Illustrations by Molly Crabapple

“ISIS are good fighters, but we fucked them,” Yusuf Halap said in fluent English.

Journalist Patrick Hilsman and I were sitting with Yusuf and two other young media activists in the Bab al-Salam camp for internally displaced Syrians, a hundred yards south of the Turkish border. Bab al-Salam houses 20,000 refugees, mostly women and children. Under dusty tarps, these refugees live in horrid conditions. Barefoot kids play next to rivers of sewage. Preventable diseases flourish. The Turkish government gives out two meals a day, but the United Nations High Council on Refugees does nothing beyond providing some of the tarps. The Assad government has forbidden them from giving aid to opposition areas.

The Saudis and the government of Qatar are showier, flaunting their generosity with branded tents. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Gift to Humanity,” one read. The Gulf states fund fighters—their charity is marketing.

In this wasteland, young people like Yusuf are trying to cobble together a future. Before the war, Yusuf was a year into an engineering degree. When the revolution hit, his father, a higher up in the Syrian army, defected. I asked Yusuf why he joined the revolution. “They were killing women, killing children,” he said.

Yusuf works under the banner of the Islamic Front, an alliance of more-or-less religious fighting groups. The Islamic Front has successfully pushed ISIS out of much of northern Syria, including Azaz, where the Bab al-Salam camp is located. However, groups affiliated with the alliance have been implicated in their own war crimes, including murders of POWs and the kidnapping of veteran activist Razan Zeitouna.

Yusuf is 24, short and skinny with a skeptical smirk. He first picked up a gun to fight ISIS in Aleppo, where he killed two of their fighters—a Yemeni and a Tunisian, he told me, with a laugh.

When Patrick and I crossed into Syria from Turkey, we saw civilization begin to fray. First, there were the piles of garbage. Then young people missing limbs. Then, a line of cars, five days long, of families going into Turkey. Police checked them for car bombs. Some cars sat abandoned in line.

Trucks, perhaps smuggling weapons, snaked into Syria.

There were green fields on either side of the highway. Their flowers hid landmines. A group of kids, one perhaps eight, walked through the minefield. They were trying to sneak back to Syria, without papers, but Turkish soldiers goaded them back towards safety.

Patrick and I crossed into Syria easily. While Turks have so far maintained an open border policy to Syrians with papers, the same cannot be said for the rest of the world. Our US passports guaranteed freedom of movement. For Syrians, theirs chain them to a quadrangle of four countries, at the whims of politicians who seldom view them as human.

If they don't have papers—or if their papers expire—all the worse. Its not like they can renew them at a regime embassy. A fake Syrian passport goes for $2,000, up from $500 a few years ago. No passport means you're stuck.

In Reyhanli, in Turkey's south, I met a young artist whose family had paid traffickers to smuggle them on a boat to Sweden, the only European country to offer asylum. She was stranded in Gaziantep, another Turkish city close to the Syrian border. Her family was lucky. Traffickers' boats are less than seaworthy. The waters at Lampedusa are rich with Syrian (and Somali, and Palestinian) corpses.

The artist's family had gotten out. Those at Bab al-Salam are still inside.

As we walked through the camp, bored kids swarmed us, giving us high fives or making peace signs for Patrick's camera. “They're like flies,” Mohammed, a media activist and former English literature student, joked. He smiled with affection; the children are adorable. But what future will they grow into? One girl, who was 11, but whose growth was stunted by malnutrition, showed me a wart on her hand. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked. “Turkish” she answered.

Everyone in this camp is Sunni. I asked about the Kurds. “They've gone to their people in the mountains.” Alawites? The camp's residents laughed uncomfortably. No. None here. None at all.

The Syrian revolution did not start out sectarian. The Syrian war became so.

The residents of Bab al-Salam are caught between Assad, ISIS, and the random violence of the war. Outside the camp, countless deaths are caused by men traumatized from three years of loss, firing surface-to-surface missiles into opposing neighborhoods. Some stranger gets blown up, and the shooter feels like a man. Trauma breeds trauma. Everyone here has seen unimaginable things.

Asma was four years old when she got hit by a barrel bomb. Her face is a mottle of scars. It took eight months after the attack for face to heal enough for her to play. The regime loves to drop barrel bombs on civilian neighborhoods. The bombs are called indiscriminate though the logic of collective punishment is anything but. Anyone who opposes the regime is a terrorist, says Assad, in an echo of American rhetoric. Those who live among those opposing the regime are also terrorists. It’s terrorists all the way down

A middle-aged woman pointed to her arm, where she was shot by a sniper while running errands. “Who did it?” I asked. “Bashar,” she said over and over.

Walid, who said he was 11 but looked seven, was a keen math student in Homs. He doesn't go to school any more. His father is dead, blown up in an ISIS car bomb. They've carried out two suicide attacks against the camp. ISIS has been murdering Syrians with impunity for nearly a year, bragging about their war crimes on Twitter. Now they’ve invaded Mosul in Iraq and the world cares, at least for this week.

Four years ago these refugees had homes and jobs. Now women are lining up to hold their empty food bowls out for chicken over rice. Kids are shoving around a massive pot laid out in the dust, scooping the rice directly into their mouths. There's never enough.

When people do not wish to take sides in the Syrian war, they suggest aid. They do not realize aid itself is a weapon. Assad bans aid organizations in opposition areas of the country, viewing it as an attack. The UN has meekly protested, but other Western organizations operate covertly anyway.

The best aid comes from the Muslim and Syrian diaspora communities from around the world. Though they are risking death inside, or the stamp of “terrorist” at home, these NGOs keep trying. I see bros from New Jersey, or nice midwestern ladies who know each other from mosque, going into the world's most brutal warzone with blankets, formula, or food baskets, and I feel ashamed for every white journalist who made such a big deal that they spent a day inside. Myself included.

A Syrian diaspora organization that does not want to be named has set up two children's tents in Bab al-Salam. The tents are cheerful and have murals painted on their inside walls. In one, kids did yoga with a young Syrian guy leading them through crow and lotus poses. Then he had them draw. I drew with them. One boy, 14, and a born performer, did impressions in a high Bugs Bunny voice.

The tents were the one respite from the dust and sun and shit. If the revolution still exists it is in these young organizers, refugees who have seen the end of their world, working together to rebuild, even in the form of a child's smile.

Outside the camp lies the city of Azaz. ISIS had just been kicked out. The residents painted over their murals in candy colors, writing the Koranic verse “There is no compulsion in religion.” Assad's bombs have been more persistent. A missile hit Azaz the day before we visited. We drove out to the bombsite. An entire block was gone, the rubble like crushed Styrofoam, the cars melted. A middle-aged man dug in the dust.

We asked if Patrick could photograph the bombsite, but the man put his hands up in the universal symbol of Back Off. The strike had killed two of his kids. What were we thinking, to come here and make a story off of their blood?

On the way out of Azaz, our car broke down. This is not a city where you want to lose your wheels. Yusuf and Mohammed walked us to Azaz's media office to get what they said were their cameras but were likely their guns. These offices were in a former government building, its grand desk empty (ISIS has kidnapped the media office's commander), with stacks of pamphlets teaching people how to remove someone with a spinal injury from a building that's just been bombed. There are many bombed buildings in Azaz. Walls gone, their rooms gape obscenely. Their floors sag like a ruined cake.

Somewhere, gunshots went off. “A wedding,” Yusuf claimed, without much conviction. Banners read “Neither Assad nor ISIS.”

In Bab al-Salam, as in much of Syria, religious observance has become increasingly rigorous. Too much death does that to people. When we visited, I wore hijab. Men didn't shake my hand. Yet, as Mohammed said to me, “ISIS cares about the stupidest things. Whether you wear jeans. How long your beard is.” Theirs is not a logic of piety, but of control. An internet acquaintance living in Raqqa told me ISIS had raided his cousin's cafe during the World Cup and confiscated his televisions. Football, a Syrian passion, was forbidden. Later, photos surfaced on Twitter of ISIS fighters allegedly enjoying the World Cup on their phones.

Our car broke down again at a checkpoint. We hitched a ride with a hippie-looking fighter in blue camo. He wore a pistol shoved into his belt. The guy who checked us in had a T-shirt reading: “Someone who loves me very much is in Dubai and all I got was this T-shirt.”

Before we left, Yusuf and Mohammed took us up the minaret of Bab al-Salam's mosque. I sat sketching those nylon tarps under which 20,000 people took shelter. The tents stretched endlessly on.

The border closed at 5 PM. Before Patrick and I left, Yusuf had us write our names on Post-It notes, which he gave to the Islamic Front's makeshift customs office. This is a real State, was the silent implication. They also stamped a printed slip of paper in lieu of our passports. “Bab al-Salam, Free Syria”, it read. We walked back across the border.

Two days before we visited Syria I was in Reyhanli, drawing murals at a refugee school as part of the Zeitouna Program, run by the Karam Foundation, another Syrian-American aid initiative. After the school day, us volenteers took a bus to the border.

On the hills of Syria, we could see the Atmeh IDP camp. It was a white smudge containing 25,000 people, run by a tangle of NGOs. Those who live there cannot cross into Turkey.

The anti-aircraft guns on the Turkish side of the border reveal why these people came to Atmeh. They hope that if they huddle close enough to a regional power, Assad will not bomb them, for fear of a stray explosion starting a war. He bombs them anyway.

Borders are gouged by war, contorted by diplomacy. But humans live in the borderlands. In those tents so close to Turkey, families suffer the consequences of geopolitics.

The Syrian volunteers took out their cameras for selfies. Smiling, they posed against the country to which they could not return.

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Photo via WikiMedia Commons.
In a push that sees Canada move one step closer to a state where being constantly watched, catalogued, and data mined is the norm, the Conservative government recently decided to expand its public surveillance policy to include all protests and demonstrations. The Government Operations Centre sent an email to all federal departments that requested information on even the most mundane social movements. The email then leaked to Postmedia news and opposition parties are now crying afoul, calling the plan a clear blow to democratic freedom.

NDP public safety critic Randall Garrison believes the government’s play is a smack in the face of basic democratic rights and freedoms. Though he doesn’t feel we’ve quite moved into a Big Brother state in Canada, he says this issue is proof that the country is undoubtedly heading in that troubling direction under the strong arm of the Harper Conservatives.

“It’s a fundamental disrespect for basic rights of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, to say that they should monitor all the time in case somebody in the future breaks the law. It’s shocking,” he told VICE. “They’ve appeared to take the position now that the government should spy on everyone who protests because there is some possibility in the future that any of us might become violent. That’s a big concern, when the government’s expressing that kind of attitude.”

In addition to gathering presumptive data for unknown purposes, the GOC will also be making use of bureaucrats and public servants to monitor legitimate protests, big or small, peaceful or vigilant, all on the taxpayer dime. From Garrison’s perspective, the most disturbing part of this push is that it is indicative of yet another bullet point on a troubling agenda that has been written over the last eight years.

“I think that’s one of its important and unfortunate impacts is that it makes Canadians very cynical and, in a certain way, almost accepting that the Conservatives are going to do things like this,” he says. “I don’t think pieces by themselves are as disturbing as the pattern. We see it with online data, we see it with the provisions they are trying to put into Bill C-13… to this order that all government departments spy on protestors. We see it in so many areas, and it’s that pattern that’s of most concern to me.”

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, also the party’s public safety critic, has called this a play one would see in a dictatorship. Easter believes his use of hyperbole, if one can even call it that, is not alarmist in the slightest. He is convinced that the government’s move to collect this brand of information is one step closer to creating a closed and fearful society:

“Sometimes you have to over-express to emphasize the danger that’s here, so that’s why the word was used,” he says, explaining his use of the term "dictatorship" to describe the government du jour. “I emphasized the point because this is in fact what you see in some dictatorships around the world and if you look at our history where a government’s spied on its citizens, neighbours spied on each other, people were in fear of each other.”

Blacklisted in the 70s on a count of a radical movement as former president of the National Farmers Union, Easter knows first-hand what it means to be on a government checklist. Shutting down political opposition, using technology to monitor the population, and instilling fear into groups that oppose the powers that be, he says, are draconian tactics being utilized by an insecure government on Parliament Hill willing to go to any length to retain its rule.

“This is all about control. If you look at the way the Harper government has treated charity organizations, for instance, they’ve gone on a concentrated attack on charities and even the status of women… that is, in a great many ways, creating a loss of expression by those who should speak out in Canadian society. Canada should be an open society where demonstrations are a healthy part of your society. And where is that information? That information is collected and gathered and then, what is done with it?”

The question is rife with controversy. Created in 2004 by Public Safety Canada, the Government Operations Centre was initially set up to deal with ongoing or eventual emergencies of national concern and develop plans to deal with human crises like pandemics. In addition, the centre was also used to monitor issues overseas like that of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011. But it seems tentacles have continued to be added to its mandate, and critics say the centre has morphed into something of a spy agency that monitors even tame citizens who may not pose a threat to the governing party.

And, while some of the information being tracked could be of national interest and help authorities to shut down dangerous groups, most of the data collected and stored by the GOC is hogwash. Documents obtained by APTN through an Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) request showed the centre had monitored a prayer ceremony in Edmonton and a “taco fundraiser” that was planned for Barrie’s Native Friendship Centre.

Still, the GOC has of late poked it's neck out into more nefarious affairs. Since the Idle No More movement, the centre has served, as reported by Postmedia news, as an “intelligence clearing house” used to compile data on First Nations protestors. In fact, the GOC prepared a spreadsheet that detailed 32 planned protests as part of a coordinated effort to move against aboriginal demonstrations last year.

The ATIP revelation highlighted the potency of the power the GOC now possesses. As a response to anti-fracking rallies in New Brunswick late last year, the centre had its hand on the dial of a play to push back on protestors, as it held conference calls with DND, CSIS and the RCMP, among other federal departments. What has come clear since that ploy and this most recent play is that the GOC’s role is to serve as an administrative, organizing, surveillance group, under a less somber guise.

As seen when Vancouver police raided the home of anti-pipeline activists in Vancouver, confiscating digital devices under the guise of graffiti charges, the ramifications of the government maintaining a database of this type could be far-reaching. A registry of past and planned demonstrations that can ultimately be used to spy on protestors is being viewed by opposition parties, the mainstream media and Canadian citizens alike as a serious challenge to a free-speaking democracy.

Screenshots from "Get Her Back"

Oh, it’s awkward, that thing where you get famous by telling everyone you’ve got a big dick, and then you end up all alone and reduced to making a concept album about your wife leaving you and your big dick behind, which is what has happened to Robin Thicke. Remember him, the biggest popstar of last year, who sang "Blurred Lines" and put out a video where he spelled out his manhood in inflatable letters and top-heavy girls danced around him to emphasise the sheer power of his genital-related animal magnetism?

The song was huge—it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 straight weeks—and hugely controversial thanks to an video full of nearly naked women and lyrics that seemed to be about pushing a woman to do something she didn’t want to do. Some universities banned it, but most clubs couldn’t get enough of it. I put it on when I DJed at a feminist club night starring Amanda Palmer, because I am a terrible human being who thought it would be funny. (People ran across the dance floor and made me take it off. They were delighted when I played Michael Jackson, though, who was accused of abusing several kids. But I digress.)

And so Thicke became a superstar at a relatively late point in his life—already pushing 40, married with a son and a mortgage and a backlog of soft-porn fantasy checks to cash. He did what anyone who finds himself in that position would do: He blamed the video on his wife, Paula, claiming he only released that version because she liked the toplessness, and then went twerking with Miley Cyrus. Then he got caught fondling a fan, kissing another woman, and all sorts of sleaze until his wife said, You know what, this is getting more embarrassing than the fact you dress like Simon Cowell having a mid-life crisis; maybe the size of your dick is in inverse proportion to the size of your thinking organ—we’re through. So she left him—and now he has vowed to win her back. By making his new record all about his dick.

Alright, so the album is ostensibly about Paula, as we know because it's titled Paula, and the first song is about trying to get her back, as we know because it’s called "Get Her Back." And because it has a just-released video that zooms on his bleeding, crying, tortured face as text messages ping back and forth across the screen between a bickering couple, with one side writing, "I wrote an album about you" and the other side replying, "I don’t care." Other album tracks have titles like "Still Madly Crazy," "Too Little Too Late," and "Love Can Grow Back."

You can't accuse Robin Thicke of being cryptic. But this is not an album about Paula. This is an album about Robin Thicke’s big dick, which now swings in his hands like a lonely metronome in a piano shop at closing time.

I remember once going to see a friend who’d been quite excited about what her boyfriend was planning to do for her birthday. He’d had the word BIRTHDAY written inside his arm in marker all week, so she was optimistic that he might present her with a thoughtful gift. But he stll didn’t manage it. He woke up on the day, realized he hadn’t bought anything, and then there was drama. His drama. “I wouldn’t actually have minded him forgetting again if he’d just got over it and tried to make the day really lovely,” she told me, “but he was so bothered about his failure that he kept bashing around the flat going: ‘Oh GOD why am I SUCH a FUCK-up’ for hours and hours, until I finally managed to convince him it didn’t matter and that I didn’t care. So my birthday still wasn’t really about me at all.”

In the same way, this album is not really about Paula, and this song about getting her back is not about getting her back in any way that makes her happy. Not least because what makes her happy is, presumably, being free of Thicke. The funny thing about it is that it’s a standard pop narrative to go from sexy to contrite, from flesh-baring to sad. It’s like when Christina Aguilera did the "Dirrty" video, with the chains and the oil and the leather, and followed it with "Beautiful," where she was all sweet and virginal again.

Interestingly, circumstance has forced Thicke, who's become something of an Antichrist for feminists, down this established female pop narrative. He’s been forced to apologize for his sexiness. He’s been nudged into the virgin-whore dichotomy by his own wife, which is quite satisfying for us onlookers. Those of us who moaned about him at the start should be happy now, right?

OK, that's sort of a stretch. Intellectual contortions beside, I believe one of the following two theories is true: The first is that his wife is in on all of this, and playing her part in a real-life soap opera. The celebrities who get the most attention these days are the ones living out their breakups and mental meltdowns on social media. Thicke is well aware of that, and so has invited us all into his orchestrated and finely produced collapse.

The other, less fun but probably true theory is that his wife is genuinely sick of him, and he really does want her back, because there’s a very good reason they’ve been together since their teens, which is also why he can’t marry anyone else or even sleep with anyone else. A noble, special, private thing that unites two human beings. And that thing is this: He doesn’t actually have a big dick at all. He has a mousey little todger. A weeny little pipsqueak of a weener. And he has to be with her, because she’s the only one who knows.

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Photo via Wikimedia

Being a girl sucks – according to the media at least. There’s the thigh gap, Miley Cyrus, the hounding, the grooming and the online abuse; I mean, even Germaine Greer claimed recently that in the age of social media, women have it worse than they did in the 1970s.

But are things really that bad? In her new book, Girl Trouble, social historian and professor Carol Dyhouse argues that, although life's always been pretty shitty for girls, it's actually getting better. According to Carol, without looking back at stereotypes and the way things were for women a century ago, it is impossible to understand the scope of the progress achieved by women's liberation movements.

I caught up with Carol to talk about all the things that have made us the drinking, swearing, loose, career-driven women that we are.
 

VICE: Hi Carol, how did you get started with Girl Trouble?
Carol: I’ve had a very long career teaching and researching women’s history and I wanted to bring it all together. History hasn’t been kind to girls; they’ve been underestimated and misrepresented. It’s hard to find out what was happening to them and how they felt about it. There’s always been masses of people all too ready to speak for girls, but it’s harder to get young women speaking for themselves, especially as you go back in time to the late Victorian period or the early half of the 20th century.

So the problem is that the people who were recording history are mostly male?
Definitely. A good example is the British Medical Journal – you’d think this was quite a reputable source and yet what they say is quite shocking. They're so quick to stereotype. In an article published in 1946, just after the war, one psychologist wrote; “They [good-time girls] spend a great deal of time on making up their faces and adorning themselves, although they do not trouble to wash and are sluttish about their undergarments. Their favourite reading matter consists of the weekly journals with the love lives of film stars and they live in a fantasy world of erotic glamour. Frequently, they’re a good deal more intelligent and sophisticated than their parents whom they outwit and despise.” It’s so negative and sexist. What were they so scared about? What I argue in that chapter is that there’s this category of female that was constructed out of male anxiety.

I guess through the book you can rewrite a less gender-biased version of history. How did you go about that?
I had to do a lot of reading between the lines. Quite often, when people got into a strop about what they saw as outrageous or troublemaking behaviour from girl, it was because there was some progress in the way that women were living their lives. So when I came across scandals and misdemeanours around girlhood I would often look into it and find a paradox in that. The more mud was kicked up, the more change was happening.

Do you have a specific example of that?
Well the book starts off by talking about "white slavery" in London at the turn of the 20th century, whereby girls were kidnapped at railway stations and dance halls and forced into prostition. It turned out to be more of a moral panic about fallen women than a real widespread problem, but it brought to light a debate about the sexual and social submission of women at almost exactly the same times as the suffrage movement – just when there was all this panic over whether women should have the vote. You sometimes get moral panics at a time, when things are moving forward in a way that some people find very frightening; when history is making some kind of leap and the fabric of society is changing.

Photo via Wikipedia

I never really liked history at school, so I’ll ask you as an adult: Why's it useful to dredge up the past?
I’m a historian so I believe that you can understand things that are happening in the present by looking at how we got here. It’s useful to know whether things have got better or worse for girls. If you just read the newspaper now, it is easy to get the impression that things are really bad – that girls are plagued by body unhappiness, eating disorders, internet trolls and that they’re braindead and boob-obsessed. I wouldn't for a minute say everything is rosy today for girls, but by looking back, there’s no doubt in my mind that things have got a lot better over the last century.

How exactly have things improved for women, then?
One main thing of course is women over 21 getting the vote in 1928 (in 1918 it was only women over 30 that could vote), which is actually not all that long ago – it’s less than a century. Another thing that has helped improve things is the decline of domestic service; having to wear these horrible outfits and having to behave in a submissive and self-deprecating manner, having your sex-life and leisure time policed. As soon as girls got the opportunity to do anything else, even if it was horrible factory work, they just got the heck out of there.

Then you’ve got education and I do believe that it’s the bedrock which opens up opportunities for self-development. It can’t not be important. A particular turning point came after WWII, when all children in Britain got free access to secondary education. And then of course the availability of contraception is particularly important. It’s hard for people to remember just how bad stuff was before you could control your fertility – the terrible anxiety that you could be pregnant after any sexual encounter. Lots of backstreet abortions went on. 

Photo via.

So you’d disagree with Germaine Greer when she says that things are worse for women now than in the 70s?
I think her point was that because women have made strides in progress, they do well in education and they’ve entered the labour market – that provokes backlash and men get angry. She was talking about how, on the internet, you get hate and loathing, trolling and abuse. This is definitely disturbing. But there are loads of men who sympathise with feminism and lots of men who object to all this hate on the web too. I don’t believe men hate women or discriminate against women more than they used to, I can’t really think that.

I think there’s a widespread conception that, on the internet, porn culture significantly contributes to this misogynistic climate.
Oh, yes you’re probably right. I mean, again, online porn… Maybe we’ve exaggerated the extent to which it’s a woman's problem. Of course it is to some extent, and if young men expect women to behave like the porn stars they watch then obviously there’s a problem, but I think it’s worth thinking that, actually, internet abuse and obsessive porn watching might be more of a man's problem than a woman’s.

There's definitely something in that. It's the same with internet abuse. if I've ever had a guy write something misogynistic about an article I've written, I just think, 'This poor guy sat at home writing sexist shit to strangers – what is wrong with our culture that he has nothing better to do?"
I think that’s a brilliant response. It brings you onto this question about victimhood, which is often discussed. Is it helpful to see women as victims all the time? Is there a form of feminism which exaggerates women’s victimhood? It’s complicated because there are obviously ways in which women are victims of male violence, they just are – more than men are of women’s violence, from rape to internet abuse. And there is an attempt by some men to victimise women. But feminism is about refusing to be identified as a victim, isn’t it? It’s about actually protesting and saying, "We do not want to be victims, we’re going to fight back!" It’s a complicated area.

Photo via Wikimedia

In the media, do you think women are more often portrayed as victims, perpetrators or both? And has there’s been a change in the way that the media present women over time?
I remember when the Guardian ran a regular column called 'Naked Ape' in the 1970s. It was a kind of precursor to Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism project. Naked Ape relentlessly exposed sexual bias in everyday language. But things didn’t always move forward... I also remember when Private Eye ran a series labelled 'Loony Feminist Nonsense' in the 1980s, with cartoons of big-bummed women hovering malevolently with knives over the genitals of trussed up, pleading males.

That’s one of the reasons I called the book Girl Trouble – the media always loved and continues to love stories about girls in trouble or causing trouble. Even today, stories of women misbehaving attract a certain kind of media coverage. Women make good copy and whether they’re in trouble or leaping about looking sexy there’s always a desire to write about them and show images of them in a biased way. I think you have to be very careful about how you read those images now or historically and the book certainly tries to make that point.

Finally, I heard that your publisher was doing a marketing campaign where if you get the tattoo design on the cover you get free Zed books for life?
Yeah blimey. I thought "God, how irresponsible!"

Would they have to get the whole cover, even with your name on it?
No, you’d have to be completely mad to do that. But I must say, some of my younger colleagues were taking the micky last week and saying, "Come on Carol, just get a little bit tattooed, like the little rose on the back. It would mark the publication of the book!"

Photos by Chad Wys

Lately I have run into Troy everywhere. I spotted him at a Whole Foods squeezing summer fruits. I swayed next to him one boozy night at a Wilco concert on the beach. His hair glowed silver in the moonlight, and his skin was as white as the inside of a seashell. Often I attempt to catch his eye, but he never looks at me.

He has even come into the bookstore where I work from time to time. He browses through biographies and spiritual books, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled up from the bike ride.

I still work at the bookstore even though I am seeing Patrick, who makes more money than Troy ever did or ever will.

Patrick lives in a large house just off the water.

On soft Santa Monica nights you can hear the ocean waves crashing from every room inside.

***

I have worked at the independent bookstore on Wilshire and Ocean for four years. It has been open for almost 45. The owner, Dennis, is an older gay man who lives in a small apartment above the store and hits on me every chance he gets. During the Vietnam War, his wife at the time, Mavis, took over while he was deployed with the Navy. When he returned they lived together for three more years before he finally broke down and told her the truth. Afterward, Mavis moved to Miami Beach with a Jewish man and started a family.

She sends Christmas cards each year, which Dennis proudly displays next to his register throughout the season. In them, she is surrounded by a big family of adult children and gap-toothed grandchildren and, most recently, a great-grandchild. He loves showing them off to customers, but to me it seems somehow passive-aggressive, and I tell him that, as though she is punishing him all these years later, because in the photos he sends her in return, Dennis is always alone. But that is only how I think of being alone at such an age—as a kind of punishment. I know, though, that this way of thinking is wrong. Just look at Dennis.

***

A few weeks ago Dennis told us that the rent on the store had been raised. He closed up early that evening and took Madison and me out to the pier. He bought us snow cones before breaking the news. We stood in the warm sand while watching birds skate across the water.

“I can’t afford it anymore,” he said. “It’s simply too much money, kids.” And then he started to cry, putting his hand on top of my wrist and his head on my shoulder. Madison and I tried to comfort him. She wiped a tear from her eye. When he finally stopped sobbing, the sun was a bright orange scar on the horizon. Already a spray of stars was visible in the sky.

Madison and I walked Dennis home that night. We said our goodbyes at the door and watched him through the display of books in the window as he climbed slowly up the stairs at the back of the store.

Madison has worked at the bookstore almost as long as I have, and in that time she has donned the same style hair—a bleach-blond pixyish cut slicked down to her scalp. On Halloweens, when we dress up in costume and host spooky readings, she chooses her character based on her hair: Tinker Bell, Daisy Buchanan, Maria Rainer with tiny paper von Trapp children sewn to her skirt.

“So what do you think?” she said, once Dennis had disappeared.

“Nothing we can do about it, I guess,” I said.

“Well, that’s easy enough for you to say,” she said. She poked me in the ribs, harder than I expected. “Patrick won’t let anything happen to you. We can’t all be so lucky, mister.”

***

By the time I got home it was almost nine and Patrick was already in bed, a MacBook propped open on his lap and headphones hanging from his neck. A glass of wine sat on the piano across the room. He was composing. I stripped to my briefs and slid under the sheets beside him, wrapping my arms tight around his smooth, brown torso. The door leading out to the terrace was completely open, and I could hear water breaking on the shore below and the whistling of wind in the palm trees.

Patrick is 40, 17 years older than I am. Wisps of white hair collect at his temples like cobwebs. He has written music for television series and direct-to-DVD features, although what he would really like to do is work on a big-budget film. Right now he composes the score for a hit zombie show on FX starring Kate Mara.

“You won’t believe what my boss told us today,” I said. My head rested on Patrick’s stomach, and I mouthed the words into his rib cage. I felt his skin heat up under my breath. I told him about the closing of the store.

Patrick continued typing away on his laptop.

“He’s having trouble making rent,” I said. “I feel bad for the guy. Can you imagine losing everything you’ve worked so hard for, just like that? It’s not like he has much else. Isn’t it sad?”

“Well, it’s not your fault,” Patrick said. “And besides, what do you know about work?” He said it with irritation in his voice, but in such an exaggerated manner that he could play it off as something said in jest, should the need arise. When I looked up at him doubtfully, he kissed me on the forehead, and I could hear Madison’s voice ringing in my ear: That’s easy enough for you to say.

“I know that. I’m just saying. It’s strange. I thought the store was doing so well.” I toyed with the patch of black fur creeping out from under the band of Patrick’s striped boxers. Music bars of varying lengths were stacked on top of one another on his computer screen, reminding me of long empty rows of bookshelves. “But isn’t it sad?” I finally said again.

“Yes. It’s sad, OK? It really is. But now I’m working. And I can’t hear myself think anymore.” He nudged me off his stomach and put his headphones on.

That is how it is with Patrick. Things can turn on a dime, especially when he is composing. Sometimes it is like finding your way through a very big, very dark house. You walk through the house blind, your arms outstretched in front of you, feeling for an exit. But then you bump into a wall—oops, you said this wrong thing—and then you bump into a chair—oops, you said that wrong thing—until finally you find the hole in the wall, a door to step through, a way out.

But I was too tired to find the door that night. So I turned over and went to sleep instead.

That night I had a dream about my crush, Troy.

We were driving through the desert, our skin covered in dirt and dust, and we were laughing. We crossed a bridge suspended over a raging river with big, choppy waves. We stopped there and got out, looking down over the ledge. Sunlight splintered off the surface of the water, burning brighter and brighter like the first light from a blast, until finally I couldn’t see Troy anymore and I was alone.

When I woke up, I thought briefly that the body sleeping beside me was Troy’s.

***

The next morning I woke up early for work. Generally Dennis does not mind if I come in an hour or two late, so I do. Rather, he pats me on the butt when I arrive at 11 instead of nine, casually, a trail of sand behind me, as though I am just stopping by for a chat, and says something like, “To what do we owe the pleasure, sunshine?” But that morning I wanted to be on time. Patrick had already taken off for the studio to record with the orchestra.

I left through the back door, which dropped me right on the beach. I watched surfers launch themselves out over the water, a cool blue belt that stretched unobstructed for miles. Bikers and mothers with baby carriages passed me along the walk.

When I stepped into the store, Dennis slapped his hand to his forehead in mock (or real) disbelief, looking as though his mind had been blown. Madison frowned at me from her corner. I just smiled. It was my day to buy used books from customers, so I went to my station at the back of the store and stood behind the giant oak desk without saying a word.

I like books. I like how from far away the colors bleed into one another on the shelf like smeared sunsets at the beach. I like how a book can change your opinion of someone, almost instantly, how you think you have them pegged down just by looking at them and then, wham, everything is different. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a beefy bronze surfer propped up against a palm tree, his face hidden from view behind Dispatches or The Red and the Black.

That morning, a tall blond girl with breasts practically spilling out of her bikini top walked in. She removed several hardcovers from her camouflage-print knapsack. They appeared new. I flipped through them. On the title page of each book read the handwritten dedication: “For Kate—I think you’ll like these! Love you, Dad.” It was written in a long, looping cursive.

Guess not, I thought to myself.

Once I had estimated the value of the books in credit and cash I waved Dennis down from across the store for final approval. He picked through the books, delicately, one last time before smiling at the girl and saying, “We’re no longer offering cash for books. Only credit.” He ran his hand over his scalp.

The blond girl scowled at us. She motioned toward the red and white sign in the front window. “See. Cash,” she said.

“Yes. Well, this is a new policy change.”

“You should take the sign down in that case.” She stared at us.

We stared at her.

“I’m taking these back,” the blond girl finally said, firmly. She stuffed the books into her knapsack before leaving.

“Money only comes in now,” Dennis said to me after she had gone, pointing toward the ground in an effort to emphasize the store. “It never goes out.”

Dennis moved to the front window and yanked the sign down. He dragged it back through the store and up the stairs to his apartment, which doubles as storage space. He looked very much like a child throwing a tantrum with the sign dragging behind him like that, like a doll or a teddy bear. Madison approached me then, while he was still gone, and said, “So I was thinking last night. I have an idea.”

“About what?” I said.

Her lip curled in annoyance. “About what? What do you think? About how we can help Dennis save the store.”

Madison and I have never been tight. There is always a razor’s edge to her voice, so sharp that it could cut through cold steel. But she is best friends with Troy, so I try to stay on her good side.

“We should have a fund-raiser,” she said. “You know, something where people will come out and give money to Dennis for the store. Like one of those telethons on PBS. All we need is for a few big spenders to roll in, and Dennis should be fine for at least a few months.” The way she said it, I knew she was expecting Patrick to come out and give big.

“And what happens after that?” I said. I was being genuine, mostly, although I also appreciated that it was the kind of question that would annoy her.

“I don’t know what happens after that. We figure out something more permanent. But for now, that’s all I’ve got, unless you have any bright ideas.”

I shrugged.

“OK then. So maybe a reading or something,” she said.

“And then we pass around a donation hat like at a church?” I said.

She ignored me. “Something to show people that this is a place worth saving,” she said. “I mean, come on, this place has history.”

***

The bookstore has seen countless celebrity regulars throughout the years. On its walls hang glossy framed photos of Dennis with literary icons and starlets, the kinds of photos you see at dim Italian restaurants or movie theaters, blown up behind the bar—Dennis arm-in-arm with Allen Ginsberg, Dennis mid-laugh with Lisa Kudrow, Dennis stony-faced with Gore Vidal. There is even a picture of Dennis and Mavis with Roy Scheider sandwiched in between, holding up a copy of Jaws. I have told him he should take that one down.

Dennis looks different in each photo but still somehow the same. I think it is his smile. His body sags differently as the years go on, his hair thins, but his smile does not change.

***

Around noon, two or three days after the powwow with Madison—a Friday—I was gearing up for a smoothie on the pier. I had spent the last hour organizing several shelves in Biography & Memoir and my head hurt. And besides, what do you know about work? Patrick’s words still rattled around inside me.

As I was leaving, Troy walked in, wearing swim trunks and a white V-neck T-shirt. He set his surfboard aside at the door before shuffling straight toward Madison, still dripping from his routine weekend swim. He hugged her while she screamed and tried to get away.

I hear about Troy through Madison, mostly. Though overhear might be a better word for it. She spends her lunch hour snacking on a salad wrap and talking on the phone with him outside. Her voice always carries through the glass—weekend yoga plans on the beach, a party in Malibu.

I played with the papers on my desk as they prepared to leave, pretending with all my might to appear busy. Then I sensed them moving toward me, and before I looked up I heard Madison. “So we were just talking about the fund-raiser. Got any ideas yet?”

“Hi,” Troy said, smiling. It was a sweet, walk-in-the-park kind of smile.

“Hi,” I said. I was not able to hold his gaze for very long. His hair is bleached from too much sun, and his eyes are the color of wet sand.

“I think a reading should work, don’t you? People can come in and share passages from some of their favorite books,” Madison said.

“Like who?” I said.

“Well, Troy’s aunt is an assistant to the mayor,” she said, motioning toward him.

“Yeah, I think I can swing it for you guys.”

“That would be great,” I said.

“What about you?”

“You want me to read?” I said.

“No. I mean who can you bring?”

“I don’t know anybody like that,” I said, though I already saw what she was angling toward.

“What about that big-shot boyfriend of yours? Doesn’t he know some stars with that show of his? I bet he’s got a phone book full of people he can call.”

Troy nodded his head.

“He can’t just ask people for favors. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well, why not? If ever there was a time for a favor, now is the time. I mean, Dennis hasn’t even come down the entire morning. He might be...” She mimed wrapping a noose around her neck and hanging herself, her tongue falling out over her glossed bottom lip.

I glanced up at his apartment door near the top of the wooden spiral staircase. A giant gargoyle knocker he had installed years ago grinned back down at me. It was true. Dennis had not emerged from his nest all morning. I looked back at Madison and Troy.

“What show does he work for?” Troy asked. And then once I had told him, he said, “Awesome! I love that show. I think anyone from the cast would draw in big numbers. Seriously.”

He smiled again. All this time I had been trying to get his attention, and finally we were talking. It made me weak.

“Well, I guess if I ask him, he’ll do it for me. But not like Kate Mara or something.” Troy’s smile faded slightly. “Or I don’t know. Maybe we can get her. I bet a few of the others for sure.”

“Holy shit,” Madison said. “That would be absolutely insane.”

Just then, Dennis appeared at his doorway and walked down the steps. He was smiling and whistling to himself, buttoning up his red cardigan. He was practically skipping.

He said hello as he passed us, flitting his fingers, as though he had just caught us on the street while out on a stroll, before walking out the door and turning the corner. The bell on the door rang twice as he exited.

“I thought he was supposed to be sad?” Troy said.

“Mourning,” Madison said matter-of-factly. She twirled her finger in circles at the side of her head. “It really fucks you up.”

Troy and I nodded together.

I would be lying if I said I have never fantasized about how different my life would be with Troy instead of Patrick. It sounds crazy, I know, but I think about it now and then. A fresh start with someone new.

***

Dennis lived with a man in the apartment upstairs for the better part of a decade. He met Damon at a gay bar in West Hollywood in the early 80s, several years after Mavis had picked up her things and left. The one time he told me this story, he explained that Damon had acted like a jerk that night, rejecting his offer to dance, flirting with other boys, but Dennis had still somehow managed to rope him in—he called it love at first fight.

The other things I know about the man I know mostly through pictures. There are two of them up on the wall. In one, Dennis has him practically headlocked, his Navy anchor tattoo bulging on his flexed bicep. Damon is black and stringy, like me, and trying desperately to unclasp Dennis’s hold on him. His skin appears as smooth and shiny as wax. A young Kim Basinger smiles mischievously beside them.

I once asked Dennis why he keeps the picture up if things ended so poorly—Damon stepped out on him too many times. He shook his head and smiled, “Come on. It’s Kim Basinger, kid. I can live with it, no problem.”

***

Patrick took me out to dinner that night at a seafood restaurant on Pico Boulevard. We ate outside, on the deck, near an ivy-covered wall. Purple flowers popped out through the cracks.

I was trying to think of a delicate way to broach the topic of the fund-raiser. I had eaten my way through a cheese plate, a side of buttermilk oysters, and a bowl of lobster Bolognese. For dessert I ordered a chocolate soufflé in order to give myself some more time, even though I was no longer hungry. I knew that if I did not ask him then in the middle of our boozy flirtation, the moony glimmer of the ocean behind us, the sound of forks clattering—the door still open, in other words—I certainly would not ask him at home.

I took a final swig of my whiskey sour. “So you remember that thing about the bookstore closing down? Well, we’re having a fund-raiser to raise some money for my boss, so he can keep the store.”

“Good idea. You come up with that?” Patrick said.

“Well, no, but I’m helping. I’m sort of a big part of it all now.”

“Do you want that?” he said.

“Well, yes,” I said, confused.

“No,” he said. “Do you want that?” He picked at the remaining chunks of lobster in my Bolognese.

“I told them you might be able to help.”

“Help how?” he said. His eyes flashed. I could tell he was suspicious.

Patrick has a weakness for younger men, but with that comes a history of deceit. The first night we spent together, after our third or fourth date, he took my face in his hand and said, “I can’t be taken for a ride. I’ve been fooled too many times before, and I just can’t take it because I am falling for you.” It was a weekend, an afternoon. I was still tangled in a mess of sweaty sheets after sex. The sun slipped in through openings in the blinds. Our bodies appeared dipped in light.

“Can’t you get someone from the show to read at the fund-raiser? I keep thinking they’ll turn the store into a Chinese place and poor Dennis will get hot and sick from all the kitchen smells. I wouldn’t ask if it was just for me, you know that.”

“Not possible. You know that. Why would you even think—”

But already I had stopped listening. I was watching as two men emerged from inside the restaurant and followed the hostess to their table. One of them was Troy. He wore a gray fitted blazer with jeans and blue saddle shoes. I had never seen him so dressed up. The other was someone I did not recognize, but he was handsome too. They sat so that Troy’s back was to me.

I wondered whether Troy had met him online, whether he had scrolled through a series of bright faces and smiles before landing on his, whether dinner was nothing more than a polite prelude to a night of sweaty sex, or whether it signified something else, something more meaningful.

After Patrick paid and we got up to leave, I glanced in their direction one last time. Troy held the other man’s hand from across the table. The stranger tossed his head back in laughter, his hair fluttering in the salty sea breeze.

I imagine they stayed like that for the rest of the night.

***

On weekends Dennis cleans the framed photos himself. There are more than 30 to get through. I know this only because I came in one Sunday about a month ago—Dennis had trusted a key to me upon starting, winking when he told me I should “feel free to use it anytime”—and found him there, behind a desk, with a dirty rag and Windex.

The photos were stacked one on top of another in small columns of various sizes across the floor. I tiptoed around, feeling very much like Godzilla stalking through Tokyo.

“Look who showed up. Decided to finally take me up on my offer?” he said.

“Maybe next time,” I laughed. “I forgot my boyfriend’s iPod. I promised to listen to his music on Friday, but now he needs it to work.”

He got up and pulled open a drawer and lifted out the iPod. I thanked him.

“Do you need any help with cleaning? I have a few hours to kill,” I said. I had gotten into a fight with Patrick—recently it had been our standard mode of communication—and, honestly, I wanted to make him wait.

“Are you kidding me? I like doing this. It’s a nice little jog down memory lane,” he said. “These are mine, kid. Go out and get your own.”

***

During the next week Madison and I prepared for the fund-raiser. We had decided to do the entire thing in secret for as long as possible in order to not worry Dennis with the details. Troy was in and out according to his schedule at the yoga studio, which, by the end of the week, meant he was in quite a lot. I wanted so badly to just tell them the truth, that Patrick would not be coming through—that I would not be coming through—but I couldn’t. Madison asked me about my plans regularly. I kept getting the sense that somehow she could see right through my curt responses, as if she were looking through a one-way mirror and waiting for the opportune moment to bust my chops, especially in front of Troy. So my lies got bigger. Kate Mara would be coming too.

One afternoon Troy walked in with an armful of pink and green flyers that read, “Save the Books Benefit, featuring readings by Mayor Pam O’Connor and Kate Mara from Dead Inside.”

It was obvious then and there that this could not go on any longer. It did not matter whether Troy thought I was a fool—I would end up embarrassing Dennis too if I saw this thing out to completion.

But before I could, Dennis returned from shelving books in the back of the store and stopped in front of Troy and Madison. “What do have there?” He started flipping through the brightly colored sheets of paper. He lifted one up and read it.

“We’re fucking saving this store, Dennis!” Madison cried. She raised her hands in the air, and Troy followed her lead. They behaved as though they were rallying the troops for battle. The few customers in the store looked in their direction before smiling and politely turning away.

I was terrified. Instead of breaking news of my failure to two people, I had to break Dennis’s heart as well, his one hope in salvaging the life he had here gifted to him and then taken away in an instant.

But Dennis’s expression turned to stone. He kneeled down and swept the papers into his chest, carrying them over to the garbage bin, shredding them to pieces with his bare hands, dumping them.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he said to Madison. And then he turned to me and yelled, “Did you know about this?” He was shaking, his fists clenched so hard that the blood drained from his knuckles until they were bone-white.

“I don’t understand,” Madison said. “What’s—”

“Let it go.” He stormed away, up the stairs and into his bedroom, slamming the door so hard that the knocker released two hollow clacks against the wood.

“See,” Madison said to us and the customers staring in our direction. She twirled her finger in circles at the side of her head. “Fucks. You. Up.”

While Madison and Troy scavenged through the trash for flyers, I went upstairs to check on Dennis. I had never seen him act that way before. It was the kind of anger I imagined he had bottled up after the war, the kind he had nurtured deep in the jungles of Vietnam in olive fatigues and war paint.

I knocked on his door, and when he did not answer I opened it. Strangely, it was the first time I had ever been in Dennis’s apartment. It was a small studio with old hardwood floors. He sat on the bed with his head in his hands. It was clean and airy, the window open to reveal a view of the hairdressing salon across the street and waxy green palm fronds from the tree just outside. An American flag hung framed on the wall, but that was the only kind of wall decoration I could see.

“What was that down there, Dennis?” I said. I continued to stand because I was still a bit scared. I refused to underestimate the strength of a 60-something year old man.

“I haven’t been honest with you, kid,” he said softly. He brushed stray cotton fibers from his pants. He spoke again only after several minutes of silence. “I lied about the rent.”

“So the bookstore’s not closing?”

“No, it is, but not for the reasons I gave you.”

Then he told me about his plans to move to Miami Beach to be with his ex-wife, Mavis, after all these years. About how her husband had died a few months ago and they had been calling each other ever since, him helping her through it all.

“Are you still in love with her?” I asked, still in disbelief.

“No! Of course not. Still wouldn’t kick you out of bed,” he said, nudging me with his elbow. “But we have history, kid. It’s hard to explain. It’s lonely up here, sometimes. You can’t understand, and I hope you never have to.”

And then I asked him why he had lied.

“Embarrassment, I guess. Who wants to admit that they’re tired of being alone? I was going to tell you once I got there, but it was just easier this way for me, I think.”

I felt something growing in the pit of my stomach, and it hurt.

Later that night, as I lay in bed next to Patrick, I understood the pain at last—betrayal. I hadn’t realized until then that for a long time I had depended on the idea of Dennis being able to live happily alone.

***

Madison and I say our goodbyes at security. We see Dennis off because, really, we are the closest thing he has to family here in Los Angeles County. All of his other friends have either moved out to small bungalows in the desert or died. He is in a floral-print, short-sleeve button-up and flip-flops. Madison’s eyes are rimmed with tears. People embrace one another around us. They say, “I’ve missed you,” “It’s been too long,” “I love you,” “Goodbye.”

“You’ll land on your feet, sweetheart,” he says to Madison. “I have no doubt about that.”

Then he wraps me in his arms and squeezes my ass. “For good luck,” he says. “I’ll keep in touch. Don’t you worry. I’m going to send you a Christmas card this year, and I want you to do the same. I know how much you hate those.”

The security line seems endless. It folds in on itself again and again. Dennis waves at us until finally he vanishes through the metal detectors and into the crowd.

We watch several planes take off down the runway, each ascending quickly into the air, until it is nothing more than a dot disappearing through the clouds. We are not certain which one is his, but with each plane I picture his face pressed against the window, looking down at us until eventually we disappear too.

Soon Madison tells me that she is leaving and that she expects to see me around. Her voice is fragile and limp, but I know it will not last. It is only the moment.

I stand there looking through the glass at the runway and the ragged brown mountains beyond. I stare at my reflection too. It floats, filmy and transparent, just over the mountains.

I am wasting time.

Thomas Gebremedhin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Duke University. He lives in Brooklyn and works at Vogue.

John Collins' workshop, with a poster of Johann Bessler stuck up on the wall

Humans have been fascinated with perpetual motion machines since the Middles Ages. In theory, a machine that could run indefinitely without an energy source would change our entire entire world far beyond the wildest wet dreams of Al Gore. The only problem is that the theory of perpetual motion violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics, meaning that, technically, it’s physically impossible to achieve.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The most infamous of history’s hopefuls was Johann Bessler, an 18th-century German clockmaker who convinced a bunch of people—Russian Tsar Peter the Great—that he’d created a wheel-shaped machine that was capable of constant motion and could perform heavy lifting and drain water. He prohibited anyone from looking inside his contraption and refused to divulge his secret for fear of having it stolen, which doesn’t exactly inspire that much confidence.

Nonetheless, there are still those dedicated to replicating Bessler's apparent success. John Collins—a 69-year-old from Warwickshire, England—is one of those people. A retired engineer who worked in the Royal Air Force and for Concorde, John has been poring over Bessler’s designs for decades and believes he has unlocked the code. I caught up with him as he neared the completion of what he thinks could be his final design.

John Collins in his workshop.

VICE: Where did your interest in Bessler come from?
John Collins: When I was 15 I took out an anthology of unsolved mysteries from the library. One of the mysteries was the legend of Bessler’s wheel. It fascinated me for a while, but gradually other things took my attention away.

When I was 30, I found the book again, by chance. The book talks about Bessler’s maid’s testimony that the wheel was driven by hand from outside the room. With my engineering experience I realized that there was no way her account of how it worked could be true. This set me off questioning other ways the project had been discredited.

So Bessler has nearly always been a part of your life?
I often ask myself why I got into engineering. I always had a practical mind, so it seemed logical to go into that field, but at the back of my mind I think I knew it would help me study Bessler.

When did you start trying to build the machine?
I made the first machine out of balsa wood, glue, and bearings just after I got married, much to my wife’s chagrin. That was when I was 28, so I’ve been working on the project for 41 years now, mostly intermittently. It was when I set up the website that things began to take off—I received emails from fairly authoritative people who agreed with me that the circumstantial evidence is all there. They said, “There’s only one thing against the idea and that’s the laws of physics. If you can find a way round around it, you’re in.”

You mention that the maid’s testimony can be discounted, but how can you be certain of the evidence that supports the machine working?
Bessler exhibited all four of his wheels and had them tested by several scientists. The main one that proves it for me was the test in which the wheel was locked behind a door with a royal seal and guarded by armed men. It was still spinning when they opened the room 54 days later.

Are you close to understanding what his secret was?
Bessler left behind a message saying he had burned or buried any drawings that might directly show how his machine works, but, he said, anyone with a penetrating mind and lots of spare time will find the solution. I think I’ve found the solution through pieces of code embedded in one of his drawings, and I’m in the process of building what I hope will be my final machine.

Do you have support from other people?
One of my main supporters is Hal Puthoff, who is Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin. He has written to me saying he’s certain I’m onto something, and has funding ready for me when I perfect my design. The problem with Hal is that he has a checkered history. Although he’s an advisor to the US government, he was also funded by the CIA to carry out experiments into remote viewing and other forms of extrasensory perception. From other people’s point of view, that makes him a dubious character.

The plans for Johann Bessler's perpetual motion machine.

How do people in your everyday life respond to your work?
My son is an engineer and he laughs at me. My son-in-law is a teacher and he laughs at me. They sent me a card with a hamster wheel on it for one of my birthdays. We use the jokey expression in my house, “W3”. It means “when the wheel works” and gets used whenever someone mentions getting new furniture or a new TV.

Do you have much competition?
There are people all around the world trying like mad to decipher the codes Bessler left for us. Although people have cracked bits and pieces no one has worked out the overall key. Everyone’s working quietly in the background, waiting to jump up with the solution any day.

It seems like the emphasis on secrecy around this machine hasn’t diminished since Bessler was alive.
Everyone says, “I know the answer but I can’t tell you yet because I’ve got to finish the wheel.” Everybody has their pet theories and aren’t keen to share them, me included. I’m more positive than I’ve ever been that I’m nearly there, but I’m keeping my cards close to my chest. In the pictures I sent you I hid the main parts of the wheel. My wife said, “For God's sake don’t send in pictures of the damn wheel, just in case you’re right.”

Patent offices don't accept claims for perpetual motion machines. But if it were possible, is your design at the point where you'd consider getting a patent?
A lot of people on forums have said I should take out a patent. However, the government can put a D-notice on a patent to prevent you divulging information if it’s against the national interest. People have suggested that, if the wheel works, it could reduce the tax revenue from petrol products and all that sort of thing. The main thing for me is that this thing isn’t buried. The best way to deal with it is to make a video with full disclosure of how it works and disseminate it as widely as possible. Once the genie is out the bottle they can’t stick it back in.

Various attempts at perpetual motion machines.

Have you considered whether there might be better ways of approaching the project using modern technology?
A lot of people argue there wouldn’t be enough power in Bessler’s wheel for it to be useful. But, from an engineering perspective, I can see a number of ways of improving the power. I see no reason why you couldn’t have a wheel 32 feet in diameter, for example.

Regardless of how big the wheel is, it still has to obey the laws of thermodynamics. How do you think you can overcome this?
It’s hard for me to explain without giving away my design. But the first thing I did is go back to basics and ask why we can’t use gravity to power something, especially given that we use it for weight-driven clocks and water mills. If you look at the planet Earth, without life the only way nature can move anything other than with heat variation is by gravity. It’s what I call an enabler. If we can find a way of configuring weights so that they fall and keep the wheel continually overbalanced you’ve got the solution, but I sense incredulity in your voice.

I’m just aware of what a massive discovery perpetual motion would be. It would turn science on its head.
When people see how this works they will realize that it requires no changes to the laws of physics other than the contention that gravity can’t be used as a source of power. The only thing I will say is that when you see it, you'll wonder how you never thought of it. The basic concept is very simple, but the leverage mechanism is ingenious.

Follow Alex Horne on Twitter.

EDIT: The question about patenting John's design was changed to reflect the fact that it is impossible to patent a perpetual motion machine.

All photos via Arij Riahi. 
Oil pipelines are about linking oil-well to terminal, linked from junction to junction along the way, spread out across vast expanses of the Canadian landscape. In Quebec, for example, two pipelines will be covering at least 700 kilomteres, from Kanehsatake, west of Montreal, to Cacouna, a port town on the Gulf of St-Lawrence.

How do you push back against a major infrastructure project that crosses dozens of municipalities, let alone provincial jurisdiction and, importantly, Indigenous territory? For one group of some two dozen environmental activists it has been to walk the 700 kilometre path of those pipelines, so that the links in those towns and municipalities isn't just between cold, metallic pipes, but between the people who are concerned about the oil flowing through them.

"A lot of people along the way didn't know about the pipelines or about the link to the tar sands," said Aurore Fauret, one of the organizers of the walk, dubbed Marche pour la Mère Terre (March for Mother Earth). "We were able to make links between a lot of smaller, local groups along the way... When you have an action [like this march] it can help give momentum to the movement at large."

I spoke with Fauret outside the gym of an elementary school in the Mohawk community of Kanehsatake, west of Montreal. It was the end point of the group's 34 day journey that took them to over 30 towns across the province, where they organized rallies, group discussions, street theatre, and even went door-to-door to talk with people about the dangers of the pipelines and increased oil extraction. Some 200 people participated along the way. The core group of 20 or so walkers who went the whole distance and were gathered at the school were sun-baked, a little scraggly, but in incredibly good spirits. The atmosphere was one more of celebration than of protest, which seemed to fit well with their overall message of trying to bring people together.

At the same time, it was clear what they were there to fight against. The path they walked followed the routes of TransCanada's Energy East and Enbridge's Line 9 pipelines. Both lines have sown controversy because they will serve to transport oil from Canada's west, through Quebec, for export. Both are meant to provide a new outlet for oil from Alberta's ever-expanding tar sands extraction, which needs to be able to reach new markets in order to stay profitable and continue growing.

The marchers and their allies, like the province-wide coalitions Coalition Vigilance Oléoducs (CoVO) and Stop Oléoduc, are concerned about the local dangers of such pipelines: the possibilities of ruptures in pipes carrying the more corrosive and more difficult to clean up diluted tar sands bitumen, and that of tanker spills in the Gulf of St-Lawrence once the oil is sent for export.

Ellen Gabriel speaking to an audience of supporters.
But they are also concerned by the fact that a growing pipeline infrastructure will allow the Alberta tar sands to continue to grow, a fact they find unacceptable, both because of what it says about our continued reliance on oil (and the carbon emissions that it entails), as well as the impacts of the oil extraction on the communities, especially Indigenous communities, who live in the area and bear the brunt of this massive industrial development.

"It's important to show our solidarity," said Nicholas Ouellet, one of the march organizers who spoke at a press conference marking the end of the walk. "It's already begun. We can never accept things that are as senseless as the projects [the government and these companies] are proposing. Projects like expanding the tar sands, which is already a disaster."

Marchers and their supporters recognized that while a 700-kilometre walk was a momentous undertaking, it's still a small start in fighting back against these pipelines. But it was clear from those assembled for the closing press conference, including community organizers from across the province and representatives of both the Quebec and national sections of Idle No More, that they saw it as part of a strong start and growing movement.

Speakers also underlined the importance of building links with First Nations communities. It wasn't a random decision to end the walk in Kanehsatake. The marchers were well-received by the Kanehsatake Grand Chief Serge Simon and other community members, including long time Mohawk organizer and activist Ellen Gabriel. Ouellet expressed how marchers felt that building solidarity with First Nations—on whose unceded land much of the pipeline travels—is an important step in building resistance. But it also felt like there's a long way to go.

Most people, including Gabriel, spoke of this as being the start of creating those links.

The march included one First Nations organizer, and was bolstered by some Indigenous participants along the way. It was difficult to escape a lingering feeling that even if they were ending at a First Nations community, where they were warmly received, that a large gulf still exists between the talk about what it means to be living on Native land and the work that's necessary to truly be collaborating on a nation-to-nation basis with Indigenous peoples.

At the same time, speakers presented strong support and hopefulness for what the walkers had done and are fighting for.

"What we see today going on in the world, it's criminal, it's genocidal, and it must be stopped," said Gabriel. "So I'm truly inspired to see the solidarity and unity that is beginning to take place here in Quebec. For too long we have been excluding each other as neighbours, we have been fearful of each other as neighbours. But now it is time to bed that fear, to walk in peace together, and to make ... fundamental changes to save the human species."

Recent statements from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper help drive home the divisions between how the current Canadian government—and much of the business community - see climate change, versus the message being shared that morning in Kanehsatake. During a  visit to Ottawa by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Harper said that Canadians are deluding themselves if they think any country would make a decision that would negatively affect jobs and economy, claiming that oil development is the clearest path to economic prosperity and well-being.

“It’s not that we don’t seek to deal with climate change. But we seek to deal with it in a way that will protect and enhance our ability to create jobs and growth, not destroy jobs and growth in our countries,” he said on June 9. "We are just a little more frank about that, but that is the approach that every country is seeking.”

It's also a movement that is gaining in momentum in other parts of the country. Following Tuesday's announcement of the Harper government's approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline, over a thousand people took to Vancouver's streets to denounce the decision. Over 21,000 in BC have signed on to a petition pledging to take action against the pipeline. In northern Alberta and British Columbia, lawsuits and alliances threaten the expansion of the tar sands, and the pipelines needed to carry their output.  Albertans aren't engaging in direct action yet, but they are overwhelmingly in favour of greater regulations on the oil industry. And in Ontario, there have been lockdowns at pipeline construction sites.

Opposition is growing in Quebec, too. The day the march started was also the launch date of Coule Pas Chez Nous, a new website that is part of a widespread effort undertaken by several anti-pipeline and environmental groups to inform Quebecers about the concerns around oil transport in the province, and the overall impacts of the Canadian oil industry. It's backers are growing coalitions like CoVO and Stop Oléoduc, whose chapters, while still small, nearly span the province and are growing.

For Fauret and the other marchers, it's clear that there is still much work to be done, but they say they are up to the challenge. Already, there is talk of forming a kind of flying squad: that people from various communities who have become connected through the walk are organizing to congregate in each other's communities when support and work is needed.

The walkers may have already come 700 kilometers, but it's clear that in their fight against pipelines, tar sands and climate change, they are just getting started.


@timmcsorley

Photos by Mat Nashed

Amine Gharbi is a bald 30-year-old man with glasses. The Tunisian hip-hop producer was born and raised in a low-income district in Tunis during a time when any explicit criticism of the state seemed unimaginable. Plain clothed police officers would stroll these neighborhoods to repress any political activity. Before the revolution many local artists alluded to this in their work, but no one outright spoke about it.

“We had to be careful,” Gharbi told me as he smoked his cigarette on the patio of a little café in Bardo, the neighborhood where he grew up. “Artists didn’t even mobilize in private spaces.”

Although the right to free speech and freedom of assembly have improved significantly since Tunisia’s revolution—an uprising that toppled former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011—police have continued to target and beat outspoken artists at public demonstrations. Inspired by the Black Panthers, Gharbi said that Tunis needed a movement that could reclaim the streets from the police and transform them into a place for culture.

His vision and prominence with local artists drove Gharbi to organize a slam poetry gathering in the streets of Tunis on July 25, 2012. He made an event on Facebook that called young artists from all parts of the city to meet and read their texts in Place Pasteur, a district with a public park located just outside of downtown. 

“It was magical,” said Majd Mastoura, a 23-year old Tunisian poet who attended the first slam poetry event.  “I felt like I discovered an entire new world.”

Only 40 people joined the first slam poetry meeting. After Mastoura’s recital he approached Gharbi and told him that he wanted to help expand the movement. They didn’t make it to the end before two police officers intervened

The officers told Gharbi that he needed to notify the district police before hosting other cultural events. Gharbi abided, and he and Mastoura created a social media page for slam poetry that same week and hosted a second event in the old city of Tunis.

Over 200 people attended the second event. Artists expressed their social and political concerns such as sexual harassment, state-corruption, and unemployment. When Mastoura recited a poem about police brutality, two unmarked officers approached Gharbi again.

“The officers accused me of lying. They told me poetry is not supposed to be politically related,” said Gharbi. “I told them the poets are free to express whatever they want.”

“Freedom of speech and the right to public space are the only things we have acquired from the revolution, so far,” added Mastoura. “This movement is our struggle to keep it.”

A 1969 law lingering from Ben Ali’s regime still regulated freedom of assembly until June 2013. This regulation stipulated that authorities must receive at least three days’ notice before any public event, but new laws ensuring greater freedom of expression restricted the officers from taking any action. Ironically, police interference inspired many more to participate in the movement.

In the first week of August 2012, Gharbi said that over 40 artists shared their texts over Facebook and in the public gatherings. The more recognition slam poetry received, the more the movement’s social and political direction took shape.

“Tunisian slam-poetry was coming to the streets,” said Mastoura. For poor Tunisians who couldn’t afford to see a movie, slam poetry offered an alternative.

Anyone could read their poetry. The only condition was that it had to be performed in the Tunisian dialect. Because most mainstream cultural production in the country is performed in classical Arabic or French, Gharbi said Tunisians feel disconnected from commercial artists.

“Classical Arabic can’t express what the Tunisian poet want’s to say,” said Mastoura.  

“Performing in our dialect allows us to produce intellectuals who are part of the people, not beyond the people,” said Shams Radhouani, a 22-year old slam poet who has steadily gained public recognition.  

After discovering Gharbi’s slam poetry movement through Facebook in August 2012,  Radhouani  seized the opportunity to read her work publicly for the first time. While her poetry has addressed women’s issues and skepticism over the electoral process, she said that it’s nobody’s place to dictate slam poetry’s political direction. But anyone who chooses to politicize their art now has a platform to speak.

This platform has connected over 8,000 people to Amine’s slam poetry Facebook page while mobilizing hundreds more in public streets. Although officers might continue to intimidate activists and artists like Weld El 15—a rapper arrested for calling the police dogs in a Tunisian concert last year—slam poetry has emerged to resist police control.

“Our movement is threatening,” said Amine. “It’s not easy for the police to accept that the streets are no longer theirs.”

Follow Mat Nashed on Twitter.

Photo by Stephen Gray

I am a resident of Austin, Texas.

Perhaps you’ve heard of us. We seem to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue lately. Everyone's investing in Austin; everyone's excited about Austin. It’s the live-music capital of the world; it’s on the cover of travel magazines, business magazines, and food magazines. It's simply the place to be.

Well, fuck that. I’ve lived in Austin long enough to know that this city can drive you fucking crazy. It’s a sweltering, congested sub-metropolis full of slack-asses and yuppies who simultaneously take themselves too seriously and not seriously enough. It's a place where spending $11 on a sandwich is considered a societal good. It’s a place where entitled people claim ownership of everything.

Austin is a place where bad people move. People in Austin actually believe they invented the breakfast taco. People in Austin will tell a Mexican family who has lived on the same street for generations that they’re doing their best to “save the neighborhood.” 

If that’s not enough, here are some more reasons Austin sucks.

Photo by Gina Pina

The Yuppiness Is So Chronic it Borders on Self-Parody

The following is an actual exchange I had with somebody in Austin not too long ago:

“We have to go to that place—they have whiskey-infused bacon!”

“So?”

"Whiskey-infused bacon! That’s so cool!”

“But like, why? Why is that cool? How is that more than just a thing? Why should I be excited that some dude made bacon and left it in a bottle of whiskey?”

“Come on, don’t be a party pooper.”

There are so many “crazy" and "awesome” things in Austin! The taco cannon! The mustache competition! The pun-off! Everyone is really excited about all of these things. People are very excited to see horribly self-involved white people tell puns at a bar. That’s something you do in Austin; it's part of the scene. Why do you go to the pun-off? Because it fits a certain collection of circumstances and idealized cultural values that supposedly makes Austin what it is. By virtue of its own perceived audacity, a pun-off, whiskey-infused bacon, or a ratball bad taco somehow becomes really cool.

But you’re not keeping Austin weird. You’re engaging in this fake, utterly distasteful blend of irony and feigned enthusiasm that will eventually cause the city to self-implode under the density of its own facetiousness. Soon you won’t be able to identify a single genuine emotion within its borders. You don’t actually care about whiskey-infused bacon. You don’t give a shit about whiskey-infused bacon. You’re pretending to, because that’s what keeps the whole city from feeling like a big lie.

Photo by Maxine Sheppard

It's Way Too Hot

Seriously. April and October are generally pretty nice in Austin, but every other month is either abrasively cold or stupid hot. You swim through the humidity here. It will utterly destroy your ass the second you walk outside. It gets so hot it will actually stop you from going to shows.

Back in 2012 we broke a record with more than 69 days with a temperature of 100 degrees or higher. That's 69 days. So before you move here, you should probably be aware that any city getting that kind of heat is inherently unholy. 

Photo by Gina Pina

Nobody Has a Clue What His or Her Job Is

When ye build a city on the promise of employing every vague Comm-degree’d asshole in America, ye will reap what ye sow.

“So what do you do?”

“Oh, you know, marketing stuff.”

 “What kind of marketing stuff?”

“I’m a digital marketer.”

“What’s that?"

“It’s just marketing stuff.”

I was recently rejected for a job in Austin that forced me to write a haiku about my feelings in regard to the application process. That’s what we’ve done in Austin: We’ve traded our marketable skills for haikus. When you move here you separate yourself from any childhood aspirations and settle down with a job that you’re still not sure actually exists.

Photo by Flickr user Kirkh

Traffic Is Way Too Bad for a Town This Small

I don’t even leave the house during rush hour. It’s not worth it. Austin is a small town that’s grown way, way faster than its infrastructure allows.

The whole city is networked by dinky two-laners, which means it takes fucking forever to get anywhere, and “anywhere” always has terrible parking. The dream is that Austin eschews the big-city problems that makes life miserable on the coasts, but in Central Texas, you’ll still be spending way too much time sitting in traffic.

Everyone Hates the Festivals That Pay Their Rent

Hell hath no fury like a bunch of Austin transplants bitching about South by Southwest. These days their ire is focused more on the F1 races and, more recently, the X Games. It feels like anything cool or interesting happening in Austin is immediately met with local animosity, because fuck anyone excited about your city if it makes the JuiceLand line longer.

But the thing those people fail to understand is that the only reason they’re employed, the only reason they even enjoy living in Austin, is because of those larger corporate interests. If this were Austin in the 80s, before all the development, you wouldn’t have your condo, you wouldn’t have your job, and you certainly wouldn’t have all your favorite restaurants. The whole anti-corporation thing is a lie. You will thank those SXSW sponsors for making your life comfortable, and you will like it.

Photo by Jennifer Holcombe

Barton Springs Is a Giant Toilet

People in Austin love going to Barton Springs. It’s the most iconic spot in the whole city. It’s just a swimming hole, but it’s treated like Mecca by the people who live here. It’s frigid, communal, charming, and when you don’t have a beach, you do the best you can, right?

Of course, if you swim in Barton Springs you might go blind if you open your eyes underwater. Why? Well, because of all the “fertilizer, leaked motor oil, metals, and other pollution” that is currently contaminating the water. Man, there’s nothing better than waking up to a nice swim and the sweet tingling of pink eye in the morning!

Photo by Sean Savage

You're Still In Texas

You may be living in Austin, but you still can’t buy liquor on Sundays, marry someone of the same sex, or legally smoke marijuana. In fact, Texas drug laws are some of harshest in the country. I know a band whose old drummer is currently spending multiple years in prison for growing and distributing weed. 

People think when you move to Austin you’re somehow not moving to a deeply conservative state. This is still Texas, and unless you're ready to deal with that, move to Minneapolis or something.

Everyone Is Scared to Move to a Real City

Everyone in Austin under the age of 25 is sort of plotting a move to New York. They will not move, though, because they are scared. Living in a city where things are actually expected of you is hard. It’s much easier to blame your professional and personal failings on the lack of inertia in Austin.

It’s just so much nicer to hunker down in an inclusive local scene than trying to reach your potential as a human. Austin is like the safety school of life.

A typical night at Emo's. Photo by Flickr user SlipAustin

Emo's Sucked

Do you like your favorite band turned into a sweaty brown-out via bad mixing and a terrible, decrepit PA? Do you like peeing in a metallic trough? Do you like ugly dark-red light? Then you would’ve loved going to shows at the now defunct Emo’s! This awful little club had some of the best shows in the whole city, which means you were at risk of catching hepatitis every weekend. Emo’s lives on at Emo’s East, a much larger, nicer, air-conditioned venue that totally annihilates the old space in every way imaginable.

Austinites being Austinites, they found a way to bitch about it. “It’s just not as authentic man!” Apparently there’s nothing more authentic than a frustrating night out. Emo's sucked so bad that there was an Austin band in the 90s called the Fuckemos.

Follow Luke Winkie on Twitter.

The Kurds have been moving further into Iraq's disputed territories, and not everyone is thrilled. In towns closer to Baghdad with higher Arab populations, like Jalawla and Sadiya, they have encountered fierce resistance from militant Sunni groups. While Kurdish peshmerga forces have been welcomed in many areas, they've needed to fight to enter others.

For our fourth dispatch about the escalating crisis in Iraq, VICE News embedded with the peshmerga as they struggled to maintain control over their land. We spoke with a Sunni tribal leader in Kirkuk about the recent Kurdish takeover and the strategic importance of the city, and with Kurdish soldiers about why they volunteered to fight and how they are successfully fending off ISIS and the Iraqi Shiite military.

All images via the Toronto International Film Festival.
For more than two decades, Canadian queercore auteur, writer, photographer, artist, (and frequent VICE contributor), Bruce LaBruce, has made films that have intended to shock us all out of a heteronormative (and homonormative) mainstream and conformist existence. LaBruce has a well-earned reputation for unapologetically demolishing taboos. Some of his previous films have revolved around neo-Nazi skinheads who have gay sex but don’t identify as gay and are actually homophobic, well-meaning but ineffectual lefty terrorists who jerk off onto posters of Che Guevara (link NSFW), and alien zombies that fuck people back to life.

LaBruce’s latest film, Gerontophila, takes a drastic step away from his traditionally NC-17 past—it’s his first feature film to not include any sexually explicit scenes. So we caught up with the filmmaker during World Pride to discuss his 20-plus years of filmmaking, what's changed about gay culture since he was just a young punk in Toronto, and the process of getting government funding to make a movie about a teenage boy who fetishizes the elderly.

VICE: Your films all tell stories about outsiders rebelling against sexual and societal norms. What's important to you about telling these stories, and what keeps drawing you back to that theme?
Bruce LaBruce: Well, for me, it's making films about characters that are underrepresented, usually in films and in media. I quite often have, for example, strong feminist revolutionary-type characters. Or characters who regard themselves as revolutionary. They're always presented affectionately—sometimes they're also made fun of a bit because revolutionaries always are a little idealistic and they paint themselves into corners or contradict themselves. But just to present strong female feminist-type characters is kind of rare in movies.

In terms of the gay world, the gay movement has become recently conservative and assimilationist and one of the bi-products of that is it tends to disassociate itself from its more unruly or fringe elements, the ones that were at the forefront of the gay liberation movement to begin with. I think people need to be continually reminded that those characters were the backbone of the gay liberation movement. And my films also question, not only the dominant culture, but the gay orthodoxy as well. They challenge the conventions of what it means to be gay, or conventions about gender, or beauty, or aesthetics, or politics.

Are you trying to reach a certain audience within the gay community?
Sometimes. Even though I might consciously be trying to do that, it's not something you can control. I've often been neglected by the gay mainstream. Over the years, some people haven't been very happy with the way I represent homosexuality in my work. So, it doesn't necessarily reach that kind of audience. Also for me as a filmmaker, I try to make films that are cinema first, and so that's why I've made a lot of films that have explicit gay sex in them but they've played at international film festivals. Three of my films have premiered at Sundance. Even LA Zombie, which is a crazy gore porn, was in competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

If you go with the idea that first you're making a film and that you're making cinema—not to be pretentious—then it has a broader appeal automatically because the content is secondary to what you're saying, how you're saying it, formal aspects and how it fits into the tradition of filmmaking.

How has gay culture changed over the course of your career and how have these changes informed your work?
The funny thing is, even in the mid-80s, my friends and I rejected the gay mainstream because we thought it had become too bourgeois and assimilationist. So you can imagine how we feel now, 30 years later. It's a bit disheartening sometimes. I grew up with this generation of the gay movement that was all about sexual militancy. The engine of the gay movement was sex and it was about challenging the conventions of the mainstream in terms of gender and sexuality. It was about sexual liberation. And then with AIDS in the 80s and 90s it was a real kind of…I guess as an understatement, you could call it a speed bump. Or it was a real kind of sea change in terms of activism; it became a health crisis, etcetera. Now we're at a point where there's a certain thrust of the gay movement that is more conservative. It even sometimes translates into a moralistic attitude toward this kind of extreme or militant sexuality.

I collaborate regularly with transsexual performers and artists and sometimes I consider gay porn stars and certain transsexual performers as kind of the last gay radicals at a certain level, because they really are challenging basic assumptions about sex and gender.

Today, there's a much higher visibility of trans folk and queers of colour. Laverne Cox is on the cover of TIME, for example, and RuPaul's Drag Race is a huge success. Do you think the politics of respectability are changing?
It's a complicated issue because then you have the backlash against RuPaul, for example, from within the LGBTTQTT-SI community, which is interesting. But that's always happened. If people will recall, there was a huge rift within the feminist community in the 80s between anti-porn feminists and pro-porn feminists about whether or not this kind of sexual behaviour can be controlled or policed, or if language can be policed, or representation can be policed or controlled.

I've always fought against that. I've always fought for politically incorrect expression as long as you can back it up and are doing it consciously or for some kind of purpose. That's something, to me, that's always important because any kind of orthodoxy needs to be challenged. Any kind of censorship or policing of representation or language also has to be really challenged, I think.



Image from Bruce LaBruce's 1996 film, "Hustler White."
In the past you've said that it's fashionable to be gay—I'm reading this from one of your VICE columns—so long as you're the “right kind” of gay. Do you think that’s changing or broadening?

Yes and no. Then there's the other issue, which is probably more problematic: what is the strategy of these subculture movements?

In the 70s and 80s, the black movement, the gay movement, the feminist movement, they were all very hardcore leftist, sometimes even Marxist-state kind of movements. That has definitely changed. Particularly now, it's like you have acceptance of some of these groups because they are playing in the same kind of playing field as the dominant culture. Does feminism make sense if women are trying to compete in the same kind of corrupt institutions that men are excelling in or that have power in? That's a certain kind of strategy. The other strategy is to actually challenge the institutions, and challenge the dominant ideology and the status quo because it isn't working.

The transsexual performers that you've mentioned are still operating in this specific idea of mainstream success—of glamour, and being accepted as these powerful women, but in the context of a system that you could say is arguably corrupt at some levels.

You mentioned that you wanted to reach a mainstream audience with Gerontophila and that this is your first film without sexually explicit content. Did that make it a different experience for you making this film?
It was a different experience and it was intended to be a different experience. I felt like I'd really explored the pornographic a lot and that I kind of got into—I don't know if you call it a rut—but this expectation that I would make a film and every time outdo myself and push further and make it more and more extreme. I made a neo-Nazi porn film where a character jerks off on Mein Kampf, and then in Raspberry Reich a character jerks off on a poster of Che Guevara, and then in Otto, one zombie fucks another one in the hole in his stomach, and then LA Zombie was kind of the ultimate where an alien zombie fucks dead bodies back to life. So I was like, Where can you go from there? I'd really pushed it about as far as I could go. So then, for me, it was like, What can I do that's kind of shocking? Maybe to make something kinder and gentler and more mainstream would be the most shocking thing that I could do. It was the idea from the very beginning to make that kind of film and to make a film in a completely different kind of process.

I quite often make guerrilla-style films with low budgets, a very small crew, very Helter Skelter. This one, the whole process of making the film was completely different. There was lots of preparation time, professional casting and actors, and working with a union crew.

Image from Bruce LaBruce's "Super 8 1/2."
I read that this was your first film that you had government funding for.
I've had Arts Council funding before for lower-budget films, but this was the first time I got Telefilm and SODEC, which is funding from Quebec.

I know this isn't really how it works, but it's funny to imagine the Stephen Harper government giving money to a film about gerontophilia. What was the funding experience like for you?
Well, considering that there's supposed to be a whole secret gay cabinet in the Conservative government, maybe it's not so strange. And they're all kind of old, so maybe they'd even like this film. But it was still a struggle. I had to go to Telefilm like three times before I finally got the financing. The interest in financing the film came mostly from Quebec, so we shot it in Montreal. But it was still a struggle. It's not as if I haven't tried this before. I tried several times over the last 15 years to get scripts that were meant to be not sexually explicit, slightly more independent narrative films made, and I just wasn't successful in getting the financing. So this is the first time that it really all came together.

I want to come back to Gerontophilia and your intention to make a more mainstream film. Were you hoping to draw more attention to the subject matter itself? We don't really hear about gerontophiles, or even sexuality within the elderly community.
It kind of annoyed me that sexuality in the elderly is almost always portrayed in the media as grotesque or something predatory—like the cougar. I just thought it would be interesting to do something more romantic, and still subversive.

Lake, the boy [in the film] who is the gerontophile, is questioning all sorts of cultural conventions and going against even nature, and going against culturally what is considered beautiful or sexual or sexually stimulating. So he's going against all these conventions and ends up kind of being a revolutionary in that regard.

The Baby Boomer generation is getting older, there are more and more old people because people are living longer.

They are being over-medicated in the institutions, their sexuality is being discouraged. There was a story recently about these old women in an institution in New Jersey who hired a male stripper to come in. The children and grandfathers were totally outraged because they thought it was the institution that did it, but it was actually the old women who pooled their money to bring in this stripper.

Women are outliving men generally and in mixed institutions women outnumber the men, and I've heard stories or read about how they put locks on the doors of the men because the women are trying to get into their rooms to have sex with the old men. There's a lot going on in those places. They have a lot of time on their hands. Sexuality doesn't go away. 

Skin Flicks: The Films of Bruce LaBruce will be presented at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto until July 4, as part of the Bent Lens: Pride on Screen series hosted by TIFF and the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival.

@reganreid2

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nothing makes you ignore what’s in front of you like Google Glass. The world fades into blacks and whites as you move your head around in search of the best contrast, fixated on what looks like a shitty version of a phone screen strapped to your face. To onlookers, you look like a slack-jawed moron, eyes raised up toward the great search engine in the cloud.

In the lead-up to Google Glass launching in the UK this week, many pointed out that it isn’t really a consumer product. If you want something that provides a simple body-mounted interface to your phone, smart watches like the Pebble are far more convenient. The only time you need a head-mounted display is if you can’t use your arms or hands, and that’s a pretty specialized case; it’s no surprise, for instance, that Oakley has pitched its smart goggles at skiers, or that surgeons featured prominently in early Glass demos.

Google’s goggles are merely the latest in a long line of ubiquitous computing devices—"smart" mobile, wearable, or embedded products aimed at gobbling up information and shoving it in front of our distracted faces. Two assumptions drive these technologies: that more data is better, and that we want that data to be as visible as possible. The trend is more data, more of the time. If you could burn the current status of every home gadget onto people’s retinas, an engineer at a tech start-up with a stupid name like Squigloo or Globblee would be pitching the idea as a product to some venture capitalists.

Some of these smart devices are more useful than others. Smartphones are bloody amazing. I can’t even remember how I lived before I had one—presumably because my life was so awful without my iPhone that I’ve blanked it all from my memory. Smart watches are still pretty cool, but not quite in the same league. Having a wrist-mounted interface to my phone is handy for checking texts and canceling calls, or displaying information from RunKeeper, but it’s more of a luxury than a must-have. Smart glasses—you’ve lost me.

Over the last few months I’ve been using two "smart home" products, Loop and Cosy. Loop, which I bought for £30 (about $50) from Amazon, sits underneath my electricity meter and monitors my apartment's electricity usage, storing data in the cloud and warning me if my usage goes over my weekly budget, recommending alternative energy providers I might want to switch to. Cosy is a smart thermostat that controls my central heating, providing various settings and schedules and allowing me to control my boiler from the internet or my smartphone. (I received a free test unit from the kind folk at Cosy, but they've reached their Kickstarter goal, so there are presumably more on the way.)

What strikes me is how little I use them both day-to-day. Leap gathers all kinds of data about my patterns of electricity usage, but I learned everything useful from it in the first week. Once I understood how much energy my apartment was using, and which devices were having the biggest impact, what else did I need to know? I could sit and watch it like a hawk every day, asking it to send me alerts every time I climb ten watts over average, but I’m not sure it’s healthy to obsess about your energy usage and I don’t need an email to tell me that turning on the washing machine is using electricity. I can literally see myself doing it.

Cosy suffers from a similar problem. The interface is beautiful, in terms of both the physical device itself (which you can carry around the house with you) and the sleek web interface. Again, though, once I’d set up a schedule that worked in the first week or so, my interactions with it tailed off. That said, the one huge advantage it does have is that I can turn the heating on from under the bed covers on a cold morning—that alone is worth every penny.

Monitoring your body is a bit more interesting than watching your utility meters, and activity monitors by Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings, Nike and a host of others have proven popular. However, like my smart home products, the volume of data produced greatly exceeds the amount of useful information, and the usefulness declines over time.

An activity monitor is great if you’re trying to change your lifestyle, but once you’ve worked out how to do your 10,000 steps and stuff the correct amount of calories in your face, what’s the point? And if you haven’t managed to change your lifestyle—well, you’ve spent a hundred quid on a little bracelet that tells you how crappy you are every day until you dump it in a drawer.

How smart do we actually want or need any of these things to be? The assumption of the tech industry is more is better—more data, more screens, more computing devices, more connections. The trouble is, most problems are pretty simple. I don’t need a massively over-engineered WiFi bulb to light my apartment, and while a web-enabled thermostat is kind of cool, it doesn’t solve any problem that I actually have in the real world.

Then there’s our fixation with data. It’s very easy to fit devices with all kinds of sensors that can record a dizzying array of variables in real time, but more data doesn’t necessarily mean more useful information. Having a fancy chart showing you the quality of your sleep minute-by-minute may be very interesting, but ultimately it doesn’t tell you much beyond “you got enough sleep” or “you didn’t get enough sleep,” and the chances are you already knew that. All those hundreds of data points translate into precisely no useful intelligence.

I love data and I love technology, but sometimes it seems that they’ve become the ends rather than the means. That’s not to say that it’s all BS—all of these devices have their place, and all of them have the potential to be useful to people. There’s no doubt a long, interesting, and profitable future for smart gadgets, wearable devices, and even computers strapped to your face. I just wonder if we’re getting a little too obsessed with speed and quantity over substance—whether we’re in danger of having all the data we want, but not actually knowing anything at all.

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

Photos by Alexander Coggin and Liana Blum

Ilived in a basement beneath a French professor and his wife, who taught German at a dying school for girls. The carpet was pine-green. There was no kitchen. I kept ready-made sandwiches from Trader Joe’s in a brown mini-fridge, and the outline of a sandwich was embossed in burnt sauce on the microwave’s plate. When Agnes visited, there was the sharp, joyous smell of new tires. That was the smell the blue vibrator released when cleaned.

I didn’t ask for help with my career. When she wondered aloud whether she should cast me in her next movie, I said no, she had to follow her vision. We avoided bars where I couldn’t afford to buy my own drinks. I paid for half of everything, except for twice, when we went to resorts she wanted to try, in Montana and Big Sur, and on my birthday, and every once in a while, when she wanted to sit at a table on a deck overlooking the Pacific and for me to be there with her.

At mid-price restaurants, waitresses praised her most popular film. At expensive restaurants, they would tell the owner she was there, and the owner would introduce himself and bring free appetizers and desserts. One owner pulled up a chair after he’d laid out his offering: slices of pie, boysenberry, sour cherry, salty honey. He called for wine and said to Agnes, “It’s been such a fucking night.” We’d never met him before.

Most times I took a shower at Agnes’s house, she knocked on the bathroom door. When she drew back the curtain, the sound of the water changed.

“Show me your asshole,” she said. I turned, bent my knees, drew apart my buttocks, and let them fall back in place. She giggled for a long time, and said, “That is just so wonderful.” I stayed longer in the shower than I had to, after it happened, while she sat on the toilet and read aloud passages of novels she hoped would move me. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “You never gave your mama any trouble.” There was something about the water and the humiliation, heat on heat.

***

Agnes only worked behind the camera, and the fans who accosted her on the street were educated people. One said, “Quietly subversive”; another said, “Throwback to the age of the auteur.” They didn’t so much tremble in her presence as thrum. When they looked at her, there was something in their faces that was rare and handsome: concentration.

Agnes was beautiful when she humored fans. In their presence, she tapped a Gauloise on the heel of her hand. She was smaller and brighter. Her high school self would not leave her, that big-nosed girl with flyaway curls, so she wore her power like a joke, smiled with her teeth, arms folded, eyes incredulous. I saw the point of an entourage.

Once, when we were waiting in line to buy hot dogs from a kiosk at the airport, a teenage girl behind us called someone on her cell phone.

“I’m standing behind Agnes Dakopoulos at a hot dog stand,” murmured the girl. “She’s talking to this guy about how he has to read this book she’s carrying. I thought he was Thor, but it’s not him. She’s wearing white Converse and white nineties jeans and this red polka-dot top with one of those little belts in the back. Now she’s ordering a hot dog.” She gave the play-by-play.

***

The first email from Dorit came when I was watching Vagabond on my Dell, an assignment from Agnes.

Sneeze,
Hope it’s not weird to still call you that? Is it true you’re dating Agnes? She’s one of our clients. How’s that going? Recently sold a documentary-style show on competitive gamers for a butt-ton, made me think of your mom’s boyfriend’s computer-game addiction.

The last time Dorit and I had stood face to face, she had said that it was so sad watching me decline from lacrosse star to benumbed failure that she could no longer have sex with me while fully awake. “If you want,” she said, “you can wait until I fall asleep and poke me. I understand you have needs.” It was odd that she would keep me abreast of her accomplishments.

I showed the email to Agnes that night, in the interest of transparency.

“She walks like a duck,” Agnes said. That was not right. When Dorit wore heels, she threw her legs in front of her and swung her arms, as if she were in a fen.

“True,” I said to Agnes. “You always nail people. I guess it’s because you’re a director.”

Agnes scrambled off the mattress and duck-walked up and down the green carpet, smoking her cigarette, looking nothing like Dorit.

“Oh my God—uncanny,” I said, clapping. “Hi, Dorit.”

We had sex, building to the vibrator, and watched The Lion King. I wanted Agnes to see it so that she could see the real America. As I explained each scene, I found myself telling the story of my boyhood. When it was over, Agnes knelt on my mattress and looked out the window. My purple-and-yellow college sweatshirt was all she wore. She loved the shirt because it proved my world was real.

“The thing about movies like that,” she said, “is that everyone is struggling with real problems.”

“Most people,” I explained, “have real problems.”

“Of course.” She shook her lighter, which, resting on the sill during the climax of the movie, had been exposed to light rain. “But they don’t attack their real problems, typically. They attack fake problems while their real problems eat them alive. That’s what French and German movies get that Hollywood movies don’t.”

“Before you respond to Dorit’s email,” she said, as we were falling asleep, “show me what you’re going to say.”

“Whatever you want,” I told her, and fit two of her knuckles in my mouth.

***

The next morning, I showed Agnes my proposed reply to Dorit: “We’re so in love, such wonderful thing, re gamers.” Agnes approved it and I tapped “Send.”

Thirteen minutes later, Dorit wrote:

Agnes D. and Sneeze in love… adorable, and it should help with your acting. Do you still not talk to your dad since he sent you the McKinsey internship application?

I could feel that Agnes was angry as she read it over my shoulder.

“She’s a cunt,” said Agnes. “She’s a devious super-yid. She wants to scheme you back, now that you’re dating me, because of my...” The omitted word was fame.

I agreed that Dorit’s interest in me had been revived by my dating a famous person. But there was no evidence of a scheme.

“The instant she emails you again, you tell me,” said Agnes, throwing on her blazer, looking for her car keys. She was needed on set; dawn was breaking around the edges of the towel I used as a curtain. Above, the four-year-old screamed like a half-slaughtered piglet and was admonished in French and then English.

“Whatever you want,” I said. I pulled down her pants and fucked her, instead of eating her out or using the vibrator, as I had been doing lately. We said, “I love you.”

***

That night, Agnes showed me The Story of Adele H., by an auteur named Truffaut. It was about a celebrity’s daughter who went mad stalking a soldier who ignored her. The movie didn’t say it, but what it was about was that she got hotter and hotter the madder she became, wandering North American colonies in a green dress.

“I didn’t realize how problematic this movie was when I was a kid,” said Agnes. “I just thought, All the world will attend my dad’s funeral while I’m in an asylum.”

What I liked about the movie, I said, was that the girl had no reason to like the guy. She didn’t know him.

“Of course not,” said Agnes. “It’s easier to be obsessed with someone when you don’t know them. You make them into whatever it is you want.”

But that’s not the point, I thought. She chose to love a god because if she loved a god she could be sad and hot.

“Yes, I see,” I said. I thrust my face between Agnes’s legs and lost myself. After we had sex, she slept with her curly hair coiled against my neck and sucked her thumb in her sleep, and I wiped sweat off her temple with the tip of my finger to taste it.

The next email came in the night. I saw it in the morning, when Agnes was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.

“Uh oh,” I called to Agnes. “Here comes Dorit.”

Agnes came to look at my phone with her toothbrush arrested in her mouth.

Caleb,
You were in my dreams last night. You were riding past me on a horse and hit me in the head with a Barbie.

Agnes paced and cursed, but for half a minute I didn’t hear much of what she said. My face was tight; I was smiling.

“You know,” said Agnes, “I want to say to her, ‘We’ve all been there, girl. I know it’s hard. But it’s over. You man up; you roll on.’” I fucked Agnes. We said, “I love you.”

After Agnes left for set, I walked out into dawn with my hands in the pockets of my sweatpants. The Rust-Oleum-dappled lawn chair caught the red light dully. The four-year-old ran down the slope to stand by the lawn chair and look at me.

“Bonjour,” he said.

“Bonjour, Michel,” I said. The child laughed at me. Dorit’s email had made my happiness uncontainable; my smile stretched my face. With the red light in his lank hair, the child ran into my legs and pressed the side of his head into my crotch.

The next email arrived at noon. It was a photograph of a breast, one of Dorit’s, pale in yellow light. She must have used a mirror, and twisted her torso, for the breast was alone. It consumed the right half of the photo, its nipple at the center, the remainder of the body out of frame. There is nothing lonelier, I realized, than a picture of a tit.

The next email came thirteen minutes later.

What has just happened makes me want to die. I hope you know that I would not do that deliberately.

I forwarded the first email to Agnes. I didn’t mention the second.

She sent back a block of question marks, exclamation points, and obscenities, and I danced by myself on the unkempt grass.

The next morning, I ran my lines for an audition but took frequent breaks to check my phone. By the end of the day, there were no new emails from Dorit. At the audition I was distracted by my memory of the breast and had trouble being a pilot in World War II.

The morning after that, there was still no email. I paced the basement for half an hour, twisting my hands. Finally I wrote Dorit, “It’s not a big deal, just surprised. How are you?” I decided it was unnecessary to tell Agnes. It was a moral issue, because Dorit sounded depressed.

That evening, there was still no response. When Agnes offered to bring Brazilian takeout, I said I was engrossed in a book about theater. I wanted to be able to check my phone in private, in case Dorit replied.

When the sun came up, I checked my phone before I got out of bed. Nothing from Dorit, nothing from the director of the play. I went outside and sat in the rusted lawn chair and, despite the glare on my laptop, priced ropes and stools on Amazon.

For lunch, I ate two sandwiches. I had just opened a paper bag of cookies when my phone sounded.

Dear Caleb,
I am writing to offer my heartfelt apologies for my inappropriate and inexcusable emails. The communications I made to you, while in the case of the photograph accidental, resulted from a lapse in impulse control for which I take full responsibility and for which I have now sought counseling. I do not ask for personal forgiveness, only that you please let me know if you would like me to make reasonable compensation for my actions, such as community service, charitable giving, or participation in therapy.
Sincerely,
Dorit

I threw out the cookies, ran to the gym, and listened to heavy metal on the StairMaster.

Agnes knocked on my door at dusk, tired from a day on set, her makeup imperfectly removed. A stroke of eyeliner emboldened her left eye. Her MacBook was tucked under her arm, because we had plans to watch part one of Fanny and Alexander.

I unlocked the door and sat on my mattress, waiting.

She took a bottle of chilled Beaujolais from her bag. Next, a DVD of Debbie Does Dallas. Next, two cucumber-and-egg-salad sandwiches with their crusts cut off. She placed them at my feet and stood back.

“Did you break into my email?” I asked.

Agnes looked scared. She shook her head. “I forwarded the photo you forwarded me, as evidence.”

I didn’t say anything. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. I could smell that she had farted.

“Let’s have dinner somewhere really amazing,” she said. “It’s my treat. I insist.”

“Okay,” I said.

Agnes drove a Civic Hybrid. Its hum made me think of a dentist’s drill as we passed a lake trimmed with busy dealers and idle rowboats and merged with the northbound 101. The silhouetted tops of palm trees hovered like spiders in the sky.

“I made sure they didn’t fire her,” said Agnes. “I insisted.”

I asked if they had spoken.

Agnes cracked the window and smoked. “On a conference call. She cried. She just said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’” When Agnes did the imitation, her jaw twitched and smoke came out of her nose.

I told her to take the next exit, and we sank into a lowland of fast food and half-gentrified strip malls. I instructed her to pull into a parking lot shared by a pharmacy, a Laundromat, and a gelateria.

Agnes stopped the car and put her hands in the air. “I have a problem with jealousy,” she said. “I’m sorry I hurt someone, but I acknowledge it, and I will try to get better. I am so sorry.”
I didn’t like to hear her say this. “It’s okay,” I said.

“No, really,” she said. “I’ll go to therapy. We can do couples therapy. I want to get better.”

“Stop,” I said.

She looked confused. “I’m being sincere. Maybe this could be an important wake-up call. If I work really hard, maybe it will bring us closer. We could get to a more honest, real place.”

I wanted her to stop sounding like a normal person. I thought about what it would be like, getting to a more honest, real place with her, and then I unbuckled my seatbelt. As I opened the door, I saw Clif Bar crumbs in the plastic pocket beneath the handle.

Behind me, Agnes started to cry. The landscape whipped and sharpened as if it were the screen of a television that had been smacked; I wondered if I was crying. An Aztec family paraded from the pharmacy in white T-shirts, a boy bucking in the seat of a shopping cart like a knight riding a horse into a valley. The streetlamps were dimmed by light fog or dirty air. A Hummer’s dashboard was coated with dust that glared like pollen in the Civic’s beams.

“Why are you walking away from me?” asked Agnes. She was calling me “sweetie,” softer and softer.

People ask me what Agnes was like, and I think, what was Agnes like? I don’t know. What she was like was:

Agnes is talking to me. That’s Agnes’s body. Agnes is educating me. I just made Agnes cry. Agnes is taking me out for my birthday dinner; that’s actually Agnes sitting across from me, with the bluffs behind her, white as dentures. That’s Agnes on the toilet. Agnes is getting jealous of her friend’s Independent Spirit Award. That’s really Agnes at the kitchen island, eating strawberries with the greens still on, depositing the greens and the surrounding flesh on the orange tile.

I wonder whether Agnes watched herself the way I watched her, the way the fan at the hot dog stand watched. Maybe she thought, Now I, Agnes, refuse to tolerate Dorit’s incursions; I, Agnes, am directing the situation. Now I, Agnes, am on my trailer on set, listening to country blues on my portable record player, purchased at a small record store, because I was raised bohemian. I, Agnes, am reading a book, a present from my famous father, who named me after a director because he knew I would be a director. I, Agnes, look up from the book to note the interesting sunlight that overwhelms the venetian blinds.

I dated her for eighteen months, and I don’t know what she was like. I wasn’t—I’m realizing this for the first time as I say it—I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t paying attention to what she was like. What she was like was not the point for me.

Benjamin Nugent’s story “God” will appear in The Best American Short Stories 2014.