Photo courtesy Mary Herron

Mary Herron has plenty of what you might call “cred”—she wrote for Punk magazine in the 70s, created feminist classics like I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Bettie Page, and, most famously, directed the movie adaptation of American Psycho that made everyone who considered Bret Easton Ellis a sexist monster realize, Oh, shit! That book is actually a really good critique of women-hating Wall Street assholes. Her latest project seems like a departure from all those “serious” works of art—a biopic for the notoriously schmaltzy Lifetime network, of all places, about the famously large-boobed reality-TV mess Anna Nicole Smith.

Based on the 2011 New York magazine story “Paw Paw and Lady Love,” Anna Nicole follows the most famous gold-digger of all time as she goes from Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken to the E! channel to her death at a Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida, and features a great cast—Academy Award–winner Martin Landau stars as J. Howard Marshall, Anna Nicole’s ancient, Crypt-Keeper-esque oil baron husband, and Oscar nominee Virginia Madsen plays Virgie, Anna Nicole’s mom. (Agnes Bruckner, who’s mostly done TV work, got the title role.)

Harron hopes the film will make audiences see made-for-TV melodramas as a vehicle to discuss serious issues and also realize Anna Nicole Smith was more complicated and self-aware than we think.

Over the weekend, I spoke to Mary via Skype and email about how to convince a respected actor to play a dying oil baron in love with a stripper, the sexist reasons we mock Lifetime movies, and how Anna Nicole could legitimize Lifetime the way House of Cards made Netflix a go-to destination for original programming. 

VICE: I guess I’ll start with the obvious question, which is how did you end up directing a Lifetime movie about Anna Nicole Smith?
Mary Harron: It’s a good subject for me, actually. It’s in the same ballpark as the other things I’ve done. Most of the scripts I get, [I think], This isn’t right for me. And this felt like, Oh, yeah, I could do this. It’s not my script, obviously. If I had written it, it probably would have been a little bit darker and have less public appeal. But I thought it was an interesting script. It wasn’t like a normal TV script—it was kind of wild. It was very ambitious. It had a sense of humor, which I liked. I was like, “Yeah, bring it on.”

So you weren’t turned off by it being a biopic for Lifetime?
I’m attracted to things that have stigmas. I’m also interested in the forms that people look down on. People look down on biopics—my first film was a biopic. You could say that American Psycho is a kind of slasher movie, one of the most despised forms. And people [look down on] melodrama. Why is [female melodrama] looked down on, and other things are cool? Forms that are looked down on like female melodrama have a lot of energy in them—tons of people watch Lifetime movies!

Production still from Anna Nicole. Photo by Bob Mahoney, © Lifetime 2013

Yeah, I know. I love them.
And whatever you can say about them, they’re not boring. I don’t normally do melodrama. I’m normally criticized for being too restrained. So it was kind of fun for me to go into something that’s so over the top.

Do you think that the stigma surrounding Lifetime movies results from Lifetime producing movies for women about women that are directed by women?
Yes, I do—although there aren’t many directed by women because there aren’t that many female directors. They’re about women, for women. There are boy TV movies that don’t have that stigma at all. Somehow, in pop culture, the thing that people look down on most is female stuff.

Was it easy to convince Martin Landau and Virginia Madsen to star in the movie?
Actors are always looking for great roles. Martin had done research into J. Howard and was really intrigued by him—he was this really distinguished guy who graduated magna cum laude from Yale and was an unofficial member of Roosevelt's war cabinet. He felt that J. Howard had lost all desire to live; when he met Anna she brought him back to life. For Virginia, her concern was that we would let her do a real physical transformation—she didn't want to be her glamorous self. Both of them were amazing and really dived into their roles.

Production still from Anna Nicole. Photo by Bob Mahoney, © Lifetime 2013

Anna Nicole's cousin Shelly and lesbian assistant Kim have become camp icons in their own right. Did you exclude Shelly and Kim from the movie because their camp appeal would hinder the film's seriousness?
I love those characters. If we had done something that just focused on the years of the reality show—which I have to say would make a great film—they would definitely have been included. But there just wasn't time in this version.

Did you consider Anna Nicole a gold-digger or a poor girl with a dream?
Well she was both, wasn't she? I don't think she would have been with J. Howard Marshall if he had been poor, but on the other hand there was real affection between them. She had grown up poor and feeling ignored and neglected, and he was like an adoring grandpa who wanted to give her everything she wanted. He liked her ambition too, and they kind of understood each other.

You’ve called this story a tragedy. What’s Anna Nicole’s fatal flaw?
She let her addiction to fame overwhelm her responsibilities as a mother. I think it was the reality show that either killed Danny [Anna Nicole’s son] or started his destruction. It was a terrible thing to do to a sensitive teenager. He had to quit school because the other kids tormented him about it. Not only was she being presented as a grotesque on national television, but he was made to be in the show too. In the end it destroyed both of them, because I think it was his death that killed her. 

Although your Anna Nicole is a bad mother, she’s also smart and easy to sympathize with. Was she smarter than people normally give her credit for being?
She was dumb like a fox, kind of like Marilyn Monroe. I think she had an amazing drive. She went from working at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken to being one of the most famous women in the world—she did it herself. She had a great instinct for attracting attention, and intuitively she understood the media. She was irrepressible. If Danny hadn't died, she'd still be at it, creating more tabloid scandal, doing infomercials, and being on Dancing with the Stars.

Production still from Anna Nicole. Photo by Bob Mahoney, © Lifetime 2013

But do you think it’s wrong for girls to aspire to become Playboy centerfolds? With this and The Notorious Bettie Page, you’ve directed two films about Playmates.
Remember, Anna was already working in a strip club in Houston—so posing for Playboy was definitely a step up. I can't say I'd want my daughters to pose for Playboy, but I can see why it would appeal to someone with no resources who was trying to make her way in the world.

Is she a victim or a feminist icon, like your other two biopic subjects?
I don't think she's a feminist icon, and she's not a simple victim. She's something unclassifiable and very modern, with this career created by new media: supermarket tabloids, reality television, and social media.

You were born in Canada, spent your childhood in America and Europe, and attended Oxford. What draws you to Americana instead of European or Canadian subject matter?
My dad is an actor and a comedian and my first step-mom was a Hollywood starlet. I spent time in Los Angeles as a kid. I was sort of interested in the workings of celebrities.

What do you think all your old punk rock friends would say about your movies?
I still see them! They’re all very nice about them.

Recently, other art-house directors have created movies based on tabloid culture—most notably Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring. Why do you think so many artists are turning to trash culture for inspiration?
We always did, in a way. [But with movies about pop culture you’re able] to get financing and an audience—yet you’re also doing something interesting and are able to say the kind of things you’re always saying. It’s a chance to do something more in the mainstream. You don’t want to be ghettoized. It seems risky in a way, because it’s not what people expect—but I find it exciting.

Anna Nicole premieres on Lifetime on June 29 at 8 PM EST. You can watch the trailer below:

@mitchellsunderland

More interviews about movies:

Don’t Insult the Iron Sheik, Bubba

Alexis Neiers’s Pretty Wild Road to Recovery

Living Inside ‘The Canyons’

A still from The Sopranos.

It seems that these days we’re all running some terrible race to announce celebrities' deaths to each other, and to subsequently conjure up cheap gags about them. Wisecracks about Thatcher's death had been planned years in advance, the guy from Kriss Kross got a couple of lame Twitter gags, as did Uncle Monty from Withnail And I. Mandela’s not even gone yet but the town criers of the afterlife still keep jumping the gun.

I’m not going to pontificate about this very modern form of gallows humour, it’s a fairly natural reaction to a world where news breaks fast and careers can be made on breaking it the fastest. I’m fairly sure I’ve done it myself. Last night however, in the last hours of a sticky summer evening, I got news of a celebrity death that nobody was joking about. A death that felt more like a death in our collective family than a news story we could make clever puns about.

James Gandolfini, American actor and American icon, had died aged 51. He had been on a family holiday in Italy when he suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving behind his second wife Deborah Lin, their daughter Liliana and a teenage son named Michael from his first marriage to Marcy Wudarski.

For the laughing boys and girls of the internet, there seemed to be no jokes worth making. Twitter was a landscape of solemnity and respect; my Facebook page became a series of thumbnails of incredible Sopranos moments. It seemed that the unexpected death of such a fantastically talented human being at such a young age had momentarily bypassed our social media shock-jock tendencies.

I think people reacted like this for a number of reasons. First and most obviously, because of what he managed to do in The Sopranos. I’m sure a lot will be said in the next few days of how Gandolfini managed to make a monster so likeable, of how he managed to make a killer so charming. But was Tony really that charming? I’m not so sure. He definitely had moments of charm, and moments where he was likeable. But one thing Tony always was was knowable. And it's that, I think, that made his character so loved.

It’s very easy for an actor to seem likeable with a bit of panache, some snappy suits and good writing. The Sopranos had all of those things in abundance. But the genius of Gandolfini, his writers and his directors was to create a character who seemed so real, so complete that you felt like you lived with him, whether he was moodily throwing eggs into his mouth at his breakfast bar at home, or waiting alone in his car at 3AM for a mark to show-up.

Everything about that character was just so perfect. The way that he used to breathe when he got angry, the terrible suits that he wore, the way he kept his vest on during sex, his terrible hypocrisies and damning sentimentalities. The way that Gandolfini somehow managed to express an array of emotions using only his shoulders, communicating more about a man’s feelings with just those hulking, polyester covered stumps than most other actors' flapping mouths, wildly gesticulating arms and pensively furrowed brows could in a lifetime.

Tony seemed like someone I knew. Not necessarily somebody I liked or would want to spend much time with, but he felt like a person who was in my life rather than somebody I’d spend an hour a time with on my laptop.

This was no doubt abetted by the fact that Gandolfini himself just seemed like such a normal guy. Sure, he punched photographers, but in the way you or I probably would if we were 6’2" guys from New Jersey who’d had enough of their shit. (Especially if, as this great Vulture profile points out, we were as innately shy as Gandolfini.) He didn’t seem precious or self-obsessed like most actors and celebrities do. He seemed like a working-class guy with a lot of talent, the kind of famous person we’d all like to be. Someone who turned up, did great work and had a great time without banging on about it.

I watched The Sopranos over the course of a few months in a period of my life that mostly revolved around not going to university and making a lot of late-night sandwiches. The show slowly became my life. It affected my speech patterns, my diet, my assessment of everyday situations. If I did something bad, I briefly found myself wondering if Tony or Paulie would be pissed off about it. When major characters died, it put me in a bad mood for days afterwards.

It should also be said that Gandolfini was the first icon of the box set. The arrival of box sets – and their predominance over the last decade or so – has given people the ability to treat their favourite shows like books; allowed them to race through at their own momentum, to navigate their own depths. Gandolfini wasn't just the first icon of the box set, he was also the first box set icon to die and, in my opinion, he's also the greatest character ever to have emerged from that clutch of shows that changed the way people think about TV – The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. It's not ridiculous to say that Gandolfini changed American acting, for he was the King of the HBO show, the leading man who cast the mould for the likes of Don Draper, Walter White and Jimmy McNulty.

Before him, TV acting seemed more to be about doing a passable, consistent job as the low-budget shoots came thick and fast, while being pleasant enough to keep the audience on your side across a span of months. The cream of the acting crop was reserved for film, but even if an actor was talented enough to truly inhabit their character, films were always too brief for the audience to really get a sense of that. Gandolfini's skill as an actor was to combine the two to glorious effect, bringing the genius of the greatest big-screen actors to the depth and familiarity that is possible with TV work. After his portrayal of Tony, acting became all about magnetism, nuance and total encapsulation. It was some new school of performance that rested somewhere between experimental theatre and reality TV, and it changed the way we absorb culture forever.

I could go on and on about my favourite Sopranos moments and what a brilliant actor James Gandolfini was. If you haven’t seen it, you should. For me, it’s the definitive chronicle of 21st century life. The finest examination of its decadences and its hardships, its comic tragedies and its tragic comedies. It’s a show about money, sex, power and family and it stands up there with any culture ever created. At the heart of it is James Gandolfini, a former bartender from New Jersey who managed to silence the death trolls by virtue of being a true legend of American performance – and maybe because we thought there was still a chance he could storm in and do this to us if he caught us laughing at him.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

I have a funny relationship with my own culture in that I feel like a tourist in it. I was raised in complete seclusion from my Aboriginal background. There was no parental influence that rooted me in any cultural experiences. I grew up knowing the textbook definition of Indians. The hunter-gatherers, the feather in the hair, something about a peace pipe... It became clear these were just stereotypes. The truth is “indians” are my family, and I should probably know about my own culture. So, now that I’m in my early twenties, it’s become a goal of mine to immerse myself in the culture that I missed out on as a child. First stop, sweat lodge.

Certain people might find a sweat lodge to be a hellish experience. When I first got inside one I realized it was truly not for everybody. A small, tent-like structure is built from maple branches and a tarp cover. Inside, fifteen scalding hot rocks are placed in a dirt pit and, on several occasions, healthy amounts of boiled water are poured onto them. You’re left to sit inside for close to three hours and take in the dense steam and allow your body to drain out those years of binge-drinking and fast food. To me, it sounded exotic and dangerous. I’ve heard stories of people claiming to have visions and hallucinations while inside. They claim to have reached states of nirvana where the Creator speaks directly to them. For years, Aboriginal men and women have been using sweats as a means to seek peace of mind and spiritual direction. What a thrill ride! However, after going in, I wasn’t prepared to take it that seriously. I have become disillusioned with this idea of talking to God for a long time now. Still, I felt like my years of sitting through dense and abstract church sermons should be balanced by something. Making contact with a God other then that of the church seemed like a welcomed change. That gave me all the more incentive to try it.   

I found myself in the woods of Vasey, a small village in the Tay Township of Ontario, at the Enaahtiq Healing Lodge. A burly Ojibwe man named John, who was to be our elder for our ceremony, greeted me. The ceremony starts with the entry of the Grandfathers. The Grandfathers aren’t actually old men—they’re the preheated rocks in the sacred fire pit. The Fire Keeper shovels them in. Most crumble and hiss as they’re thrown into place. Then the artifacts are placed inside. A tin of boiled cedar water, a marble cup of tobacco, a whistle carved from animal bone, and musical shakers. I sat there while this was happening, in nothing but boxer shorts, eyeing the other seven participants that were huddled in this lodge with me. The ceremony consists of prayers, songs, and the passing of the feather. When the feather gets passed into your hand, it’s your turn to speak to the Creator. This part put me off a bit. Have you ever had dinner at someone else’s house and had to sit through grace? Doesn’t it seem awkward and unnecessary? Now imagine having to actually say grace for the table. I guess I was prepared to have a back seat experience but now I was suddenly expected to drive.

All this was shooting around my mind as the doorway, traditionally facing the East, was shut and we were submerged into absolute darkness. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. That’s when things got intense. That’s when I began to question what I was doing there. From the first onslaught of steam, my face was in the soil seeking the coolness of the earth. I don’t think I was prepared for the intensity of the heat. It was disorienting and unsettling. I tried to think of the origin story we were told, and I tried to remember the physical benefits of the sweat itself, but when you’re actually in there all the niceties of that one Wikipedia article I read seem like bullshit. This was an endurance race. It didn’t take long before I was fully experiencing the sweat. I was drenched. Dirt was mixing into my pores and every movement was itchy and sensitive. The feather was being passed around and I was listening to these strangers open up about their personal trials and tribulations. Perhaps the honesty that was shared that day would have been vehemently moving in any other environment but here I was finding my cynicism coming to the forefront of my thoughts. I guess I felt like I didn’t need the supposed Creator’s help.

I listened to what the other participants shared. “I’m confused with what to do with my life,” “I’m mixed in with a bad crowd,” “My vices are consuming my life.” I didn’t think I shared any of these problems and began to wonder why I thought I needed this experience in the first place. I wasn’t depressed, a drop out, a felon, or on parole. I wasn’t even a serious spiritual seeker. I felt this was no more then a cultural experience. It was clear that believing in the Creator or a God or some spiritual lifestyle is what brought these people here in the first place. So where was I coming from? The feather was passed to me and to my surprise I found myself talking. Talking about what I’m talking about now. How I didn’t know how to take this sort of thing seriously. How I was more then happy to treat this like a cultural experience. I wasn’t knocking it or putting it down. All I did was state my belief that when I exited I would feel like the same human being as when I came in. My honesty was all I could share in that moment. In response, the other participants gave out some affirming whoops and hollers. They seemed to understand where I was coming from.

The feather had gone around. We had sang the songs of old. The air was dense with steam and our bodies were jellylike. We were back in the womb. I was settling into something I might call being comfortable. At any rate, I could see the ceremony was coming to a close. I began to look forward to the cool night air soothe my skin as we emerged from a complete sweat session.

“Thank you, my brothers, for coming along on this journey. It may take some time to process the meaning of what you found today. At least it will hopefully have alleviated some heavy thoughts so that you may focus on purer things. Trust me when I say that you will sleep well tonight.”

John closed with a prayer and when the Fire Keeper lifted the veil, we exited through the rising steam and felt the wide-open air once more. I had made it through in one piece, but did I find God? Was I supposed to? For me, taking part in such an old tradition was enough. I feel that a native sweat isn’t so much spiritual as it is natural. A hot yoga class or a sauna might have similar effects, but it’s inside a native sweat that you really get challenged. I felt connected to myself and the earth when I was in there, embracing the elements, then fighting them. Like anything, if you search long enough you will find some sort of answer, clue, or direction. Even though I am inclined to think that these answers ultimately come from ourselves—things like isolation tanks, prayer, meditation, and sweats are effective ways to shut out the world around us and get back to that part of ourselves we know so well. That, to me, is the point.


Previously:

The Art of Native Regalia

I’ve been reading the stories of Matthew Simmons for years now. The first thing I remember learning about him was how he used to be in a one-man black metal band called Fire in My Bag. I’ve never actually heard any of Fire in My Bag’s music, which somehow makes it bigger and grosser, composed of any possible sound.

Trying to imagine what would come out of one friendly bearded guy with glasses simultaneously shredding five instruments is a surprisingly good analogy for the texture of Matthew’s writing. I’ve always felt it’s very difficult to relate emotion in short stories without coming off sentimental or cheesy—not to mention boring. But Simmons walks a very certain kind of line, sometimes taking a reflective texture that shows up in certain modes of David Foster Wallace, and an attitude like George Saunders or Lorrie Moore. You feel close to his narrators even as you watch them fumbling to feel close to anybody, to make sense of what and where they are, how anyone could love them. Simmons has a rare gift for bringing a familiarity to any sort of outcast human: skaters, conspiracy theorists, undergrads, RPG enthusiasts, weird dads... For instance, here’s an e-book he wrote about a guy who only dates caves.

And now, at last, Simmons’s first full-length collection of stories, Happy Rock, has come to light. It’s full of as many surprising modes and tones as you could ask for from a story collection, both refreshing and surprising in how much range it can cover in such a short space.

By way of an example, here’s an excerpt taken from the middle of a story about a guy who kills himself after listening to Rush.

Excerpt from the story “Honey” from Happy Rock

Do you hear music? I hear music for some reason. Is there music?

Where were we? Oh, yes. More clearly than anything else from my life before, I remember this. I remember a haircut.

I sat on a folding chair on the back porch. I was under a rain poncho, under which was a ratty comforter—chewed through all over by a bored or frustrated or possibly fiber-craving cat. Michael’s cat, Pizza. My older cousin's cat. And I shivered and I shivered.

It was five below zero. Colder with the wind. And there was wind. There was plenty of wind. It was cold, and from the last day's dusting of snow—too cold for a real, heavy, thick snow—the flakes were small and solid, and whipped around in little sparkling white funnels. I was with Michael, and he was cutting my hair.

He would not cut hair in the kitchen, even in the depths of winter: “I really, really don’t want hair getting in my food,” he'd say. He would not cut hair in the bathroom, even in the depths of winter: “I know you can sweep up, but you just can’t get all the little strays, and I don’t want to get hair stuck all over the bottom my feet after I shower. Willies, dude.”

He would only cut hair on the porch, even in the depths of winter. So, heavy coats, comforter, poncho. And, for him, winter gloves. Heavy winter gloves and scissors with large handles to fit clumsy, gloved fingers.

He said: “The thing about a really good haircut is that a really good haircut is one that lasts much longer than a few weeks or a couple of months. It doesn’t just look okay when you get it done. As it grows out, it still looks good—just in a different way. Like it was cut to grow out. That’s what a good haircut does.”

He said: “This is not a good haircut.”

I replied: “That’s OK. It just needs to hold out for a couple of weeks. Work complained.” He cut. We talked.

He said: “You know that metal band, Celtic Frost? You know if you play a Celtic Frost CD after midnight, the devil comes? Or sends like a proxy demon to you? My brother played Into the Pandemonium by them once, and he said he watched the red power light on the stereo turn into an eye. And then it talked to him. About meditation.”

I replied: “Your brother shoots Robitussin for dinner. Instead of eating food, he drinks Robitussin. Right from the bottle. All night.”

He answered: “That just means he maybe has access to a part of the mind we all tend to usually turn off. That’s all that means.”

I said: “My grandfather has gotten to the point where now he no longer yells at the TV about the fact that he thinks there’s a Communist in the White House. He doesn’t even mention it to me when I visit him. And this has all happened in just the last couple of months.”

He replied: “My dad’s getting older. He doesn’t walk as well.”

I answered: “He sometimes gets this completely empty look in his eye and no televised Democrat can shake him from it. I go to visit and I just want him to yell 'pinko' at one of the Clintons so I know he's in there.”

He said: “You know, the Nazis spent most of their real time and resources trying to conquer death. Not Europe. It's true. The inner circle was all occultists. Himmler. Goebbels. I read on the internet that Hitler said he wanted to grab God by his throat and shake him until he snapped his neck. That the Nazis were planning to build this new Tower of Babel to attack Heaven eventually. That’s why they were into rockets.”

I replied: “I don't remember reading that. I just remember all the stuff about the war and the invasions and death camps.”

He answered: “Yeah, that all sucked, too, apparently.”

I said: “I guess currently I know only two couples on the verge of divorce, which has got to be some sort of record for lowest number of divorces among my friends and family. They both have kids this time, though. That's something.”

He replied: “I used to get laid sometimes at weddings because of all the drinking. If they had some sort of divorce ceremony with an open bar, I'd be into twice as much trim.”

I answered: “You usually use the word 'tail.' 'Trim' is a new one for you. Nice.”

He said: “Did you ever see that Caligula movie the Hustler guy made? Where that old guy offs himself in that hot tub because he thinks there's a better world somewhere else. One without all the sodomy and murder or whatever. And, like, if he dies, he's not throwing his life away, but showing that he has hope for some other world.”

I didn't reply. I just thought about how nice that sounded. And wondered why it sounded nice. And I shivered a lot, too. It got colder and darker, and he sped through the last of the haircut, leaving some longer bits on the back of my neck.

When he was done, I gave him the two five dollar bills in my wallet. He let the wind sweep the porch. We carried his kitchen chair back inside and fit it beneath the kitchen table. On my way out, he told me to grab the bag near the door.

“That's for you. I found you a copy of Signals at this garage sale in Iron Mountain when me and Liz went up to visit her folks.”

“Is it in good shape?”

“It was a dollar,” he said. “I didn't check.”

“Why were they selling it?”

“Who the hell asks 'why' at a garage sale, Chad?”

“K,” I said.

“Maybe they listen to CDs like everybody else, Chad.”

“K,” I said. “I'm going to get going.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”

“K,” I said. “Later.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Leave.”

And I did. And I went home. An OK haircut, my last one. Could've been worse. And I didn't need it long.

I went home and I put Signals on my turntable. I listened to it alone. Because, as I said before. Dot. Dot. Dot. I listened to “Subdivisions,” and I listened to “The Analog Kid,” and I listened to “Chemistry,” and I listened to “Digital Man.” And the song, “The Weapon,” came on.

So, my parents were good people. And my heart was never majorly broken. And my grades in school were always just fine. And my day was livable. And my nights were a little lonely, but not all that bleak. And I wasn't losing my hair. And my weight was mostly under control. And I wasn't bullied. And I had a crappy job, but everybody has a crappy job.

It's just that everywhere around me, everything kept moving. And I couldn't do anything to stop that. I'd accepted that I couldn't do anything to stop it. I just didn't really like anymore that I couldn't do anything to stop it. I imagined if I was somehow a bigger individual, maybe I'd have more control over the continuing move forward of everything. If only I was bigger.

Then a line came on in the song. “He's not afraid of your judgment / He knows of horrors worse than your hell / He's a little bit afraid of dying / But he's more afraid of...” And then the record skipped back to “... horrors worse than your hell.”

So that's it. That's when I met the man I spoke of earlier. He was dried there in the grooves of the record. I took it off the turntable and felt it with my fingertips, and felt a spot that flaked. I grabbed a paper towel and put a little water on it. I rubbed the spot, and it came up rust red. When the water melted the dried substance, it smelled a little like blood. And then a lot like blood when I held it to my nose. It was the man crossing my path and giving me a message. Conspiring with everything else to give me a message. “… A little bit afraid of dying.” Only a little.

I smelled the blood and I smiled and I knew him and I used my belt to hang myself in my closet. And I hung there just filled with hope.

Previously by Blake Butler - What Are These Freaks Reading?

@blakebutler

Drawings by Molly Crabapple

Camp X-Ray is the first place that the US held detainees in Guantanamo. Captives lived there for four months in 2002 while the military built permanent prison camps.

Prisoners lived in open mesh cages under the brutal Cuban sun. Their cells had no running water. Guards gave them two buckets: one for water and one for shit. 

The classic photos of GTMO, (dogs, marines, hooded captives in orange jumpsuits) were taken here. With its watchtowers, clapboard interrogation huts, and rings of barbed wire, X-Ray looks like nothing so much as a concentration camp in the Caribbean.

X-Ray has been empty for over a decade. Birds nest in the razor wire. Vines overtake former cells. Miles away, 104 prisoners are hunger-striking. Forty-four are being force-fed. Many of them first came here through X-Ray. 

My press escort hates when the media uses images of X-Ray to sum up GTMO. X-Ray, she says, was very long ago.

@MollyCrabapple

Previously - Molly Crabapple Sent Us Sketches from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Pretrial Hearings at Gitmo

In porn, one of the things I'm marketed as is "all natural." This phrase basically indicates that I have not had breast implants or other obvious plastic surgery. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether I've dyed the hair on my head (yes, multiple times and a variety of colors), what temporary or permanent body-hair-removal procedures I've had done (many, including stuff involving lasers), the amount of makeup piled on my face, or the degree of Photoshop work that has been done to my photographs. It also ignores the fact that for a decent chunk of my career, I had metal bars through my nipples, and the last time I checked those things don't come factory (or womb) installed. In the adult industry, natural is merely another word used for search-engine optimization, like teen, MILF, and big. Natural is not an expression of dictionary-definition fact. It is a marketing tool.

The term natural also gets thrown around in the entertainment and beauty industries. Countless websites have galleries of celebrities either caught without makeup by the paparazzi or posing bare faced for photo spreads in magazines. Depending on the publication, commentary ranges from "OMG ewww!" through to gushing discussions of the bravery involved with said celebrity allowing themselves to be photographed without makeup. The whole concept of being "photographed in their natural state" carries an inherent silliness, because putting any kind of lens between the viewer and the thing being viewed makes it look different than it does to the naked eye. Different kinds of lighting change the way a person's face looks, as does viewing it from different angles. You can easily experiment with this yourself if you have a camera lying around. As in the porn industry, use of Photoshop, subtle cosmetic surgery, or hair dye is rarely disclosed when a magazine labels a person's appearance as "natural."

What about advertisements like Dove's Real Beauty campaign? Their definition of beauty is vocally accepting of wrinkles and gray hair, but it does appear to be heavily reliant on even-toned and blemish-free skin. Sure, freckles are deemed acceptable, but I have yet to see a giant red pimple on the nose of one of the women in Dove's ads. Nor have I seen them feature a model with a port-wine birthmark or a case of eczema. They do show a broader range of skin colors and body shapes than a fashion magazine usually does, but they don't include people with visible physical disabilities or obvious large scars. Natural is, again, a marketing tool; they're using the concept of confidence coming from within to hawk more lotions to rub on your outside. They're redefining the word natural to correlate with how little makeup a woman is wearing, and they're totemizing this willingness to appear in public without cosmetics as courageous.

This leaves out some major factors in conventional aesthetic appeal: genetic luck, having the resources to eat well, the time and money necessary to purchase and regularly use face creams, oils, scrubs, and other weird stuff like placenta-blood facials or whatever it is that people who go to spas are up to these days. I can only speak for myself, but I put an insane amount of goo on my face and body, and I'm not working with nearly the budget that a Hollywood starlet is. I spend more time on just exfoliating and moisturizing than most of my female peers spend putting their makeup on. If my physical appearance were not the main source of my income, the amount of time I spend applying stuff to my skin would be utterly absurd. Even in that context of the body as a professional tool, it still might be absurd. My point is that a lack of obvious eye shadow in no way guarantees a lack of vanity.

Some people (who obviously don't know me very well) have complimented me on being low-maintenance because I don't appear to be wearing makeup. Some other people have told me how much they love the fact that I don't wear a bunch of crap on my face when I am, in fact, wearing a ton of crap on my face. I am usually wearing at least mascara and some kind of concealer when I receive these comments. Sometimes I'm wearing everything in my makeup bag except the false lashes and stage glitter. Additionally, I'm covered from head to toe in various products that are meant to protect my skin and hair from the elements and am usually full of vitamins. I love vitamins. Until someone finds a previously undiscovered specimen of tree bearing multivitamin fruit in the Amazon or Madagascar or something I'm hesitant to call the ingestion of vitamin pills natural, much less the previously mentioned absurd amount of goo. I have spent at least a year and a half trying strange potions that promise to grow my eyebrows back to their original, unplucked glory. I ended up with an eyebrow hair that was over an inch long. One single inch-long eyebrow hair. It was more horrifying than my first nipple hair. If you see me in public somewhere you probably shouldn't ask me about either of these hairs unless you want to see me blush tomato red.

Whether it's maintaining an obviously enhanced platinum blond or touching up gray roots to match an original brunette color, dyeing one's hair is still artifice. It may take slightly more time to have a set of French-tipped acrylic nails put on than to get a buffed manicure with no polish, but both are indicators of effort put in to be more aesthetically pleasing. Working out for the sake of having a certain physical appearance and undergoing cosmetic-surgery procedures are two different forms of body sculpting, one mostly acquired with sweat and the other mostly acquired with cash. Laser hair removal is a bit more futuristic than shaving cream and a razor, but hair removal isn't natural for anyone regardless of sex or gender. I'm pretty sure frequent showers aren't strictly natural either. I'm all for people showering as frequently as they want to and making their bodies look however they prefer. Dolly Parton once said, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap," and I feel like it's important to make clear that it also takes a lot of work to look this natural. I think we do each other a disservice when we pretend that there's something laudable about ignoring the effort we put into our appearances or that there's something brave about admitting the fact that we do put that effort in.

@Stoya

Previously - So You Want to Perform in Porn

Pyongyang's national flower exhibition, displaying the Kimilsungia and the Kimjongilia, the DPRK's national flowers. Photo by Maxime Delvaux

No matter whose finger is in charge of pushing the big red button, nuclear bombs are scary things. But put them in the hands of leaders who appear to believe in unicorns and you get the same kind of unease you’d feel while watching a toddler play with a loaded gun on fire. So how does the world’s least rational regime cope with science, the world’s most rational discipline?

The answer, for the most part, has been a sort of relentless pragmatism. North Korea leaves research for research's sake to the decadent West, and regards dollars, industrial output, or better weapons as the most important outcome of any scientific program. In some cases this approach has been quite lucrative, with advances in drug manufacturing opening up new streams of income to match the dollars earned from exporting giant patriotic statues to sub-Saharan Africa. In possibly the first example of a country taking its economic policy directly from Breaking Bad, the Koreans have built meth labs and are exporting product into China and perhaps even the West via its network of diplomats. Drugs are now so easily available, and real medicines so hard to obtain, that locals are using them medicinally—heroin is now a common treatment for colds in some parts of the country. 

North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, sounds like the world leader you'd want fielding the "science and nature" questions in Trivial Pursuit, at least on paper. As well as holding a degree in physics, the planet’s youngest head of state is renowned across almost the whole of North Korea as an expert in the social sciences.

A student in the Kim Il Sung University computer lab.

His accomplishments in the field are so great that, last August, a symposium took place in Pyongyang dedicated to the “ideas and theories clarified by the dear respected Kim Jong Un in his recent works.” These works include landmark publications of papers such as, “The Great Comrade Kim Il Sung Is the Eternal Leader of Our Party and People,” the lavishly titled, “Let Us Brilliantly Accomplish the Revolutionary Cause of Juche, Holding the Great Comrade Kim Jong Il in High Esteem as the Eternal General Secretary of Our Party,” and, of course, “Let’s Dynamically Struggle for Final Victory, Holding Aloft the Banner of Songun”—regarded by many as a sort of The Selfish Gene of politics (though you can't imagine any of them do particularly well in SEO terms).

According to the Korean Central News Agency, papers were presented at the symposium that proved "the greatness of the ideas and theories of Kim Jong-un," and doctors and professors lined up entirely of their own free will to praise the dictator. Dr. Yon Jong Sul, for example, “noted that Kim Jong Un in his works elucidated Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism as the only guiding idea of the Workers' Party of Korea and the Korean revolution,” while Dr. Hong Thae Yon “recalled that Kim Jong Un scientifically formulated the idea that when the single-minded unity, the invincible military muscle and the industrial revolution in the new century are added up, they make a thriving socialist nation.”

It's compelling stuff. Overall, it sounds like everyone involved had a great time thrusting their entirely objective case studies in the general direction of the Supreme Leader.          

Given Kim Jong Un’s many glorious achievements, you’re probably wondering why North Korea’s top scientists haven’t created, from scratch, a special new flower for him yet, like they did for his dad and his granddad. Only recently, a national scientific symposium was held to discuss vital new research on the flowers Kimilisungia and Kimjongilia, two immortal breeds of Begonia produced by North Korea’s leading science wizards in honor of the young man’s predecessors. So far, though, a Kimjongunia specimen remains conspicuously elusive.

Kimjongilia festivals are held every year in North Korea. They don't look very exciting.

As well as presenting research on the flowers’ ecology and cultivation, “speakers at the symposium cited facts to prove that Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia, the flowers of the sun, are world-famous flowers as they are in full bloom reflecting all the people's high praises and ardent reverence for the peerlessly great men.”

Curious to find out more about these world-famous flowers, I got in touch with Rajveer Sihota at Kew Gardens, which hosts the world’s largest collection of living plants outside of North Korea. He consulted with some of Kew’s top specialists and returned with some shocking news: “We do not have any examples of these flowers at Kew.” Not only that, but “my contact in the tropical nursery doesn’t think they have ever been bred outside of North Korea.” Clearly, Britain’s horticulturalists have a lot to learn.

North Korean science isn’t all fun and games, though. Thanks to the nation’s  policy of self-reliance (known as juche), there’s a strong sense of pragmatism, with a focus on the military, industry, and agriculture. “They are putting a lot of work into agriculture science, entirely out of necessity,” said one North Korea expert I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous. “Sanctions have hit food supply hard. The first attempt to launch a satellite last April cost them 250,000 tons of US food aid, and apart from what comes over the border from China, the Koreans must be entirely self-reliant.”

Meanwhile, KCNA reports from yet more scientific symposiums—you wonder how the country’s scientists get any actual work done—reveal radical new research being undertaken in fields such as welding technology, the construction of modern trolley buses, and efforts to modernize the Pyongyang pig farm. They even seem to take climate change seriously, which puts them a few decades ahead of the Republicans or the Eurosceptic wing of the UK's Conservative Party.

Kids at a North Korean kindergarten playing on a nuclear-warhead merry-go-round. Photo by Alex Hoban

And while news that North Korea’s archaeologists had discovered a unicorn lair was widely mocked in the West, this may have been unfair. “I’m of the firm opinion that the story was mistranslated, accidentally missing out the vital word mythical,” said the expert I spoke to. “The whole story was meant to confirm a vital piece of folklore that showed Pyongyang is Korea’s ancient capital, but it was badly worded. Papers were only too happy to hold it up as an example of ‘those loony North Koreans.’”

Perhaps some of the greatest North Korean advances have been in health. While we in the West struggle ignorantly with nicotine patches and those electronic cigarettes that make you look like you're deriving some kind of satisfaction from sucking on a mini-Maglite, residents of Pyongyang can buy a "quit smoking" pill. Made with “rare medicinal herbs growing in steep mountains and deep valleys”, the remedy “removes nicotine accumulated in the human body”, thus leading the human to “give up smoking spontaneously.” If only our governments would ignore the protestations of Big Tobacco and import these foolproof pills for use in the West.

There’s an intense practical focus to North Korean science that would satisfy even the most rabid conservative demands. While Western scientists piss about looking for new things for Professor Brian Cox to point at on shows about the formation of the universe, the Einsteins and Newtons of North Korea march on at their own pace, creating new flowers, devising heroin cold treatments, and investigating nuclear bombs.

Creativity and the open exchange of ideas are unwelcome in this world: if you can’t praise the leader, feed a worker, build a factory, or blow up an American with your proposed invention, then you can fuck off back to the drawing board. This is the kind of progress that can be made with a micromanaged, target-driven approach to science. Which, it turns out, is not a lot of progress at all.

Martin Robbins is a writer and talker who blogs about weird and wonderful things for the Guardian and New Statesman. Here Be Dragons is a new column that explores denial, conflict, and mystery at the wild fringes of science and human understanding. Find him on Twitter @mjrobbins, or email tips and feedback to martin@mjrobbins.net.

More North Korea:

The VICE Guide to North Korea

North Korean Labor Camps

Hoping No One Dies at the North Korean Fun Fair!

Hey, British xenophobes: Ever wonder where all those Romanian immigrants who've been stealing your jobs have been spending your money? On the building of strange, gigantic mansions that no one lives in, and the planning of extravagant funerals back in their hometowns, apparently. Romanian photographer Petrut Calinescu hung out in the northern part of Romania for a while looking at how the culture of emigration has changed the landscape of traditional Romanian villages. 

I called him up to talk about his project, Pride and Concrete.

VICE: How did Pride and Concrete come about? What is the idea behind it?
Petrut Calinescu: Northern Transylvania, where these pictures were taken, is a place I've visited a lot as a photographer in the last ten to 15 years. In the beginning, I was fascinated by how the rural part of this area preserved their traditions and their way of primitive subsistence farming. But, slowly, that changed—people left to work abroad and the villages became deserted overnight.

My frustration grew, because I was looking for that kind of romantic image depicting the last peasants, but there were more and more modern mansions and foreign cars spoiling my idyllic pictures. I realized then that there was a story developing in my pictures of how the traditional world and the modern one coexist, because of the people working abroad sending money back home.



What was that story developing in your pictures?
During the year, some villages in Romania are left deserted. They’re completely silent, and the only sound you’ll hear is the sound of concrete mixers, while the village elders walk around construction sites like inspectors. The villages come back to life in August, when everybody travels back home to attend weddings, which traditionally are between Romanian emigrants. There can be up to 60 weddings in the span of a couple of weeks.


What is the alternative way of life for someone who stays in Romania?
There aren’t too many opportunities since the agriculture and industrialization collapsed. Everybody is seeking a way to escape. Only a few young people are going to neighboring cities to study. But studying isn’t really popular, because it’s a long-term investment and a degree doesn’t guarantee a big salary, which is a bummer when compared to doing manual labor abroad.



Why do the people build these mansions if they live abroad?
Almost all the people who left are planning to return at some point. Until then, they work hard and save the money to invest into a nice little retreat for their return. 



Do you know how much of the money comes from those working abroad?
I think each family has at least one member who is working abroad. Before the global economic crisis, Romania’s economy was on the rise. But it wasn’t because we did something special, it was solely because of the money sent back by emigrants being spent on the ground.



On your website you mention that the locals look down on the emigrants. Why is that?
I'm not sure there’s a particular reason. I think a lot of simple people work hard abroad, and once they’re back with more money than a professor can earn in his lifetime in Romania, they can act a little silly looking for recognition of their new status as a rich man. And the "professors" don't necessarily appreciate that, either.


Do a lot of people actually come back to live in their big houses?
Not really. The majority stay abroad. Only a few of them work with legal papers, which means there isn't a pension waiting for them in Romania.

Don't you think it's hard for them to return? I would imagine the country has changed a lot since the time they left.
It’s difficult to say, because each village, each community, has its own way of relating with Western Europe. There are villages that people leave for only three to six months a year, so they are already more at home that abroad. For the ones who live abroad full-time, the most difficult part will be to convince their children, who are attending European schools, to go back and restart a life in Romania. 



Thanks, Petrut.

Petrut is in the middle of a crowd-funding campaign to publish a book of this project. Show your support by clicking here.

Follow Paulius on Twitter: @paulius_ka

More photos of people from around the world:

Desk Nazis of the World Unite

Photographing London's Little Worlds

Civil War, Cowabunga!

German photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer has seen a lot of walls over the past couple of decades. Beginning with the Berlin Wall, which he witnessed collapse in 1989, Kai has photographed many of the world's most famous barriers, including the Peace Lines in Belfast, the controversial fence in the West Bank separating Israel and Palestine, the DMZ between North and South Korea, and the US–Mexico border. He's had no shortage of subjects to shoot, since 22 new border walls have gone up in the 24 years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, compared with only 11 between World War II and 1989. Now Kai wants to install his massive panorama photos on fragments of the Berlin Wall in hopes of creating a dialogue about the use of walls as political tools and their role in our everyday lives. He's started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds, and we strongly encourage you to donate to it, because it's one of the most interesting art-documentary projects we've seen in years. 

VICE: How did this whole project start?
Kai Wiedenhofer: I was a first-semester student in mid-October 1989, so three weeks into my education, the Berlin Wall came down. I was in Cologne, and one of my professors said, “If you have time you should go immediately to Berlin.” So a few of us drove off, missed our studies, and went to Berlin for four days. It was the most interesting political event of my life. We thought, We have a free world now, no more walls, but as we have seen in [the US] over the last 20 years there's actually a renaissance for walls.

What made you return to walls later in your career?
Basically, it was more forced upon me by a friend of mine I had worked with at a Swiss newspaper. He wanted to do a story about the wall they had built between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. After about six or seven phone calls, he basically dragged me over there. That was in 2003, and I made a book of that work for Steidl, which was published in 2007. From there, I expanded the project and went to the other places.

The border between Ceuta and Melilla, Spain, and Morocco.

What about walls in particular sparked your interest?
I think it’s a stupid concept, basically. The Berlin Wall was actually the best proof that you cannot solve a problem by building a wall. It’s counterproductive. Whatever it is—an economic problem or an ethnic or religious one—a wall will only make things worse. You can see it in Belfast, for example, where the more the people don’t know each other and don’t communicate with each other, the more people just get an image of the other side that has nothing to do with reality.

You’ve done a lot of traveling through a lot of different areas, and some have been dangerous. Have you ever worried about your safety?
You can’t stay long in a place before you have to go. You drive around and you see something and then you photograph ten, maybe 15, 20 minutes tops, then you go off. 

The South Korea–North-Korea border.

What was most surprising to you in all your travels?
I worked in parts of Ireland in the 90s and hadn’t been back, so I thought maybe the wall would have been reduced or even dismantled. I bought a new camera in 2008 with a perspective control and shift in all directions, so I thought I’d take the camera and go back to Belfast. I discovered that they had restarted a lot of walls, they built them higher, they had built new ones. It was the opposite of what I thought would have happened.

The Belfast Peace lines.

How did it come about that you wanted to mount your photos on the Berlin Wall itself? It seems like you’re coming back to your roots.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a very positive thing. You can see, for example, in Syria that revolutions can go badly wrong. But during the fall of the Berlin Wall, no one died. It was a very positive event and could have been a model for the rest of the world. In '89, many people thought there would be no more walls, but we were really proven wrong. So we had the logical idea to go back to the wall and put the photos on there. If we manage to put this thing up, we will have a quarter of a million people there and we won’t have to pull anybody into a museum to see it.

Baghdad.

Looking at the photos, they remind me of Edward Burtynsky or Andreas Gursky in that you're using image size to convey physical immensity. Was that your reasoning behind using the panoramic camera?
Yeah, sure. Like I say, if you want to put a nail into wood, you use a hammer not a screwdriver. It’s a basic logic, you know? I come from a craftsman family and what is a wall, basically? It’s this massive, seemingly endless thing. When you’re standing in Jerusalem and the wall is nine meters high, that’s really immense. For the exhibition, I want to transmit this endlessness of the wall and also the size.

What kind of things do you hope people start talking about when they see these photographs?
Everyone has their own opinion. We made a life-size test print of one of my photos from the Mexican-American wall and put it on the Berlin Wall. A group of Americans walked by and was telling us how we can’t compare the wall in the US to the Berlin Wall. In every place you go, someone will explain to you that a certain wall was needed and it’s different from the other ones. It’s also about getting a discussion going about imposing will. There is always this talk about globalization, but if you really think about it, it’s the money that goes global, and the people who stay behind walls.

The USA-Mexico border.

Why do you think walls still exist in this day and age?
It’s a simple solution and it’s also something visual. In the USA [with the border fence], for example, voters can say, “OK, the state is doing something, because a wall is a physical thing standing somewhere." In the Arizona desert, it’s very visual. And at the same time, it also becomes a mental thing. You don’t have to be there, you don’t have to stand in Arizona and look over to Mexico. You can get a mental image about a wall when you are in New York, or Denver, or anywhere else. It’s basically a symbol people have in their minds.

@ChristianStorm

More from this project can be seen here and you can donate to the Kickstarter campaign here.

Want more socially-conscious photography? 

Arthur Conka Photographs the Roma Poor He Left Behind

Syria's Refugees Are Wedged Between Hells

Remember Haiti? Giles Clarke Does

Have you ever had to transcribe an interview? It’s the absolute worst thing in the history of doing things. I’ve been trying to figure out ways to get out of it since I started this racket 20 years ago, but it’s not easy—no one wants to do it. I once tried to get an elderly Jewish woman to transcribe one of my interviews and she said she’d rather go back to Dachau. When I moved to Cincinnati for a year to work at a small skateboard magazine in 1999, I was lucky enough to get very sexy coeds from UC and Xavier to transcribe my interviews in exchange for college credit. For the most part, I chose these interns based solely on looks and fuckability. It didn’t matter if they could type more than the six words per minute, eked out in my chicken-pecking style. (I once took a typing class in high school that actually corrected my problem and had me typing 55 words a minute. Tragically, my teacher died midsemester and was replaced by this older woman with serious insecurity issues who refused to make eye contact with her students. She looked just over their heads when she spoke to them, which was quite disconcerting. I spent the remainder of the semester trying to get her to look me in the eye by slowly raising up out of my seat into her line of sight. But each time I tried, she’d raise her gaze just above my head. As a result of this game my typing suffered terribly and never recovered.)

I would typically keep the Ohioan gals for a week or two, depending on how good they were in bed, before telling them that I’d sign off on their college credits and they could have the rest of the semester free to party; everyone won. Then I’d call the English department for another girl. That’s not against that law, is it? If so, what’s the statute of limitations on being an asshole?

When I moved to LA in 2000 to work on Big Brother magazine it was more of the same: sexy English students looking for sex and college credits from UCLA or USC.

In 2004 I moved back to New Jersey, thereby kicking off a long, dreadful decade of typing my own interviews. There were brief stretches when my sexy wife was between jobs where I was able to convince her to type for me, but now that she’s employed and we have two kids, that’s no longer an option. (Yes, I’m aware there are digital recorders and programs that transcribe for you, but I trust neither. I’ve had too many friends come back from interviews only to realize their recorder malfunctioned and all of their time and energy was for naught.)

I desperately need help. My vision is worsening, I’m forced to type in 20-point just to see what I’m doing. My carpal tunnel is seizing up my hands to where I look like Bela Lugosi about to pounce on my keyboard. I have decided it is worth the cost to pay a sexy assistant to type up these hour-long interviews (that take me five hours to transcribe) in order to avoid the pain and suffering and possible risk of hemorrhoids from sitting at my desk for extended periods of time. I started looking on Craigslist for help, but most people refused to send me photos of themselves typing (they didn’t understand the need for it), and the few who did were hideous. I REFUSE TO LET UGLY PEOPLE TYPE MY WORK!! If I wanted that I’d just do it myself!

Then I discovered this amateur porn site, MyGirlFund.com, where you can pay the “girl next door” to perform nearly every manner of naughtiness. I thought I’d hit pay dirt. I have a sex kitten at home so I no longer need an assistant for sex, but at nearly 40 I really need someone hot to type for me. But the request seemed suspicious to a lot of girls on the site who kept asking, “Wouldn’t you rather see me piss on something or shove something up my ass?”

I ran into a similar problem ten years ago in Amsterdam and it nearly got my teeth knocked down my throat. I had just gotten together with my wife, and so didn’t want to fornicate with any of the hookers, but I was bored. I was on a skateboard trip and all my buddies were high as kites in the coffee shops, and I hate pot. I thought I’d kill some time by going to the supermarket and buying some cucumbers, eggplants, and other oblong vegetables and see if I could pay a whore normal sex rates to masturbate with my healthy choices. If I were a prostitute I would have thought it was the deal of the century! No actual sex, paid full freight, and free produce? Instead the girls freaked out on me, calling me names, asking if I’d enjoy the zucchini up my ass. I was confused and taken aback. I tried to explain how I was the best John they’d ever come across, but they could not be reasoned with. Instead, they called for three huge massive Mongolians, who tried to kill me. I barely escaped with my life and spent the rest of the evening eating veggies on a canal bridge, crying into the river.

Here I was again, trying to make a girl a decent proposal and getting stonewalled. Then, when I tried to narrow my search for girls in New Jersey, the MGF admin stepped in and told me I wasn’t permitted to inquire about whereabouts or exchange personal info with the girls (I guess rape and kidnapping are trending hard right now), nor was soliciting them to transcribe my interviews permitted because file sharing was also not allowed. I was SOL holding a cassette with an 80-minute-long Chima Ferguson interview for next week’s Vans’ Rider Week. I quit my search and began typing.

Let’s rewind. Two weeks ago my silly little Oklahoma video really bummed a lot of people out, and as a result the porn girls took a lot of unnecessary flack for what I thought were clearly comedic comments. Internet morons with their sarcasm filter turned on attacked and vilified the porn gals (and guy). I felt like I needed to make it up to them by showing people that porn not only cares, but gives back in big ways. I remembered the profiles I’d seen on MyGirlFund.com with all the pleas from the amateur cam girls beseeching kind, horny souls to contribute to their funds to help with rent, credit card bills, divorce fees, surgeries, etc, etc. I could think of no better way to demonstrate how porn changes and improves peoples’ lives than reaching out to a few of the girls and listening to their sob stories.

The first few problems I heard were pretty mellow, but if the last two don’t tug on your heartstrings you might just be a corpse.

Apt No 7

Apt No 7 is a mother of two willing to perform nearly any act to make her dreams come true.

VICE: What are you saving money for?
Apt No 7: I’m saving for my own photography studio. I have been able to purchase a lot of equipment over the last few years. I have been able to get everything from backdrops, a camera, lights, wardrobe, etc. from doing what I already love to do. I’ve spent $75,000 easily. I have taught myself everything from the ground up. Google Academy... LOL.

I have over 50 photo sets uploaded here, and 50 videos from the day I started camming till now. I do erotic art, mostly.

xSerendipityx

xSerendipityx is a college student who will gladly sell you a POV whip-cream blowjob where the guy comes in her mouth and on her face for the low price of $20. In this economy, where are you going to get a blowjob for $20? She also boasts, “I cater to most fetishes! Just ask for the list.” If that’s not the hardworking DIY mentality that made America great, I don’t know what is!

VICE: What are you saving money for?
xSerendipityx: I originally joined MGF to pay off college loans. So the stripper statement was correct. I am currently working on my doctorates. I save my money on here for all sorts of things, from traveling to bills. I am working on my PhD in clinical psych. I’ve done four years of college and three years of graduate school. I have two more years. I’m also saving for a flight home to see my family. My flight home typically ranges from $700 to $1200. Currently, it’s around $1,000. As of now I have raised $245, but have plenty of time to raise the rest. I usually only go home annually because of how expensive it is. The guys on MyGirlFund.com are great with helping out. I have been around a while and always go home around the same time, so they are aware and always willing to contribute.

CurleyCutie

Stay-at-home Florida mom of two, Curley Cutie proudly offers a ten-minute-blowjob cam show for $55. “My BJ videos are my most popular videos. I guess because guys can tell I'm not a porn star, and I'm truly enjoying what I’m doing, and enjoy knowing other guys enjoy it. I just love knowing I have that much power in my eyes, mouth, and hands to pleasure my man more than anything else and for those moments, there is absolutely no stress in his body.”

VICE: What are you saving money for?
CurleyCutie: Well, it allows me to afford to be a stay-at-home mom. My ex-boyfriend was abusive, a cheater, an alcoholic. After catching him red-handed cheating on me, I took our daughter and left. I felt ugly, useless, and was lacking any real confidence. I had never even slept with anyone without my shirt on. This site allowed me to explore myself physically, sexually, and emotionally. I love MGF. I've been here four years! I'm an everyday innocent girl. I'm still super shy away from MGF.

VammyRose

Nineteen-year-old Candadian VammyRose charges anywhere from $10 to $30 for custom videos, depending on length and what the request is. “The only things I’m uncomfortable doing are shame videos,” she says, “as in yelling at the men, calling them horrid names. I just can't do that. Other than that, as long as they have a detailed idea of what they would like, I'm up for it.”

VICE: What are you saving money for?
VammyRose: I'm trying to get out of my house. I grew up in a poor household, my college fund was given to my brother, and my credit card was stolen. Over $1,000 was charged on it. I just paid it off. Growing up my household was full of abuse and still is. I'm trying to save up enough to get out of this house and be somewhere that has job opportunities and transportation. We live in a small town with no transportation. I wasn't allowed to learn how to drive, and there are no job opportunities here, hence why I joined MGF and "chat-urbate." I would need about $2,000. I've made $1,000 on this site in the past year, but had to use that toward the theft. Right now, I have $200 on the site, and $70 in the bank. It's been rough, financially… and mentally as well. My brother would call me a whore when I was 12 because I was raped. My parents wanted to take me back to where I was raped to see if it would happen again. My brother has a mental disability and has anger management; he would kick me in the face and cause nosebleeds, scratch my face, my arms, legs… I have scars all over from him. He would tear off my door, doorframe, and break things within my room to use as a weapon against me. One time, while trying to defend myself, I put my leg forward to try and push him away from me, but he slammed the door on me and my entire foot went through the door; that was a very big mess. My dad always sided with him and would help him. He would drag me up the stairs by my ankles, yell at me, and slap me.

YummyAudrey

http://www.cash4mommy.com/

Disabled Iraq vet Audrey charges $5 a minute for custom videos and will do anything you ask except harm herself or shit. Oh, and she won’t fuck her dog. Her most requested video is to have her dog lick her pussy. The most requested video that she will do is daddy role-play: “Lots of men love being called ‘daddy.’ It’s a control thing,” she says. So for all the people who got so pissed off about Lexi Belle’s Oklahoma daddy comments two weeks ago, it seems she knew exactly what men want.

VICE: What are you saving money for?
YummyAudrey: I’m saving to survive! I’m a disabled veteran of the army, and times are hard right now. I served in Iraq and broke my hips. I still have issues with my hips. I have a 14-month-old son to support and MyGirlFund.com is my main income right now. Also a tornado hit my car a few weeks back, and basically ruined it. I also need rent money badly. I have $350 and need another $300.

Previously - A Quicky with Farrah Abraham

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

Induced by booze, blues, and drugs, I’ve often found my mind wandering into strange places. One peculiar recurring vision I have involves an insane fight scene where the laws of physics bend and I reign supreme. I like this delusion. Whose wet dream isn't beating up bad guys, mastering kung fu, and coming out of a fight totally unscathed? There’s also something playful about violence that is instilled in us during childhood. Replicating gunshot sounds with our mouths and cocking back our thumbs is as much a part of our wonder years as cartoons and cereal. Those good old days of finding wonder and excitement in violence was the idea behind Brian Petsos and Bryan Gaynor’s short film Boobie. To pull it off right, they got a big warehouse playroom, some white jumpers, a fake mustache, a teddy bear named Boobie, and a shit ton of weapons.  

Writer and star Brian Petsos is playful with his violence, taking it to obscene levels and leveling it with deadpan comic delivery. Going head-to-head with a mustached Elijah Wood, he hosts a Mexican standoff in a sick take on the classic kids' pastime. Director Bryan Gaynor heightens the experience by taking something so annoying as boys being boys and pushing it to its most exaggerated conclusion. If you let yourself drip into Boobie’s warped trip and cozy up to its peculiar logic, you’ll really enjoy it. 

Director Bryan Gaynor makes, writes, and edits a bunch of movies that have played at Sundance, SXSW, Slamdance, HBO, Funny or Die, and many more. Boobie was in the 2011 SXSW film festival. He usually makes movies with his company, Last Pictures.

Writer and star Brian Petsos does more of the same in his newly released feature Revenge for Jolly, which stars Kristen Wiig, Oscar Isaac, Elijah Wood, Ryan Phillippe, and Adam Brody. The film has a similar hyperrealistic vibe, but instead of defending the honor of a teddy bear, he defends the honor of his adorable dog and kills WAY more than just one person. I reached out to Bryan Gaynor and Brian Petsos to answer some questions about their goofy film. 

VICE: Where the hell did this idea come from?
Bryan Gaynor: Petsos and I talked about making a short film with a big machine gun, a little guy, and slow motion. That was the egg, I wasn't there for the fertilization process.
Brian Petsos: Mr. Gaynor and I had collaborated on several things prior to this, and we discussed incorporating an extremely large machine gun into something. From there, for me, it was a matter of infusing and juxtaposing as much childlike/absurdist essence as possible in order to create a desolate minidisaster. The violence is crucial, as is the teddy bear.

Did you ever have a stuffed animal that meant the world to you?
BG: No, but I kept Boobie and we still hang out a lot.
BP: When I was slightly younger, I had a little stuffed buddy named Zeke. He and my imaginary friend, Spike, were instrumental in my life. They argued a lot. It was difficult to mediate.

What's it like to have gigantic machine guns on set?
BP: It's both frightening and exhilarating—tantalizing even. Somebody could die.
BG: I remember being pissed the arms guy wouldn't let me play with it. I'm actually still upset about that.

Why the mustache? I have a mustache, and I know they're cool. But why here?
BG: The mustache has a lot of significance. I can't explain it though, that would be cheating. All I can say is look closely.
BP: The mustache is fake. They're funny. Right?

What are you working on now?
BP: I just made my bed. I think I'm going to eat something, and then watch cartoons.
BG: Arms and chest. My abs need work too.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Previously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'The Rambler'

The Brazillian uprising. Photos by Stephanie Foden.

It’s been over a week since Brazil erupted into mass protests, and people are finally starting to realize that the 20 real (0.9 USD) raise in bus fare is not the only reason why. Even though Brazil finally caved and reversed the fare hike, people are still pissed off.

#ChangeBrazil has been grabbing the world’s attention and galvanized the country, but not in the same “Hurray, we got the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics!” kind of way when they were awarded these mega-events back in 2007 and 2009.

Even though it’s a stereotype, most Brazilians really do like futbol. So, it might come as a surprise that a lot of Brazilians are actually pretty choked that they’re hosting the two biggest international sports competitions on earth. But that’s probably because the country is spending billions on soccer instead of on much needed health care and education. FIFA President Sepp Blatter said that football is being exploited for domestic problems facing Brazil, but author David Zirin thinks otherwise.

Dave is an author and a journalist who has written extensively about the problems with sports today. His latest book, Game Over: How Politics has Turned the Sports World Upside Down, adds to a collection of books like Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports that dive into the influence that sports has had over politics, economics, and human rights. Last September he went to Brazil to check out the effect that the World Cup’s preparation is having on the country. It’s pretty bleak. I recently called him up to talk about it.

VICE: It’s pretty clear that these protests aren’t just about the 20 Brazilian real hike in bus fares, what do you think they are about?
Dave: Oftentimes in mass social moments there is usually one small point, which crystallizes discontent and then it becomes a catchall for so much more. The May 1968 general strike in France started because people wanted to be able to have co-ed dorms so they could sleep over with their girlfriends and boyfriends when they went to college. This event became a symbol for all the repression and strict nature in France—and it mushroomed into something much bigger. Based on the people I’m speaking to in Brazil, the 20 real hikes on the bus fare becomes this catchall…

You’re raising fares on us, people who need public transportation to go to work and school everyday, but at the same time you’re able to pour in billions of dollars into the Olympics, into a rapid bus transit system, into the kinds of infrastructure, which fundamentally benefits wealthy tourists who are going to be coming in, not just in the mind of the state for the Olympics and the World Cup, but for all sorts of reasons to try and make the state more friendly to capital. What you have instead is people standing up and saying we disagree with these priorities. 

What’s your stance on the World Cup and the Olympics? Great event or huge waste of money?
It’s a massive social disruption for whatever city or whatever country is cursed with having to host these events. Historically, they tend to take much more out of the local economy than they put in. They tend to build stadiums referred to as “white elephants” that have no real use once the confetti is gone and the smoke is cleared. Yet, I would argue that it’s gotten even more profound post-9/11. It puts stress not only on the infrastructure projects that have no long term use, but it’s also linked very strongly to the surveillance state, towards “anti-terror initiatives,” which are not only a disruption on people’s lives, but it also militarizes the state. That is why in recent years when it comes to the World Cup and the Olympics you see a real tendency for the International Olympic Committee or FIFA to look to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), because they think with a lot of good reason that they can get away with the kinds of crack-downs that you wouldn’t be able to get away with if let’s say the Olympics was in Chicago.

So FIFA and the IOC are to blame for the protests?
Absolutely. Brazil is of course getting a left/right punch here because of having to host these events back-to-back. I mean really, this is unprecedented. The United States hosted the World Cup in 1994, and the Olympics in 1996, but they were nowhere near each other really. It’s a particular stress not just on the host country, but what they demand of the host country. There’s the expectation of “peace by any means necessary,” that you will remove people from their homes if you have to, that you will do whatever you have to do to the environment and also figure out ways to “greenwash” the thing so that everybody will call them the “Green Olympics” no matter how much pollution and smog is in the air. All these things are demanded by the IOC and by FIFA. [Brazil must sign FIFA’s “General Law of the World Cup”into law, but it is pretty controversial especially due to its restrictions of ticket prices. See: InfosurHoy and Cipamericas.]

Is there any way we can make these events work and not feel shitty about them?
The best way to make these events work, I think, is if there is a permanent staging ground for them—not this idea of bringing them from country to country to country and then being used as a cudgel of neoliberalism wherever they go. If you have them in a permanent locale wherever the hell that is, and I don’t really care where it would be, then you would be able to build the infrastructure for it once. You would be able to then repair and refurbish the infrastructure over the course of a period, but actually have some long-term use value. And they would also exist in such a way that they wouldn’t be able to be used and really prostituted by a local government as a way to push through economic initiatives that people would otherwise oppose, like they do in Brazil.

Countries don’t want out of hosting these events, they keep wanting in. Why are they still bidding to host them?
As recently as 1984 with the LA Olympics, Los Angeles was the only city that even bid to host the Olympics. After the experience of Montreal in 1976 nobody really wanted the Olympics anymore—they were seen as just overly negative. Peter Ueberroth [former chairman of the United States Olympic Committee] devised a different way to do it in conjunction with corporations as a way to get them to underwrite the costs, plus the fact that there was a strong recommendation from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that the goal for every country should be to bring down tariffs, encourage global trade, get hard currency into the country—mega events are seen as ways to do that. And they undoubtedly are ways to do that, but not unlike other IMF and World Bank dictates, they tend to be very good for people in power and very bad for the people who actually have to live in the country. The value of investing in that country goes up, but the trickle-down effect just doesn’t work, it just doesn’t trickle down.

Ernst & Young predicted that the World Cup and the Olympics in Brazil will bring in 3.6 million jobs and contribute 0.4 per cent of GDP until 2019. Those seem like pretty significant numbers.
It’s not that the jobs are trivial; it’s what’s going to happen to the jobs when they’re gone. And are those jobs the best thing that could happen with the $35 billion real ($18 billion USD) (which is a very conservative estimate) for spending on what the Olympics are going to be or the $26 billion ($13.3 billion USD) for what the World Cup is going to be? The question is not: Is it a bad thing that those jobs are being created? The question is: Are they the best possible jobs that could be created given the massive capital investment that’s going into Brazil?

Right… This is set to be the most expensive World Cup in history. What is raising the cost?
That’s a great question. The Sochi Olympics are going to cost more than the last 21 Winter Olympics combined and I don’t know enough to say if the Sochi story is the Brazil story, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It has to do with corruption or what you could call crony capitalism: whoever gets the contracts does substandard work, so things have to be built and then rebuilt and then rebuilt again. And the other thing is security. You know who the real winners of the Olympics and the World Cup are? The research and development divisions of private security companies. That’s been growing at an alarmingly rapid pace over the last decade and of course it’s expensive. The more research and development you put in, the more hidden cameras you put in and the more demands from FIFA or the IOC that you have, the  more it’s going to cost as well. I’m talking about unmanned drones, I’m talking about the missile launchers they attach to roofs of residential apartment buildings, the growth in cameras, the cameras that can code license plates. I mean all the things that turned London into this concentration of Big Brother mentality before and during the Olympics. [The Brazilian government said they have invested $535 millioninto security for the World Cup. Johnson Controls is a major security company with a $29 million budget to install cameras, ticket systems and communication between stadiums. The government has also recently purchased 34 anti-aircraft tanks from Germany. See this Bloomberg article about other people and organizations that benefit from the World Cup.]

With so many massive problems with major, international sports events, do you ever get the feeling that it’s all just hopeless?
I think we have to separate what we like about sports and what we don’t like about sports and challenge what we don’t like to change. To me, sports are art and all art is contradictory. What I don’t believe in is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying “because there are structural problems with sports I’m therefore going to reject sports as an entire entity”—there’s too much good in there. I love the World Cup, I want us to be able to have a World Cup without having what’s happening to Brazil or what happened to South Africa, it frankly doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam

More from Brazil:

Sao Paulo is Burning

Rio Militarizes its Favela Slums in Preparation for the 2014 World Cup

Video: Teenage Riot – São Paulo

As we have reported here and here and here, the bus-fare protests in Brazil have escalated into a revolt over many social issues. The government has lowered the fare back down to three Brazilian real, but the gathered masses are still protesting government corruption, the lack of health care and other social services, and the fact that billions of tax dollars have been pumped into funding the World Cup.

Reporters from VICE Brazil are on the ground in São Paulo live streaming tonight's activities. Watch below and stay tuned for ongoing coverage.

For more about the Brazilian bus-fare protests, watch our documentary Teenage Riot - São Paulo.

More comics from VICE:

Aromatherapy Cops

Weirdo Club

Bald Commitment

Rising unemployment combined with rapid inflation has left many Egyptians jobless and desperate. High-profile violence and political instability have tanked Egypt’s tourism industry, a major player in the Egyptian economy. During the Mubarak era, before the Egyptian spring of 2011, the police were more or less omnipresent: stationed on most street corners and extremely diligent when it came to snuffing out any sign of public dissent, crime or infraction. Now though, many view the police as inept, undisciplined, corrupt, or simply absent, their disappearance from the streets leaving a power vacuum that is currently being filled by a crime wave.

In this fraught climate, families and business owners have taken to arming themselves. The porous border with Libya, combined with the widespread looting of police stations during the revolution, has flooded the country with a new stock of weapons. I sat down with Sayed – a lingerie salesman turned arms dealer based in Port Said – to learn more about Egypt's burgeoning private gun market.

VICE: How did you get into this business?
Sayed: I started right after the revolution. With all the bad economic conditions, some businessmen in Port Said were getting robbed by thugs. They would stop the trucks carrying containers and take the shipment. So, we thought about it. I have money riding on these shipments, and could lose it all in a second. We decided to arm ourselves. I went to Arish [The largest city in the Sinai peninsula], bought 600,000 Egyptian Pounds' [about £55,400] worth of weapons, came back to Port Said and got three well-known criminals to market my guns. Step by step, we became weapons dealers.

How many and what kind of weapons did that amount of money buy you?
The cheapest weapon you can buy is a marota [a sort of untraceable, homemade shotgun]. That’s about 600. Handguns cost around 6,500, but now they’re worth about 15,000. It’s an investment. You get it, you keep it, then sell it for a high price. The more the security fails, the more people need weapons. The biggest gun you can get is the Girinof [the Belgian made MAG FN]. That costs about 30,000 - 60,000. The last automatic gun I saw, that was brand new, was from Israel. There are three main weapons in the market: the Israeli automatic weapon, the Afghan gun – they call it "bin Laden" – and the Port Saidi gun.

Is it made in Port Said?
No, we don't really know what it is or where it comes from, so we just called it Port Said. 

How are the weapons coming into the country?
Sources and sub sources. Most weapons come from Libya, Gaza, or the police stations that were looted during the revolution. In the country, Arish is a source, Port Said is a source...

How are they spread?
There are Bedouin guides with every deal from Sinai. The seller provides a guide to get the buyers from Arish to Port Said, through the desert and the mountains away from army checkpoints and the police. They can navigate the mountains in a way where they disappear completely.

Where are the weapons coming from?
Right after the revolution it was known that most of the weapons in Port Said came through the tunnels from Palestine. Dealers in Arish, they get arms from Gaza. The last big deal in Port Said, that created the whole market, was from Libya. It was right before the 26th.

Who are your customers?
I sell mostly to rich people: businessmen who need to protect their stores. To get a marota, you are probably a thug. To get a real weapon to protect yourself, you must have money; you must have something you need to protect. What you have to protect is valued more than the gun. But to get the marota, it’s someone who needs to show off, it’s someone who needs to rob or steal something. Usually people in poorer areas or slums. On every street there is a home that has a weapon. Mostly I deal with criminals. To have bad people on your side is smart. This means if there is something serious happening, if they are attacking the market, you are guaranteed that you’ll have reinforcements. Even if you aren’t a bad person, at least you have them on your side. As for good people, my work put me close to them in the markets. I deal with them on their level.

Do you get bothered by the police?
Detectives are showing up now more on the streets. I keep a low profile now, to hide any of my activities.

Do the police know about this at all?
They must know. Of course they know.

Are they doing anything about it?
No.

Why?
That’s a good question. The ex-Minister of the Interior Ahmed Gamal El-Din had plans to fight crime everywhere. He had a vision of clearing and cleaning all the thugs out of Manzela lake [a notorious haven for the criminals of Port Said]. Before, it was occupied by the criminals from Arish and even Hamas dealers from Gaza would travel to Manzela lake to do business. Abdin flushed them out of there and for at least 15 years, the fishermen were able to go the lake to fish there. But Morsi came and changed everything, he replaced him with Mohamed Ibrahim who never does anything, just lets everything get bad. He's only been there for seven months or so and Manzela lake is already run by criminals again. There are no fishermen any more. The Muslim Brotherhood want instability to be everywhere in Egypt. They don’t want a stable country.

Why is that?
If Egypt is stable, people will force them to lead directly. People won’t be busy with other problems. 

Follow Max on Twitter: @SaxMiegelbaum

More chaos in Egypt:

Teenagers Are Being Lynched in Egypt

The Army and Police Are Shooting Each Other in Port Said

Egypt's Black Block Don't Wanna Be Your Mate

We can't believe the Downtown Sound program is actually over. Somehow traveling all around the country to throw five different parties and make ten videos along the way went by in the blink of our hungover eye. Just to wrap it all up, we put together a supercut of all the best party footage so you can pretend like you flew around the country with us. Enjoy, and big thanks to our friends at HTC Canada for putting this all together!

Tear gas seems to be pretty in vogue at the moment. Protesters in Turkey, Brazil and even Switzerland have been subjected to some of that noxious tear-jerker in the past couple of weeks, leaving the rest of the world back in the demonstration dark ages. Protests featuring tear gas are iD magazine to the rest of the world's Cosmo – we're trailing behind, thinking we're sexy with our batons and shields, when really we're just a bunch of fucking squares.        

Unfortunately, British police don't use the stuff. But if they did, strangers I spoke to on the street, what do you feel passionate enough about to get tear-gassed for?      

D: Shit! I have no idea.

VICE: There's nothing you'd go up against tear gas and rubber bullets for?
Probably something to do with design. I don’t know, though.

Like if the government banned computer-aided design?
If they removed all the typefaces in the world and there was only comic sans left, I’d be pretty pissed off.

And you lost the ability to use it to piss off other designers?
Yeah. This is possibly the worst answer ever.

It's a pretty niche answer.

Andy: For freedom you mean?

Yeah.
It would have to be almost a complete social break down for me to get tear-gassed or have rubber bullets shot at me.

What about the NSA fiasco? Did that not make you want to riot in the streets?
Nah, I assumed they pretty much do that anyway. It would have to be way more serious than that – some pretty major corruption.

Daniel: I wouldn’t ever go somewhere thinking I was going to get tear-gassed, but I do go to a lot of protests.

Oh, that's good. So when the police crack out their riot gear…
I like to think I could stay. I think it would make me want to protest more, because you’re protesting against the tactics as well. I’d try and stick it out.

Hot shit.

Tony’s friend (out of shot): A ban on beer?
Tony: If it was for the right cause, I’d get up. But a lot of the time, these things get manipulated by the media and the government, who make out people are being violent for the sake of it.

I hear that.
But yeah, probably a ban on beer.

Fair enough.

Kat (left) and Sandy.

Sandy: I’m a pretty chilled person, so it would take quite a lot.
Kat: Yeah, it’d definitely have to be pretty bad.

There must be something.
Sandy: I’m pretty protective of my family, so if something was to happen to them that would tick me off quite a lot. I’m not sure about the rubber bullets, though.

Previously - What's Your Biggest Nerd Passion?

Matthew Conrad (far right) and Paul Watson (far left) with their Pohnpei national team before flying to play in Guam. (All photos courtesy of Matthew Conrad.)

Matthew Conrad was a man with a dream: he wanted to coach an international soccer team. The one tiny issue was that he'd never coached a soccer team before—not a school team, not a squad of paunchy, hungover men slumping their way into a park on a Saturday morning, and definitely not a team with international ambitions (if not quite international caliber).

So, he had two options. The first involved finding out all there was to know about coaching, potentially getting some kind of qualification, tracking down an amateur team that would let him coach them, and slowly working his way up the ladder to the rarified echelons of international soccer. The second, slightly easier option was to find a national team so shitty that no one wanted to touch them, providing him with a spot to swoop in. Matthew chose the second option and, after a bit of back-and-forth, arranged to train the team of a small island called Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia. 

Pohnpei had never won a game, which wasn’t that surprising considering the fact that the island has a 90 percent obesity rate, the locals were all addicted to a psychoactive plant called the betel nut, and the only available soccer field was infested with giant toads. The guys from Pohnpei had also recently suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the nearby island of Guam, who had beaten them 15-0, and didn’t seem particularly inspired by soccer until Matt and his journalist friend Paul flew over and took their team on.

Eventually, Matt and Paul had taken an inexperienced bunch of amateurs and led them to victory against a team from their rival island—exactly like the plot of The Mighty Ducks, just with some betel-nut-chewing Micronesians instead of American schoolchildren. I spoke to Matt to find out how exactly they went about doing that.  

VICE: What inspired you to travel to Pohnpei and coach this team? It seems like a pretty unusual thing to do.
Matt: Steve McClaren. After England failed to qualify for the Euros, we thought that, if he could manage England, surely we were at least capable of managing a team who had never won a game. Another inspiration was the way the media has ruined soccer. The hyperbolic insanity that surrounds modern soccer and the character of many of the players is frustrating. I love soccer and I love the Premier League, but it’s a total circus, with the media behaving as a sort of demented, meth-head ringleader. 

So you became Steve McClaren minus the media madness.
Yeah. Without sounding like megalomaniacs, we wanted to create our own little soccer world where we would have total creative control. But ultimately, our inspiration to coach the team was the place and the players. We originally intended to play for the team. It was going to be some cool, self-aggrandizing bar anecdote that we could tell for years to come. But once we went there and realized that we could give something rather than take something, we decided to install ourselves as coaches. At the time, it made us the youngest international coaches in the world.

How exactly did you go about setting yourselves up as the team’s coaches?
We sent an email out to some dodgy address that we found on some crumby, text-only website, and heard nothing for weeks. Then, out of the blue, the head of Pohnpei’s old FA got in touch, telling us that he was moving to Walthamstow in London. We took him out for a curry and got him onside. I think the lamb bhuna sealed it. It wasn’t a coup or even a putsch; it was more of an amicable, poppadom-fuelled takeover. Once we got to the island, we were given a lot of encouragement by the local National Olympic Committee, run by this massive, hulking ex-pat from Montana called Jim Tobin. He saw we had come a long way on our own dime and were serious about helping, so he gave us a lot of logistical and moral support.

Matt coaching the team.

The island has a 90 percent obesity rate, right? What steps did you take to keep your team in shape?
Pohnpei didn’t have a culture of obesity until the arrival of the US around the time of World War II. They brought soda, beer, sweets, Spam, and all those tasty, cheap, non-perishable, high-salt, high-sugar, high-fat goodies. It’s very sad, because an indigenous Pohnpeian subsistence diet is very healthy. On the team, we did take fitness very seriously, mainly because we knew that it’s an easy way to have an edge over a more experienced opposition playing on home turf, which is what Guam would be, and we were planning on playing a team from there. 

We only had one technically obese first-team player on the roster and he was very successful in losing weight. His transformation was miraculous, but the whole team got in great shape. We did periodical bleep tests to make sure no one was skimping on training while we were off-island, and the boys really did us proud.

I’ve heard that Pohnpei has a major problem with betel nut addiction, too. Was that an issue?
I found it to be distinctly unaddictive. The two times I tried it Pohnpeian-style, I put too much lime in and lost functionality of my mouth for 24 hours. In Pohnpei, they take the betel nut, which is like a smooth horse chestnut, put in half a cigarette and some lime [as in the stuff that the mob uses to dissolve bodies], wrap it in a leaf and chew it. The result is oral paralysis and a constant stream of red juice streaming out of your monged-out mouth.

Many Pohnpeians’ gums and teeth have been destroyed by the stuff, as in rotted to the gum, but they don’t see it as a vice. It grows all over, so it’s a hard sell to tell them that it’s bad for you. Betel nut does get you pretty buzzed, so we outlawed it in our training. We wanted to instil in our players the mindset that they were athletes who had to take care of themselves. That was a big breakthrough, actually.

And your field suffered from a chronic toad infestation. What was the deal with that?
I mean, there were just a shit load of toads around—what else can I say? There was a gully around the field that was constantly full of water, and they laid their eggs there. For large parts of the year, the field was very marshy. From what I remember from prep-school ecology, those are perfect toad-farming conditions.

I seem to remember the same thing. Was there any other wildlife that caused problems for you?
You haven’t really experienced Pohnpei until you’ve been chased by a pack of feral dogs.

Did you come up against any cultural obstacles?
The language was a factor. Like morons, we just assumed that everyone spoke English perfectly, and that just wasn’t the case. Pohnpeians are often too shy or polite to say they don’t understand you. That was another seismic cultural difference from the UK. We love to shout and chant and generally be loutish, especially in soccer. It was a massive challenge to get Pohnpeians to be vocal.

You managed to get sponsorship for the team and get a uniform done up. How did that come about?
Our sponsor was a company called Coyne Airways. They specialize in getting airfreight to really inaccessible and challenging places, like Iraq and Afghanistan, so it felt perfect when they got involved. The owner, Larry Coyne, is a very kind and infinitely patient football fan who believed in what we were doing. He supports QPR, so has endured plenty of heartache, and he probably wanted to take charge of his own soccer destiny.

You eventually took the boys to Guam, where they won their first-ever match against a team from there. How was that?
We didn’t beat Guam National, we beat a Guam Premier League side called Crushers FC. But, without resorting to tabloid hyperbole, the victory really was a historic moment for Micronesia. It really said, "Pohnpei is serious about soccer and we are no pushovers." The toughest guy on our team, a dude called Denson, was in tears. Then there was that awful stat of never having won a game, so when that whistle went at the end of the match, it was such a proud moment. The players and the coaches had put everything into it and the win was vindication for two years of really hard work. It was one of the most satisfying things I've ever been a part of. I'll never forget it.

I understand you’re not living in Micronesia any more. Is the Pohnpei team still going strong now that you aren’t on the island?
Football in Pohnpei and Micronesia as a whole is going relatively well. The Pohnpei Premier League that was instituted under our regime is still going and adding new teams each season. We exported soccer into other Micronesian islands as well, particularly Yap and Chuuk. Yap has a killer field—almost zero toads. It is well-drained, has functional floodlights, a locker room, toilets, the whole shebang. I visited Yap to help start their pilot program and, I must admit, I was extremely jealous. Still, Pohnpei remains the strongest team in the Federated States of Micronesia and recently beat a team of Chuuk and Yap’s finest 4-3. I’m told it was a corker.

What's next for Micronesian soccer, then?
We're trying to get the Federated States of Micronesia into FIFA. The Pohnpei Football Association, run by Steve Finnen, applied for membership and is currently awaiting FIFA inspectors to judge whether we qualify for developmental assistance. Being in FIFA has massive perks; once you're in that club, soccer really has a chance to succeed. Guam was where we were ten years ago. Now I would say they have a soccer infrastructure there that could rival anywhere in the world.

Great. Thanks, Matt.

Matt has managed to raise the money to fund a documentary about his time as Pohnpei’s coach using Kickstarter. It will be available to watch some time this autumn.

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