It's time, once again, to despair at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: The Organizers Of the 14th Annual Richmond Homeschool Prom

Photos via Wine & Marble

The incident: A girl wore the above dress to her prom.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: She was allegedly thrown out of the prom for 

Clare Ettinger is a 17-year-old homeschooled girl in Richmond, Virginia.

Last week, she attended a prom for local homeschooled kids.

Before attending the event, Clare consulted the organizer's dress code, which stated that a girl's dress must be "finger length" - meaning that, if a girl's arms are placed at her side, the dress can be no shorter than where her fingers rest. As you can see from the above photo, Clare's dress is of that length.

According to Clare, when she arrived at the prom with her boyfriend, one of the organizers, who she refers to as Mrs D, stopped her to tell her that her dress was too short. After showing the woman that her dress was in fact finger length, Clare was allowed into the event.

In a blog post she wrote about the incident, Clare says that there were lots of girls there wearing dresses shorter than hers who had gone unnoticed because they're not as tall as she is. "I was surrounded by girls in much shorter dresses then me, albeit they were shorter, and therefore stood out less in the crowd, but it was still frustrating," she wrote.

In the post, Clare goes on to explain that she was standing around talking with some friends when she became aware of a group of dads watching her, "[we were] a little grossed out by all the dads on the balcony above the dance floor, ogling and talking amongst themselves."

Clare says she was suddenly approached by Mrs D and asked to step into another room. When she did, she was told that some of the dads had complained about the way she was dancing and the length of her dress. "I was told that the way I dressed and moved my body was causing men to think inappropriately about me," said Claire. 

After attempting to convince the organizers to let her stay, Clare and six of her friends were kicked out of the prom. Clare's friends were given refunds but Clare says she was not. Clare is asking that the school apologize and refund her ticket,

In her blog post, Clare also admits to shouting abuse at the security guards as she was leaving, as well as flipping them off. Which I can't imagine is going to help her case for a refund/apology. 

Cry-Baby #2: Carlos Blue and Monte A. Johnson

Carlos Blue and Monte A. Johnson

The incident: Some kids asked a man to buy them beer and he refused.

The appropriate response: Moving on to another person.

The actual response: They attempted to rob him, then shot him. 

On Tuesday of this week, 47-year-old David B. Porter Sr. went to buy something from a liquor store in Pine Lawn, Missouri.

As he entered the store, he was approached by a 17-year-old named Carlos Blue. According to police, Carlos asked David to buy beer for him, and David declined. 

Police say that when David came out of the store, Carlos was waiting for him and confronted him, demanding his wallet. When David refused to hand it over, Carlos shot him in the back, injuring him.

When police arrived at the scene, they found Carlos and another teenager, 19-year-old Monte A. Johnson, rummaging through the unconscious victim's pockets. 

Carlos was charged with first degree assault, first degree robbery and two counts of armed criminal action. His buddy was charged with robbery.

David's injuries were described as "serious" but not life threatening. Presumably, the kids never got their beer. 

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

Previously: A baseball coach who kicked a kid off his team for having long hair vs. a school that suspended a kid for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance

Winner: It's a draw!!!

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An Ethiopian domestic worker hangs washed clothes on a balcony in Beirut, Lebanon in 2007. Photo by AP/Grace Kassab, file.

Elhanan is a 24-year-old Ethiopian woman with broad shoulders, short black hair, and a nest of wrinkles surrounding her brown eyes. She came to Lebanon five months ago to work as a maid. She was promised a monthly salary of $200 and the option to return to her native country if she disliked her working conditions. Yet after Elhanan arrived in Beirut, the man who owned the house she tended took her passport and, when his wife and children left the house, he often raped her.

“I said no Mister,” Elhanan (which is not her real name) told me in an office near a safe house in the suburbs of Beirut. “I always said no Mister. But then he would threaten to kill me.”

Thousands of foreign domestic workers in Lebanon are part of what is known in the Arab world as the Kafala system, a way that people from surrounding regions can emigrate to Arab states and work for higher wages than what they would earn in their homelands. Kafala guest workers are used in a variety of industries, notably construction and domestic labor. The conditions of laborers working in places like Qatar  and the United Arab Emirates have been reported on widely. In Lebanon, like other countries, the arrangement gives employers the power to take away workers’ passports, withhold their salaries, and keep them in what sometimes amounts to a kind of indentured servitude.

For women guest workers, there are added dangers. With over 250,000 domestic workers in Lebanon—mostly from Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines—this system doesn’t only subjugate women to a kind of tacit bondage, but it also empowers perpetrators of sexual violence and forced prostitution, according to both traffickers and those working to stop the trafficking.

Najla Chahda, the director of the Caritas Lebanese Migrant Center (CLMC), an NGO supporting domestic workers in the country, says that while some women routinely suffer from rape or sexual abuse from the hands of their employer, it’s also prevalent for gangs to offer false promises of better working conditions to entice women to leave their abusive household. But once a worker escapes before her contract finishes, she loses her legal status completely.

“The legal system needs to be improved,” said Chahda. “Domestic abuse is pushing these women into the hands of traffickers.”

“Let me tell you how it works,” said Ali, a 26-year-old Lebanese gang member living in Shatila, a Palestinian camp in south Beirut and a space inaccessible to Lebanese authorities. “I charge $30 for a Filipino and $20 for an Ethiopian. You give me the money and I make the call.”

Ali says he often sends women to meet his clients next to a fast food restaurant called King of Fries in Hamra, the most cosmopolitan district in West Beirut. But to avoid the police, Ali stays in Shatila and relies on a network of taxi’s to escort women.

Taxis are the primary way people get around in Lebanon. But since drivers typically make a meager two-thousand Lebanese liras ($1.33) for every passenger, shuttling women presents a lucrative side job.

“Taxi drivers are not strangers to this business,” said Ghada Jabbour, the director of KAFA, a Lebanese NGO advocating for an end to violence against women. “Too often, one of the first questions foreigners ask their driver is where they can find some girls.”         

These are precisely the questions that a 40-year-old taxi driver, who goes by the name of Castro, receives all the time. Castro makes $200 a week through ferrying women, and though many have approached him freely, he admits that he’s fixed clients for traffickers before.

 “Some of the foreign girls didn’t have a choice,” Castro told me while chain smoking in his bedroom in Shatila. “Even if they didn’t want to have sex, what could they do? Run to the police?”

Because of their lack of legal status, domestic migrant workers who approach the Lebanese police are detained and sometimes further abused until their original sponsor pays for their deportation.

Consequently, without any option to escape, many contemplate suicide as a last resort. According to a report by Human Rights Watch in 2008, approximately 95 domestic workers died from unnatural causes in Lebanon between January 2007 and the report’s publication. Forty of those workers committed suicide. While there haven’t been conclusive numbers released since that report, advocates in Lebanon report that deaths are still a common occurrence.

After escaping to her recruitment agency’s office to request for help, Elhanan was grabbed by the hair and beaten for hours before being returned to her employer’s household. The next day she grabbed a kitchen knife and closed herself inside the living room.

“Madam wouldn’t let me do it,” said Elhanan as she showed me the scars on her wrist.

The mother of the household managed to push open the door and take the knife away. But she was in her own way complicit in Elhanan’s mistreatment. With two children in the house and an insufficient support network, Elhanan says that “Madam” always knew she was being raped but was too afraid to speak up.

Days after her attempted suicide, Elhanan began going for short walks around the neighborhood whenever she found herself alone in the house. One morning she bumped into a fellow Ethiopian woman on the street. Elhanan softly whispered for help.

The woman immediately waved down a taxi and instructed the driver to head straight to the Ethiopian embassy.

Today, Elhanan resides in a safe house in the suburbs of Beirut. With the help of CLMC, she’s pressing charges against her sponsor and awaiting a court hearing next month. But despite her pursuit for justice, she has little faith that conditions for domestic migrant workers will improve.

“How about I offer you a Filipino for 20,000 Lebanese liras ($13.33),” said Ali the gang member while showing off his rifle from the corner of his bedroom. “She won’t resist, I promise.”

Raëlians in France set up an inflatable flying saucer with the movement's logo.

By now, you've probably heard that Pope Francis is cool with aliens. In an out-of-the-blue nod to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the Pontiff told a Vatican City audience this week that he would definitely baptize aliens, if they landed in St. Peter's Square and asked for a forehead sprinkling. The way the Pope sees it, Catholic baptism is a lot like an open bar at the Star Wars Cantina, where gays, atheists, unwanted children, and little green men can all receive the Holy Spirit (no droids, though).  Because, as he said this week, “who are we to close doors?"

“If—for example—tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here,” the Pope half-joked in his homily. “Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them…. And one says, ‘But I want to be baptized!’ What would happen?”

The problem, naturally, is that aliens have no interest in being Catholic, at least according to the International Raëlian Movement, a UFO religion whose followers believe humans were created by an advanced extraterrestrial species known as the Elohim. In fact, Raëlian leaders are offended that the Pope would even suggest baptism. 

“There will be no need to baptize those he calls ‘aliens’ when they decide to come back,” the movement’s founder and spiritual leader, Raël, said in a strongly worded statement Thursday. “They are the ones who created all religions on Earth, and they were mistakenly taken for gods. Instead of offering them baptism, the Pope will have to acknowledge that they are the gods he has been praying to all along.”

At this point, a little explanation on Raëlianism is probably useful. The movement was founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon, now known as “Raël,” a former French auto-racing journalist who claims to have had UFO encounters with the Elohim. Members are best known for sexual-liberalization events, including "Go Topless" protests, as well as for their emphasis on technological utopianism, particularly through cloning, which Raëlians see as the key to eternal life.

Raëlians also believe that most major world religions were engineered by the Elohim through “messengers” here on Earth—including Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith. Raël is the final messenger, who will prepare Earth for the aliens’ eventual return. Upon their return, the extraterrestrials will determine who is intelligent enough to be cloned for eternal life.

“Evidence of the their work is worldwide, and we ourselves are becoming creators as new forms of life are now being conceived and created in our laboratories,” said Brigitte Boisselier, a French doctor and Raëlian leader who ran the movement’s for-profit cloning lab Clonaid, and now runs the Raëlian-affiliated Clitoraid, which raises money to provide reconstructive surgery for victims of female genital mutilation. “The arrogance of the Pope in wishing to baptize those who sent Jesus shows the level of his ignorance.”

The baptism issue is not the first time the Raëlians have butted heads with the Catholic Church. Raëlians in Canada and Europe were pretty active in protesting the Church during the pedophilia scandals of the 2000s, and in 2010, the organization sued Pope Benedict XVI, Francis’s predecessor, for claiming that condoms don’t stop the spread of AIDS. More recently, Raëlians have accused the Church of stalling the opening of a Clitoraid hospital in Burkina Faso.

But Ricky Roehr, the North American leader of the Raëlian Movement, insists that “there are no hard feelings” from these battles. When I called him on Wednesday at his home in Las Vegas, where he also works as a musician, he told me that he sees Pope Francis’s comments as an indication that the Church is starting to begrudgingly acknowledge the truth about extraterrestrials. “The Church is always playing catch-up,” he said. “Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo—they were all branded heretics because science always proves that religion doesn't have the monopoly on the truth.”

“What we’ve been trying to make people understand for 40 years is that there is no God,” he said. “So it just doesn’t make sense to us that any of these extraterrestrials would want to be baptized into what we believe is a primitive belief system.”

A few hours after we got off the phone, Roehr, with great urgency, called me back. 

“I just want to make sure to add that when the extraterrestrials arrive, we, the Raëlian Movement, would be happy to baptize the Pope,” he said. “Because when the extraterrestrials come back, the Pope will then understand who the god of the Bible really was. Or is.”

Rachel, left, in action. Photo via Allan Lissner.
By now most Canadians are at least mildly aware of the damage that mining companies can do to the environment and the indigenous communities who live close to the site of a mining project. But in lesser known news, Canadian mining companies are causing massive travesties in other parts of the world and currently own over 70 percent of the world’s mines. For example, in Guatemala, Canadian mines have the largest presence and are causing problems in the environment for communities who live there. One company, Hudbay, is facing criminal charges for their actions in Guatemala and another, Goldcorp, is being asked to take responsibility for severe human rights infractions, including the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old girl.  

Canada has activists acting in solidarity with some of Guatemala’s resistance groups, and they are currently more active than ever. I reached out to a young woman named Rachel Small—who I first saw protesting against Canadian mining company Goldcorp’s actions in Guatemala—for an interview. We met a week later at another protest she was running outside Hudbay’s (another mining giant) office on King Street.

The following is an edited version of my conversation with Rachel Smalls about what is happening between Canadian mining companies and the people of Guatemala.

VICE: What are you protesting today?
Rachel Small: Today we’re gathered outside of Hudbay’s annual general meeting where we've convened a people’s court to highlight three cases of injustice the company is responsible for. Two of the cases concern Hudbay's former mine site in Guatemala, where people have been forcibly evicted as a result of a project and hundreds of homes were burned down. In the community of Lote 8, at least 11 women were raped by security guards and police during a forced eviction of their community to make space for Hudbay’s mine. Another incident in Guatemala where a community activist, Adolfo Ich Chamán, was murdered. We've brought real testimonies with the direct words of the Adolfo Ich's widow and a woman from Lote 8 who was raped. We shared those testimonies here today.

That’s pretty intense, are these kinds of things happening a lot in Guatemala?
Unfortunately, yes. We’ve seen lots of violence around all of the Canadian mining projects in Guatemala. During the Lote 8 attack, a number of the women were pregnant at the time and lost their babies. Horribly violent acts took place as part of evicting this community. In 2009, a community leader in the town of El Estor named Adolfo Ich Chamán was murdered by the former head of security at the mine. The security head is named Mynor Padilla and he is currently facing charges in Guatemala for that murder and for shooting seven other peaceful protesters.

All human rights activists face high risks there. It is estimated that there have been more than 2,000 assaults against activists over the past ten years, with over 100 defenders murdered. Attacks tend to especially target individuals and groups who are Indigenous community leaders, environmentalists and activists. Diodora Antonio Hernandez Cinto, a woman who had resisted the Goldcorp Marlin Mine since it began operations, was shot in the face at her home in 2011. The assailants were arrested and traced back to having worked for a company who did contract work for Goldcorp. She claims this happened because she refused the sell the company her land.

Do you think the Canadian mining companies know what is going on?
Yes, these Canadian companies know full well that they can operate with complete impunity overseas. There are no laws in Canada governing what Canadian mining companies do in other countries. There is a case against Hudbay in Ontario courts for a violent attack and murder, and this is precedent setting. It's the first time that a Canadian mining company is being held accountable for its actions overseas. 

OK, so this is going to court because there is enough evidence to prove that Hudbay knew what was going on?
Yes, absolutely. In this case the claimants are trying to pierce the corporate veil, to explain that if Hudbay had a wholly-owned subsidiary in Guatemala and decisions were being made here governing operations there, that Canada is absolutely the right jurisdiction to have this trial move forward in, and the right place to seek justice. The criminal case going on in Guatemala is purely against the former head of security who held the gun, what’s happening in courts here in Canada is really an attempt to hold the company responsible.

Does Hudbay still own that mine?
No, it’s owned by a Russian company named Solway now. They sold at $290 million loss right after the lawsuit was announced here in Canada. The communities around the mine have decided that because they have been unable to achieve meaningful justice in Guatemala, they want to pursue their case here in Canada, where the real decisions took place in the company offices.

Why can’t they find meaningful justice in Guatemala?
Unfortunately, there's a very corrupt government that's in place. The current President was the head of military intelligence during the genocide that took place. He has never faced justice for these crimes, so the government is not at all accountable to the people—least of all to these indigenous communities who are being directly affected by this mine. It has been very easy for the company to buy off local leaders and bribe whoever they needed locally, and so really none of the benefits of these mines go to the local communities. Yet they are left with all of the negative impacts of the mining projects—they're often unable to grow crops, unable to pursue their former livelihoods, left with illnesses, social conflict, and community divisions. In addition to that, there has also been violent attacks including murders, assaults, and kidnappings against resistance leaders.



Rachel giving a speech. Photo via Rachel Small. 
There was a young woman killed recently as a result of her protesting of one of these mines, is that correct?
Yes, Topacio, a 16-year-old youth organizer, poet, and musician was murdered a few weeks ago protesting Tahoe Resource's Escobal Project. Topacio’s father, Alex Reynoso, is one of the main resistance leaders, and he and his daughter were leaving a meeting one night when they were attacked by unknown armed assailants, who shot both of them multiple times and killed Topacio. Alex remains in intensive care at a hospital in Guatemala.

And this is a newer Goldcorp mine?
Well, Goldcorp is a 40 percent shareholder in the Tahoe mine. This is a newer mining project, and in this area the majority of the population is not indigenous people, however the communities around the Escobal Project have really banded together. They've seen what other mines like the Marlin have done to the area, and have very clearly decided that they don’t want a mine on their territory. Specifically, they have seen what has happened with Goldcorp’s mines elsewhere. And the CEO of Tahoe was the former CEO of Goldcorp. They know what’s going on, and they don’t want it. 

Why do people believe that the mining companies had anything to do with that attack?
First of all, this is not the first instance of violence that has taken place around this mining site. Last year in March, the President and three other members of the Xinca Parliament—which is a non-Mayan Indigenous people—were kidnapped. One of the kidnapping victims, Exaltación Marcos Ucelo, was later found murdered. The rest escaped with their arms tied behind their backs.

Also, during a peaceful resistance set up outside the mining gates last April, six unarmed community members were shot by private security forces. Two of the men suffered serious injuries. The incident lead to the arrest of Alberto Rotondo, who was the head of security of the company at that time. While details of the specific recent attack against Alex and Topacio Reynoso remain unclear, it is impossible to not view this incident as part of a larger pattern of violence and repression carried out against those who defend their right to life and territory in resisting this mining project. 

What does the resistance look like over there?
They are on the front line, they are doing the blockade, they are doing everything they can to save their communities and to seek justice for deaths of their husbands and wives and sons and daughters.

How large is presence of Canadian mining companies in Guatemala?
The largest mine in Guatemala is the Marlin mine in the West part of the country. That mine has been run and operated by Goldcorp under 100 percent owned Guatemala subsidiaries, for about 10 years. It has been met with nothing but fierce and staunch opposition since it began. In fact, a community called Sipakapa, which is located right by the Marlin mine site launched the first community referendum, which have been called consultas, and was an opportunity for this community to get together and hold a vote according to their indigenous traditions and at that time they voted 99 percent against the mine. The mine has continued to push forward without consent, and those communities and are continuing to see those mines encroaching on their territories. Sipakapa, however, has set an amazing example in Guatemala of a way of carrying out peaceful resistance. Since they held their consulta in 2005, which was the first in the country, more than 65 consultas have been held across Guatemala, with a vast majority of the over one million participants voting “No” to mining and other mega-projects on their lands.  



A tribute sign for Merilyn Topacio Reynoso, a 16-year-old killed after leaving a protest. Photo via Rachel Small.
The mining company rhetoric is often that they are contributing to the community by providing a stronger economy and better resources, such as schools. Do you see that as being true?
Wherever this money goes, it corrupts. These companies go into countries, set up as NGOs and then incorporate as a mining company in the region. The mining company leaves a tiny percentage of the profits in the country. It just recently was changed to a voluntary contribution of five percent royalties, but up until just a few years ago, it was one percent of the profits that were left in Guatemala and 99 percent were taken by the company. A small percentage of that goes to the local community and authorities, and the rest goes to the government.

What are some of the negative leftover effects of these mines in Guatemala?
What we’ve seen in terms of the Marlin mine—which is more advanced at this point—is that they’ve left rivers completely contaminated, any livestock that has drank from rivers near the mines have died almost instantly. We’ve heard stories from people who have simply stuck their hand in a tailing pond to remove a soccer ball and died the next day. There are countless stories of people who have become very ill because of waterway contamination. The number of birth defects has also risen since the mine’s presence there. Children have been left unable to walk, unable to move their limbs—issues that were never a problem in the area before. People’s homes have been cracked; often people will learn that there is a tunnel running beneath their house by feeling their house shaking and seeing their walls cracking.

Is it safe to say when a mine is dried-up of resources, that the companies just tend to leave?
That has been our experience. A few years ago, a group of people got together to propose a shareholder's resolution at Goldcorp's AGM to ensure that the company set aside a $49 million dollar bond—the estimated cost of closing the mine—and to disclose their plans for closing the mine. They also advocated that the company conduct meaningful consultations with communities regarding closure and post-closure plans, because when the mine is operating they promise they will clean up everything, and then it’s very easy for them to leave the second they are done extracting. That was something we tried to do, but it didn’t pass.

Because these mines do employ people from the area, does this also create a divide in the community?
Yes, community divisions are a big problem. These Canadian companies have developed all sorts of different strategies to divide communities that before were very united. For instance, they have promised things like water wells nd then tell people it can’t happen until their neighbor stops protesting. 

You recently returned from Guatemala, what did you observe about the culture around the mines while you were there?
The Marlin Mine is essentially a series of open pits, tunnels, and smaller extraction sites. It is completely mind-boggling just how much land the project has taken over and irreversibly changed. I had to constantly remind myself that a forested mountain had previously existed where now all you can see is a giant dusty pit. Just the tailings pond alone is enormous. Seeing it perched up on a hill, and knowing how often tailing ponds leak and where all of that water contaminated with arsenic and other highly toxic chemicals would flow, is terrifying. I look at this mining site and am deeply impacted. I can't even imagine the pain and suffering local Indigenous communities who have such specific and sacred relations with the land must feel. 

Did you ever feel afraid for your safety?
When I’m in Guatemala, especially around the mining areas, everyone has to be careful and take care of themselves. However, it’s really the Guatemalan communities on the frontline who are risking their lives for this.

Why do you feel like it’s so important for you to speak out about this in Canada?
I feel like I am involved in this issue whether I like it or not and whether I speak out about it or not. Any bank that I chose to put my money in here in Canada is investing in these companies. The Canadian Pension Plan is a large investor in all of the companies that are operating in Guatemala right now, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International trade, and the Canadian embassy in Guatemala have been huge supporters of these projects, so I know that my country here and my money is 100 percent playing a role in these projects whether I like it or not. The very least I can do is stand in solidarity with communities there whose lives have been lost and destroyed and whose lives continue to be on the line. I think the only way we're going to continue to have change is if we do what we can over here to support their fierce and amazing resistance over there.

Do you find it difficult to have your voice heard in Canada?
Absolutely. The mining companies have huge budgets to spend on PR. Just a few years ago Bill C300 was advancing through the parliament and it was a very modest bill to begin to start the process of holding these companies accountable, beginning with if egregious human rights violations are found to be true, the Canadian Pension Plan, will consider divesting from these companies. It was modest, and it was just a beginning step and the mining companies, though they claim to act responsibly in all of their operations, lobbied fiercely against this bill. It reminded us of just how much power they have. And eventually the bill was lost by six votes.

Do you think there is a general ignorance amongst Canadians about what is actually happening at Canadian mining sites across the world?
Yes, it’s very telling that most Canadians don’t know that over 70 percent of the mines across the world are owned by Canadian companies, that should be a bragging point and something that Canadians are proud of, however I think it’s kept a secret for a reason because I think the more you look into these companies and you look into their projects, the more you realize it’s giving Canada a terrible reputation in many places around the world. There are many places where I would suggest people not put a Canadian flag on their backpack. Rural Guatemala is definitely one of them.

How did you get involved in all this?
I first got involved as an 18-year-old who had quit school and was backpacking around Ecuador. I ended up spending a few months living with a community in the rainforest there that was resisting Texaco. At that moment, I started to realize, Wow, I had no idea that oil companies and all sorts of extractive companies treated indigenous communities this way. When I realized how huge a role Canada plays in extractive communities, I felt like that was something that I had to continue to follow up on.

And what is the group you work with here?
We’re the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network and we’re a collective of volunteers. We have no paid staff, we’re just people living in Canada who are really concerned about what is happening. More than anything, we are people who are based right out of Toronto who have come together to help. And we work with other allies in Canada, such as MiningWatch Canada, Breaking the Silence, and Rights Action. 

In an ideal world, what do you believe would be the best outcome with these mining sites?
Well, something that has been really exciting is that a mine site in Guatemala that was formerly owned by Canadian company, Radius Gold, and is now owned by an American Company, has not actually been able to open because communities there have held a two-year, 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week blockade. So that is one of the most exciting stories we’ve had where communities have been unified. They are calling their resistance La Puya. These people seen what’s happened across their country and are trying to stop it.

It must feel good to see any kind of progress happening.
There are uphill battles, and it's rare to have such clear "wins" as La Puya. Even where we can't always see it we have to believe that bit by bit, we're changing the way this industry operates and supporting moves towards justice, decolonization and self-determination for communities.    


@angelamaries

Click here for last week's episode of Band for Life.

In episode seven of Last Chance High, we meet 13-year-old Keontay, who is enamored with gang life, his disabled mother Takita, who has lost all hope of prying him from the streets, and a former gang chief nicknamed Shotgun, who has a plan to help them both. 

On Chicago's West Side, there is a school for the city's most at-risk youth—the Moses Montefiore Academy. Most of the students at Montefiore have been kicked out of other schools for aggressive behavior, and many have been diagnosed with emotional disorders. 

Last Chance High takes viewers inside Montefiore's classrooms, and into the homes of students who are one mistake away from being locked up or committed to a mental hospital.

Screencap via.
The Conservatives have had the misfortune of getting called out repeatedly in committee, as Members of Parliament heard from witnesses on Bill C-13: a piece of legislation that has earned the dubious honour of being criticized by the Boys and Girls Club of Canada.

The cyberbullying legislation—which criminalizes so-called ‘revenge porn,’ but is widely recognized as an omnibus bill—has been derided by lawyers, activists, journalists, NGOs, and now, even the families and survivors of cyberbullying themselves.

But, luckily for the Conservatives, at least the cops are on board.

The bill has proved enormously controversial, as it will allow ISPs to fork over personal data without a warrant. It will also provide any “peace” or “public officer,” from a mayor to a fisheries agent, to obtain your data—while also making it easier for police to obtain new, broad, warrants.

The Conservatives, of course, have maintained that this bill allows Canadians to have their cake and eat it too. They say that C-13 doesn’t make it easier for police to get your data. It simply “modernizes” the Criminal Code.

Justice Minister Peter MacKay, the first to come before the committee to speak on the bill, swatted away criticism: “The proposed legislation would not provide the police with any new powers for voluntary disclosure, nor does the bill propose to create a mechanism to bypass the necessary court oversight,” he said.

The key word, here, is “new.”

Police already have the power to obtain your data without a warrant, and bypass the necessary court oversight; C-13 just makes it a whole lot easier. Namely, it enshrines civil and criminal liability to anyone who gives your data up to police—making them immune from lawsuits, and ultimately removes incentive for companies not to comply.

But MacKay was backed up by a gaggle of police officers that came before committee to endorse the entirety of the bill: “We fully support this,” Jim Chu, Vancouver Chief of Police, told the committee.

The police officers there—Chu, his Haligonian counterpart, as well as representatives from the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP—noted that they frequently deal with cyberbullying, and that slapping child porn charges on high school students is rarely the best way to go about policing it. This is exactly how two of the alleged tormenters in the Rehtaeh Parsons case were charged last year.

The law enforcement defenders of C-13 also noted that most requests police make will still go through judicial oversight, and that the legislation actually makes it harder for police to obtain tracking warrants. But it was the lawful access provisions that police were particularly applauding, noting that the Criminal Code is quite out-of-date, and that going through a court to get a production order or warrant, as Chu noted, can be “cumbersome.”

Chu decried “misconceptions”that have been trotted out in the media about what the bill does. Namely, he cited one report detailing how C-13 could give Rob Ford the power to get ahold of your personal information (written by yours truly)—as “unnecessarily alarming Canadians."

While the police are more than happy to assume C-13’s new powers, the civilians before the committee were less-than thrilled: “Young people deserve to be protected from cyberbullying, but they also deserve to be protected and respected for their privacy,” said Fahd Alhattab, a representative of the Boys and Girls Club of Canada—who were, otherwise, supportive of the bill.

Carol Todd, Amanda Todd’s mother, told the committee that she’s not comfortable with many of the provisions in the bill: “We should not have to sacrifice our privacy for our children's safety,” she said, frequently getting emotional when recounting what led to her daughter’s suicide. ”I don't want anyone hurt in my daughter's name.”

Glen Canning, Rehtaeh Parsons’s father, flanked Todd, but was more supportive of the bill’s more controversial points. Also present was Allan Hubley, the father of Jamie Hubley—a gay teenager from Ottawa who tragically took his own life at 15.

Canning maintained that cops are professionals, and that privacy concerns are the least of his worries: "It seems so out of place to complain about privacy while our children openly terrorize each other to death,” he said.

Critics of the bill did underline that, in criminalizing revenge porn—phrased as the "non consensual sharing of intimate images"—to be guilty, you only need to be “reckless” in failing to obtain consent in sharing the image or video. Lawyers have taken that to mean if someone downloads and shares a piece of amateur porn from the internet, they may have broken the law. Officers testifying committee told Parliament not to worry; the courts won’t read it that way.

Even so, a Halifax lawyer with McInnes Cooper named David Fraser took a blowtorch to the bill when he appeared before committee. He raised the concern about amateur porn downloading in front of the committee, noting that given the huge amount of porn on the internet, it’s pretty hard to know which videos were filmed with the person’s consent, and which weren’t. Should users have to do their due-diligence before they watch porn?

Fraser says the bill should focus on criminalizing “the guilty mind: somebody who knew, somebody who was in fact betraying a trust. That in my mind reaches a level of criminal culpability. Somebody who has no idea, and no reason to know? You don't criminalize that sort of conduct."

Numerous witnesses and opposition MPs put forward the novel idea of splitting the bill—getting the ‘revenge porn’bits on the books, and considering the lawful access sections separately.

The Tories, however, weren’t budging.

Fraser also took specific issue with making it easier for police to obtain a production order for “transmission data”—a vague new concept introduced in C-13 that is, in effect, metadata.

The Conservatives promised that transmission data would not include anything relating to the content of what Canadians are doing online. Fraser disagreed. He told the committee that it included everything from a user’s IP address, details on what computers and browsers are being used, the URL of the website, and ultimately, some level of content from what users are browsing.

Then he moved on to immunity—the complete legal protection for any company that voluntarily forks over Canadians’personal information to police, even without a warrant: “This provision, I believe, should be removed. It can't be fixed, and will only encourage overreaching by law enforcement,” Fraser said.

Chu says that police have the onus to always take the least intrusive route to an investigation. He, however, incorrectly believed that companies would not have immunity if the requesting officer was acting in bad faith—like if a cop called up Bell to request his ex-wife’s call logs. The language in the bill, however, is clear: if a peace or public officer requests the information, and the company is legally allowed to disclose it, the company “does not incur any criminal or civil liability for doing so.”

The Tories admitted that, yes, companies can volunteer our personal data without a warrant—but, they maintained, those companies already have that ability. C-13, they argued, just codifies and clarifies it in the law.

However, re-wording the provision will make it a whole lot easier.

Bob Dechert, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, tried to poke holes in Fraser’s logic: “I'm more of an analog than a digital kind of guy,” he began by noting. He drew an analogy: requesting a user’s personal information from a telecommunication company is roughly the same as taking down the license plate number of someone breaking into your neighbour’s house and calling the cops, right? No, Fraser said, that’s not at all the same as requesting millions’of Canadians data from private companies, without any paper trail or oversight.

C-13’s predecessor, C-30—the so-called ‘cybersnooping’ bill—met its fate behind the woodshed after widespread public outcry. Then Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, subject of the #TellVicEverything campaign (which was created in response to Vic’s apparent hard-on for surveillance), was lambasted for introducing alarming measures which would have given police Patriot Act-style powers. 

MacKay has been careful to avoid the same mistakes, and has benefitted from the fact that much of the focus on the bill is centred on the cyberbullying aspects. However, with opposition mounting, the Tories have signaled that they may be open to amending the bill.

@Justin_Ling

The path Obama's party might follow is clouded by corporate cash. Photo via Flickr user DonkeyHotey

Looking for the fight over the heart and soul of the Democratic Party in the waning days of the Obama administration? Next Tuesday morning, take the elevator to the 8th floor of a downtown Washington, DC building and step into the offices of America's Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA), the premier lobbying group for some of the largest fracking companies in the world.

While much of the talk about a progressive revival revolves around populist figures like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Elizabeth Warren, there are other, better funded efforts afoot. Corporate titans from finance to natural gas to big retail and telecom are attempting to steer the party, and as the midterms shape up, these interests are pushing to ensure they continue to have wide sway over America's only viable outlet for center-left expression at the polls. Which brings us to the latest venture in corporate-centered party-building and the group hosting a chat in ANGA's headquarters: The NewDEAL.

Created by Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and Senator Mark Begich of Alaska, the NewDEAL is one of several cash rich efforts to resurrect the Democratic Party's flailing bench of electable candidates.

This NewDEAL has little in common with President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal platform, which pledged to save capitalism from itself by cracking down on predatory banking institutions and restoring workplace rights for Americans. No, this NewDEAL is a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy non-profit, a tax vehicle which allows campaign activity without disclosure of donors, and its name is an acronym for "Developing Exceptional American Leaders."

The group, touted as a platform to "highlight rising pro-business progressives," is led by Democrats who have made a name for themselves by bucking the populist trend. They include NewDeal co-chair Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose zeal for the charterization of public schools and love of Wall Street makes him indistinguishable from many across the aisle. The other co-chair, Governor John Hickenlooper, has staked a position in Colorado's energy wars as a staunch defender of drillers.

VICE has obtained a "supporter list" showing donors of the NewDEAL, which reads like a who's who of corporations seeking government access: Comcast, Fluor, Merck, Microsoft, New York Life, Pfizer, Qualcomm, Verizon, Wal-Mart, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, among others, including, of course, the host of Tuesday's event, ANGA.

While the disclosure of a secret list of political funders is always a worthwhile revelation, it's also worth noting that the same corporate forces that Democrats are leaning on are propping up the far right tilt of the Republicans as well. On the local level, meaning state legislative races, there are two competing committees, the RSLC for the GOP and DLCC for Dems. A VICE review of recent campaign filings show that the two committees share many of the same top 25 donors: Wal-Mart, Pfizer, tobacco giant Reynolds America, PhRMA (a drug industry trade group), AT&T, and Comcast cut the biggest checks for both the RSLC and the DLCC.

This incredible symmetry exists for the committees seeking to elect governors of their respective parties this year, as well. The RGA, chaired by Governor Chris Christie, has collected its largest checks from the exact same corporations pumping the most generous donations into the DGA, its Democratic counterpart: WellPoint, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Pfizer, Wal-Mart, and Reynolds America.

Back to the NewDEAL, which promises to serve as the latest vanguard for Democratic outreach. The organization is staffed by many of the lobbying world's top Democratic allies, including those who have worked to channel the party's election efforts into backchannel corporate influence. The fundraiser for the NewDEAL, Helen Milby, previously served as the "chief fundraiser" to the New Democrats, a caucus of business-friendly lawmakers whose last period of influence, in 2009 through 2010 when their party controlled Congress, featured a massive campaign to water down health care and financial reform in exchange for corporate donations, as chronicled by an investigation in ProPublica. After many were wiped out by the Republican tidal wave in Obama's first midterm—the president identified himself as a member of this coalition right after he was first elected—most of the New Democrats became lobbyists themselves.

Another NewDEAL leader, a consultant named John Michael Gonzalez, represents the firm Peck Madigan Jones. Peck Madigan Jones probably isn't familiar to the average political observer. But it's the lobbying firm that's been in charge of fundraising for the think tank best known for fighting for corporate control of the Democrats, Third Way, a group that has been waging war on the burgeoning left-wing element of the party. "Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats" wrote Third Way's leaders in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece earlier this year that scorched the tax-the-rich politics of Warren and de Blasio.

A critic might argue that winning is winning. Democrats need cash too, especially in the era of Citizens United, so why not bring corporate lobbyists aboard when the de Blasio approach might fall on deaf ears outside of New York City? That argument loses some weight, though, if you follow the money trail. NewDEAL board member Gonzalez serves as a lobbyist to the US Chamber of Commerce, which is currently airing harshly negative campaign ads against NewDEAL co-chair Senator Begich, who may lose his seat this year. Business first, I suppose.

These efforts go back thirty years. In the 1980s, centrist voices organized the Democratic Leadership Council, a non-profit charged with grooming the next generation of politicians who loved free trade and lower corporate taxes and were careful to keep their distance from labor unions. Just as Third Way and affiliated business-oriented outreach arms of the Democratic Party today seek social liberalism (gun restrictions and gay rights) and economic neoliberalism (tax cuts and deregulation), the DLC charted a similar course on behalf of the now largely extinguished New Democrats. There were victories, too. The DLC became famous by serving as a springboard for prominent Democrats such as President Bill Clinton, and later, 2000 Vice Presidential nominee and former Senator Joe Lieberman.

Who helped lead the DLC in its own conflict with Democratic populists? A scoop by journalist Robert Dreyfuss over a decade ago exposed the fact that the DLC was not only bankrolled by the country's largest corporations (including present day NewDEAL donors Verizon, Merck and Microsoft) but that the DLC was being steered by two lobbyists from Koch Industries. One of them, Rich Fink, has been the brains behind much of the Koch brothers' sprawling political network, which the energy barons shamelessly use to protect their bottom line at the expense of our planet.

Of course, not every corporate Democrat organ is a Koch front. But the Koch brothers probably didn't have a progressive renaissance is mind when they invested in one camp of the Democratic Party's civil war. And corporations don't bankroll candidates out of a sense of charity; they expect something in return. In this corporate cash-driven system, choosing Democrats that don't offend business interests is an old story. Which is to say there's not all that much new about the NewDEAL.

Lee Fang, a San Francisco-based journalist, is an Investigative Fellow at The Nation Institute and co-founder of Republic Report.

For the first 13 years of his career as a journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas did his best to avoid two topics: immigration and himself. That trajectory flipped in 2011 in a The New York Times Magazine confessional that detailed how he his mother sent him to California from the Philippines with a fake green card, how he spent his entire career documenting the life of others to avoid talking about his own, and how he avoided the words “I,” “me,” and “my” in his stories as much as possible.

“To me, when you’re a journalist, your religion is reporting. That’s the basis of everything you do, “ he said, “Whenever you use ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ the reason has to be pretty strong. Meaning, in what way are you using your experience and yourself to illuminate a greater point or to make an argument.”

A few months before his New York Times confession went to press, Vargas wrote a profile of Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker. It was an important moment professionally; he was writing about one of the world’s most influential people for one of the world’s most influential magazines. That moment also helped him realize that he was done running from himself. “At one point, Mark turns to me and says, ‘Where are you from Jose?’” Vargas told Reiham Salam during a VICE podcast, “Very simple question. I just looked at him and glared at him and that’s when I kind of knew I was done.”

The 8000-word profile of Zuckerberg takes on a new layer of meaning when you understand that Vargas was writing while carrying this secret that was about to come to the surface. In the profile, Vargas discusses identity management, over sharing, and the chafing that can occur when you feel pressured to reveal more than you’re comfortable with. He questions who really has the most at stake in Zuckerbeg’s idealistic conception of a “more open” world. Of course, all of this is relevant to any discussion of Facebook, but it’s a conversation that carries more weight for Vargas than it might for someone with nothing to hide.

Vargas told me that he allowed more of himself to seep into the Zuckerberg profile than he had in anything he had written before. There is a brief exchange in the article where Vargas tells Zuckerbeg that he equivocated about revealing his sexual orientation on Facebook. When he first signed up, he checked the box saying he was interested in men, but it made him uneasy, and he removed the checkmark two weeks later. Zuckerberg “responded with a flat ‘huh,’ dropped his shoulders, and stared at me, looking genuinely concerned and somewhat puzzled,” wrote Vargas, “Facebook had asked me to publish a personal detail that I was not ready to share.”

Before his New York Times confession came out, his lawyers told him he was committing legal suicide. Thus far, the government has taken no action to change Vargas’s situation, positive or negative. He continues his story and confessionals in his autobiographical film, Documented, which is currently showing around the country.

The film takes the intimacy of his New York Times confession to a new level. A bullet point in the article, like how his mother stayed in the Philippines and sent him to America for a better life, is amplified in the film with her tears as she talks about how, for years, her son was too afraid to add her on Facebook. “Once the decision to go personal is made, it’s either you go all the way, or you don’t go at all. You can’t really hold back,” says Vargas of the more emotional aspects of the film.

I attended a screening in Los Angeles, where Vargas told the audience that Documented isn’t the film he intended to make, but the film that he had to make. He later told me that the film is much more personal than he had originally intended. He initially planned to focus on the stories of five other undocumented immigrants and give only the basic outline of his experience. He quickly learned that he couldn’t tell anyone’s story more effectively than his own. He wanted to use his own journey to illustrate “The visceral, emotional mental impact of this issue.”

As he was developing the idea for Documented, several filmmakers advised him against directing his own life story, but he wanted to be the one to grapple with what had happened. “I felt very determined that it’s really important to own up to my story and face my own family and shape the narrative,” he said, “I spent most of my teenage years and certainly all of my 20s hiding from myself. I didn’t really know the toll of it until all of a sudden I could be open and could be honest. I feel like I’m just now starting the process of understanding what exactly happened to me.”

He believes that the confessional nature of the film will inspire other undocumented immigrants to discuss their own life stories. “It also allows for mentors and allies to speak up, “ said Vargas, “It creates that kind of space because it acknowledges them in the film.” Over the years, Vargas found many allies who listened to his secret in moments of fear. Instead of turning him in, as he feared they might, they actively helped him to stay in the United States and thrive—like his high school principal, Pat Hyland, and Peter Perl, an editor at The Washington Post who was Vargas’s mentor for many years. “I wanted to send a message and underscore a point that people don’t understand,” said Vargas, “If every undocumented person has a network of three, four, five, six allies, than we’re talking about quite a bit more than 11 million people.”

Allies are essential for any movement. Vargas is gay, and during his teen years he witnessed cultural shifts, like Ellen Degeneres outing herself and the popular show Will & Grace. He hopes that the immigration rights movement can follow a similar path.“Will & Grace was a really watershed moment because it showed that for every Will there’s a Grace. For every gay person there’s the straight best friend or relative or straight classmate that advocates and treats their gay friends or relatives or neighbors just like everybody else,” he said, “That’s a cultural shift that has not happened with the immigration rights movement.”

Cultural change preceded political change in the African American civil rights movement as well, he told me, “Barack Obama would not have been possible without Oprah, the Cosby Show and all those strides that happened to normalize and humanize and reflect African Americans in this country as complex, full human beings.”

Since Vargas has spent so much time and energy bringing attention to his own battle, some have suggested that he can’t be both an advocate and a journalist, including his former Washington Post colleague, Patrick P. Pexton. “There are people who say I am no longer a journalist because I have taken a position and am advocating for something. What am I advocating for?” He said fighting for immigrant rights is no different from  fighting for LGBT rights or African American rights.

“It’s the right thing, and it’s the human thing to do,” he said “I’m really interested in disrupting these paradigms about what we consider to be ‘advocacy’ and why. To me, not only as a writer and a filmmaker, but as someone who has lived in this country as a minority and who is part of marginalized groups, it’s always been a question of who’s telling the story and who’s framing who’s narrative.”

The stories of undocumented immigrants still remain a largely unspoken contribution to America’s economy and its culture, but Vargas’s film could help weave them into the fabric of America’s public story. 

Follow Hannah Harris Green on Twitter.

Illustrations by Jenny Hirons

If you decide to get any kind of arts or humanities degree at college you will probably have to read post-modern, neo-Marxist, social and literary critics who write in the kind of language that makes your head cry with pain and your body long for porn. As a breed, these people are known as critical theorists.

Now, you might be thinking, I won’t have to read these people, I’ll just read CliffsNotes. In which case, all I can say is: fair enough, you’ll probably do pretty well. There really is barely any reason to read the books, let alone the theory around them. Further education comes cheap (not literally, sadly) these days and you really don’t have to be very smart to get a humanities degree from a decent university.

But if you feel up for doing a little more work than you strictly have to, why not read some stuff that will be hard to understand and may not actually mean anything? After all, that’s what studying is about. A year after you leave school you’ll have no idea what it means but you’ll have a better, instinctive (i.e. borrowed) understanding of society and for a brief moment you’ll be able to say: “I read Roland Barthes and I sort of got where he was coming from.”

With the intellectually challenging end of the library—as with everything at most universities—it may just be best to embrace it and then look back on it with raised eyebrows. "Oh, those were the days," you can chuckle, 40 years from now, as you come across a forgotten copy of Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality.

In the meantime, here are some of the characters and situations you’ll run into on your journey into the logic jungles of critical theory.
 
Elaine Scarry

Dear Elaine wields some serious power in this world from her throne at Harvard. Scarry’s big achievement is a book called The Body in Pain, which is about different kinds of pain and how pain is inflicted. The crux of the book is that hurting someone is bad, whereas creating something (anything, unless it is painful) is good. When you do that you “make” the world, whereas when you inflict pain, you “unmake” it. So, if you relentlessly torture someone then you are not helping the world out, whereas if you write a book about why people relentlessly torture other people you are totally helping the world out. Still, she is responsible for one of the greatest pieces of Biblical analogy you’ll ever read, in which she compares the creation of God to the making of a table that can think for itself and change its form whenever the time dictates it. Could you have thought of that? No. But you might be able to turn that idea into a zingy sitcom.

Other Languages

Yeah, you’re fucked. Go on all you want about how you took French in school, but Jacques Derrida didn’t write about where the train station is, or if the swimming pool was open on Sundays. He wrote about binary oppositions, rhetoric, deconstructualism, and a whole load of other things that Rosetta Stone didn't get into. If you are lucky enough to be doing anything that relates to Ancient Greece or Rome (and academics relate basically everything to those two cultural swamps) you will have to also contend with Latin and Ancient Greek. Latin, at least, is written in the same alphabet you find on the back of your average Friends DVD. Greek is written in a bunch of antique wingdings, so good luck with that. Further afield, if you can’t throw a few Old Norse quips into an essay on the Viking sagas then you aren’t fit to ride my longboat to Asgard. And if it’s on Beowulf, the Ray Winstone accent needs to be implied.

Jacques Rancière

No one has done more to explain the role of the spectator, in a complicated French way, than this guy. Yes, the spectator. That’s you at an Atlas Sound gig, or paying Russian girls to strip on the internet. What pissed off Rancière was that the spectator didn’t know the machinations behind the devised theatrical happening (“play”) they were witnessing (“watching”), they just sat there pretending to find Shakespeare’s jokes funny. Rancière wanted to break that fourth wall; a cultural quest which arguably plodded through punk and ended up as Wayne’s World.

POWER

Critical theorists used to be very into the analysis of POWER, in an all-caps-kinda-major-you-can't-escape-it-this-is-how-you-are-placed-in-the-world-and-you-don't-in-fact-have-any-agency sort of way. The stupid ones are still going on about the grand machines of the elite and how they can be found controlling our desires in the novels of Henry James, the music of Beethoven, and the ingredients of our breakfast cereal. Writers like the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of, I am not lying to you, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, moved on from the POWER place to the “the world is a shades of gray" place, while their former disciples still splutter on about the John Malkovich guy in Henry James novels being a forerunner to Donald Rumsfeld.

Benjamin and Foucault

Like Gandalf and Gandalf’s gay son, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault (above) are the great wizards of critical theory. Benjamin’s magnum opus, the Arcades Project, wasn’t finished by the time the Second World War (and his subsequent suicide) rolled around, so it was hidden in Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, where it remained, undiscovered, until well after the war. Remember, the “j” in Benjamin is silent. People have been ruined in academic society for fucking that up. Foucault was indebted to Benjamin but created, with his work, a global team of starry-eyed disciples who couldn’t wait to put his pendulous French balls in their mouths. And I don’t blame them. He was an awfully clever man.

Excessive Use of Clauses

When an academic is attempting to say something complicated or, as is often the case, analyze a simple phenomenon in a complicated way; justifying a pointless essay, a number of clauses will be used. Sentences will go on for pages. Ideas, or statements, will pile up on top of one another, agency is taken from the reader, the consumer of the text, the product, as ideas pile up; the statements remain though, buried, amid the clauses, the clause. In high school you were probably reverentially told about George Orwell and his famous rules for writing good English (be simple, be clear, don’t use metaphors, etc, etc. It always sounded boring to me). Time to throw old Orwell in the trash along with your dreams of a brighter future. There's no room for that short sentence bullshit in critical theory.

Theodor Adorno

The great, pontificating old goat of 20th century seriousness may have famously said that after the holocaust there can be no laughter, and he may also have spent his life furiously pulling apart popular culture, but that didn’t stop his classic tome Minima Moralia ending up artfully scattered around branches of Urban Outfitters. He would have hated that. But then he deserved it. He was a dick.

Queer Theory

You are not a man. You are not a woman. You are not a neuter. You are a construct. Maintaining your gender is a constant performance. These ideas don’t seem that radical now, but before Judith Butler adapted them from Foucault and laid them out in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, they seemed alien. “What do you mean getting hammered with your pals is a culturally ingrained performance? Are you saying I’m gay? Are you saying I don’t like pounding beers at the bar and then going to the club to throw up on my best friend, Steve, whom I fucking love?" A bro might have said those very words to Judith Butler in 1990. Now, he’s read Gender Trouble, and is content as can be sitting around watching Sex and the City with his girlfriend.

So, welcome, friend, to the innermost circle of critical theory. Before you know it, you will be unmasking the terrorism present in your family, analyzing the agency of the police within literature, and drawing a direct and clear line between the book you are reading and the public nap you are taking. You will be left thinking, Yes, of course, I always wondered why I behaved in that way and now I know it’s because of the way society works and the way society works is perfectly demonstrated in this book about gender politics and the novels of William Faulkner. And the day you think that is the day you are born.

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Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–82-year-old shitbag Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, police commissioner Robert Copeland joins Donald Sterling in the "crazy old white man getting caught saying horrible things in public" hall of fame. A new resident to the sleepy northeastern town overheard Copeland say, "No, because whenever I do I'll have to see that fucking nigger," when asked if he watches the news. "That fucking nigger" happens to be the President of the United States.

Copeland doesn't deny what he said and has no intention of ever apologizing. He told his colleagues in an email, "I believe I did use the 'N' word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse. For this, I do not apologize—he meets and exceeds my criteria for such."

This, of course, begs the question of what Robert Copeland's criteria are for being a nigger. Here's a guess at what they are:

• Being black
• Being black
• Being black
• Confusing hand gestures
• Being black
• General uppity-ness
• Being black
• Looking at my wife's calves for longer than five seconds
• Unregulated office horseplay
• Being black
• Hippy-hop music
• Wearing pants with a waistline below the belly button
• Being black
• Seriously, stop looking at my wife

Copeland has refused requests for interviews thus far, so I suppose we'll just have to continue speculating. RACIST

–Next time the ice cream man shows up in your neighborhood to peddle his sickly sweet wares, remember the above song. Southern California public radio station KPCC dug up a classic romantic slow jam called "Nigger Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!" It happens to share a tune with the instrumental that just about every reputable ice cream truck plays when it goes trolling for customers. The lyrics wax poetic about the black man's love of watermelon, which the singer calls the "colored man's ice cream." Speaking from personal experience, the colored man's ice cream is ice cream. Ice cream, like Will Smith, hip-hop, and syphilis, transcends race.

Not sure how this is going to affect the ice cream truck business, but if they can deal with the whole child molestation thing, they'll be fine. RACIST

–Seniors at South Forsyth High School in Forsyth County, Georgia, unfurled the above banner on the side of their school as a prank. The banner, which features the lyric "Nigga, We Made It," was quickly taken down and the administration issued a strongly worded apology. The full banner helpfully included the hashtag suggestion "#2k14," in case you wanted to get involved with this wacky prank on Twitter. Who wouldn't? Pranks are awesome, as evidenced by the movie National Lampoon's Animal House, old Jerky Boys records, and this cool Michael Myers mask that Nicole Kidman wore to the Cannes Film Festival. #2K14 just might be the Year of Pranks we've all been waiting for! We're coming for you, Crusty Old Dean! 4

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

Some fuckn bullshit that a man that speaks fuckn English and was born here can't get a job over some wetback that can't even say America!

— RED MAN❗ (@richthegreat40) May 15, 2014

nearly shat myself in exam today, luckly got away with just a gargantuan fart, blamed it on the chink next to me #sneakybasterd #demasians

— Penny (@LloydPenny9) May 16, 2014

NIGGER TEST. IF YOU SEE CHICKEN YOURE A NIGGER pic.twitter.com/Ou6JxDXsiW

— JASON (@CheefPolo) May 12, 2014

sand nigger womyn need to be beat about the face for dressing western style.

— Hot Shot (@Boozermouth) May 15, 2014

The kings fan that did this probably wears a SnapBack, saggs his jeans, says he plays hockey, and is a beaner. pic.twitter.com/ufKRjPpg6W

— boring silfverberg (@Silfverbullet33) May 15, 2014

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Gulseer at his home in Amethi District. All photos by the author

Gulseer, who goes by one name, is about 34 or 35 years old. His exact age has escaped him. He’s been married to his wife, Ayesha, for the past 10 to 15 years. The exact duration of their marriage has escaped him too.

But as he woke up from a nap on the dusty veranda outside his family’s modest home in Barowalia village in the state of Uttar Pradesh last week, he told me one thing he is sure of—his unwavering support for Rahul Gandhi and India’s National Congress Party, which has governed India for 55 of the last 67 years. “It’s been like this since I was born,” he said, shoving a bidi into his mouth. “Whether Congress will win or lose, I’m going to vote for Rahul. Because he keeps coming here.”

The Congress Party, it turns out, lost badly—catastrophically, some might say—amid wide dissatisfaction with the country’s infrastructural development, meager economic growth, and systemic corruption. Congress, which held 262 seats in India’s lower house of parliament, is projected to win 58 seats, the fewest its ever held since India's first general elections, in 1951. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, headed by Narendra Modi, is projected to win as many as 333 of the 543 seats in the lower house of parliament, called the Lok Sabha. Results of the six-week-long election were announced today.

Despite Modi’s association with religious riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002, which killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, and his alliance with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing ideological body widely viewed as an extremist Hindu nationalist organization, he will become the county’s next prime minister after a fierce campaign during which he promised governmental accountability and economic stability. Rahul Gandhi, Indian National Congress’s candidate for prime minister and the scion of India’s Nehru/Gandhi political dynasty, will be a member of parliament and head a newly chastened Congress Party.

Barowalia village, where Gulseer has lived his entire life, is in the district of Amethi, the heart of Rahul Gandhi’s constituency in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Even before election season started and Rahul Gandhi earned a reputation as a man too inept to lead the country, reports surfaced he was the reluctant heir to India's first political family. But some supporters of the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh refuse to believe this might be the end for the family and the political party that has defined much of India’s history.

Take Gulseer, a Muslim who takes pride in the fact that Rahul Gandhi has been Amethi's MP for the past 10 years. “Rahul Gandhi and I are nearly the same age, except I was born poor and he was born with a silver spoon,” Gulseer said with a smile and blinking heavily. He was wearing a beige shirt that had surely been several shades lighter at one point, and had rolled his dark trousers all the way up to his thighs to keep cool in the scorching heat. His wife, dressed in a violet salwar kameez and mustard-colored headscarf, stopped sweeping the floor to listen to him. A crowd of children and a couple of other women followed, as well as two teenage boys.

“The best thing is that he keeps coming here,” Gulseer repeated to his audience. He claimed Rahul Gandhi had come to their village two to three months back, and again a two weeks ago. When asked how it was to see this long-lost brother, Gulseer played it cool. “It was fine,” he said nonchalantly, blowing smoke between his lips.

Every political party in India has a particular social base, according to Ramesh Dixit, a retired professor of political science at Lucknow University, and the Congress Party has historically benefited from the support of three disparate groups: low-caste Hindu landless laborers, Muslims, and upper-class Brahmins.

“Most upper-class Brahmins participated in the freedom struggle, and so they became part of the Congress Party,” he told me.

Among those freedom fighters was Jawaharlal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather and India’s first prime minister; Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi became India’s first female prime minister in 1967. Like today, reports of corruption and disillusion at rising food prices started to plague the party during her rule, and Indira Gandhi was widely viewed as a ruthless leader—she imposed a state of emergency in India in 1975, which made the country a police state where no dissent was allowed and media was censored. But Congress lost support only momentarily. It was defeated in the following 1977 general elections, but its opposition party, the Janata Party, couldn’t maintain power because of its own internal struggles.

And so the Congress Party came back to power in 1980, with Indira Gandhi becoming prime minister again. Indira’s son Rajiv Gandhi—Rahul's father—became India’s youngest prime minister at the age of 40 after she was killed in 1984. With the help of the sympathy votes following her assassination, Congress won a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament during the 1984 general elections. But by the next general elections in 1989, scandals trailing the Congress Party brought on its defeat, and India’s first minority government, backed by the BJP and an alliance of other smaller parties, came to power.

Even as the fickle nature of Indian politics besieged the bulk of the 1990s. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991 again returned voters to the Congress Party, but general elections were held in 1996, 1998, and 1999 because these Congress-led governments could govern effectively. Although Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP governed India from 1998 to 2004—the only prime minister outside the Congress Party to do so—Congress became the ruling party again in 2004, with Manmohan Singh as its prime minister.

History might be repeating itself now, with voters again upset at price hikes and massive speculation at corruption within the Congress Party. Yet against the backdrop of acres of parched land meant for harvesting wheat, small ponds, and skinny trees, Gulseer defended Rahul Gandhi and his party.

“It’s not that he hasn’t done much,” Gulseer said as he began to dig up mud for a household construction project. But the laborer—who makes 150 rupees a day, or about three dollars, on the days he is able to find work—couldn’t come up with a concrete answer for what Rahul Gandhi had done for Amethi.

Roads came into the village just three years ago. There is a one central well where people can fill large metal buckets with their daily rations of water. They get electricity about six to eight hours a day, though these days, because of election season, they enjoy a few hours more. None of the 150 households in the village have any working toilets.

“They’re broken-down and non-existent, so we have to use the fields,” Gulseer’s female neighbor lamented of their sanitation facilities.

J.P. Shukla, a political analyst in Lucknow who covered Uttar Pradesh for 18 years as the state correspondent for the Hindu, one of India’s leading English-language newspapers, says the Congress Party has sustained a psychological grip on poor villagers in rural India, especially in places like Amethi that are considered Congress bastions.

“I am from these kinds of areas. I know what they [villagers] are thinking,” Shukla told me. “Suppose an actor comes to the village. Of course the villager will be transfixed. ‘Oh, what is he like!’ It is the same situation with this Gandhi family. They adopted this constituency and did not develop this constituency, but what did they do? They showed their gestures. They went and dined with the families of poor men.”

Now, in keeping with the Sanskrit saying of treating one’s guest like a god—Atithi devo bhavah—even the most hard-up villager probably has nothing but admiration for the Gandhis, says Shukla.

“They are very poor and are engrossed in their own problems,” he said. “They have no time to think of politics.”

But 60 miles north of Amethi in Ayodhya, the city considered to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama and one of the holiest cities for Hindus, 25-year-old Kuttu Moriya has different reasons for supporting the Congress Party.

Ayodhya is the site of a decades-long dispute between Hindus and Muslims over the site of the Babri Masjid, a mosque built by the Mughal Emperor Babur in 1528. A series of movements launched by the Vishva Hindu Parishad, a right-wing organization aligned with the RSS that is part of the larger network of Hindu nationalist organizations called the Sangh Parivar, resulted in the demolition of the mosque in December 1992. A mob of about 200,000 Hindu extremists brought down the mosque within four hours with hammers and their bare hands, according to media reports. The destruction triggered violence and rioting throughout India that left more than 2,000 people dead and 8,000 people injured.

The site remains a contested area. Visitors can view the temple devoted to Rama, but reconstruction of the mosque is nonexistent despite the petitioning of activists and religious groups. On May 7, when residents of Ayodhya headed to the polls six different security checkpoints lined the path to view the Rama temple. Groups of about six to ten security officials, all of whom brandished rifles as part of their tan-colored uniforms, hovered at each station despite the meager turnout.

Twenty-five-year-old Kuttu Moriya ponders his party's future.

The following day, Kuttu Moriya sat cross-legged on a bench perched on the banks of the Sarayu river, a tributary of the vast Ganges river that flows through five Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh. Young men were bathing in the river behind him, but Moriya, a Hindu, kept his eyes on the landscape in the opposite direction. He said he had voted for the Congress Party because he doesn’t trust what might happen with a Modi-led BJP government, especially given Modi’s affiliation with the RSS.

“Look at what happened at the Rama temple!” he told me. His teeth were stained red from chewing betel nut, and he spit out more red phlegm over his right shoulder as he talked. The red liquid melted into the murky water. “If Modi comes to power, then there will just be more fighting.”

Moriya shrugged off talking about unemployment and development, two issues the BJP has championed in its campaign. Instead, he pointed at a bridge to his left.

“Look at the bridges, the roads! These are all from the Congress days,” he said.

After the last day of voting on May 12, Congress supporters in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, were hesitant to talk about what the election results might mean for the Congress Party.

“Let us wait, and then we will see what will happen,” said Shailesh Asthana, laughing. He’s a self-proclaimed “Congress man” who often comes to Indian Coffee House, a favorite spot among journalists and politicians in the city, to gossip about politics with his friends. The elections are always the first topic of discussion these days.

Satyadev Tripathi, a senior spokesperson for the Congress Party who joined up 29 years ago, said he didn’t trust the exit polls.

Forty-eight hours before the announcement of the results, he was sitting in his office at the Congress Party headquarters in Lucknow, entertaining a few journalists who were sitting on white plastic lawn chairs and relaxing in the air-conditioned room. Aside from the people in Tripathi’s office, the Congress Party building was virtually deserted. The first floor of the building was bare except for a few rusty bicycles that lined the hallway. Only a few laborers were working on a construction project near one door.

Bad news all around. Congress Party officials in Lucknow watch election results.

“We have seen exit polls in 2004 and 2009,” he told me. “And they weren’t always accurate.”

A giant poster of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi stretched the span of the wall behind his desk. The Congress Party symbol, the hand, was lined up just behind his head as he spoke. When I asked him what he thought of the Gandhis’ performance in this year’s electoral campaign, he deflected.

“The Kennedy family is respected in the US like anything,” he said. “The UK also has its royal family. Every one of these families is related to the freedom struggle, and people have faith in them.”

He paused. “And the BJP... They are also being run by a family. That is parivar—the Sangh Parivar,” he said. Parivar means family in Hindi. 

“Whatever mandate comes, we will be happy to accept it,” he said quietly.

Two days later, as the results of the elections started trickling in, all nine plastic lawn chairs in his office were occupied. Everyone’s eyes were transfixed on the flat-screen television mounted across from Tripathi’s desk.

“It is a big defeat,” said Tripathi. The Congress supporters and journalists in his office started a heated discussion about where the party had gone wrong.

But one Congressman was absolutely resolute this wasn’t the end for his party.

“No! It’s not defeat!” said Shakeel Farooki, the secretary of the Congress Party office, after the discussion broke up. He and the others had started to leave the room. He spoke with urgency.

“It’s only a defeat for a few years, a maximum of five years,” he said as he saw his friends off. “I was born in Congress, I will die in Congress.”

Follow Sonia on Twitter.

All photos via the author.
The snow is finally melting in the Northwest Territories, revealing a year’s worth of mouldy junk in Yellowknife, the capital city. It’s a dusty and dirty time of year, a season to clean, purge, and offload clutter at Yellowknife’s legendary thrift shop: The YK Solid Waste Facility.

I say thrift shop because the dump is a haven for salvagers, who are more than happy to take your unwanted crap and call it their own. If they don’t keep it, they will resell it to some other shmuck. This practice is unique in Canada. No other capital city let’s people rummage through the landfill at all, let alone give permission to load up your truck and haul junk out of the place.

And because Yellowknife is a transient town where residents earn some of the highest wages in Canada, you’re sure to find some high quality trash. It costs too much to ship things out when people leave, and it’s not like there are a ton of stores here either. So it’s not unheard of to walk away with a brand new flat screen TV and recliner, for instance. Some people have found diamond rings, new Xbox 360s, drum kits, sailboats, and rumour has it one lucky person walked out of here with a bin full of sasquatch erotica.

With quality and service like this, the YK dump is the northern version of Ikea, a place some residents call, “YKEA.” You’ll probably find a hotdog on your way out too.

“Look at these coveralls, they’re in perfect condition,” says Walt Humphries, arguably the dump’s greatest ambassador. If the dump had a mayor, it would be Humphries. For over 40 years he has advocated for salvaging, and is a vocal critic of City administration when they impose new restrictions on salvagers.

“Open up the whole damn place like how it was in the old days. Hell, give people licenses or go one step further and hire people to do this professionally,” he continues. “I’m willing to guess there’s several million dollars worth of stuff here. You can turn salvaging into a business and the City would have less waste to deal with. Everyone goes home happy,” he says.

He digs through a bin wearing gumboots and his trademark Outback hat. His wiry white beard grazes a pair of argyle socks. He looks a bit crazy, but he’s not really. In fact, Humphries is a well-respected historian, prospector, and artist. He even has a weekly column in the local rag, appropriately titled: “Tales From The Dump.”

“It’s just not the same,” he says. “The dump used to be one huge free market, and now we’re pushed to the back into these overcrowded little kennels,” he says.

The “kennels” are actually three fenced yards called “cells,” built by the City to keep salvageable items and salvagers alike to one spot in the dump, rather than letting people roam all over the place.

“There were some major safety concerns from the Public Works Department over the years, namely salvagers and children being in places where a lot of heavy equipment was being operated,” says Mark Heyck, Yellowknife’s mayor. “We decided to address these concerns, while at the same time, keeping salvaging permissible. We understand how important salvaging is to Yellowknifers,” he says.

This makes sense. After all, many children go to the Yellowknife dump too and this isn’t exactly a bouncy castle.

If anything, the changing regulations means people are physically closer together, which has ramped up the competitiveness (and fun) of salvaging. Every weekend between May and October you have dozens of salvagers hunting for a good score: moms and artists and rednecks and hippies, together on a big scavenger hunt.

There are strategists too. Some will park their trucks by the cells, and wait all day for people to offload a bunch of junk. When someone does show up, the salvagers jump out of their vehicles and surround the newcomer, hoping to claim a great prize.

To unsuspecting YKEA virgins, this is like being mobbed by the walking dead with arms outstretched, desperate to snag that ripped loveseat you farted on a million times. “Here, take the goddamn thing! Take it, dump zombie! Away with you!” you’d yell.

“Just wait until you see this place next week, its going to be a nut house,” says Bruce Bourque, a longtime salvager who rebuilds bikes for kids. “Next week is Amnesty Week,” he says. “There’s no fee to drop off your junk, so that’s when most people come to throw stuff out. And the salvagers, well, they show up in droves. It’s like Black Friday, dump style,” he says.

Humphries chimes in: “One year this lady pulls up with a flatbed full of great stuff like brand new golf clubs, a TV, and VCR. I think a few Remington rifles too. She called everyone to gather around her and yelled to the crowd: ‘My asshole of a husband fucked Linda, so I’m giving away his prized possessions to all of you,’” he said. “It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen, and I imagine very cathartic for her!”

We look around and YKEA is full. Some new kids to town need a couch, artists are digging around for yarn and buttons over in the crafts section, and tinkerers are tinkering with machinery in the electronics section.  

I chat with Lachlan Maclean, a young Walt Humphries of sorts. He’s from Vancouver and comes to the dump regularly. Most of the time he’s in the scrap metal section.

“I made this guitar amp out of a lunch pail and a reel-to-reel,” he says. “This is a great place for an artist. There ought to be an artist in residency at the dump. The first of its kind,” he says.

“If you drive around Yellowknife, you’ll see how resourceful we are. We decorate our homes with trinkets from the dump. We make gardens and decks and cabins from wood from the dump. The stuff we find at the dump gives the city its charm,” he says. 

I suppose he’s right. This is a town built by salvagers, scavengers, pioneers, and prospectors. Yellowknifers are a resourceful bunch, partly because they have to be and partly because they want to keep that pioneering spirit alive.

That, or they just love furniture covered in raven shit. 

@patkanephoto

All photos via Flickr user Catholic United Financial

Last September I wrote a blog post about the pope, and to find an image that could go with it I started browsing through Flickr's Creative Commons library, which is a great place to find images you don't have to pay for. I didn't get any particularly good shots of Pope Francis, but my search led me to the Flickr page of Catholic United Financial, an account that has over 6,000 photos—all of them of people posing next to cardboard cutouts of Pope Francis.

Now, I don't know anything about Catholic United Financial, though I imagine it's some sort of charity that brings cardboard cutouts of the pope to events. As you scroll through the photos the cutout changes from waving happy Pope Francis to a more serious Pope Francis, so I assume the cutouts get worn out after so much use, but that's conjecture on my part. I prefer to keep myself ignorant, because adding context to these photos—where they were taken, what events the cardboard pope was attending, why a charity would decide to post them all online—will only detract from the pure joy I get from periodically clicking through that Flickr page.

And for the record, I'm not enjoying these photos on some kind of ironically detached level where I'm pointing and laughing at people in Middle America who like something as old-fashioned as the Catholic Church. The images below are great simply because they show people being happy. Thank you, Catholic United Financial!

BONUS POPE PICTURE: While going through this Flickr account I came across previously unknown (to me, at least) photos of people posing with a cutout of the previous pope, Benedict XVI. These are a little odder because—there's no nice way to say this—Benedict looks evil when he smiles. They're still great though:

Harry Cheadle is still looking at these photos. Follow him on Twitter.

Hijras pose in their office in Peshawar, Pakistan. All photos by Abdul Majeed Goraya

"My father used to beat me and ask, ‘Why do you have to go around pretending to be a girl?’”

Now at 35, she says her cheeks burn and fists tighten if anyone refers to her as a man.

Khushboo, whose name means fragrance, classifies herself as a hijra, a South Asian gender designation that encompasses transgender and transexual people, as well as transvestites and eunuchs.

She has a different definition for herself and the estimated hundreds of thousands of other hijras across the region. “Our souls are female and our bodies are male,” she says, dipping a rag into a red plastic pail filled with a chalky mixture of water and face powder. Surrounded by a group of several other hijras in a room they call their “office,” Khushboo smears the dripping rag over her face and adds, “I’ve known I was a hijra since I was a child.”

She used to wear her sisters’ clothes. At 16, Khushboo slipped out of the house in one of their outfits and didn’t return home for years. Along with another hijra, she settled in Peshawar, a city in northwestern Pakistan one night’s drive from the costal city of Karachi where she’d grown up.

Peshawar has long been home to cultural traditions that insist on strict gender segregation, and the city has come under increasing sway of an extremist view of Islam in recent years. These intolerant, conservative beliefs are made brutally clear through the bombings and shootings that are now near-weekly occurrences. Taliban suicide bombers killed 85 worshippers at a church there last September, and militants killed thirteen people at a cinema showing pornographic movies in February. Lesser attacks are momentaryblips on local news coverage featuring bloodied streets and blaring sirens.

Khushboo points to battered doors and broken windows around her. She says young men—“college boys” she calls them—wreak havoc on her and fellow hijras who are preparing for a dance performance later that night. Sometimes the men recite scripture and beat the hijras to shame them out of their profession as dancers, and other times they force them to dance or even rape them, she tells me.

Despite the extremism that has only further marred the city since her arrival nearly 20 years ago, Khushboo has an affinity for Peshawar because it’s where she had a sort of rebirth as her new self.

Free from the abuse of her father and brothers, as well as the sense of dishonor she felt on behalf of her mother and sisters, Khushboo embraced a new life of openness—and was adopted into a new family.

“In this field we have mothers. We have gurus. We have uncles and aunts,” she says, and then points to a girl who’s rolling a spliff in the corner of the room. “She’s my daughter. I’m a daughter of someone so she has a grandmother too. And,” Khushboo adds, “She also has a father.”

That last bit comes so quickly that I almost miss it. I inquire further about the girl’s “papa” and Khushboo says, “Her father is married to someone else, but he loves me.” She then goes on to explain what their relationship entails—and it’s all very practical until it gets utterly tragic: “If I’m sick, he comes by and brings me medicine,” she says proudly. “If I don’t have money he drops some cash off. If I die, it’s this man who will dress me up as a man and take my body to his house to carry out the cemetery. He might not explain the full story and just say that I was killed in the market or that there was some kind of shooting, but he’s the one who will take care of the funeral.”

I can’t help but think that this grim possibility is one that Khushboo has discussed with her “husband”—and one that he too has come to terms with.

“In Pakistani society, there is a really strong [sense of] place and family,” says Dr. Jamil Ahmad Chitrali, a professor of anthropology. “There is no alternative for anyone.”

Based at the University of Peshawar, Chitrali has written about the city’s hijra community. He says that by forging the same sorts of familial connections that they left behind, hijras create a social order that mimics the very society from which many of them fled.

“It’s forcing all those revolutionary individuals who are against those binaries of man and woman to come into a structure which is reaffirming patriarchy,” he says.

Pakistan’s hijras have made some strides in recent years despite their rather isolated existence. In 2012, the Pakistani Supreme Court allowed for a “third gender” category to be added to national identity cards, which effectively gave hijras increased legal standing. It’s because of this broader recognition that hijras could vote in that year’s presidential election—at least five hijras even ran for office.

But the third gender classification has made little practical difference in Khusbhoo’s life. “We live in a third world,” she says, the difference between her life and that of a cisgender person just as stark as the difference between life in Pakistan, and say, Monaco.

And, she says, no matter what she does, she’ll always be seen as different.

“Even if I give up dancing, everyone will still call me a hijra so what’s the point? Why not do what I love?” She adds that even if she were to become a traveling evangelist, her family would still regard her with the same disdain. “I’m better off staying a hijra.”

And that’s the hardest thing that Khushboo has to face: her family. She got back in touch with them after five years of not speaking, and goes to see them in Karachi at least once a year. But when she does, she goes dressed as a man.

Though she moves about as a woman in Peshawar, Khushboo wears a black floor length, full-sleeved robe (or abaya), and a face covering (or niqab) that reveals only her eyes to hide herself from prying eyes. Even so, she’s been thrown out of several houses by people who fear hijras will ruin their neighborhood.

While they occupy a marginalized space across Pakistan, hijras are probably worst off in Peshawar. In all of the other major cities in the country, they are frequent sites at traffic intersections or in shopping centers where they offer a prayer for a few rupees. Many passersby fear denying them might mean a curse and so will either oblige quickly or turn away completely.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Peshawar over the years, and have never seen hijras out in public the way they are in other cities. After speaking with Professor Chitrali, I learned that might be because hijras have a different role in the Pathan society that dominates the Peshawar area. In this part of the country, hijras aren’t seen to have some sort of greater spiritual connection than cisgender people—instead, their role is celebratory. They’re often asked to sing and dance at weddings and births.

“It's their performance which gives [a family] social recognition,” Chitrali says, though the tradition is fading as weddings move from family houses into wedding halls. Some might have other professions—Khushboo says she has hijra friends who are lawyers and pilots and act cisgender in order to maintain their jobs, though they’re free to “be themselves” with her and other hijras. Due to a lack of societal acceptance, many hijras live marginalized lives as low-income entertainers, but they’ve got a bit of a role as educators, too. Hijras sometimes teach—or even initiate—young men into sex. For many in Peshawar who live by strict religious and cultural codes that denounce almost any pre-marital interaction between the sexes as sinful, hijras provide a sort of in-between, or a “cushion,” as Chistrali calls it.

“If you cross the domain of manhood into womanhood, that is against the culture, that is crossing your limits. But you can always move into the gray area, so this hijra community, in that sense, in a clear binary of man and woman among Pathans, [forms] a gray area.” But he says that this “learning experience” is becoming less common with such how-to’s readily available on the internet.

As she and her "daughter" Laila prepare for a dance performance, Khushboo gets calls from potential clients.

In Peshawar’s increasingly religiously-motivated milieu, the presence of hijras—be they dancers or sex workers—is frowned upon and politicians vie for favor by pushing them out of their homes and worksites.

Seeing this, Malik Iqbal says he wanted to do something. “I sympathize with them because no one gives them any space,” he tells me.

He rents out the office that Khusboo and her fellow hijras use to prepare for their dances.

“I didn’t used to be on their side,” Iqbal says. “Now I help them. I say they’re humans too. We should have some empathy for that reason. Not just me, everyone should empathize with them as people.”

But some believe Iqbal’s connection to hijras goes beyond a shared humanity. Though he refuses to speak about it, Iqbal was arrested in 2010 for attempting to marry a hijra called Rani. Such a union would be illegal under Pakistani law, which only recognizes marriages between men and women. He has repeatedly denied the charge and claimed that police were trying to extort money from hijras at an event that wasn’t a marriage but an innocent birthday party. Either way, the shock the story garnered reveals just how far removed everyday Pakistanis are from the hijra community. A big-grossing film called Bol, or Speak—released in 2011—may have helped some, but real connections like Iqbal's remain few.

And not everyone in close proximity to hirjas is sympathetic. Noor Illahi, who owns a grain shop down the street from the hijras’ office, doesn’t have a problem with the hijras themselves or even their work, but thinks they should find some other place to go. “My work has suffered because of them. The other storeowners and I, we think they should be given some place off to the side. It should be separate.”

He’s worked in his store for 15 years and says that sales have dropped fifty percent since the hijras set up shop next door a few years ago. “There are a lot of fights here now. They create quite a scene sometimes.”

The raucousness has driven away his customers. Those who stop in the area are more interested in the hijras than the sacks of flour he has for sale.

“I’m not personally offended by them. But look,” he says, pointing to a group of several white shalwar kameez-clad men loitering outside the hijra’s building. “These poor people have earned just three or four hundred rupees all day ($3-4) and they’ll come here and waste it all on them.”

The men are all rickshaw drivers. One by one, they go on the record to deny being there to solicit sex. “We’re just here to chit chat with them,” one says while peering over his shoulder to see if any of the hijras have come out into the alley. “It’s a totally innocent relationship that we have with them.”

Back up in the hijras’ office, the lights have gone out as a part of the rolling power outages that have frustrated Pakistanis for years. It might be another hour before they’re ready to leave for their performance. When they do, they’ll be cloaked in massive shawls and under the cover of night.

Follow Beenish Ahmed on Twitter.

Godzilla in the mist

Back in 1998, I went to see the newly released Godzilla film for my tenth birthday. I remember seeing the trailer before something else, perhaps Men In Black, or Independence Day, or some other film with Will Smith and some aliens in it, because back then that was largely the basis upon which I decided to go and see films. Films in which the Fresh Prince of Bel Air got covered in slime and took the piss out of old white guys for being old white guys. 

Sure, Godzilla wasn't an alien, and Big Willie Style didn't appear to be in it, but at the time I thought that it looked perfect for my birthday celebrations. An action-packed amuse-bouche before a visit to the local TGI Friday's. I was hyped; I even bought Jamiroquai's proto-dubstep banger Deeper Underground. Evidently this stuck with me longer than the film, because I remember absolutely nothing about Godzilla '98—not one set-piece, not one stream of dialogue, not who was in it, nor who directed it, nor what buildings they blew up, nor how they killed Godzilla in the end.

IMDb tells me that the film featured a ragtag cast made up (bizarrely) of Ferris Bueller, Leon the Professional, and two cast members from The Simpsons. But my lasting image of that day was of sticky ribs and potato skins rather than Japanese nuclear monsters. I guess, in some way it was the first film I saw that failed to impress me. Until then, the very act of being in a cinema had been enough. Godzilla set the precedent for a lifetime of cinematic disappointments, from Tomb Raider to The Butler. 

Sixteen years later, and Hollywood has finally had another bash at Godzilla. We're at the stage where Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Sam Raimi's Spiderman and Christopher Nolan's Batman are no longer even the latest versions of their franchises, so it makes sense that Godzilla would be revisited, even if it was hugely underwhelming last time round.

For those of you without a Forbidden Planet discount card, the history of the Godzilla franchise dates back to Japan, where the titular giant dragon/dinosaur thing first appeared on screens in 1954. The films were very much of their time: rickety stop-motion, miniature model cities on fire, wooden acting and most interestingly, a series of fairly blatant parallels with a real-life monster—nuclear warfare, which was still all-too fresh in Japan's collective memory less than ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The iconography was clear. Not only was Godzilla a mindless, unstoppable entity that left Japanese cities in ruins, the story says that the creature was awakened by nuclear testing in the Pacific. Despite the fact that it was a lizard the size of a skyscraper, the original Godzilla was in many ways a very real monster—a monster that lingered in the minds of the Japanese people who flocked to the films, and spurred on several sequels with a whole cast of secondary monsters like an irradiated dinosaur with five brains and a crocodile's face and a gigantic benevolent moth that lives on a tropical island where it is worshiped as a god.

Quite what the American production company behind the '98 film was trying to draw parallels with, I'm not sure. Bill Clinton's impeachment? Savage Garden? It was little wonder the film flopped in an era where the world was more interested in rogue blowjobs than the nuclear endgame. 

The trailer

Turning up to the local cineplex for an afternoon screening of the film, I wondered who it was trying to appeal to. Kids? Grown-ups? Geeks? Looking at the small gaggle of tourists, amateur film critics and middle-aged men with membership cards, Crocs and, shall we say, "social issues," I was none the wiser. This just seemed like a random collection of people you might see in a Post Office line or at a bus-stop.

I was keen to take a look at the current state of the cinematic summer blockbuster. The last film I saw in the cinema was The Great Beauty, and I realized I hadn't seen a legit blockbuster in a theater for well over a decade. I didn't even see Avatar.

Where and what are the descendants of those films I loved as a child, before I went through that teenage gateway of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas that led me to Italian neo-realism and Michael Haneke? I wanted to know what the children of MIB, Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Hard Rain, et al looked like. I wanted to know what their worldview was, if presidents still fly fighter planes, if you could still land on asteroids and punch aliens in the face. I wanted to know if that typically American idea of man vs. intergalactic disaster was still alive, or if the characters were more concerned with their personal brands than saving the world.

So, I gladly paid the $30 for entry and a regular Pepsi (I know, cheap right? I'm glad I went when it was "off-peak") and entered the cinema, a place Maxim Gorky once called "the kingdom of the shadows." Though at those prices he probably would have just sacked it off and gone to the candy store instead.

According to the trailers before the film started, the blockbuster was still in full flow, or at least back in some sort of semi-aware, post-modern incarnation. Watching the Transformers trailer, it occurred to me that this was the fourth installment of the franchise, and that I had never seen any of the previous three. Then I realized that I'd never even heard anyone talking about any of them, or even met anyone who'd admitted to watching one. Maybe it's cultural elitism on my part, but I can't help but think that despite their obvious box-office appeal, the series seems to have passed without making any tangible impact on the wider culture. Whereas films like Juno or Shame clearly did. I wondered if these kind of films now existed in a kind of parallel world to the rest of cinema, whereas once they were very much the mainstream of Hollywood. 

Perhaps these big summer action films had their glory years, and now existed in a different, more niche, but still just as stupid sphere. One populated by young men who still buy FHM, and talk about how hot Megan Fox is over games of pool. Maybe these films had become the heavy metal of American cinema, an overwhelmingly macho aesthetic that is now long past its glory days, and focuses on keeping its hardcore demographic happy, rather than trying to rule the world. 

After the mandatory 45 minutes of trailers and ice-cream ads, the film started. As the credits began to roll, I played a game with myself, guessing which actor would fill which stock-role.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the guy from Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, would inevitably play the hero, I thought, a guy with tons of brawn and just enough brain to get by. Elizabeth Olsen? His love interest; sensitive but sassy. Bryan Cranston: cranky maverick, a scientist perhaps. Ken Watanabe: he's Japanese, it's Hollywood, of course he's going to be a scientist.

Juliette Binoche and Sally Hawkins were oddball casting moves; they're both more likely to be starring in indie films about female sexual awakenings than movies about giant monsters. But I put them down as scientists just in case. David Strathairn I wasn't sure about. He looks like a president, he'll probably be a president, I thought.

30 minutes into the film, and I was 90 percent right. A tonked up Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a soldier who unwittingly becomes an action lead. Bryan Cranston was indeed a cranky maverick scientist. Elizabeth Olsen played AT-J's girlfriend, who is a nurse and doesn't say much. And, impressively, Sally Hawkins, Juliette Binoche and Ken Watanabe all played scientists of various kinds. Only David Strathairn, with his face of authority, spoiled my predictable-casting Royal Flush—he played a navy admiral, not a president. 

As you might expect from a film that—when you strip away all the social allegories—can basically be boiled down to the central premise "lizard's too big," it's somewhat thin on story. Or rather, it starts off telling a kind of story, then kills most of its principle cast members and lets rip into an hour-long monster brawl. It starts in Japan, where we meet a team of scientists working in a nuclear plant, who spend a lot of the early part of the film frowning at strange electro-magnetic activity on their charts. Binoche and Cranston are a married couple who work at the plant, and for some reason I can't quite remember, Binoche dies in an explosion. About ten minutes into the film. Presumably she can go off to make another Iranian family drama rather than the prequel to this. 

Cranston, needless to say, is angered by this, and the film zooms forward to 15 years later, where his young son has become Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Since this has happened, Cranston has lost his mind and become an amateur sleuth, trying to find out the real reasons behind this strange electro-magnetic activity and the death of his wife. As are Ken and Sally, who wobble around the film looking nervous and intelligent.

Structurally, it's a mess. The best actors in it all die pretty early on, and not only are Johnson and Olsen's roles outdated and thinly realized, they both play it blander than the worst sex tapes. Both have been excellent in other films like this, but the script gives them little to chew on, and while Johnson looks the part with his jarhead and Creatine shoulders, he lacks that sense of "we're OK with this guy" that was exuded by the likes of Smith, Willis and Costner. After the oldies depart, it's a bit like watching a cast of high school kids trying to do Paradise Lost. 

The special effects are impressive enough, I guess, if you're the kind of person who gives a shit about special effects. But the 3D only really provides one good shock, and for all the moments where you feel like you're in the teeth of the beast, it did just remind me of all the identikit first person shooter games set in muddy grey landscapes that made me give up on video game consoles. Call me pretentious, but I like my movies to be more than just watching somebody else play Killzone. 

But Godzilla does touch on a few nerves, and isn't afraid to kick you in the teeth every now and again. Characters you like die without warning, and I couldn't help but notice the slightly subversive comment on the army's presence in it. In Godzilla, the boys in uniform are not the heroes. They're helpless onlookers, as terrified and enthralled by the monster fight as everybody else. AT-J's character tries, but they never come close to really making any impact on the beasts. Instead he and the boys are forced to watch, petrified and in awe of this thing that is bigger than them. Impotent with their man-weapons and Stars and Stripes patches, I don't think you need to be Slavoj Žižek to wonder if this is a comment on America's interventionist failures.

The almost totally unveiled threat in the original Japanese films may have been nuclear warfare, but in the 2014 version it seems to be a manifestation of all our modern nightmares. The disaster scenes played on the grimly iconic moments from recent tragedies and disasters that were burnt into our collective retinas by rolling news. The collapsing buildings that fill the streets with dust clearly call to mind 9/11, the tourist resorts ruined by tidal waves almost make you shudder as you remember that handheld footage from the Boxing Day tsunami, and the Japanese nuclear plant where the early part of the film is set is surely based on the Fukushima disaster. It's not surprising that the 2014 version feels scarier to me than the 1950s ones—it's tough to get too worked up about a puppet of a gigantic benevolent moth—but there is something acutely nightmarish and amorphous about the threat today's Godzilla represents. He's the culmination of all our paranoias rolled into one unstoppable disaster. The realization of everything we're doing to fuck up the world we live in.

Ultimately, though, it's a brave attempt at making a modern, subversive blockbuster that falls short due to bad writing and acting. It definitely possessed more vision than I expected it to, however, and for that I respected it, even if it did feel like a bit of a waste of time.

As to the bigger question of whether the blockbuster has any place in our self-aware, self-obsessed culture? I'm not sure. I suppose people will see Godzilla, and the new Transformers, and maybe Into The Storm. But among the trailers was a new kind of film. A new kind of blockbuster that'll probably fill seats like all those films I loved as a child. For instance, there's Tammy, a film in which professional fat person Melissa McCarthy plays an overweight armed robber who dances to "Gangsta's Paradise" and can't jump over a fast food counter.

With that in mind, I decided that the days of the blockbuster as a form of mass entertainment are probably gone. They're oversized, overstuffed, outdated monsters that only really shake us when they strike a note of nostalgia within us—a bit like Godzilla himself, really.

@thugclive

All photos by Lukas Gansterer

When we met with Andreas Kronthaler for this interview, we didn’t know what to expect. We heard the most outrageous rumors, of which licking male model’s nipples before fashion shows seemed to be one of the more harmless. But we also knew that in interviews he famously keeps his secrets to himself.

Kronthaler grew up in a tiny picturesque village in Tyrol amidst the Austrian Alps but instead of becoming a skiing instructor or whatever else it is they are doing up there, he left for Vienna to study fashion design under Vivienne Westwood in the early Nineties. By then, Westwood already had built up quite a reputation of being unconventional and full of contradictions. On the one hand she creates high-priced, pompous evening gowns yet doesn’t stop talking about the devastating effects of global warming. She is known as the queen of punk, all the while dressing the Hollywood elite. Her fashion is shocking, ripe with sexual connotations and references to the BDSM scene. The fact that Westwood and the much younger Kronthaler fell in love with each other and married shortly after, fit her infamous public image like a shiny latex glove.

Our preconceptions don’t add up to his soft-spoken voice with the heavy Austrian accent though. He carefully chooses his words avoiding touchy subjects and even seems shy at times. Yet there is no hiding in the fact that he is a hot piece of meat and obviously has a wild side. He is an incredibly hard worker and perfectionist and manages the men’s fashion department of Vivienne Westwood. His wife calls him the most talented man she ever met.

VICE: I would like to emphasize that you are one of the few rebels left in the business, specifically, a recent campaign by Juergen Teller featured your butt naked wife. How was that for you?
Andreas Kronthaler: This was Juergen’s idea, but he asked me in advance. He did this very cleverly because he wanted me to sound it out with her. I have no problem at all with the nudity. He is a great photographer and we know each other well. It was also a beautiful day – I think it was Boxing Day. He came over with his family, his two children and his wife for a drink. Then they shot the nude photos. I don’t question it and I think it’s beautiful. She is a woman who stands for something. She doesn’t have any surgery. It’s un-retouched beauty, even if it may sound naive.

I love the image of femininity that you preach because it’s all about boobs and waist.
Yes, these are ultimately facts which you have to use. I've learned this from Vivienne right away and that is what I appreciated so much in her. She is a woman, designing for women. Femininity has also attracted me to her, from the first moment on. I absolutely found myself in it. It was like enlightenment. It sometimes happens in life that someone touches your soul. You can immediately feel that everything is right and you have to hang on to that.

You also collaborated with Pamela Anderson.
She has even become a good friend. Great person! She is a fierce advocate for the environment and animal welfare and is also a terrific mother. Back then she was at a fashion show and I had asked if she wanted to work with us. She said yes and we flew over to Los Angeles. That was somewhat cheaper than coming to London. At that time she still lived in a trailer in Paradise Cove, a "gated community" in Malibu. It was the first time that I really saw her. When we arrived, she was driving down this mountain, in a white buggy, only wearing a men's shirt and nothing else. She was barefoot, her hair open, all made up and insanely beautiful. I've never seen anything like it! I was there with Vivienne and Juergen and she invited us into her mobile home. We photographed for two days straight.

You're a family man and also had a close relationship to Vivienne's mother.
I loved her like crazy. She lived on the countryside until she was 80 years old, only then she moved to London so she could be closer to her three children—she died at 94. I got to know her properly this way. She was a very cool person. I regularly visited her once a week, every Friday evening I went over. Finally, I bought a big old car and we drove 200 meters to the pub and had a beer. This gave her so much pleasure. We always talked.

Her mother was always well dressed – with a feather boa and a great skirt. She went to dance classes and has always had boyfriends up into old age. She simply enjoyed life just like Vivienne. She also loved music and had a great record collection with lots of rock and roll. She always had good advice. Every time I talked to her, it was like Chicken Soup for the Soul. I do not know if that was the wisdom of the age or her character.

You always seem so quiet in interviews and reserved. It differs strongly to how you dress or how I perceive you in photos.
I have a completely different side and that it's very temperamental.

But you don’t show it in interviews obviously.
Yes. I can be a difficult person if something does not work out the way I imagine it. I always want it my way. In that regards I make it too difficult for myself sometimes, but too many people make it too easy for themselves. I notice that often with young people. They simply like or dislike something. I don’t accept that. Get involved and don’t believe everything! They are sitting in front of their computers and then are extremely disappointed when the real thing is in front of them.

How do you perceive the current fashion scene? Are you satisfied?
I am living in London and I have recently found myself again. I don’t want to get into details, but I have just gone through a crisis. Now I am looking at a lot of things again, going to exhibitions, archives and going out again too. I was living quite secluded these last years, but the scene seems to be interesting as far as I can tell. A lot is happening right now and a new generation is emerging. But can they stand a chance? We are living in a world of fashion shows and big names. The trend towards luxury is irritating. There are people buying a crocodile handbag worth thousands of pounds, wearing it with Jeans and a sweatshirt. I don’t know what’s supposed to be luxurious about this. You know, it just doesn’t make sense.

But the trend points in a different direction, large chains satisfy our greed for luxury. They are churning out clothes that you throw out again the very next season.
Unfortunately, this is the throwaway society in which we live—it's blind consumerism. I don't understand it. When someone buys something, he should consider whether he needs and likes to have that. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against things that cost a lot. To me it is more about the attitude towards how you consume things. You do not need six sweaters, when you have one.

Are you living like this? Do you look after of your things?
I take extreme care! I have things that are 20 years old and I still like and wear them. Vivienne is even more extreme in this regards and she is also so economical—very English. People there are wearing things until they are falling apart in the truest sense of the word. And that has nothing to do with rich or poor. I have seen aristocrats who had moth holes in their jackets. A great tweed jacket is made for you and it suits you. It is lived in and has a quality that you cannot imitate. Today there is this trend to make everything look old and washed out, turned inside out and twisted. I do that too in fashion sometimes, because certain fabrics are simply better when you wash them or it is beneficial for the cut. But a leather jacket that you buy new and then it looks as if it was old!?

And such a crime against the environment!
Yes, that brings us to denim, one of the biggest problems. That is why now we also do a denim collection with minimum ecological washes. One can make a huge difference, although you cannot entirely avoid it, but reducing is a good start.

Is this a reason why you have rejected the collaboration with H&M? Because of the wasteful and irresponsible use of resources they promote?
That was not necessarily a reason. It just did not feel right at the time. If they would ask again, it would probably be different. We would have to add some meaning to it though.

Are you proud of the fact that you are not part of a major brand?
Totally! This is such freedom. You are your own master and responsible for yourself. It is a different starting-off point and I miss this nowadays. There are more and more designers hired by large corporations.

You sell luxury items but at the same time you preach sustainability. How would this work if you were part of a big company?
It would not work out anyways, because they would simply not approve. This dichotomy can be difficult. My wife, Vivienne is sometimes saying it in a naive way, but that can make it powerful. She is very aware of the naivety. Fashion and clothing has always been a platform for her to express her views. She did it 30 years ago and sticks to it now. And you can’t just close your eyes. There are too few people out there who are in these positions and really speak their minds. She is one of those.

Climate revolution sounds a bit passé, like Al Gore or saving rainforests in the 90s, no?
But the concept of Climate Revolution is working out better and better. Vivienne wasn’t even being taken seriously from inside the company, but she pursued the project independently and it is still growing. She has currently got so many platforms and cares about them so much. Two girls are constantly working with us on climate issues exclusively.

Does she simply want to provoke or is she really that interested in climate change?
She genuinely cares about it. She is such a do-gooder, she wants to make the world a better place and is risking her neck for it. That's her character. For me? I don’t know, maybe I'm too stupid or too clever, either one.

I think it's brave that she allows an issue outside the glamour world be important. Many designers downright emphasize their disinterest in reality.
This is a world that takes you over completely and other issues are often of little concern, because the whole day is spent trying to indulge in the beautiful. I don’t criticize that but I know what you mean. The long-established big designers are one thing, but it’s the young generation that doesn’t stand up for anything, that worries me.

Suzy Menkes has written a long spiteful article about the "fashion circus". She specifically tackled the bloggers, who she thinks, are corrupt and would be openly bribed with gifts from brands and designers. Are you disappointed in the young scene?
Disappointed? Maybe I know them too little. A huge number of them follows the well-established paths. They all want to sell and have success. I am not sure whether it can survive as meaningless as it is. When you're young, you have to be a little crazy and it doesn’t even have to be political: take a risk, play around and be playful—that's whats missing!