The photo which started it all, courtesy of basilica.ro.

Romania loves its religion. In fact, over 80 percent of Romanians follow the Orthodox Christian church, meaning its priests have a lot of blessing to do. A few times a year, they'll go door to door in every village, town and city, walk through every room and throw holy water at whatever needs blessing with a basil branch – always for a price, of course. 

However, sometimes the basil branch just won't do. The guy poking the TV screens with a paint-roller in the photo above is the resourceful leader of the Romanian church, Patriarch Daniel, who's become an internet superstar after developing a new blessing technique that involves dipping a paint roller in holy water and using it to bless hard-to-reach surfaces.

Many Romanians were quick to judge, so back in January the church issued a statement defending their "extendable blesser", instructing journalists to “read more on holy matters before misinforming the public".

You can do that if you like, or you can scroll through all these photos of Patriarch Daniel using his blessing rod instead. 

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June 30, 2010
Here's Patriarch Daniel using the blessing rod to get some holy oil under the roof of the Bârsana Monastery in Romania's Maramureș region.

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July 11, 2010
His Holiness blessing a church in the city of Brașov. In this one, another priest is holding something that looks like a pine cone covered in M&M's. This is presumably helpful in some way.

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September 6, 2010
The Patriarch rolling another level of benediction onto a freshly painted cathedral in Alba county. 

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October 31, 2010
Here's Daniel doing his thing to some paintings at the Bucharest School of Engineering campus church.

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September 18, 2011
At this blessing in Turda, Patriarch Daniel gives a blow-by-blow commentary of what it takes to sanctify a wall with his rod.

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June 1, 2012
On International Children's Day, Daniel carefully blessed the prayer corner of a kindergarten.

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August 16, 2012
His Holiness inaugurating the summer altar of the Țigănești Monastery in the Teleorman region.

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October 2, 2013
Here, Daniel is blessing an orphanage near one of his new churches. To the left, you'll notice a guy looking inexplicably bummed out about having to hold the Holy Rod.

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November 3, 2013
In this photo, Daniel really doesn't need to be using the rod. 

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January 16, 2014
Here's the rod in the Romanian-American University, blending science and superstition with panache.

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Bonus: Bishop Teofan of Iaşi shows Daniel that his rod is the biggest blessing rod in the game.

More things that may or may not make you think of penises:

The London Skyline Is Becoming a Collection of Expensive, Towering Penises

A Vandal Has Been Cutting Dick Sculptures Out of Bushes

A Sex Trade Show... on Acid!

Schweitzer in New York's Times Square promoting Yellowstone National Park. Photo via Flickr user Montana Office of Tourism

In a profile published Wednesday in National Journal magazine, former Montana governor and current Democratic presidential tease Brian Schweitzer remarked that it seemed to him like maybe Eric Cantor was gay:

Don't hold this against me, but I'm going to blurt it out. How do I say this…men in the South, they are a little effeminate. They just have effeminate mannerisms. If you were just a regular person, you turned on the TV, and you saw Eric Cantor talking, I would say—and I'm fine with gay people, that's all right—but my gaydar is 60-70 percent. But he's not, I think, so I don't know. Again, I couldn't care less. I'm accepting.

Cantor’s wife could not be reached for comment. Although Schweitzer made it clear that he accepts the outgoing House Majority Leader’s probable homosexuality, and even though he specifically asked them not to, the national press is still holding this one against him.

At the Los Angeles Times, Noah Remnick complained that “this kind of commentary isn’t folksy—it’s bigoted.” The Washington Post's Aaron Blake declared the end of Schweitzer’s unannounced bid for the White House, writing, “Anybody with illusions that Schweitzer could be a major player in the 2016 presidential race should probably re-evaluate themselves.” That’s how bad his gaffe was: you should re-evaluate not just your election picks, but your very self.

Don’t be too hard on yourself, though. Democrats can be forgiven for getting excited about Schweitzer, a center-left governor who enjoyed success and popularity in a very red state. He’s smart but still personable, articulate but still casual—sometimes a little too casual, as we saw this week—and his last name is neither Bush nor Clinton. In a denuded political landscape, he seemed like a viable candidate.

I would like to agree with Blake’s belief that voters in 2016 will remember a dumb thing Schweitzer said two years earlier in National Journal, because it shows a commendable faith in the electorate. But it’s possible that this bolo tie-wearing, chainsaw-wielding, perpetually smiling woodchuck has not seen the end of his career just yet.

It’s also possible that in his bonehead remarks, national commenters are getting their first good look at the hypnotic weirdness of Montana politics. Schweitzer’s comments reflect two key features of electoral politics in Big Sky Country: that just-folks attitude, and the tin ear you get from being the only folks you know.

Before we go any further, let us agree that Schweitzer’s comments were incredibly dumb. Even putting aside decades of progress in queer rights and the centuries of brutal repression that preceded them, the surprise resignation of the House Majority Leader is not the occasion to tell National Journal that he seems gay to you. At 60%, Schweitzer’s gaydar might seem accurate enough to speculate about the sexuality of public figures in the national press, but he probably should have restrained himself anyway. Ask any city councilman, much less a governor with presidential ambitions, and he’ll tell you that was a stupid thing to say.

But Schweitzer is stupid like a fox. What he said keeps getting crazier as you read it, but it is also a distillation of the strategy that brought him where he is today. He is a master at appealing to moderate voters in both parties who identify themselves as ordinary folks. Schweitzer’s apparently dumb remarks reflect his years of experience triangulating a divided state electorate, as well as his inexperience doing the same thing on a national scale.

Let’s start with the South. Montanans relentlessly deride the South and those (white) people who live in it, which is weird because to my midwestern eye, they are exactly the same. Both populations are broadly conservative with pockets of intense liberalism. Both are poor with pockets of industrial and agricultural wealth. And both Montanans and southerners place a high premium on rural individualism, whether they actually live that lifestyle or not.

At the beginning of the National Journal profile, MSNBC can’t get its camera truck under the post-and-lintel gate at the entrance to Schweitzer’s ranch, so he cuts it down with a chainsaw. That is insane behavior. Safety aside, after the camera crew is gone, the former governor might look at the ruined timbers of his old-timey gate and wonder if he acted impulsively. But like George W. Bush cutting brush for reporters in Crawford, Texas, Schweitzer is on the lookout for opportunities to be an ordinary person, a good old boy, just folks like you.

It’s a skill he learned by necessity. Schweitzer served eight years as the Democratic governor of a very conservative place, winning by four points in the 2004 election and then by 32 points in 2008. To appreciate the magnitude of that achievement, consider that the Montana House hasn’t seen a Democratic majority since 1991.

A Democrat cannot become governor of Montana based on his policies. A Republican has a hard time doing it, too. The Montana electorate is so strangely polarized, such a bizarre mix of social conservatives and freakout libertarians—plus hippies and backwoods hermits and other people who own their own water supplies—that you’re much more likely to get elected based on who you are than on what you propose to do.

Schweitzer has mastered the art of convincing moderates and low-commitment voters in both parties that he is someone like them. In this week’s comments, he put this skill on display.

To political writers at the LA Times and the Washington Post—as well as to those of us who understand gay identity as something other than a fun new thing straight people can talk about—“gaydar” is offensive. But to your mother and the ladies at her office, to the farmer who is beginning to suspect that it doesn’t matter if two dudes get married, talking about how you have a sixth sense that helps you recognize the gay people in your life is a safe way to embrace a new idea.

Brian Schweitzer has built his career on being a safe way for ordinary people to embrace new ideas. As governor of Montana, he made his progressive agenda safe for lifelong conservatives by wearing a bolo tie and swinging a chainsaw around. He did it by goshing and shucksing his way through every TV appearance he could get. He is a student of that political compromise which seeks out not common policies, but a common sense of who the good guys are.

In the South, politicians do that with religion. If there is one difference between Montana and Kentucky, though, it is that Montanans are not so churchy. Where the South has deacons, Montana has ranchers—candidates who embody the ordinary voter’s sense of himself as a classic individualist, someone who is more loyal to his way of life than to either party, more guided by his intuitive values than any political theory.

In short: rubes. Schweitzer’s gaydar schtick is offensive to those of us who follow politics and language closely, because it represents a step backwards in our understanding of gay people. In the time-honored practice of playing to the rubes, however, it’s a step forward.

Schweitzer inappropriately joked about the outgoing House Majority Leader’s sexuality at the worst moment possible. He associated male homosexuality with effeminacy, and he did it using the hackneyed concept of “gaydar,” itself a way for straight people to express their homophobia while pretending to be supportive. But in the 2016 election, the choice would not be between thinking like that and thinking the way we do. The choice would be between Schweitzer’s brand of dopey, chauvinistic tolerance and the Republican Party.

The hardcore homophobes and the libertine VICE readers have already staked out their positions. It’s the dazed, flabby middle that could go either way. Those are the people Schweitzer is trying to bring with him, and he intends to lead them from the middle.

The former governor of Montana said a dumb thing to the National Journal, but he may have said something useful to a broader, less engaged swath of the American people. On Wednesday, he sent the same message he’s been sending his whole career: I’m just like you, and we could both be a little better.

Dan Brooks lives in a rocket-powered supertruck in America, and writes about politics, culture and lying at his blog, Combat! Follow him on Twitter.

Patrick Kennedy saying something while using his hands to make a point at a Senate hearing in November 2013. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“This is just the beginning,” former congressman Patrick Kennedy said, voice heavy with concern and nasally New England vowels. “Is this the kind of country we want?”

Kennedy was pointing to a picture of a jar of Nugtella, a weed-laced hazelnut spread that High Times has described as “mind-bending happiness.”

“Yes,” I thought, imagining Nugtella on waffles. “Sweet Jesus, yes.”

The majority of the rest of the audience probably did not agree with my vision of America.

In a congressional briefing Thursday sponsored by the Friends of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Kennedy and a pair of scientists briefed a standing-room crowd on recent social trends in Colorado, where citizens voted to legalize weed.

“My biggest worry is commercialization,” Kennedy said as he flipped through slides on his Powerpoint presentation that showed pot advertisements in Denver newspapers for such pot strains “grape ape.” “It’s all about the marketing. Who are they ultimately going to be after? Kids.”

Kennedy’s question, of whether this is the country we want, echoed comments by other politicians this year as support for legalization has continued to grow.

"If there's advertising and legitimacy, how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?" Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown said on Meet the Press in January. "The world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together."

“See if you want to live in a major city in Colorado where there’s head shops popping up on every corner and people flying into your airport just to come and get high,” Republican New Jersey Gov. Christie said on a local radio show in April. “To me, it’s just not the quality of life we want to have here in the state of New Jersey, and there’s no tax revenue that’s worth that.”

Decline and decadence—is the USA that appeared in Mitt Romney campaign ads possible if we’re all smoking trees?

Since leaving Congress, Kennedy co-founded Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM). The group bills itself as “a coalition of professionals working for balanced, sensible policies that aim to reduce marijuana use.”

Kennedy was joined by William Compton, the deputy director of NIDA, and Robert Booth, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado.

Rep. John Fleming (R., La.) introduced the event. Fleming, who is also a doctor, is one of the more vocal opponents of legalization in the House. “My concern today is, are we making bad laws to, in fact, respond to mythology?” Fleming told the crowd. “We're assuming things that really aren't true.”

Part of the main contention of SAM, NIDA, and legislators like Fleming is that the public debate over weed legalization is light on science. The presenters alluded often to “the facts,” clinging to the phrase like a talisman.

Fleming used his time to highlight seven “marijuana myths,” such as the idea that weed in non-addictive or medicinal.

“Folks, I’m a physician,” Fleming said. “I can tell you with the possible exception of people who have terminal illnesses and who might be in extreme pain, there is no medicinal value to marijuana. I looked at the data. I’ve talked to the organizations.”

Fleming went on to try and dispel other “myths” such as “this whole notion of prisons filled with marijuana users who’ve broken no other law.”

“I talk to law enforcement all the time, and they reassure me that there are people who are marijuana users who, that may be part of their arrest records, but they’re behind bars for other reasons.”

What is apparent listening to speakers like Kennedy and Fleming is that the recent trends in public support for marijuana decriminalization and legalization have put them on their heels.

And at this point, the majority of the American public does not believe smoking a joint will lead you to become a heroin addict, shoot your friend in the face, or provide material support to al Qaeda. You might end up listening to Miles Davis with some beatniks, but you probably won't murder your new friends in a fit of reefer madness.

The choom gang suddenly has lobbyists, two states worth of territory, and a former member at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Facing these problems, Kennedy, Christie, Jerry Brown, et al, have taken a more society-wide tack in their arguments.

For example, Compton cited two New Zealand studies that showed long-term marijuana users had lower IQs over time and worse social outcomes than their peers.

After Compton, professor Robert Booth shared the results of a long-term, longitudinal study on registered medical marijuana users in Colorado, conducted before full legalization went into effect.

Compton and Booth’s presentations were heavy on data points, more measured in tone, and as a result much more effective than Fleming’s and Kennedy’s.

“I have no financial interests or conflicts,” Booth began. “However, in the spirit of transparency, I will tell you I went to the University of California at Berkeley in the 60s.”

Among Booth’s more interesting data points: 86 percent of registered users in Colorado reported driving while high, and 95 percent reported having sex while high.

Meanwhile, Booth said alcohol and cigarette use has been trending down among 12^th graders nationally over the past decade, but marijuana use began trending up around 2006. In Colorado, those numbers are above the national average, and suspensions and expulsions at high schools for drugs are at an all-time high.

These are issues that will no doubt have to be grappled with, but Kennedy and crew have to make their argument in the face of a drug war that costs an estimated $13.7 billion a year, and where drug offenders make up half of the federal prison population.

Kennedy doesn’t deny the gross problems with the current criminal justice system, and it’s hard to disagree with him when he says things like, “We must interrupt the cycle of addiction before people end up in the criminal justice system.”

However, Kennedy said problems like racial disparity and draconian sentencing guidelines are not directly related to weed prohibition.

“We need to address criminal justice and sentencing reform, but a lot of people have used that as an excuse to push legalization,” Kennedy said. “That’s conflating two separate issues.”

Sitting in the audience for the briefing was Howard “Cowboy” Wooldridge, a retired police detective and the co-founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Dressed in a cowboy hat and a big belt buckle, Wooldridge shook his head and muttered under his breath while Fleming and Kennedy spoke.

When the Q&A session began, Wooldridge rose from his seat. “What advantages do you see to prohibition?” Woolridge asked at the end of a long streak of declarative sentences about the ill effects of the drug war.

“If we’re using your approach, we should legalize heroin, crystal meth, and cocaine,” Kennedy replied.

“They’re less dangerous than alcohol,” Woolridge shot back.

The two circled around each other’s arguments for a minute or so before a cease-fire was reached. It’s an old argument most of us have heard hashed out dozens of times in college dorm rooms and high school debates. But in the halls of Congress, no one’s seen a dead horse that didn’t deserve a beating.

After the briefing, I talked to Wooldridge. He’s a familiar face in DC. As his business card declares, he’s the “police voice on Capitol Hill in opposition to drug prohibition.”

“I’m not denying marijuana is a serious drug,” Wooldridge said. “But cops are missing pedophiles and sex traffickers because we’re spending thousands of hours chasing a green plant.”

The thing that must chafe anti-pot groups is most people these days find the guy in the cowboy hat more convincing than a former congressman from America’s biggest political dynasty.

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, nearly 100,000 people flee Pakistan's North Waziristan as the military steps up its anti-Taliban offensive, the Ukrainian government publicizes its efforts to root out Russian spies, hundreds of Albanian police officers raid a pot operation, and SpaceX tests a new feature on a reusable rocket.

All photos of Kate Durbin at her reading by Emily Raw

It’s a rainy Saturday night and the Bushwick, Brooklyn gallery is filled for a reading by LA-based performance artist, writer, and underground style icon Kate Durbin. We’re here for Durbin’s new book, E! Entertainment, a poetic annotation of reality TV shows; it's got a magic-eye cover and pink pages and is sectioned into eight “channels,” experimental chapters with titles like “Lindsay’s Necklace Trial,” “Kim’s Fairytale Wedding,” “Wives Shows,” and “Anna Nicole Show.”

During the performance, Durbin recruits audience members to play the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” a participation tactic that is surprisingly successful given how wallflowery reading attendees tend to be. She reads the Kim Kardashian story in celebration of Kim's recent wedding to Kanye West and ends the evening with a chilling transcript from the Anna Nicole Smith “clown video.” As she reads as Anna, Howard, and the doll Anna mistakes for her child, an assistant paints Durbin in clown makeup.

“I’m happy to sign your books, if you aren’t scared of me,” she says afterward.

Pulling from pop culture is a theme for Durbin, whose previous book of poetry, Ravenous Audience, culled scenes from Catherine Breillat films. Other projects she’s undertaken, like Women as Objects (a Tumblr that collected and reblogged the art and writing of teenage girls) and Gaga Stigmata (a blog that collects academic writing about Lady Gaga), have similarly recycled imagery to internet acclaim.

I spoke to Durbin and discussed how an outfit can say the same thing as a poem and how reality TV serves an ancient and barbaric function in society.

VICE: So I read E! as sort of a reclaiming of “trashy” television with the idea that while reality television is often written off as “lowbrow,” it actually uses techniques of classic literature.
Kate Durbin: Yeah! So on all TV shows there are archetypes and conflicts from classic mythology or Shakespeare comedies and tragedies—yet when this happens on reality TV we tend to denigrate the crises. I conclude that this dismissal is about who is having the crisis.

Yes, and your book centers on the stars of “girl culture” or maybe “queer culture”—Kim Kardashian, Anna Nicole Smith, Lindsay Lohan, the Real Housewives. These female “reality TV” stars seem especially mocked.
Yeah, and watching them, I also started to notice how the shows sort of set us up to mock the stars. There’s sometimes this dark undertone that reminds me of the Roman forum.

We do this scapegoating ritual with celebrities that feels almost ancient, barbaric. We build these people up to destroy them; we love to blame celebrities for the evils of society instead of looking at ourselves. They are these sort of beautiful mirrors that we can look into when we don’t want to look at ourselves.

Yeah, it strikes me that celebrities can become like human sacrifices… Marilyn Monroe is a big example.
And after they are sacrificed we reward them with eternal life. Marilyn Monroe is much more powerful than she ever was when she was alive. It’s so twisted that we do this, and I don’t think it’s even removed from what we do to the environment and the wars that we fight. It’s all tied together.

Reading E! I was thinking about how on reality TV there’s a double narrative. You have the narrative of what’s happening on screen with Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, and then the narrative of what the audience thinks is really happening. I thought your decision in the book to turn Humphries into TV static showed that, as I think the audience sees him as a fake TV-screen husband.
It was an intuitive choice. I kept thinking about that literary idea of the static character, who doesn’t change. I find it interesting that in reality TV the characters don’t change, which doesn’t actually bother me.

There’s a lot of policing of femininity in these shows. The distance in your writing gave this an almost anthropological angle. As though the book was saying: “These are the circumstances of being a woman in the public eye,” which made it feminist.
I was worried people might not think this was a feminist project because there’s no authorial voice coming in and saying, “Oh these shows are terrible,” but I think the best works of art, including feminist art, are not didactic. I had to create something that could maybe be interpreted both ways in order for it to be potent.

While I find a lot of reality TV disturbing, I’m not totally cynical about the shows. I feel like the women in the shows have real friendships. People always talk about the shallowness of these shows but I’ve always felt that maybe I’m also shallow in certain ways. So what?

Heidi Montag blurbed the book and I know you talked to Spencer and Heidi about the idea of reality television as art.
Heidi and Spencer are interesting. They've done conceptual projects within reality television. They worked with University of California while on Big Brother, and pretended that Spencer lost his phone and that it was then found by a poet who was tweeting poetry and weird stuff from England. In reality it was an electronic literature project, collaborating with U of C.

You know, it really isn’t just a double narrative, sometimes there’s triple or even quadruple narrative on reality TV. But really that’s how we all live now with the wealth of information and technology that surrounds us at all times. Reality TV is very much a medium of this moment, so not to think of it as artistic, or to have the potential for art, just seems blind.

Ann Hirsch, who does performance art by going on reality shows, is a great example of someone that realizes this potential for art. There’s also Josh Harris, who did We Live in Public, which was like pre–Real World underground bunker in New York City full of artists that he filmed invasively 24/7 for an internet television station. That was really the beginning of reality TV, and the fact that this started in the art world is pretty cool.

And now you have Kim getting married on TV, her mom getting a facelift on TV, her sister literally pulling a child from her womb. It all aligns with this idea from the art world of “life as a performance.”
Definitely, it’s the same thing… just more makeup.

I’m curious if this is part of your practice as a writer and artist. Seeing one’s whole existence as a body of work with certain standards…
I do. For this project, I was watching reality TV like any person does and it turned into an artistic practice. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures and I don’t believe in having parts of my life that I don’t encounter fully. I am always trying to integrate the various aspects of my life together for art.

Why should I feel guilty for watching reality TV and why should any part of my life, even the most mundane part of it, such as watching TV, not become a work of art?

You are also such an underground style icon. Do you feel your style says the same thing that your poems or performances do?
Absolutely. I went to Christian schools with strict dress codes growing up, so I always knew fashion was political. I’ve always tried to literally embody ideas that are important to me. People don’t realize that they can do that, embody your work in this medium, and I just wish more people did because it would just be so interesting to encounter people in that way all of the time.

My next project is going to be about what men desire and so I’m going to have to come up with a new way of dressing that is more enticing; my style is very whimsical and strange, so I’m not sure yet how I will marry the two.

I watched “Kim’s Fairytale Wedding” after reading your story and I’m left still questioning all the narratives. They made money from the wedding? How real was the relationship?
What I hope people will take away from reading my book is how much we do these things too. How often do we go to weddings and say, “OK, why are these people getting married?” It can be romantic, of course, but marriage has always been a double narrative. It’s about power, assets, money. Maybe I’m a cynical divorce-type person but I loved that it was called “Kim’s Fairytale Wedding” and it was such a disaster. They were fighting, and yet it was still beautiful in moments and then it didn’t last. I just thought, That’s life.

One of the things we are always asking about reality TV is, “Is this fake or real?” We can’t decide and one of the reasons is because life is complicated. With Kim and Kanye, it’s been a great business merger for them but what’s wrong with that? They do seem to love each other, and finally she’s found someone who is smart enough for her.

So in your work is this theme of mirroring or recycling, taking other pieces of media and reusing them, it feels like a theme or device of the age.
For me to be an artist in this moment it feels right to me to work this way rather than create something new. It definitely feels like we have so much already. 

Rachel Rabbit White is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Playboy, The New York Observer, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Jezebel, Cosmopolitan, and more. 

Photos by the author

Think about your favorite pair of leather boots. Do you love them? Like, REALLY love them? Love them to the point where you’re sexually obsessed with them, and feel the need to connect with a community of people who love to fuck while wearing leather?

This, and many other things, is what leather means to the queers and heteros who attended the 28th Annual International Ms. Leather and International Ms. Bootblack Contest (IMsL/IMsbb) at the end of April.

For four days, nearly 600 people took over the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, about 50 miles south of San Francisco. The weekend served as a chance for pervs from around the globe to gather and get laid in meticulously designed temporary dungeons, cramped hotel rooms, and public bathrooms.

According to rumors I read online, the event moved from San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood to San Jose this year partially because the raunchy sex bothered San Francisco’s squares. For years, IMsL/IMsbb took place in SOMA—which after Stonewall was known for being filled with bars where you could receive a mouthful of piss and a fist in your ass—but the neighborhood has become so gentrified it’s now unrecognizable.

Although I have been involved in various kinky communities for nearly ten years, I had never attended IMsL/IMsbb before. Based on past participants' stories, I imagined the event was like a beauty pageant where contestants wore fetish gear instead of sequin-covered gowns. In April, I decided to throw my bar vest and reporter cap in a suitcase and see what a leather weekend was really like. 

Like a doughnut, the Doubletree lobby circles around an enormous pool courtyard, so to get from my bedroom suite to the dungeon, bootblack stand, ballrooms, classrooms, and café, I had to past the civilians in the lobby. IMsL/IMsbb didn’t book the entire hotel, so I saw several vacationing families eating sushi next to women in full-body, latex catsuits. I also walked past people who crawled on the ground and wore collars and special hoods to make them look like dogs. 

The official contest took place Saturday night, and the schedule for the rest of the weekend was packed. The Alameda County Leather Corp hosted a cigar party with human ashtrays. Vendors turned one ballroom into a kinky shopping mall, where they sold everything from handmade chain mail to enormous dildos. Workshops with names like “Advanced cock confidence” included explicit live demos. During Bawdy storytelling, which is like an X-rated version of The Moth, I heard the tale of a man sticking a thermometer in his urethra in front of noted science fiction legend Sam Delaney.

The bootblack salon consisted of three chairs with metal stirrups on raised wooden platforms. Sitting for a kinky bootblack was like receiving a shoeshine in Grand Central Station, except it was acceptable for me to sexually objectify my bootblack Allison. (She gave me a view of her magnificent cleavage while she rubbed leather up and down my calf like a masseuse.) After the shoeshine, my boots looked brand new and I felt “shiny on the inside,” as International Ms. Bootblack 2011 described the feeling. 

On Saturday afternoon, I took a walk through the 24-hour dungeon, which was actually a hotel ballroom furnished with donated furniture. Spanking benches, wooden ladders, and a gynecological table stood next to sterile prep surfaces. Curtains distinguished a few men’s sections and women’s sections, but anyone could play in most of the dungeon.

The event encouraged voyeurs to watch as long as we behaved respectably. On Saturday, I saw a young woman wearing gym shorts hold an older man in a chokehold on a wrestling mat.  Elsewhere in the room, someone bent over a chair to receive welt-raising punishment from a long rattan cane, and an elderly woman sat in a chair while another woman performed fellatio on her cherry red silicon strap-on cock. It was 2 PM, and the room was relatively quiet compared to the previous evening, when people filled the room with the sounds of 90s sex music, screams, orgasmic moans, and the thwap, thwap, thwap of different objects colliding with flesh. As I eavesdropped on kinky sex enthusiasts setting up “dates” and “scenes,” I thought their negotiations sounded similar to comic nerds' conversations about their favorite characters.

At Saturday night’s contest, a panel of judges chose the people to represent the titles of International Ms. Leather and International Ms. Bootblack for the following year. Anyone from any gender could compete as long as they identified with the women’s leather community.

This year’s International Ms. Leather, Patty, won for her achievements in community service and education (it’s like a Rotary Club community service award, except the community service involves pledges to “cruise, fist, and fuck” across the globe), and International Ms. Bootblack, Dara, earned his title because he possessed the best technical skills to take care of his kinky gear. 

During the most entertaining part of the contest, a talent show called the Fantasy Scenes, contestants created a performance illustrating their unique desires and personalities. Narine sucked Rock em Sock em robots' lightsaber-like cocks; SubMissAnn performed human-pony choreography; and Patty starred in an elaborate rock star scene involving a human drum kit.

No matter how much you really know about kinky sex, leather is probably one of the first things that comes to your mind. Tom of Finland-style daddies in caps and chaps. Rihanna or Madonna in dominatrix drag. These archetypes and many more wandered around the Doubletree during IMsL/IMsbb. Some opted for rubber, or vinyl, while others wore ordinary dykey jeans and flannels.

Despite the different kinds of outfits, there was a unified passion for what leather clothing represents. For the people who congregate around leather events, that material is symbolic of their proud deviancy. 

After sitting for a sexy bootblack, reeking of the smoky smell of Huberd’s shoe grease, and watching the contest, I realized I would never look at my leather boots the same way again.

Follow Tina Horn on Twitter. 

Photo courtesy of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

When I was 25, I moved to Berlin with a beat-up copy of Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories tucked in my bag. Like many hobosexuals and fagabonds before me, I considered the book a lodestone, a guide to transmuting aimless searching and polymorphous desire into meaningful experiences. So when I heard that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux was releasing The Animals, a collection of the letters of Isherwood and his longtime lover, artist Don Bachardy, I knew I had to read it.

Bachardy met Isherwood when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48 (a year older than Bachardy’s own father). Despite the age difference, the couple spent the next 33 years together. Though love affairs and artistic exploits frequently sent them ricocheting around the world, they maintained a deep and unbreakable connection. They expressed this affection (and frustration) through “the Animals,” personae the two adopted in their letters. Bachardy acted as Kitty and Isherwood called himself Dobbin, Kitty's faithful horse.

Bachardy, now 80, still lives in the house the couple shared in Santa Monica. Shaking with faggoty fan boy excitement, I called Bachardy to discuss The Animals and what it's like dating a famous old man who was older than his dad.

VICE: How did your letters become a book?
Don Bachardy: It was my idea. I'd saved all of Chris's letters, and after his death, I found that he’d saved all of mine. Reading through them just made me think the material was too good not to share it with others. There's almost nothing, no letter in the book, that is missing, except one, though I can't remember now where in the sequence it is.

Did you ever discuss publishing something like this with Chris before he died?
No, no, no. And the animals at the time would have been horrified at the suggestion that they would ever be revealed and their letters [would be] published in a book. They would have been quite shocked by such an idea.

What changed your thinking?
I came across both sets of letters and it was very strange reading them again, but interesting too. There were even some laughs in the material, our attempts to entertain each other. There were things I would have liked to have changed—would have changed if I could—but then it's always a mistake to tamper with any mementos of the past.

How did you meet Isherwood? Had you read his books?
I'd seen a production of I Am a Camera [the play adaptation of The Berlin Stories which was later turned into the musical Cabaret]. It was the road company, here in LA, at the Biltmore Theater downtown. I'd actually already met Chris on the beach with my brother on summer weekends—he was one of the many people my brother introduced me to—but it wasn't until February of 1953 that Chris and I started seeing a lot of each other. It hadn't occurred to me that the “Herr Issy-voo” of I Am a Camera was actually the man I was getting to know. He had to tell me himself, and of course, I remembered the play, and eventually I got to meet Julie Harris [who played Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera] because he and Julie had become good friends because of the play.

How did people react to the age difference between the two of you when you started your relationship?
They freaked out about it at the time, all those years ago, because Chris wasn't in the closet. He couldn't very well pretend to be anything but queer. And everybody knew this very young looking friend he was going around with—they knew he wasn't his son. It was considered quite shocking by people who guessed this relationship with a 30-year age difference. That was not at all usual in those days, and certainly not at all usual that neither party was hiding. No beards required! We just brazened it out. Also, we were both artists, so that made it easier. If we had nine-to-five jobs in a clerk's office, it would have been much tougher because different standards apply. 

How was your life as an artist affected by dating Isherwood?
I would never have become an artist except for Isherwood. It was he who constantly urged me to consider being an artist. When we met I showed him drawings that I was doing as an 18-year-old. They were copied from magazine pictures, mostly of movie actors. I did them freehand. Chris saw that I had a real flair for drawing and kept after me: “Why don't you go to art school?”

Well, it took me three years before I dared to make the jump. I was frightened of failing, but his continual support and interest in the work I was doing in art school, once I got started, was invaluable to me. I could never believe in myself as an artist without his support at the time. That was essential to me.

Was it difficult to get people to take you seriously as first?
Yes, because I looked so young and presentable, and most of Chris's friends were around his age or older, so it wasn't so easy for me to be taken seriously by anybody—especially since I hadn't established myself yet as an artist. That's why being an artist was so important! I had to have an identity of my own that was more than just Chris's boyfriend.

Did the age difference concern either of you?
No. I naturally gravitated to people older than I was. It was just instinctive. I knew I could learn so much more from them, and for some reason or another, I had few friends my own age in my school years. So I was ripe to meet an older distinguished man who could give me very, very good advice, which Chris always did.

My favorite paintings you’ve done are the portraits you did of Chris in the last six months of his life.
I was doing close-ups, these close-ups of what Chris was going through at the time. He was lying in bed, and I was hovering over him, just a few feet away. I don't know of any other artist who has ever done close-up drawings of someone dying day after day, week after week. It seemed so appropriate to me because Chris had urged me to be an artist. And here I was with a model who I knew very well, who I'd drawn and painted through our 33 years together. And here he was dying, and it was a way of being with him intensely for much more of the day because I was drawing him. I was with him and looking at him in a way that I only looked at somebody when [I was] drawing or painting that person, so I could be with him intimately. It felt like dying was something he and I were doing together.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter. 

Over the past year, Brazil's public school teachers have played a major role in the protests surrounding the World Cup. They have demanded pay increases, better working conditions, and improvements to Brazil's lagging social services. Teachers also have been going on periodic strikes.

For the past month, they have been trying to meet with Rio's governor to voice their demands, but the governor has ignored their requests. In VICE's third dispatch from the World Cup, we go to the public school teachers' demonstration in downtown Rio, where they demand a 20 percent pay increase and continue to try to make the governor hear their voices. 

Although polling day passed smoothly in Kabul, the Taliban are still keen to show their power to strike within the capital. Early Saturday morning, a suicide bomber struck the convoy of Masoom Stanikzai, the head of Afghanistan's High Peace Council, who is responsible for peace negotiations with the Taliban.

Stanikzai survived, but the attacker and a bystander outside of Kabul's Dawat University were killed, and three were injured. VICE News was the only news crew allowed through the police line to witness the aftermath.

GIFs by Daniel Stuckey

A British teen decided to yank a fire alarm at a rave, pulling off most of his pinkie in the process. The teen didn't rush to the hospital, though—he kept dancing. “I didn’t want to be the sore thumb sticking out—or the sore pinkie—so I was like, ‘Fuck it; let's skank on and enjoy it,’” he said.

Twitter plays GIFs now, but still won't allow users to select GIFs as their avatars. I guess I won't be choosing a GIF of me fucking a robot as my avatar anytime soon. 

Hillary Clinton handed a copy of her book, Hard Choices, to a Republican National Committee intern who was dressed as a squirrel. This made no sense, but making no sense is very on brand for Clinton, whose gay lovin', liberal husband supported DOMA and Don't Ask, Don't Tell, deregulated Wall Street, and allowed Arkansas to execute a mentally challenged man. Keep reppin' the family brand, Hill! 

Scientists have yet to invent antibiotics that don't make you shit your brains out, but they have created a process that allows art historians to look deep into old paintings. Recently, this technology allowed historians to uncover a picture of a cute man wearing a bow tie beneath Picasso's “The Blue Room.”

Proving mommy bloggers are the biggest sociopaths on earth after poets and theater kids, a mommy blogger poisoned her son with salt. 

Idiots invested $1 million in a new app called YO that allows you to say, “YO,” to your friends. This news pissed off tech bloggers, who make pennies while tech geeks make millions creating new ways to say hi to their friends. Of course, the REAL thing to be pissed about here is that YO is a ripoff of Facebook pokes. 

Authorities apprehended a man who danced around a burning pickup truck that he allegedly lit on fire in Northern California, blessing the world with this glorious picture.

A drone took a picture of a naked dude, however, for long-distance dick pics, dick pic connoisseurs still believe telephoto lenses are the way to go.

Eleven years after the start of the Iraq War, Sunnis and Shiites are once again fighting in Iraq. This week, Dick Cheney decided to open his mouth and blame the mess on Obama, even though ruining countries is what Cheney does best. 

This week commemorates the two year anniversary of Julian Assange's decision to hide in Ecuador’s London embassy. Two years later, the notorious creep (and defender of public transparency) is still trolling Obama hard:  “You must surely, now, start to reflect on what your legacy will be,” he said. “It must be at odds with a former professor of constitutional law to have a legacy that not only involves the construction of extrajudicial kill lists of individuals—including American citizens—but also a legacy of being the president who conducted more Espionage Act investigations against journalists and their sources than all previous presidents combined.” Ouch. Nice burn, Assange!

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter. 

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Although most Americans believe water scarcity only occurs in countries where Angelina Jolie campaigns for peace, two of the world’s most overexerted rivers are right here in the United States. According to the World Resource Institute, both the Colorado and Rio Grande suffer from extremely high stress, meaning that we annually withdraw over 80 percent of each river’s renewable water supply, and at least a third of the US exhibits medium to high water stress or higher.

Take Lake Mead. Located outside Las Vegas, the lake has experienced an alarming decline in elevation. The US Bureau of Reclamation commissioned the Hoover Dam in 1931 to protect the water needs of the area, but according to the Las Vegas Sun, experts predict that Lake Mead could run dry by 2050, with declining power generation possibly occurring in as little as a year. According to the Sun, the Colorado River “provides drinking water for 36 million Americans, supplies irrigation for 15 percent of the nation’s crops, and supports a $26 billion recreation economy that employs 250,000 people." In other words, if Lake Mead dries out, we’re fucked.

What should we do to fix this and other water problems? Professor Glen MacDonald, a UCLA Distinguished Professor, a UC Presidential Chair and the Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, believes he has the answers. I emailed him to discuss America’s water problem, the issues in the South West, and what the government can do to save our water supply.

VICE: Where do you think our biggest threat lies in terms of water scarcity?
Professor Glen MacDonald: In the United States we are so used to turning on the taps and getting clean water we forget this is not the way it is in many parts of the world, or that in a state like California we need about 80 percent of the water we apply to grow the food we eat. We urbanites forget about the huge needs of water for agriculture and the problems that drought can cause for farmers and ranchers, even in a rich country like the United States.

Which industries, in your opinion, could make changes that would produce the biggest drop in global water consumption and river stress?
The biggest use of water is agriculture. However, in California many farmers are using water pretty well relative to the crops they grow. Getting efficiencies in irrigation while protecting crop yield is getting increasingly difficult as the easy fixes have already been applied in many cases. Perhaps we need a movement by consumers to favor water-wise food choices and crops. [This will] help incentivize the growing of crops which are efficient in terms of water per-yield, provide healthy and diverse food choices, and allow farmers to make a living. This is an important area with exciting possibilities.

What do you think about population control as a part of the solution to the global water crisis?
I believe that if we work together we can supply good clean water to meet projected population growth in this century. As economic status, educational status and freedom increases population growth rates tend to decline naturally. I think we should worry about getting good clean water to people who lack it and not focus on global population head counting.  

What about reclaimed water?
Reclaimed water is part of the solution in arid cities. It can be grey water used for irrigation or it can be treated waste water placed directly back into the water system or used to replenish groundwater and reservoir supplies first.  

What is the future of Southwestern American cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles?
I believe that in the Southwest we may see changes in our urban landscaping as we become even more water wise. Remember that 50 to 70 percent of urban water is typically used for landscaping. By rethinking our gardens and outdoor spaces we can conserve a lot! I think in any case that urban water supplies will be protected. Cities in the Southwest will not dry up and disappear, but the cost could be higher water rates for consumers, and less water for agriculture.

What should the government do to protect our water?
The State needs to pass a comprehensive water bond that has no pork and provides improved water infrastructure and water management—including ground water management. Problems with our groundwater supplies are a looming problem that we need to get a handle on.

What countries provide good examples of responsible water conservation that the U.S. can follow?
I think Australia has a broad number of technologies and strategies that work to save water. [Since] their climate is similar to ours, it provides a good test bed for us to look at.

What can the average citizen can implement to make a dent in water consumption? 
Most people have installed low flow toilets and showers—if not, do it now! Tackle how much you water your outside plants. Most people over water their gardens. If you can get rid of lawn and replace it with beautiful low-water demanding plants by all means do it now!  We have zero lawn at our new house and I am seeing more and more people replacing lawns and boring high water consumption gardens with beautiful water wise landscaping.

It’s easy to write a novel: Just keep typing until you have something that is very long and mostly lies. But getting that mess published is another beast entirely—unless you are famous, in which case your every utterance is assumed to be worth printing. As a result, there are a ton of embarrassing books with famous names attached to them. We sampled a few to see whether they were really that bad and found that yes, they were.
 

THE JUSTICE RIDERS
Chuck Norris, Ken Abraham, Aaron Norris, and Tim Grayem
B&H Fiction, 2006

Who knew that Walker, Texas Ranger, would be the best ridiculous-name-giver since Stan Lee? If you want to read about “Ezra Justice” as he teams up with English sharpshooter “Reginald Bonesteel” to fight “Slate Mordecai” and teach the Wild West about the Bible, The Justice Riders is the grocery-store paperback for you! The book wraps up with Justice sharing the gospel with Mordecai, then shooting him dead after the bad guy rejects Jesus—which is sort of Norris’s worldview in a nutshell.

MIKE PEARL

PARADISE ALLEY
Sylvester Stallone
Putnam, 1977

The plot of Paradise Alley is a predictable yawn about three brothers in 1940s Hell’s Kitchen who get involved in underground wrestling in search of a quick buck and learn heartwarming lessons, but Stallone’s prose makes what could have been a merely mediocre novel memorably awful. He was likely aiming for a Dashiell Hammett–esque hard-boiled style but winds up sounding both simplistic and overly fond of the stalest stereotypes of New York City tenement life. When your fight scenes include lines like “Patty McLade dropped to the floor like a whore’s nightgown,” it’s time to go back to writing movies that are mostly inspirational jogging scenes and anguished grunts.

HARRY CHEADLE

VOODOO CHILD
Nicolas and Weston Cage
Virgin Comics, 2007

One time, Nic Cage and his black-metal crooner son, Weston, came up with an idea for a comic book about the child of a slave who was killed in the 1860s and gets resurrected by black magic to clean up the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans. Then they got an artist and a writer to make their dreams into reality, because the Cages are not like you or me. This book is like if Spawn impregnated the Candyman with his demon seed on the set of Treme while a cuckolded Todd McFarlane masturbated in a corner. In other words, it’s fantastic.

DAVE SCHILLING

MODELLAND
Tyra Banks
Random House, 2011

Modelland is the story of Tookie De La Crème, a 15-year-old girl from the land of Metopia. Everyone considers her a “Forgetta-girl,” but on the Day of Discovery, the annual event where girls catwalk down Metopia’s main street, a scout invites De La Crème to Modelland, a mysterious place on a mountaintop where every year seven girls become “Intoxibellas” (a.k.a. supermodels). But before she can achieve Intoxibelladom, Tookie must survive the “Catwalk Corridor” and “Thigh-High Boot Camp.” There’s a positive message about inner beauty yada yada yada in here, but it’s buried under 5,000 tons of gibberish that Tyra Banks thought would sound cool to 12-year-old girls. PS: I did not finish the book because come on.

MITCHELL SUNDERLAND

JUNIOR
Macaulay Culkin
Miramax, 2006

So it turns out that when a child megastar writes a semi-fictional memoir-slash-sketchbook, what comes out is kinda nuts. Junior is loaded with non sequiturs, drawings, lists, and daddy issues. At one point, Culkin writes, “Dear Dad, Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck…” Reviewing this would be like reviewing a roomful of headless dolls.

BOBBY VITERI

A LIFETIME OF LOVE: POEMS ON THE PASSAGES OF LIFE
Leonard Nimoy
Blue Mountain Arts, 2002

These poems (nauseatingly printed on pastel-colored paper) are all about the most amorphous form of love possible—it’s a love free of sex, fear, envy, or passion, which makes it a love that’s incredibly boring to read about. Nimoy employs nature imagery you might find on the back of a box of organic quinoa (he’s big on sunrises, trees, breezes, and gardens) and generally writes like a man who has never read poetry or gotten a boner. This book is bad.

WILBERT L. COOPER