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The Derailment of the SEC – Part IV: New Allegations That a Former SEC Official Lied to Federal Investigators; the Unlikely Source Is His Own Law Partner

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Spencer Barasch in Houson in 2002, three years before he left the SEC. Photo by James Nielsen/AFP/Getty Images

A law partner of a former Securities and Exchange Commission official, Spencer C. Barasch, gave testimony in a civil lawsuit recently that directly contradicts Barasch’s own testimony to federal authorities as to how he came to represent financier R. Allen Stanford, who is currently in prison for defrauding investors in a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.

If the testimony of Dennis Ryan, Barasch’s law partner, is correct, that would mean that Barasch gave false and misleading testimony to authorities in 2010 when Barasch was under criminal investigation by the United States Department of Justice relating to his legal work for Stanford.

As a partner at the Houston law firm of Andrews Kurth, Barasch represented Stanford before the SEC in 2006, despite having previously overseen decisions while at the agency as to whether to investigate Stanford. Federal law prohibits former SEC officials from representing an individual as a private attorney if, while in government, he or she played a substantial or material role in overseeing said individual’s actions.

In 2010, while under investigation by the Justice Department and SEC for violating federal conflict-of-interest laws, Barasch claimed to have completely forgotten everything about work he did whileat the SEC that in any way related to Stanford. Without evidence to disprove Barasch’s claim, the Justice Department in 2012 closed its criminal investigation of him and instead allowed Barasch to pay a $50,000 fine to settle far less serious civil charges.

But the testimony of Ryan, a partner of Barasch’s at the firm Andrews Kurth, given on May 21 in a civil lawsuit, indicates that the Justice Department and SEC did not know that Barasch may have lied to them in 2010. Ryan directly contradicted Barasch’s previous account that he had no memory of work he did at the SEC that was related to Stanford, when Barasch later agreed to take on Stanford as a client for Andrews Kurth. Ryan further testified that during discussions with Barasch in 2005 he openly expressed to him reservations about representing Stanford because of his previous work at the SEC regarding the financier—telling Ryan that any representation of Stanford might be illegal. Ryan also testified that Barasch expressed these same concerns with the general counsel of Stanford’s bank, Mauricio Alvarado, during a conference call with Ryan and Alvarado in the summer of 2005.

When presented with the new information in this story, current and former government officials involved in the earlier investigations of Barasch and Stanford said that the Justice Department and SEC should reopen their investigation of Barasch, or open a new one to examine whether he possibly made false statements to federal investigators or engaged in obstruction of justice.

In addition to the settlement to pay $50,000 to settle the civil charges with the Justice Department, in May 2012 the SEC also banned Barasch from practicing before the Commission for a year for allegedly violating the same laws and engaging in “improper professional conduct.” In settling matters with both the Justice Department and SEC, Barasch was not required to admit any wrongdoing.

Barasch was questioned on March 2, 2010, by then SEC Inspector General David Kotz, who was in the midst of conducting a broader investigation into why the SEC had failed to charge Stanford until 12 years after agency examiners first uncovered evidence that Stanford was running a massive Ponzi scheme. As for the Justice Department, they did not independently question Barasch but, rather, relied on his previous statements to the SEC in closing out their own investigation. Besides that, the Justice Department never formally questioned Ryan in any substantive way when it settled with Barasch, according to sources close to both cases.Barasch’s testimony that he did not recall working on Stanford matters while at the SEC—the veracity of which is in further doubt because of Ryan’s testimony—was central to the Justice Department’s decision to close its criminal investigation of Barasch and the SEC’s decision not to seek harsher punishment, according to sources close to both investigations.

Stanford’s Ponzi scheme was the second-largest in American history; only Bernard Madoff stole more. In many ways, however, Stanford’s malfeasance was much more complex and has arguably done more lasting damage to his victims and the financial system as we know it. Madoff defrauded investors of more than $19 billion but still had billions in his accounts when he was caught. Madoff’s victims have received some $10 billion in compensation recovered by a bankruptcy trustee. But Stanford's victims have recevied virtually nothing. The sum Stanford pilfered—$7 billion—remains lost and unrecovered in an intricate web of lies, bribery, and international banking scams. When he was finally indicted and his banks and brokerage houses were closed down, Stanford had almost no money left in his personal coffers.

And so Ryan’s testimony, if he is telling the truth, is crucial for two reasons, according to people close to the earlier federal investigations of Barasch: First, it would mean that Barasch—the man who at various points was tasked with making sure Stanford was not pilfering the hard-earned income of American people—purposely violated federal conflict-of-interest laws in his representation of Stanford. Second, it would indicate that Barasch’s own account to former SEC Inspector General Kotz was untrue. Barasch’s motive for lying, of course, would have been to conceal that he had knowingly violated the law.

Dan Richman, a professor of law at Columbia University and a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, told me, “A false statement or obstruction case would require the government to prove that when Barasch said he had forgotten his involvement with Stanford, he was intentionally lying to them.” Richman noted that there is a high threshold to bring such cases to court, because the government has to provide evidence of a motive as to why the person would lie. “Showing someone knowingly lies requires proof or inferences of what was in their head when they made the statement,” Richman said. Barasch had an obvious motive to lie that he had forgotten his Stanford-related work at the SEC, investigators who worked on the early investigations of him say they believe. Any acknowledgement otherwise would be an implicit admission that he knowingly violated the law in his representation of Stanford.

H. David Kotz, then the inspector general of the SEC, testifies before the House Financial Services Committee during a hearing on R. Allen Stanford's $7 billion Ponzi scheme. Photo by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In his testimony, Ryan said that Barasch had expressed reservations about the legality of representing Stanford before the SEC in a conversation in the summer of 2005 and in a subsequent conference call, days later, involving Ryan, Barasch, and Alvarado, then chief counsel of the Stanford International Bank. The importance of that very small bit of Ryan’s testimony may be this: namely, to the minds of investigators who worked on the earlier cases of him, that Barasch indeed remembered his earlier Stanford-related work at the SEC when he agreed to represent Stanford (which would indicate he knowingly violated conflict-of-interest laws), and he may have lied to the SEC inspector general about that.

Even before this disclosure, investigators had found Barasch’s testimony that he did not recall his SEC work on Stanford issues to be implausible, according to several people close to the case. As the chief enforcement officer with the SEC’s Fort Worth branch, Barasch had overseen the agency’s regulation of Stanford’s bank and brokerages.

Examiners with the SEC’s Fort Worth office first warned that it was likely that Stanford was running a “massive Ponzi scheme” in 1998, but Barasch refused to open a formal investigation at that time. Year after year, these same examiners repeated their warnings. Still, Barasch refused to authorize any investigation of Stanford. Indeed, while at the SEC, Barasch quashed no fewer than six investigations of Stanford between 1998 and 2005. Barasch told Kotz that had he shut down those potential investigations because of his office’s limited resources and because his superiors had prioritized other types of cases.

In the 2010 report that followed his broader investigation of the SEC failure to regulate Stanford, Kotz described Barasch as a central figure at the agency in conflicts with examiners and other colleagues over whether or not to institute a large-scale investigation of the Texas billionaire. Kotz concluded in his report that the colleagues described the disputes as the most contentious of their careers and noted they went on for at least seven years.

Yet Barasch claimed in his own testimony to the inspector general that he didn’t recall anything about having been involved with matters regarding Stanford when he considered representing the financier: “I just don’t remember anything,” Barasch told Kotz during his March 2, 2010, deposition.

In his final days at the SEC, when he had already negotiated with and agreed to go to work for Andrews Kurth after his tenure at the agency, Barasch also attended a summit of federal and state regulators in which an SEC examiner gave a presentation about the SEC’s intelligence on Stanford. Not only did Barasch attend that summit—he also took the examiner to task, berating her for continuing to press for an investigation of Stanford, the examiner told the SEC’s inspector general during the course of his investigation. Subsequently, Barasch quashed a potential investigation of Stanford one last time by telling the examiner that he and their mutual boss, who headed the SEC’s Fort Worth office, would not be pursuing the matter.

Barasch claimed in his testimony that he could not remember any of the above when he negotiated with Stanford to represent him before the SEC. “I have no recollection of that,” Barasch testified during his deposition to the SEC’s inspector general.

Stanford first attempted to retain Barasch to represent him before the SEC in June 2005, less than three months after had Barasch left the agency. Ironically, Stanford’s needing an attorney was not unrelated to Barasch’s departure. Examiners at the SEC’s Fort Worth office had prepared yet another memorandum for Barasch, recommending a formal investigation of Stanford. But after having been rebuked by Barasch at the summit, the examiners held off on opening their investigation of Stanford until Barasch was preparing to leave the agency. The investigation of Stanford began exactly one day after he left.

The SEC’s ethics counsel, Rick Connor, told Barasch that he faced a lifetime ban of representing Stanford before the SEC because of his earlier involvement at the SEC with so many Stanford-related matters, according to agency records. Connor bluntly warned Barasch that any representation by Barasch of Stanford before the SEC would be illegal.

In 2006 the SEC intensified its investigation of Stanford. This time, however, Barasch readily agreed to represent Stanford—possibly ignoring both federal conflict-of-interest laws and the SEC ethics counsel’s warning from a year earlier.

Ryan said in his recent sworn testimony that he was first contacted by Alvarado about Barasch’s and Andrews Kurth’s representing Stanford and his bank before the SEC in 2005. In preparation for the two of them talking further to Alvarado, Ryan and Barasch spoke first among themselves, Ryan testified, and Barasch himself said he might not be able to do the legal work because of federal conflict-of-interest laws.

“I think—I think at that time he [Barasch] may have mentioned to me the federal statutes and regulations that may have prohibited him from working on it,” Ryan testified, “but we agreed that we needed to talk to Mr. Alvarado before we could… make any call on that.”

A short time later, Ryan and Barasch had a conference call with Alvarado—the call that Ryan referenced in his testimony last week: “Mr. Barasch told Mr. Alvarado that, you know, he would love to help him—he would love to help him, but that Spence was under the—under the federal prescription [sic] statute and, regulation-wise about dealing with matters, that he—or representing clients in matters that had been before the commission while he was there, and he would have to seek clearance from the ethics office of the SEC on that.”

Days later, on June 20, 2005, Barasch emailed the SEC’s ethics counsel, Rick Connor, seeking permission to represent Stanford before the SEC. In the email, Barasch claimed: “I am not aware of any conflicts and I do not remember any matters pending on Stanford while I was at the [C]ommission.”

Barasch’s letter was, of course, disingenuous. He had been intimately involved with Stanford matters for seven years. He had quashed numerous investigations, referred information regarding Stanford to other agencies, and sparred with the examiners in his office. Less than three months earlier, Barasch had attended a summit where he rebuffed examiners from the Fort Worth office after they made their presentation about Stanford.

Connor, however, did not rely on Barasch’s word alone. He emailed many of Barasch’s former colleagues in the SEC’s Fort Worth office, seeking their input. More than one remembered the recent summit and other instances of Barasch’s involvement with Stanford-related matters. Connor then informed Barasch that if he would face a lifetime ban of representing Stanford before the commission if he chose to take him on as a client.

Kotz testifies at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on the agency's probe of financier R. Allen Stanford's alleged Ponzi scheme.

During his deposition before then SEC Inspector General Kotz, Barasch said he could not recall anything about considering defending Stanford in 2005.

When Barasch was shown documents about his conversations with Alvarado and his interactions with Connor, he said, “Yeah. Yeah. Obviously this happened. I just don’t remember this.” At another point, Barasch said, “’05—I have no recollection whatsoever, but I can’t remember what would have prompted me to think that I might work on something related to Stanford in ’05… I’m certain, 98 percent certain, that the call from Mauricio was ’06.”

The following exchange occurred between Kotz and Barasch, according to transcripts of the investigation’s line of questioning:

Q (Kotz): But even at that time when you talked to Rick Connor in 2006, did you say, “Here is what I had—here were my connections or involvement with Stanford while I was—”

A (Barasch): I didn’t remember. I just didn’t remember anything.

Q: You didn’t mention the ’98 MUI or the 2002 matter? [MUI stands for matter under investigation—a preliminary investigation by the SEC that may or may not lead to a more serious formal investigation.]

A: Maybe I said—you know, maybe there was something back in 1998 or in 2005 and ’6. I just can’t say I would have mentioned something from 1998.

Q: But you don’t remember mentioning the 2002…?

A: Quite frankly, until you sent it all to me, I didn’t remember really any of that.

The reason that Stanford and Alvarado were so anxious in 2006 to have Barasch represent the financier was because the SEC’s pursuit of Stanford had intensified after Barasch left the agency, according to Stanford’s own records and information the Justice Department filed in federal court in Houston in 2009.

Stanford ran his Ponzi scheme from his bank located on the Caribbean island nation of Antigua—far away from the prying eyes of US regulators and disgruntled investors and former employees. Stanford also allegedly paid bribes to Antigua’s then top banking regulator, Leroy King. A federal grand jury in the US indicted King in June 2009 for accepting bribes from Stanford to help him conceal his Ponzi scheme. As first reported by VICE last month, King, who has fought extradition, has had preliminary discussions with US authorities about accepting a plea-bargain agreement.

In 2006, King received confidential correspondence and information from the SEC that it was investigating Stanford and seeking any information the Antiguan authorities had about Stanford’s bank. The Justice Department’s indictment of King alleged that, after receiving the sensitive information from the SEC, King immediately contacted Stanford and leaked the correspondence.

Days after King passed the SEC’s letter along to Stanford, he became even more determined to have Barasch defend him. On September 29, 2006, he emailed James Davis, his chief financial officer, and Alvarado: “The former sec [D]allas lawyer we spoke about in [S]t [C]roix. Get him on board asap.”

Alvarado emailed back an hour later: “I have already spoken to Spencer Barasch. I have scheduled a meeting for next Tuesday in Miami in the afternoon.”

Barasch emailed Alvarado later that same day: “Thanks for the call this morning—I look forward to the opportunity to be of service to Stanford going forward. I will await instructions about where and when to meet in Miami on [T]uesday…”

On October 3, 2006, Barasch and Alvarado met and discussed the SEC investigation at Stanford’s Miami offices, according to Andrews Kurth billing records. These same billing records indicate that Barasch billed Stanford on October 2, 2006, for “[t]ravel to Miami for meeting with client” and to “review publicly available company information to prepare for [their] meeting.” Additionally,on October 3, Barasch billed Stanford for “prepare for meeting with Mauricio Alverado [sic] and attend meeting in Stanford's Miami offices.” On October 4, Barasch billed Stanford for his “return to Dallas from Miami” and to “review documentation received from company about SEC and NASD inquiries.” On October 12, Barasch billed Stanford for a “telephone conference with Mauricio Alverado [sic] regarding status of SEC and NASD matters; review draft letter to NASD,” and the following day he billed for a “Complete review of NASD letter and email comments to client.”

Other confidential records indicate that Barasch planned to travel to Antigua to meet Stanford himself.

Despite all this, Barasch testified to the SEC’s inspector general that he had done no real legal work for Stanford. When shown documentation related to his work for Stanford, Barasch answered: “Yeah, I don’t remember this, but whatever it is I can tell you nothing ever happened. I never represented them. I never did anything. My recollection is, every time I talk to Rick Connor, the answer was no. I couldn’t do it. So I didn’t do it, and that was that!”

On 24 occasions, Barasch answered questions from the inspector general by saying he could not recall any details regarding his work for Stanford. He told Kotz, variously, that he had “no recollection of any specifics”; “I don’t remember seeing it, but I might have”; “I don’t recall have any recollection of this”; and “I don’t happen to independently recall this. No.”

In sharp contrast, Barasch provided the inspector general with expansive answers—rich with detail and colorful anecdotes—as to why, regardless of the documents sitting before him that presented evidence to the contrary, he had decided against doing any legal work for Stanford:

So ’06 came around, and I got the call from Mauricio, and so he said, “Come out and I’ll introduce you to everybody, and I’ll tell you what this about.” And I flew to Miami, and it was incredibly embarrassing!

First of all, there was not one person here for me to be with. Nobody was there, and Mauricio wasn’t even here. I came into the office, and I finally got a secretary, and she said, “Mauricio pulled out his back, and he’s in incredible pain and apologizes, but, you know, he’ll try to get over there.” I know I just sat there in the lobby, and Mauricio finally comes in, apologized profusely, and late in the day. I just sit in the waiting room for like an hour. And he just limped horribly, and he had a flight somewhere the next day. Paris or something, or he had to go to the doctor for his back. So we sat for 15 minutes, and all he did was handed me a stack of Stanford promotional documents, the stuff that’s kind of in the lobby.

Barasch added, “I billed him for the trip! I felt horrible. I mean it wasn’t my fault, but I felt horrible because nothing was done.”

But two people who told me they have direct and independent information regarding the matter said that Barasch, in direct contradiction of his statements to the federal authorities, gave specific and detailed advice to Stanford and Alvarado. If the accounts of these two individuals are correct, that would mean that Barasch gave misleading and false testimony to the SEC inspector general on a second crucial issue—whether he in fact performed any legal work whatsoever for Stanford, and the nature of that work.

Contemporaneous records from inside Andrews Kurth and from Stanford’s confidential files appear to corroborate in part the accounts of the two people who say that Barasch, contrary to his statements to then SEC Inspector General Kotz, provided legal advice to Stanford.

The advice that these two people say that Barasch gave Alvarado and Stanford was extremely valuable: Barasch told them that if they simply stonewalled the SEC and refused to provide records from Antigua, the SEC would likely just give up because it was difficult to secure such records from institutions overseas and there was no bureaucratic or political will within the SEC to do so. Barasch said he knew this to be the case, specifically because he had closed out investigations of Stanford for just that reason while he was the agency’s chief enforcement officer in Fort Worth.

According to the two sources mentioned above, at one point Barasch had specifically told Stanford’s aides that while he was at the SEC, examiners had attempted to investigate Stanford in 1998.

A photo of Lodis B. Stanford, grandfather of R. Allen Stanford, appears on a book provided to investors by the company. Photo by Dennis Brack/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Back then, Stanford was represented by Wayne Secore, also a former SEC official. Secore, who would not comment for this story, was a former administrator of the SEC’s Forth Worth regional office and had supervised Barasch earlier in his career. SEC records confirm that Secore had represented Stanford, that Stanford did withhold records, and that Secore and Barasch had interacted and likely met to discuss the case.

In explaining in his deposition to the inspector general as to why he shut down one of the several potential investigations of Stanford that had been brought to his attention while at the SEC, Barasch said he did so because it was so difficult for the SEC to get records from overseas: “At one point I called our office of international affairs. It was very, very hard to get the Commission in those days to be aggressive. It’s different after [convicted financial fraud mastermind Bernard] Madoff. OK? It’s a different world. But to push the envelope... I called them, and I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this situation. How hard of it would be to get information in Antigua?’ Almost impossible. OK… It’s an Antiguan bank. Forget about it. Impossible!”

In any case, while Barasch was representing Stanford or, according to his account, billing him and not doing much of anything, Stanford sent a letter to the SEC and a second to the NASD (National Association of Securities Dealers), a securities-industry regulatory organization, saying he would not provide records from Antigua to either. Andrews Kurth billing records indicate that Barasch billed Stanford for reviewing the letters before they were sent. Email correspondence between Stanford and another lawyer working for Stanford appears to indicate that Barasch was involved.

Extraordinarily, Ryan also testified in his May 21 deposition that Barasch had represented Stanford in 2006 without Ryan’s even knowing anything about it at the time.

Ryan was questioned under oath as part of a legal malpractice case that a real estate firm, Walton Houston Galleria Office LP, has filed in a Harris County, Texas, state court against Andrews Kurth because of alleged faulty legal advice that the firm provided to Walton. Andrews Kurth simultaneously represented both Walton and the Stanford Financial Group in real estate transactions between the two—legal advice that, Walton alleged, was skewed because Andrews Kurth wanted to please Stanford and obtain more legal work from him.

Walton also alleged in its lawsuit that Andrews Kurth—through Barasch—knew that Stanford was running a Ponzi scheme and should have warned Walton of this. The real estate firm alleged that it suffered tens of millions of dollars from its deals with Stanford—losses, it claims, that could have been prevented had Andrews Kurth warned the firm of what it knew about Stanford. Andrews Kurth has denied all of these charges.

Portions of Ryan’s deposition became public during oral pretrial arguments in the case on May 29 but have been previously unreported. Attorneys for both sides declined to comment for this story. The trial is scheduled to begin this next Monday, on June 9.

On October 26, 2006, the SEC issued a formal order of investigation in the Stanford matter. Never before had Stanford faced a more direct threat that he was a fraudster rather than a successful billionaire.

Stanford and Alvarado were eager for any additional inside information—besides what King had told them—about what the SEC was up to regarding their investigation of the Houston billionaire and his massive ongoing fraud.

Stanford and Alvarado asked Barasch and Tom Sjoblom, another former SEC enforcement officer who at the time was representing Stanford, to work together to find out what was going on within the SEC’s investigation of their client. Sjoblom and Barasch emailed back and forth, trying to learn whatever they could, internal correspondence between the two men indicates.

On November 27 Barasch called a former colleague at the Fort Worth office, whom he believed to be working on the Stanford case, to find out whatever he could about the investigation. Barasch then also spoke with Jeffrey Cohen, another former colleague at the SEC office.

Barasch later told the SEC’s inspector general that Cohen had said something to the effect of “Spence, can you work on this?” Barasch added that he recalled Cohen telling him: “I’m not sure you’re able to work on this.” Cohen told the inspector general that he could recall little of the conversation.

Barasch’s contacts with Cohen and his other former SEC colleague to learn information about the investigation of Stanford was one of the reasons that the agency disciplined him in 2012 by banning him from appearing before the Commission for a year. In a civil administrative order, the Commission concluded that Barasch had “knowingly communicated with [Fort Worth] staff with the intent to influence them,” which the Commission charged was a violation of federal conflict-of-interest laws. Barasch had violated the law in two ways, the Commission found: “First, Barasch attempted to obtain information from [Fort Worth] staff about the investigation of [the company]. Second, when one of the [Fort Worth] attorneys, in responding to that call, questioned whether Barasch could represent [Stanford Group], Barasch attempted to [falsely] convince him that Barasch’s involvement with the [Stanford Group] matter while at the Commission was minimal.”

After speaking with Barasch, Cohen emailed several of his colleagues, some of whom questioned the propriety and legality of Barasch’s representing Stanford before the agency, according to internal SEC records. More than one contacted the SEC’s ethics counsel, Connor, who warned Barasch for the second time in two years that any representation of Stanford would be illegal and that Barasch and his law firm should stop. Barasch resigned from the case.

Barasch was asked by Kotz whether when he spoke to Connor he disclosed any of the work he had done at the agency regarding Stanford.

Barasch responded: “I don’t remember. I just didn’t remember anything.”

Additional reporting: Amanda Orr, Kiah Berkeley

Editing: Rocco Castoro, Carl Pisano, Harry Cheadle

Read parts onetwo, and three of our investigation of the derailment of the SEC. 


Is a Symmetrical Face Actually More Beautiful?

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Is a Symmetrical Face Actually More Beautiful?

Why Cinema of Transgression Director Nick Zedd Stayed Underground

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Photo of Nick Zedd by Richard Kern from 1984, courtesy of Nick Zedd and Fales Library, NYU

It was a freezing Saturday night in 2004, and Nick Zedd was pushing a shopping cart full of film reels across the Williamsburg Bridge. He was headed to a cheesy Bulgarian-themed nightclub on the Lower East Side where he projected movies once a week. It was Zedd’s only paying job, and he was too broke to afford the cab ride from his home in Brooklyn. His solution was a shopping cart and a wind-whipped, one-and-a-half mile walk over the East River. Zedd is a legend among no-budget directors, called by some the King of Underground Film—a glowering scarecrow with blood-red hair and combat boots. But to the kids flying past him, toward Brooklyn, on fixed-gear bikes and skateboards, Zedd must have looked like a relic from downtown Manhattan’s crusty past, a middle-aged thrift-store rocker going the wrong way, geographically and culturally. When Zedd got to the club that night, the owner fired him.

Relic or not, Zedd is very much a product of downtown New York in the 1980s and 90s. “Living in New York now, it’s impossible to imagine what the scene was like and how fucking crazy it was,” photographer (and VICE contributor) Richard Kern told me. New York had been Zedd’s territory since 1976, the place where he met and collaborated with people like Kern, Jack Smith, and Lydia Lunch—and the only place where he could have made the filmic freak-outs for which he’s famous: They Eat Scum, Thrust in Me, War Is Menstrual Envy. But by the beginning of the 21st century, the city that Zedd had moved to was gone. The director John Waters told me that Zedd had wanted to remain a true “underground celebrity” at a time when “there was no such thing as ‘underground’ anymore.”

Losing his job at the nightclub was just one in a line of setbacks Zedd has suffered in the new millennium. His mother died. His girlfriend and collaborator dumped him. The Adventures of Electra Elf, a satirical public-access superhero show that was probably his most popular work, collapsed. Then he had heart surgery. In 2009, Zedd gave up making films altogether. He was a King of Underground Film without a kingdom. In 2011, at 55 years old, Zedd dropped his life in New York and headed south to that traditional refuge for renegades, desperados, and weirdos: Mexico.

Zedd and I had lived just blocks from each other in Mexico City for more than a year before I knew he was there. In February 2012 one of my friends invited me to what sounded like a fun night dancing to 80s music at a tiny goth club. While the Cure pumped out of the speakers and goth kids danced in ripped fishnets, I watched a series of crazy images projected on the wall: fat women tearing one another’s clothes off, a Hindu goddess caressing a man covered in burns, an amputee floating across the screen. No story line, no “production value,” just a montage of dissonant, entrancing images. At first I wanted to laugh; then I couldn’t look away. At the end of the night, I found Nick Zedd lurking in the DJ booth.

Over the next few months, Zedd and I spent many hours talking. He lived in a sunny apartment in the Condesa neighborhood, Mexico City’s equivalent of the West Village. Hummingbirds flew by the window. “They like to stop at the bird feeder,” Zedd said, deadpan. Zedd didn’t exactly match his surroundings. He sat in a huge, gothic armchair, scowling under his shock of dyed hair, like an aging mixture of Andy Warhol and Sid Vicious. (Women tend to remember Zedd’s scowl. Former porn star Annie Sprinkle gushed to me about his “bad-boy yumminess.”) His punk pallor hadn’t changed much in 30 years. Neither had his thrift-store glam wardrobe.

Zedd was self-effacing and funny in our conversations, but he became sullen when we talked about commercial success: New York was full of people who wanted “to make as much money as possible and conform in whatever way necessary to do so.” Old friends had found fame thanks to “business sense” and “meeting the right people.” Other times Zedd seemed to contradict himself, saying he would “like to make commercially more successful films even if it’s less experimental.”

Zedd has deliberately spent his career on the fringe, creating films that few people can tolerate. So his bitterness about not making money was hard to understand. Was his move to Mexico the ultimate rejection of New York’s yuppification, or was it just a concession to poverty and middle age? Did he truly scorn friends who’d profited in the internet age, or was he jealous of them? Was he well preserved or childish? Deep down, Zedd seemed to think that history had cheated him, and he wanted me to think so too.

Polaroids of Nick Zedd, circa 1985, courtesy of Nick Zedd and Fales Library, NYU

Zedd grew up in average, boring suburbia. He was born James Harding, in 1956 in Maryland, to typical conservative middle-class parents. But transgression lurked just beneath the suburban surface. Zedd’s father worked as a mail-classification specialist, and conservative groups often sent him publications they wanted banned from the postal system due to their “subversive” or “pornographic” nature: everything from pinup calendars and mild S&M to weird stuff featuring women on broomsticks. Zedd’s father kept the “subversive material” and rejected the requests for censorship. Zedd discovered the erotica only after his father died, uncovering the collection in his parents’ basement alongside pamphlets from the Methodist Church and the John Birch Society.

At 14 years of age, he wrote the lead role in a screenplay for a girl he was into. She refused the part. But he made the movie anyway, inspired by shows like Dark Shadows and films like Mothra. Even then he chose to ignore the “actors” in the school drama club. “I’m fascinated by really bad acting,” he told me, “if there’s some kind of passion to it.” It would become a huge part of his aesthetic.

In 1976 Zedd moved to New York to study at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, and the School of Visual Arts, in Manhattan. He found his fellow students boring and repressed. Zedd had wanted to be part of New York’s underground art scene—“freaks and outcasts like myself”—ever since reading about Andy Warhol and the New York Dolls back home in Maryland. He started going to CBGB and Max’s Kansas City and found the punk scene “a very positive development.” Attending school became nothing more than an “excuse to have access to film equipment.”

At Pratt Zedd also met his first serious girlfriend and collaborator, a printmaking and painting student who called herself Donna Death. According to Death, she “promptly took his virginity, although he was older.”

Zedd’s first movie started as a final-year project at Pratt in 1979 and actually became They Eat Scum, a punk zombie/monster/comedy flick that is still perhaps Zedd’s most beloved film. He decided to shoot Scum in Super 8 because the format was cheaper, simpler, and grittier than the usual 16- or 35-millimeter gauges. They Eat Scum was a pretty ambitious project for Super 8, which was normally used for home movies. It included live music, special effects, and numerous overdubs, “techniques that no one had used before in Super 8,” Zedd told me. When Kern saw Scum he knew he wanted to meet Zedd. “That’s a fucking incredible movie for Super 8,” Kern told me. “It’s a feature about these punk-rock zombies destroying New York City. When I saw that I was like, Wow, you can actually make a movie for nothing.”

In fact, Death put up about $2,000 to help make Scum. Zedd’s parents also loaned him money. While no wave filmmakers working just blocks away from Zedd made a point of discarding anything resembling traditional productions, Zedd’s shoots were more like a Lower East Side version of Hollywood. He rented professional lights and placed casting calls in Showbiz and Backstage. He filmed screen tests in which actors performed Ramones and Sex Pistols songs. But “the best actors wanted to get paid,” Zedd told me, so he cast Death as the lead. Other parts went to friends from the punk scene and to fellow Pratt students. Zedd’s parents and their dog even made an appearance as an undead family.

The Underground Film Bulletin, circa 1985, courtesy of Nick Zedd and Fales Library, NYU

They Eat Scum was first shown at Rafik’s O-P Screening Room, a hub for New York independent film, near Union Square. Zedd put ads in SoHo Weekly News and flyers around the neighborhood. Zedd says Rafik’s was full for the premiere. John Waters and no wave director Amos Poe attended. Zedd had never met them before, but they congratulated him on the film. Waters told me They Eat Scum is “maybe my favorite title in cinema history.” For a few months, Rafik’s screened Scum every Saturday at midnight.

Critics were less enthusiastic. The Village Voice’s Amy Taubin called it “uniformly revolting.” “With this film,” she wrote, “I have a sense of a generation gap that I don’t have with the films of [no wave filmmaker] Vivienne Dick.” In 1982 a Manhattan public-access station broadcast Scum. In response, the Wall Street Journal denounced public access in a front-page article. But those types of responses were the goal. “I just wanted to offend everyone,” Zedd said in a 1980 interview. “Because nowadays there’s a new breed of asshole called the punk that replaces the old breed of asshole, the hippie. And soon a new breed of asshole will replace the punk.” At one point Zedd told me that Scum was a parody of the way the “dominant culture” viewed punk at the time, hence the zombies and cannibalism. Later he told me Scum was actually about the death rock movement that was starting up at the time, “the next phase… after punk rock.”

Zedd’s next major film was Geek Maggot Bingo, or: The Freak from Suckweasel Mountain (1983), a horror comedy. Again, Death played one of the leads. Zedd wanted to also use recognized actors to give the film broader appeal. He asked downtown singer and actress Brenda Bergman to play Buffy, a mad scientist’s daughter. Her only compensation was transportation and food. Richard Hell, the musician and writer, lived a block away from Zedd and played the part of the Rawhide Kid, a stumbling ersatz cowboy. “He was the first actor I ever paid,” Zedd told me. “He had to get $50 a day.”

Geek played well at underground clubs like St. Marks Cinema and Danceteria. After a few successful screenings, Zedd was able to pay back the money Death had lent him. “I actually thought that film would be a big commercial success,” Zedd told me, “which is absurd. We showed it to a lot of distributors who walked out on it.”

By the time Geek came out, Zedd had broken up with Death and found a new lover, Lydia Lunch, who became a less willing muse. Lunch was another Lower East Side celebrity, fronting the noise band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and acting in movies by Beth B and Vivienne Dick. Then Lunch traveled to London. “Everywhere she went,” Zedd told me, “she had new guys waiting in the wings. By the time I got to London, a month later, she had already essentially replaced me.” Zedd spent a month in London following Lunch around with a camera, basically filming their breakup. He turned the footage into The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983). It features a voice-over that Lunch told me was “a fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone recording” that she had taped and mailed to Zedd. “That he was bold enough to come and track me down anyway,” she said, “is a testament to his stubborn dedication to his art.”

The Underground Film Bulletin, circa 1985, courtesy of Nick Zedd and Fales Library, NYU

Zedd is sometimes grouped together with more familiar no wave filmmakers from the same era. But no wave was largely about copping the unscripted, realistic cool of French movies from the 60s. Zedd had more of an affinity for the campy midnight-movie scene that John Waters came out of. Zedd knew no wavers like Beth and Scott B and Jim Jarmusch, but he never felt part of the group. “They all seemed to live in SoHo,” he told me, “and they seemed to have more money.” Zedd wasn’t enthusiastic about no wave films, either. “The main interest in them was based on the fact that most of the performers were in bands,” he said.

To Zedd, no wave was a press creation. In 1977, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman published an influential essay about downtown filmmakers titled “No Wavelength.” Zedd became convinced he would end up an outsider. The Voice’s subsequent lack of support for They Eat Scum only confirmed his anxiety.

“I had a feeling that because Hoberman had decided to group [the no wave crowd] together, I would then be excluded. Which is what occurred,” Zedd said.

That feeling of isolation changed when he met Kern. It was 1984. The two were at a screening for Beth B, who was dating Zedd at the time. Zedd remembers that Kern wanted to make his own movies and asked Zedd lots of technical questions.

Kern had bought a Super 8 camera with money from selling pot. Zedd still didn’t have his own equipment, so he suggested they work together. (Zedd “goes for that financial advantage whenever he can,” Kern explained.) Zedd wanted to make a movie in which he would play two characters who have sex with each other. The result was an eight-minute, co-directed short called Thrust in Me (1985): A depressed girl (played by Zedd) slits her wrists; then her boyfriend (also Zedd) comes home and gives himself a blowjob with the body. Kern said most of the ideas were Zedd’s. Kern came up with “the giant cumshot in the face and the disposal of the body.” Unlike some other collaborators, Kern never found Zedd hard to work with. They made one more short together, Kern’s King of Sex (1986), in which Zedd again played both the male and the female lead. Zedd was also featured in other Kern films: Woman at the Wheel (1985) and Submit to Me Now (1987). These films coincided with a brief period when Zedd experimented with walking around the Village in drag. (He and Kern had a falling out in the late 80s but have since made up.)

Kern said that during these years he and Zedd “did everything together,” including “tons of drugs.” “We had very similar worldviews.” Unlike Kern, Zedd “was like one of those magic people, always able to walk away from drugs.” Zedd did have a tendency to get in fights at bars, hitting people out of the blue with bottles and two-by-fours. Zedd’s recurring problems with the cops inspired his 1987 film Police State, in which a punk character played by Zedd gets his dick cut off by a police interrogator, played by Rockets Redglare.

By the mid 80s, Zedd had also met filmmakers Tommy Turner and Manuel DeLanda and felt that he was finding more like-minded artists. He had always wanted to be part of a movement: It had worked for the no wavers, and for the dadaists and surrealists whom Zedd admired. Searching the dictionary, Zedd settled on transgression as the right label for their work. (Other people claim that Zedd reappropriated the word from Amy Taubin’s scandalized 1979 review of They Eat Scum, in which she described the film as “transgressive.”)

In 1985, Zedd published a 438-word essay titled “The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto,” which reads in part:

    We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again... that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at... There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined.

The manifesto appeared under the pseudonym Orion Jericho in the Underground Film Bulletin, a zine that Zedd wrote and illustrated to publicize filmmakers of the transgressive school and other underground auteurs. The cinema of transgression may be Zedd’s greatest legacy: Zedd, Kern, David Wojnarowicz, and other filmmakers collaborated and did group screenings under the transgression label. Zedd said, “I think [the other filmmakers] were grateful for the attention they were getting as being considered part of something bigger.”

Zedd produced some of his most “transgressive” works in the 90s. War Is Menstrual Envy (1992), Why Do You Exist? (1998), and Ecstasy in Entropy (1999) have almost no narrative or dialogue. Zedd featured performers like Annie Sprinkle, the World Famous *BOB*, Kembra Pfahler, and Taylor Mead, and focused on images of large women, amputees, boys carving words in their chests with razor blades—the kind of imagery that can keep you from dancing to your favorite Gang of Four song in a crowded Mexico City club. Shock was important but not the final goal. Zedd wanted that shock to force the audience to look more honestly at the “freaks” on screen. This is why Zedd thinks most underground filmmakers from his generation don’t deserve their “cutting-edge” label. Their protagonists are conventionally sexy; their female characters “all look like models.” “No amputees, no fat women,” Zedd said. “And they’re all white.”

The Underground Film Bulletin, circa 1985, courtesy of Nick Zedd and Fales Library, NYU

The ten years before he moved to Mexico were Zedd’s most productive, despite their turmoil. In 2000, he met the woman who became his longest-tenured collaborator: Reverend Jen, the self-proclaimed “Sex Symbol for the Insane,” and founder of the Lower East Side’s everyone-gets-a-perfect-ten anti-slam scene. Jen was 16 years younger than Zedd, but like him she had been born in suburban Maryland, had changed her name (from Jen Miller), and had a taste for low-budget 70s television and awkward acting. Before long the two were dating and collaborating on shorts like Lord of the Cockrings. Their biggest project became The Adventures of Electra Elf, a faux-cheesy, 70s-throwback superhero show. Jen played spandex-clad Electra Elf. Jen’s Chihuahua played Electra’s sidekick, Fluffer. They battled villains like Bi-Polar Bear and Pastor Fred Faggart.

In many ways Electra Elf was Zedd’s greatest success. Starting in 2004, it ran for a total of 20 half-hour episodes. Despite the show’s paltry budget, it drew appearances from art-world luminaries like Taylor Mead and developed a cult following. Zedd thought of Electra Elf as a G-rated kids’ show, and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network originally aired it after school. The network quickly reconsidered and switched the show to a 1 AM slot, but it remained an enthusiastic supporter. People shouted, “I love you, Electra Elf!” to Jen on the subway. It was far from the cinema of transgression, but Zedd liked the lighthearted direction his art was taking. It was campy and cutting.

But Jen and Zedd clashed on set. He suspected she wrote torture scenes to indulge her sadomasochism. Jen told me Zedd was “dictatorial” and a “sociopath.” Their romantic relationship was just as rocky. Jen never trusted Zedd after finding journal entries in which he described making out with Italian horror-flick babe Asia Argento. Jen had a group of obsessive followers (“They were great for crowd scenes,” Zedd told me) who increasingly ostracized Zedd. After a series of breakups, Jen split with Zedd for good in 2006. Somehow they continued working on Electra Elf.

Zedd was well into his 40s, but his starving-artist lifestyle had barely changed since he arrived in New York. To pay the bills, he held a series of odd jobs over the years: working as a clerk and bouncer at a gay-porn store called the Male Box on 42nd Street, driving food trucks on the set of “some Ron Howard movie,” driving a cab, DJing at burlesque clubs, writing a screenplay for Mr. Kim, owner of Kim’s Video & Music.

His only regular job during the Electra Elf years was VJing at the nightclub Mehanata, which also went by the more descriptive English name, the Bulgarian Bar. But the gig became a nightmare: Zedd’s free drinks were revoked, his pay was cut from $100 a week to $50 (hence the shopping cart full of films over the Williamsburg Bridge), and the club DJs unwaveringly played the same Eastern European pop songs night after night. Zedd was fired in 2004. The club’s owner humorlessly accused him of always showing the same films.

Meanwhile, just getting people to see his films required huge amounts of time. He never had an agent or representation. It’s easy to forget what a challenge the indie-film process was in the pre-YouTube and pre-Vimeo age. The kind of movie that Zedd or Kern made in the 80s might get screened only once. If you didn’t read the right zine, you’d never find out about it. When it wasn’t being screened there was no way to see it. Starting in the mid 80s, Zedd was able to sell a trickle of tapes through mail-order companies and at local video stores when he was out of town. He spent endless hours copying tapes on a pair of VCRs that frequently broke down.

By the 2000s Zedd was regularly screening films at places like Anthology Film Archives and selling DVDs on his website. But while underground contemporaries like Kern, Jarmusch, and Waters had gained financial stability, even wealth, by reinventing themselves for a mainstream audience, Zedd had never found ways to profit from his films. For Zedd, being a “mainstream filmmaker” who had to find “a lot of money and an established actor” was “out of the question.”

“He certainly had no desire to cross over into Hollywood,” Waters told me. “He usually hates even the successful independent movies.” Waters is a dedicated fan of all Zedd’s films, books, and TV work. The two would often see each other in New York and at Waters’s annual Christmas party. And Waters assured me that Zedd’s bad attitude isn’t mere late-career disgruntlement. “He was always angry,” Waters said. “He wears anger like a good haircut. He’s pissed, cute, and nuts.”

Nick Zedd and his son, Zerak, at their home in Mexico City. Photo by Alicia Vera

The same year he was fired from the nightclub, Zedd’s mother died. It was an even bigger blow than losing his father a few years before. Zedd had avoided showing his parents many of his films—which were “designed to offend people like them”— but they had always supported him as an artist.

There was a void in Zedd’s life, but he was too old to go back to picking up girls at bars. Then he met Monica Casanova, a Mexican artist living in New York. The two began dating. When he was with Casanova and her teenage daughter, Zedd felt like he had a family for the first time since coming to New York.

Electra Elf finally stopped production in 2009. Jen told me that she and Zedd “could no longer stand to be within five feet” of each other. That winter, Zedd suffered an attack of bronchitis and a severe flu. A doctor told Zedd he had a malfunctioning heart valve. He had to undergo surgery.

Worst of all, New York had turned into a place Zedd no longer recognized. In his view the change started with the rising rents and quality-of-life “cleanup” of the Giuliani era, when Zedd abandoned Manhattan for Williamsburg. Zedd believed that the truest art was made underground, on the fringes, away from the “mind-controlling” influence of market forces. But by the 2000s Zedd was convinced that the cycle of new underground scenes that had always rejuvenated art in New York was grinding to a halt. He felt he was “struggling to continue producing art in a counterculture that was disappearing.” The Lower East Side and Williamsburg were more “faux bohemian than cutting edge.” Despondent, Zedd temporarily gave up making movies altogether.

Zedd likes Marcel Duchamp’s slogan “The great artist of tomorrow will go underground,” and during our interviews he repeated it to me often enough that I wondered whom he was trying to convince. In 2010 Casanova took Zedd to Mexico City, her home turf. Mexico looked like a place where Zedd might be able to afford more of the comfort he needed and still stay in the Duchampian underground. But he was too broke to make a move.

Liberation came in the form of New York University’s Fales Library, which was building a “Downtown Collection” to document New York’s underground art scene from the 1970s to the 1990s. Richard Hell and Amos Poe had sold collections of papers and ephemera to the library. Zedd had been hauling his own assortment of letters, artwork, and retro porn between storage facilities and apartments for decades. Fales offered him more money for his collection than Zedd had ever made before. He accepted. I asked Zedd if he found it ironic that he had sold his collection to NYU, which many people see as a primary force in downtown Manhattan’s gentrification. “I figured if they were forcing me to move out of New York, at least I could get them to pay me for it,” he said.

In 2011, after the sale, Zedd and Casanova moved to Mexico City. Their son, Zerak, was born there later that year. Zedd says that after Williamsburg’s ugliness and high rents, his neighborhood in Mexico City is a beautiful place where “it’s hard not to be happy.” He spends most of his time painting and doing laundry for Zerak.

And his career might be entering something like a revival. In 2011 Mexico City’s Macabro Festival presented a retrospective of his films. The next year, he read from his memoirs to a packed house at Mexico City’s only English-language used bookstore. In 2013 art-house cinemas in Brooklyn and Mexico City held workshops and festivals on Zedd and the cinema of transgression.

And he’s started making movies again. The last time we spoke, Zedd told me he was raising funds for a new feature-length film called Love Spasm. The way he described it, the film sounded like a Zedd version of a romantic comedy. In the meantime, new odd jobs pay the rent: teaching film and English classes. He says his students are mostly bored or hostile, but that sounds about right for Zedd.

I Got Drunk at the Sesame Street Gala and Met Cookie Monster

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When you’re an aspiring journalist/writer/reporter/editor/media person, you’ll take whatever job comes your way. Some of those jobs are red carpet reporting at galas, movies premieres, fashion week parties—you get the idea. It sounds so much fancier than it actually is. It’s the kind of scene that leaves you contemplating your self-worth as you head back to your apartment across from a U-Haul depot. I know this, because I used to do this.

Luckily, I work for VICE now, and we don’t give a shit whether or not Barbara Walters had plastic surgery. Since I gave up those morally deprecating days, I’ve managed to  ignored any red carpet invites from publicists and avoid all the rich people who say "GEY-luh" instead of "gal-uh"—until I got invited to the Sesame Street gala last week. I wanted to go, because I wanted to know Cookie Monster's weight-loss secrets given his obvious issues with gluttony. And what did Elmo think of Katy Perry's tits?

I grabbed our Photo Editor, Matthew Leifheit, and headed to Cipriani's in Midtown, New York. I can't lie; I was excited, but I knew what was in store: Yes, we'd get to go to a really fancy party with really fancy people in really fancy clothes, but depending on the publicist working that night, we potentially risked trespassing charges, if we walked past the velvet ropes. 

The invite said press check-in was at 5:30 PM and people would arrive at 6 PM. In true form, no one showed up till 6:30. We stood along the velvet rope with other reporters and photographers, like we were in some weird ration line from the Great Depression. Reporters were shoving us with one arm as they were shoving their recorders in the face of whatever celebrity with their other arm. Some were pleading with publicists to ask JUST ONE MORE question to Michael Buble then followed up with, "So, what time do you and your wife go to bed?" (Hey, if people didn't want to read garbage, journalists wouldn't ask garbage questions.)

Since we were only there for the muppets who had to pose with Michael Buble as he made his duck face, we decided to take advantage of the free alcohol floating around. Usually I hate mimosas, because they remind me of wine coolers, and wine coolers remind me of repressed middle school memories. But these mimosas were delicious. Part of me hadn't eaten dinner so I would've salivated over Draino, and another part of me assumed they were made with Abby Cadabby's magic fairy dust. 

I chugged three mimosas, because—like Cookie Monster—I too have issues with gluttony.

By 7 PM, panic started to set in a little bit, because dinner was starting in 30 minutes. I channeled all my inner hustle and grabbed Cookie Monster away from the chaos. It was awkward at first, but that's just what happens when you meet a celebrity of Cookie Monster's caliber and good looks. We chatted for a bit, and—objectively speaking—it was the best six minutes of my life. He then ate my microphone and a little bit of my hand.

You can listen to the full interview or read some of the highlights below or do both.

Cookie Monster on nicknames:

You can Cookie Monster; you can call me Cookie; but please no call me “Kooks.” Me no like that one. You can call me C.M.

On an eating idol:

Me not really have eating idol. Me just humble, cookie-loving monster. Me do me own thing.

On butter:

Butter? Plain butter? That’s disgusting. Me like butter in cookies. Me like butter cookies. Butter main ingredient in cookies, but plain butter—disgusting. Your microphone looking better and better. Maybe you put a little butter on it and we have big party.

On New York vs. Chicago pizza:

Me have tried both. Me love both. They very different. So it really hard to compare. You no can compare.

On his cowardly stance on pizza:

Me love Chicago pizza—and me love New York pizza. You not edit that.

On reporters:

Me love journalists. Me love Chicago journalists and New York journalists. They completely different.

On reading:

Me read New York Times. Me very well-read, cultured monster.

On choosing monster as a career path:

That’s really compelling question. Me was born a monster. Me born Cookie Monster. Me from family of cookie monsters. Long line of cookie monsters.

On losing weight since making cookies a “sometimes” food:

This not recent thing. Me always eat vegetables; me always eat fruit; but me love coooookies. Me in good shape, can you not tell? 

Matthew and I hung out with Elmo and Abby Cadabby for about 13 seconds before dinner started and all the muppets disappeared backstage. At this point, Matthew and I headed to the bar because free champagne. We took selfies in the Elmo camera booth. Then we listened as rich white people congratulated themselves for spending money on an extravagant night in the name of bringing Sesame Street to Afghanistan because where the troops couldn't succeed, the muppets sure as hell could.

Angelina Fanous didn't grow up watching Sesame Street, so maybe that's why she gets drunk at charity events. If you share her love for butter or Cookie Monster, follow her on Twitter.

The Prophet

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The members of the White Army are defined by being Nuer and wear red headbands to avoid shooting one another. Photo by Tim Freccia

Riek Machar can seem like an enlightened Westerner, with his casual English accent, Christian values, and genial dismissal of conspiracies, superstitions, and other things that are not backed up by logic and facts. But in this time of need, Machar must rely on the White Army to rise again to power. And they will oblige him only if a prophet invokes them to appear.

Initial reports of the large, armed tribal groups that came to be known as the White Army appeared in the late 1900s, as Nuers expanded their territory by raiding and burning the villages of Dinka cattle farmers.

Machar first harnessed the power of the White Army when he formed his breakaway SPLA-Nasir faction with his wife Emma McCune in November 1991. Urged on by the prophet named Wurnyang, mobs of armed men left their cattle camps and villages to attack the Dinka. Murder, rape, and pillage flared up around Bor, leaving 3,000 dead. Then the White Army vanished back into the bush, as quickly as they had come, leaving the outside world to wonder what exactly had just happened. Machar refused to take responsibility until his tearful admission ten years later.

A normal army is trained to carefully weigh risk, enemy strength, and secondary impact. The White Army is driven by divine purpose, immune to fear and tactical considerations. Their modus operandi is to attack as a sort of flash mob with spears, clubs, and machetes, driven by a divine confidence in victory that in their minds has been guaranteed by their prophet. Their lack of restraint is usually enough to make opposing armies flee.

The White Army fights in small, clan-like groups that form a larger, overarching structure of ragtag fighters who overwhelm and brutalize their enemy. When given weapons, purpose, targets, and permission—as it appears Machar has afforded them, possibly via Khartoum—the White Army transforms from a mob of cowherds with blunt and bladed objects into a swift and totally unpredictable killing force. The White Army prefers to move and attack on foot to avoid assaults from gunships and artillery—one of the main reasons why the Ugandans used those cluster bombs to decimate the widely spaced groups that were threatening Bor.

The power of the prophecies Ngundeng Bong made to the Nuer at the turn of the past century has positioned the White Army as a critical part of any military or political alliance. When the British made a big deal about returning Bong’s dang, or divine rod, in 2009 to celebrate South Sudan’s move toward independence, Machar kept the magical wooden staff in his vice presidential residence. Machar’s consultation with the latest prophet and commander is done in secret, away from cameras or recording devices.

While we sit under the shade of the trees, Amos explains the odd pressure valve that triggers the White Army. “In the Nuer culture we think everyone is equal, but at the same time Nuer always think they are in charge. The Nuer are always patient; they can take a lot of dirt.

“Since 2005 the Dinka have been getting the good jobs. We didn’t start the fight—they tried to disarm the Nuer in the Tiger presidential guard, and now the White Army will come.”

Machar has more than mass violence on his side; he has religion. Bong foretold that the country will be run by a left-handed Nuer without the traditional tribal marks. Machar is happy to fulfill that prophecy.

As we are sitting there chatting, Machar’s former mortal enemy, General Peter Gadet, strolls up.

Gadet is responsible for having almost destroyed the country of South Sudan before it began—by defecting in spring 2011 and fighting for six months before integrating back into the army as leader of the Eighth Division. Before that he battled with Machar over control of the oil fields. Then, in December, he defected again to Machar and attacked Bor with the White Army and went as far as threatening to attack Juba. The Ugandans managed to stop him. Now he sits in a council of war with Machar, planning their next moves. Their strategy is not spiritual. They are planning to attack the north, marching toward the oil.

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This Guy Wants to Be Berlin's First Weed Van Man

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Oliver on a research trip in Morocco. All photos courtesy of Oliver.

The purchase of marijuana is generally prohibited in Germany, the exception being Berlin's Görlitzer Park, which has long been an oasis for weed consumers and served as a shining example of the capital’s rather lenient drug policy. Throughout the years, the residents of the traditionally left-wing Kreuzberg neighbourhood have co-existed in a kind of deceptive peace with the dealers and buyers frequenting the park, while the police—apart from the occasional raid—have mostly turned a blind eye.

However, the rising number of dealers—most of whom don’t have a residence permit and no other option to make a living than by selling drugs—has led to violence, harassment and increased media attention centred around the area. Last year, the mayor of Kreuzberg, Monika Hermann, proposed the opening of a legal coffee shop in order to get a grip on the situation. The senate rejected the idea, while the tension continues to build and police activity in the park swells.

The latest episode in this back-and-forth has been a YouTube video circulating on German social media for the past few days. The tape features a guy standing in front of a colorful bus, parked in the middle of the Sahara desert, announcing that on June 21, he is going to open a coffee shop in Görlitzer Park. He appears to have carefully considered his plan; he’s got a business registration with the "permit” to sell "Moroccan Hash” and a poster that shows the types of hash he plans to sell. “Come to Görlitzer Park!” he shouts into the camera. “I’ll have shitloads of hash on me!”

The guy’s name is Oliver Becker and he calls himself "an original hemp activist." During a phone call with the German Hemp Association, I was assured that Mr. Becker is serious about his vision. They passed me onto Oliver himself, who at the time was in Morocco, so he could explain his plans in his own words. 

VICE: Hello Oliver, I just watched your video on Youtube. Are you serious?
Oliver Becker: Of course I am serious! This is not a joke, man. I’ve been part of the hemp movement for a long, long time now. For me the 21st of June is the right moment—that’s the day Germany will compete against Ghana [in the World Cup]—and the Görlitzer Park is the right place to start. The grand opening of a coffee shop is the right kind of signal and I am the right person for this. I really want to make big fuss about this: “Holywoodstock"—a holy Woodstock in Berlin.

What is your plan?
I am going to drive my mobile home onto the park's grounds and will put up a sign that says “Mobile Coffee Shop." I even have a sound system. I didn’t register it. I am just gonna go for it.

But, didn’t you also have a business registration?
Yes, indeed! I simply went to the commercial register. I knew that the guy in charge over there is a rather young chap, so I more or less threw him a curve. I could tell that he'd had a night out in the weekend so I said, "I’d like to start a business: import and sale of Moroccan Hash.” He said, "But that’s illegal!” I quickly replied, "Nah, it just requires permission.” And he issued the trade license.

Not bad.
Well, 45 minutes later, the guy rang me up and indicated that he had read up on it and asked me to, please, come back so he could revoke my application. And that's what I did.

You did it?
Yeah, I didn’t want to get the guy into trouble. The application cost me €45 [£36]. With a trade certificate like that, I've got good leeway with the authorities here in Morocco. I’ve got something I can produce to show that I occupy myself with the trade and import of Moroccan hash. Currently, I am also writing a letter to the king of Morocco asking to be received in audience.

Are you not afraid of the Moroccan authorities?
Not in the least. I am not in possession of a single gram. Sure, if I was driving a few kilos around, that would be illegal. But you won't find anything on me. I even stopped smoking it. They could even test my blood and not find anything.

But you said you wanted to import hash to Germany?
That’s my business plan, as specified on the trade certificate. But whether I am going to personally import the shit—that’s a completely different matter. I’ve been part of the hash movement for such a long time that I’ve now got a few contacts in Germany who “deal” with it in larger quantities.

So you are not going to sit on a plane with a few kilos of hash in your luggage?
Of course not. Even if I am driving onto the park grounds, that does not mean—by a long shot—that I am going to have anything on myself or onboard the bus. There could instead be someone in the crowd who would, for instance, hand me something. There are many other options here.

Oliver's bus in the Sahara

What if the police come and arrest you at the park? You've certainly made sure to publicize your plans.
Then I’m going to go on a hunger strike. I require that everything will unfold without violence, no radical lefties throwing stones. I would give in to my arrest. I hope that I will be able to mount enough support for myself to last me until the 50th day [of the hunger strike]—which would be the 9th of August, Berlin's Hemp Parade Day.

You want to go on hunger strike for 50 days?
Yes. I am going to go through with it, even being an insulin-dependent diabetic.

But we should hope that it won't come to this, right?
Sure! I don’t actually believe that it will come to this. I will inform the police about it. I wrote to the mayor of Kreuzberg, and Christian Ströbele, the member of Parliament for Kreuzberg, asking them to forward my contact to the Kreuzberg Chief Constable. I will resist and call upon the Constitution.

This is an act of resistance, then?
Absolutely. This is resistance in the terms of article 20, section 3 of the German Constitution: "Every German has the right to resistance where other means are out of reach." [Editor's note: It's actually section 4] He who is locked into a box for dealing hash is a political prisoner as far as I am concerned. Consider that our commissioner for drugs, Marlene Mörtele, advertises for alcohol. In my mind that’s unacceptable. I resist that.

When 120 legal experts get together to write a letter advocating the legalization of weed to Parliament and nothing, absolutely nothing comes of it, then a citizen must come forward and speak. And that’s what I am doing. I am a professional revolutionary—or evolutionary. I want things to change.

You also aim to make people aware of the publication of your book, right?
Yes, it's titled The Legaliser Autobiography. I have been part of the hemp movement since the early 1990s. In Germany, I was the first wholesale provider of hemp seeds. Unfortunately, I am also partly responsible for the recent rise in the market for artificial lighting—in my eyes that’s not a positive development. I’d like to promote a few ways to push this thing back a step towards nature.

What do you mean?
In order to produce THC under natural conditions, you need a hill. All hemp production areas on earth are in mountains; the Rif Mountains in Morocco, the Himalayas in Afghanistan or Nepal, the Blue Mountains in Jamaica and so forth. With artificial lighting you can simulate that. We’ve achieved THC levels that you will normally only find in mountains between three and four miles high. There, under normal conditions, you can no longer grow any other plants.

All seeds that are currently sold on the market are produced under artificial lighting. I don’t agree with that. I no longer smoke that at all, because it makes you much more lethargic. The main reason of course is to encourage the debate about drugs a bit.

Sounds like an exciting book.
I’ve got many stories to tell. I offer quite a few revelations that some people won't enjoy too much. But I stand with all of what is in there: I am not a criminal, even if I once brought some through the border or sold some here and there. I think a supermarket cashier selling a bottle of whiskey to an 18-year-old is as bad as any drug dealer.

A Girl's Guide to Not Being a Dick This Summer

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Summer is upon us—the season of saying yes to everything you’d normally reject. After-work drinks? Sure. Kissing strangers in broad daylight? Fine. Peeing in your front yard because you lost your house keys in a river? Acceptable. Summer's great because everyone looks hotter, each weekend feels like a school vacation, and the place you live becomes a place to explore rather than endure.

But then you take it too far. Shoes no longer matter, but for some reason, sea-salt hairspray really, really does. You’re late for work so often that people stop being angry and start getting nervous. You wear “gladiator sandals” and tie-dye maxi skirts and stay up all night smashing laughing gas with the kind of guys who spend the winter trying to pick up girls at bus stops. You start listening to reggae. And after a month of reggae, you go temporarily insane.

The truth is, everything seems like a good idea in the summer, when it truly, madly, deeply is not. Here's some advice on how not to be a dick now that the sun's out.

SOCIAL MEDIA
Each season brings with it its own particular variety of social media bullshit. If in spring Instagram was awash with photos of cherry blossoms and girls flagellating themselves for daring to eat a chocolate Easter egg, then summer is going to be Ugg-clad yoga enthusiasts pouting with Frappuccinos (no, it’s still not interesting if they spelled your name wrong, "Melanda") and requesting rides to festivals they can't afford to go to.

In all honesty, if you’re not going to any festivals or exotic locations this summer, it's best to stay the fuck away from social media. Islands in the sun are like giant petri dishes when it comes to spawning Instabraggers, and who can blame anyone for thinking, I’ve spent $1,500 on this vacation—I've earned the right to make everyone at home hate themselves.

If you are lucky enough to be going away, here are a few tips. I'm not going to patronize you by telling you not to "check in" at the airport or photograph your hot dog legs—these are no brainers. Tan-line selfies, on the other hand, are more complicated. Snapchat them to your crush, but there’s really no need to share with everyone—you'll get loads of compliments when you get home anyway.

If you insist on "tastefully bragging" (no such thing) from paradise, avoid provocative hashtags. #LivingTheDream, #SorryNotSorry, and #CasualMonday on pictures of sunsets is 100 percent going to turn your friends into vengeful whispering snake-bitch people.

When it comes to documenting your vacation for posterity, I'd say take it old school. You know what’s fun? Underwater film cameras you buy at the airport. Postcards with tacky 3D blob things on the front. Getting your hair braided. Henna tattoos.

Photo by the author

GIRLY HOLIDAYS
These are largely age-dependent. For example, everything you’re going to regret doing between the ages of 16 and 20 is going to happen on a “girly holiday.” Twenty-one to 24 is the dignified bracket—you and your friends are going to be too broke and overworked to have a real vacation anyway, so you'll just end up going on a long car trip to nowhere soundtracked by Beyoncé. But 25 to 30 is your time to shine—these are the years reserved for the glory of a quarter-life crisis in full thrust, halcyon years in which you'll finally be irresponsible and self-confident enough to spend decent money flying somewhere hot to give a mysterious ethnic stranger a blowjob.

If you’re off on a “girly holiday” this summer, here are a few dickhead things you should avoid:

–Tattoos: If you’re young enough to think, I’ll get a tattoo on a spot where my parents will never see it, then the tattoo is going to be a mistake. If you’re old enough to make your own decisions, then you’re old enough to know you shouldn't let a guy with a ponytail named Manu loose on you with a needle.

–Not eating: It’s hard not to be body-conscious when you’re walking around half-naked all day, but skip lunch and the whiny one in the group is going to annoy you so much she'll be in tears by dinnertime.

–Mopeds: Bicycles are so much cuter and so much less likely to cause a fractured femur.

–Sex on the beach: "Sand gets everywhere" is the clichéd advice. Arguably more persuasive is the advice that, these days, so do people's cameras:

–Penis-shaped straws: There is a picture of me drinking through one of these somewhere on the internet. I haven’t slept soundly for five years.

All that said, it’s fine to give in to some of your “basic bitch” impulses on a girly holiday. Vitamin D intake from actual sunlight is going to make you much happier, so take advantage of that feeling by opening your mind a little too. Do dance on the bar to Avicii, do wear a neon bikini, do rent a pedalo, do read Time Traveller’s Wife. Cultural snobbery is an exhausting thing to try to pack in a suitcase.

COUPLES HOLIDAYS
Couples holidays are essentially all about finding the right time and place to poop. If you struggle to do this around your significant other because you think he'll react to you taking a shit like you just set his grandma on fire, then you're going to need some subterfuge.

Let's face it: You're not gonna go seven days on a diet of foreign water and fresh shellfish without losing control of the wheel once or twice. If you'd rather not be a grouchy dick to your lover while sharing an expensive hotel room, you need to be chill about getting rid of "that bloated feeling."

Once this is out of the way, you're free to have a good time. I mean, you're on a vacation, with the person you love. What could be better? Use your time wisely by being as disgustingly coupley as possible—lovingly feed each other pasta, coyly splash each other in the pool, go PDA-wild while your bitter single friends at home aren't there to sneer. Just keep the vom-fest off social media, OK?

Photo by Jason McDonald

FESTIVAL CHIC
At some point, people stopped dressing like it was summer and started dressing like they were constantly at a festival. Paris Hilton can get away with it because her whole life is a festival. Yours... isn't, so let's make this the year we lay the idea of "festi-chic" to rest.

Only acceptable at festivals:
Underbutt: This is when your hot pants sit halfway up your butt cheek. It’s a really great way to avoid tan lines and let everyone know that you’re DTF. The problem is that it’s a look mostly worn by 15-year-old girls so it could very easily attract the wrong type of psycho—y'know, the kind of guy who'd ask you how old you were when you lost your virginity on the first date.

Not acceptable anywhere:

–Fedoras: It's the patriarchy's favorite hat. Women who wear fedoras do so because they hate themselves.

–Flower crowns: Leave these to Florence Welch and whoever's job it is to dress the dead prostitutes in True Detective.

–Dip-dyed hair: This actually looks OK until you realize that everyone has it and your festival campsite has turned into a weird sequel to Being John Malkovich in which all of the characters look like Haim.

DRINKING ON WEEKNIGHTS
This, unfortunately, is a double standard. If you are a student, you should really drink and smoke and snort and puke, then do it all over again, for days on end until the world is dark and cold again.

You need to get it out of your system, because once you're part of the workforce, nothing screams DICK louder than showing up to the office in last night's makeup looking and smelling like a clown who got hit by a train.

Photo by the author

DATING
All girls want a boyfriend in the winter, when you can’t afford heating and can’t be bothered to leave the house. But, weirdly, the girls I’ve known to be October's most enthusiastic boyfriend-hunters are the first to callously toss aside their loved ones when an opportunity arises to straddle a bearded bear on the beach after a pocketful of MDMA.

Let 'em. Girls have a way harder time feeling as confident as boys in the summer because they’re expected to get a wax every two weeks, be a realistic shade of bronze, and look good in short shorts. Once we actually achieve this Kendall Jenner–like appearance we might as well have some fun with it.

Girls: Go wild, be as big a dickhead as you want this summer—just avoid hooking up with boys who are dickheads.

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter.

Beach romance photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete (top), Amdraci (middle) and Javier Izquierdo (bottom).

Montreal's Controversial Anti-Protest Laws Have Led to a Bunch of Class-Action Lawsuits

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Montreal police image via VICE doc "Protesting Police Brutality in Montreal."
As arrests in Montreal under controversial anti-protest laws rise, so do the attempts to challenge police authority.

Two years after protests spurred on by the Quebec student strikes rocked the province's streets, Montreal police have continued to carry out mass arrests while doling out huge fines. As the number of arrests rise, challenges to two of the most controversial laws continue to weave through the courts, and class action filings continue to pile up.

“We see a complete lack of interest among politicians to even discuss the issue,” Julien Villeneuve says. Julien is a college philosophy teacher and also the man behind Anarchopanda.

I last saw Villeneuve on the streets of Montreal, sans panda costume, in a small police kettle at this year's anti-capitalist May Day demonstration. Montreal police didn't let the march get far before surrounding protesters and handing out $637 tickets for demonstrating without presenting police with an itinerary beforehand. Protesters had adopted a new strategy for May Day this year, organizing various meeting points one after another throughout the city, in order to avoid one large group being arrested. It certainly worked to the degree that some were able to protest longer than last year, when the original group of 447 people was surrounded after about 15 minutes of walking. But police still used their newfound powers to hand out tickets to 146 people, including Villeneuve.

That's the common scene now on the streets of Montreal under bylaw P-6, which turned two years old in May.

A refresher: amendments to the P-6 bylaw brought during the height of the student strike forces protesters to give their itinerary to police in advance for approval, and also bans anyone from covering their face during protests, under threat of being mass arrested and handed a $600 ticket. This bylaw, along with article 500.1 of the highway safety code (which more or less states that people cannot block traffic) was little-known before its use on demonstrators in 2011, and has become the bane of civil community organizers in the city.

While they have been trying to find creative ways to avoid mass arrests and hefty fines in the streets, challenges in the courts still hope to overturn the laws.

Of truckers and marchers

One of the court challenges goes back to just before students took to the streets in mass numbers in 2012. On March 15, 2011, 258 people were surrounded and ticketed for blocking the street underarticle 500.1. It was one of the few times the law had been used since its adoption in 2000, when the Quebec government brought it in with the specific goal of stopping recent highway blockades, notably carried out by discontent truckers.

The charter challenge was filed in August 2012, alleging that the legislation violates the freedom to expression and the freedom to peaceful assembly. The challenge hit a speedbump this past April, though, when it was rejected by municipal court judge Richard Starck. The Ligue des droits et libertés (Quebec Civil Liberties Union) quickly organized an appeal of the decision, pointing to what it sees as several egregious errors in the ruling. “Even though the judge recognized the right to protest is protected by the [Canadian and Quebec] charters, he has imposed limits that cannot be justified,” said Nicole Fillion, coordinator with the Ligue, in an interview with VICE.

In their appeal, among other issues they point to the fact that while the law says that it cannot be applied to protests that have been granted authorization, neither the Montreal police, nor the City of Montreal lawyers, nor the Attorney General of Quebec could say that there is a body that could even grant that authorization. The fact no one can actually grant an authorization for a protest presents an absolute restriction on the right to protest and should clearly invalidate the law, said Fillion. “With this decision, they are saying that we can only protest on sidewalks,” she added.

The appeal also argues the judge selectively interpreted the original debates justifying the legislation. While the law was adopted in order to ensure that roadblocks did not hinder the delivery of food and provisions to a city, the ruling expands that justification to include the “efficient and safe use of public roadways,” a clear misinterpretation of the law, according to the Ligue.

They are still waiting for a decision on whether their motion to appeal is accepted, after which they will receive their next hearing date.

“We could just keep adding to the case”

As for P-6, while opposition politicians at Montreal's city hall still argue for police's beefed-up powers to be revoked, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre has remained adamant: “The Coderre administration supports the police force... So long as I'm mayor of Montreal, P-6 is here to stay,” he said at a city council meeting at the end of May.

But the Panda's charter challenge is expected to be heard this winter, and Villeneuve believes it will force Coderre to eat his words. While the challenge was originally filed in 2012, the case has only gotten stronger over time, says Villeneuve, and so he and his lawyers decided to file an amended challenge last fall.

Originally, he said, the filing simply theorized that police would multiply their use of P-6 to mass arrest protesters in the future. “And that's what we've seen happen,” Villeneuve explained. “Actually, we could just keep adding and adding to it, but after a certain point you just need to stop [and file],” he said.

The case is set to be heard in December 2014, when Villeneuve and his lawyer will argue that articles 2.1 and 3.2 of the bylaw, which, respectively, require protesters to provide an itinerary to police and to demonstrate without their faces covered, violate the freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, and an individual's right to liberty and security of the person, under both the Canadian and Quebec charters.

Another challenge to P-6 will be heard in September, when community organizer Jaggi Singh, who is a member of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (CLAC), will head to court to challenge his arrest at the June 9, 2012, demonstration against the Montreal Grand Prix. For his part, he will be challenging the entirety of P-6, not simply the powers of articles 2.1 and 3.2 added in 2012. He sees the legal route as one tactic among several, but his faith isn't in finding a solution in front of the courts.

“I don't want to get people's hopes up,” he said in an interview. “P-6 has been challenged [in its entirety] before...But it's worth trying again.” Instead, he says, he believes that P-6 will only really be defeated in the streets. Over 86 groups  put out by the CLAC pledging to refuse to abide by P-6.

Class-action

Finally, some Montrealers are trying to go on the offensive, filing class-action lawsuits against the Montreal police, arguing, among other things, that their mass detentions in kettles under P-6 and 500.1 are illegal and arbitrary, and therefore violate their rights to liberty and security of the person. So far, all ten class-actions filed are still waiting to be authorized by the courts, so it's still unclear whether they will move forward. If they do though, with almost 2,000 possible participants, it could theoretically cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The most recent class-action was filed on behalf of participants of the 2014 annual march against police brutality, where again protesters were rounded up just as the march began, and given tickets under P-6. The Coalition Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP), which organized the march, hailed this class-action as a first, since it is accusing Montreal police of violating the rights of protesters due to political profiling. While it's still unknown whether this is an argument the courts will agree with, for the COBP it goes to the heart of the problem: that P-6 grants police arbitrary power to decide which protests can go forward and which cannot.

In a posting on their site, they point to the fact that, since March 2013, at least 60 protests have been allowed to go forward in Montreal without authorization under P-6, while another 17 have been stopped. Montreal police have argued that under certain circumstances they will allow protests that violate P-6 to continue, but no official regulations have been produced. As the COPB also points out, demonstrations like this year's May Day and anti-police brutality marches were stopped before they even really started, meaning there was nothing to prove they would have proceeded differently than any of the demonstrations that the police tolerated.

“What we've seen is that you can defy P-6 unless they are organizing in name of COBP and CLAC,” Singh said.

Trivialization of the right to protest

Also concerning to civil liberties advocates is the power that P-6 seems to grant the police to arbitrarily decide which protests are good and which are bad. “It establishes unreasonable limits that give police the power to decide which protests can go forward and which cannot,” Fillion said. “They're supposed to apply the law, not make judgement calls,” Villeneuve added.

It all adds up to an ongoing trivialization of the right to protest, say both Villeneuve and Fillion. The fact that there's been no further debate at city hall, despite opposiiton to the bylaw from not just "anarchists like us" (as Villeneuve puts it), but also from groups like the Quebec Bar Association, shows just how low protecting the right to freedom of expression is on the list of politicians' priorities, Villeneuve says.

“They don't seem to care about civil liberties in general.” 


The Rise of the Sheikha

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Image of Rabia Basri, a female Sufi saint, via Wikicommons

In 1980, Muzaffer Ozak al-Jerrahi, the 19th Grand Sheikh of the Istanbul-based Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi Order, sat in the old Masjid al-Farah in SoHo before two of his disciples. He’d called them there to place the Taj upon their heads, the crown of his order that would imbue them with the authority to lead and spread his lineage’s three-centuries-old teachings into America. First he laid the Taj upon Lex Hixon, a spiritualist and author (and also an initiate of Eastern Orthodox, Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, and Zen orders), thereafter known as Nur al-Anwar al-Jerrahi, who would lead the new American Sufi community for the next 15 years. But he also placed it upon Philippa De Menil, thereafter Fariha al-Jerrahi, an oil heiress and head of the then-floundering Dia Arts Foundation, and the first woman Sheikh Muzaffar had ever bestowed the power of leadership upon.

Sheikh Muzaffer’s elevation of Fariha was, according to his own universalist values, not unexpected. Although Sufi orders run the gamut from conservative to liberal, most of these mystical, tightly-knit and structured communities have a history of inclusiveness, and Muzaffer’s tenure saw an exceptional openness amongst the sometimes traditionalist Halveti-Jerrahis. But in the wider world of Islamic religious communities, it was an unusual and potentially alienating move. And it only escalated when, after establishing a new offshoot of the Halveti-Jerrahis, the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order (based out of TriBeCa), and establishing communities of followers across America and Mexico, Sheikh Nur died in 1995, leaving the community under the ultimate guidance and leadership of Sheikha Fariha. Before then, Fariha had been an important transmitter and member of the Jerrahi community, but Sheikh Nur had been the central pole of the organized Sufi structure. In becoming a leader, says Tom Rippe, member of the order for the past two decades and representative of the Sheikha who responded on her behalf, she became the facilitator and guide of a diverse community on their journey toward a connection with God. “She becomes what that person needs in the moment,” said Ripp. “This takes great clarity, strength, character, love, and humility.”

The Islamic world has (contrary to some silly assumptions) known many influential female social and political leaders, as far back as the time of the prophet Muhammad—and his quite intimidating wives Aisha and Khadija. And today, even in what are often considered (not without justification) extremely patriarchal modern Muslim nations, there are women (think: Iran’s pre-Revolution chief judge and post-Revolution activist lawyer Shirin Ebadi or Saudi director and provocateur Haifaa al-Mansour) raising some notable hell and gaining recognition for it. Despite all that, though, says Oxford University Professor and recent author of Women, Leadership and Mosques Masooda Bano, it’s always been rare to find women in Islamic religious leadership. “There’s not too much variation across regions and populations,” says Bano. “For the past four or five centuries at least, across the world, [Islamic religious leadership] has been a very male affair.”

That’s not to say there’s been no role for women in Islamic religious institutions. “Over the last 30 years or so,” says Bano, “more women have entered the madrassa system [of religious education], but mostly teaching women or the husbands of students.” In some madrassas, the number of female religious scholars has reached up to 50 percent. But at the higher levels, and in the leadership of prayers, mosques, and communities, it’s still mainly men. (If that sounds a bit like the Catholic clergy, it is and it isn’t: Save for some sects, there’s no central religious authority telling Muslim communities their leaders must be men. It’s more the force of religious interpretation, custom, and consensus.)

Some argue that far back in Muslim history, female religious leadership was accepted, if not common. Rippe believes that “female leadership has always existed,” although, “mostly because of the [prevailing global cultural] patriarchy, it has been somewhat hidden.” But within the past 200 years at least, the exception to male domination has been, according to Bano, Sufi groups and the informal communities forming within and parallel to them. Rippe generally agrees that it’s often easier to find female leadership in the Sufi world, given its history of inclusiveness of marginalized groups and frequent embrace of antinomian practices, but he cautions that there are many conservative orders as well.

The Sheikha herself has claimed that, even in the Sufi milieu, Sheikhs Muzaffer and Nur showed a great deal of bravery in opening the way for female involvement in Islam in America. Within her own order, says Rippe, her leadership has always been accepted and was never the subject of any dispute or consternation. “People back in Istanbul do not always agree,” he admits. Membership did drop around the time of her rise, according to Rippe, but he believes this was due to unrelated factors, like the general ebb of those who attended due to a unique or personal relationship with Sheikh Nur and his style of leadership that they felt any other leader might lack.

Sheikha Fariha and her Order believe that there is value in female leadership in the Islamic world. The head of their Mexican community is a woman as well: Sheikha Amina Teslima al-Jerrahi. Part of their interest in powerful Muslim women stems from their universal embrace of all Abrahamic faiths, mystical traditions, and backgrounds. But another part of it comes from their belief that we’ve entered the Age of the Female. According to Rippe, this refers to “coming into balance, which we’re out of now. It is a patriarchal world we live in, in almost every way. The world is out of balance partially due to the disregard for women and feminine qualities… In general, these traits are thought of as weak and undesirable by man. But a whole person, in Sufism, a ‘true human being,’ must have these qualities.”

That belief hasn’t led Sheikha Fariha and her Order to go out and advocate for women’s involvement in Islamic religious leadership, though. As a small community, they’re rarely the subject of much attention, and that’s fine by them. They keep a low profile, allowing those who seek and agree with them to find them. It’s not an illogical move, given that the few female religious leaders who have entered the public eye leading mixed-gender groups have faced castigation and controversy, like Amina Wadud, an American Islamic scholar who led coed public Islamic prayers in 1994 and 2005 and faced substantial threat and criticism. 

But the low profile isn’t really about fear. Sufi groups are niche by nature. “Not many people are into what we do,” says Rippe. What they do involves devotional worship replete with chants and dances, equality, and openness. “The seeker must visit many groups and teachers to see where they might thrive spiritually,” adds Rippe. Some walk in and complain about their activities or their leadership, but then they leave. And that’s fine and over with.

It’s unlikely that small and soft-spoken Sufi communities will lead the charge for a push to place women in Islamic religious leadership. But Bano believes there may be change coming. “We see many mosques and madrassas with movements for re-evaluation by educated and independent women, especially in the informal [small, part-time group] dynamic,” says Bano. They don’t want to slavishly imitate Western ideals of female empowerment, though. They’re in the tough process of hacking out their own space within the context of Islam, and bit-by-bit these small communities holding true to their own ideals may reach critical capacity. If that happens, perhaps Rippe and the Order will have truly ushered in the Age of the Female.

Kids Telling Dirty Jokes: Season Two - Trailer

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This summer, our favorite little knee-biters are back and better than ever. We pulled these pint-sized punks off Craigslist and convinced them to say some of the most crude, nasty, and downright offensive jokes we could find.

We'll be hitting you with a new episode featuring these vile creatures every Friday, starting next week. Keep an eye out.

Comics: Band for Life - Part 16

VICE News: Here's What Happens When Hackers Send a SWAT Team to Your House

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In recent years, a small amount of hackers and gamers have been "Swatting"—anonymously reporting fake hostage situations, shootings, and other violent crimes so elite police units (like SWAT teams) will bust down the doors of unsuspecting people's homes.

Swatting is a dangerous and expensive prank. It's also easy to pull off. With SWAT teams and paramilitary gear becoming the norm across America, these calls have predictably chaotic results.

Who Needs Chefs When We Have Digital Cooking Machines?

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Who Needs Chefs When We Have Digital Cooking Machines?

Twitter Picked Up the Slack for Local Media In Moncton

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Photo of alleged cop-killer, Justin Bourque (left), with a friend, a few of his weapons, and bullets scattered in front of him. Image via Facebook
A desperate manhunt for the suspected killer of three RCMP officers in Moncton, New Brunswick ended late last night after a terrifying 28 hours of uncertainty. Moncton, and millions of others outside of the rarely newsworthy city, followed along closely. At first the crowd was desperate for information, then fearful for developments as the searching stretched into days, and finally, we were able to celebrate that no one else had to die. Thanks to Twitter, the population of Moncton grew from almost 70,000 to a virtual population of millions—myself included.

Residents of north Moncton had very little information to go on at first, other than scared tweets from neighbours: a shooter was staking their quiet suburban neighbourhood. Cops had been shot, some might be dead.

In the end, three officers were killed; two others are alive but in the hospital.

Justin Bourque, age 24, was armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a six-shot pump-action shotgun, which was determined by Global News. Decked in camouflage with two guns slung across his shoulders, he made it clear he was dangerous.

The people of Moncton had to wait hours to get that scary information, and really, it wasn't much.

The media scene in Moncton isn't like the cities where mass shootings have happened in the past, and it showed badly. At 7:20 p.m, calls were made to the police about a man wielding guns in the Hildegarde neighbourhood. Shortly after, accounts spread across Twitter like wildfire by people watching the firefight saying officers were down. Television and radio was surprisingly useless.

It wasn't until 9:12 p.m that the RCMP published on Twitter that there was a shooting in the area, and the press became more visible. At 10:17 p.m, the alleged shooter was identified—on Twitter—and it wasn’t until 10:54 p.m that it was confirmed three officers had died, two others were in the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, but no names were given.

These were some of the only tweets that early in, and undeniably the most accurate.

The local hospital in Moncton tweeted at 9:27 p.m that they had received two patients with gunshot wounds, and a third later on at 10:56 p.m. It was a saving grace that they were self-sufficient online. With a hospital in code orange (an emergency status reserved for an event that results in massive casualties), being able to react quickly and get the word out are essential to saving lives. They didn't know how many bodies would be brought in, but they were ready and they made sure people knew.

That's the value of immediacy in news. Don't forfeit accuracy, but getting information out to people as quickly as possible when someone is shooting officers in the streets is day-one stuff.

The onus of coverage falls to the local resources: radio, television, and print—especially in a digital age when everything can be published immediately. For Moncton, that would be the Times and Transcript. As the local paper, they're expected to know what's happening, as it's happening and get the word out fast. Police scanners in the office aren't some sick kind of elevator music journalists just like to have going in the background.

So why did they not have anything online for people to see until 9 p.m, which only told people what they already figured out? “At least three police officers shot in Moncton—manhunt underway,” read the tweet.

Their staff were out on the streets, interviewing people and following what was happening, but no one was tweeting. Nothing was out for one reason: paywall.

Viktor Pivovarov, a photographer who snapped the horrifying photo of Justin Bourque patrolling Moncton with heavy rifles, could be said to have done great journalism—the type that regularly warrants a paywall. Thanks to his bravery, the people of Moncton and the rest of the world could put a face to a name, and somehow it felt like they were closer to catching him.

This is a whole new problem for the media: Moncton’s local papers have very strict paywalls. They’re arguably affordable to bypass, but impossible to take down from inside Moncton, for a night or even just for one story. The reaction on Twitter was almost unanimous: a lot of people were furious that the paper wasn't covering the shootings, and later even angrier to find the content they were putting out there wasn't made publicly available.

Global and CBC received similar complaints when the people of Moncton didn't see anything from them.

Those major media entities have a much different reason for their initial absences. The CBC has endured well-publicized budget cuts this year across the board. Now, like Global, they operate in Moncton but are overall run from Halifax, under the broader Maritime bureaus. They couldn't just as quickly pull the cord, cancel what was on the air and interrupt your regular broadcasting to bring you these important messages. And, with the bulk of the crisis happening after dark, it's not as if someone was sitting in Halifax waiting to do just that.

So if you wanted news on a shooting? Tune into talk radio.

Moncton isn't like anywhere else where a mass shooting has taken over because there is such a small pool of local resources that when the time came for it, they were ill prepared. Broadcasters couldn't regain control of their airwaves and your pen-and-paper reporters couldn't get their news out to anyone without a subscription. People went to Twitter because their televisions and radios gave them nothing, and very little was accessible elsewhere online.

This mass exodus of audiences away from traditional media and onto the internet was certainly noticed by the RCMP New Brunswick, who did an excellent job of keeping their Twitter feed updated. They also urged citizens to not share any information about police movements—just in case Justin Bourque was watching.

It only took a few hours for everyone to get their footing, but with a killer on the loose and families hiding in their basements, a lot more could have and should have been done. Panic and fear should have been met with up-to-date information, and the promise to be right there the moment there's anything else to report.

Despite their small-city status, Moncton is reminding the rest of Canada there's a lot more to prepare for in the event of crisis. Have your police ready, keep your hospitals in top form, but loosen the leash on your journalists enough so they can get their jobs done and provide immediate information to the local population. Media budget cuts and staff outsourcing are a bad first line of defence when people want to know where their news was when they needed it, and it won't be accepted a second time.


@kristie__smith

A Sword Fight Erupted at a Sikh Temple in India

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A Sword Fight Erupted at a Sikh Temple in India

This Week in Racism: Black People Still Love Justin Bieber

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

–Well, folks. It's come to this. After throwing a variety of childish temper tantrums, running afoul of the law, and exposing his shocking lack of basketball and graffiti skills, Justin Bieber's found a way to top it all and further assert himself as perhaps our most embarrassing celebrity with not one, but two videos surfacing online that contain Bieber's gratuitous use of the word "nigger." In the above clip supplied by TMZ, Bieber modified his classic tune "One Less Lonely Girl" to have a slightly more ominous message. Beebs is not known to drop a ton of remixes, but when he does, you'd better believe it's going to have plenty of racial slurs  and threats of hate crimes in it. 

Hold your outrage though, online commenters! Fortunately, since this column runs on Fridays, I had the luxury of waiting for some experts to weigh in and put this controversy to bed:

*MIC DROP*

Enough said. If Weezy and Birdman (and Whoopi Goldberg) are on board, I'm on board. After all, Birdman is already proven to be a safe, sturdy bridge between black and white culture. Walk across the Birdman Bridge with me to a color-blind, post-racial America!

To further drive the point home, Young Money President Mack Maine told TMZ that Bieber does not have a "slave mentality," has "legitimately adopted the culture of the hip hop, African American culture," and "treats people with respect." Maine also had the following to say regarding telling racist jokes:

"I remember telling a white man, Chinese man, Black man joke as a kid that was terrible and I told it to my friends because I thought they'd think it was funny."  

The difference being, Maine didn't get caught telling his racist joke. I'd wager that there isn't an adult person alive today that hasn't had a racist thought, made a racist joke (either sincerely or sarcastically), or stereotyped/racially profiled someone in their lifetime. It's just that not everyone is famous enough for it to matter if they get caught. 9

–If you're really lucky and you're a regular person that is videotaped being racist, you can become famous though. Case in point, one Janelle Ambrosia—stripper, single mom, and racist. Ambrosia,—in the midst of a fight in the parking lot of a Dollar General store in Cheektowaga, New York—referred to her adversary as a "nigger." Internet commenters (who are all legal experts) have started clamoring for her to be charged with a crime. I doubt it's a crime to be an asshole, especially not in New York, where "being an asshole" is one of the more lucrative career paths available to young people entering the job market.

According to her statements to WBLK radio host "Big Rob," she's not only innocent of any crime, she's also not a racist. Ambrosia said, "Quite frankly, if you look it up, nigger means an ignorant person. It has nothing to do with race. But it’s okay for him to call me a racist or honky. That’s racist.” 

OK, maybe I've been wrong this whole time about that word. Let me look it up on this handy tool I have called "the Internet." 

For the sake of transparency, I got this definition from the notorious liberally biased website, merriam-webster.com. Take this with a grain of salt. It could be all lies! 

OK, so if we're to believe these Ivy League, latte-sipping, bleeding heart pussies, the word "nigger" is only "usually offensive." Sometimes, it's HILARIOUS. Have you seen a rerun of Chappelle's Show lately?

Maybe Janelle was trying to make a point about how socially disadvantaged her opponent was? "Stay away from my kids, you politically marginalized mother fucker!" 

Trust me, Merriam-Webster, you don't want to know. RACIST.

–Janelle Ambrosia's fame as a racist would likely not exist without her squishy mug landing in a viral video. For some racists, celebrity is elusive. Maybe they're not telegenic enough, not as wealthy as Donald Sterling, not as talented as Justin Bieber, or just plain don't have that "X-factor" that Simon Cowell is always prattling on about. Or they could be caught in an audio recording so we never see their face. Untonia Harris—a black employee at a cotton warehouse (DON'T SAY IT) in Memphis, Tennessee—recorded someone he claims is his boss verbally abusing him. The voice on the recording would not let Harris use the office microwave, and then said that he can't drink from the water fountain because it needs a "whites only" sign. Finally, if Harris was caught drinking from the fountain, the voice said, "That's when we hang you." 

Frankly, I think that's no big loss, since the quality of the water that comes out of fountains is quite poor. I mean, if Untonia Harris wants lead poisoning, that's on him. That said, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that a "cotton warehouse" in Memphis doesn't have a Britta filter. RACIST.

The Best Justin Bieber Tweets That Use the Word "Nigger":

 

Canada’s New Sex Work Laws Are Taking a Big Step Backwards

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Image via WikiMedia Commons.
It’s happened. The government has tabled a new law surrounding what they call “prostitution” in Canada, and it’s worse than sex workers imagined it would be. The purchase of sexual services would be made illegal, as would communicating for the purposes of “prostitution” in a public place. The selling of sexual services would be made illegal wherever persons under the age of 18 might be present, and it would even be illegal to advertise sexual services, both in print and online. Violating those laws could land sex workers in jail for up to six months. Their clients could face up to five years, or up to $4,000 in fines. The bill treats all sex workers as “victims,” in the words of Justice Minister Peter MacKay himself.

The law, as outlined, will put the very lives of sex workers in danger. Despite the fact that most Canadians said in a poll that it shouldn’t be illegal to buy sexual services, the government is making it pretty damn hard to do so.

Sex workers have been saying since before the old laws were struck down last December that a Nordic-inspired law for Canada would be just as harmful as the old laws, but their voices have not been taken into consideration. The result is a proposed law that will be just as unconstitutional as the old ones.

For background: in December, 2013, the landmark Bedford decision was made. Three current and former sex workers—Terri Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch, and Valerie Scott—challenged Canada’s “prostitution” laws. They said the laws violated their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, they challenged the fact that it is unlawful in this country to operate a “common bawdy house,” live on the avails of “prostitution,” (making it difficult to impossible for many sex workers to hire managers, drivers and security personnel), or communicate in public for the purpose of “prostitution.”

The Nordic model, on the other hand, makes it perfectly legal to sell sex (as it always, technically, has been in Canada), but illegal to buy it.

Sex workers and advocates of those in the industry are vehemently against the Nordic model—so are many academics and media organizations. Sex workers say their preference would look more similar to the New Zealand model. Naomi Sayers is a former sex worker and the creator of Kwe Today, a site dedicated to Sayers’s fierce Indigenous feminism. She outlines a method that would work much better than the one outlined by the government.

“What would help with recognizing sex work as work is the decriminalization of the trade, or what is called the New Zealand model,” she says. “When sex work is decriminalized, there is access to other rights like labour and employment rights or human rights.” In New Zealand, sex work is seen as real work. For example, a sex worker was recently awarded $25,000 in the courts after being sexually harassed by the owner of a brothel.

If clients are criminalized, on the other hand, Sayers says, they, for fear of arrest, would be highly unlikely to go to police if they noticed a sex worker was being maltreated or exploited by her employer.

Chanelle Gallant, a sex worker, long-time advocate and community voice, and former spokesperson for Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, says a spin on New Zealand’s idea would be preferable too.

“[It wouldn’t be] the same, but similar to New Zealand. For example, independent workers would be able to work together without requiring a license, but business owners who owned larger operations like for example brothels or agencies, [those would] require a license,” she says.

If sex workers could create their own regulations, they would come up with solutions like these, which Gallant says would serve different needs in the industry. People could work for themselves with a few others for safety and community without requiring a license, but bosses of larger agencies or organizations would still be forced to comply with labour regulations.

The reason this preference has not been parlayed into the new laws is that there was no direct consultation with sex workers to form them. According to a statement I received from the Department of Justice: “The government sought the input of all Canadians. The online consultation was publicized through press releases and social media, and open to the general public.”

There was not a widespread, face-to-face conference with sex workers to gather their views on the subject.

“Canadians were encouraged to submit their views. We received input from many people writing on behalf of groups and organizations, including those who identified themselves as sex workers or who wrote on behalf of organizations that support the decriminalization of prostitution,” read an email I received from spokesperson Carole Saindon.

She said 131 of those who responded to a survey circulated by the government in the winter were either from sex workers, or organizations representing them. For more results, the public opinion research results will be available through the government’s library and archives public opinion research site at the end of July, “as per Treasury Board guidelines,” I’m told.

The government is actively ignoring sex workers’ voices and expertise on what would make their work the safest and most comfortable, instead allowing their safety to ride on one public opinion survey. They’re also ignoring the research.

“The government needs to begin to listen to sex workers,” Sayers says. “They are the real experts in this discussion. When we ignore the voices of sex workers, we miss the entire point of ensuring sex workers remain safe and secure in their line of work—this was the whole point of the Bedford decision.”

Gallant says there was no additional, meaningful consultation with sex workers in regards to the new legislation. She says there was a “token conversation with a handful of sex workers,” but nothing beyond that.

The result is a bill called, for now, the “protection of communities and exploited persons act.” It is so very far from what Bedford, and the majority of sex workers, wanted to see.

"We are criminalizing the purchase of sexual services and in very specific instances the sale… in areas where young people under the age of 18 could be present," Justice Minister MacKay reportedly said mduring a news conference Wednesday, after the bill was tabled in the House of Commons.

The language he uses to describe the government’s excessively paternalistic concerns does nothing more than attempt to morph sex workers into victims under the guise of wanting to protect them. MacKay said the bill would target those who purchase sexual services, as well as pimps who make profits from them, rather than targeting sex workers. Then he turned around and says this, according to the CBC:

"The bill recognizes that the vast majority of those who sell sexual services do not do so by choice. We view the vast majority of those involved in selling sexual services as victims," MacKay said.

It’s very interesting that MacKay makes this claim in light of the fact that there are absolutely no statistics available outlining how many sex workers there actually are in Canada. Also, the government doesn’t listen to sex workers, so I’m doubtful they conducted a survey. How, then, can he profess to know anything about the “majority” of this group?

Further, the bill will criminalize the advertising of sexual services in print and online, and offenders could face up to five years in prison. Or $5,000 in fines.

Five years for fucking? I think I need to find a new country.

It’ll also increase penalties relating to child prostitution, and allocate $20 million to find programs helping sex workers get out of the industry.

First, the government needs to understand that there is a massive difference between people who decide they want to be sex workers, and those who are forced into sex work via trafficking or child prostitution. As of right now, they have the language all wrong and clearly lack an understanding of the industry.

Second, $20 million to fund programs for sex workers to get out of prostitution? What if they don’t want to leave sex work? I’ve met plenty of sex workers who have great relationships with clients and, for the most part, enjoy their work. (Let’s be real, no job is perfect). This assumes all sex workers are absolutely without agency, which is wholly untrue.

Sayers says a model like this will only make sex work less safe.

“The government needs to understand that sex work isn't inherently violent, but what permits violence to occur is the criminalization of the trade," Sayers says. The research indicates that the Nordic model hasn’t helped to address violence or exploitation in the trade.” Because it pushed the industry underground, it’s actually harder for police to catch pimps and traffickers under this kind of law.

“The criminalization of clients increases exploitation of sex workers,” Sayers continues. “This is the case because sex workers are forced to sacrifice their safety with respect to clients, since clients are less likely to provide screening information in a criminalized environment.”

She explains that when sex workers can’t screen their clients, they can’t decline them. Bad date lists, for example, would be next to impossible to maintain. (Bad date lists are shared lists providing information on potential clients with a history of showing violence toward sex workers. If clients are criminalized, they may well refuse to share their information for fear of arrest.

“So the sex worker sacrifices her safety and security in the process, and [these laws] recreate the previous legal framework that the Bedford decision rendered unconstitutional,” Sayers says. “The Nordic Model recreates the communication law. It is still unconstitutional.”

As for the government’s need to ensure it is “protecting” sex workers?

“The government also needs to understand that sex work isn't inherently violent, but what permits violence to occur is the criminalization of the trade,” she says.

Gallant also says so-called labour protections installed by the government without consulting sex workers have the potential to be incredibly harmful, “because we know what we need, and have very practical concrete implementable solutions to regulate the industry."

If this bill is made law, it will have a detrimental impact on all sex workers. But indigenous sex workers, sex workers of colour, and migrant sex workers will be especially hard-hit.

“As an Indigenous woman, I can definitely say yes, these laws will have an adverse impact on Indigenous women,” Sayers tells me.

“I feel this way because as an Indigenous woman, I already don't feel safe enough to go to the police if I am a victim of a crime. For instance, as a former sex worker, I learned to never go to the police for. I was once sexually assaulted by a date not associated to my work and I went to the police. However, because of sex work, they blamed my work for what happened to me, even when I told them it wasn't related.”

She says these laws are likely to exacerbate the already high apprehension rates of Indigenous women’s children, as well. Migrant workers are targeted under the Nordic model, too, and while it’s not yet clear whether the Canadian model will follow suit, it’s important to be cognizant of that. At the same time the Nordic model was enacted, the Swedish government also instituted the so-called “Alien Act.”

“This is the act that allegedly helps combat human trafficking,” Sayers explains. But it does that by targeting sex workers at the same time.

“A migrant worker who comes to the country to engage in sex work will automatically be deported, and they will be deported even if they didn't intend to do sex work on their initial arrival, but choose to do it after they arrived.”

In short, there are too many problems with this newly-proposed model to explore in one article. But I would like to know why the government is deliberately ignoring the voices of sex workers, choosing instead to forge ahead on criminalizing an industry they clearly know nothing about.

For more information and goings-on amongst advocates, follow the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform.

@sarratch

Meet the Nieratkos: Some Rich Guy Paid $84,000 for Webcam Shows He Never Watched

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I thought I’d heard of every fetish known to man. During my decade-long stint at the British fetish magazine Bizarre I saw shaven Barbie doll heads up asses, stretched out pee-holes, people stomping on scrotums, tarantula-tickling, and just about anything else a person might enjoy doing to get their rocks off. Then, last week, I heard about an act of financial domination so exorbitant that it almost warranted its own genre of kink.

Financial domination is nothing new. The idea is simple, and typically involves very rich men showering women with money for little in return. The incident in question, however, involved close to $100,000 and the buyer got absolutely nothing out of it. It happened on Kink.com, a website that specializes in all things fetish and regularly auctions off one-hour private cam sessions with two of its most popular and renowned doms, Maitresse Madeline and Lorelei Lee. At a recent auction, the bidding for both Madeline and Lorelei attracted a number of (I’m assuming) one-percenters, who quickly got into a bidding war, upping the cost of the cam shows by thousands at a time. When the dust had settled both girls had earned $42,000 for a one-hour show. I believe it’s an unprecedented amount for a cam show, and I have never been more proud of two girls in my life.

But here’s the kicker: the same guy won both auctions—paying $84,000 in all—and has never asked for his videos. It’s so fucked. As someone who has always dreamed of being financially dominated, I decided to interview Lorelei and Madelineto find out what it feels like to make $42,000 for doing absolutely nothing.

VICE: What is Kink Bitches?
Lorelei Lee: Kink Bitches is mine and Madeline’s platform to sell porn in sort of a new way. We’ve both been working in the industry for many years. For me it’s been 14 and Madeline has 9 under her belt, which, in porn years, is about 100. We both have this extensive knowledge of and interest in fetishes and BDSM, and working at Kink we have a platform with a huge audience. So many of the things we’ve done in the past, like selling panties and doing webcam shows, we’re now doing in a more exclusive and high-end way.

Maitresse Madeline. Photo courtesy Kink.com.

Were you shocked when you heard the final amount of the winning webcam bid?
Maitresse Madeline:I’m not going to lie; it was an incredible moment. It was quite an accomplishment thinking back to my early web-camming days. But taking into consideration the experience I have with financial domination and my deep understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the fetish, I’m not shocked at all.

LL: I was very excited watching the bids increase, but it makes sense to me. Our culture is constantly pushing toward the individualized. Every company that markets to you is trying to tell you: “This is a product made for only you!” That’s what a webcam show is—it’s only for you, specifically tailored to you.

At $42,000 am I allowed to point a video camera at my computer screen and recorded it for myself?
No. It’s an exclusive, once in a lifetime opportunity.

What a bargain! Did you already make the one-hour video? How crazy did it get?
He never asked for the show. He may decide at some point to ask for that, but he hasn’t yet. So basically he just gave us the money.

And the same guy won both auctions, correct?
Yes. There were other people in the running. There’s a large audience out there for this idea of financial domination by paying a higher and higher price. It’s a little bit like gambling.

He’s the wolf of whore street.
MM: I’m not going to presume that I know the psychology behind why this particular person decided to pay for the show and never actually request it. In general, getting off on giving a woman large sums of money is an age-old fetish. Who doesn’t like the feeling of slipping cash into a stripper’s panties? Our auctions are the same idea, just on a larger scale and with a bigger payoff on both ends.

LL: I understand the psychology of this from our perspective. I have worked as a stripper, a pro dom, and in porn, and in all of those avenues there’s something very exciting about the receiving of cash. I think people even get it from waiting tables. Cash turns you on. It’s not just the amount of money—it’s the physical feeling and texture and smell… all of that.

Lorelei Lee

But it’s so disgusting and dirty!
Yes! It’s so dirty; I love that! One of the most exciting things I’ve ever done with cash was to jerk off at a bachelor party over an increasingly higher pile of cash. Just watching it pile up was bringing me closer to orgasm. Some people enjoy giving their money away to a specific person. To some people that’s humiliating. They’re not worth anything and they have to give everything that they have to a woman who is a goddess. But then there’s also the opposite feeling, which is one of power—if you have the most money to spend you have the biggest dick.

Let me ask you: Is the winner of the first two auctions Donald Sterling?
I’ll never tell.

Was there any communication with him after he won? Was it naughty?
There was an email exchange and he was very respectful. He seems charming.

There’s no meeting in person, right?
Correct. This is only a cam show.

How extreme would the cam show be?
It would be within our personal limits. I have things that I would never do, like scat, bestiality, and extreme age play—pretending to be an extremely young person. But the things I’m willing to do I would do in this show, with the caveat that this is a one-person show.

And, just to be clear, there’s no sex? For $42,000?
It depends on your version of sex, but no, we will never touch each other.

What type of guy can afford that kind of money?
MM: This particular gentleman is from Australia, and in the few interactions I had with him he was kind and charming.

The armory, where the magic happens. Photo courtesy Kink.com

What’s the most you’ve been paid for a scene in a porno?
LL: I’d have to say somewhere around $3,000.

Are you annoyed at all the times you put in a day’s worth of work for $3,000 when now you’re making $42K for doing nothing?
I’m actually not. Here’s the thing: I didn’t do nothing for that $42,000. I worked 14 years for that $42,000.

What did you do with your windfall?
We spread it on the ground and rolled around in it. We put $84,000 on the ground and played in it to celebrate. I also spent some money on champagne and lipgloss! Two of my favorite things. And then I put some in my 401k.

MM: I save and invest my money. Longer-term goals are to own a beautiful house of domination unlike anything that is available today. A place where the women are empowered to run their own business and have multiple avenues for revenue streams under one umbrella. I’d like to take my years of knowledge and give back and help other women create a brand for themselves and run profitable businesses.

What are some of the more interesting and unique fetishes you've encountered?
LL: I am fascinating by people’s fetishes, no matter what they are. It’s so thrilling to me to hear about them and experience them. Something pretty straightforward is cross-dressing, and yet when you do it right and really make it happen for the person, dressing them up and telling them what a beautiful slut they are, it is the most glorious moment. There are all kinds of other ones that are less common. I had a client who wanted me to spit yogurt into his mouth, and he would say, “Thank you for the gift.” I had another client, who was one of my favorites, who had a newspaper fetish. He would bring a bag of folded up papers with him and there were a series of things we would do with them, like press them against his face or cover him entirely in them and I’d step on him.

MM: I used to have a customer who would pay to simply stare at my empty worn shoes. I wouldn’t be on camera, and to him that was the ultimate humiliation, which was his biggest turn on. I also had a man who would pay me $1000 for a minute of humiliation. He wanted me to call him on the phone and threaten to tell his wife about the money, then hang up after one minute.

Madeline, you have more camming experience than Lorelei. What do you enjoy about the job?
I got into camming in my very early 20s as a way to pay for dental hygienist school. It ended up being very lucrative. I was very successful at it and was able to make a six-figure income by camming four nights a week from my home office. As I’ve progressed in my career, camming is now saved for these special-auction-type occasions. It’s always fun to go back and do it. I sometimes miss the hustle of camming. I miss the intimate interactions I had with fans and customers.

If you happen to have tens of thousands of dollars just burning a hole in your pocket, first of all, fuck you. But also, there's an auction going on now through June 10th.

Follow @DivineBitches, @MaitresseM and @MissLoreleiLee

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

A Fashion Love Letter to Those Shiny Soccer Stickers

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Vintage T-shirt from Headlock Vintage, H. Samuel necklace and earrings, Gogo Phillip ring, vintage patches

PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN BY FRIGHIL & GORSE
STYLIST: Bridi Foden

Stylist Assistant: Stephanie Woods
Hair: Leire Barrenetxea using Label.M
Make-up: Amy Conley using MAC
Models: Lily W at M & P Models and Gracie at Profile


Clio Peppiatt top, Nike sports bra, Atsuko Kudo gloves, H. Samuel earrings

Mary Benson jacket, vintage jersey and shorts from Headlock Vintage, Phiney Pet sneakers, Nike socks 

Vinti Andrews top, Adidas sports bra and sneakers, American Apparel skirt, vintage patches, Nike socks

Vinti Andrews sweater, vintage jersey from Headlock Vintage, Phiney Pet pants, Saucony sneakers, H. Samuel earrings, Gogo Phillip ring, vintage socks from Beyond Retro, vintage patch



SAM MC T-shirt, Topshop skirt, H. Samuel earrings, Adidas sweatbands 

Vintage sweater from Beyond Retro, Urban Renewal by Urban Outfitters shorts, Nike bike shorts, Phiney Pet sneakers, vintage patches, American Apparel socks
Chic Freak coat, vintage jersey from Blitz Vintage, Urban Renewal by Urban Outfitters shorts, Monki leggings, Adidas sneakers, H. Samuel earrings; Nike soccer ball 
Vintage sweater from Rokit Vintage, Filles à Papa shorts, Atsuko Kudo thigh highs, Adidas sneakers, H. Samuel earrings  

Clio Peppiatt dress, vintage jersey from Headlock Vintage

Please Kill Me: Jonathan Richman: In Love with the Modern World

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Ernie Brooks is a very likable fellow who was raised in New York and Connecticut by intellectual, liberal parents, which explains why he became a civil rights activist down South during the violent “Freedom Summer” of the early 1960s. Ernie’s a Harvard graduate who studied English literature, poetry, and rock 'n' roll, along with his college roommate Jerry Harrison, who later became the keyboard player for the Talking Heads. A chance encounter with Jonathan Richman led to a wild ride as one of the founding members of the legendary Modern Lovers, perhaps the greatest alt-rock, pre-punk, indie band that no one has ever seen.

“I’m Straight”

Jerry Harrison, who was my roommate at Harvard, saw Jonathan Richman playing on the Cambridge Commons, which is smaller than the Boston Commons, right by Harvard Square, and said to me, “You gotta come see this weird guy. He’s really nuts, but he sounds very cool…” 

At that time, Jonathan used to wear these suits with a very conservative white shirt and tie, sport coat, and dress pants, and he had really short hair—it was really funny. There was something about it that was really confrontational in an interesting way. 

Jonathan had a band with David Robinson, who was the drummer, and another guy named Rolf, who was playing bass, and they played these free shows on the Cambridge Commons. Jonathan had this blue Jazzmaster guitar with like two strings and had decorated it with the Howard Johnson’s decals. He had painted it light blue and orange like the Howard Johnson's colors—and almost all the songs he played were in E minor—it was very minimalist. "I see the restaurant. It is my friend" was a line from one of the songs.

Jerry and I were both amazed by Jonathan. I had been studying poetry with different people at Harvard, like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Creeley, so I was struck by the connection between Jonathan’s deep poetic roots and the idea of talking about everyday things. So the poetry was there—instantly I could hear the visionary poetry. 

Jonathan was doing that song “I’m Straight,” which, of course, he was. Jonathan didn’t take drugs—though, later on, Jerry persuaded him to take a puff of marijuana, and Jonathan suddenly got this weird look on his face and got up and was about to pick up a frying pan and said, “Jerry, I’m gonna have to hit you with a frying pan, 'cause I have to hurt somebody in order to know that I am stoned and I’m not myself...”

And I cracked up and said, “Jonathan, that’s OK. You don’t have to do that…”

Jonathan was really upset that his consciousness had been altered. And as far as I know, that’s how he’s always been—very straight—so in that sense, “I’m Straight” was real and completely true.

At some point, before we saw him on the Cambridge Commons, Jonathan had gone to New York and slept on Lou Reed’s couch and worked briefly as a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, where he was fired because he was really not very skilled as a busboy. But he loved the Velvet Underground—he loved two bands—the Stooges and the Velvets. He used to preach about the Stooges all the time—and that’s what’s funny about Jonathan, his music didn’t sound like either band, but there was some deep connection there.

Anyway, Jerry Harrison and I saw Jonathan a couple times on the Cambridge Commons, but we didn't meet him—and then he showed up at our apartment at 152 Putnam Ave wearing his white plastic motorcycle jacket. Danny Fields, the great facilitator of all things rock 'n' roll, brought Jonathan over, and that was the first time Jerry and I really met him. Jonathan started dancing around and showing us his songs. Jonathan would grab whatever instrument was around; sometimes he didn’t have an instrument, and he’d just start clapping his hands and singing whatever new song was in his head, to whoever was there to listen. He still does that.

I don't know how it came about, but we started talking about Yeats—Jonathan knew some literature, and we connected on that level. You know that Yeats poem, "The Wild Swans at Coole"? "…lover by lover, / They paddle in the cold / Companionable streams…” It’s a very beautiful Celtic twilight kind of vision.

"I’ve Got the AM Radio On...”

So Jonathan was into poetry—but he was also into the first Stooges album, which had just come out. So I talked with Jonathan about what a great rhythm section the Stooges had, and he was really into that, and he was really funny. He also loved the Velvet Underground, but he was very conflicted about them, because of the darkness they presented. I always had this theory that our sound was almost the opposite of the Velvets, that basically we were playing into the light as opposed to the darkness. But you could argue that about anybody—any art that expresses pain is also suggesting a way out of the pain.

I don’t know exactly what Jerry and I said after Jonathan left that day, but we both thought that he was interesting—not like anybody else. Basically everything else was just a lot of blues jam bands and folk rock remnants of the Bosstown Sound (remember Ultimate Spinach and Beacon Street Union?)—and what appealed to me about Jonathan was that he was as new as anything and there was something that was really positive about him.

So it was decided we were going to play this gig with him—our first gig—at some teen center out in Natick, Massachusetts. Natick was one of those beltway suburban towns around Boston, near Route 128, which was just starting to have some high-tech companies and factories. So we went and rehearsed in David Robinson’s basement—he lived with his parents in Woburn, Massachusetts, and his mom made us food, like tuna fish sandwiches or something to eat after we'd play. And Jon Felice, who had been Jonathan’s childhood friend, joined us on guitar. He seemed to be constantly leaving the band and coming back, following his frequent fights with Jonathan. So anyway, we played the teen center in Natick, and that was our first gig.

All of our early gigs were pretty dippy, so, of course, Jerry and I said, “Well, we can probably get some jobs at a Harvard mixer,” like we’re gonna come up in the world and our band can make one hundred bucks!

And we did get a Harvard mixer! But the funny thing about the mixer was that when we were playing something with a good beat, the people would dance—there was always a small group of people who were really into it and were listening—and the rest of the people didn’t give a shit, which I guess is always the way. I mean, most of the guys were there to pick up girls, and we had a song called “The Mixer,” which goes, “Hey, girls, do you notice the smell?” It’s talking directly about girls and the guys at the mixer, confronting them with the absurdity of the situation. It’s a pretty funny song, and we’d play it at these mixers—and nobody got it! Of course, the PA was lousy and they might not have heard the words.

When we first met him, I think Jonathan was incredibly isolated and caught in his adolescence. He really wanted to meet girls, but not knowing how to do it, he focused on the astral plane, in which he could meet someone in this world and communicate with her in a dream state. I mean, he did meet girls, but then he would not know what to do with them or what to say to them. He’d call me in the middle of the night, saying, about a girl we both knew, “Ernie, I think I entered her dream. Do you think that’s right?”

And I’d say, “Well, Jonathan, I guess its OK, I dunno...”

He was describing how he had entered into some girl’s dream and was feeling some connection to her soul. Of course, Jonathan was a big fan of Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks—that’s such a beautiful record. I wasn’t sure if Jonathan was actually able to do that, enter a girl’s dream—but he really believed in it, which is where that song, “The Astral Plane,” came from—the idea that you can communicate in another dimension with someone who's hard to reach in everyday life.

“I’m In Love with The Modern World…"

Jonathan definitely wrote the lyrics to “Roadrunner,” and we did the arrangement. Jonathan came up with the idea for most of the songs, but the music started out pretty simple. Mostly on one chord, and you could say the nut of it came from Jonathan—and then we filled it in and gave it structure.

I mean, we’d argue in rehearsal—about which song to do, about how to arrange it, or whether we should have the break here or there. We argued from the very beginning. We talked and discussed things endlessly—we all loved to talk—and Dave was the one getting pissed off, saying, “Come on, stop talking, rehearse it, play it!” From early on we had an agreement where we would split all the publishing; all songs would be by the Modern Lovers, kind of like the Ramones. It was a way for us to recoup some of our expenses. It felt really justified at the time because I got the van and Jerry brought a lot of the equipment from Milwaukee.

"When You Get Out of the Hospital, Let Me Back into Your Life"

At some of the early shows Jonathan would set up an easel, and he’d place his drawings on it. I don't know if you’ve seen any of the drawings, but I have a copy of a poster that he drew; it’s of the Modern Lovers—a cartoon of the four of us with a heart flying over the band. It’s got the highway in the background and stuff. And he had this picture of a girl in the suburban town in Massachusetts where she lived and a picture of the hospital she ended up in, and while pointing to the drawings he’d recite the lyrics before he did the song. 

Eventually someone—it must have been Danny Fields—called Lillian Roxon from the Daily News about the Modern Lovers. So Lillian came up and heard us play in this little dump and wrote about it for the newspaper—and that article started a sudden rush of record companies coming to see us. The funniest thing was Clive Davis (head of Columbia Records) coming to see us in this school gym in North Cambridge. We’d set up with our PA, and there were probably 50 totally bored, indifferent high school students there. So Clive was there—he couldn’t hear shit and actually had his ear up against this Shure Vocal Master Speaker—and just said, “These lyrics can be taken on many different levels!”

Clive offered us a record contract, but we didn’t go with him. That was when we started our insanity, thinking we were hot shit and we were going to go check out everybody in the business to find the best manager and the one record company that was worthy of the Modern Lovers.

I think we were just idiots, believing that we could be so demanding, before we had really done very much as a band.

It was a funny bunch of personalities. And I’d say Jerry Harrison and I were the most business-oriented, most reasonable, but David was pretty pragmatic too. However, the three of us were not good at being decisive. Jonathan was more so, but we generally would not agree with him when he was.

“I Don’t Want to Hurt Anybody”

In the spring of '72 we flew to LA to work on a demo for both Warner Bros. and A & M, two of the labels hot to sign us. John Cale, a house producer for Warner at the time, was a big reason we went. We really wanted him to produce the first Modern Lovers record; we were fans of his through the Velvet Underground and through the fact that he'd produced the first Stooges record. The first time I met him was when I went to his apartment years before, somewhere on the lower East Side, and he had photos of someone having a nose job on the wall—a fairly disturbing set of pictures. In the couple of weeks on the West Coast, we recorded all the songs that went into the Modern Lovers album, most of them recorded by Cale in a session where he basically captured us playing our live set. It went well, though all of us thought at the time that it was just a demo, preparation for what would be the "real" record.

In summer of '73 we went back, finally signed to Warner Bros., to record the real deal with John. After staying a while in Van Nuys at Emmylou Harris's place, we got this stucco house on Kings Road in Hollywood, one of those windy roads that runs off of Hollywood Boulevard, sort of hidden in the shrubbery. It was one of the scariest places because these houses were so isolated. One night we could hear the sound of helicopters circling, their searchlights trained on the house just down the road, and then we see the black cars driving up with guys with their sniper rifles and black vests—so we knew something was going on, but we didn’t know what. We heard a lot of shooting and then cars driving away.

There’s something very sinister about LA that people don’t usually talk about. 

And that’s where the problems started, almost immediately. I think it was because Jonathan had been changing. I don’t think it was so much that he was getting tired of the old songs as he was developing this idea that the whole rock-'n'-roll-star-making machinery was corrupt. And part of that was the whole system of burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, using a lot of power for amps and sound systems, playing stadiums—you know, feeling that there was something wrong in profiting from all these things—and he started tying it all together in his mind and decided that he didn’t want the Modern Lovers to be a conventional rock 'n' roll band.

But it made it impossible for us!

David, the drummer, and I shared a love of tight, poppy rock 'n' roll songs, and that’s the way we wanted to make our album. So I had endless conversations with Jonathan, like, “Jonathan, you can do whatever you want afterwards. Let's just make this record, and then let’s go out and play some shows! People need to hear these songs—they’re good songs, and they sound good!”

Jonathan was saying, “Ohh, I don't know, I don’t know. I don’t want the music if it's too loud. It’s gonna hurt kids' ears, ya know? And if it's real, the people will hear it, even if it's quiet, if there’s magic in it.”

He never denied the magic of rock 'n' roll—he just said if it was really quiet, you could hear the words better, and that was part of this whole shift.

John Cale had a real sense of how he wanted things to sound and was very insistent. So there was a problem in the making there. While working with Cale, things got even more difficult, probably because Jonathan was starting to not want to play loud, powerful, electric music anymore, and that made Cale crazy.

One of the songs we tried to re-record and couldn’t quite get right, I think, was "Someone I Care About," so Cale said to Jonathan, “You gotta sound mean; you gotta sound like you wanna kill somebody!”

And Jonathan said, “Oh, I don’t want to hurt anybody—I wanna make a nice, happy-sounding record,” because this was obviously his new sensibility. Jonathan was headed in a new direction, and Cale wanted the angst and the violence in the sound, which really characterized us in our early days.

John Cale was also not in the best shape: He was drinking a lot, though I don't know if he was taking drugs. I used to go out and play tennis with him at the Burbank tennis courts when he was in a good mood, and Cale was always asking, “What’s going on? What’s with Jonathan? Why can’t we do this record? Why do you have to change the sound?”

He was growing increasingly frustrated with Jonathan and the whole ordeal. As I said, things weren’t going great in Cale’s life. One evening he even called me up and said, “I know my wife’s there!” Of course, part of the story there was that she, Cindy, had been a close friend and bandmate in the GTO's of Miss Christine, who had died of an overdose the year before at the house we were renting on the South Shore of Boston, and that's another part of the story, of things that cast a pall over the Modern Lovers. Miss Christine's death had apparently totally destabilized Cindy.

I said, “John, she’s not here!”

I don't know what was going on, but I don’t think it was good. I have to say, it must have been a terrible thing for Cale, because he was the producer of this potentially great record he wanted to make—that Jonathan wouldn’t let him make—and at the same time we all admired him, but it just wasn’t working out.

So we were all kind of upset because we felt we were on the cusp of greatness—we envisioned everything going right—and at the same time Warner Bros., desperate to keep the project on track, was trying to put us together with a manager. They kept saying, “If we just get these guys a good manager, they’ll fall into line…”

“I Never Said, ‘Fuck You Jonathan!’”

One of the funniest things was when we played at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino—the gig was set up by Warner Bros., and we played with Tower of Power in front of 10,000 people—and everyone started throwing stuff at us.

I remember getting hit with a can of something, and that’s where Jonathan said, “We know you don’t like us, but we love you anyway.” And Warner Bros. had all this promotion that said, “The Modern Lovers —Warner Brothers' Big New Hit Group!” That was a pretty comical, and it was the usual thing where a couple kids liked us and ran up and said, “Hey, you guys are good!” Or they handed us a note saying, “You guys are great,” because they were terrified to have their friends know that they liked this band that was getting booed off the stage.

At one of the last gigs we did, when we played “Roadrunner,” we still didn’t have a record out, but that was always a catchy song, and we actually got some applause—and then Jonathan said, “People like that song too much; I don’t think we should do it anymore….”

I think it was just part of Jonathan’s natural inclination that when things seemed to be going well—to go against it. He was very contrary. He was very difficult. I mean, anybody who is on to something new has some element of being a contrarian, because they’re rejecting the status quo. They're doing something in the way they’ve figured out how to do it—and they don’t want to hear something different, even if it could make things better. When Jonathan said, “I won't play 'Roadrunner' anymore," it was pretty much the classic case—you can’t really get any more contrarian than that.

So we got in a heated debate, and I said, “Yes, I can understand how one can be suspicious of people liking something, but at the same time, we are a functioning band, you know? We’re not going to be so particular; we’ll do something if people like it, not to please someone but because it’s a great song. We like it too, so we’re not pandering to anyone by playing it.”

By that time, Jonathan was already rejecting the use of electricity, and a head guy from Warner Bros. called and Jonathan said, “We’ll play the songs for the record, but we won’t do any of these songs when we play live.” Jonathan said this to the guy who had given us this fairly substantial record deal to record the songs—and who didn’t want to hear that.

Jonathan started saying his old songs were too negative and dark, and he started writing things like “Hey There Little Insect,” and maybe he was way ahead of us, but we couldn’t follow him—he wanted us to go, “Buzz, buzz, buzz” on stage, but we were too cool!

Later, there was a conversation with the guy from Warner Bros., who said, “Listen, if you guys aren’t going to do these songs on the road, if you’re not going to play them, we’re not going to keep on putting money into the recording...”

We got about four crazy, not very satisfactory tracks done, and then came the moment when Warner Bros. continued to put pressure on us, which led to Jonathan saying, “Well, I’m just not gonna do this anymore…”

So Warner Bros. dropped us.

So that was a turning point where. It had gotten to where, if we had something that people wanted to hear, Jonathan would refuse. It was a conceptual way of approaching rock 'n' roll—but not a way to make a living or feel very happy.

So we were like, “Jonathan, maybe you’re brilliant, but we’re not gonna go there...”

But I never said, “Fuck you, Jonathan!”

I never said, “I’m not talking to you…”

I really left the band when we were in Boston and Jonathan had been talking a lot to that guy Matthew Kaufman, who ran Beserkley Records. Matthew got Jonathan to fly back to Berkeley and record an album with him. Matthew was telling Jonathan, “Ya know, things aren’t happening with the band, so I’ll take care of you in Berkeley. I’ll manage you. I’ve got musicians here, and you can do what you want.”

But Matthew turned out to be a real crook, and it was really funny, so ironic and so emblematic of that industry. Having presented himself as the honest "alternative" to the big companies, he turned out to be into drugs and gambling, and was dishonest even to the point where David Robinson, after the Cars, hired a lawyer who tried to serve Matthew to find out what was going on with our royalties. Well, it turns out Matthew had kept two sets of books, and if someone tried to serve them they’d actually run away and hide so they couldn’t be served.

The last time I played with Jonathan was for Joey Ramone when Joey was sick, at the Continental. It was before Christmas, so it wasn’t one of Joey’s Christmas shows. I think it was Joey’s birthday party. I didn’t know Joey was sick, but he was. Joey talked to Jonathan and said, “Would you set up with the band and do 'Roadrunner'?”

So I played bass with Jonathan and, I think, Tommy on drums. it was fun, and the crowd loved it. Of course that made me think, “Hey, let's do this some more!”

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