some intuitive spark, some reflex action, prompting this queer method of avoiding a subject which he had been taught to guard with secrecy.”

Scotland claimed that his method for resolving this little hiccup was to simply laugh along with the boy, prompting him to buck up his ideas and talk straight.


(Image from The London Cage)

Strange, sadistic lieutenants aside, the secrecy surrounding the London Cage once again raises the issue of Britain’s so-called "no torture policy" since the end of the war. Sure, it was guys facing mass homicide charges who faced the worst treatment. And their accusations – especially those of Knoechlein, who'd already been sentenced to death and seemed hell-bent on damaging the reputation of the British Armed Forces before he was executed – should be treated with scepticism. But his accounts don't differ substantively from those of other prisoners; and, as Darius Rejali states in his book Torture and Democracy, we can’t ignore the fact that, “Scotland refused Red Cross inspections, arguing that his prisoners were either civilians or criminals within the armed forces, so not protected by the Geneva convention.”

A later MI5 investigation concluded the opposite, but Scotland was never charged, despite later admitting, "We never went in for any sadism. Still, there were things we did which were mentally just as cruel… One fellow we had up before us was really cheeky and obstinate. We told him to undress and eventually he stood before us completely naked. That deflated him. Then we told him to start doing exercises. That killed his resistance completely. He soon started to talk.”

The humiliation also extended to bodily functions: “Sometimes we would keep them standing on their feet round the clock,” Scotland continued. “If a prisoner wanted to pee, he had to do it there and then, in his clothes. It was surprisingly effective.” It’s also been claimed that British interrogation officers wore KGB uniforms to further intimidate the German inmates.

Was it this that caused the War Office to block Scotland’s memoirs when they were submitted for censorship in 1950? He was swiftly threatened with a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act and his home was raided without warning. The Foreign Office insisted the book be concealed from public knowledge and it was only published seven years later after all incriminating evidence had been removed.

Whatever the exact cause – and we may never know – it’s important to highlight how far back Britain’s secret use of torture goes as concern mounts towards the introduction of Secret Courts, closed cases where defendants may not be aware of all the allegations against them, presided over only by a judge and security-cleared "special advocates".

We have a long history of unjustly presenting ourselves as a lawful state that respects and upholds human rights. And our government is now at liberty to conceal from us more information than ever before; to cover its tracks, when due process doesn’t prove quite as effective as brute force.

Follow Nathalie on Twitter: @NROlah

More stuff about torture:

Greece's New Anarchist Generation Are Being Tortured by Police

I Was Tortured as a Bahraini Political Prisoner

Full Metal Torture

Wild Things: The Wolfman

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80-year-old Werner Freund would rather be a wolf than a man. He's been raising and living with wild wolves in Germany for the last 30 years and considers them his family. Last January, Gersin Paya from VICE Germany and a small crew drove to the town of Merzig to meet Werner and help him feed raw deer meat to his sons and daughters.

More videos about life in the wild:

The Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl

The Dog Hunter

Agafia's Taiga Life

Legendary Producer Mike Dean Talks About His Work on 'Yeezus'

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As far as hip-hop producers go, Mike Dean is a legend. He's a Grammy Award-winning producer who helped pioneer the Dirty South sound in the 90s. Mike's had a hand in mixing, producing, and mastering multi-platinum records for everyone from the Geto Boys and Pimp C to Tupac and Jay-Z. Mike's also been one of Kanye West's go-to guys from the very beginning. He's worked on the majority of Kanye's albums, from mixing College Dropout and Late Registration to co-producing tracks on Graduation and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. For the past six months, Mike Dean, Ye, and the legendary Rick Rubin have been putting the final touches on Kanye's new record. The way Yeezus has been blaring out of every pair of headphones around the VICE office, we can't wait to catch Kanye and Mike performing the new tracks on tour

We sent Archie Green, an MC and producer who's made beats for VICE's Noisey Raps and has been featured in the Creators Project's Layers series, to catch up with Mike Dean before Yeezus dropped. Archie picked Mike's brain about Kanye's new album, Mike's past projects, and what the future of hip-hop holds.

VICE: What's your main setup when you're in the lab with Kanye?
Mike Dean: My go-to is Ableton right now. I use Logic and Pro Tools to mix.

How do you feel about playing digital versus playing live?
Playing live is dope, but you have to mix them both together. You can't do too much of one or another. That's the secret.

How many instruments do you know how to play?
I don't know. Seven or eight? I play the sax, piano, guitar, bass... I started as a kid with piano lessons.

How did you come to be with Rap-A-Lot?
I was producing some local rappers around Houston, this group called the Deathsquad and another group called the Power Lords. This was in 1998 or 1999.

How many years have you been in the game?
I started with Selena in 1983. So, it's been almost 30 years.

What was it like working with Scarface and the Geto Boys? I know there was some crazy shit that went down.
It's good making music. Mostly it's all just making music and smoking.

Yeezus sounds fucking crazy. It's on some futuristic shit. Kanye's repetoire is always grandiose, but this seems more of a minimalist approach. What was the motivation behind that?
It was Kanye. He wanted to strip everything down and make it more like a rock-band album.

How much was Rick Rubin's hand involved with the final pieces of the album? I know he came in at the last minute.
A lot. He helped put everything together. And he took some stuff away.

What's your favorite song off the project?
I would have to say "Hold My Liquor," because I produced it. Well, Kanye and I produced it. It has a nice guitar solo.

What direction do you see the sound of hip-hop going? Obviously with Yeezus, you're doing something completely different.
We'll change it again next album. We raise the bar every time.

How did your association with Travis Scott come about? Is that mainly due to your ties with Houston?
I met him through Anthony. He was hitting me up on Twitter like six months prior, but I really didn't answer him. Since he got with Anthony, I started helping him out. He's dope.

Follow Mike Dean on Twitter.

Check out Archie Green on Soundcloud and follow him on Twitter.

More hip-hop from VICE:

Big Booties Don't Get into Rap Videos Without Face Time

Never Party with The Brick Squad

Pimp Rap Has a New Prince and His Name Is 100s

Wearing a Mask at a Canadian Protest Can Earn You a Ten Year Prison Sentence

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Canada is now a country where a protesting panda bear can be sent to prison for a decade. Photo via JustinLing.

As we told you in November, Canada’s House of Commons passed a bill last Halloween that forbids masked protesters from joining in on an “illegal” protest. Anyone who is in violation of this new anti-mask legislation will be facing a maximum penalty of a decade in prison. Many Canadians understandably see this as the latest move by the Conservative government to criminalize dissent in this country.

The world has seen a surge in social upheaval over the past few years, as movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy have dominated headlines. Most recently, Istanbul and São Paulo have been coated in flames and tear gas clouds as crowds of protesters clash with swarms of riot police. Alongside these uprisings is a recent report by the Guardian that indicates the Pentagon is “bracing for public dissent”—which is in part why they have built a massive system of “suspicionless surveillance”—emerging from environmental activism, as the world prepares to be rocked by new natural disasters.

Over here in Canada, we have experienced our own brand of protesting and social uprising, specifically from the student movement in Montreal. Recent legislation in Montreal has made it illegal to be in a group of more than ten people without prior notification to the police. The incredibly shitty and controversial P-6 bylaw has also made it a requirement for protesters to send an itinerary of their demonstration to the police in advance. If protesters fail to send in their protest route, or the protest deviates in any way from the submitted route, their protest will be deemed illegal, and so if any of the protesters at said protest are in masks, they could lose the next ten years of their life.

Besides that insanely disproportionate penalty, so-called illegal protesters are also being levied fines starting at $500 for the first offence. Given that the crux of the protest movement in Montreal is a student uprising, kids who are living off Kraft Dinner are understandably concerned about having to pay fines that can sometime go over a thousand dollars for repeat offenses. It’s squashing the alternative voice in an alarmingly ironfisted manner. As Alex Norris, a Montreal councilor, told the CBC: “P-6… doesn’t belong in a democratic society.”

As a result of these restrictive legislations, protests are oftentimes declared illegal in Montreal. In March, 250 people were arrested at an anti-police brutality protest, including one VICE Canada journalist. At the May Day protest on May 1st, police arrested 447 protesters. VICE Canada was also there, filming a documentary about the P-6 bylaw.


Anarcopanda hanging out with a bunch of masked riot police. via xddorox

Blake Richards, a conservative MP in Alberta, introduced the anti-mask legislation to the House of Commons. He refers to the new law as “my bill,”—like a proud, crappy dad—and was quoted as saying: “We can all rest easier tonight knowing our communities have been made safer with its passage.” But why is that the case? What exactly are we protecting ourselves from? Just because wearing a mask at a protest is illegal, does not mean the Black Bloc members who vandalized storefronts and burned police cars at the Toronto G20 are simply going to stay home the next time there’s an opportunity to riot.

Then there are the headlines, like the one CBC ran today, stating that: “Wearing a mask at a riot becomes illegal today.” We know that this law is simply not a measure being used against riots—because the definition in Canada of what is and what is not an illegal protest has become so one-sided. Like I mentioned in my first article about this issue, the Occupy Toronto protest, which was by all accounts a very tame and uneventful proceeding, was deemed illegal by a Toronto judge. This was absolutely not a riot, and yet, if you were hanging out there with a Guy Fawkes mask over your face, under this new legislation, you’d likely be going to prison.

Given the wide variety of facial coverings one could possibly wear to a protest, it is relieving to hear that at least there have been “exceptions” built into the new legislation for “religious or medical reasons.” But that doesn’t help anyone who is wearing a mask to express his or her own “radical” political beliefs. While it certainly makes some sense that vandalism is made easier by mask wearing, why are we looking to prosecute non-vandals who are wearing a Guy Fawkes mask or a panda suit simply because riot police—who wear full facial and body coverings and sometimes don’t wear ID badges—can’t see their face?

This type of legislation is maddeningly one-sided. No one in their right mind wants to see innocent people hurt in the process of protesting—nor should anyone, save for the most die-hard of anarchists, wish for property damage to be included as a protest method—but the trend of restrictive legislation against political expression in Canada has reached an alarming level. And it appears to only be getting more stringent as the global climate of social dissent worsens.

 

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Watch:

Teenage Riot: Montreal - Part 1

Teenage Riot: Montreal - Part 2

Read:

Anarcopanda Speaks!

We're Throwing Two Sled Island Parties in One Night

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If you haven't been paying attention to Sled Island, you are truly one of those snoozer-types who is now a loser-type. The little music festival that could now boasts one of the best Canadian festival lineups we've ever seen. Suffice to say this thing ain't just a Cowtown secret anymore. However, it's not to late to undo your wrongdoing--because we're throwing two really awesome parties at Sled Island that you and your really awesome friends should come to.

It all goes down on Thursday. The first massively amazing event we're putting on features our buddy and big-time crooner/twanger, Mac Demarco. He's headlining along with opening sets by Dent May, Lab Coast, and Calvin Love.

Then there's the House of Vans party thrown our friends at (you guessed it) Vans. It's also on Tuesday, and it's being headlined by our compadres from OFF! who are playing alongside Chlorinator and Vinyl Ritchie. You can find all the ticket info you need over here, just in case you don't have a festival pass.

If there was ever a time to clone yourself in order to appear in two places at once, it would be now. We love Calgary so much and we think everybody else should, too. So, we'll see you at one thing or both things. Have a good Sled Island!


16-Year-Old White Swedish Rapper Yung Lean Doer Is Back with a Weird New Video

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16-Year-Old White Swedish Rapper Yung Lean Doer Is Back with a Weird New Video

A Hundred Thousand People Marched in São Paulo Monday

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What began as a demonstration against the rising cost of public transportation in São Paulo has become a full-on national protest movement giving voice to long-brewing anger over how the Brazilian government has been spending its taxpayers' money. The country is getting ready to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, and that means massive expenditures on stadiums and other infrastructure projects being built for the events rather than things that a lot of Brazilians seem to care about, including health care, better schools, and fighting corruption.

Monday saw the fifth demonstration in São Paulo in the past week against fare hikes on subways and buses. It was by and large a peaceful and festive affair, unlike some protests that have turned into riots in previous weeks; according to some estimates more than 100,000 people participated. It wasn't all sunshine and slogans, however—skirmishes did break out and some factions of protesters tossed Molotov cocktails at the Bandeirantes Palace, the governor’s office, and riot police responded by firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd.

But protesters stayed on the streets well into the night. And they’ll likely, peacefully or not, continue to voice their greivances against their government. 

More from Brazil:

São Paulo Is Burning

Teenage Riot - São Paulo


VICE News: The Battle of Consolação

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Since June 2, when the price of public transportation in São Paulo, Brazil, rose from R$3 to R$3.20, the Free Pass Movement has initiated protests that have turned into a wave of revolt.

On June 13, protesters who had been marching peacefully from the Municipal Theater to Avenida Paulista, the city's main avenue, were attacked by São Paulo's military police. The attack took place in Rua da Consoloação in the center of the city; tear-gas bombs and rubber bullets were fired into the crowds. Students and journalists covering the events were cornered, beaten, and arrested. Several reporters were injured, and one photographer even lost an eye after being hit in the face with a rubber bullet.

The events were a chilling reminder of the violent protests against the military dictatorship in 1968, which took place in the same region and have shaped Brazil's history. On one side of the protests were students who agreed with the military currently in power. On the other, young protesters called for an end to what they saw as oppression. The idealogical disagreement escalated into physical aggression, and with stones, pieces of wood and glass in hand, the two sides battled until the police intervened, killing a 20-year-old student.

After last week's attack on the protesters, evidence of police violence began to spread via social media. The movement gathered popular support and the Brazil's major media networks—who until then had been praising the police and condemning protesters as "vandals"—changed their tone completely. They began criticizing the police's actions and attempted to manipulate the motivation of the protests in accordance with their own interests, using the events to attack President Dilma and the mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, both of whom represent the left-wing Workers' Party.

More about the bus-fare protests:

São Paulo Is Burning

Teenage Riot - São Paulo

 

Comics: Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #90

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Dear Comic Bookies,

Alex Schubert made a Killer Driller cartoon for Fox's ADHD programming. You can watch the whole thing above.

Rock 'n' rollers who resent digital music have been losing it over this panel from an old Archie comic in which he seems to predict the future. 

Last Gasp, publishers of neato books, are selling sets of their classic underground hippie comix for cheap starting June 26. Check it out if you want some of them. 

Look at this old photo of a Vampirella model. For a long time, Vampirella models were just about the only girls you would see at comic conventions. There have been several official Vampirella models, and the width of the strips of fabric that make up their costumes has changed with the attitudes of the times.

Here are some great Sesame Street posters that Jack Davis drew some time in the 70s.

Eye of the Majestic Creature Volume 2
Leslie Stein
Fantagraphics

Frequent VICE contributor Leslie Stein has a new book of comics out from Fantagraphics, and it's a really good one. 

Eye of the Majestic Creature Volume 2 continues Leslie’s tradition of telling self-contained stories about a thinly veiled stand-in for herself named Larrybear. Larry's eyes are these big white wafers that sit on top of her face and make it hard for the reader to ever really feel like they are the character. Most of the other characters’ eyes are also pupil-less, making every interaction Larry has feel potentially threatening. The core of this series seems to be about how uncomfortable it is to interact with other people and how lonely it can be in New York. I was quoted saying something similar in the book's press release.

The first story in EOTMCV.2 starts with Larry waking up naked and hungover, which has happened before in this series. She lives with three sentient instruments that have arms and legs, but no faces. She has a shitty time but finds solace in her new hobby of Victorian sand counting, which seems to be a metaphor for how fruitless and time consuming making comics can be.

The next story is a terrifying one from Leslie's childhood in which her mother takes her and her siblings to Disneyland and then invites a drifter to come with them. It does a very good job of communicating the horror that children of alcoholics feel—the scariness of parents who aren't protecting you. We published this comic in two parts on VICE. 

There are two more comics about Larry experiencing severe joys and discomfort as a child and visiting a boyfriend's alcoholic father. The book ends with Larry finding a Booji Boy mask (google it if you don't know) in a secondhand shop and wearing it around for the remainder of the book. 

What Leslie does with her work is special. She seems largely influenced by newspaper comics, but her stories are subtle. There's not always an obvious storyline, but you can tell something's happening although you might not be able to tell what the hell it is.

Legends of the Blues
William Stout
Abrams

Comic artists loooove drawing blues musicians. There's just something about a world-weary black man with straight hair holding a guitar in a neighborly fashion that seems to satisfy illustrators. This reminds me of various trading-card sets that Kitchen Sink Press put out in the 90s, except that it's a book. Both R. Crumb and his son Jesse Crumb have done a lot of drawings like this. If this wasn't by someone as great as Bill Stout I might not care. It is by Bill Stout, though, so I care a lot. He's got a mastery of delicate details and bold use of black. His stuff is great every time and I would be happy to look at a book of anything he drew. 

I Love Your Butt
Sabrina Elliot
Self Published

This is one of those zines made by taking one piece of printer paper, putting a slit in the middle, and giving it an accordion fold so that it's a teeny little eight-page booklet. This one is full of cute lady butts. They are all good drawings of varied butt types and they're not crazy idealized. When you unfold the zine and lay it out flat, the other side of the paper is a print of one large butt in a heart that is signed and numbered. This is a really cool zine. 

Sketchbook
Kate Beaton
Desert Island

Sketchbook collections are like the live albums of the comics world. If you're super popular, at some point your fans will love your creative product so much that they'll want to see work that's less polished. Just like musicians and live albums—Frank Zappa's live records, for example, were carefully cut together from many different shows and went through lots of studio work and intense editing—some illustrators aren't comfortable delivering a raw product. A lot of the sketchbook collections out there are kinda like Zappa’s live albums. 

Kate Beaton's seems to be for real, though. It's not full of finished illustrations and it's still very entertaining. Many of the pages in this book will make you laugh if you're a Beaton lover.       

Dream It
Ronald McDonald
McDonalds

This is a great little activity book that kept me entertained for a very long bus ride.

@NicholasGazin

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #89

I Vaporized Booze, Then Felt Like Dying

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We’re the idiots who decided to smoke booze.

I love alcohol. Our society loves alcohol. It wouldn’t be too far off to say that we pretty much thrive on it. It’s a staple in most people’s lives, whether it’s a quick drink after work for happy hour, or a Saturday night bender where you know you’re going to wake up Sunday morning hating yourself. We can’t seem to get enough of it. But what happens when you get tired of getting drunk by oral consumption? You branch out and find try the newest frontiers of how to get fucked up, of course!

The other day I was perusing my Facebook feed when an article about “smoking alcohol” grabbed my attention. I read on, and within the first few lines I said “Fuck yeah, I’m so doing this.” The article went on about all the hazards involved and even included a list of dangers that the inhalation of alcohol can cause, but I didn’t care, because it claimed that huffing booze vapor does not give you a hangover. My dream had come true. And let’s face it, the worst part of drinking alcohol isn’t the painful shame of over-indulging and making an ass out of yourself, or drinking yourself sick, it’s the actual drinking part. It’s 2013 and everyone knows that lifting a glass to your mouth and letting gravity push liquid into your stomach is for conventional pussies.

There are two ways to smoke alcohol. The first is to pour it over dry ice and inhale the fumes with a straw—a new-wave freebase, if you ask me. If you don’t have access to dry ice, you can also attach a bike pump to a cork and pressurize the hell out of your alcoholic beverage to smoke it back. It looks like a sink-toke, an alcoholic sink-toke.

Before we go any further, you probably should be aware that smoking alcohol is by and large a dumb idea for the following reasons:

  1. Alcohol is poisonous to your lungs
  2. It’s bad for your nasal passages
  3. You can get alcohol-poisoning super easily because you can’t throw up the excess booze on account of the fact that it’s been directly vaporized into your bloodstream
  4. You can’t measure your actual intake because even though the alcohol is gone there’s still liquid in the bottle and unless you’re a crazy scientist you can’t tell how much was actually vaporized
  5. Do not try this if you’re asthmatic or have a lung infection. Because it will make it worse.

On the bright side, here are a few of the so-called “positive effects” that come from smoking alcohol—according to me.  There are no calories and no carbs, so if you’re on a diet you can still get drunk and not worry about putting on pounds. People who do it for this reason have been called “drunkorexic” by doctors and haters alike. Also I think I’d like to say it again, no hangovers. But that’s really about it. Otherwise this activity might kill you.



I found a pretty helpful thread on a drug forum I frequent often to get more information from people who have done this before, and found out there are a few machines you can buy which vaporize the alcohol for you, but I did not want to wait for the shipping because I was super jazzed to hoover some booze fumes. So I found a set of D.I.Y. instructions from a very nice drug forum poster, located in Russia, and set to work on acquiring the parts needed to make my own pressurizer.

I started putting together all the pieces with a friend, and after a few trials, perfected the art of making my own alcohol vaporizer. Our cork wasn’t thick enough, so we had to wrap it with some painter’s tape to make sure it would be airtight. During the first trial run we didn’t pump the bottle enough, so I pretty much just inhaled the taste of gin and was dissatisfied while everyone looked at me with wide-eyed curiosity. It didn’t do anything.



Once we cut the cork smaller the needle of the bike pump stuck out of the bottom and the magic started happening. After our first really successful vaporize session the cork came flying out from the pressure of the bottle and it filled up with a fog-like substance. We had a round of high fives and cheered “FUCK YEAH SCIENCE!” as we all sucked the vapor out.



We kept pumping and after two or three hits I started feeling “tipsy,” which basically means my brain started to feel fuzzy while a dumb smile slowly stretched across my face. It felt more like smoking weed because the drunkenness felt very mellow and smooth. Every time we’d pump up another bottle we would get stoked and super hyper, anticipating to get shitfaced, but that was toned down from all the energy we were expending on the bike pump. All of us broke a sweat from using it to pressurize the bottle. It’s a workout to get wasted like this.



The first hour or so was pretty fun. We were all smiles and giggles, but that was probably more from the novelty of the whole situation than the alcoholic vapor to be honest. We all took turns pumping, inhaling, smoking cigarettes, and laughing. It was a pretty good time in the beginning. Over the night we tried gin, vodka, whiskey, and beer. Then we mixed all of the hard liquor together and made a smorgasbord of booze to vape into our bodies.


This is what beer looks like as it’s getting vaporized.

In the end, all I felt was really mellow and extremely nauseous. I ate some stale french fries and that kept the nausea at bay for a bit but it was a constant nagging in my stomach. It was really annoying. I kept feeling like I drank too much and wanted to puke, but my mind was feeling like I had smoked weed and was chilling out. There was a disconnect between my body and my mind that made me feel super awkward. All of a sudden I didn’t know how to properly engage in social conversation, which is messed up because I’m usually the loudest person in a room. We kept on smoking booze because we didn’t feel drunk, and thought that maybe if we smoked more that it would make it all better. But we were so very wrong.



After a while, it just felt like we were smoking booze to fulfill some kind of imaginary obligation we had all invented in our own minds. It was like crack. There was so much hype and expectation built up from all the articles and YouTube videos I read and saw, that the act of actually vaporizing booze shattered my expectations. I felt like a real big piece of shit afterwards. The only real good thing to come out of this was, after one big toke of gin, my right ear, which I somehow messed up on St. Patricks Day, finally un-popped. I could hear again from that side of my head. That was a bit confusing given I had been half deaf for nearly four months—so maybe smoking booze is a cure for plugged ears?



As the night wore on everyone got disinterested with smoking alcohol and started a late night jam session, while I sat on a chair wishing I was still deaf. Battling the nausea in my tummy was getting really fucking old. I felt like I was dying. My roommate noticed something was off as I sat quietly, and she asked me if I was okay. I gave her an honest answer: “I feel like my lungs are bleeding.”

This wasn’t as hyberbolic of a comment as it may sound to you, as I just got over a lung infection two weeks previous to creating my own booze vaporizing machine (yes, not the best idea, I’ll admit). I decided to carry on anyway because my lungs are already so messed up that I was positive a little more wear and tear wouldn’t damage them any more than a usual night of drinking. But now I realize that was silly so, if you have shitty lungs, don’t do this. In fact, even if you’re the healthiest person in the world, don’t do this. It’s insanely dumb.



I wish I was dead. This is the face of disappointment and nausea.

As the night came to a close, I tried in vain to fall asleep. I tossed and turned in my bed and couldn’t get comfortable for the life of me. I started to get irritated and noticed every small movement and sound around me. I felt like I was coming down off speed or something even though I hadn’t even gotten more than a slight buzz from the all the alcohol I smoked. Finally I was certain I was going to puke, so I ran down stairs and dry heaved over my toilet for about two minutes before realizing I had nothing in my stomach to puke up. As I came to terms with the fact that I was probably going to die from alcohol poisoning, I listened to the trains pass by outside my house. I made a vow to myself that if I survived the night I would never consume alcohol in any other way than God intended, which is orally.

So again, in case it’s not already clear, I do not recommend smoking alcohol and I do not condone its consumption in any other way but orally. Don’t be an idiot. It’s not even that fun. It’s all the worst parts of being drunk, with absolutely none of the fun, and an added dose of nauseous insomnia. Fuck you, booze smoke. We’re through.



Follow Gabe on Twitter: @gabekill

More “fun” with substance abuse:

Things I Learned from Butt Chugging

New Frontiers of Sobriety

Why I Quit Drinking

The Unhealthiest Restaurant in San Francisco

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I’ve been living in San Francisco since November and I’ve just about fucking had it with the so-called foodie capital of America. Listen up gastro-cowards: you can take your healthy, free-range, vegan, vegi, pesci, locovore, halal, kosher, organic, all natural, probiotic, low carb, no carb, fat free, gluten free, sugar free, dairy free, soy free, soy, antioxidant, agave, raw nonsense being passed off as food and you can shove it up your exceptionally healthy ass. Come on white people, get it together. When are you going to get over waking up on Saturdays at some ungodly hour, trekking to brunch with your unemployable bohemian buddies who say made-up shit like “boughetto” and overtip from white guilt?

When did we lose touch with our roots? Remember when gourmet meant purple ketchup and the only crème fraîche in your life was encrusted at the bottom of a tube sock? Before your attempts to impress everyone at the feminist labor rights collective bike workshop with your unremarkable palate, you scarfed down dinosaur-shaped nuggets and beefaroni in front of the TV without a care in the world. Whatever happened to microwavable babysitter cuisine? I remember. Come with me.

Deep in the health-conscious heart of San Francisco stands a monument to the inner fat kid we abandoned to go live in the Bay called Butter. Sitting pretty on 11th and Folsom, the stucco yellow walls thump with tasteless classic rock. Inside, a big fat truck cab stares you in the face, the walls are covered with outdated nostalgia, and it smells of movie-theater popcorn. Known to the gentrified locals as “two turntables and a microwave," since 1999, the food place (calling it a "restaurant" would be giving it airs) has a sticky, faded menu featuring the finest in cheap frozen comfort foods. Nothing is over $5 and it's all served nuked or deep fried (because try as you might, you can’t sauté a Twinkie). The bar, overrun with flavored vodka, throwback softies, and cheap, watered-down beer as far as the eye can see, reminds us all of the kids we once were, the children who got drunk on the sly and crammed ourselves with inedible processed foodstuffs.

These dishes don't taste like food. They taste like horrible childhood memories. Come with me as I illustrate each individual horror as I experienced them.

Mac 'n' Cheese + Latchkey Tea (Long Island Iced Tea and Strawberry Soda)

Mom and Dad are gone for the night, and you’ve masturbated so many times that nothing’s coming out anymore, so it’s off to the kitchen where Mom’s left half a pot of starchy macaroni topped with mild cheddar cheese sauce, bubbles of unmixed powder floating around. You consider spooning it into a bowl, but you don’t because you’re not a sociopath. On the way to the TV, you do a double-take as you pass Dad’s liquor locker. Ding, ding, ding—it’s slightly ajar. So it’s back to the kitchen so you can fill up your dinosaur mug with one of everything. Dad’s got vodka, rum, tequila, gin, and triple sec, but when you taste it, your testicles zip back up into your body, and you run right back to the kitchen to dilute your dirty Long Island iced tea with as much strawberry soda as you can find. Three hours later, Mom and Dad find you passed out, dino mug knocked over, and a half-eaten pot of mac 'n' cheese upside down over your genitals. They’ll never forgive you. 

Tater Tots + Tiki Trash (Coconut Rum and Fruit Punch)
It’s the second week of summer camp at the Lake Wohali Recreational Enclosure and for the ninth breakfast in a row you’ve grabbed nearly five portions' worth of tater tots and nothing else. You’ll lose your mind when you realize they’re just bite-sized hash browns, but that day will come a long time from now. Today the overcooked shredded potato is hot and crispy all the way through, as though the camp chef has given up on even pretending he gives a shit. You pocket the remaining three portions and go ask the head counselor for something to drink. He pours you a cup from the water jug from last night, totally unaware that the younger, more hormonal counselors have been filling the water jugs with coconut rum sold to them by the camp chef, then fucking each other raw dog in the bushes. You don’t know any of this, and can barely taste the rum on top of the overly sweet and tangy fruit punch as you cram a fistful of potato in your toothy preteen mouth.

Deep Fried Mac 'n’ Cheese Bits + Bitchin’ Camaro (Spiced Rum and Dr. Pepper)

You just turned 17 and have a wispy shit-stache to prove it. The popular kids at school all make fun of you, but not for long because your dad’s giving you his 1997 Subaru Legacy Outback Wagon, and the floor is about to be littered with clove butts and handjob residue. Dad forgets a bottle of spiced rum in the glove compartment, and since you don’t drink anything else, you feel it pairs well with Dr. Pepper. You are an innovator.* Drunk with power, and rum, you fever-nightmare an anthropomorphic dish of mac 'n' cheese frying to death in a bubbling lake of oil. You later try to recreate your nightmare for lunch, and ask mom if you can use the deep fryer. She refuses, but you know you’re onto something. She will never be proud of you.

*But soon you will discover weed.

Deep Fried Corn Dog + Prom Night Punch (Apple Vodka, Lemon-Lime Soda, and Cranberry Juice)
It’s 3:30 AM on prom night and you’re sitting in a hotel room you didn’t pay for with the girl you didn’t ask. She passes you a sickly sweet and tart drink that tastes like a watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher, and the more you drink, the less you see her as a chubby disappointment from gym class. The virgin boner pressed against your tighty whiteys has enough potential energy to flick a quarter 30 feet, and in an effort to relieve the pressure you offer her a bag of mini corn dogs your mom packed in case you got hungry. She is not impressed. You optimistically pull out your own mini corn dog in an attempt to be brazen, and before you know it she is on top of you. You both attempt to maneuver your penis into her, thrusting blindly into the folds of thigh meat, but her girth well exceeds your length, and you are unsuccessful. Classical mechanics wins again. You die three days later, a virgin.

Frito Pie + Bottle Service (Pint of Beer, Minibottle of Amaro Digestif)

You are a fatty in a fedora. Although any normal person would view your eating habits as deranged, you consider yourself a man of the world, well-versed in the finer things. While your friends order hamburgers, you pull the waitress aside and order off the menu. A layer of Fritos, a layer of chili, and a layer of cheese. Her hands tremble as she takes down the order, and the Quebecois chef quits on the spot. You will tip 3 percent. This road trip to Alberta means you can finally drink, so you order what your dad always gets, a pint of PBR, and what your mom always gets, a minibottle of fernet. You are a fat idiot and will eventually remove your fedora to discover premature hair loss brought on by karma.

Deep Fried Twinkie + Junkyard Dog (Vanilla Vodka and Root Beer)

You are fatter than the fedora guy. Born clinically obese in a booth at Hometown Buffet, you’ve never known another life. You view the skinny as a waste of space, and would proudly pay double fare to fly, if there existed an aircraft capable of supporting your weight. For your 21st birthday, you are served a deep-fried Twinkie with a single candle in it, which is blown out every time you shift due to the air you displace every time you do so. You want ice cream–flavored liquor, but settle for vanilla vodka. Your gravitational pull knocks an A&W off the shelf and into your drink. It is the best day of your life, just like every day of your life. You live to be 100 years old.

Chili Cheese Nachos with Jalapenos + Hubba Bubba (Grape Vodka, Citrus Soda, and Cranberry Juice)
Your friends came over, not because they like you, but because you have a ton of video games. In an effort to impress them you spend a half hour making your favorite dish, chili cheese nachos topped with soggy jalapenos, but when you pop your head in the living room to ask, “Snacks, fellas?” you are ignored for neither the first nor the last time. Defeated, you raid the fridge and mix squirt, cranberry juice, and what you think is grape soda and run to your mom’s room to cry it out. Hey, Jeremy, maybe all that crying is why you don’t have any friends in the first place. Grow a dick, kid.

Canned Spaghetti + White Trash Driver (Vodka, Orange Drink)

You are a shitty dad. Too wide awake after a 22-day Percocet bender and delirious with hunger, you rip open the cabinets to find a solitary can of SpaghettiOs collecting dust from the last time your son came to visit. So long ago. You can barely remember his face, he must be in his late teens now, nearly a man. You peel open the can and empty it into a mug, then put it in the microwave. You stare blankly at the rotating tray and consider all the mistakes and missteps that have lead you to this moment. Before the 90-second wait is up, you are already searching for something to dilute the open handle of vodka sitting among a sea of spent bottles and nitrous capsules. You find a Sunny D behind the fridge. You cry behind the fridge. You black out behind the fridge. The SpaghettiOs are untouched.

Jalapeno Poppers + Tang-Tini (Orange Vodka, Triple Sec, and Orange Drink in a Tang-rimmed glass)
You are an orangutan in a business suit. In the late 90s you were the mascot for Tang, but since that cocksucker John Glenn drank that shit in space, you’ve been out of a job. Down on your luck, and an orangutan, you drown your sorrows nightly in an ironically cruel combination of orange vodka, triple sec, and orange drink. Every few waking hours, you rail a line of Tang, letting the sickly sour postnasal drip pool in your throat before you hack up another blood-tinged orange loogie. While you're slumped against a wall in downtown Toronto, a kindly Canadian offers you the remains of his lunch. But alas, you're an orangutan and cannot stomach jalapeno poppers. You eat them anyway and diarrhea into a fountain.

Another place to eat food:

The Worst Restaurant in the World

Important Questions Raised by Miley Cyrus's New Video, "We Can't Stop"

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Important Questions Raised by Miley Cyrus's New Video, "We Can't Stop"
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