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Meet Louis Ortiz, America’s Most Convincing Barack Obama Impersonator

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Imagine waking up one day to discover that you look so much like one of the world’s most famous faces and that there may be job opportunities and fame waiting for you—if you play your cards right. That’s what happened to an unemployed 45-year-old Puerto Rican man in the Bronx named Louis Ortiz, whose striking resemblance to President Barack Obama is so uncanny, he began getting used to being stopped and approached for pictures with strangers on the street in early 2008.

A deluge friends and acquaintances began badgering Louis about his likeness to the President almost immediately. He began to mold himself into a convincing Barack Obama mimic. Not long after that, a mutual friend connected him to filmmaker Ryan Murdock, who started work on a documentary about Louis and his life. It didn’t take long for major media outlets to come knocking. In early 2012, This American Life devoted 40 minutes of a particularly memorable episode to Ortiz and Murdock. At the end of the year, the New York Times presented an op-doc on their website that excerpted the resulting documentary: Bronx Obama.

Bronx Obama
is an intricate and compelling documentary that deftly weaves together multiple narrative layers—the American Dream, surrealism, fatherhood, race relations, celebrity—while following Louis as Obama on tour with Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney impersonators, and a pernicious manager named Dustin (who, it turns out, has ties to hate groups) who hired a comedy writer to produce material that scrapes the bottom barrel of race-baiting humour (Donald Trump impersonator: “What are you going to do to create jobs in the inner-cities?” Ortiz as Obama: “Nothing, Donald. Come on, man: You think I’m going to get my supporters to vote for me by telling them they’ve gotta work?”), as they perform shows for Libertarian conventions and Republican boosters eager to see the President portrayed as a smarmy buffoon. Another captivating component of the film is Louis’s complex relationship with his teenage daughter, Reina, a hyper-intelligent 16 year-old high school basketball star, who lives 1,864 kilometres away in Florida.

When I meet Ryan and Louis for brunch in a downtown Toronto restaurant, Louis’s similarity to the 44th President of the United States is almost disturbing: He possesses Barack’s congenial smile, slender build, substantial ears, and even has a similarly located mole (it’s Sharpied on, but convincing nonetheless). He speaks with a heavy Bronx accent and demeanour that is part seen-it-all street veteran and part reserved paternal figure.

During our 90-minute conversation, steady streams of excited onlookers eager to pose for a picture with “the President” interrupt us. No bystander interaction tops the one we share with our waitress, a buoyant young woman in her early 20s, who is so taken aback by Louis’s likeness to the President that she appears faint. “I’m serving the President!” she says, wonder palpable in her voice, before rushing to the kitchen. Louis, Ryan and I have a brief debate about whether or not she actually believes he’s the President, before deciding that she was most likely playing along. Five minutes later, when our waitress returns, she approaches us with a facial expression that falls somewhere between confused and skeptical. “Wait, that’s not actually the President,” she says, mistrustfully, before we explain who Louis is and why we’re meeting.

VICE: Does that happen often?
Ryan Murdock:
That thing only happens sometimes. I’ve only seen it like three times.

Really?
Ryan: Yeah, where someone was convinced for an extended amount of time. It’s funny because you want to believe that it’s what you think it is.
Louis Ortiz: The funny thing is that it’s fun for them to believe it, but for me, I wouldn’t want to walk anywhere and say “I’m Barack Obama.” You feel like you’re tricking them. It just doesn’t feel right. So I try to be up front.

After watching the movie, it’s clear that your manager, Dustin, had you doing a lot of the material as Barack that was—in your own words—“a little racist.” Did you feel a responsibility to do or not do certain jokes because of the tone?
Louis: I put up with a lot on that tour—a lot more than is in the movie. He [motions to Ryan] just didn’t catch a lot of it.
Ryan: Hey now, give me some credit.
Louis: I walked away from that manager three times because of the racist material and pressure he was putting on me. The third time was the final time—I could not continue. All of that happened in a six-month period. He was promising me the world. He made it seem like there was no other guy who could guide me. It was a job and I had to do what I had to do. Still, every time I walked away I was hoping that I would stay away, but he would come back promising and apologizing and convincing me, so I would go back and be like Damn, I know this guy’s the truth. This guy’s the truth.But then, again, things would happen and I would walk away again, but every time I walked away I walked away with some new knowledge—I learned where the money’s at, I learned certain things about marketing, I learned how to tweak myself to be more commercial. So I think I had enough with the third time to say, “I learned enough. This is it—I’m done.” I got a new comedy writer and I have new stuff going on. I wouldn’t even blame my original comedy writer. It was my former manager who specifically asked for that type of race-baiting material and I think the comedy writer had a problem with it, too.

Did you know Dustin had a background with hate groups?
Louis: No. We had no idea, we only found out afterwards.

You guys played to pretty right-wing crowds.
Louis: Dustin wouldn’t go searching for events for Democrats. He would go searching for things Republican meet-ups and Libertarian conventions because that’s where the money’s at. And the kind of material we had to give them was pretty racist. I was brainwashed.

There’s this one joke that you told that goes something like, “I need to be reelected because you know how hard it is to get black people out of public housing.” It was pretty enraging.
Louis: I know, I know.
Ryan: It feels unfair to slam the audience too much because in a way they don’t know what they’re getting. They know it’s “Presidential comedy” or whatever, and they’re complicit in the laughter part, but I think it’s very different in a group. This is our fourth festival showing the film and sometimes there are laughs at that joke and I don’t know if the laughs are a result of people being uncomfortable—but it happens.

Louis, did you grow up around a lot of black people?
Louis: Yeah, blacks and hispanics. When I joined the army at 17, then came the white people. So I had to learn how to hang out, drink beer, and eat pizza with white people. [Laughs]

I mean, I got a little racism here and there but it was nothing like the way I feel it now that I “look like a black guy.” So, the way me and my boys—black and Puerto Rican—said it in the ‘hood was different. We use the N-word in a very different way. Then, when looking like I’m looking, and you get it from an obviously racist person, it feels totally different. It feels like I can actually relate now. Before you might be able to say, “Oh yeah, I understand.” Motherfuckers really don’t understand what it’s like to be called the N-word until you hear it from someone who has racial rage behind it. And I know I’m not a full black man, but I represent that half-black and half-white President. So now I feel it, because I know why it’s coming at me the way it’s coming at me. It’s weird.

Ryan, is it weird to be a white guy parachuting into these complex conversations with Louis about race?
Ryan: I’m a white guy making a film about a Puerto Rican guy who impersonates the first black president. Things are definitely weird!

That couldn’t be any more “2014.”
Ryan: That’s America right now.  I think it’s very easy to get caught up in “is it OK to laugh at this? What is OK to laugh at?”




How did Reina feel about being on camera?
Louis
: My impression is that it was uncomfortable for her. But she did it. Ryan’s a great documentarian. He dealt with Reina in a special, personalized way that was different from the special, personalized way that he dealt with me. It’s what allowed us to open up so much to him personally and on camera.

How does she feel about her father being this sort of famous Barack Obama impersonator?
Louis
: I don’t think she makes it a big deal to her friends. She’s actually sort of shy about it. She’s very, very calm and collected—no boasting, no bragging. No matter what I tell her I do, she goes “Oh, dad. That’s cool.”

She just graduated high school and received a few scholarships to different schools for college.

That’s amazing, congratulations. Is your family political at all?
Louis: I try not to be. My mom was always a Democrat with a union job. Maybe I’ll go Republican if I get rich, maybe not. It all depends.

You seem eager to find out.
Louis
: I really do believe in Democratic policies, though. [Speaking through his Obama impression] You see there’s a book, now the book is called The M. Now among other things, the book claims I’m practicing Muslim. That’s just not true. I’ve been a Muslim for over 50 years, I don’t need any more of practice. [laughs]

That was just one of those jokes that the Republican crowds loved.

I can see why. One of the best moments in the film to me is when Obama wins the 2008 election and people are freaking out on the streets of New York. What was it like being there when that happened?
Louis: It was great. It felt like we landed on the moon. It was like the Cold War was over. It was something big—really big. It was like the Berlin Wall just came down. It was history and we were living in it. For me, it was a little extra special because I was going to play the guy that everyone was celebrating.

My street name back in the days—and people still remember me as it—is Louis Balls. It’s actually tatted on my back. I used to wear these big beads around my neck. I was in an Afrocentric state of mind back then. I danced to house music with the mushroom hair and cargo pants and the crazy polka dot shirts. Even though I’m Puerto Rican, I really thought I was fully black. The name started back then, and then with the crazy stuff that I used to do people thought: Wow, you’ve really got some set of balls.

A well-earned streetname must be a source of pride.
That’s how it all started for me. It feels like the name holds weight again because to do this whole thing I’m doing it does take balls. It really does. Everything happened for a reason. People are called certain things for a reason.

You’re in French Montana’s “Choppa Choppa Down” video.
Louis: Yeah, the one that was playing on VH1, MTV and FUSE.

There’s a scene in Bronx Obama that follows you to that shoot and it seems like French Montana doesn’t want to pay you.
Louis: No, you know what it is—music videos don’t pay a lot—especially if you’re not one of the primary stars of the video. They pay a couple of hundred bucks. The normal rate for something like that is two or three hundred dollars—I was trying to get five.

Louis Balls.
Yeah, you know. I didn’t want to go into haggling with them, so I said I’d go half way: give me two-fifty and I’m good.

What are you hoping happens in the next two or three years? I know you want to meet Obama but haven’t yet.
Louis: Yeah, I want to meet Obama. I would love to just keep working, specifically the corporate events—that’s where the big money’s at. I’m hoping that Hollywood comes knocking. I’m looking for the bright lights.

Bronx Obama is screening next at the American Film Institute’s AFIDocs showcase in Washington, D.C. on June 21 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, then on June 22nd at the Silver Spring Theater. To learn more about the film, visit www.bronxobamamovie.com

@jordanisjoso


Bad Cop Blotter: The Dangers of Calling the Police on the Mentally Ill

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Helmet-cam footage of Albuquerque, New Mexico, police confronting a mentally ill homeless man. The incident ended when the cops shot the man in the back and killed him. Screenshot via this YouTube video

After any mass killing comes the wave of stories that ask why no one saw the tragedy coming. Those who knew Elliot Rodger—who killed six people on May 23 in Santa Barbara, California—were likely aware he was disturbed. The 22-year-old had been under psychiatric care since the age of eight, according to the New York Times; Rodger suffered from anxiety, depression, and likely high-functioning autism, and he became progressively more and more isolated as he went through adolescence.

From what I’ve read, his parents tried to help him as best they could: His mother even called the cops when she found his distressing YouTube videos. On April 30, Santa Barbara County sheriff's deputies questioned Rodger—who managed to talk them out of searching his apartment—but they apparently never actually watched the videos before deciding he wasn’t a threat to anyone else, nor did they check the relevant databases to see if he was a gun owner. It’s easy to criticize the authorities for not divining that this reclusive loner was more violent than other reclusive loners, or to tut-tut at Rodger’s parents for not persuading the police to respond more aggressively, but doing so ignores the serious consequences of calling the cops on a mentally ill relative, and how limited law enforcement's responses are.

On May 28, the Washington Post published an article on Bill and Tricia Lammers, who in 2012 turned in their 20-year-old mentally ill son Blaec for planning to shoot up a Walmart. Was it a good decision? Sure—except Blaec is now serving a 15-year prison sentence, and it’s not as if his psychiatric problems will have been healed when he gets out. That just underscores the inflexibility of the criminal justice system: All the cops can do, in cases like that of the Lammers, is charge someone for a crime, which in many cases means they’ll spend a long time behind bars.

Around a quarter of people in the US suffer from some type of mental illness, and about 6 percent are dealing with a serious disorder. If a disturbed person’s family thinks he is planning to do something horrific, it can be very difficult to convince medical professionals to help him against his will. That means that the cops are summoned to deal with situations where a psychiatric expert is needed “The mental-health system is totally broken,” Bill Lammers told the Post. “Calling the police is the only option.”

Deploying the cops against anyone in your family is not a decision to be taken lightly. Any time the authorities intervene there's a chance of someone getting seriously injured or killed, but cops and the mentally ill are a particularly deadly combination. Police in Fullerton, California, famously beat and killed Kelly Thomas, a homeless man with schizophrenia, in 2011; this March officers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, shot a mentally ill homeless man in the back. And it’s not just wandering indigents who are killed this way. In too many incidents to list here, mentally ill individuals have ended SWAT standoffs by provoking cops into shooting them. By some estimates, half of of the 500-some victims of police shootings in America each year suffer from mental illness. Shootings like the one that Elliot Rodger perpetrated in California are relatively rare compared to incidents that end with a police bullet in the body of a mentally ill person—shouldn’t we be talking about policies that solve the latter problem as well as the former?

On to this week’s bad cops:

–On Wednesday, during the course of a 3 AM SWAT raid, a Georgia narcotics task force severely burned an 18-month-old after they threw a flashbang grenade into his playpen. His mother Alecia Phonesavanh told CNN that the toddler is now in a medically-induced coma. Members of the Habersham County Sheriff’s Department and the Cornelia Police Department who participated in the raid are apparently “devastated,” though Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell said that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the local DA already have decided that the police officers did nothing wrong during the operation, which ended in the arrest of an alleged meth dealer. Terrell did say that the SWAT team would have done things differently if they had known a child was in the house, so I guess the lesson here is MAKE SURE THERE ISN’T A FUCKING CHILD IN THE HOUSE BEFORE YOU BEGIN AN AGGRESSIVE NO-KNOCK RAID.

–Another drug raid, another death: Details on the killing of Joseph Wescott at the hands of the Tampa, Florida police are slim so far, but what is known sounds like familiar bullshit. The raid was conducted late on Tuesday night, and Wescott—a 29-year-old criminal mastermind previously arrested for driving without a license—was apparently armed and supposedly pointed that weapon at police. He had a marijuana grow op in his rented house, and whether he knew it was the cops who busting down the door or not, he’s now dead because he was producing a substance that will probably be legal in a few short years. Good job, officers. Totally worth it!

–On May 29, VICE News’s Natasha Lennard reported on a recent First Circuit District court decision that upheld the First Amendment right to film police in states covered by that court: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. Lennard noted that the judges made the right call before correctly dampening the glee by reminding us all that cops being filmed still get away with literal murder on occasion. Filming the police is good, but correcting their bad behavior is better.

–More than 120 Seattle police officers have filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Justice, who in 2012 instituted federal standards for the department after repeated allegations of excessive force—fancy talk for “the cops were beating and sometimes killing people for very little reason.” The lawsuit asks for financial compensation and a complete reversal of the policy, which the lawsuit says "unreasonably restrict[s] and burden[s] Plaintiffs' right to use force reasonably required, to protect themselves and others from apparent harm and danger." Going to court to protest a policy that was instituted because your fellow officers killed people is one thing, but saying you should get a payout because of that policy? That’s true chutzpah right there.

–Over Memorial Day weekend, an officer with the Howard County, Maryland, police department saved a nine-year-old girl from drowning after her foot got caught under a rock. Sergeant Michael Johnson was patrolling a park by foot when he heard the girl screaming for help as she struggled in shoulder-high water. Johnson called for water rescue backup, but before it arrived he jumped in himself and managed to rescue the girl. Officer Johnson gets our Good Cop of the Week award for endangering his own life to save that of a little girl.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

New York Progressive Party Kisses Andrew Cuomo's Ring

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Andrew Cuomo got his way in the end. Photo via Flickr user Diana Robinson

Going into this past weekend, when the labor-backed Working Families Party (WFP) held its convention to select candidates for fall elections in New York State, there was at least a faint sense that the organized Left could genuinely wrest some measure of power from the Democratic Party and send shockwaves throughout the country. After all, so much mainstream American political chatter in recent years has centered on the perceived ascendance of fiery forces on the populist Right—the Tea Party and the Republican “establishment” being locked in some perpetually existential conflict, and so on—that if the WFP indeed went ahead and denied incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo its endorsement out of frustration with his neoliberal approach to governance, it might have forced us all to pay attention to a newly-resurgent populist movement.

Fortunately for those New Yorkers comfortable with the status quo, this was not to be.

Virtually everyone at the convention Saturday in the state capital of Albany agreed that Cuomo, first elected governor in 2010 after serving as New York attorney general, was somewhere between an untrustworthy practitioner of brute force politics and a morally repugnant scoundrel. Many similarly affirmed that the WFP had a prime opportunity to consolidate and exert its burgeoning political leverage: Cuomo plummeted 20 percentage points in recent polling when an unnamed WFP candidate was included in a three-way matchup with him and the Republican nominee, Rob Astorino. The party had also scored major victories in New York City in 2013, with ally Bill de Blasio roaring to an easy win in the mayoral race even though the WFP failed to coalesce behind him. Besides, Cuomo would be heavily favored to win in November irrespective of the WFP’s tactics.

But as the night neared its apogee, Cuomo had managed to secure the WFP endorsement, and so will appear as both their chosen candidate and the Democratic nominee on ballots across the state this November, likely boosting his margin of victory. The triumph for the famously image-conscious pol was the product of high drama, including a frantic final ten minutes during which back-room negotiations were underway between WFP leadership and Cuomo. At around 9:30pm Saturday, the convention parliamentarian declared a ten minute break for “technical difficulties” at what seemed to be a critical juncture leading up to the final vote by members of the WFP’s state committee, composed of about 200 people. Ten minutes turned into 15, and then 20. A person with knowledge of the situation later described the alleged technical problem as “a total ruse"—in reality, frenzied talks between the Party and Cuomo were still underway until the last possible second.

This was the culmination of a days-long negotiation marathon, involving many actors, all seemingly terrified of upsetting one of the most ruthless figures in American politics. Despite his reputation in New York media as having a frosty relationship with Cuomo, State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman acted as a surrogate for the governor’s interests, privately conferring with committee members throughout the afternoon. “Step into my office,” he told one woman with a smile, leading her to a closed-door talk. Schneiderman, always quick with a joke, responded wryly when I asked what advice he might offer to committee members still deciding whether to vote for endorsing Cuomo. “I give legal advice only,” he quipped. The governor was said to have directly telephoned Schneiderman during the conference; when I asked Schneiderman to confirm this, he shot me a devious look and scoffed before darting away.

As the outcome remained uncertain late into the night, multiple pro-Cuomo surrogates surfaced to address the convention on short notice. George Gresham, the burly, paternal president of the 1199 SEIU labor union, among the most powerful in the entire country, told attendees he’d been “summoned” that morning to Albany from his home in Washington, D.C. to deliver a message: the Working Families Party must not “overplay our hand.” Another speaker interrupted a vacation to advocate that committee members pick Cuomo without delay.

But it was a third player’s role in the affair that was most essential in tamping down dissent and brokering an accord between activists and Cuomo: that of Mayor de Blasio. That the biggest impediment to the WFP disrupting the existing order turned out to be the man known for his alleged radicalism was some kind of dark poetic justice. De Blasio, acting as a conduit of sorts between the Left and Cuomo, all the while fortifying his own leverage in state politics, cast the night’s proceedings in typically grandiose terms: endorsing the incumbent governor would mark “the moment when the world turns,” he declared to the WFP horde.

Thanks in part to the mayor, pundits are suggesting Cuomo successfully “neutralized” his leftward opposition. The progressive Twitter-sphere immediately went up in arms. One WFP member who identified as an Occupy Wall Street organizer predicted that online donations to the Party would dry up—“Most people are giving money to the party because they’re against Cuomo,” the person told me—and the WFP’s image would be tarnished in left-wing intellectual circles.

When Cuomo’s prerecorded video address did finally arrive (he declined to appear in person—an odd strategy to appease the crowd he was supposedly wooing—and reportedly had to be talked into filming multiple takes after the first was rejected), he paid verbal homage to a few key WFP priorities such as more local control over setting the minimum wage, decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana, and helping Democrats win back control of the state senate. Which is to say: boilerplate stuff any other Democrat would be expected to support as a matter of course. Naturally, the governor left himself ample wriggle room; by Sunday, Cuomo was quoted clarifying that his position on the minimum wage still differed from that of the WFP (he did not want localities to go too crazy autonomously boosting the wages of the working poor). Following in the age-old American political tradition of left-wing political parties folding after some strategic pantomiming from the Democrats, Cuomo emerged the PR victor in the eyes of the assembled political press. 

Union leaders and others on the WFP state committee were apparently determined to maintain the balance of power approximately as it is. Cuomo sealed the deal when Dorothy Seigal, an influential state committee member and party treasurer whose district is in Park Slope, Brooklyn, abstained from the roll call vote that would decide the WFP nomination. Earlier in the day, Seigal had been a lead orchestrator of the intra-Party Cuomo opposition, tabulating votes and lobbying other committee members to support the alternative candidate, Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham and an expert on political corruption (of which Cuomo is widely suspected). It was a rather salacious turn of events. “They got to her,” one fellow former anti-Cuomo organizer growled.

After the "second draft" of the video address was shown, Cuomo strangely opted to call in via speakerphone to a chorus of roaring boos. The furor at first drowned him out, but soon dissipated. The best part came last, when the governor explained he could not be in Albany that night because he had “some meetings in the City.” That pretty much says it all.

Michael Tracey is a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.

Meet the Nieratkos: Fancy Lad Is the Best Thing in Skateboarding Right Now

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The modern skate video has never looked as polished as it does in 2014. Every dirtbag on a skateboard has an HD camera, and professional videographers are renting Reds and Phantoms, hoping to make the elusive Spike Jonzian leap from skate videos to Hollywood blockbusters. But while all these newfangled gadgets have made skateboarding more beautiful and stylized than ever before, the end result feels very soulless to me.

I miss the gritty and grainy way skating used to look on VHS tapes filmed with Super 8s and VX1000s. But lest you think I'm some Luddite reminiscing about the olden days, I think there’s room for every form of skateboarding film—I just wish things were a bit more diverse. So when I got an email last night from Boston’s own Fancy Lad Skateboards' CEO, Nick "Big" Murray, with the subject line "House 2," it was like someone farted fresh air into my inbox.

House II: The Second Story

Inside was a link to their new web clip and the words, “Nieratko, I'm not fucking around, I think we have done it this time.” I considered deleting the video without watching it (you have no idea how many times people email me claiming to “have done it,” when they most certainly have not), but I’ve been keeping tabs on Fancy Lad’s lowbrow aesthetic for quite some time now, and so I decided to give their latest opus a shot. My response to Big: “HOLY FUCK! THIS SUCKS! I LOVE IT!”

It was simultaneously the best and worst web skate clip I’ve seen in quite some time. Filmed like shit and edited by a baboon with the comedic timing of Neil Hamburger, it is some of the silliest and most ridiculous skating since the old Landspeed videos. I decided to call up the Burger King employee/food-stamp dependent CEO to find out what the fuck the deal is with this pack of fucktards.

VICE: Who and what is the Fancy Lad crew?
Nick "Big" Murray: The Fancy Lad crew is a bunch of nobodies. Names that if I wrote down would be quickly read and even more quickly forgotten. We are a ragtag group of misfits who were never chosen. A crew, who despite their lack of talent, love skateboarding too much not to be a part of it. Our style comparatively is based on ingenuity rather than skill. We like to make fools of ourselves because it's good for a laugh. The first merried skateboard team of jesters as we sail the ship of fools.

And you all live together in one house?
It’s more like an asylum. We’re all broke and the only reason I think I own the company is because I’m the least tapped-out of everybody.

Are these videos an accurate representation of what day-to-day life is like in the Fancy Lad house?
Yeah, pretty much. The skits are all spontaneous and on the spot. It’s 100 percent genuine. There’s no pre-thought whatsoever. The camera is not always rolling, but with Fiske in the house you never know what he’s going to do. The other day he stormed out on his bike and yelled to everyone, “Get on your bike and go north! Trust me!” Then he took off and that was it. He came back the next day, but no one knows where he went.

Do you guys worry about being compared to Jackass and Bam?
We actually haven’t had too many of those yet, but I encourage them because I love Bam and I love the heartagram symbol.

Do you like skinny Bam or new, fat Bam?
I was more of a skinny Bam fan, back when he was just doing it for the love. Back when he had a good varial heel.

I don’t want to insult you, but is Fancy Lad one of those hipster skateboard brands?
What separates FL from all other new crappy brands popping up is that we actually suck at skating way more than any other company ever could. A purity of essence. It's something that you just can't fake. To quote Mike V.: "Nothing or no one can take that away from me." Also, we sell our boards at affordable prices.

What’s Colin Fiske's deal? He was a former member of PJ Ladd’s entourage. Wasn’t he supposed to be somebody? Is it true he went insane?
Colin Fiske is actually the only co-owner of the company. Like many other great artists, he has done the unexpected by changing the medium of his art completely to BMX. Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Colin Fiske. Colin Fiske was the future of skateboarding, and if you think tugging on your foreskin every day to get re-uncircumsized is crazy, then lock him up in an institution.

So what if he says he met an alien on government assistance who was trying to buy a bike off Craigslist? I guess he lives in a different sort of world than the rest of us. A world where the government is putting Yellow No. 5 and Red No. 3 into your food and using fake food that’s actually nuclear waste that they’re trying to get rid of to control your mind. At one point Fiske had a month’s worth of filtered water to reduce fluoridation saved up in kombucha bottles, as advised by a Y2K survival VHS tape narrated by Leonard Nimoy. I guess he’s just more in touch with nature than the rest of us.

Is he really all about BMXing now?
He spends his time between BMX and skating, but his first passion is BMX. He sees it as a return to his roots. He does still skate as well, and has a part in Matt and Gene's "GIANT SPIDER SKATES TO RAVE (on weed laced with PCP)" video.

What happened to him? Why did things between him and Heroin Skateboards shit the bed?
It’s tough to tell. I think Fos (founder of Heroin Skateboards) didn’t really like how Fiske sent him fully edited parts with his harsh techno. Fos thought he was sending him too much poetry and techno and not enough skate tricks. Apparently Fiske didn’t play ball too well, but when you have a creative skater like him you should expect erratic behavior.

You just released House II: The Second Storythe sequel to your beloved original House clip. Whose house is that, and what’s the story behind the destruction?
That was Matt Roman’s house. He was the original owner of Coliseum skate shop (which put out PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life). He was tearing it down, and he wanted us to go in there and fuck it up as much as we could before he did. We feel that to create anything new you have to destroy the foundation on which it was built.

What’s the skate scene like in Boston nowadays? It was internationally renowned in the 90s, but not much has come out of there since Zered Bassett, PJ Ladd, and Eli Reed.
I'm gonna pretend that Brandon Westgate never saw this question. It’s tough to say what the scene is like now. It’s a small scene and everyone knows each other, but it’s kind of divided into three crews: Orchard, RAW, and Fancy Lad. For the freaks there’s this new shop called Maximum Hesh, and they’re starting a new crew. Orchard is pretty much the biggest thing around, and they have a certain aesthetic to them—they make the nice polished videos where ours are just shitty. And RAW are pretty much ledge gangsters who love Josh Kalis and Rob Welsh.

Is it the goal of Fancy Lad to restore the Boston skate scene to its former glory?
No! The goal is to make fun of what you got. The city that you live in is what you make of it. Everyone is moving to New York or LA to make it, but we don’t give a shit about that. Fiske is a bike messenger, and I work at a café, which is nice because they let me wear that Burger King hat. I don’t think any one of us could get a glamorous job. We are all on food stamps due to our low-paying jobs, and we even made a board graphic out of all of them. We’re just in it for the fun times.

Any chance of getting Jereme Rogers on Fancy Lad after Selfish Skateboards eats itself?
I really hope we can get Jereme Rogers on the team. He's gonna have to provide his own Magnums, though.

What’s next for Fancy Lad?
I am proud to announce the NEW Colin Fiske pro-model board, designed by Fos before he was kicked off Heroin Skateboards. Also, FL3, the third full-length Fancy Lad video, should be dropping by the end of the year. The best-worst video ever made. We are also working on the worst-shaped board ever made.

Last question. If Fancy Lad could be any other company, what company would it be?
I’d probably want to be Shorty’s around the Guilty era. Jesse would be the Crazy Monk because he’s got the nollie inward heels off the loading docks, Fiske would be the Muska, and I’d be Smolik. Or maybe we’d be Monster Energy. I’d probably be Nyjah Huston because he’s doing it for the love of the game. 

Follow Fancy Lad on Twitter.

More stupid can be found at ChrisNieratko.com and on Twitter.

Inside the Crumbling Cabarets of Cairo

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The baladi bars are the dive bars of Cairo. They were once glamorous cabaret clubs; now they're run-down and seedy and far from bustling. Even so, they are the only place you can drink a beer outside of an expensive hotel or restaurant. Baladi means native or folk in Arabic. If you're a working-class Cairene and you want something more fortifying than a coffee and shisha but can't afford to go to a five-star hotel, then the baladi bars are for you.
 
 
Cairo was a big party town in the 1940s and 50s, and the downtown baladi bars were packed with an international bohemian crowd. This started to change after the ousting of King Farouk during the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the nationalization of many businesses by the new president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Downtown Cairo, which was modeled on Paris and built in the late 19th century, has slowly crumbled. It's degentrified. 
 
 
The bars have also been hit hard by the rise, since the 70s, of conservative Islam. It has become very hard for the owners to renew their liquor licenses or transfer them to new owners, and most Cairenes view them as being centers of prostitution and drug taking. They're disreputable places to go, and they have a furtive air about them—which you'll really notice when you pull out a camera and try to take some pictures.
 
 
But if you have a high tolerance for being hassled, you can have a good time there. You'll walk down streets crowded with women in headscarves, go through a discreet doorway, and see a few men scattered around, smoking and drinking locally brewed beer while a woman sways about on stage in skimpy clothes and men throw Egyptian pound notes at her. Other liberally attired women prowl the bar encouraging beer consumption, shelling peanuts, and soliciting tips. Foreign tourists are very rare in Cairo now, so you'll be jumped on and fought over the second you enter. A tip: Pay drink by drink to avoid an unpleasant scene when you're presented with the bill at the end of the night.
 
Muir Vidler is an award-winning London-based artist, and a frequent VICE contributor.

Wackaging Is Your Food’s Attempt at Hitting on You

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Wackaging Is Your Food’s Attempt at Hitting on You

I Asked the Discoverer of a New Fish Why Its Anus Is on Its Head

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Photo courtesy of Prosanta Chakrabarty

The other day, when Ben Richmond over at Motherboard filed a story on a new kind of cave fish with its anus just behind its head, I had to know more. Coverage elsewhere focused on the new species, known as the Hoosier cave fish, already being considered endangered. Still, no one was telling me what I needed to know: Why have an anus on (or just behind) your head in the first place. Should I be jealous?

The discovery came from Matthew Niemiller from the University of Kentucky and Prosanta Chakrabarty from Louisiana State University. I managed to track down Chakrabarty, who turned out to be kind of an ichthyology rockstar, if you'll permit me to stretch the definition of rockstar to its breaking point.

In this video, he explains in plain, lucid language, why we should pay less attention to oil-stained pelicans in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and focus instead on the all the disgusting bottom feeders who get short shrift. After all, they're the ones who make their homes in the muck that becomes inhospitable thanks to the oil and dispersant chemicals we leave down there.

But never mind all that. The important thing is figuring out why the Hoosier cave fish has its asshole on its head. To explain, Chakrabarty had to take me on a surprisingly thrilling journey through what he calls its "lifestyle," touching on why it's blind, and why it poops sperm into its mouth. It was a crazy ride, but it all came full circle. Then he burned me for having a small dick.

VICE: Hi Dr. Chakrabarty. I'm going to need to know why this new fish has an anus on its head, but am I asking the right question? Is that the important thing?
Prosanta Chakrabarty: Well, the coolest thing is that it's the first subterranean cave fish that's been found in North America in 40 years. We sort of made this discovery based on molecular work that my coauthor Matthew Niemiller did, and It's telling us about the evolution of blindness, and how in some cases like this one the genes are catching up with the morphology. So the change to a subterranean lifestyle happened well before the loss of function of some of the genes related to their lifestyle.

Let me see if I follow: These are fish that not only are blind, they do not have eyes?
Yep. They don't have eyes.

And at some phase in their evolution their ancestors had eyes?
Their ancestors had eyes, and when they entered these cave habitats, they lost them.

OK, but how does that make this fish special?
This is kinda cool: There are about 150 species of fish that have become cave fishes. They've lost their eyes. They've lost pigmentation. It's happened at least a couple dozen times. And every time they do this it's a new way of evolving blindness. There's no light. It's pretty much a constant temperature. So it's a very different environment than what we live in where sight is very important. In a cave, even if you had eyes, you wouldn't be able to use them. It's pitch black.

So this random mutation knocked out rhodopsin [the gene for vision] in one of the species, but not the species we just described. It's still producing a functioning gene, even though that gene doesn't basically do anything. It just shows you how finicky these mutations are when they come about. You can still have a functional gene for something, even though you lack the eye altogether. 

So it's one of those inefficient evolutionary remnant things? Like when Richard Dawkins dissected that giraffe and proved that some nerve was going all the way up and down its gigantic neck for no reason?
I don't think I know that story, but there's weird things about giraffes for sure. There are remnants even in humans. We have organs that don't serve much of a purpose, and things that aren't well-designed. Our heart is pretty crappy. It's not simple explaining any organism. You would think going blind would be easy, and it sorta is, but it shows you that it's not always the DNA that goes first.

But what does its blindness have to do with having an anus on its head?
Well, it's really bizarre. So some people say it's to poop out of the water. So they can lift their bodies out of the water and poop on land. But they all figure that it's also to get the eggs inside the gills. It's a cloaca, but functionally, it's mostly an anus. But eggs are coming out of that hole too. Everything comes out of there.

So having [its anus] right behind the head allows the eggs to get more simply into the gills, which is where these guys brood their young. Nobody's observed this, but we know its closest surface ancestors do this, so we're assuming it's for the same reason. One odd thing is, we're not sure how fertilization happens, but that might be facilitated by having the cloaca-head-neck-anus. 

So they sort of at the same time push their heads and anuses together, and that might be how mating occurs? 
Yeah, we think it might be mouth brooding. Sperm comes through the mouth, then through the gills, and then it's fertilized. It's a possibility, but it's the one that makes the most sense.

So you're saying that it effectively poops sperm into its mouth?
Yeah, maybe. That's our best guess. Lots of fish actually have mouthbrooding, where the females are taking up sperm into their mouths where they also have the eggs. With these guys we're saying that's essentially pushed into the gills as well. They're freaky.

What's the advantage of brooding your young in your gills?
Well, if you don't have eyes, and you can't see where your babies are, you'd want to keep them pretty close. That's about as close as you can get without developing internal fertilization, which has only happened a few times. This allows them to kind of protect their young.

But even for a blind fish, that's like being pregnant in your lungs, isn't it?
It also means the young get more oxygen. They get more water flow, because in caves, usually the water gets pretty stagnant. So this will allow more water to flow over them, which allows more gas exchange, which will help them develop. 

So it's not just a safe place?
No. There's certainly an advantage to having your babies brood in your gills.

The other thing I wanted to ask is, did you name it as an insult to Hoosier basketball, because you're at rival schools?
No. Matt grew up in Indiana. He was really excited about naming it that. He's a huge Hoosier fan. I can't talk to him during basketball season. The name is in praise of the University of Indiana for starting North American ichthyology. But it's weird how the anus is news, and I don't know if you saw the Gawker article, where they said it looks like a dick...

Oh the Gawker picture definitely looks like a dick.
Not mine, but maybe somebody's.

Touché.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Body of an American: The Russian Immigrant Who Conquered Porn

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Photo by Matthew Leifheit

If you believe the conventional wisdom about the porn industry—that it’s falling apart, that there’s no money in it, that the studios that once made high-quality films are being supplanted by unwashed amateurs with webcams and stained mattresses—a visit to the immaculate offices of Lucas Entertainment will disabuse you of those notions.

Located on the second floor of an office building in midtown Manhattan, the place is less a palace of sleaze and more a temple to 21st-century showbiz yuppie living. The waiting room, which has a plethora of adult-film-industry awards on the walls, features a plush white chair, an abstractly shaped wooden table, and a fridge stocked with green juice, almond milk, and water bottles. Lining the hall are cabinets containing rows and piles of costumes for porn actors, who do their business in a space that can be decorated as a hotel, bedroom, or pretty much anyplace else where men would plausibly have sex. A few doors down from the set, the company’s 15 employees sit in front of computer screens doing the behind-the-scenes work that results, eventually, in someone somewhere masturbating. For all this, Lucas Entertainment pays $16,500 a month, which it can afford thanks to its steady output of high-budget films that showcase the sexual talents of beefy muscle queens and often have cameos from D-list celebrities like Andy Dick.

“We’re the only [gay] company that hasn’t gone belly-up or been owned by a distributor at this point,” Marc MacNamara, Lucas Entertainment’s then creative director, told me when I stopped by last June. “We’re the only company who still travels the world and makes big-budget movies.” (MacNamara has since left Lucas Entertainment to start his own porn studio.)

I was there to see Michael Lucas, the founder and animating force of the company that bears his name. A former porn star who still dabbles in performing in films, he looks even today like a man who could sell his body for a living. The 42-year-old has the lean, sculpted body of a model, his skin is implausibly perfect, and his muscles show through his loose-fitting shirts (he told me he works out every day). His office is, unsurprisingly, a monument to all the success he’s had in his 16-plus years in the industry. Gay-porn-magazine covers featuring Lucas are stuck to the walls—X-Factor, Unzipped, Man, Mandate—and the decor also includes antique cameras, Lucas’s law degree from Moscow State University, and a set of artistic-looking photos of gay men: a naked guy standing behind an old TV, another naked guy balancing a TV on his butt.

When I asked him where he had gotten one of the pictures, he replied, “Someone gave it to me as a gift… It’s interesting, but it’s not good enough for my apartment. I have very beautiful stuff from [Robert] Mapplethorpe there.”

Misha and Sasha, a Russian couple who have lived together for eight years and appear in Campaign of Hate

Everything about Lucas oozes wealth and power—a 2007 New York magazine profile called him “the Lion of Chelsea” and New York’s only “bona fide member of porn royalty.” But over the past several years, Lucas has also become notorious for using his fortune and name to promote his pet political causes—mainly, his support for Israel and hatred of Russia, the country from which he emigrated when he was 23. His worldview is clearly present in 2009’s Men in Israel, one of Lucas Entertainment’s most popular videos. The two-hour porno (purportedly the first gay adult film to use an all-Israeli cast) is loaded with long, loving shots of muscular Jewish men fucking, sucking, and rimming on riverbanks and beaches—if not for all the hardcore gay sex, it could have been made by the Israel Ministry of Tourism.

“I totally wanted to bring attention to Israel and bring tourists, and it was a success,” Lucas told me. “Gay men would rather watch porn than the geography channels—and I don’t think there are many films about gay Israel—so I not only showed men having sex. I showed them having sex in beautiful surroundings.”

He’s praised Israel in the pages of the Advocate, a popular gay publication, and has started to make documentaries: Last year he released Undressing Israel, which praised Israel’s gay-friendly policies, and this April he put out a film about homophobia in Russia called Campaign of Hate.

His outspoken Zionism has naturally brought him into conflict with those on the left. The New Republic has called him “gay porn’s neocon kingpin,” and the novelist Sarah Schulman, a Jewish lesbian, penned a New York Times op-ed that accused Lucas of “pinkwashing” Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. In 2010, Lucas joined a chorus of right-wing voices when he objected to an Islamic cultural center being built near the site of the World Trade Center, writing in the Advocate that the center was an “Islamic colonization project” and that “Muslims murdered 3,000 people and are building a mosque on the site of a crime.”

Lucas is guarded about nearly everything, and talking to him about this stuff—the money, the controversies that surround him, any aspect of his personal life—can be a challenge. When I mentioned to Lucas that he is rich, he stopped me: “Who told you that I’m rich?”

Activist Masha Gessen (left) and her wife, Svetlana Generalova, speak to Lucas about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies in Campaign of Hate.

Lucas was born Andrei Treivas in Moscow in 1972. Jewish, gay, and possessed of a natural distaste for authority, he constantly clashed with the confining power structures of the Soviet Union.

“He was rebellious,” Marina Giliver, Treivas’s schoolmate and friend, told me. “He didn’t want to go by the Communist standards for how people should be, so he was different.”

By age seven, Treivas had started questioning the Soviet Union’s government and politics. One day he asked his grandfather, a Communist Party member, “Why do we go to vote? It doesn’t matter if we vote or not, because there’s only one person on the ballot.”

“Don’t you dare say no!” his grandfather shouted. “Don’t you dare tell anyone; don’t you dare talk about it.”

When his parents sent him to a Young Pioneer camp, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of the Boy Scouts, Treivas refused to wear a red tie or wake up at 8 AM to salute the red flag. He told the camp leaders, “I don’t want to go.” They called Treivas a “fucking little Jewish brat,” and an hour later he climbed the camp wall and escaped. He took the train to his family’s country house; his father was infuriated when he saw him, and only the intervention of Treivas’s grandmother stopped his father from punishing him.

“It was a Communist regime—there was no freedom of speech, and we didn’t know anything about sex, so I was struggling with understanding who I was,” Lucas told me. “I was abused by kids in school and by teachers, because I was very different, like gay people and others [marginalized in the Soviet Union].”

By 1995, the Iron Curtain was gone for good, and Treivas was 23, with a brand-new law degree from Moscow State University. He went west in search of greater freedom, entering Germany on a tourist visa that didn’t allow him to work legally. He ran out of money in two days, but he did have a big dick and a willingness to do whatever it took.

He made porn—both gay and straight—in Europe for a time and moved to New York in 1997, after Falcon, then America’s biggest gay-porn studio, saw a French film Treivas had made. They gave the 25-year-old a one-way plane ticket, a one-year contract, and a new, Americanized name. “Michael Lucas” was born.

“It’s funny when people say, ‘I don’t have any regrets,’” Lucas told me. “I have regrets all the time… It’s a big regret that I didn’t fucking tell them that I wanted my real name. I like Andrei Treivas. I was 25, and I didn’t know anything about the industry. Falcon didn’t ask me. I saw my new name already in the movie. I was just some Russian boy to them.”

Porn stars Rod Daily and Vito Gallo with Andy Dick and Lady Bunny, who have guest-starred in Kings of New York, Lucas Entertainment’s cameo-heavy porn series

For his first four months in New York, Lucas lived in a basement in Midtown with ten other people—each room had just enough space for a mattress, a tiny table, and hangers dangling from nails in the wall. This didn’t bother him. “When you’re young, when you’re 25, it’s OK,” he said. “You can survive.”

Lucas did better than survive—he won a green card through the lottery system and, with his newfound legal status, left Falcon to found Lucas Entertainment in 1998. (He refused to talk to me about his experience at Falcon.) By the time he started his own company, he had a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village (he paid half a year’s rent, plus a fee and the security deposit, in cash) and had achieved what he sees as the American dream. Not only was he hardworking—watch his early films if you don’t believe me—he had started his own business and, in true bootstrapping immigrant fashion, hadn’t even taken out a loan to help his empire grow.

“When you take a loan out you waste it,” he said. “If it’s your hard-earned money, then you actually think about how to spend it. You start to be more calculating.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Lucas is generally a pretty hands-off manager who trusts his staff to decide when and where to shoot and lets them hire celebrities to make cameos. “I don’t do it for business purposes,” Lucas said of the guest stars. “I do it because I don’t want my guys to burn out. I want to do something that excites them.”

Lucas’s only guidelines are that he have approval over the actors (he goes by looks, naturally), that the actors be sober on set (Lucas has tried alcohol but doesn’t like it), and that the films feature intricate plots and big dicks. “A big dick is a major plus,” he said. “I believe in plot because plots make it more interesting. It’s sexy to know why people have sex rather than having people you know saying, ‘Here’s the pizza. Here’s the delivery.’ That’s not sexy. The reason people have sex is hot. Sometimes you’re watching a mainstream movie, and you don’t see the penetration, but it’s hot—and hotter than porn—because you know why they’re having sex.”

J. C. Adams, a writer who covers the porn industry, believes these creative decisions are why Lucas Entertainment has flourished in the digital age as older companies have imploded.
“This is an industry full of artists and mavericks, but Michael Lucas has never lost sight of the bottom line,” he said. “Additionally, he tries different things, takes creative leaps, and goes against the grain. He released a fetish film called Farts! for Pete’s sake.”

The cover of the second season of Kings of New York

Last July, I went to MacNamara’s apartment to watch a shoot for an episode of Lucas Entertainment’s Kings of New York and was somewhat disappointed to find that, for all that talk about plots and high budgets, it was as cheap and narratively confused as a homemade YouTube music video.

The story revolves around two gay theater owners who are converting an abandoned playhouse into a “gaiety.” As they arrive at the venue, former Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, a fixture of New York’s gay scene, arrives. He’s just been fired from the Voice and has come to see his old childhood theater. After a flashback involving a young Musto at the theater and then a shot of the renovated theater’s opening night, we see the theater owners having anal sex in their apartment for reasons that remain obscure to me.

After MacNamara cleared off the bed, he and Angelo and David, the two actors, figured out the scenes as Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez tracks played on a stereo.

The script didn’t specify exactly how the actors should have sex, so, like choreographers working on a ballet, they had a lengthy discussion about how each position would flow into the next. MacNamara planned the cumshot. “Are you a shooter or a dribbler?” he asked Angelo. They were a little shorthanded on set, and I found myself being enlisted to hold a boom mic over David and Angelo’s heads as they fucked.

While I was there, MacNamara wouldn’t let me watch the cameraman shoot stills of the actors, which was just one of the many times Lucas Entertainment employees refused to give me access to something or attempted to influence the writing of this story. Lucas’s assistant, Jeff, told me that Lucas would agree to be interviewed only if he could choose the photos that would appear in the story, and when I asked for photos Lucas emailed me glamour shots of himself in a Speedo. (He later approved the photos of him that accompany this article.)

Lucas also played coy when I spoke with him about some of the controversies he’s been involved in. Schulman, the writer who attacked Lucas in the New York Times for his Zionist beliefs, later wrote a book, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, that included a story of how, in February of 2011, New York’s LGBT Community Center banned Siege Busters, a pro-Palestinian group, from holding events there. Lucas had threatened an “economic boycott” of the center if they didn’t ban the group, according to Schulman, and the center’s director, Glennda Testone, did as he asked within hours. (The center ignored my requests for comment.)

Shortly afterward, Lucas sent out a mass email to brag about the decision. “We prevailed! Congratulations to everyone who stood with me in support of Israel,” he wrote. “With your help it only took eight hours to accomplish our mission.” When I asked Lucas about the story, he replied, “I have no financial influence on the center… If I would, I would use it immediately. They use that stereotype a lot—the rich Zionist pornographer-mogul is shaking his checkbook.” He failed to mention that his husband, the businessman Richard Winger, is the former president of the center. In fact, he didn’t even mention he had a husband until I prodded him about it. (Since I last spoke to Lucas, the couple has started divorce proceedings.)

“Michael’s very much about censorship,” said Schulman.

Stills from Undressing Israel, Lucas’s documentary about Israel’s gay-friendly policies

Though he clearly tries to keep a lid on certain aspects of his life, he never shies away from expressing his beliefs, even if they alienate people or create enemies. The comedian Yonah Ward Grossman, a friend of Lucas’s, said that even Winger disagrees with Lucas’s politics. “He does not share any of Michael’s more strident political or geopolitical views,” Grossman told me.

Grossman also said that the porn mogul predicted Putin’s anti-gay laws before anyone else was talking about them. “Some people thought he was crazy,” Grossman said. “Occasionally, life and the world turns, and his craziness proves to be correct… Michael Lucas is probably one of the two or three most geopolitically informed people that I know, and I know a lot of people who are well informed.”

Lucas retains the defiant streak that got him into trouble as a kid. Last August, at a tent Lucas sponsored at the annual Ascension charity party on Fire Island, he ordered his staff to kick Nick Gruber—the young, socially connected ex-boyfriend of Calvin Klein—out of the premises. Lucas told the New York Daily News that Gruber had said, “Keep your hands away from me!” to two men who had brushed against him by accident; Gruber then informed Lucas, “I’m straight, and I don’t want gay people touching me!”

“You’re leaving,” Lucas told Gruber, according to Lucas’s Facebook.

“Do you know who I am?” the 22-year-old said.

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, “and I don’t even want to know.”

Afterward, he was told who Gruber was but shrugged the incident off, even though it was likely to cause ripples in the insular world of New York City power gays, where he is well known.

“I’m happy it went public,” Lucas said. “It was a no-brainer for me. I had to do it. Everyone should do it. It’s so easy to stand up to homophobes. Did these other older men just lose it because he’s cute?”

He may be secretive about many aspects of his life, but his defining characteristic is right there on the surface: He doesn’t give a fuck and won’t back down when he thinks he’s fighting the good fight.

Lucas in Moscow. For years, Lucas has warned friends about Putin’s homophobia.

“Michael sees the world in black-and-white,” Bradford Shellhammer, the founder of Queerty and Fab.com and another of Lucas’s friends, told me. “He and I mostly feel the same things about the world, but I subscribe to tact. He’s in your face and aggressive at times. He’s unwilling to accept compromise.”

Shellhammer believes it’s even fair to say that Lucas is anti-Muslim. “I think he does really object to many principles of the Muslim religion,” he said. “He has very strong opinions about the Muslim religion, especially when it comes to the treatment of women and gays, and you can’t argue with that to some extent.”

Whether or not Lucas could fairly be classified as an Islamophobe, he clearly sees the world in terms of good and evil, famous and irrelevant, capitalist and communist, Zionist and anti-Semite.

“I experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism when I was growing up in Russia. Part of my family was killed in the Holocaust,” Lucas told me. “That’s why I understand the need for Jews to have their own state where they can defend themselves and never be exterminated again. My great-grandfather was a rabbi and was killed in his own synagogue by Nazis. I never believed in God. I have nothing to do with Judaism. I believe in the state of Israel and the history of my people, which was very tragic. The contributions Jews have made to the world are great, and all the Jews were getting back was discrimination and extermination.”

Grossman said that Lucas reminds him of his own father, who emigrated from war-torn Europe in the middle of the 20th century. Despite the way he’s made his fortune, Lucas holds a set of traditional, old-world values. In 2000, not long after Lucas started his own company, the porn actor moved his grandparents to New York, and he immediately took them to the giant menorah in Central Park.

“He was just amazed when he got here that a Jewish symbol could be put in a public place and nobody vandalized it,” Grossman said. “That was one of the first things he took his grandparents to see, because he was so blown away by the freedoms we have here.”


On Patrol with North London's Orthodox Jewish Crime Fighters

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Shomrim members at the scene of a hit and run in Stamford Hill, North London

It’s a wet Tuesday night in Stamford Hill and I’m on an impromptu stakeout with two Orthodox Jewish men wearing police-issue stab vests.

Shulem Stern’s roomy people carrier has three child seats in the back to accommodate his large young family. But tonight – like almost every night of the week for Shulem and his partner Michael Scher – it's our undercover surveillance vehicle as we cruise around north Hackney looking for any prospective criminals.

I lower the window to get a better look at the “IC1 male” spotted acting suspiciously around Clapton Common. We’ve killed the engine and the lights, and we all watch in silence as the suspect wanders back and forth in the rain. He walks off after a few minutes and Michael speaks into his crackling two-way radio: “Male no longer considered a threat, let’s conclude.” Three similar vans I hadn’t noticed peel off in different directions, their Orthodox drivers nodding to my co-passengers as they pass.

Shulem Stern

Shulem and Michael are members of Stamford Hill Shomrim (Hebrew for "guards"), a Jewish neighbourhood patrol group set up to assist the London Metropolitan Police (MPS) in reducing crime. It’s one of four Shomrim groups in the UK (there’s one in Golders Green and two in the Manchester area, plus a number in various US cities), but this is the largest.

The 22 volunteers are on call 24 hours a day and spend three to four hours each day driving, walking or cycling the streets of Clapton, Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill and South Tottenham in search of any crimes being committed. The only restriction to the patrol is once a week during Shabbat, a period of roughly 25 hours that entails refraining from any work activities, i.e. using a mobile phone or driving a car. “We’re like a very proactive neighborhood watch,” says Shulem once we’re back on the road.

Since it was founded in 2008, Stamford Hill Shomrim has taken more than 20,000 calls to its hotline from local people, mostly within the Orthodox Jewish community, reporting break-ins, thefts, muggings and other crimes. The group responds to every single call, arriving on the scene before identifying, pursuing or detaining the suspect and waiting for the Met to arrive and make an arrest.

“People in this part of London call us before the police in an emergency,” Shulem says of their hotline number, which receives between 11 to 15 calls a day. “People know they get an instant response from Shomrim, and in most cases we’ll be there way before the police because we’re so local – usually in around 40 seconds, whereas the police have their fastest response target at around 15 minutes.”

The speedy response time clearly works in their favor; Shomrim hands over an average of three to five suspects a week to the police, and between April of 2012 and April of 2013 has directly assisted police with the arrests of 197 suspected criminals.

Michael Scher standing in front of a Hatzola ambulance at the scene of a hit and run in Stamford Hill

The patrols are supported by Hatzola, an ambulance service run by Jewish volunteers with emergency medical technician training. “Our ambulance service is much faster as well," claims Shulem. "They get to the scene of an incident in three minutes. The London Ambulance target is eight minutes.”

Though I’m initially skeptical of these speeds, I witness them first-hand soon after we’ve abandoned our Clapton Common post. At around 10PM a Shomrim patrolman spots a woman lying in the middle of busy traffic on Stamford Hill Broadway. Shulem gets us there in less than a minute. When we arrive, two Shomrim members are giving first aid to the woman in the street – a (non-Jewish) pedestrian knocked down by a hit and run driver – while another tapes off the area. Two more Shomrim members are taking contact details of witnesses to pass on to police.

Three minutes later, a Hatzola ambulance arrives and prepares to take the woman to hospital. Three minutes after that, the police arrive.

“It’s no secret that the police are stretched and officers are tied up with paperwork instead of being able to patrol the streets,” says Shulem. “Even before the cuts, Shomrim has been a simple addition to the police. We have been brought up locally, live locally, work locally and drive up and down these streets every day. We know the regular faces – the goodies and the baddies.”

With 22 patrolmen, the organization has almost as many people on the ground in the area at any one time as the Met, who typically have between 24 to 30 officers on the response team for the whole borough. Shomrim’s close links to the community also mean they can utilize resources, such as private CCTV, that take the police much longer to access.

Shomrim members at training session in Stoke Newington Police Station. (Photo via)

However, Shomrim are careful to state that they are “not an alternative” to the cops, and are keen to tell me about the good working relationship they have with local police stations. Members receive informal ongoing training at Stoke Newington Police Station and are kept updated about new, targeted operations in the area.

Local police officers are in contact with Shomrim on a nightly basis and intelligence is regularly passed between the two organizations. “I have a direct line to the robbery squad on my mobile,” says Michael, adding that corresponding with 999 operatives while pursuing a burglary suspect is often slow work. 

Shomrim's annual statistics between April of 2014 and March of 2014. (Click to enlarge)

The Met, for their part, have openly praised the organization; in March, Stephen Greenhalgh, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, said: “I applaud the work of Shomrim in helping the police to keep neighborhoods safe.” But this hasn’t always been the case. In 2008, Chief Superintendent Steve Bending (Hackney’s then-borough commander) said, “I do not support the concept of any community having its own form of patrol service. There is a risk of other communities feeling intimidated by this course of action.” Shulem believes that the Met has reversed its opinion because of the sheer number of arrests Shomrim has helped to orchestrate over the past six years.

On the evening I join the group's nightly patrol, Shomrim has already overseen two arrests: one man who was spotted threatening members of the public with hedge scissors, and another man caught using counterfeit £20 notes in shops around South Tottenham. The day before, volunteers observed a man – who was later arrested – exposing himself on Amhurst Park, and then helped to locate a missing autistic 14-year-old boy in Stamford Hill in just 40 minutes.

Volunteers queue to be allocated streets in the search for Leiby Kletzky. (Photo courtesy of Shomrim)

Shomrim is particularly adept at locating missing persons, and in the last two months have assisted police on eight searches for high-risk individuals, personally locating seven (the eighth was found by police). “It’s sheer numbers that ensure our success,” says Shulem. In a high-profile case in New York, 5,000 Orthodox Jewish volunteers coordinated by the Brooklyn South Shomrim searched for missing eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky, whose body was discovered during the search.

The necessity of having restricted foot patrols on Shabbat has been a problem for the group in the past. “Last year there was a spree of burglaries in the Jewish neighbourhoods in Stamford Hill each Friday,” Michael tells me. The suspect was eventually arrested and sentenced to six years imprisonment, but each week following Shabbat “we get a back-log of calls from people reporting incidents they had witnessed the previous day”, says Shulem.

It’s a demanding job, but one that Shulem is proud to have: “Volunteering is very much a part of life among the Orthodox community,” he says. But joining Shomrim isn’t easy, and applicants have to contend with a very strict acceptance policy. “We turn down applications every day,” says Shulem. “It’s tough to get in because it’s a risky job. If someone has a history of having a short temper we turn them down straight away.”

Volunteers from the Stamford Hill Shomrim patrol at the base of the London Met Air Support Unit. (Photo via)

Despite previous reports, Shomrim does not stipulate that members must be Jewish, male, employed or married. However, being married indicates responsibility, Michael says, which is a factor that can support an application.

“There’s no rule saying you must be Jewish to be a member, though I’m not aware of any applications from the non-Jewish community,” says Shulem. There are currently two unmarried men in the Stamford Hill Shomrim, and a number of hotline operatives and back office staff are female – though all patrolling members are male. The organization is a registered charity, and one of its three trustees is female.

Falling on the right side of the law in volatile circumstances is crucial to both legitimizing the work Shomrim does and combating the critics who accuse the group of vigilantism. However, even its members agree that knowing how to properly detain suspects and perform a safe citizens’ arrest comes with experience: “There’s just a hairline between what’s legal and what’s illegal, and if we do something on the wrong side of that line we run the risk of being arrested ourselves,” says Shulem.

Volunteers from the Stamford Hill Shomrim patrol after receiving a briefing from Hackney Superintendent David Grainger. (Photo via)

No Stamford Hill Shomrim member has been accused of any crime in its six year existence. However, groups in New York have been criticized in the past for using excessive force against non-Jewish suspects, and last month in Brooklyn two Shomrim members were charged as part of a group of five men for attacking 22-year-old student Taj Patterson as he walked home from a party. Shomrim organisers in New York have also reportedly withheld information on suspected Jewish criminals, and the NYPD has openly criticised the group for not always notifying police when a call comes in.

For the Shomrim in Stamford Hill, though – the area with the highest concentration of Hasidic Jews in Europe – integration in the non-Jewish community is key. The patrols don't just exist to serve the Orthodox community, Shulem says: “If you look at the results in the last quarter, 55 percent of victims of the crimes we stopped were non-Jewish.”

Last June, amid the rise in Islamaphobic attacks following the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, Shomrim met with Muslim community leaders to discuss cooperation between the two communities. The group now includes protection of the Cazenove Road Mosque and Community Centre on its nightly patrols. During the riots in Tottenham in August of 2011, Shomrim provided first aid to injured members of the public (including one young male who had been stabbed numerous times) when London Ambulance Service ambulances were unable to attend without a police escort.

“It’s just all about the local area,” says Shulem. “A crime is a crime and a victim is a victim.”

Follow Tabby Kinder on Twitter

Meet the Children and Pregnant Women Carrying Rocks All Day for Albania's Mining Pirates

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Kids working in the piles of rock and chrome.

Violeta Koci is 23, and her wheelbarrow just broke. For the rest of the day she will have to carry the bags of rock and chromite on her back. She is six months pregnant.

"My doctor says I shouldn’t work, but what choice do I have?" she asks.

For many in Bulqize – a grey and dusty town about a four hour drive northeast of Albania’s capital Tirana – it’s all about survival. There are not that many jobs available and you take whatever work you can get. One job opportunity is found outside of the city’s chromium mines in the piles of rock that have been dug out when new tunnels and shafts have been excavated. Sifting through the rubble for pickings of chromite, Violeta Koci and day laborers like her can earn the equivalent $3.00 or $4.00 a day. On a good day, that is.

”We get about 20 Lek [7 cents] for every pound of pure chromite we collect” says eight-year-old Shpendi Lloshi, who is busy rummaging through the rubble looking for remains of the black gleaming mineral.

Violeta Koci, 23 years old and six months pregnant.

Once a booming mining town, Bulqize sits on one of the largest chromium reserves in the world. Since they first opened in the late 1940s, these mines have supplied roughly 18 million tons of chromium, an important metal in the production of stainless steel. This was the backbone of Albania’s economy during the country’s half-century of communist rule.

Today, business is not what it used to be, but private enterprises are still extracting the precious metal, digging deeper into the ground and opening up new galleries. Albchrome, owned by Albanian oligarch Samir Mane, is a major employer in the town. Alongside the large enterprises, there is another mining industry: an informal one, squeezing profits from some of the old abadoned shafts and the slag heaps dug out from the mines. This is where people like Violeta Koci and Shpendi Lloshi work.

Shpendi, eight years old, and his father Guri, 37. Shpendis father works below ground in the mine, Shpendi works above.

It’s Saturday, and Shpendi has been here since early morning, scuttling up and down the steep piles of sharp rocks, turning over stone after stone. All the pickings of chromite or rocks with mineral residue he finds go into his white plastic bucket.

Although it’s late in the afternoon, Shpendi does not look tired or worn out. His father Guri, 37, is a professional miner, working underground extracting the ore, but on his days off he usually works together with Shpendi.

"I’m not worried about my son" he says, and gently ruffles the hair on Shpendi’s head.

The Nezha family walking to the mine.

Another boy, who doesn’t want to state his name, says he has been working here since he was nine years old. Now he’s 16. He looks far worse for wear than Shpendi: scrawny, with dark circles below his eyes and an exhausted gaze.

”I stayed in school for the first couple of years, but then I started working here full time every day to make money,” he says.

On this particular day, there are about 50 people working in the heaps of stone outside the mine. Almost all of them are children, many just as young as Shpendi. One of them, a somewhat older boy wearing a dusty red t-shirt and a cheerful grin, is missing the thumb on his right hand. Accidents are common. Two years ago a young boy died when there was a small landslide and the rocks came tumbling down on him.

The people these kids work for are locally referred to as pirates. They are local businessmen who have been awarded concessions for extracting and exporting chromium. They buy the minerals off the kids for a pittance and then ship it off, mostly to China. These mining tycoons take no responsibility for their workers and are often involved in other illegal business activities. They also fight each other over control of the chromium business.

Just a month before I visit Bulqize, one of the city’s mining pirates was murdered. Gjin Nica, 35, was driving his Yamaha motorcycle on the outskirts of Tirana when he was ambushed and sprayed with machine gun fire. Police suspect rivalry over the chromium business in Bulqize to be the motive behind the killing. Gjin Nica had been suspected of complicity in the recent murders of two rival chromium businessmen from Bulqize: one this January and another one in September last year. Gjin Nica had recently been detained on charges of forgery, but was set free two weeks before he was assasinated.

The second home I visited. This woman talked about how there’s basically no life for women in Bulqize. If they can’t work collecting chrome, there’s nothing for them to do except being a housewife. "Every day my husband goes to work and I’m not sure if he’s going to come back in the evening" she said.

Bulqize’s shady mining business illustrates Albania’s weak rule of law. It’s rare enough that labor rights are respected and upheld for public employees in Tirana, let alone for children working for warring gangsters in godforsaken towns in the middle of nowhere.

Corruption is what makes this all possible. The officials who award the mining pirates concessions for extracting chromium will not go without reward. In Transparency International’s corruption-index Albania dropped to 116th place last year, down from 95th place in 2011. This explains why this murky part of the economy can chug along undisturbed, year after year.

Poverty provides the businesses in this informal economy with a never-dwindling workforce. At least one eighth of the population of Albania lives on less than $0.70 a day, and despite the fact that the town rests on such abundant riches, the situation is no less dire in Bulqize.

Nexhmedin Nezha (left), 42, suffering from PTSD since an accident in the mine. Pictured with his wife.

In a concrete housing block just below the slag heaps lives Nexhmedin Nezha, 42, with his wife, three children, and another family who shares the space with them. Entering the dark hall feels like stepping into a cellar. Moisture dripping, the air heavy and humid – the ragged sofas have a damp feel and a moldy smell. Nexhmedin Nezha’s welcome is kind and warm, but, arms convulsing, he is unable to perform a handshake.

His accident happened 20 years ago. He had just started his shift when the mine caved in. He was trapped for eight hours, not knowing if he would survive. Finally, he was saved, but since then he has been suffering from anxiety-related symptoms that could indicate posttraumatic stress disorder and has not been able to go back to work. Nexhmedin Nezha worked for one of the larger mining operators – not the pirates – and therefore at least has a pension to live off of. But it’s not much. His medicines, which keep him from having hysterical fits, cost $8 each month. His monthly pension about $40. For the family to be able to survive, their two oldest children have had to take up work collecting chromite alongside the other kids behind their house. Just like Shpendi Lloshi, neither of them is a yet a teenager.

Nexhmedins daughter, the youngest of their three kids. She does not work (yet).

Many families are in similar situations. According to the Confederation of Trade Unions of Albania, 88 miners have died in their line of work only in the last five years. Many more have been severely injured or crippled. No one really knows how many deaths and injuries occur in the informal mining industry. This hasn't stopped the kids of Nexhmedin Nezha and many others from signing up for work.

@aaxl

Cowboy Capitalists

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Philippe Heilberg, the white guy, with soldiers loyal to the warlord General Paulino Matip Nhial. Photo by Jenn Warren

Entrepreneurs tried to invest in Sudan but quickly handed over their pipe dreams to companies owned by governments. Parastatals, they are called—deep-pocked corporations seemingly immune to the international criticism about the human rights violations involved in extracting the oil out of southern and central Sudan. But in the early 2000s, like Roland “Tiny” Rowland pulling up a chair to the high-stakes poker game of African investment, a new round of capitalists began to bet on the coming peace talks. Insiders who knew that stability might be on the horizon started arriving in Juba. While the house always had the odds in this winner-take-all, loser-lose-all game, some were determined to beat these odds and bet on southern Sudan’s vast potential for agriculture and oil.

Among these newcomers was Philippe Heilberg, a libertarian former commodity broker who basks in the glow of cowboy capitalism, proactive frontier development, and doing business with warlords.

In 2003, two years before the peace agreement that laid the path to South Sudan’s independence, Heilberg’s investment company, Jarch Capital, signed an agreement with the SPLM to snag the exploratory and commodity rights to 46,000 square miles of the Block B oil concession. The contract also required the SPLM, the political party that would eventually run South Sudan, to notify Jarch Capital prior to arranging any additional commodity deals in the region. The government of South Sudan now claims the contract is invalid, and Heilberg has accused certain parties involved in the negotiations of operating “outside international law.” He alleged that, just a year and a half after he signed the exclusive oil deal in Block B, the SPLM signed a conflicting contract with a British company called White Nile Ltd. Following this violation, Heilberg named high-level officials he said were directly involved in or “were made aware of this deal prior to an agreement with White Nile.” The list included John Garang, his wife, Rebecca, Riek Machar, and a host of government officials.

Other questionable deals abounded. Besides buying the rights to Block B, Heilberg had also leased a million acres of land in Mayom Country from General Paulino Matip Nhial—a famous commander who didn’t actually own the land. In 2008 a Texas-based group with the quaint name of Nile Trading and Development claimed to have leased the entirety of Lainya County from local chief Scopas Lodua—a deal securing them 1.5 million acres. Oddly, the actual size of Lainya County is only half that. When Loduo was contacted by the BBC in July 2012, he said, “I signed, but I didn’t know what it said.”

In the buildup to South Sudanese sovereignty, McKenzie Funk profiled Heilberg in a 2010 article on cowboy capitalism for Rolling Stone. The entrepreneur’s company and philosophy were presented as a high-risk, gun-crazy, warlord-loving, roll-the-dice, make-it-or-break-it attempt to exploit the lack of sophistication in emerging markets. But these cowboy capitalists soon learned the hard way and reined in their ambitions.

While speaking to a room full of Duke University MBA students in April 2013, Heilberg took a very different tone. He warned the students of risky investments, saying the capital costs could be 100 percent—i.e., you could lose all of your money.

“There is no governance; it’s a complete, utter disaster,” he said to them of his dealings in South Sudan. “Until ministers found to be corrupt are hanged or severely punished, it won’t be stopped.”

Who would have thought? Carpetbagging, double-dealing, backstabbing, and blatant corruption in South Sudan? Africans outsmarted outsiders again and again, as Chevron, Rowland, Arakis, White Nile, Nile Trading and Development, and Jarch Capital all busted and then pushed away from the South Sudan high-stakes table.

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Facebook Takes Down Assad's Syrian Election Ads

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Facebook Takes Down Assad's Syrian Election Ads

Things Men Have Said to My Face Right After Seeing My Naked Body

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The author

Since the dawn of time, with the exception of maybe a few weeks there at the beginning, nakedness and shame have gone together like snakes and planes. Ear hair and bassists. Milk and cheese. Drunk and uncles.

Like all of those examples, when shared, one’s nakedness can be received with anything from elation to degradation. But you don’t have to tell me twice about the vulnerability and embarrassment that accompanies nudity.

Here are five verbal reactions I've gotten after various dudes saw my unclothed human form for the first time. Much to no one’s chagrin, this won't be a detailed account of my sexual history. That’s for my gynecologist to know (hey Greg!) and for my new gynecologist to find out (Greg’s leaving the practice soon).

So sit back, relax, and put your feet in these stirrups here. I apologize if my hands are cold.


The author in a pool

“DO YOU REALIZE HOW HOT YOU’D BE IF YOU WORKED OUT EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS?”

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, and if it were up to this guy I wouldn’t be anywhere near a cake ever again (unless I’m fully clothed and standing next to one with a stripper hidden inside).

This is a banal observation. Who wouldn’t be hotter after working out every day for three months? Think outside the bun, dude! But in the moment, benefit-of-the-doubt-me got it. He was just trying to help me realize my... uh... untapped potential. Zing!

A few other questions spring to mind: Why three months? Do you want me to complete that "Thinner Thighs In Thirty Days" program three consecutive times? Can I stop working out after the three months are over? Also, why in the name of Satan’s colostomy bag would you say this to a person’s face?

In the moment, I could only assume he meant, “You don’t look bad, the bones are there, underneath a squishy layer of goat cheese and herbs, but I prefer nude people look like Susan Fucking Powter.”

What I learned: If you can’t say anything nice, sure as hell don’t say it to someone who just showed you their Geena Davis for the first time. Gratitude goes a long way. A simple, “This is very kind of you, thanks,” makes the moment pleasant and (God-willing!) forgettable. If not, chances are your reaction is emblazoned on their brain forever, and the chick will have the opportunity to write a weird essay about it. Who wants that?

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I NEED A SHOT.”

What kind of shot are we talking here, pal? Rabies, tetanus, diphtheria, polio? As far as I know, we’ve yet to develop a vaccine against seeing anyone’s naked body, much less mine (Hope-atitis C?).

All joking aside (yeah, right), sometimes the truth punches you in the teeth before it sets you free. That’s just one of the risks we have to take when we’re open to self-discovery. So call it what you want; a nude surprise gone awry, the fast track to sadness, a fucking terrible idea. They’re all apt synopses of this situation, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, and e-books in Biden’s Kindle library.

What I learned: You can’t assume anyone wants to see you naked, ever. And if they must poison their liver before doing so, git along little doggie. There are greener pastures and better metaphors that don’t involve so many references to cattle.

“YOU’VE CHANGED A LOT SINCE THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU.”

The circumstances that surround this particular quotation are objectively hilarious. My first visit to the gynecologist? Check. My mother’s OB-GYN? Check. And he’s a HE?? CheckMATE, my friend. The last time we interacted, I didn’t have teeth, and was umbilically obligated to my mom. You know what, doc? I have changed a lot since then.

Dr. Greg articulated this gem mid-breast exam, which resulted in no lumps in either the medical or Black Eyed Peas’ definitions. While the nurse chuckled at the funny truth-phrasing, I stared at the popcorn ceiling and wondered how I could possibly reply. I decided on the nonchalant, “Yessiree, Bob!”

What I learned: Sometimes it’s part of your job to make conversation while you check someone else's body for cancer. Maybe you speak without thinking to avoid the crushing awkwardness of that situation. Sometimes I just gotta roll with the motherfucking punches, baby. This one gets a pass.

“YOU LOOK LIKE A FREAKIN’ PORN STAR!”

Where do we start? First of all, there was no censoring of this quote (or any of the others, for that matter). Someone really said “freakin’'’ in a romantic context, and they weren’t singing “Ignition (Remix).” Next, we’ll appreciate the gusto that accompanies this comment (bloom where you’re planted!). And finally, blurting out something stupid in the heat of a moment is always understandable, but I would be remiss if I didn’t take a second to flesh out some possible interpretations:

“You look like you’re paid to be here!”
“Get ready, we are about to have a surprise orgy!”
“Intimacy is a business transaction to me!”
“I have never seen a single porn!”
“I have seen so much more porn than you originally thought!”

And if that last one was the case, what kind of stuff was he watching? Young and Confused Girlfriend? Lanky Co-Ed Sees Penis For First Time And Weeps? Sturgeon Face Sluts 5? The possibilities end there.

What I learned: When it comes to complimenting your significant other, it’s best to keep it simple. This may not even require speaking a sentence! Just make a noise. Oftentimes, it’s better that way.

Now that you all know about my shamefully selective long-term memory and penchant for overanalyzing passing comments, I must admit I’m feeling a little exposed.

Follow Hope Cantwell on Twitter.

Even Though Toronto's Men's Rights Music Fest Was Cancelled, Equality Day Still Happened

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Some CAFE volunteers, including Dr. Silvia Merdrano (left). All photos via the author.
Remember the cloaked men's rights festival that was supposed to go down on the Toronto Islands last weekend, but which was cancelled due to overwhelming lack of support? Yes, well “Equality Day” kind of happened anyway, in the form of a demonstration near Yonge-Dundas Square. Right next to the Jesus freaks wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Fear God…Trust and Obey Jesus,” about 20 or so volunteers wearing signs that said “I support boys, men and families, ASK ME WHY” milled about on Sunday trying to attract stray ears.

The misleadingly-dubbed Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) organized the demonstration, which took place on the southwest corner outside of Toronto’s Eaton Centre. The organization’s title is misleading because by “equality,” they clearly mean “equality—for men.” I went to check it out and see what compels people to participate in an event like this. In summation, some of the concerns were worth discussing, including the widespread lack of emotional support systems for men in our society. Some of the concerns—as one might suspect—were not so reasonable.

The first man I spoke to, a tilley-hatted forty-something, curtly told me I could speak with their spokesperson if I wanted an explanation. The next was a friendly-faced, amiable 20-something.

“What really brought me here was originally custody issues,” he told me. He said he finds it upsetting that a majority of mothers get custody over their children in the event of a divorce, and that their dads need to be happy with every other weekend.

Suicide rates, he added, are four times as high for men as they are for women in Canada. He said as far as he can see, no one is addressing this. He also said when boys and men are bullied in schools; it’s not taken seriously, whereas it always is for women. And when men are raped, he says, there is no support system.

“Rape is a huge, huge issue for women, but it’s not addressed when it happens to men. It’s like ‘Man up, get over it, deal with it, be strong.’”

“The other issue, for me, is males in university—their rate is dropping. We need to look at why male enrollment rates are dropping. My understanding is that more and more men are being pushed into blue collar jobs, like plumbing.” He says the group is definitely not a men's rights group, and he is definitely not a men’s rights activist (MRA).

He says this is not a men’s rights group. But actually, that’s exactly what they are. CAFE has a long history of hosting talks about how men are systemically disadvantaged in the Western world.

Just a small FYI: Women are not trying to disenfranchise men simply by opting to go to university. Sorry, but it is not your right to make up the majority of a university population. Women are studying hard and getting into these institutions to pursue meaningful careers. No one is barring men from applying. In short, men, as a group, are not marginalized due to the fact that they are men, though there are issues, some of them very worthy of discussion, that disproportionately affect them.

Anyway, because the first dude I spoke with didn’t want to attach his name to any of this, I asked him where I could find the organizer of the event. He pointed to his left, to a man passing out fliers to volunteers from a knapsack. I walked over to say hi, and looked straight into the face of Justin Trottier, a long-time men’s rights campaigner. His involvement is very interesting, especially given this article NOW Magazine published last week. In it, over the phone, CAFE spokesperson Denise Fong answered questions with the help of a surnameless Justin in the background. She repeatedly denied it was Justin Trottier. Strange coincidence indeed, given the fact that the two are engaged. Trottier claimed he wasn’t actual the organizer and only gave me his first name. I repeatedly tried to convince him to talk to me, but I was met with the iciest glare and not a single comment. He told me he was simply busy volunteering.

Then I found Dr. Silvia Medrano, who is also part of CAFE, and writing her third book about “masculinities.” She says we don’t give men the option to express their feelings. We believe men have to be strong, so we can’t imagine them ever needing mental or emotional support.

“Men are taken for granted,” she says. “To be a man is to be important, and if you are important, you don’t need any help.”

“We are trying to [make men aware] that they need many things. They need support, emotional support.”

Still, other CAFE members showed up at the corner of Yonge and Dundas to talk about the violence men face…at the hands of women. Michael Abraham, who organized what he said was the first panel discussion on the topic in Canada, was one of them. He told me he was abused by his ex-wife, and found that to be a more occurrence than he would have thought. He started a support group for battered men. (The rate of intimate partner violence is four times higher in Canada for women than it is for men).

“I want you to know that we are not against women. We are not denying violence against women. We just want equality between genders. If women are involved with our organization, we can’t be against women, right?”

Well…I’m not too sure about that. Women have the capacity to get confused, too.

I’m wondering why people in this group, if they’re so down for equality, wouldn’t simply identify as feminists. There is a whole careful, nuanced, hard-fought framework in place already to address issues of inequality, and we want to challenge the ways in which patriarchy dictates to and harms men, too. They’re told they can’t share their feelings, or cry. They can’t be nurturing or fey. They must only be the strong-jawed, dictatorial winners of bread—always the hero, or the aggressor, and when they’re not those things—well, are they really men at all? This kind of ideology does nothing more than contribute to widespread violence and exacerbate the high rates of male suicide. Talking about it is important, but using the umbrella of a “men’s rights movement” is offensive. I ask these people why they don’t align themselves with feminism, which aims to challenge and dismantle patriarchy.  

The nameless dude says he has participated in feminist conversations on inequality, but that he’s had mixed luck, which is part of what brought him to the street corner.

“I know the traditional way of looking at men needs to be broken down, just like it does for women. I have feminist friends that are pushing for an equal society. Then there are other feminist groups that just hate anything I have to say.”

He said he’d identify as a humanist, not as a feminist—but that he does get “encouragement and motivation” from the feminist movement. Maybe men, he says, will get as far as women when it comes to gaining recognition for their issues, since feminists were able to accomplish most of what they set out to do.  (Not true. Still working on it, bruh).

Medrano says feminism may have been necessary in the beginning, but that now it’s been taken too far.

“Feminism was very good in the beginning, for women to get some rights. They had no vote, no rights, no property, no anything,” she says. “But now, we need to be supporting feminists to understand what men are feeling. Sometimes I realize that women try to get revenge over men, or to get the position that men used to have in the past. Or they try to be more powerful than men.”

I’m sorry but…since when was it a travesty for a woman to be more powerful than a man? I explain to them that women just want the same opportunities men have always had, and to be taken as seriously, not to eclipse men or to rule over them as unshakeable Amazon goddesses. Alsoto go out and not expect to be raped. I’m met largely with blank stares and vague upset.

It’s interesting that a group ostensibly so focused on equality is ignoring the wider cultural discussions shouting “no, notallmen, but yesall women.”  If one really cared, you’d think that one would take part in those discussions rather choosing right now, in the aftermath of Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic killing spree, to discuss men’s university enrollment rates.

While the very notion of MRAs is farcical, some of the ideas within their campaign are crucial, and very much part of the feminist crusade. But instead of participating in feminist dialogues about tearing down harmful and oppressive structures, MRAs are hell bent on making the discussion into the kind of excessively childish competition that would go on amongst second graders. Actually, men have it worse in society! Oh yeah? You guys get raped a lot? Well, we have high suicide rates!

This is not, no pun intended, a game of tit for tat.

I’m left wondering ‘Why this divide?’ Is it because people don’t understand what feminism is? Do these people feel like they’re not invited into the feminist fold? Or do they just feel threatened, resenting women and the progress we’ve made? Do they hate women? I don’t know. Feminism, in all its diversity, is not perfect. Perhaps some of us could reexamine ourselves, extend an olive branch or two, and help shut down some of this toxicity in the process. Don’t get me wrong, I think much of what the MRAs have to say is utter derailing bullshit. “men’s rights movements” and “activists” blame feminists for their problems and largely just miss the point. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting feminists fall all over ourselves trying to cater to men’s feelings, only that maybe we might have more discussions about the ways in which we’re all harmed by patriarchy. Because it is cause for concern that men are expected to conform to a quintessentially masculine ideal. And the already existing feminist framework can help to rectify some of the damage that’s been done, if only we can come together.


@sarratch

Look at the Ridiculous Shit the UK’s Billionaires Spend Their Cash On

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Photo via the Bespoke Bureau

The UK is now home to a total of 104 billionaires, which makes it the nation with the highest per-capita concentration of the ultra-rich in the world. Collectively, these billionaires are sitting on a combined wealth of £301 billion ($504 billion) at a time when most of us are sitting on a forest of unpaid utility bills.

But what do they do with all that money? When I think about what I would do if I had limitless money, I quickly run out of ideas after eating and drinking whatever I want all the time and going on a nice vacation. Luckily for billionaires, there are plenty of people who are inventing new ways for them to spend the thousands that their bank accounts accumulate in interest every second.

The first rule of spending like a billionaire is buy niche items. What's the point of spending a few million on something someone else already has?

That's where concierge services come in.

“He wanted to give his wife a diamond. A very large diamond. So we went one better, and delivered it encased in a solid block of ice for her birthday,” said Alexander Martin, director of the Envy Group, a highly exclusive service based in Mayfair, London. When clients like Martin's diamond-lover ask the Envy Group to fetch something, it's the company's job to say "at once, sir."

“If it’s unobtainable, we can get it,” said Martin. “We’ve sourced llamas for clients, refurbished supercars in Louis Vuitton, had chess sets built from black and white diamonds, arranged dinners for clients with people like Al Pacino—everything. We’ve got something really far-out we’re working on now. It’s a Tiffany-blue Bentley that comes in its own Tiffany-style box. The whole thing’s powered by robotics. It’s even got an eight-foot bow on top.”

If you thought this kind of overblown peacocking has taken a hit because of the worldwide recession, you'd be wrong.

“We’ve been in business five years," Martin told me, "In the last two, we’ve seen things grow continually. We don’t really get involved in advertising. We work solely on introductions. To be honest, at the elite level, all that really counts is what you can do.”

Screenshot of a butler serving a silver platter of food to a dog from a Bespoke Bureau promotional video

Based on conversations with employees at these companies, it seems that London-based bespoke concierges like GC Prive, Black Diamond, and First Ladies (Britain’s first female-only concierge) are experiencing a boom, with many springing up around 2008—right before the recession hit. 

“We were never touched by the recession,” said Sara Vestin Rahmani of Bespoke Bureau, an exclusive staffing agency and butler academy that supplies butlers, chefs, and domestic staff to service some of Britain’s wealthiest individuals.

In case you were in any doubt about what wealthy means, Rahmani told me, “One of our clients just invested in a five-story penthouse in Vauxhall. They’ve converted one of the floors to a swimming pool. The entire floor. And one of the others, his wife has had converted into a Union Jack–themed apartment for her chocolate Labrador. They’re very sweet people, but they value their privacy intensely.”

Screengrab via Phillips 

I called a few of London’s exclusive interior designers to see how billionaires are furnishing their private pads. Brigitta Spinnocchia, who runs Mayfair-based Bespoke, walked me through some of her recent projects: She's working on a house in Kensington with the world’s first rotating elevator that spirals like a corkscrew through each level, surrounded by glass stairs. He house also has a 25-foot chandelier that extends over two floors through a hole in the ceiling. And this weekend, she’s just managed to source a $68,500 Campana Brothers chair for a client that's made entirely of teddy bears. If you don't want to spend more than many people earn in a year to sit on a chair that looks like a spoiled child's bedside table, you could seek out Alexis Turner, owner of London Taxidermy. He told me he’s sourced everything from bears and camels to “a whole giraffe” for a client's hallway.

Those who stop short of turning a floor of their house into a Hemmingway-esque nightmare are still pretty adept at blowing insane amounts of money on decor. A friend who has over 15 years construction industry experience in some of London’s most prestigious locales, filled me in: “The majority of places will be fitted out twice. They’ll fit and furnish them to sell them, and then when the client moves in—stone, marble, mirrors, everything—it’ll all get ripped out and they’ll start refitting it to their own tastes. Some of the skips around West London—you should see what gets chucked out—like brand new marbling that costs anywhere from £1,200 ($2,000) per square meter.” He told me about one place near Hyde Park he’d recently refitted, installing £9,000 ($15,000) remote-controlled toilets into every bathroom.

Once you've spent an obscene amount of money on your house, you'll probably want to get as far away from it as possible. So it might pay to give Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's brother a call. For just £50,000 ($83,500) a year, his company Parnassus Luxury Travel will organize a private jet to wherever you want and set up pretty much anything you could possibly ask for when you arrive. “I have access to all the Grands Prix, tickets to the Oscars, paddock passes, backstage passes. Some companies will organize tickets to go and see Bon Jovi or whatever, but we organize passes to go backstage to meet him,” Osborne told the Evening Standard. But if you want that kind of service, you'll need to hurry: Parnassus is only going to take on ten families.

Another concierge company is Brown + Hudson, a bespoke Kensington travel company that's been in business since 2008. “We recently had a couple on honeymoon who were interested in travelling down to South Africa. So we put them in touch with Bishop Desmond Tutu. Given it was their honeymoon, he very kindly blessed their marriage,” said Elizabeth Ellis, the company’s marketing manager. “Everything is possible. And we can involve award-winning documentary makers and BBC wildlife cameramen to document the experience.”

What happens if you become bored by trips to absolutely wherever you want in the entire world? What if your documentary film crew sets up to capture the joyful moment you first see the Aurora Borealis with a reincarnated Frank Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon" and all you've got is "meh" written on your face? If all this luxury gets a bit dull, you can always turn the globe into your own personal adventure playground and live out your most juvenile James Bond fantasies.

“People want to be Bond, people want to be Bourne, but people also want skills that are applicable to everyday life and transferrable to the boardroom," said the anonymous founder of Secret Me, which offers a course for £10,000 ($16,700) where you learn how to make cocktails, take out an assailant with a pen, shoot a gun, and other ripped-from-spy-movies skills. If you want to take the next step, £40,000 ($67,000) gets you a weeklong “mission” in which, the founder told me, “You’ll experience an attack that we will have orchestrated. Different modes of transport—helicopters, boats, cars—all of which will culminate in a hostage rescue of sorts.”

If money is no object in getting people to pretend to attack you (with live ammunication) then you can move on to stage three. “They’re bespoke,” the founder told me. “A client may enjoy skiing, they may enjoy boats, casinos, the Caribbean. And we’ll combine it so they’re literally in a movie set for a week. We don’t really put a figure on those. Because if you want to jump from the edge of space, it’s obviously going to cost you a little bit more than if you want to tandem skydive out of a biplane.” 

Well, that goes without saying.

Follow James Rippingale on Twitter.


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