Remember SOPA? Remember how when we the people finally defeated SOPA everyone got so stoked that confetti poured out of their eyeballs and its opponents downloaded films and albums and pirated video games in celebration? Well, shortly after SOPA there was CISPA—the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—a bill that is both scarier than Zombies and much less well known than SOPA .
On April 18, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, CISPA passed in the House of Representatives. Obama’s White House has expressed “fundamental concerns” about CISPA. They, rightfully so, are a bit turned off by how CISPA doesn’t specify precisely how it intends to spy on the internet—and when it is ok to spy on internet users—and that is a terrifying prospect.
As a Canadian, these American “fuck up the internet” bills have always been disconcerting. While Canadian sovereignty would ideally save anyone who lives in this country and errs on the wrong side of a SOPA or a CISPA—with so much internet traffic filtering through American-owned web servers—it is not out of the question that American jurisdiction could be called against an international cyber-offender. The state of Virginia, for example, claimed jurisdiction against the Hong Kong owned Megaupload who was hosting their website in that state.
But now it appears that it’s going to be even easier for international copyright offenders to be tried in court by the interests, and lobbying power, of Hollywood. Starting today, 11 countries—Canada, America, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Brunei, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand—are having a secret (no members of the public and no press) meeting in Lima, Peru to figure out what can be done about copyright offenders who transmit Hollywood’s precious content over the interweb’s tubes without paying for it.
The meeting is held under the banner of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. They’re looking to sign an international treaty that will create world government-esque laws to handle anyone who downloads an early leak of Iron Man 3 illegally.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling this the “biggest global threat to the internet since ACTA.” If you remember, ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an international, internet-policing treaty that was shut down by the European Parliament with a 92 percent nay vote. Luckily for Europeans, no EU country is anywhere near the TPP negotiations in Peru right now—and European politicians are now quick to distance themselves from the policies that ACTA is trying to ram down the world's throat.
But in North America, the ACTA movement is still very much alive. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government passed a bill in March that makes Canada more ACTA-friendly by allowing customs officers to destroy counterfeit goods and ratcheting up the criminal penalties against copyright offenders. And the United States has seized hip-hop blog domains without warning or trial, because they were alleged to host pirated material.
A leaked chapter outlining some preliminary discussion to re-examine intellectual property has revealed that TPP wants to add further checks and balances to restrict fair use. Those behind TPP want to make sure that if a teacher is trying to show some copyrighted material in their class for the purpose of education, or if a humorist using copyrighted material in an article for the purpose of satire, they’re doing so under what TPP calls a “good faith activity.”
The language in this leaked TPP chapter is incredibly dense and dates back to February 2011—so not only is it a confusing bit of writing, but it will also likely be revised over and over during this meeting in Peru. As it stands, the EFF is worried that “the United States is trying to export the worst parts of its intellectual property law without bringing any of the [fair use] protections.” And just like SOPA or CISPA, many people are concerned that the broad language in new legal terms like “good faith activity” will potentially lead to unjust prosecutions.
It may take a while before the results of this TPP meeting in Peru filter out to the press, but it’s crystal clear that even though SOPA died, the Hollywood lobby is more than willing to generate new legislation and international partnerships to protect its interests. SOPA, for a combination of reasons, incited the ire of the public. We saw SOPA blackouts where websites like Reddit and Wikipedia went offline for a day, celebrities spoke out against it on Twitter; there was a bona fide cultural movement.
But now, the language behind international efforts like ACTA or TPP is getting more and more obscure, the reporting on such efforts less and less frequent, and the meetings being held to define these treaties are being held behind closed doors. The wheels of government are moving quickly to restrict international copyright online as much as possible—with the lobby of Hollywood thrusting it forward—in order to preserve the profits of content gatekeepers like the RIAA and MPAA.
Just over six months ago, Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast and devasted entire communities, including those that had never before been hit by such extreme weather. As winter turned into spring, however, Sandy seemed to drift away from the public's consciousness. As Memorial Day and summer approach, towns and cities all across the coast that were affected by the storm are scrambling to ready their houses and boardwalks, at least what is left of them, for the tourist season. We spent a few days traveling to the New Jersey shore, Far Rockaway, and Long Beach in Long Island, New York, to survey the damage and the work being done to repair it. Some areas were almost back to normal, and some had seemingly given up hope of reopening, at least for this year.
A celebrated writer regales the 92 Street Y with a wry account of his recent revisions of his early classics. He informs the younger-than-blue-rinse audience, with an adorably self-deprecating wonder that has made him beloved in all of Westchester and several parts of Brooklyn, that he was much influenced by cultural fashions “in the air” at the time he wrote those novice volumes. Today he shakes his wiser head, recalling that youthful naiveté. Not that he wasn’t already brilliant. The truth is, he didn’t realize then how brilliant he already was, and these airborne notions, political pieties, flights of surreal nihilism, and so on, crept in as crutches for his then-demure ego. Now, after two decades of being called brilliant on the many occasions when he was far from it, he felt that certain passages, even whole chapters, issued from this ephemeral take-out menu of topics and poses, didn’t adequately convey what he was driving at. He explains what he was driving at, and declares that he’s tossed the offending arabesques of verbiage out of the new editions. He wishes them to be read in the future as “stand-alone works,” to appear in the form of those wonderfully cute little items bookstores display next to the cash register.
All right. Boring enough. The maestro rummages through his published masterpieces with a magnifying glass, chortling and cackling away at his own precocious wit, his uncanny insight, his deliciously coy, tartly malicious style, and those cheeky turns of phrase that marked him from the outset as a veritable sperm whale in the mucky sea of literary arts and crafts, spewing winsomeness and wit from his blowhole. Quite the Baby Jane Hudson, really. Thanks for the memories, chum.
In the street, Tom runs into Dick, someone he considers, like himself, a “survivor” of a faraway time when life among an attractive stratum of this difficult city offered different, more intense gratifications, in other words when they were young, reckless, possessed of unlimited criminal energy and multiple circles of friends and associates. That world has dried up over time, suffered the attrition of deaths, divergence of fortunes, personal difficulties numerous and altering enough that they are now entirely different people than they were. Vaguely recognizable to each other, nominally functional, still resisting incitements to suicide, madness, or retreat from all contact with the world the city now reflects, refreshed, if that is the word, every day, with reminders that life itself is a brief scribble of being, sealed off at both ends by an infinity of eternal non-being. And etcetera, one could say.
Good enough. Bad enough. Nothing will ever be as it was. Nobody actually wishes anything would be. Everyone does wish it would all be something else, but exactly what, nobody can say. Anywhere but here, comes the thought, and sometimes the words, or, anything but this.
This is what we have. A lot of demanding tweaks in the scanning pattern. Conversations, not that many, marked by avoidance of depressing themes, or else by an uncontrollable leakage of them. Cargo manifests of everything that is wrong. Spontaneous, feeble theories about why things don’t connect, or can’t be rescued, or the ineluctable fact that changes beyond our capacity to adapt have occurred, rapidly. Structures once considered immutable collapsed so easily that people can only gaze at the debris in bovine disbelief, with a hollow feeling where their viscera should be.
Many wonder if they have survived, or if they occupy an afterlife, a coda, an epilogue pinned to their narratives like the tail on the donkey. Whom or what wrote this sequel is an open question—not themselves, certainly, because they flounder, circle themselves, run along inescapable ruts, and muddle through forgettable days under sedation, counting out the remaining pills until a visit to the doctor levers them out of the maze again for a few hours.
“You’ll be fine again,” the doctor says, “you always are.” “You’ll pull out of this, you always do.” You’re already dead, the doctor thinks. But it never helps to say so.
Transfixed by information that carries no charge, shifts focus every few minutes or seconds, resists synthesis or repudiation—information that’s useless, metallic, inert, like a lead sinker on a fishing line dropped in a stagnant pond. Yet this information is evidence that some people, in various places, everywhere in fact, work themselves and some unimaginable constituency into a lather, strike poses of indignation, mint watery sarcasms, make shaky efforts to amuse each other, inhabit a bubble of epiphenomena that popped for the rest of us quite a while ago. Yes. There are too many people with too much to say about anything, crowding time with defective, reactive urgency, brains blazing with opinions, parsing intolerable reality like butchers slicing salami—semioticians of the random algae calligraphy on that lifeless fishing pond. If anything lives in its depths, you wouldn’t want to see it, and it wouldn’t want to see you. Some refugee phyla from the Burgess Shale, no, I doubt it, I mean you never know, but you don’t want to know, either.
The non sequitur as the standard form of communication. Two people work themselves up to an unavoidable promise to “see each other soon.” To overcome an entirely impersonal and meaningless silence, they’ve already crawled over a mental kilometer of broken glass, diluted affections dripping all over the restaurant carpet. Yet there is a real wish in there somewhere, that they lived in a world where they would, willingly, see each other, if not soon, sometime, but, how does it go: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I think I’ve got that right. A year passes. The ante has gone up a tick. “We keep saying we’ll see each other soon, let’s really see each other soon.” Alas, ahem, no really, I mean it.
Knowing better than to revisit other times, or imagine they would’ve been improved by a little insight, better instruction, kinder parents, different drugs. You’d still be exactly where you are now. Or else you wouldn’t be.
What kills us makes us stronger. And then kills us.
The narcoleptic who won the lottery. He couldn’t stay awake long enough to claim his ridiculously huge fortune, kept falling asleep while pinching the ticket between his fingers. As he lived alone, no one knew how magnificently rich he would have been, if he hadn’t starved to death.
“The shadow of mortality that falls over the prose of writers who’ve lived much longer than the authors of yesteryear”—paraphrase of a review of our popular, high-middlebrow writer who has revisited himself yet again in the course of an inexorable procession of LOL articles, a body of work remarkable for its tendency to feature the same unappealing, reputedly hilarious real-life characters from one piece to another, reviewed by another writer who has outlived the median age of writers 100 years ago, just like the writer under review. Two hardy relics enjoying their good luck, and complaining about what good luck it isn’t.
The graphomaniac who came to dinner. She wrote an entire bodice ripper on her napkin, a genre she publishes under a pseudonym—or whatever one calls a name before which the author’s real name appears, “writing as” the other name. Some have said this nuance comprises the graphomaniac’s major contribution to the literature of our time.
“No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies, who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice: she appeared intact, she said, but was threatened with disintegration, if her protective envelope should happen to melt.” (Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques)
Gogol and Lermontov. Lermontov could never have written "The Nose," but Gogol would have turned "A Hero of Our Time" into a really brilliant farce.
Bassett went through medical school and trained as a neurophysiologist, but avoided getting licensed to practice medicine in New York State. He'd learned he didn't like poking in anyone's brain any deeper than its outer container. He also recognized that his occasional need for Schedule III substances was judiciously met by knowing someone else with a prescription pad, and suspected this would change dramatically if he had legal carte blanche to write his own. Not being financially ambitious, he managed to live well on what he earned. His fees were reasonable. He carried just enough of a client load to leave some free time during the day.
Bassett had written several books, published many articles, traveled on his own dime three or four times every year, usually to countries new to him. He was often a paid speaker at conferences, too. He bought more books than he needed, gave a lot of thought to office supplies and dishware, and sometimes purchased small works of art. He ate in very good restaurants. He gave dinner parties three times a year. He preferred the company of escorts over more time-consuming personal relationships. He enjoyed being alone, and never felt especially lonely.
Karen had intrigued Bassett since her first appointment. She tried several analysts she knew she couldn't talk to after one session, before she remembered a friend from college she ran into in front of Bergdorf’s had mentioned Bassett. His name hadn't stuck, but she found it in her diary. She had diaries that went back to age 9.
When Bassett asked who recommended him, Karen told him she would rather not say, in case things didn’t work out. She had, she said, read one of his books, and got a strong feeling from it that he was just the person who would help her. She hadn’t read one of his books, but knew a little flattery goes a long way, especially with writers.
Bassett didn't mind not knowing where she came from. The little Karen said before he asked about it convinced him she would be a reliable long-term client. In case she needed more than his half-listening ear, he sent her to a psychopharmacologist, who took a blood sample and prescribed a cocktail of three medications.
Well, that’s a lie. He didn’t take any blood sample. He wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what to do with it. No one would, psychiatrically speaking. He prescribed this and that, weaned her off one thing, boosted dosage on another, dropped in new pills, subtracted old ones, observing how she behaved from one appointment to the next, for his own amusement. Or to enhance a feeling of doing something important, but never mind. He discounted his ineptitude by reminding himself her insurance covered prescriptions. She had to travel across the city to see him, and these trips, by subway or cab, were absolute torture for her. “I hate this person,” she realized. “I especially hate coming all the way over here.” Finally she dropped him, and only went to Bassett, after her internist confided that psychopharmacologists are full of shit.
A number of Bassett's clients terminated at the same time. Over the course of a month or so, he mentioned to all of them that he was writing his "farewell to Lacan” in the form of a short story he hoped to publish in the Paris Review. He was rather surprised that ten patients dropped him immediately. Bassett called it "the great die-off," as if they comprised a species of elephants or dinosaurs. They had sought him out because he had audited Lacan’s seminar 27 years earlier. He had assiduously inflated this ever since, eventually becoming known as Lacan’s favorite disciple. They had believed they were undergoing "Lacanian analysis." Bassett had never employed any of Lacan's methods in his practice. But he’d let them think so, since saying “Lacan” gave them a vicarious feeling of exclusivity and importance, as it did Bassett himself. They felt betrayed and swindled when he abandoned techniques he had never actually used. Karin stayed, she was in love with Bassett and didn’t know who Lacan was anyway.
Item. Item. Item.
The parts he removed from his masterpieces distracted from the great author’s theme of—oh, for fuck’s sake, all this and I can’t even remember what it was—if I say “betrayal,” I could be confusing it with “blasphemy,” or mixing it up with “barratry,” for that matter (you know, deserting a seaworthy ship)—what a twit I’ve become, just when a pinch of sincerity would probably go down well. We will only know for certain when those deleted passages are published separately, what the point of him actually was. And when they are, you can bet I’ll read them, because he’s an important writer. An enduring writer. A classic who has passed the test of time ever since 1997. Important enough, anyway, to revise his old chestnuts and get some sycophants to write about it as a cultural milestone, and it is, everybody says so, and everybody can’t be wrong.
Everyone can be wrong, of course, but in that case there wouldn’t be anyone to say so, in the same sense that all Cretans are liars including me, a Cretan, and things would follow their anointed course, as they do anyway, without interruption or wayward obstacles, world without end, and so on, and so forth. I would add, Amen, if I actually knew what that means.
USA. South Carolina. 2011. "Wounded" soldiers are treated during a combat lifesaving course that attempts to train soldiers to treat common wounds during simulated combat.
Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, be they Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers on the agency, so becoming a member is a pretty gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.
Thus far, photographer Peter van Agtmael's career has primarily focused on documenting the effects of America's post 9/11 wars both at home and abroad. Before traveling to Iraq in 2006, however, he covered certain issues surrounding HIV-positive refugees in South Africa, and the Asian tsunami in 2005. After starting work in Iraq, he went on to win numerous awards, work in Afghanistan—both embedded and unembedded—and documented injured servicemen and their families. Oh, and he also shot the photo in the table of contents for this month's issue of our magazine. We spoke to him about the mysterious attraction of conflict, and the realities of censorship and care for a country's wounded.
VICE: You graduated in history with honors from Yale. What specifically did you study?
Peter van Agtmael: I studied a pretty general curriculum, that being the expectation. By the time I wrote my thesis, I had decided to write it on how the iconography of WWII Yugoslavia, of opposing forces like the Chetniks and Ustaše, was renewed in the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. How it was used to stoke fear and exploited by the power brokers to wage a civil war.
USA. Wisconsin. 2007. Wounded veteran Raymond Hubbard plays with Star Wars lightsabers with his sons Brady and Riley.
Do you think that your education led to you working as a photographer in a warzone at the age of 24?
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Those suburbs are like suburbs anywhere. It's easy to want to dream about more exciting places. When I was a kid, I was always very into pictorial history books—especially ones about WWII. I found it all very exciting and romantic, in its own way.
Obviously, you get older and the reality of these things kicks in, but the romance doesn't go away, even when you get caught in the midst of it; that's the strange and scary thing. I have had depraved and scary experiences in the last decade, but I've had beautiful ones, too. The fact is that when you get caught in the middle of these things, in these places there's an indescribable merit somehow to feeling involved, to be making a record for history, it is satisfying a certain natural curiosity—one with certain useful impulses, and certain dark impulses as well.
Do you think that built-in fascination with conflict applies to most soldiers, too?
I think it's across the board. If you have read Michael Herr's Dispatches, he puts it really well—though it may be a dated reference in some ways. He essentially said that you can't take the romance out of war. It's sort of innate. It's a genetically hardwired part of the experience. We all objectively realize the awfulness and brutality of it, but also for a lot of young people —especially men—there is this draw to it, not at all based on logic or rational thought. There are a million ways to try to intellectualize it, rationalize it, and break it into its tiny component pieces, but at the end of the day there's a pull that can't really be described or explained away. At least not for me. I envy people who aren't drawn to war in a lot of ways. I've had a good and interesting life so far, but at times I wish I had made different choices.
AFGHANISTAN. August 10, 2009. Marines of Fox Company, 2/8 Battalion swim in a canal that runs through their Forward Operating Base in Helmand province.
Your photos of graffiti on military bases betray, possibly, a waning enthusiasm for war, or these wars at least, among soldiers. Did you see a great change in morale over your time in Afghanistan or Iraq?
I felt some dissatisfaction from when I first started covering these wars, which was at the beginning of 2006 when things were already going wrong. But actually what I most often found striking was the lack of curiosity that a lot of soldiers had about the ramifications of what they were doing. There was something sporting about what they were doing, people testing their limits, doing it for the love and protection of their comrades... but the big picture? I don't think the average guy on the ground is very curious about it.
Of course there are some who are extremely engaged in it, others not at all. I remember in Iraq in 2010, one guy came up to me who heard that I had been covering both Iraq and Afghanistan for some years. He wanted me to clarify if the wars had started at the same time. I was stunned by this question. Obviously there’s a pretty important historical trajectory of how these wars started. I asked how old he was, and he said 19. I realized then that he was just ten years old when the war in Afghanistan started, 12 when Iraq did—he joined the military in an era of wartime and none of these things had made much impression on him.
I speak with a lot of qualifications when talking about these things, because the US military is a pretty diverse cross section of society, but I was surprised by a general lack of interest in why these wars were being fought at all. In terms of how these wars were going, I would say the average soldier was pretty sceptical.
IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. An Iraqi man is shoved to the ground to be searched after acting suspiciously. No contraband was found after a search of his person and house.
How have your own views on these wars changed?
I try not to draw too many conclusions before going into a situation. Despite working within the media, I have always had a pretty healthy scepticism about it. The problem is it’s very hard to interpret what’s going on in the longview when you are seeing things on a day-to-day ground level. By going to these places I learned an extraordinary amount about them, and, more specifically, because I spent so much time embedded I learned a lot about how America wages a war. Which is a fascinating thing, the way this gigantic military bureaucratic machine arrives, builds these structures, and then conducts itself.
That’s what I focused on. I became pretty jaded about ill-informed people—or even decently-informed people—spouting their opinions that are often manipulated by their desire to be heard. When you sift through all the white noise of it you end up with very little of real worth. I think that the meaning of historical events is really determined during them or in the immediate aftermath, so at this point I am very cautious about making judgments. I am of the "wait and see" category. But of course it's pretty dispiriting being there and seeing what's going on. I am left with more feelings of concern than optimism.
Was the military ever hard to work with? That "huge machine" you spoke of?
I have heard a few reports of censorship, but as a general structure I think embedding with the military is amazingly open. There are certain unit commanders who might be concerned about you and what you are doing, more often out of concern for their men than for some sort of fear of reality getting out. But then you can just move to a different unit. I've never had any problems with censorship. I have been able to record the depraved core of these events. I am referring here more to the Americans. The British and the Germans, for example, allow hardly any access at all—certainly not to combat operations.
I heard of one instance involving the British photographer Jason Lowe, who had taken a photo of an injured British soldier. The soldier in question gave full consent for the photos to be published, but the MOD tried to make it very difficult for him. To me, that feels very un-democratic. That said, I feel like the real censorship, in my experience, came from the media institutions. There's been a lot of discussion about what the iconic images of these wars are, but iconic images rely on a lot of dissemination, and I think that a lot of the images have just not been afforded that.
IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. Aftermath of a suicide bombing that killed nine and wounded 20.
You have taken a number of shocking images. Have you had trouble getting any of them seen?
Don’t get me wrong on this: I am not in favor of publishing graphic images for graphic images' sake. I think there are a lot of violent and brutal images that actually can have a distancing effect. But there are plenty of violent images that do bring one into the subject. Actually, my photo of a US soldier holding up a boot in front of a blood-spattered wall in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, for example, did get published, and in an American magazine, but only in the European edition. The article ran in both, but they substituted that photo with a generic image of some helicopters in the US edition. A similar thing happened with another photo of mine of an injured soldier staring at the camera. To me that amounts to the media’s reluctance to expose Americans to these brutal facts of war—wars that we are all incriminated in by the nature of our democracy. Lots of people try to absolve themselves by saying, "Oh, I voted against Bush, I did my part." But at the same time we haven't exactly had an antiwar movement to speak of. I find those gestures and claims a bit empty.
As well as photographing these wars, you spent a great deal of time following injured soldiers trying to reacclimate to life in America. What’s your impression of the situation for injured veterans in the US?
It’s an interesting question. What we have had in the US is a lot of "support for the soldiers," on the surface at least. After the Vietnam War it went too far toward disgust for the soldiers. They were seen as bloodthirsty criminals rather than for the most part victims of poorly crafted foreign policy. In these wars it has flipped to the other side, where the soldiers are almost fetishized, but in a very superficial way. People are putting on all these Support Our Troops events, tying yellow ribbons on their cars... these very public displays. The idea of the soldier as noble and serving the nation is there, but what I have found in practical terms is that it's all pretty empty. Once it gets down to it, a lot of these soldiers I know who have been injured—physically or emotionally—no one wants to really care for them much beyond a pat on the back. The interest in soldiers is that sort of classic "Did you kill anyone over there? Did you get in any scary firefights?" sort of interest. The empathetic interest in soldiers is, I would say, extremely limited.
USA. New Orleans. 2012. Second line on a Sunday with the Dumaine Street Crew.
What are you working on now?
I am still working with these soldiers, but my focus is shifting onto looking at the other side of these wars. The Iraqis and Afghans who have been affected by the war. The diasporas of refugees around the world as a result of these wars. I was recently in Bavaria, which has very strict immigration laws, to look at one of these refugee camps where Afghan refugees are essentially in limbo, confined to Hitler-esque barracks for years at a time with limited support from the local government. The fall out from these wars is that, and it will continue for many years.
As well as warzones, you have also worked in civilian situations, photographing daily life in America, or the Egyptian revolution, or post-earthquake Haiti. How does your working style differ in these settings?
I find myself attracted to fairly similar things in most situations. What I like about photography is that I can make myself as open as possible to what the place has to offer—obviously you can't avoid having a point of view, but you can be confronted by beautiful, novel, confusing, or shocking things without warning. That can happen in a warzone, or anywhere. I think as long as you are keeping your eyes open, it’s much the same.
Click through to see more photography by Peter van Agtmael.
AFGHANISTAN. August 18, 2009. US Marines play a game involving landing beanbags in a hole as a helicopter lands in the background in a cloud of dust.
AFGHANISTAN. August 17, 2009. A Marine Sergeant and an Afghan village elder during a lull in conversation at a Marine base in Mian Poshtay.
USA. South Carolina. 2011. New recruits to Fort Jackson prepare to board a bus to their barracks.
IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. A young boy is separated for questioning after a raid.
AFGHANISTAN. Nuristan. 2007. A helicopter comes in to land on an impromptu helipad built into the side of the mountain at the outpost of Aranas.
USA. New York. 2008. Fleet Week in Manhattan.
IRAQ. Rawah. 2006. A weary American soldier stands guard as a residential home is searched.
IRAQ. Mosul. 2006. Women grieve as their loved ones are detained after a raid that netted a large weapons cache.
IRAQ. Baghdad. 2006. Specialist Jeff Reffner, 23, moments after being wounded by a roadside bomb (IED).
USA. Chicago. 2011. Anthony Smith, a prisoner in the Cook County Jail system, complains to Sheriff Tom Dart about his treatment and sentence.
A meeting with an anarchist in Exarcheia, a district of Athens. Photos by Henry Langston.
Standing in the Athens police headquarters, interviewing the director of the drug unit, I realized I had a bag of chemically enhanced crystal meth in my pocket. I’d bought it the night before from a Greek homeless man and had forgotten to throw it away. After the interview, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, which is when some officers noticed the film crew I had brought along, who were recording from a distance.
Minutes later the cops dragged us into a holding room, the little packet of drugs still stuffed in my pants. They made some calls, glared at us, and eventually, reluctantly, released us—without ever searching me, thankfully. On my way out, I threw the baggie into the first garbage can I passed.
Several Greek police stations have been firebombed in recent months, so the cops have reason to be nervous, especially when they notice that they are being filmed. On our first evening in Athens, a different group of officers approached us and, after spotting our film crew down the street, demanded to see our papers. They deleted our footage and detained us for a couple of hours, until we’d managed to get our passports delivered to the station. Greece is a paranoid place at the moment. The police, fascists, anarchists, dealers, and drug users are all fighting for local supremacy and no one trusts anyone else.
The night before our close call at the Athens police headquarters, I was approached by a group of homeless people, one of whom was smoking some horrible-smelling stuff through what appeared to be a meth bowl made from an old lightbulb. Although I don’t speak Greek, I managed to let him know that I wanted to buy some of the drug, colloquially known as sisa. The homeless guy wandered off with my five-euro note, and afterward an old man grabbed my arm and shouted, “No, no take! Very bad.” I wasn’t going to smoke it, but I was very curious about Greece’s infamous new drug.
In 2012, Charalampos Poulopoulos, director of KETHEA, a government-funded antidrug, rehabilitation organization, authored a research paper titled “Economic Crisis in Greece: Risks and Challenges for Drug Policy and Strategy” for the journal Drugs and Alcohol Today. In it, he detailed the ways the Greek economic disaster has exacerbated drug use in the country, claiming that “rates of drug and alcohol consumption... as well as the associated mental-health problems are set to rise the longer the recession continues.” At its essence, the report provides data for the obvious: the instability that results from widespread and increasing nationwide poverty leads to hopelessness, health problems, and self-medication by way of street drugs.
“In the last two years drug users have become more self-destructive,” Charalampos wrote. “Especially in the region of Athens where the effects of economic crisis are more obvious.” According to him, it was around this time that sisa emerged on the market.
The basic ingredient of sisa is methamphetamine. Addicts have reported that it can also contain filler ingredients like battery acid, engine oil, shampoo, and cooking salt. “There is no official data on that,” Charalampos told me. “The General Chemical State Laboratory of Greece hasn’t gotten enough samples to reach any conclusions yet.”
Whatever’s in it, in many ways sisa is the epitome of an austerity drug. The majority of its users are poor, often homeless, city dwellers reeling from the psychological and physical impacts of a country in the grip of total economic collapse. In a country so broke that upper-middle-class families reportedly ate their Christmas dinners in unheated homes so they could afford a turkey, many users’ habits have become unsustainable. Addicts who’ve been priced out of using smack, crack, and meth have turned to sisa, which costs as little as two euros a hit.
As with most cheap highs, sisa comes with some nasty side effects, including “insomnia, delusions, heart attacks, and aggressiveness,” according to Charalampos. “It’s often compared with cocaine,” he said, though it acts faster, and the effects last longer than coke. “It’s the drug of the streets, produced in home-based laboratories.”
Sisa is the latest grim example in a global trend toward mass-produced synthetic drugs, from the skin-eating opiate cocktail krokodil in Siberia to South Africa’s new fascination with getting high from souped-up anti-AIDS meds to the bath-salts craze in America and the UK. These are cheap, DIY highs, so it’s no wonder that in poverty-stricken Greece, sisa has found a natural home.
Kapodistriou Street, a long road in the center of Athens, where sisa users congregate.
The day we arrived in Athens, we approached a man as we walked through Exarcheia, a district that’s traditionally been home to anarchists and is now known for its high concentration of addicts. The man was glaring at the sky, shouting. I thought he was screaming at God, but it turned out he was just yelling about a broken traffic light. Cars swept past, their drivers giving him no opportunity to beg at their windows. He was inconsolable, flitting between rage and tears, but after I bought him an orange juice, he chilled out, said his name was Konstantinos, and told me all about sisa.
“The cocaine of the poor! It’s the cocaine of the poor!” he shouted. He said that people he knew who smoked too much were losing limbs. “If you smoke it for six months, you’ll be dead,” he said. He claimed that he wasn’t a user, but the next day I bumped into him again, and he beckoned for me to follow, squatted behind a car, and smoked a pipe full of sisa. It was the middle of the afternoon.
Sisa has become something of an urban legend in Athens; everyone knows it exists, but no one knows exactly what it is. The only people with any real understanding of it are its users, the police who bust them, and the dealers who fuel the epidemic. The rest of the country is too busy trying to ignore the country’s 58 percent youth-unemployment rate, the rise of the far right and the extreme left, an increasingly ineffective legal system, a political class reduced to selling the nation’s islands, and the European Union’s demands for austerity measures that may or may not be working. As such, reports about sisa in the Greek media have been rare.
“We found out about sisa from a paper by the European Center of Disease Prevention in November,” said Dani Vergou, the health editor of the newspaper Efsyn. Sisa was a mystery to her. She’d heard rumors, but “there’s not much research from the Greek authorities or the Ministry of Health. It just sounds dangerous.”
In the streets, though, people know all about it. On Kapodistriou Street, one of the most popular junkie hangouts in Athens, I met Kostas, Stathis, and Panagiotis—chronically homeless addicts who have been trying to kick sisa, without much success.
“There’s three ways you can take sisa,” said Stathis, who’s in his 40s. “With a pipe, with a syringe, or with a piece of aluminum, and I’ve seen people snorting it as well. But let me say that if you shoot it, you don’t have long to live. It destroys all vital organs from the inside.” I asked him if he knew of anyone who had died from taking it.
“Many,” Stathis said. “I know too many. For some, their innards rotted… It might give you other sorts of sicknesses, it might hit your liver, your heart, kidneys... anywhere.”
A bag of sisa we bought for $6.50. We suspect we were ripped off.
The three of them spoke darkly about sisa. “When I had it for the first time, it freaked me out,” Panagiotis said. “I didn’t like it. It tensed me up, I didn’t feel good at all.”
“It melts you,” Kostos said. “It hits others in their nervous system. It creates wounds on the body that don’t heal, they never close. It starts like a pimple and instead of healing, it grows. Even the user’s face is full of holes.”
“You see 50- to 60-year-old guys addicted to sisa. Men, women, wherever you look, sisa,” Panagiotis bleakly added. “Everywhere in Athens: alleys, squares, smoking all day long and looking for more sisa. You don’t hear about heroin anymore, or weed or pills. This is because sisa is a cheap drug… For me sisa is the drug that will destroy Greece.”
Later the trio took us to the Off Club, a day center for sisa addicts, where the attendants handed us zine-like comic books about the dangers of the drug. The club is located just off Exarcheia Square, which is cluttered with coffee shops, bars, gangs, teens, immigrants, and others on society’s margins. Near the square is the enormous building that houses Athens Polytechnic, one of Greece’s most prestigious universities, and where, in 1973, the military sent tanks to break up an antigovernment protest, resulting in 24 deaths. The police don’t patrol around here much; instead they stay in their riot vans on the square’s outskirts, smoking cigarettes, submachine guns hanging from their shoulders. A few anarchists I met harbor a conspiracy theory that the police themselves are behind the influx of sisa into the neighborhood.
In a nearby bar, we met a notorious young anarchist who we’ll call Alcander. In 2008, during the anarchist riots, he allegedly manufactured gasoline bombs and handed them out en masse. Two years ago, Alcander noticed that homeless drug addicts were acting differently; then he had the shit kicked out of him by a group of people he claimed were users. He said that he directly blames sisa for their wanton aggression, and the way he spoke about the drug made it sound demonic. “How can I tell if someone’s a sisa user? It’s easy—they’re unbalanced, unstable, like a psychopath. They have crazy eyes, are talking to themselves, and they are very aggressive. I think sisa is the worst drug in the world.”
I asked him why he thought local police officers were behind the distribution of the potentially fatal narcotic. “Some of [the users] came to us and said that the police told them to go to Exarcheia. They said, ‘We cannot do it anywhere else, they send us away from all the other territories, all the other squares. They said go to Exarcheia.’”
“So you believe it’s political?” I asked.
“Yeah, this whole social movement is starting to rise up, and they want to have an excuse to come in as a savior for the residents... They’ve done it before, like two decades ago with heroin.”
Greek anarchists have already begun fighting back against the sisa epidemic by coordinating attacks on dealers and users in an attempt to clean up their neighborhoods. “We want the children to play in Exarcheia Square and not have to worry about drug dealing,” Alcander said. Their goal doesn’t seem like it will be met any time soon, however. Users are scattered throughout the city and, presumably, other parts of the country. And over the course of our visit, sisa dealers appeared out of nowhere to sell their wares before charging off just as abruptly.
According to Alcander, some women in the area have been raped by sisa addicts. However, this could be a rumor inspired by the idea that sisa fuels sexual appetites—a description that some addicts agree with. Konstantinos said that after he smokes sisa, he usually ends up having wild, violent sex. And he wasn’t bragging; he looked upset about it.
A sisa user smoking his pipe on Kapodistriou Street.
As recently as 2009, it was a rarity to see homeless people in Athens. But since then, homelessness in Greece has gone up 25 percent, according to Greek activists, and today, a drive through the city feels like touring a never-ending Skid Row. The police have even started throwing the homeless in the back of vans and driving them out of Athens to Amigdaleza, an immigrant detention center, in an effort they’ve dubbed Operation Thetis, after Achilles’s mother. The word thetiko, taken from her name, means “positive,” but in the minds of the homeless people it targets and those who work with them, it’s nothing short of fascistic.
“This is crazy policing,” said Charalambos. “It pushes people with the problems to the margins, and toward criminal behavior.” While we were in Greece, the homeless people we spoke to claimed that at least twice a day, the police were conducting sweeps through the center of Athens to round up the homeless and drug addicts.
“We don’t know where they’re taking them or what they’re doing it for,” said one social worker, as I accompanied her on her nightly tours of addict hot spots. “It’s a mystery.” She was being coy; it was obvious what she thought the police were doing: cleansing the streets of undesirables.
A couple days later, we visited Kannigos Square, where prostitutes, addicts, and drug dealers (who, we’d been warned, were often armed) congregated. The atmosphere was tense: earlier that day, about 20 uniformed policemen had rounded up the homeless situated throughout the square and loaded them into three large buses. When we arrived, plainclothes cops were still milling around a crowd of tweaked-out sisa and heroin users.
The sergeant who had detained us and deleted our footage when we arrived in Athens was also there, so we hid our cameras and approached his colleagues. They told to us inquire at the local headquarters, which is how I ended up accidentally bringing sisa into a Greek police station, where I met George Kastanis, the director of the Athens narcotics division. He said that he thinks sisa originated in Africa and Asia, and although he told me he was increasingly worried about its popularity, he didn’t believe the drug was turning users into violent maniacs and rapists, which matched up with my own impressions—very few of the addicts I met had showed any signs of aggression. When I asked George about Operation Thetis, he told me that it had been enacted only once.
“But I saw something this morning that looked a lot like a sweep of the streets. Was that Thetis?” I asked.
“No. It’s something completely different,” George answered, adding that these detainees are taken to police stations where the cops check for outstanding warrants against them, and that most of the time, they’re set free after an hour and a half. When I asked him whether he believed schemes like Operation Thetis were useful, he looked as though the question made him uncomfortable and said, “I’m a policeman—I follow orders.”
The follwing day, before returning home, we bumped into Konstantinos again and took him to a bakery to get him some lunch. We stood in the sun, eating small, honey-covered balls of dough, while Konstantinos tried to explain something in broken English. He kept running his finger across his neck to clarify his point, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He was a nice guy, the son of a prostitute who said he’d always been surrounded by drugs, whose quality of life had become immeasurably worse since Greece’s financial collapse. We gave him prints of some photos he’d asked for earlier, and he left smiling, saying he loved us.
“You know what he was trying to tell you before?” my translator asked me later. “That he loved you, but if you’d approached him in English that day underneath the traffic light, he would have got his sisa dealers to kill you for your cameras.”
I’ve never been one to have problems with my family, save for my twin brother. If we’re visiting, we can usually manage five days together before we are at each other's throats. Once we pass that threshold, every action, gesture, or comment can be perceived as a slight that draws the other into a frenzy of aggression. We constantly give each other one more chance, one more chance, one more chance, and then it’s too much. We spiral down and it gets ugly. It’s not the type of fight with friends where there was a beef, and it gets resolved. No, our fights are primal. Only time and distance can cure the anger.
In 2008 Brady Corbet set his sights on that particular kind of macho anger in his short film Protect You + Me. He captured the ebb and flow of a man’s irritation as it pushes against a wall poised to break. The man, played by Daniel London, eats dinner with his mother at a restaurant. The two of them share small talk, but their minds constantly stray. They bring things up only to dismiss them. Both are victims of noncommittal attitudes, unable or unwilling to confront what truly ails them. A stranger in the restaurant becomes the object of their anxiety for supposedly staring at them. They try to ignore him to no avail. Their uneasiness may or may not be of their own construction.
Corbet leaves the antagonist offscreen and instead focuses on the growing desperation in his main character. London’s reaction to the situation is simultaneously understandable and totally crazy. Repetition is key to conveying the emotions in the film. London obsessively cleans his hands well after they’re clean. The mother mentions things only to circle back to them again. Everything culminates and builds until Daniel snaps and gets stuck in a loop that is unsettling to watch.
Corbet was only 18 when he made the film. He first rose to attention for a brave and harrowing performances in Thirteen, when he was just 13, and then for starring alongside Jospeh Gordon-Levitt in Gregg Araki’s childhood sexual abuse drama Mysterious Skin, at 15. Famed director Michael Haneke tapped him to star alongside Michael Pitt, Naomi Watts, and Tim Roth in his US remake of Funny Games. After that film, he set out to make Protect You + Me. It premeired at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it was was given an honorable mention for Best Short Film. Despite being a young dude, he knows his way around some difficult emotions. His performances caught the eye of the Borderline Film boys, and he went on to star in their moody and unsettling films Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer. Currently, he’s prepping for his debut feature and set to star in a few more pics that come out later this year. He has continued to make smart and mature choices both in front of and behind the camera, and I only expect more from him as he continues to age. I reached out to Brady to clarify and elaborate the process behind his new, unusual film.
VICE: How did this short film come about? What made you want to direct? Brady Corbet: It was supposed to be a series of three short films on the theme of protection. Each film was concerned with an adult male character being faced with a hostile or aggressive situation and tracked his reaction to it. The films all had a moment where the character would get caught in a "loop of aggression" in an effort to demonstrate the absurdity of violence and the male ego. I was 18 years old when I made the film, so it's all a bit weighed down by it's concept, but I still find the film fascinating when I look back on it. The following two films were meant to be shot in France, the following year with an excellent DP named Yves Cape. But we lost the financing and they were never completed.
I had always intended to direct. I was an early cinephile, so in a way, it had been a long time coming. When I was working as an actor on Funny Games in2007, I asked our cinematographer Darius Khondji to shoot the film, as well as that film's producer, Chris Coen, if he would be interested in supporting the project. They both said yes.
How did you conceive of the climax? It's pretty fucking disconcerting and intense and I don't know if I've ever seen anything like it.
I have a lot of theories about redundancy and repetition in regards to both the visual language of a film and its narrative content. I've often felt that that redundancy can aggressively reinforce certain narrative themes while also allowing an audience to reassess their relationship to what's happening at that particular moment in the story. It is the same way that by the third time you have heard the chorus of a pop song your relationship to it has changed from the first time you heard it. You've only really processed the melody by the end of the song.
The current project I am working on has shades of these concepts but explored in a more subtle way. My short film was about testing these limits, whereas my upcoming feature will hopefully implement them in a more elegant fashion.
At what point did you decide not to show the antagonist on screen and why?
I guess the antagonist was irrelevant because it never really mattered to me why he was bothering these two people—I was only focused on the paranoid reaction to the scenario by Daniel's character.
What are you working on now?
I am in Paris now doing very early prep work on a feature I am directing called The Childhood of a Leader. The film is, in part, about events leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
A pigeon, thinking about racing. Or maybe it's just thinking about eating and flying. Maybe it hates racing. Who is to say? Photos by Dan Berlin.
Paul Tsiampas paces back and forth on his Toronto rooftop, while his racing partner and biggest competitor, Nancy LeBlond, tends to his restaurant below. He glances up at the midday sky and back down at his watch. “Anytime now,” says Tsiampas, anxiously anticipating any one of his 23 racers returning home. It’s been six long hours since his prized possessions were released from their starting point, some 500 km away. The wait is excruciating. So too is the race.
While their wait will soon be over, the sport they love may also be nearing its end. Despite its rich history, pigeon racing is a dying sport in Canada, struggling to attract a new generation of competitors who seem more inclined to participate in activities that are easier to do, involve the internet, and don't involve all of the pigeon shit cleaning and animal cruelty that’s simply inherent to the game.
Invented in Belgium in the early 1800s, pigeon racing has existed in Canada for nearly a century. Currently, there are five thousand pigeon racers competing across 101 racing clubs nationally. The stars of the races are homing pigeons, whose genetically built-in GPS makes this sport possible. On race days, the birds are driven to starting points up to 600 km away, where trailers release hundreds of birds from competing lofts simultaneously into the air. Pigeons scatter in all directions, dodging deadly hydro wires, hungry hawks and hunter’s bullets, in their attempt to find their way back home in the fastest time possible. Following their grueling flight, each pigeon, sporting a timing device around their tiny ankle, must re-enter their loft through a gate equipped with an electronic-sensor that records their time. Here, precious seconds—and even the race—can be won or lost, so the handler must calmly and quickly lure the pigeon inside. The bird that records the best overall velocity, measured in metres traveled per minute, determines the winner.
Six months ago, in the wee hours of a cold spring morning, Tsiampas is awake and dressed. He walks across the roof from his apartment to his adjacent loft, which he built for $25,000 a decade ago. The 4’ x 16’ thermal structure stands complete with nesting boxes to accommodate over 40 pigeons and a white-stained plywood floor from years of exposure to pigeon crap. A small hammer hangs on the wall that, according to him, is there for good luck. Tsiampas’s youngest birds, now three months old, are finally mature enough to train. With the morning sun still nowhere in sight, he loads 24 of these baby birds into wooden baskets and drives them some 20 km away in his trusty Ford pickup truck. Once there, he opens the basket lids and watches them fly off together, disappearing into the dark sky. He wonders if he lost them all. When the birds return home an hour later, he knows they’re ready to race.
While those, like Tsiampas and LeBlond, remain dedicated to the ritual of breeding, training and caring for pigeons year-after-year, the next generation of pigeon racers are becoming harder and harder to find. Today’s young generation are less active and seem more interested in blazing kush in front of 3D TVs. “Young kids don’t want anything to do with animals,” says the 59-year-old Tsiampas. “It’s too much work. They don’t want to get up at 4 a.m. and take pigeons for a training toss.” But kids aren’t the sport’s only detractors. In places like Cornwall, ON, municipal by-laws are in the works to ban pigeon breeding in residential areas, due to its unsightly and unwanted mess.
Unfortunately for people like Tsiampas and LeBlond, dedicated animal activists haunt the sacred integrity of pigeon racing. In April 2012, PETA released a 15-month undercover investigation in the U.S. that exposed a cruel and ugly truth about pigeon racing: The rampant slaughter of unwanted birds at season’s end. “When pigeons are used in these races, the birds aren’t voluntarily participating in this,” says Lisa Watney, a spokesperson for PETA. “It’s not a romantic sport—it’s a pastime that costs birds their lives.” Like many other pigeon racers in Canada, Tsiampas competes solely in “young bird” races, featuring pigeons under the age of one. At season’s end, he has the majority of his birds not retained for breeding killed. “(Activists) would say, ‘you’re an animal killer.’ Maybe I am,” says Tsiampas. “But it doesn’t mean I’m harming them.” Truth is, Tsiampas, a lifelong animal lover, can’t bear to kill the birds himself. He annually leaves his unwanted birds for a friend in a basket on his front stoop, because his friend likes to eat pigeons. Turns out, pigeons that fail at pigeon racing are still good at something: being tasty.
The wait is finally over. With his bird now in sight, Tsiampas feels that signature rush coursing through his veins. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," he shouts incessantly, while shaking a can of peanuts, trying to grab the bird's attention. The bird finally comes to rest on the loft’s perch, and with both grace and precision, Tsiampas grabs his trusty six-foot long bamboo rod and ushers the bird through the loft’s gate to record its all-important time and velocity. Success. Pigeon No. 2061, issued to LeBlond, finds her way home in under six-and-a-half hours, a good time by race standards.
"She always beats me," laughs Tsiampas.
But as luck - and skill - would have it, LeBlond not only beat out her lifelong friend that day, but competitors from lofts across the province, capturing first prize in the inaugural Newcastle Bow Open. It marked the second time in her career that the 57-year-old LeBlond would capture a coveted “open” title, to go along with Tsiampas’s unprecedented eight open victories over his four decades of racing.
“When I was a kid, I always thought I was flying,” says Tsiampas. “Maybe that’s why I’m for the birds.” Or maybe it’s for his love of the game.
Most of the internet is devoted to games and porn, but the overlap between the two categories—video games that let the player pretend to fuck fictional characters—are often ignored, because ew. But it should come as absolutely no surprise that there are a lot of weird entertainments floating around for those who love gaming and jerkin’ it and are too impatient to do those activities separately.
A lot of these games are very lousy, and I should know—in never-ending quest to reach the bottom of the internet, I’ve come across several of these depressing artifacts. I want to share my discoveries with the world so you too know that these things are out there. This is by no means a complete consumer’s guide, but I doubt you’d want to read that anyway.
The VDateGames website hosts 23 different games featuring 26 different digital girls, all the work of one dude with too much time on his hands who calls himself Chaotic. He’s spent countless hours creating strange, sweaty point-and-click—sometimes he makes people pay money for them, sometimes he releases them for free out of the goodness of his heart. His dedication is sort of admirable, in a way.
In the course of the average game on the site, a plastic-y, laughably endowed 3D model arrives at your apartment door for a date, and then you navigate around a slideshow of urban imagery, taking your “girl” to a casino, a park, and even a strip club if you’re feeling particularly risqué. (It should be said that all of these locations are ripped directly out of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Hitman: Blood Money. I recognized them right away, and yes, I know what that says about me.) If you play your cards right, you can get your internet dick wet in a number of obvious sexy-fantasy conclusions. Threesomes! Public blowjobs! You can fuck an alien in one of them!
Gameplay: 2/10
Problem is, these games are fucking impossible. To earn your gross sex scene you have to get a very precise set of circumstances to line up on your date. You’d have to be a legit psychopath to go through all the permutations and figure it out. Luckily (?) there is a legion of legit psychopaths on the internet who can provide detailed walkthroughs for every cum-soaked ending there is. But without those walkthroughs, you’ll probably spend a lot of your time on VDateGames getting frustrated instead of laid—just like real life. It’s seriously a byzantine process: “If you want to get her naked in the hotel room, you need to have had three drinks, win roulette at the casino, and purchase the camera at the store. What’s that? You bought the candles instead of the camera? Tough shit, horndog!”
No, it doesn't, because the VDateGames chicks are MAD DEEP in the uncanny valley. Unless you’re turned on by cyber-human nymphs who crave polygonal cock, these are probably not the games you’re looking for.
I don’t know who makes the Meet ‘n’ Fuck games and I never want to meet him (it’s definitely a him). These are basically hardcore cartoon sex scenes from semi-obscure Japanese hentai cartoons linked together by a few barely game-like features.
Gameplay: 0/10
At their heart, these are just trivia contests. You’re asked questions and if you answer correctly, the terrifyingly giant-breasted girls will want to fuck you. Nothing gets a pussy moister than knowing the approximate distance between Earth and Venus in the Meet ‘n Fuck universe.
Sexiness: 0/10
I don’t find these games sexy because I don't have severe emotional problems—these are nightmarish cartoon fever dreams, not erotica. If you are turned on by the anatomically impossible cocks and tits and sex acts, you are going to severely confused when you finally do get laid.
Ganguro Girl is a middle school classic. Before you had the balls to find actual porn, you’d turn to whatever smut you could siphon out of free gaming sites like Newgrounds. At least that’s how it worked for me. So many countless, curious nights were spent logging a ridiculous amount of hours into this stupid game, just desperate, desperate, for some preteen glimpse of eroticism. This game, by the way, is from 2002, when technology hadn’t reached VDateGirl levels.
Gameplay: 0/10
I honestly have no idea how I had the patience for this in my youth. It plays like a cut-rate JPRG, with all the boring repetitive grinding that entails, except instead of potions and swords you’re buying flowers, and instead of defeating a world-threatening demon, the game climaxes in a 30-second sex scene. Without the cheat codes (yes there are cheat codes) you’re caught in a perpetual loop of talking to your girl, giving her presents, and asking her on dates until you’ve earned enough experience to see her pussy. Ganguro Girl bills itself as a “dating sim,” but if real romance were this monotonous, the human race would have died out long ago.
Sexiness: N/A
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t get to the sex scene in Ganguro Girl, because it would’ve taken me something like 90 minutes and a lot of pointless clicking. I did get to the sex scenes when I was 12 and had a lot of disposable time and no concept of self-respect, and I’m sure I enjoyed them very much. But the things it took to reach that point… occasionally your girl would mention what her height was in centimeters, and when you went on a date with her, she’d sometimes ask you to give her that figure exactly. If you answered incorrectly, you had to start the whole date over. Fuck Ganguro Girl.
Hungirly is a slideshow of sad, unhealthy-looking Hungarian girls stripping while you pretend to have a conversation with them. Inevitably, the porn video game industry was going to go international and turn actual, real-life women from countries where there aren’t a lot of employment options into characters in a game. Hungirly is the result. Hoo boy.
Gameplay: 2/10
The English translation of the dialogue is a little dodgy and filled with terrible sex puns, as you can see from the above image. “Thanks, I just really need to put it in.” HA HA HA MY CHARACTER IS ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT HIS PENIS. God, the world is terrible.
Sexiness: 0/10
If you want the porn, you have to hand over your credit card information to Hungirly HQ. I wasn’t feeling that brave, so all I got to look at was the blank stares of these depressing, likely underpaid models. This is a website that should make you feel sad.
Matthew Heimbach insists he’s not a racist. This comes as a surprise to his fellow students at Towson University, in the suburbs of Baltimore, where Matthew has formed a group called the White Student Union that advocates for “persons of European heritage”—what most of us call “white people.” It also comes as a surprise to the African American students who feel targeted by the night patrols the senior history major began conducting in March. The patrols target supposed “black predators,” Matthew wrote on the WSU’s website, citing (among others) a case in which an African American man pulled out a knife and his penis, and wagged both at a co-ed couple who were copulating in a parking garage. “White Southern men,” he wrote, “have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.”
We recently went to Towson to meet Matthew and his cronies, as well as the students who want him off campus... or at least muzzled. White Student Union is a documentary about race, class, and self-righteous college students yelling at each other. It premieres Thursday, May 23, on VICE.com.
My “weird” sex thing is crotchless panties. I’ve never had anal, I think 69ing is stupid, and I’m not about to go around pissing on someone, even in the shower, unless, you know, I was like in love and he really, really begged for it. But I do enjoy wearing underpants with the important bits cut out, and when I say “enjoy,” I mean nothing else on this planet, not even nude Jake Johnson offering me a burrito, could make me hornier. There’s something about wearing something while having sex—even if it’s just lace around my hips—that really turns me on.
I first discovered this when I was about 23. Wanting to impress a boy I loved more than I’ve ever loved any boy before or since (so much he didn’t even have to beg), I bought a crotchless lace g-string and matching lace bra with the boob region cut out, garter belt, and thigh high tights from Ann Summers and surprised him on his birthday. (Budget option: take a pair of scissors to existing cotton briefs. BONUS: kill two birds with one stone by cutting out the crotch on pairs that have yellowed over time and you’ve been too lazy/cheap to throw out.) Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Well, if we are to consider the men I’ve been with a representative sample for the population as a whole, no, you probably don’t. While that ex boyfriend was crazy about my penchant for negligible undies, others haven’t been so bonered-up by the idea.
The next long-term boyfriend I had wasn’t into it at all. I wore them for him once and he looked at me, top lip curled in scorn, blood rushing from his penis, and spat, “Who else have you worn those in front of?”
But he’s not the only one! I’ve brought the prospect up on two other occasions with more recent boyfriends and been told it “sounded stupid and weird,” with one guy even saying he’d probably just laugh at me if he saw me wearing sexy lingerie.I am truly, honestly baffled as to why a straight male in his “raging hormones” period of life wouldn’t want to see a woman— and moreover, the woman he regularly sleeps with—wearing itty bitty panties with a part cut out for him to stick his dick in. It’s perfect for lazy dudes! No need to even bother taking anything off, just slip it right in! More bang for your buck!
At this point I’ve stopped asking why guys don’t want to entertain my penchant for kinky underwear and started asking why they don’t. In a relationship sometimes both parties have to suck it up (be it cum or fucking a girl with crotchless panties) and do things they don’t necessarily enjoy in order to please their partner. All of the men mentioned above expected me to fulfill certain functions for them sexually; functions that weren’t always my favorite things to do, but I did regardless, because mostly I am too lazy to give blow jobs but I know it would be mean to have a boyfriend and let such a selfish, sluggish thing get in the way of him having them. And yet, all of the men mentioned above flat out refused to meet my requests.
It’s inherently accepted in sex—even in what we deem “healthy” and “non-violent” sexual relationships—that women will do things they don’t really love to please a man, like suck on his balls or go doggy style. In my experience, as well as the experiences of many women I speak with about sex regularly, there’s rarely even a polite question put forward before a man follows his impulses in the bedroom. That is to say, oftentimes a dude will just try and stick it up your butt without notice.
Yes, sex should be spontaneous and crazy sometimes—no one wants to feel like they have to ask their partner “are you OK?” every 30 seconds—and it’s always great to have that level of trust with someone, but the fact remains that there’s still an imbalanced gender dynamic where sexual intimacy is concerned. Men aren’t expected to just do things they might not be that interested in because women want them; and yet, though it goes largely unsaid, a woman who refuses to flip over and take it from behind by a guy who took the liberty to shove her hips around that way is a prude, someone who is killing the mood, or collar-pullingly awkward. That dynamic exists, and I’m not saying it happens with malicious intent, or that it exists in every relationship, but generally, in heteronormative sexual relations, the balance of power still resides with the male, no matter what we tell ourselves.
I’m fed up with not being allowed to wear my favorite panties to bed. Maybe next time I’ll just wear them under my dress and when it’s time for the clothes to come off and the dude I’m with is faced with the HORROR! of porn-star panties, I’ll just scream “PUNK’D!” and jump on top of him regardless.
Once upon a time, long before Angelina Jolie got a mastectomy, she adopted a Cambodian child. As a result, privileged Westerners of all nationalities flocked to the country's orphanages in the hope of simultaneously nurturing a child and their own sense of self-worth.
In 2012 alone, Cambodia was visited by 3.5 million tourists, so I guess someone was eventually bound to put two and two together and realize that the hundreds of orphanages throughout the country could be exploited into becoming a tourist attraction for the rising amount of foreign visitors.
The country's orphanage boom all began in the early 70s, when Pol Pot marauded around the country, intentionally splitting up villages, slaughtering families and imprisoning the educated populace in an attempt to win the civil war. The tactic worked for Pol and his Khmer Rouge regime, but left thousands of children displaced, so NGOs came flooding in to salvage the situation by building orphanages all over the country.
Thirty years later, Cambodia now boasts more than 500 orphanages—a figure that has doubled in the last decade, presumably because the large donations they receive are a much easier way to make money than actually working. Sadly, that nifty little ruse seems to have become public knowledge, and the exploitation of Cambodia's orphans has turned into a booming, multi-million dollar industry.
Dr. Setan Lee, a Cambodian who lived through the Khmer Rouge era, has watched the spread of corruption through his country's orphanages. There are Westerners who come to Cambodia under the pretence of helping orphans, Lee told me, but "literally all they're doing is fulfilling their own lusty lifestyles" by siphoning off the donations intended for the children into their own pockets.
Foster schemes and effective family planning are arguably much better alternatives to orphanages, but unfortunately neither of them exist to a sufficient extent in Cambodia, largely due to the country's poor economy. According to Tara Winkler, founder of Cambodia’s Children’s Trust (CCT), it's that same economy and "lack of alternative support" that's making parents "feel forced to send their children away" to orphanages.
Tara continued, saying that there's a common perception among Cambodian parents that, if they send their children to orphanages, they will be provided "an education, access to medical care, and better nutrition.” That perception now means that orphanages are no longer comprised of just orphans, but also children from poor families.
In fact, according to a 2011 UNICEF study, an estimated three out four children in Cambodia's orphanages still have one living parent. That clearly seems to be dodging the definition of "orphan" a little, but those in charge couldn't care less about stuff like definitions or, say, morality, because the more children in their care, the more donations they receive to pillage for their own ends. A well-intended scheme that has now become a loophole for the corrupt, with some orphanages even offering small sums of money to parents in exchange for their children.
A number of unlicensed orphanages are now popping up around Cambodia and starting to reel the kids in. They are all, Tara tells me, “operating without official registration and without essential documentation, like child protection policies.” So we can only guess what goes on behind closed doors, but Tara is certain that whatever it is, it's deeply corrupt in some shape or form. Dr. Lee goes one step further, claiming that the children in these unlicensed orphanages are being "forced to do labor in jobs that they don't want to do.” It's Oliver Twist, only with exploitative, morally corrupt caretakers who ruin lives, rather than charismatic weirdos who teach you how to pickpocket.
Children in these orphanages are rarely given an education, instead being put to work until the tourists come to visit, when they're wheeled out as bait for donations. Unsurprisingly, little of those donations end up being spent on their care. And it's not only the physical toll on these children that's worrisome, but the damaging emotional effects that come with your parents handing you over to a workhouse where you're forced to live in worse conditions than you were at home.
Tara works with many children and families in Battambang, a region in northwest Cambodia, and her observations of the children’s feelings sum up the issue pretty concisely. “Imagine being one in 100," she says. "Imagine not really understanding why you’ve been taken away from your family, and imagine how it would feel to miss your family and siblings, knowing they’re only a few minutes down the road.”
Tara went on to warn that children being turned into “moneymaking tourist attractions” isn't even the most serious issue currently plaguing Cambodia's orphanages. Sexual abuse is rife, and according to Dr. Lee, Western child abusers travel to Cambodia to work in its orphanages just so they can gain easy, unsupervised access to the children in care.
In 2007, Tara’s organization, CCT, rescued 14 children from an orphanage named Sprouting Knowledge Orphans, where the director had been sexually and physically abusing the children in his care. The children, Tara told me, were “provided with so little food that they were forced to catch mice and rats to survive.” Working in the country for the last six years, Tara assures me that cases like that are endemic in Cambodia's orphanages.
Earlier this year, an Australian-run orphanage was closed down amid accusations of child abuse and child trafficking. The orphanage in question—the ominously named Love in Action—had "rescued" 21 children from the streets of Phnom Penh and, like many others, was unregistered. A week later, a director of another institution in the city of Siem Reap was arrested for sexually abusing two girls, one 11 years old, the other 12. His orphanage remains open, but is expected to be shut down.
Although the likely closing of the orphanage seems like a good thing, when orphanages are shut down—or when children escape or grow too old to stay—they're forced out onto the streets with no family or support. They're vulnerable and susceptible to becoming tied up in work that's nowhere near suitable for children.
Young girls often end up offering themselves to geriatric sex tourists in small, dirty bars, and others—according to Dr. Lee—flock to factories to get work because they don't have the education required to apply for any other jobs. And while it may beat sex work, life as a factory worker in Cambodia still isn't that desirable—you're basically guaranteed malnourishment, exceptionally low wages, and only about four days off a month.
It took the Cambodian government 20 years to establish a tribunal system to punish the Khmer Rouge members guilty of genocide in the late 70s, so it's unlikely that they're going to step in and put a stop to the orphanage exploitation any time soon. Accentuating that problem, Dr. Lee tells me that a quick, "$750 or $1,500 will keep [the authorities'] mouths shut, so even though these people should be sent to prison, it's very hard to do anything because the government is so corrupt."
That said, the government has promised an investigation and, if necessary, raids into the offending orphanages. However, there's no real sign of that being carried out any time soon. The most realistic aim, according to both Tara and Dr. Lee, is trying to keep children with their parents, but that's far easier said than done in a culture where those parents genuinely believe that orphanages will provide their kids better prospects than they can offer themselves.
Of course, the legitimate, licensed orphanages still doing things the right way may well be able to offer these kids the futures they deserve. So perhaps it's time to start paying a little more attention to where exactly the donations are going.
On Wednesday, Commander Chris Hadfield came back to Earth. The Canadian astronaut recently garnered headlines by performing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station. Just as Hadfield received his hero’s welcome, though, an anonymous NASA official sent VICE a copy of the commander’s flight journal in an effort to, he says, “stop the monster we’ve created before it’s too late.”
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 001
NASA recently approached me about recording the first full-length music album in space. They claim it’s to generate good PR for the space program, but I’ve been briefed on their real motive. They want to definitively determine whether it’s any cooler if your dad sings to you from space. In other words, to produce conclusive results, my three adult children will have to lose their minds to their father singing NASA-approved songs from the ISS. There will be scientists on the ground measuring factors like dungaree moisture levels and the presence of "Dad Sweats".
My initial reaction was that this was both frivolous and perverse, and would probably not help the program director reconcile with his estranged family. But I do have my own motive for going along with the project, in addition to all the literally star-struck land poon I’ll be getting after I land. An acoustic guitar, you see, is the perfect way to smuggle a penis pump and furtively test its properties in space, away from the prying eyes of our Earth's Lord, and in brazen defiance of his iron-fisted genital theocracy. I got the idea from Glenn Frey’s short-lived TV Miami Vice spinoff Smuggler’s Wild.
The purpose of this log will be to record my own findings, as well as keep track of the process of making an album that I have little to no interest in.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 002
NASA is thrilled with my suggestion of a collaboration with Ed from the Barenaked Ladies. They love the Canadian angle and the beyond-inoffensive music. What they don’t know is that Ed is my partner in collecting penis pump data. His stinkstick is as similar to mine as anyone I could find given the time constraints, so he’ll be serving as my control back on Earth.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 003
NASA waited till I was up here to tell me that the album will be all covers. I was the first Canadian to walk in space. Now I'm the first Canadian to memorize Foreigner lyrics in a vehicle over $8,000 in value.
Also, I’ve been told the Queen of England has sent me her “best wishes.” What a thoughtful, heartfelt sentiment. I’m sending her back “regards” from my “undermustache” (a signed headshot of my star-taint).
Chris Hadfield's photo of the Bahamas. Found in his diary and via.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 004
I'm going off book. This can't be entirely covers. I'm not representing our galaxy with a fucking novelty record. Like it or not, they're getting something straight from this Spaceman's universe-sized heart. Here are some of the originals I started penning as soon as we launched:
"Blastoff Your Ass Off"
"The Space Between Our Groins"
"I Swear I'll Make You Mrs. Cosmos"
"Saturn Smiled at Me"
"Backseat of my Astrowagon"
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 005
I should mention that the rest of the crew is mostly made up of session musicians (they’ll be billed as Marsman Mitch and the All-Mars All-Stars) and hit-making producer Don Was (“Walk the Dinosaur”, the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge). They’re having a hard time adjusting to the diet up here, which mainly consists of astronaut ice cream, astronaut semen (rich in protein and testosterone to intimidate alien parasites), astronaut meat, astronaut Cheetos (ice cream flavor), and astronaut Vitamin Water.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 006
It turns out space cures cancer. Well, back to miking this amp.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 007
NASA heard the first demos and is livid over the lack of covers. They want to hear an established hit by tomorrow or they’re going to start “fucking with the oxygen.” I said I’d throw them a bone by including a version of “Spaceman” by Babylon Zoo, but they turned it down on the grounds that it “sucks major shit.”
Turn down the oxygen all you want, you shitheel cowards. You think I need air to deliver the greatest album in NASA history? All I need is an acoustic guitar, this filthy mustache, and the courage to say what every astronaut is thinking.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 008
As promised, they’re making the air harder to breathe. The band is concerned about delirium, but I told them not to worry. I’m maintaining a sane public face for all of us by sending down videos of how I clip my nails and brush my teeth in zero gravity. I’m saving the three-hour feature on our plastic piss-sacks for an emergency.
In other news, my own penis pump testing is proving inconclusive. To be honest, this was the result I was hoping for. I mean, I can't come out here every single time I need to upbeef my meat.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 009
Instead of complaining about the “lack of oxygen” and “reduced brain function,” I’m making the best of things. Going to try using my pump as a guitar slide, like a penis-obsessed Jeff Healey, which might have been Regular Jeff Healey had he been able to see his own dink.
I also got to put on a green bowtie and sing “Danny Boy” for St. Patrick’s Day. I love taunting the Irish and their shit space program.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 010
I suppose my greatest fear is falling endlessly through the infinite void of space and I can't open my spacesuit to change the song I have on repeat to learn it for the record and the song in question is "Sunset Grill" by Don Henley. But it would be a small price to pay for pushing the limits of human accomplishment to the limit.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 011
The program director’s insisting on Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” I’m going along with it for the sake of the men’s morale; it may be the only thing that gets them to stop hiding in the astro-crawlspace.
It’s a shitty, obvious choice, but I’m not a prima donna. I’m a simple guy; I was married in a Reebok tuxedo, for Christ’s sake.
Unfortunately, Don Was just suffocated in the airlock. I told him it wouldn’t be “great for vocals.” He’ll be producing “Butt Town” in heaven tonight…
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 012
These Bowie lyrics are pretty fucking depressing. I do not love my wife very much. She knows.
Commander’s Jam-Log: Entry 013
Despite seemingly everyone turning on me, the recording’s finished. Things started moving along once I got to use the arrangement I wanted. All I had to do was convince the band to get into the escape pod, which was really just the compartment we use to jettison garbage. They’re in a better place right now, a place I like to call “off my bozak.”
Regardless of what comes of this, I’m not sure what the lesson is here. I can only lie back and listen to the playback of my own voice, nature’s own organ expanding into a vacuum that holds nothing we can ever wholly consume.
You should watch our show about space, Spaced Out:
Tony Clifton and the author's pet goat, Chauncey Gardner. All photos by Zack Smith
Scroll to the bottom of this piece to watch the exclusive premiere of Tony Clifton's music video for "Lonely Girl." It's safe for work... ish.
Before the flood, Jeremy Johnson and his wife were always in the process of starting or ending some new independent business venture. Nothing ever stuck. Before Hurricane Katrina filled their New Orleans home with poisonous water, they’d curated a personal museum of pop-culture knick-knacks that they eventually tried turning into a thrift shop. Looking back on it, the most important items in Jeremy’s collection included the official WWF Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler figurines, and a copy of Lynne Margulies's Kaufman documentary I'm From Hollywood, which told the story of the aggressively strange, groundbreaking comedian and performer’s venture into the wrestling ring. “Andy Kaufman hit me hard at a young age,” Johnson explains. “In sixth grade, this male friend of mine would get these girls in the neighborhood to come over, we would watch videotapes of Andy Kaufman wrestling women, and we would wrestle the girls in his parents’ living room while watching the videos.”
Katrina also flooded the school where Jeremy had been teaching moderately disabled high school kids, so in 2007, at the age of 27, Johnson began working at a coffee shop, while rebuilding his home. As an emotional booby prize, Johnson finally had the time to indulge his amateur filmmaking urges. “For a long time I’d been denying my creative side,” Johnson says. He slung coffee to a number of New Orleans layabouts, including an old gray-haired hippie type who began coming in every day to chat up Jeremy about pop culture, especially film. Not until the ponytailed fellow asked Jeremy to help him film a commercial for insult comic and “singer” Tony Clifton’s big comeback tour did Johnson recognize him as Andy Kaufman’s former writing partner, Bob Zmuda.
By the time he approached Johnson, Zmuda had been doing charity work for decades, pretty much ever since Kaufman's death in 1984. He founded the American version of Comic Relief in 1986 in Kaufman’s memory and put on a number of high-profile comedy shows to raise money for philanthropic causes, mainly benefitting the homeless. The organization has raised tens of millions of dollars and in the process helped break the careers of Dave Chappelle, Bill Hicks, Dane Cook, Sarah Silverman, and many others. In 2006, after an eight-year hiatus, Comic Relief reemerged to put on a show to benefit the victims of Katrina. When he hired Johnson as a videographer, Zmuda was working on a more ambitious project than a one-off gig: a tour featuring two dozen New Orleans musicians and dancers that would both raise money for performers still dealing with the effects of Katrina and restart the long-dormant career of Tony Clifton.
Clifton is a character, both figuratively and literally. Andy Kaufman claimed to have “discovered” the drunken, foul-mouthed nightclub performer in 1969, but in reality—if the word reality applies to any of Kaufman’s projects—he might have emerged from Kaufman’s head, like Foreign Man. In any case, since the 70s, the Clifton costume and persona has been passed around like a handle of warm whiskey in a green room. In his book Andy Kaufman Exposed! Zmuda copped to having first worn Tony’s signature thick prescription sunglasses, and starting in 1979 Kaufman impersonated Clifton as well—so often and with such hateful aplomb that audiences quickly came to consider the character Andy’s original creation and forgot that a “real” Clifton supposedly existed somewhere. In public, Zmuda and Kaufman played an elaborate, years-long Tony Clifton shell game that lasted until Kaufman’s death in 1984. In the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey played Kaufman doing Clifton, and Paul Giametti imitated Zmuda imitating Clifton. Andy’s brother Michael Kaufman has also publicly donned the Clifton leisure suit, as has Criss Angel, though both Johnson and Clifton say Angel sucked at it.
“I work for the original Tony Clifton, though,” Johnson says, “the guy Kaufman discovered in a Vegas nightclub.”
Most people believe today’s Tony Clifton to “be” Zmuda, who’s now old enough that he no longer needs prosthetics to approximate Clifton’s jowls. Either way, Jeremy has always served two bosses: Zmuda—who Johnson by now considers “a dick”—and Clifton, whom he much prefers. Johnson has spent over five years as Clifton’s de facto assistant, on-call videographer, and sometimes writing partner. People close to the duo have suggested that Johnson is to Tony what Zmuda was to Kaufman. Which still doesn’t mean he can answer the most basic of questions: Who is Tony Clifton?
Jeremy Johnson and Tony Clifton pose in a photo booth.
Jeremy’s employment with Comic Relief began in earnest in 2008, when Clifton and his Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra spent several weeks' worth of long afternoons practicing more than 100 songs at One Eyed Jacks in New Orleans’s French Quarter. A lot of work needed to be done if the crew was to revive Clifton’s career—other than a one-off appearance in 2004 commemorating the 20th anniversary of Kaufman’s death, Clifton hadn’t performed live onstage since 1985. Suddenly here he was, rising from Katrina’s toxic floodwaters for a second act.
Johnson’s job was to film the shows and also run the videos that played during the performances, like the footage of ships battling on the high seas that accompanied Tony’s nasal rendition of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The show did not debut in New Orleans but rather with a successful run in Georgia. Jonhson was then asked to stay in Chicago for the summer, to shoot another set of Clifton’s live shows, a gig that turned into a cross-country tour. The show’s cast included famed burlesque dancer Trixie Minx and members of her Fleur De Tease troupe, plus musicians on the level of backup singer Whitney Meyer, who recently impressed the judges on The Voice. Clifton’s trumpet player Ashlin Parker has backed Aretha Franklin, while saxophonist Adrian Crutchfield has played with Prince and Lionel Ritchie.
Like so many other well-meaning Katrina charity projects based in New York and LA, Clifton’s show helped in one way but also removed a lot of important talent from an already weakened New Orleans music scene. Still, Clifton maintains, “I did a good thing getting them out of this hellhole.”
Despite fronting a charity project benefiting New Orleans, Clifton claimed to hate the town. “While Bob Zmuda, president and founder of Comic Relief, cared a great deal about New Orleans after the flood,” says Johnson, “Tony Clifton didn’t give a fuck about it.” Tony supposedly only ended up on the tour as part of a plea bargain in a New Orleans rape case. Tony calls it a drunkard’s simple mistake: he came back to his hotel very late and wasted, accidentally entered the wrong room, and crawled in bed with a woman who got the wrong idea, freaked out, and pressed charges. “That broad was old as dirt,” he says in his defense. “I do not under any circumstance fuck anything over half my age.” He claims to have only led his band of Katrina survivors as part of his community service. “Fuck New Orleans. New Orleans put me in fuckin jail," Clifton grunts. "I think the best thing that happened to this place was that big fucking wave comin’ here and cleaning out a lot of the nigs.”
Another thing about Clifton: he has the tendency to be as racist as you’d expect a weathered old alcoholic lounge singer to be, both privately and especially publicly.
The Katrina Kiss My Ass tour came to a close with two killer shows in New Orleans. The first night’s collection of songs, skits, racist and pedophilic jokes, and puppet shows was so awe-inspiring, I returned the next night and caught a completely different, equally hair-raising show. A lot of comedy is falsely described as “dangerous,” but at those two shows it genuinely felt like something bad might happen. Clifton doesn’t use the word nigger to break down its associations and our prejudices, the way Louis C. K. does with hot-button words; he spits it out with abandon. Tony makes Quentin Tarantino seem tasteful. You wonder how he would ever find even one black musician to work for him, much less five of his 11 band members—especially since he claims he doesn’t warn anyone what they’re in for before he hires them. Johnson admits, however, that the show’s musical director went behind Clifton’s back to explain things. “Think of Tony Clifton as Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse,” Johnson says, quoting the official line. “Heʼs a bigoted Archie Bunker–type man, and he says what he wants. Part of his shtick onstage is to always push boundaries. No matter how hard it hurts, he’s just going to go for it all the time.”
Carved into Jeremy’s shoulder is a large Public Enemy tattoo, which makes one wonder how he feels about hearing the N word constantly from a white man. Chuck D likely wouldn’t see it as funny. “I have felt guilty in certain situations, where I just don’t want to be there while he’s saying that stuff,” Johnson admits. “But then I remember this is part of the game, the ride, the act. And also, what the fuck else am I gonna do?”
Zmuda claims to not like the racial component to Clifton’s act either. “I don’t agree with people saying the N word onstage,” he says. “But Tony’s able to get away with it because people perceive him to be a character. Use your own name and say it? You’re dead. It’s different when said by a character. But to do it at all, it has to be well thought out.”
It was Clifton’s offstage verbal abuse, however, that finally sunk the ship. “One night Tony didn’t like the ending of a song, or something,” Johnson recalls. “He was hammered as usual, and backstage, I’d never seen Tony Clifton more pissed. He was runnin’ around with his shirt off, stomping up and down, yelling, screaming in the hallways, ‘Just fire these fucking niggers!’ And the band was like, ‘Wait a minute. We were cool with what you were doing onstage, but you’re not on stage right now.’” At the next night’s performance in Denver, Colorado, an extra large dose of N words finally compelled four black members of the Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra to abandon Clifton midset. Trombone player Kyle Rothchild got behind the drum kit and moved the awkward show forward. “Some of the burlesque dancers came out on stage crying,” remembers Jeremy. “They still felt they needed to do the numbers to get the paycheck.
“I came to tears, too,” he admits. “I mean, this really wasn’t what I signed on for. It was too much, every day for a month, with no relief, stuck out on the road with Tony Clifton.”
When asked why he abruptly quit on Clifton, respected New Orleans sax player Khris Royal answers simply, “Somewhere there has to be a line.” While he doesn’t regret walking off stage that night, Royal does feel conflicted. “Tony just wanted to see where our line was, so in some ways I was a sucker,” he says. “I did maintain my line, but he got the reaction he was after.”
Clifton claims that “the Denver Massacre,” as he calls it, made him realize he needed to henceforth really befriend all of his employees. “I am now very close to my band members,” he says. “I’ve learned that I need to be talking with my people and communicating with them directly. People who work with me now know who I am, and know where I’m comin’ from... Some of the people who decided not to leave the band that night, by the way, were also black. But they saw the bigger picture. So, it’s not like all the blacks left the band at once. Just the niggers left.”
Tony Clifton's house.
After that precarious first tour, the remaining employees were rewarded with an invitation to Clifton’s killer digs on Lake Tahoe just south of Reno, Nevada—a grand estate equipped with a recording studio, movie theater, dance studio, and hot tub. His backyard opens onto 10,000 acres of protected forest and mountains. When Johnson arrived there with the rest of the staff, he had been working for Clifton for seven months. “In Tahoe, Tony was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him,” recalls Jeremy. “He pegged us all with a lot of questions about what happened on the road, and a lot of truth came out. He also needed to know where his loyalties lay. He invited us out there so he could figure out who had to go, and who needed to stay.”
At that two-week retreat, Johnson and Clifton grew close, as the story of Comic Relief’s new Sony Z7U camera illustrates. “I was at first using old hand-me-down gear from the 90s,” says Jeremy. “But I wanted to stay on the Clifton project so badly I went into $7,000 worth of debt for a serious camera. Then, after a while, I told Comic Relief we really needed a second camera. I got shut down by Zmuda. But when the cast was out in Tahoe and we finally got to hang with Tony as a real person, I brought it up again. After a few drinks, he asked me, ‘Will the HD make me look good?’ I said, ‘The HD is gonna make you look fabulous.’ He said, ‘OK, I’ll talk to 'em.’
“So the next morning I got a phone call from Zmuda. He said, ‘I’m kind of angry about something. We hired Tony to do this thing mainly because we don’t have to pay him, and it’s not costing us much money. But I got a phone call from Tony this morning, telling me that he thinks the HD is going to make him look good, and that we really need to get this second camera. You’re not in trouble this time, but any time you’re fucking hanging out with Tony Clifton don’t you ever talk to him about money or ask him for any kind of fucking equipment. He will always want it, and we’ll have to pay for it. And we really don’t have any money, Jeremy.’”
Johnson got down on a more personal level with Tony after the cast all left the estate and Jeremy stayed behind. Soon, a snowfall made Tony’s driveway impossible to traverse—and Johnson didn’t have the money to return to New Orleans even if the ice melted. He was trapped, forced into living alone with Tony Clifton in Tahoe for a winter that turned into an entire year.
During that time, Johnson never saw Zmuda—meaning he either never broke character, or else Clifton's not his character. Jeremy and Tony filmed continuously and made six music videos. “There’s so much beautiful green space there around Tahoe,” says Johnson. “We shot tons of stuff up in Reno, Carson City, in the woods, up on a mountain.” It wasn’t all beauty though. “Tony Clifton was all up in my shit the whole time,” Johnson recalls. “Once he had me there, he had me. I was on the clock the entire day, and the day would stretch into weeks and then months. I just couldn’t get any fresh air. We started to not have such a great relationship after a while because I was trapped in his magic castle. Any time of the day he could bombard me. I mean, I like talking about ideas, but it was just nonstop.”
Meanwhile, back home in New Orleans, Johnson’s marriage began to crumble and he was losing his house to bankruptcy, situations aggravated by his absence. “I was having a total breakdown,” Johnson says. “The only thing I had that I could almost call stable was the Tony Clifton gig. It sounds fucked up because you should also have a commitment to marriage but… it’s not every day that an historic comedy icon gives you a job. Sometimes something will cross your path and you have to have the gumption to take it."
Predictably, Clifton wasn’t exactly Ann Landers when it came to marriage advice. “When I first mentioned divorce to Tony, he immediately said, ‘I think that sounds like a good idea,’” Johnson remembers. “He has a strict policy: no relationships with women except hookers. So there were a lot of times in Tahoe that I just wanted to say to him, ‘This is not the life I pictured for myself at 32 years old, you know? Getting divorced and having no friends and being trapped in the snow sleeping on your couch… Can’t you just act like a human being?’”
Clifton and companions.
By Thanksgiving of 2009, Johnson was officially separated—and thus free to be taken by Clifton for the first time to Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Mound House, Nevada, the whorehouse most famous as the set of HBO’s Cathouse. Though Clifton admits to being a “big supporter” of legalized prostitution, and to visiting Thailand multiple times a year, he denies he bought his Tahoe property 22 years ago to be close to the Bunny Ranch. “He claims he lives there because he likes the fresh air,” Johnson chuckles. “But yeah, absolutely, he’s a 45-minute drive from the biggest legal brothel in America, with the best girls.”
Clifton tells anyone else who’ll listen how he's the “official tester” at the Bunny Ranch. He calls Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof “the PT Barnum of booty” and claims, “Nobody gets laid more than Tony Clifton... As soon as Hof gets a new girl, I go down there and test to make sure they can do all the nasty things that clients want. I’ve fucked, on average, two or three girls under 25 years of age every week for the last 12 years. And they get nervous that I’m not gonna give them a good report! So they’re like, ‘Do you want me to suck your cock again? Do you want me to swallow your cum? Do you want anal?’ I am the luckiest guy on the Earth.”
Zmuda has never joined the crew at the Ranch, so Johnson has gone either with Clifton or alone on all of his roughly 40 visits so far. Clearly, Tony has rubbed off on him. “Not that I have participated every time,” Jeremy says. “But I was completely alone in Tahoe with the snow, and I was going through divorce, and I didn’t have any friends. So just going to the Bunny Ranch and hanging out at the bar and shooting the shit with the girls, those were some of the most fun times I’ve ever had. You don’t have to be fucking ‘em.”
Johnson remains most impressed by the Thanksgiving feast he shared that first night with the girls. “There is always food at the whorehouse,” he says. “The Bunny Ranch has this immaculate kitchen. Hof hires special chefs. Great people come from all over the place to cook and eat in there.” Once, around an opulent Thanksgiving spread, Clifton gathered Johnson, Hof, and all the girls to make a poignant toast. “Today is not a day for thinking,” he said. “I don’t want to intellectualize, or think too much today. The only serious decision I want to make today, is: Will I have white meat? Or dark meat?”
It wasn’t until Christmas 2009 that Johnson finally came back to New Orleans for a visit. His marriage was officially over, but he had a partner in Tony Clifton.
Following the stint in Tahoe, Johnson moved to LA and says that only recently, finally, have his prospects improved. This year Clifton and Johnson premiered their Katrina Kiss My Ass Orchestra concert documentary Tony Clifton: the Movieto a sold-out crowd at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; afterward, Tony and crew traveled to Austin’s South by Southwest festival to again screen their documentary, hang with the Flaming Lips, and accept High Times magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “For a couple years after those Katrina tours, there was a lull,” admits Johnson. “And I wondered if the project was going anywhere. But MOMA reinstituted my faith, and [New Orleans-based event-planning company] Huka Entertainment has hooked Tony into events with all kinds of musicians and comedians. He’s working with R.E.M. and Smashing Pumpkins. I think Tony is about to blow up, finally. And maybe I can one day buy a house again.”
Johnson hadn’t been back to New Orleans—which he still considers home—until earlier this year, when he made the trip with Clifton for Buku Fest, where Huka had booked Tony to judge an air sex competition.
It’s a more corporate vibe than Andy Kaufman traveling the country, challenging women to wrestling matches to be sure—Huka is owned by SFX Entertainment, which is in turned owned by giant Clear Channel. But Clifton is clearly excited for new opportunities to do his act for a younger crowd who know nothing of the dead comedian who popularized him. “I have energy and I have a big fucking heart,” he brags. “And the trick is to keep yourself associated with young people. Going back to Dennis Hof: I don’t fuck any girl over half my age, and I promise you.” He pokes my chest for emphasis: “Fucking, young, girls, will, keep, you, young. Their pussy juice is the nectar of the gods. It’s my secret to life.”
Clifton and Johnson at work on the set of one of the singer's videos.
Like the Republican party, Clifton may have to remake certain aspects of himself to appeal to this younger demographic. These days, Tony rarely unpacks the mean version of his act for strangers. “He’s trying to adapt to people he wants to work with,” Johnson says. “After 30 or 40 years, he’s learning to respect people.” And that includes respecting Jeremy. “One thing that changed after our miserable year in Tahoe,” Johnson says, “is it made us much more honest with each other, and helped us keep less secrets—secrecy being a huge part of this project. Up till then I’d been a good little soldier, but after that I just said what I thought, regardless of the consequences.” This mostly meant Johnson limiting his work hours, and not answering his phone for every one of Clifton’s drunken 3 AM epiphanies about women or performing.
When I accompanied him and Johnson to the Buku Fest, Clifton didn't insult even one young person, all of whom were clearly rolling their faces off—he was feeling the contact high and seemed enamored of the incredible bass and ear-splitting squiggles that the kids these days call music. He smiled and waved at the oblivious young’uns who shouted, “Nice costume, man!” In New Orleans he’s just another costumed kook.
“I don’t think Tony’s ever been able to come to life the way he has in the last five years,” Johnson shouted over the blaring dubstep. “Ever since he finished his community service, he’s felt rejuvenated to actually want this career again. And now that he finally has Andy Kaufman off his back, this is the first chance Tony’s had to just be himself, to be who he wants to be.”
A scantily clad Lolita led Clifton into some heavy, molly-induced flirting, and we all danced a bit as Kid Cudi performed “Man on the Moon,” which is named after the movie named after the R.E.M. song about Kaufman. An extremely high young man cut between us, aimed his swirling eyes down at Tony and asked, “Andy? Are you in there?”
As we headed towards the scheduled air sex contest, I noticed Johnson didn't walk beside Clifton, so I took the chance to ask Jeremy, finally, if he and Clifton are friends. “We definitely are on a certain level,” he replied. “But I’ve separated myself somewhat because I realized it wasn’t a good thing to be friends with my boss. Because one day everything’s good, then the next day he’s screaming at me. And then I’m like, ‘Wait, aren’t you my friend?’”
Here's the premiere of Tony Clifton's new video:
Epilogue: The Katrina relief funding that had paid Johnson's salary has now run out. He is now moving home to New Orleans, where he will continue to do Comic Relief’s bidding on a more limited basis.
Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.
I’m sure by now you’ve seen that video that Los Angeles-based writer Greg Karber made where he hands out a buch of Abercrombie gear to homeless people. It’s embedded above if you haven't.
Karber made the video in response to that stuff that Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries said about their “no women’s clothing above a size 10” policy. Essentially, Jefferies only wants “thin and beautiful people” shopping at his stores, because he doesn’t want the “cool kids” to have to endure the horror of seeing a fat person wearing the same outfit as them. I think we can all agree that the most shocking part of Mike’s statements is that they reveal there’s a person out there who thinks that the cool kids are wearing Abercrombie.
Karber handed out A&F clothing to, as far as I can tell from the video, a fairly bewildered homeless population on Los Angeles’s Skid Row. His goal was to “rebrand” Abercrombie & Fitch by putting their clothing not on the cool kids that Mike Jeffries so loves, but on the homeless, who, I guess, are the opposite of cool.
Now, if you only think about it for a few seconds, it would appear that this is a great campaign. Karber wanted to make a point about Abercrombie & Fitch and to “clothe the homeless,” in his words, while doing it. Unfortunately, “Fitch the Homeless,” as Karber dubbed his campaign, is fucking stupid. For one thing, Karber doesn't appear to ask these people if they want Abercrombie & Fitch clothing, or if he did ask them, he cut those parts from the video for some reason. He just sort of dumps polo shirts and A&F brand tees onto the residents of Skid Row, as if they were pack mules and he were a sherpa venturing into the mountains to deliver striped rugby shirts to a monastery.
Perhaps Karber realized that homeless people make great props for your viral video. You can dress them up any way you want, bribe them with free stuff, and the worst that can happen is maybe they bite you, but they don’t brush their teeth, so it’s doubtful they’d break skin. It’s just too damn easy to use a homeless person to elicit sympathy from gullible viewers, so why not? We have no idea if these individuals are even in need of clothing, or if the clothes given to them would fit, and yet that is hardly the reason this video exists. It’s a prank that uses the most abundant scenery in Los Angeles, which is dirty people. Also, Karber himself says several times that Abercrombie & Fitch clothing looks “douchey,” which it does. By his own logic, why would the homeless want it?
The “Fitch the Homeless” campaign centers on the idea that homeless people are dirty or gross: the anticool kids. Karber’s thesis seems to be “Mike Jeffries would be so mad if homeless people wore Abercrombie & Fitch, because the homeless are lowly and disgusting. This’ll show that crusty old CEO!”
Karber’s video has gone viral, receiving over 2 million views in just two days. He’s already appeared on several talk shows. On Twitter, the hashtag #FitchTheHomeless is thriving. That’s because at the end of Karber’s video, he called for others to raid their closets and give all their Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to the homeless, as he had done. Many people have tweeted about what a good idea this is, how this really sticks it to Abercrombie & Fitch and helps the homeless in the process, so it may be too late to say this, but please don’t “Fitch the Homeless.” This is all just some cheeseball stunt perpetrated by a guy who really wants attention and saw an opportunity to get it. Yes, it seems clever, but making fart noises with your armpits in seventh grade seemed clever, too.
We were feeling celebratory. We were on vacation, and we liked the place. Unfortunately, it was nearly midnight—on a Sunday. And we wanted Champagne.
For a Canadian, this usually means: game over. We were tiring of the bars, and the clubs were cheesy and vaguely threatening. We just wanted to grab a bottle and retire to our balcony.
We were also in one the largest metropolises in the Muslim world.
Montreal or Toronto we would have been totally fucked. But not in Istanbul. In Istanbul, where the conservative Erdogan government has been cracking down on all things alcohol-related for a decade (sample statement from the Prime Minister himself: “they want all of our youth to become alcoholics!”), there were, on a short stretch of Siraselviler Cadessi in Cihangir, three late-night stores of the surly-man-behind-a-grate variety available to take my lira in exchange for a bit of bubbly. And this wasn’t strange or anomalous.
Canadian-style liquor store setups are exceedingly rare. There are almost no countries that require you to purchase spirits in the manner that we are accustomed to. In legalistic, rule-heavy Switzerland, I have—personally—rolled up to a Geneva late-nighter with an all-too-fat wad of francs (damn Swiss) and emerged with a little something-something.
In sleepy Basel, union-run Paris, staid Vienna, and still-kind-of-Catholic Dublin, things proceed with a similar (from a Canadian perspective) abandon. In Communist China, it’s a free-for-all. Meanwhile, in Ontario, employees of the vaguely Yugoslav (except every ex-Yugoslav country is cooler about this) LCBO are preparing for their first-ever strike, which will see Canada’s largest city reduced to the status of that place Kevin Bacon’s mom moved to in Footloose.
Did we lose a war?
Last week, British Columbia Conservative leader John Cummins promised voters that, if his party is elected, beer and wine (sorry, mixologists) will be available in corner and grocery stores from Victoria to Fernie. Yesterday, the Saskatchewan government released a long list of slightly relaxed regulations that will—among a great many other things—“allow customers on tour buses and boats to self-serve alcohol,” thus increasing the appeal of a double-decker bus tour of Regina by approximately infinity per cent. Even in Toronto the Good, as VICE Canada’s LCBO-hating Managing Editor Patrick McGuire outlined back in December, Conservative Party leader Tim Hudak has made noises indicating that the reign of the sex-shop-in-Victorian-England-like “Beer Stores” might, if his party is elected, come to a merciful end.
So it’s not like there isn’t anybody fighting the good fight.
Unfortunately, as I have previously outlined, Canadians can be a prickly, defensive people. Even though we are, in my experience, a boisterous, party-loving bunch, arguments for liberalizing our liquor laws must overcome one very significant hurdle: they require us to admit that we were wrong.
This is not an easy thing for Canadians. In exploring this topic in various booze-friendly roundtables across our kind-of-great nation, I have encountered a few significant counter-arguments, all of which are intended to make the would-be revolutionary feel somewhat less-than-festive; provincial, even. Out of the loop.
Of these counter-arguments, the most interesting is the epicurean one. According to this line of thought, whose hedonistic veil hides a savagely puritanical visage, Canadians need the LCBO system (as well as its non-Ontario analogues) because Canadians enjoy quality spirits. Canadians, according to this argument, are not the type of disorderly, depressing lowlifes who nip out to sketchy late-nighters for an overpriced bottle of Jim Beam. Instead, we are connoisseurs—a people whose sophisticated requirements can only be met by the immense buying power (and vast selection) that a grandly-scaled Provincial liquor monopoly can provide.
“I don’t know,” such people hesitantly utter while looking away from you, “I guess I’ve never been in that situation. I just sort of try to keep the place well-stocked, and besides—I’m not sure if a corner store would really sell the sort of 900-year-old, monk-distilled, dungeon-aged whisky that I like to drink.”
In Montreal, where slightly looser legislation allows for beer and wine to be sold in corner stores, this argument has a trashier (because: Montreal) analogue. In this formulation, your booze-after-11pm-on-Sunday-night requirements do not represent a failure of tastes or morals, but rather one of knowledge: Montrealers always know a guy.
“Oh yeah, dude—I know it sucks. But do you seriously not know Dépanneur Super Plus Bronzage? It’s, like, this tiny place under a sidewalk grate and behind an abandoned sugar factory in Griffintown. Ask for J-F (pronounced “gee-eff”)—he’ll totally hook you up. Anything you want. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of this!”.
Clearly, we are kidding ourselves.
In my experience, insecurity—whether personal or cultural—is a difficult hurdle to overcome, but it can be done. You just have to make an appeal to ambition. For Canada’s great cities, whose residents are totally-sure-but-still-kind-of-not-sure that they live in the sort of fantastic, cosmopolitan, beacon-to-the-world type of places that people from all nations flock to, I present a traveler’s dilemma:
It’s late evening, and it’s been a long day. Starting in Zurich or London or Buenos Aires or Bangkok or even Cairo, you’ve been put the wringer of endless ticket lines, implacable baggage regulations and babies developing ear disorders at 35,000 feet. But it’s over. You’ve landed. And as you walk through downtown Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver (or Ottawa or Calgary or Halifax etc.), all you can think is that it might be time for a little nip. Just a small one. Back at the hotel. For the nerves.
You walk around in a daze, looking for the sort of minor convenience that is common where you are from, but find, in its place, a mystifying profusion of Red Bull and Snapple. No relief. You try to ask a local for help—Canadians are friendly, right? But all you receive are confusing directions to distant locations that “might be open.” You pass darkened displays of wines from all over the world, and tug on locked doors. Literally dispirited, you give up, heading back to your room while thinking:
“What is wrong with these people?”
Almost nobody does it like we do, Canada. We’re an outlier. We’re a weirdo.
Our buddies from VICE Japan hung out with the crew from Hatos Bar in Tokyo's Naka-Meguro neighborhood. Hatos Bar serves up American-style pit barbecue at its best. Owners Sou Ieki and Dubrai showed us to their favorite places to go out and then got suitably wasted before cooking up some barbecue back at Hatos. Enjoy.
The incident: A man named Barry Swegle became upset about a fence his neighbor had installed.
The appropriate response: Talking it out with the neighbor, if that doesn't work, maybe contacting a local council or something. If that doesn't work, smashing down the fence when your neighbor isn't home then denying all knowledge.
The actual response: Barry got into a bulldozer and partially leveled his neighborhood.
Apparently the fence, which was installed by Barry's neighbor several months ago, was blocking Barry from being able to move his logging equipment in and out of his driveway in the small town of Port Angeles, Washington.
This caused some kind of dispute between the neighbors which, according to Barry's brother, turned Barry into "a ticking time bomb."
On Monday, Time Bomb Barry exploded. He got into his bulldozer and smashed down the fence. But his rampage didn't end there, he carried on rampaging, and destroyed four houses, a boat, a truck, and knocked down a telephone pole.
Once he was all rampaged out, Barry was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree assault and six counts of first-degree malicious mischief.
The incident: 18-year-old high school senior Larry Liero mooned a couple of kids.
The appropriate response: Nothing. Mooning is funny. I guess if it was really bothering the kids, they could have yelled at Larry or something.
The actual response: Larry was suspended from school and arrested.
According to police, Larry mooned two 13-year-old girls that were being taken on a tour of his school, Pleasant Valley High School in Monroe County, Pennsylvania.
The mooning victims told their teacher, who told school officials, who told the School Resource Police Officer.
Larry was escorted from the school in handcuffs and taken to the local police station, where he was charged with disorderly conduct and open lewdness. He was also barred from taking part in his school's graduation ceremony and suspended. His charges could lead to a year in prison.
In a statement, Doug Arnold, the school district's superintendent said, "It's a violation of law not to keep your clothes on. It's unacceptable in school." Adding, "I don't know that anybody would condone mooning someone"—suggesting that Doug knows some really, really fucking boring people.
Who is the bigger cry-baby up in here? Let us know in this poll:
