Toad Road is a new film directed and produced by Jason Banker that simultaneously expands the parameters of what documentary filmmaking can be and blurs the lines between that format and traditional scripted filmmaking. In production since 2008, Jason views the film as a “horror-thriller” that follows the lives of a group of hard-living young friends who pursue an urban legend in York, Pennsylvania, that concerns a path in the woods that supposedly leads to the seven gates of hell. Their journey is one of self-discovery, heavy drug use, nihilism, and all of the other things young people around the world are struggling with at this very instant. What sets Toad Road apart from other movies is that the film was conceptualized and shot in a hybrid documentary-feature style, weaving a narrative out of the real lives of its subjects in a way that hits on greater truths than either form is capable of alone.

The film is due to be released—appropriately—this October. And it was during a prerelease screening attended by Elijah Wood that his horror-film company the Woodshed decided to back it as executive producers. I spoke with Jason and Elijah about the premise for the film and how the definition of “horror” has changed in this increasingly terrifying world we all share.   

VICE: The way you cast this film was unique. But it falls in line with the aesthetic of the film. A few years ago, when you were conceptualizing the movie, you looked to VICE’s top MySpace friends and through that found your principals. How did that idea come about?
Jason Banker: I wanted to do a hybrid doc-horror thing, but I wanted it to be real situations. I started using MySpace first because at the time you could search it by area code, and I wanted to shoot it in my hometown. But I couldn’t find anybody from there, and I was like, “God, I want some really cool kids.” People who were pretty hardcore, you know? So I thought I should go on and check who’s friending VICE because everybody who reads VICE is connected to that culture. So I did that, and I found this perfect group of kids—actually I found one, and then I looked at his top friends and they were the perfect cast.

How long ago was this?
I started casting in 2008. It’s been a long process because I didn’t have any money to make the film and I needed to find real kids. I wanted to do this thing where I used their real lives and bend a fictional story around them. They were totally down to do it. And I told them I wanted to use like them using real drugs and being who they were, and find the characters that way.

Yeah, I think obvious comparisons will be made between Kids and Toad Road. But even though Kids featured actors who were sort of reliving or embellishing real-life experiences and its aesthetic was appropriately gritty, with your film you’ve defined parameters that blur the lines even more. No one on your cast was a professional actor in the slightest. Did you face any difficulties when you had to direct them in the more narrative-centric scenes? There’s some traditional “acting” involved, but there are also scenes that seem like straight documentary, and I imagine that was a challenge. 
It was definitely difficult. The first thing I wanted to establish was a story about a guy and a girl—a couple—going into the woods, and when I got into shooting Sara [Anne Jones], I realized I wanted her to be the lead, but she was dating Whitleigh [Higuera]. So there was a lot of friction because I had to pair up James and Sara, and Whitely kind of got frustrated. I actually ended up incorporating some of this into the film, where Sara starts sort of seeing Whitleigh. So that’s one example of the kind of difficulties we faced. Then there were other things, performed things, that I wanted to do—performances that also relied on real drug use and real moments and letting it be organic and actually crafting the story around that.

I imagine the editing room is where a lot of the fine-tuning of the narrative took place, and lots of surprises were discovered.
I shot a lot, and then what happened was I started editing it and that’s where Random Bench was incorporated. I started working with them a little bit, and we would talk about how the actual narrative needed a couple of extra things here and there. There was a lot of shooting additional scenes after the fact. We massaged the story as we went along, realizing we needed more elements to talk about.

The process of a filmmaking process such as this must have also had residual effects on the actors in their real lives. Were you conscious of that as you were shooting? Did you have parameters? In other words, was anything off limits?
I tired to make it as low impact on them as possible and the whole point was to work with a group of friends that had their own dynamics and emphasize those. But we worked on it for such a long time that certain people started having issues with other people… The film really comes down to James and Sara, which made it doable because I wasn’t focusing on the whole group for the whole film. James and Sara were very professional, and they wanted to tell the story and keep working on it. Without them, the film wouldn’t have come together. They put a lot into it.

The film explores what might be considered a sort of tortured existence of a group of young friends in a very real way. Tragically Sara passed away last September of a drug overdose shortly after the film’s premiere. I’m sure everyone who worked on it was deeply affected, but in some ways it makes the film’s story all the more powerful. But it’s real, these ramifications of nihilism and drug use and—I guess… boredom? How did her death affect you and how you viewed the project in hindsight?
It’s been very difficult for any of us who have been involved in the film. It’s super tragic. It’s very hard for us all to believe... I don’t know… I’m still working though a lot of things about it. And even the film itself is difficult because it’s a document about a group of kids. It’s a time capsule and you look at that and reflect on that, and it makes things very complicated and confusing and, yes, even more tragic. It’s tough to talk about, but I felt like she put a lot of herself into the film. It’s obvious that she was an up-and-coming person. People have really responded to her performance, and I was thinking of dedicating the film to her.

VICE: How did you become involved with Toad Road? I know that you saw a screening after its completion, but what compelled you to back its production, after the fact?  
Elijah Wood: Well, it so perfectly exemplifies what we’re trying to do with the Woodshed, our horror-production company. We came across the film last year at Nightmare City, which is this film festival that we started with Cinefamily. We were programming the festival and looking for films, but actually weren’t actively looking to lend our name to them. It hadn’t even occurred to us, because we were so busy producing our own content. But we came across this film, and part of our interest in starting this company was not only to make interesting genre films—specifically horror films—but we were really excited about the notion of trying to make films that kind of pushed the boundaries of what people consider a horror film. And, seeing this film, it so perfectly exemplifies that mission and that idea, because the movie—effectively, a good 80 percent of the movie, or 70 percent, depending on what Jason would say—is a genuine documentary. And then he weaves this kind of horror narrative into it in a way that the documentary elements are sort of horrific in themselves. We were blown away by the hybrid, and how organic it felt. We’ve seen a couple of films—Catfish being one of them, I guess—that tries to sit within the context of being a genre film, and people often question if it’s real or not. And with this, there was no question. We knew it was real and, therefore, extremely powerful and disturbing and difficult to watch. So it hits you on a visceral level. We were extremely impressed by all of the elements. That’s what pushed us to want to be a part of helping them get it seen by other people.

It seems that your company is part of a growing trend—with something like Django Unchained, for instance—that hones in on genre in a very specific way to almost subvert it, turn it on its head to widen the scope of what a genre film can be. With Toad Road, it becomes more intriguing because of its hybrid nature, but there is definite “horror” there. What are the parameters of the horror genre to you? What scares you? 
That’s a good question. It’s interesting, because I think you’re also talking about the idea that the definition of genre, I think, is, in a way, becoming blurrier. [laughs] And I feel like we’re in a much more global world now, in regards to the cinema that we’re exposed to. Some of that is responsible due to VOD and the power of the internet in terms of giving attention to films that people may not have otherwise seen. A lot of those films tend to be genre. And it feels like genre has sort of expanded in its reach—and it’s not just to a sort of select audience anymore. I find that interesting. I think that, as it pertains to what is “horror,” or what we look for and what scares me… it can be a variety of things. I’m moved by and inspired by classic horror cinema and cinema from the 70s and 80s, and those things that remain frightening and remain scary. But I think there are human stories that can be equally as scary and don’t necessarily have to include any kind of exploitable elements or “horror.” In a way, those are the stories we’re looking for. We [at the Woodshed] always talk about the notion of classic horror movies that we love, that if we were actually to take the genre elements out, they would still be compelling. I think that one of the elements that I love so much about a movie like Let the Right One In, for instance, is that’s a movie where you could take the vampirism out of the film and the film would survive on its storytelling, because it’s essentially about a boy and a girl who become friends. I think that can be true of horror at its greatest—that it’s not surviving wholly on its violence or its gore, but that it’s actually surviving solely on its storytelling and its characters. And that’s where it should rest its hat on.

The drug use in the film is real, which is sort of terrifying—perhaps especially to those who have no experience with drug use. Do you view Toad Road as a sort of cautionary tale? 
It might be. I think it’s a cautionary tale about what can happen with letting go... going down the path of that much drug use. Experimentation with certain substances is a part of being human, and it’s sometimes a part of expanding one’s mind and having different experiences. But it can also lead to dark places. Which I also think, to a certain degree... it’s those kinds of things that are reflective of our own internal struggles, too. If we’ve got something to sort out that’s unhealthy within the context of our insides and who we are, I think that that probably will manifest in the substances that we choose to experiment with.

@rocco_castoro

Wanna see Elijah Wood get shot? Check this out:

I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Boobie'

And more film stuff from VICE:

First Patrick Bateman, Now Anna Nicole Smith?

‘American Psycho’: Ten Years Later/Twenty Years Later

I’m at the four-star Radisson Hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania's capital, for one of the world’s most cosmopolitan gatherings of former and current drug users. There are heroin-injectors from the slums of Nairobi, opium-eaters from the streets of Nepal, and crack-smokers from Kabul, alongside a number of health workers, human rights campaigners, and politicians.

Like reading about drugs? Interviews with People Who Just Smoked DMT | In Colombia, Lawmakers Debate Making Ecstasy Legal | Can Digital Drugs Get You High?

In total, 750 people have made it to the International Harm Reduction Conference in an attempt to figure out how to reduce the damage being done to drug users by the world's governments' War On Drugs. For four days, the Radisson is a bubble of immunity for narcotics fans from Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, and other states whose citizens are beaten, slung in remote detention centers, and denied basic health care because of their drug habits.



At the hotel, there are needle cans in every bathroom (all hotel staff have been trained to dispose of used needles), a pop-up methadone clinic, a needle exchange, and a heroin overdose nurse on hand to pull delegates back from the brink (by the end of the conference, she'd saved three lives).



In the huge first floor lounge, a heroin-smoking workshop entitled "Demonstration: Foil Pipe Making Techniques," carried out by a drug worker from Kent named Neil Hunt, is attracting a large and curious crowd, with Neil using sugar as a heroin substitute to demonstrate the best way to craft your own homemade pipe. It’s not often that you find heroin-smoking workshops in the middle of a corporate hotel in a former Soviet state. But, to be fair, it’s not often you go looking for them, either.

I decided to leave Neil's demonstration to meet some of the attendees and find out more about the lives that had brought them here.





Outside, I talk to Sergey Uchaev, a 30-year-old drug user activist and former heroin user from Uzbekistan. He tells his translator that he's worried I'm from the KGB. I think he’s joking, but it turns out he’s not. The Russian authorities have a track record of spying on activists in former states. Plus, he’s a drug user activist, so no wonder he’s wary.



Sergey had his leg amputated 13 years ago because of infections caused by shooting up. He was 17 at the time and had already been injecting for three years. He tells me he had no idea it was addictive or that you could get diseases like HIV and hepatitis C from using needles. Later in life, he was sentenced to five years in prison after he was caught with a spliff.

Anastasia Teper, 30, who works for a charity called Vocal that helps young drug users, tells me in a thick Brooklyn accent that coming to this conference so close to Russia means her life has come full circle. In the early 1990s, her impoverished Jewish-Gypsy family fled from Moscow, fearing persecution. They took refuge in New York, and at 15 she ended up falling in love with a heroin user, six years older than her. By 18, she was speed-balling and had a full-blown crack and heroin addiction.



“I realized that, all along, my boyfriend had wanted to get me addicted to heroin to have someone to share the whole drugs and money thing with.” By 21, she had been sectioned twice and had tried to kill herself just as many times. “I was getting ready to die. I had a death wish. I could not see past the age of 25,” she tells me. “But when I turned 22, I realized I wanted to live. Most of my friends are dead, but now I’m caring for people, which is what I always wanted to do.”

Daniel Tinga is from Nairobi in Kenya. He’s probably the biggest man I’ve ever seen, standing around seven feet tall. He started using heroin when he was 26 after becoming a “safe-keeper” for a drug baron. “I used to hold kilos of heroin for him in my house where I lived with my wife and two kids. I got paid £300 (about $460) a month per kilo. At first I didn’t know what I was looking after... but I realized when then they started bringing junkies around to test it.



"I was curious, so I stole a bit from the stash, smoked it, and it felt nice, like a euphoria. I was secretly using 1.5 grams a day, but then my wife found me very high and decided to leave me. The drug baron found out I'd been taking some of the stash, so he fired me. I got very depressed. In order to buy heroin, I started dealing. I was also a mugger. I think I have the build for that job.”



Fred, a quick-talking Frenchman, has tigers tattooed on his neck. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, he spent his 20s DJing on the Paris catwalk scene, regularly hoovering up four to five grams of coke a day—for nine years.



“It was too much, I know, and it wasn't possible to sleep sometimes, but I never had financial problems. Life continued; it was cocaine, clubbing, and sex. I thought about that product, cocaine, more than my own existence.



“I found out I had HIV when I was 18. My future was to die young. I was depressed, but I had so much fun with cocaine. The public have a bad opinion of drug users—they consider us criminals—but they all drink alcohol, and that's far more deadly.”



Brun Gonzalez, 24, also uses his experiences to help other people. When I ask him about drugs, he tells me that he’s “lived a bit,” which, after we get chatting, turns out to be something of an understatement. His body is a walking drugs well.



A reclusive outsider at his school in Mexico City (“because I had hippie parents”), from age 13 he was mixing “a non-stop series of chemical concoctions... whatever drugs I could find," and locked himself away in a studio playing psychedelic blues on his guitar.



By his late teens, he was injecting cocaine, mescaline, and opium in the same session. He had become a psychonaut—someone who explores the mind using an array of new and old psychoactive substances. “What I like about drugs is the introspection,” he tells me.



If there is a king of the drug users, it’s Eliot Albers. He is chief executive of what's effectively the global union for drug users, the International Network of People Who Use Drugs (Inpud), which has a stall at the conference and some nice T-shirt designs. A former punk from London whose drug career was sparked after reading Junky by William Burroughs as a teenager, Eliot was “a fairly withdrawn, depressed, pensive teenage existentialist worried about cosmic matters, death, and doom.”


“I thought heroin sounded like something I really ought to try,” he says. And he did. Straight out of school, he took off to the Golden Triangle, one of Asia’s two main opium-producing areas, and spent a whole year smoking high-grade heroin brought straight from the factory with two guys in a room in Chiang Mai. “It seemed to suit my temperament; it made me comfortable, relaxed and confident.”



Eliot’s passion for opiates led him to a stint eating opium in Palestine and another as a heroin-smoking philosophy lecturer. Now, he is one of only a few hundred people in the UK to receive injectable morphine on the NHS.



“I’ve never bought into the notion that addiction is an illness. It kept me functioning how I wanted to function, it suited me. I have a very strong bond with drugs. It’s a passion.”





The strange thing about Abdur Raheem, 49, from Kabul, is that after living one of the toughest lives imaginable, he is the mellowest person here. He started eating opium in an Iranian prison (where he had been sentenced to 12 years after getting into a fight) so he could numb a painful leg, allowing him to play soccer in the exercise yard.



"When I ate opium, it was a very special, enjoyable moment that I cannot express in words,” he tells me. After he was released from jail, addicted to opium, he discovered his fiancée had disappeared and his parents were both dead. He was then deported back to Kabul, where he became homeless and joined a community of 700 heroin injectors squatting in the city’s bullet-ridden former Russian cultural center.



An injecting abscess in his groin led him to a new drug clinic set up by Medecins de Monde, and Abdur became the first Afghan to be treated with methadone. After seven detoxes, he quit methadone, has been off it for two years and is now part of the Afghan Drug Users Movement. Expecting a harsh rebuke, I ask him if he uses any drugs nowadays. “Sometimes I take cocaine and crack,” he smiles, “but only with my friends at parties.”


Elsewhere, there are screenings of short films, one of which is called Carpet Drugged. Footage shows children in a hut in an Afghan village being fed opium by their parents to stem the pain from weaving carpets all day. This guy, Bikash Gurung, 26, won the best film award at the conference’s Drug Film Festival for Journey of Change, a film about how young drug injectors across Nepal are, as he was, routinely kidnapped, tortured, and detained by police. When Bikash was caught with some heroin in his teens, he was interrogated and beaten for 53 days before spending nine months in a jail where half the inmates were there on trumped-up drug charges.



There are other presentations about child glue-sniffers in Mombasa and teenage mephedrone-injectors in Bucharest. There’s a workshop about anthrax-contaminated heroin and one about how Sweden’s much-hyped drug treatment system isn’t as good as it thinks it is.



Having a conference about how best to help people with severe health problems is a perfectly sensible and laudable thing to do. But what makes a drug users conference at the Radisson hotel in Vilnius so absurd is the absurdity of the drug laws that brought these people here in the first place. None of the people I met were monsters. They seemed like good people who had suffered deep unhappiness, put themselves through a chemical wringer, and managed to come out fighting. By and large, they seemed to have done far more damage to themselves than to anyone else. Yet, what became clear from chatting to them is that, wherever they came from, the state had made it harder for them to survive and escape their situation for one reason: because they took drugs.

Not for the first time, I was left with the impression that the world's governments are less interested in waging a war on drugs than they are a war on drug users.

Follow Max on Twitter: @Narcomania

Kendrec McDade was killed by the police last year partly as a result of a false report to 911, but no one is getting punished for his death.

Welcome to Bad Cop Blotter, our weekly news roundup that compiles instances of cops behaving like assholes and the occasional instance of an officer actually serving and protecting the community.

Whose fault is it when cops shoot the wrong guy? That’s the question raised by the case of Oscar Carrillo of Pasadena, California, who this week pled guilty to filing a false police report that lead to the death of a 19-year-old robbery suspect back in March of 2012. Oscar was “frightened” after getting his stuff jacked, he later said, so in order to provoke a faster police response he lied and claimed in a 911 call that his assailants were waving guns in his face. The cops ended up chasing a 19-year-old named Kendrec McDade, who was black, and Kendrec—in absolutely cliched fashion—reportedly reached towards his waist as if he had a handgun. If you’ve ever heard a story of a police shooting, you can fill in the rest. One officer fired four shots from the patrol car; the other, who was on foot, fired three additional times after thinking Kendrec was the one shooting. The teenager turned out to be unarmed.

His alleged accomplice, a 17-year-old, was caught and charged with two counts of burglary. The stolen property was never recovered. A witness said that the patrol car (which hadn’t turned on its siren or dash cam) was very quiet, he didn’t hear the police identify themselves, and he thought the shots were “a drug deal gone bad.”

In December, the Los Angeles County District Attorney said that the officers were acting in self-defense and in March the shooting was ruled lawful after an internal investigation. The investigating officer in that case, Corporal Keith Gomez, was recently the subject of an NAACP complaint alleging that he manufactured evidence and intimidated witnesses in previous cases, including a murder investigation—and there are other reasons to raise an eyebrow toward the credibility of Pasadena police. But officially and legally, at least, the shooting was justified. So does that mean no one is to blame?

At the time, the shooting provoked outrage in the community and was compared to the death of Trayvon Martin. There are always depressingly similar stories of young black males killed by cops floating around, and when you hear them, it’s hard not to wonder whether cops just have itchier fingers when it comes to someone who looks like Kendrec. Or if you’re a law-and-order type, maybe you dismiss that narrative about racist cops in favor for one about a kid doing something he shouldn’t have been doing and getting on the wrong side of the law, and you figure he caused his own death.  

What about Oscar, who told a lie that led fairly directly to a man’s death? He was initially taken into custody and threatened with involuntary manslaughter charges, but in the end his conviction was for making a false report. His punishment is 90 days in jail, 90 more of community service, and most bizarrely, $3,000 to be paid to Pasadena police to reimburse them for the resources they used in the investigation of the shooting. (Oscar could also be deported, as he is in the country illegally.) The death of a teenager is tragic, but the fact that the courts and the police deal with it by essentially shrugging and saying “These things happen” makes it worse.

More bad news from Copland:

- New York City Muslims got together (with help from the American Civil Liberties Union and others) to sue the NYPD for violating their constitutional rights. New York cops have been monitoring Muslims all over the Northeast in an attempt to find terrorists, but the widespread and intrusive nature of the spying program—first revealed by the Associated Press in 2011—has resulted in many Muslims feeling harassed and threatened.

- Last Sunday, a confused, autistic 11-year-old girl was found wandering near the road in Ashland, Oregon, by a man who called the police. A cop showed up and promptly used his taser on her.

- On Monday, June 17, a cop in Liberty Hill, Texas, went to the wrong house to serve a warrant and ended up shooting a dog that approached him. The dog survived, but the family that owns the house—who don’t know why the officer was even there, let alone why he decided to fire three shots at their pet—say the police should pay the vet bills.

- Another family dog was shot in El Monte, California, on Wednesday. Surveillance footage supports the family’s claim that cops ignored two “Beware of Dog” signs and entered their backyard without taking any precautions. Sadly, this dog eventually had to be euthanized. (The officers were there in the first place to follow up on a report about the family’s runaway son.)

- Las Vegas cops apparently require a SWAT team to serve an arrest warrant on a couple using their home as an illegal brothel, which was raided on Thursday.

- Similarly, the police in Norwalk, Connecticut, used a SWAT team to arrest six people for illegal gambling. Good use of resources, guys.

- The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that the police arriving at your home with an Army helicopter, and a ton of semiautomatic weapons doesn’t count as “coercion” and if you agree to have your home searched in such circumstances, it’s as legal as apple pie is American. As a result, a 78-year-old man’s conviction for growing weed will stand. :(

- Police in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, screamed at a woman and forced their way into her home to serve an arrest warrant for the woman’s landlord. The crime that justified such extreme behavior? The landlord had failed to cut the grass.  

- A lawyer filed a lawsuit that claims Maricopa County, Arizona, deputies savagely beat and arrested him when he tried to speak to his employee who was being arrested on suspicion of a DUI.

- Let’s not forget the Good Cops of the Week: Knoxville, Tennessee, police chief David Rausch and internal affairs unit captain Kenny Miller, who defied the blue line of silence and helped bring to light a February 9 beating of a homeless man by three officers as well as the ensuing coverup by various supervisors. Three former cops accused of the beating have plead guilty. It's a relief to know that not every cop who beats the shit out of someone for no reason gets off scot-free. Have a good week, everyone! 

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

Previously: Stop SWAT Raids

Photos by Nate Miller

The Chateau Marmont hotel has famously served as a welcome respite for celebrities looking to avoid the all-seeing eyes of the public. Whether it’s Lindsay Lohan ducking from the omnipresent tabloid press, or John Belushi throwing off the pesky shackles of mortality, the Chateau has long been a place where you can go specifically to not be seen. But that’s not so for musician and visual artist Devendra Banhart, who agreed to spend a full day in one of the hotel’s rooms as part of the clothing line Band of Outsiders' exhibition for its 2014 Spring/Summer collection. With cameras set up all over his room streaming live to online viewers, his every move was on display and his every word audible to anyone who cared to listen.

I pulled up to the valet outside of the Hollywood landmark and thanked myself for getting my car washed a few days ago. It still looks like a piece of shit, but at least it gave me enough confidence to hold my head up high among the hotel’s patrons who were shelling out hundreds of dollars a night to feel like real celebrities (conveniently forgetting that celebrities never pay for anything). I went upstairs to check in with my contact at Band of Outsiders and was met with a room of eight people watching one of the three monitors displaying the different camera feeds from Banhart’s room. It felt like one of those uncomfortable moments at a party when someone wants to show everyone something on YouTube. Except it’s not YouTube, it’s live, and you’re at the Chateau Marmont instead of your friend’s shitty studio apartment.

The event worked by organizing the collection into various looks and associating them with certain themes. The Band of Outsiders team would inform Banhart of the theme and give him a directive by knocking on the door and passing along an envelope containing a typed note with instructions. The image I saw on the computer screen when I walked in was of Banhart playing with a small child. This was nostalgia. Afterward, the child was traded for a barber and manicurist who went to work on Banhart. That was vanity. I learned that I’d be eating lunch with Banhart for my interview, and that the theme would be hunger. I immediately became apprehensive. I won’t say no to a free lunch, but I am a notoriously slow eater and began to work out the schematics of asking questions while maintaining some sense of dining etiquette. I was told we’d have another 30 minutes or so until they needed me, so I went outside to smoke a cigarette and steel myself.

I smoked three cigarettes and came back. I chatted with Scott Sternberg, the designer for Band of Outsiders, about why he chose to eschew the traditional runway approach to unveiling his collection. He pointed to the success Band of Outsiders has had in doing so before, and stated his belief that the runway is not the most conducive venue for male models or clothing. As we were talking, he looked up at the computer screen to see Banhart still being groomed for the theme of vanity. Sternberg asked, “Should we move on? Is this getting boring?” I began to worry about how long it would take him to ask the same questions once my interview started.

Fortunately, I didn’t have long to freak out. I was told that the food for lunch was ready and that I’d be going into Devendra’s room. The hotel servers knocked on his door, and a look of surprise registered on his face. We exchanged names and handshakes before sitting down to eat. I grabbed my BLT, and mentioned that this was a dream scenario for me. Not because of the subject of the interview, per se, but because it was a blessing to be able to eat at my own pace while someone else spoke at length. I asked him if he was hungry, to which he replied, “No.” This seeming impossibility shook me to my core. Now I’d be eating slowly in front of someone who wasn’t eating anything. A fate worse than death, indeed. Banhart must have sensed my unease, because as I stared blankly at him he assured me, “Eat. I’ll talk, don’t worry. I’ve got logorrhea.”

Less than a minute in and I was already impressed by his vocabulary, which didn’t fail to disappoint throughout the rest of the interview. We spoke for about 30 minutes and I got about four bites into my BLT. Here are some of the conversation highlights.

VICE: With all these cameras, I can’t help but think of the recent issue of NSA surveillance in the US. Are you at least comforted by the fact that you know you’re being watched?
Devendra Banhart: No, I’d much rather not have any idea. I prefer not knowing that I’m being filmed. I’m sure that someone has access to the camera on my computer, and I spend half my life in front of that screen, but in this situation, ignorance is liberation. I really admire people who can just be themselves or a version of themselves they don’t regret later. A lot of us don’t like the sound of our own voice, sure, but most of us know how to speak and act with the camera on.

I’m envious of those people. Ian Svenonius comes to mind. I know he’s being a version of himself, but it’s such an incredible, sagacious, and charming version. Which is him, but a version. He’s aware he’s doing an interview. There are those people whose art I love so much, but they can also be insightful and give an amazing interview. Maybe it’s genetics. The diplomacy gene.

What is your relationship to fashion and clothing? Are you a clothes horse?
I like clothes. I really do. I like going through colors, in a way. I go, “Greens, man. Greens. Oh, yellow. This yellow feels good.” So it shapes your psyche in a way. But I don’t think about it too much, even though I’m interested in it. So why am I doing this? Because I think this is a company that makes some of the best stuff. I think of a fashion company as its own little museum, and there’s a whole look to it. From the tag to the material to the label.

Green is one of my favorite colors. And here I am wearing this lovely green. It’s almost a nostalgic green. Like a lived-in green, with a bit of kitchen appliance thrown in there. So we can visit different cultural epochs with what we wear. For me, I don’t really know how to talk about how I feel about fashion. It’s not that I have some issue with it. I really like fashion and I’m happy to talk about it. But what usually inspires me to wear something is the cut and the fabric. And as a record collector, I’ll go through these different phases. So I’ll get into a scene and look for something that touches on that.

The current theme you’re exploring right now is hunger. I know you’re not eating, but what about the bigger kind of hunger? You’re a successful musician now, and at one point I imagine you hungered for it. Do you still have that same hunger? Is it different now?
No, no. I can be very used to something, but not comfortable in it. I don’t think I’ve reached that idea of success yet. For me it’s about making a full album I really like. Or with visual art, I do variations on a motif and repeat it for long periods of time and then move on to another motif. So there are five more motifs that I need to tackle before feeling excited for where I am. So I don’t think I’ve lost a hunger for success. Look at where I am doing this shoot for Band of Outsiders at the Chateau. It’s an incredible privilege and honor. It’s flattering, but I still have that feeling that everyone is going to figure it out and pull the plug. And I’ve had that feeling since the beginning of my quote, unquote career.

[He then asked me about my BLT, and I answered that it was relatively light due to the minimal amount of mayonnaise. He then brought up a type of mustard he can’t find anywhere before moving on to fermented horse milk, which is apparently all the rage in Mongolia. That touched off a brief discussion of our mutual love of milk and, in particular, milkshakes. I recounted a time recently when I had two milkshakes in a row, and he said he had done the same thing, although his body hated him for it.]

It’s like when you’re a kid and you think about being an adult and what that means—for a kid that means drinking as many milk shakes as you want.
Oh, yeah. Like I imagined I would have so many skateboards on the wall. I remember when I was a kid I thought I could either be an athletic water drinker, like an Olympic-level water drinker, or I could invent Windex. Which I thought was really smart, because it already existed.

I had a friend in high school who had a younger brother and we asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said he wanted to be a milkshake. I thought that was a perfect answer to that question.
That’s the best answer to any question. Like, what time is it? I’d like to be a milkshake.

I imagine you stay in a lot of hotels.
I sometimes feel like I should be in the hotel business.

You know that feeling of walking into your hotel room? It’s almost like a new-car smell. Does that ever go away?
It happens every time, and it’s only the anchor of a consistently similar bathroom that I create that gives me that sense of, “No, I know this.” So always the car smell, but then I go right to the bathroom and I align the toothbrush in a particular place and the toothpaste in a particular place and then that new-car smell evaporates. And then I go, “Oh, OK, I’m someplace familiar.”

[During that last question, the phone in the hotel room started ringing. It just got boring, I thought. The call was from the other room, asking me to wrap it up. I complied, but I didn’t get out of there before Banhart was kind enough to ask me some (at least seemingly sincere) personal questions. As I left the room, plate of BLT in hand, I started to fret about how the interview played out. Did I ask the wrong questions? Should I have talked more about clothes? Was I… boring? But I didn’t hang on this line of thinking too long. I had bigger things on my plate. I sat down on the couch while the team left to prepare Devendra’s room for the next look and finished my BLT.]

Check out the video of Allen's interview with Devendra below. It starts at 4:09:17 and ends at 4:41:00.

More interviews with musicians on VICE:

How to Not Violate Man Code: My Day with Waka Flocka Flame

The National Helped Elect Obama, but Don't Call Them a Political Band

Finally, the Hip-Hop Kids Are Taking Acid

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

My co-workers are always going to exotic places, doing dangerous things. I, on the other hand, rarely leave my desk. I don’t like heights, going swimming makes me immediately imagine drowning, and having to drive a car down a windy road makes my crotch sweat. My three biggest fears are impotence, accidentally eating mold, and Nazis. So, when approached to scope out a purported Nazi hideout in Los Angeles’s Rustic Canyon, I jumped at the opportunity to do something crazy for once.

I absolutely wish I hadn't. Murphy Ranch, as it's called, was built in 1933 by wealthy American Third Reichers, Winona and Norman Stephens to house a totally self-sustaining Nazi community. Nazi sympathizers engaged in military exercises, under the expectation that the war in Europe would inevitably spill over into the American mainland. That didn’t happen, and the ranch was abandoned. There seemed to be nothing to worry about, but if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s that I will find something worry about.

After driving to the end of a residential street, we reached the entrance to Camp Josepho, the current name for the recreational area where the ranch resides. A barrier stands guard to keep unauthorized vehicles off the camp’s trail. We ditched our car and began the hike into the canyon. We hit a fork in the road, and I left our bag of empty beer bottles on the ground as a marker in case we got completely lost, which I was sure we would.

If it wasn’t bad enough that we were walking in 90-degree heat through a goddamn forest, we found our path down into Murphy Ranch. A seemingly endless series of 500 poorly fashioned stairs appeared to be our only means of accessing the Nazi campground.

There were no guardrails, and each step was about as wide as half my foot. In my mind, an elaborate scenario played out in which I would slip, fall 50 feet, bump my head on every step on the way down, then be Medivac-ed out via helicopter, and having to live the rest of my life inside an iron lung.

Thankfully, I didn’t fall and get shoved inside a giant, metal burrito, but there was still plenty of treacherous terrain left to go. Once we got into Murphy Ranch, there were tick-warning signs everywhere. All I know about ticks is that they attach themselves to your body and suck your blood, plus they carry Lyme disease. Good thing for me I was wearing shorts so that the ticks had easy access to my fucking legs.

The first major landmark we came across was what I learned was a diesel power station. At the time, I assumed it was some sort of altar where they sacrificed Jewish virgins to the pagan Nazi god (admittedly, I don't really know very much about what Nazis do). I had already heard that the owners of the ranch had been convinced to build the compound by a German named Herr Schmidt, who claimed to have supernatural powers and regularly conducted séances in his ample spare time. So it seemed highly plausible that he was also big into human sacrifice.

The historical record is hazy on this, but my posthike research confirmed that no sacrifices took place there. There was clearly plenty of partying that went on recently, as the litany of empty beer and spray-paint cans strewn about illustrated. I’m pretty sure Der Fuhrer would not have approved of all those people drinking warm American beer in his compound.

Adjacent to the power station was a large water tank that looked like it had been shot at with a cannon. There was a massive depression in the center of the tank, which made me want to investigate further. By “investigate further,” I mean, run screaming in the other direction because something horrible must have happened there. We opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank, and much like the power station, it was filled with empty beer cans. The only horrible thing that went down must have been a guy throwing up.

The last major structure we came upon was the living quarters. I gathered that this was meant to be a place of habitation from all the broken sinks and stoves lying around the site. In its heyday, it must have been quite a sight to behold, but in its current condition, not so much. Unless you enjoy spending your nights next to a rusted out VW hippie bus. 

Instead of turning around and going back the way we came, it was decided (against my will) that we would trek farther through the camp in the opposite direction. I was positive we’d seen everything, and taking a new route would get me eaten by bears. Also, we left the empty bag of beers at the fork in the road, and I hate to litter. As you can see in the above photo, I even went so far as to remove a used pair of undies that some sneaky bastard had left behind. A dirty Nazi campground is something I cannot accept.

My entire body itched. I felt bugs on every inch of me, even if there weren’t actual bugs anywhere to be seen. The bugs were in my mind. I actually jumped a quarter of an inch in the air (my vertical leap is atrocious) when a lizard popped out from underneath a severed car door. The lizard was no bigger than my pinky, but it was definitely full of poison. I could see it in its eyes. It was a killer lizard.

After another 20 minutes of my stopping every few feet to catch my breath, we ran into a giant iron gate. This was the actual entrance to the ranch. There were no dangerous staircases, just a gentle road that led back onto the trail we had arrived from. If we had just kept walking a few more feet past the stairs at the beginning of the day, I never would have had the a series of minor panic attacks and hot flashes. Still, I suppose the experience of taking those stairs and roaming through the canyon helped me overcome my fears of falling, bears, and most importantly, American Nazi sympathizers. For this, I am eternally grateful.

@dave_schilling

For more weird LA shit:

How Poisonous Is the LA River?

Exploring the Interior Designs of Los Angeles Weed Clinics

Celebrity Swatting and Other Popular Los Angeles Trends

Photos by Nicky Young.

On Thursday afternoon, news broke that a crew of activists had shut down construction on Enbridge’s Line 9 crude oil pipeline in Hamilton by camping out on the site and locking up the gate with their own lock. Line 9 stretches from Sarnia to Montreal and over the past few months it has attracted the ire of protesters from across the country. That's because Enbridge is looking to reverse the flow of crude oil so that it will start running from west to east—a move that many worry will increase the likelihood of a spill somewhere along the pipeline’s path. While defenders of the reversal plan say there’s nothing to worry about because the line has been reversed before, activists don’t buy that explanation. On top of that, protesters are extra pissed off because the National Energy Board required any dissenter to Enbridge’s reversal plan to submit a ten-page application just to have their voice heard.

To get a closer look at this latest protest in Hamilton, I went down to the construction site where Enbridge is working on Line 9 to chat with some of the activists and see what exactly was going on. According to David Prychitka, the man acting as a media liaison for the activists, the protesters are planning on camping out at the construction site until Enbridge’s reversal plan is stopped.

“There are direct environmental concerns, we know that Enbridge as a company averages one pipeline spill every five days, between 1999 and 2010 they themselves reported 804 spills,” said Prychitka. “90 percent of those spills occur around pump stations.”

With the North Westover station being so close to Beverly swamp and Hamilton watersheds, activists are particularly concerned about the possibility of a spill in this area. Despite the high level of spills on Enbridge’s track record, Graham White, manager of business communications at Enbridge, says the company’s goal is “zero spills.” Well, no kidding.

Another source of local controversy for Enbridge comes from their recent gift to the Hamilton police force. The energy giant recently donated over $44,000 to the Hamilton Police Services so they could buy a sweet new ATV, along with mapping and GPS equipment. Activists see the donation as a concern that the Hamilton Police Service will be biased towards their new, petrochemical sugar daddy.

Graham White says the notion that Enbridge expects favouritism from the police is “cynical and irresponsible.” He says they donated that money as part of the Safe Community Program and that Enbridge has been donating cash and resources to different public services for years. The program is “to be better able to respond to any pipeline incident.”

As of right now there has been a small police presence at the protest site, and Enbridge and the activists have had some type of an open dialog. So far, no legal action has been taken against the protesters but it’s unclear as to how far Enbridge’s patience will last. After all, like it or not, they have work to do. While the activists have essentially taken control of the construction site, they have politely agreed to let two to three Enbridge workers conduct hourly checks on the site to ensure everything is running safely.

Since the takeover of the site, the activists have received donations, and have seen some new protesters join their cause since it all got started. On top of that, the protest has garnered positive support online from those who cannot attend. Currently there are about 60 activists camping out at the construction zone. Henry Allen, a protester I spoke with, summed up the cause for me bluntly: “I'm concerned about our land’s environment and the watersheds. I want it to stop.”
 

To find out more about the protest, you can check out their Tumblr. Or pop over to their Twitter timeline for live updates.


More about Line 9:

Enbridge's Sketchy Pipeline Reversal Plan Affects Most Canadians

Nuremberg's Zeppelinfeld. Image via

It’s amazing to me how many real-life Spinal Tap moments I’ve had. This always leads me to ask myself, “Did that really happen, or was I so fucked up that I just imagined it?” You know, tramping around a backstage construction area with INXS, searching for the stage door for an hour before giving up. Watching a groupie’s face melt after finding out the opening band she’d just gangbanged wasn’t Danzig, the headliner. And my favorite, watching the Ramones demand that me and the staff at Punk magazine cross out, by hand, all reference to them as a punk band in their cover story. They just didn’t think the term was “accurate.”

This month, Black Sabbath released their new record 13, and it shot to number one in the UK after its first week of sales. Now remember, that’s 43 years since “Paranoid” went number one in 1970.

I’m also reminded that some of the dumbest metal moments—some of those Spinal Tap flashes—have landed among the most profound experiences of my life. I had one of those bizarrely significant experiences with Ozzy Osbourne in Nuremberg, Germany, in the same stadium where Leni Riefenstahl made her epic Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.

I was traveling with Scorpions, a huge heavy metal phenomenon of the 1980s. They were so internationally famous that I had to wonder if the whole world had gone batshit crazy. Not that Scorpions sucked. Far from it—they were a decent band with some great songs, and they put on a fantastic show. It was the ratio of fame to talent that was a bit disproportionate, if not utterly ridiculous.

Still, Scorpions were good guys, even if one time they had their roadies strip my clothes off and strap me into a harness, sending me sailing high above the band—naked—in front of 50,000 commie kids in Budapest, Hungary. Maybe I deserved it. Here’s what happened, and then I’ll get to Ozzy.

It was in the last years of my drinking, when my life was an utter train wreck. The chaos followed me to Eastern Europe, on tour with Scorpions. First, I caused the press junket to miss our flight because I was having too much fun in the airport bar. Then I offended everyone at the reception at the German embassy in Budapest. And then I called a girl back in New York City who I was having an affair with and passed out on the phone, leaving me with a $700 phone bill in the morning. The next night I caused a real barroom brawl—complete with Russian soldiers battling it out with Hungarian draftees—smashing everything in the joint, from the big barroom mirror to the tables and chairs, then I hid under the bar, giggling madly.

That was a lot of fun, actually. It was almost like being in a cowboy movie when the local ranchers meet up with the cattle rustlers and kick the shit out of each other—except that two KGB agents found me, dragged me out, stuck me in a little car, and drove me to what I thought was going to be prison. Since I was so fucked up, and already living in one movie, I just switched the channel to some spy movie and growled, “You goddamn commie bastards, you’ll never get anything out of me except my name, my New York City library-card number, and my blood-alcohol level!” 

But instead of a place of torture, they dropped me off at some Roman ruins that’d been transformed into a swanky tourist spa and restaurant. There was a meet-and-greet dinner with Scorpions going on. I was more horrified than if they’d taken me to jail, thinking, Fucking Disneyland? Lenin’s dream of a workers’ state now holds all the charm of a waterslide? Is the entire world turning into fucking Cheese Whiz?

Since the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine had just melted down in April of 1986, which was only 800 miles from Budapest, and clouds of Cesium 137 were wafting over the Hungarian countryside, I thought it best if I did not order the lamb, beef, or chicken. I ordered the frogs’ legs. When my order arrived, it looked like the frogs had been cut in half, their little hips were still attached—so alcohol told my brain to shove a frog in my nose. Scorpions thought it was mildly amusing, except for the drummer’s girlfriend, who began vomiting at the sight of half a critter protruding from my face.

The party broke up pretty quickly after that, and that’s why they strung me up naked over the stage the next night.  I was swung bare-assed over the band. It was humiliating. But even after all of that, as I watched the rest of the Scorpions’ show from the side of the stage, I couldn’t help thinking that Communism wouldn’t stand a chance against the power of rock ’n’ roll.

On the short flight from Budapest back to the West, I was feeling a bit like the boy who gets caught whacking off while watching a fat-lady porn—disgraced. Everyone on the plane was giggling at me. Thank God we were getting out from behind the Iron Curtain, where Scorpions were rejoining the 1986 “Monsters of Rock Tour.” Our first date back was in the charming little city of Nuremberg, Germany. I quickly joined the roadies and guitar techs in the hotel bar to resume drinking and restore my confidence, since I’d realized that the way to maintain my alcoholism was just not to stop. I knew that if I paused for a second in my drinking, I was in for some horrible withdrawal symptoms. The obvious conclusion was to just keep going, and forget about Budapest.      

I was sitting in the Nuremberg Hotel bar with all the other drunks when Ozzy Osborne made his first grand entrance. He was dressed in some extravagant bright suit with scarves, gloves, top hat, and other weird shit. It looked like he was about to take the stage in front of thousands of people. We all just laughed, since their were no women in the bar or record company people. There was no one there to impress except for the seven or eight of us lowly rock ’n’ roll drunken functionaries, shaking off last night’s hangover.

When Ozzy didn’t get the reaction he desired, he disappeared back into the lobby and reappeared about ten minutes later, having changed into an even more elaborate costume. What the fuck was he doing? We just laughed even harder and went back to our drinking. It was pretty pathetic really: Ozzy desperate attempt to get a reaction from a bunch of losers like us, and us laughing at such a gross display of drug-induced insanity. We got into it as Ozzy disappeared again, only to reappear another ten minutes later, having changed his clothes again.

It was ugly. Ozzie made about six or seven entrances into the bar for our amusement, before he finally ran out of gas. The whole time we were screaming at him, asking him how many dicks he had to suck to get his shoes or whether or not he could stuff a bit more down the front to draw more attention to his crotch. Maybe it was his preshow warm-up, or maybe did it out of sheer boredom, but I wasn’t expecting much from Ozzy that night at the show knowing how wasted he’d been that afternoon.

It wasn’t until I arrived at the Zeppelinfeld, where the concert was being held, that I’d realized I’d seen the place in hundreds of documentaries on World War II. It’s the famous stadium that Albert Speer had built for Hitler—the one with the giant, concrete swastika on top of it—that always explodes in that dramatic film footage that starts every Nazi documentary.

I was a bit shocked that I was so familiar with this place, since I’d never been there or even knew we were going. None of the road crew had any interest in history, and to them it was just another venue. But I knew what this place was and what it stood for—Hitler's rise to power.

Without Ernst Rohm’s million-man army of National Socialists called the SA, Hitler wouldn’t have had the base of support essential to his early successes and probably would’ve become just another angry guy shaking his fist at the sky, muttering about the “injustices” of the world. Instead, Rohm carried Hitler into power when he became the Reich chancellor in 1935, and then disbanded the German Republic and transformed it into a fascist dictatorship. Once securely in power, Hitler no longer needed his old pal Rohm, and on the week of June 30 to July 2, 1934, had Rohm murdered along with thousands of other SA members in what became known as “The Night of the Long Knives.

In order to unify any hurt feelings because of his liquidation of Ernst Rohm and the SA, Hitler held a rally at the next Nazi Congress in the Nuremburg Zeplinfeild, where 700,000 Nazis’ swore their personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The film of this event was titled The Triumph of the Will, and became the most stunning piece of propaganda ever produced.

"When Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment,” William Shirer wrote in Berlin Diary of the Nuremberg rally, “[The people] reminded me of the crazed expressions I once saw in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers... they looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman."

I sat watching the Monsters of Rock Concert from Hitler’s box seat, right in the middle of the stadium. The giant steps where Hitler and all the high Nazi functionaries stood during the rally had become the bleachers for the concert—everything had been reversed. And I was reminded of the Shirer quote, as the fans looked equally insane, possessed, and inhuman. Maybe it was all that cheap wine, bad dope, glue fumes, black leather, and denim, but the most disturbing thing about them was that a lot of them had the Confederate flag stitched, stapled, or painted on their jackets as an homage to American rock ’n’ roll. This was pretty much the most evil symbol the fans could have used since the swastika was banned in Germany at the end of WWII. I’d never seen it used so unironically.

Just as the crowd was building to testosterone frenzy, Ozzy took to the stage. Somehow the Blizzard of Oz, the craziest fucker in rock ’n’ roll, the man who’d been doing bizarre costume changes just a few hours ago, faced this savage beast of a crowd and began to sing. And not just any heavy metal song, but the most appropriate song ever to be played in this fucking cesspool of evil: “War Pigs.”

And then everyone in the audience began to sing along with him:

“Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses / Evil minds that plot destruction / Sorcerers of death's construction / In the fields the bodies burning / As the war machine keeps turning / Death and hatred to mankind / Poisoning their brainwashed minds—OH LORD YEAH!”

Never had I been so moved by a metal song or so grateful for Ozzy’s fucking brass balls as I’d been that night, sitting in Hitler’s box seat, dazed by this confluence of history and pop culture. God bless Ozzy!

Maybe someday Sabbath will play a cut off 13 in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Previously - Happy, Happy, Happy! - A Memory of Arturo Vega

Not long after the existence of the NSA's massive PRISM surveillance program leaked, Snowden truthers began speculating on the leaker's identity. Was the whistleblower still an NSA agent? Was it all just a false flag operation? 

These were more or less reasonable questions, as it was impossible to know at first who the leaker really was. Snowden's very public outing of his identify only added fuel to the fire. From there, the conspiracy theories went into their theoretical paroxyms. That paranoia over Snowden's real modus operandi even managed to infect journalists and writers like Naomi Wolff, Ezra Klein, and Evan Soltas. 

Wolff, who in Shock Doctrine theorized a corporate-state economic panic machine, wrote a Facebook post in which she speculated that Snowden is actually still an NSA agent:

I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive—even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times—rather than the machine itself—that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests—why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times—unless we know about it?

Klein and Solta, writing in their daily Washington Post column Wonkbook, even went so far as to suggest that Snowden doesn't actually exist. That he is, more than likely, a NSA creation—a diversionary tactic to get the masses following a narrative, "emotional arc," and thus forget the NSA leaks themselves.

"Aeroflot flight 150, from Moscow to Havana, was packed with dozens of journalists who’d bought tickets to get a glimpse of, and maybe even an interview with, fleeing leaker Edward Snowden," write Klein and Soltas. "But when the doors closed and the plane readied for takeoff, they made an unpleasant discovery: Snowden wasn’t on the plane... There is, of course, only one explanation for Snowden’s absence: He never existed in the first place."

Let's pretend for a second that they aren't being cheeky. (An added editor's note makes clear that it's a joke.) For the Klein and Soltas theory to work, an endlessly fascinating, all encompassing, stem-winding NWO-style conspiracy theory must be explored, in which all of the following would have to be true: Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian and Washington Post were complicit with the NSA; Julian Assange is a NSA agent; WikiLeaks is an ongoing false flag operation and isn't actually with Snowden; and Russia, China, Hong Kong and Ecuador are all in league with the US. Put more simply, America's domestic and international spy operations have completely infiltrated every foreign government, news organization and airport in the world. 

We could even get playfully recursive with the theory. Perhaps Klein and Soltas are, in fact, NSA agents spreading disinformation. Maybe I am, too.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.

For the past few weeks the bus-fare protests in Brazil have been raging. Last week, the government announced they would reduce fare to its original rate in an attempt to quell the outrage. Members of the Free Pass movement held a meeting this past Sunday to announce another mass protest to be held today to fight for a new set of demands, such as:

- Demilitarization of the police.
- More money for public health and education, and less for the World Cup.
- No tariffs on public transportation.
- Reduction of the work week to 40 hours without loss of pay.

VICE's Tim Pool flew down to São Paulo a few days ago to report on the protests and produce this live stream.

For the full story behind the bus-fare protests, watch our documentary, Teenage Riot - São Paulo.

Previously, Tim was in Istanbul covering that city's massive uprising for us.

Emre Elmekci, a Kurdish activist, sits on a barricade in a road leading to Taksim Square during clashes with the Turkish police. 

The fallout from the protests in Turkey isn't all bad. Unthinkable only three weeks ago, the demonstrations have begun to unite Turkey's Kurds – both those in Istanbul and travelling there from the east of the country – with a broad cross-section of Turkish society, all under a collective banner of anger against the government and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Years of clashing with riot police in the east of the country has taught the Kurds a couple of things about protest tactics, and their know-how came in handy the weekend before last when Gezi Park was forcibly evicted.      

Sidenç is a Kurdish 20-something from Diyarbakir, the major city in the Kurdish part of Turkey. "Most English-speaking people call me Angel, so call me that," she said. And the name is fitting; she's a strikingly beautiful girl from the eastern heartlands of Turkey's Kurdish population who's flown in with her equally striking friends to support the anti-government occupation.

The day before Gezi Park was evicted, we were all crouched under a tarpaulin, smoking cigarettes. "We're here to support this revolution, despite 30 years of problems, pressures and no recognition for the Kurds," Angel told me. "We're here in solidarity with the Turks in Istanbul. Now they [predominantly young, middle class, first time protesters] know what Kurds have been experiencing all these years."

And the Kurds present at the occupation have been sharing their hard-earned knowledge of how to face riot police with the first time protesters. According to Sarphan Uzunoğlu – a teaching assistant in Kadir Has University, who's involved with the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party – the sharing of those defence techniques has enforced a newfound unity through "common struggle".

Both Sarphan and Angel told me that it's the Kurds who "know how to build the barricades" to protect protesters from police. "We know how to fight the TOMA [the government's armoured water cannons]," she said. "We've been doing it since childhood." Oiling the roads is one tactic, but barricade-building was the main focus among protesters. At strategic points around Taksim Park over the weekend -- and during other clashes over the past few weeks -- the streets were packed with lines of protesters ripping up cobbled pavements and dumping them, by hand, onto piles of garbage, fences, billboards and whatever else they had to hand.

Of course, ripping up the pavements to build barricades isn't exactly legal, and the police would argue that it justified their intervention in the eviction of Gezi Park (the extent of police brutality, however, seems impossible to justify). Angel tells me that, while most young, middle class kids from Istanbul spent their youth enjoying the fruits of economic growth under Erdogan, "We've 'the Kurdish community] come to know the government's tools", meaning water cannons, pepper spray, tear gas and sound bombs. "Tear gas doesn't affect us," she told me, laughing.

Kurdish activists sing and dance in the Kurdish camp in Gezi Park.

It's not only during the clashes that bridges have been built; it's also through living cheek by jowl in Istanbul's Gezi Park. Çansu, a young commercial lawyer and first time protester, says that, "they [the Kurds] really knew what they were doing. We [the large number of young professionals] had no idea – we'd never even heard of TOMA before Gezi Park". And rubbing shoulders with Kurds has changed her views towards the community as a whole: "I never realised how fascist I was," she admitted. "I was thinking, 'The Kurds are terrorists.' I didn't care about their demands. But after being in Gezi Park, after seeing how the police react over these past few weeks, I realised that I might be wrong and that I needed to adjust my ideas."

The Kurds' role in the Turkish state is a highly contentious political issue, and although these protests have undoubtedly broken down boundaries for some, there's been no "official" support for the movement from any Kurdish political party. To his credit, Erdogan has successfully pressed ahead with a Turkish-Kurd peace process and no one wants to scupper it. But walking around the occupation or going to the general assemblies that are sprouting up in smaller parks across the city, it's obvious that many Kurds, as individuals, have the same gripes as those out on the streets: they don't like the way they're being governed.

Happily, there's been few reports of hostility towards the Kurds during the protest. Rather, many talk about non-Kurdish Turks joining the circles of dancers who were singing traditional Kurdish songs at the main entrance to Gezi Park before it was razed. And although the sharing of knowledge was common during the protests, the importance of who exactly was introducing what skills is fading. Far more important now is that, by connecting with Kurds over the past few weeks, people are being forced to question their own government. "I understand their ignorance of the Kurds," Angel told me, referring to Turkey's non-Kurdish population. She says the Turkish government "never told the truth about us, so they never understood us".

Kurdish women shout slogans during a march to Taksim square.

Although most media outlets in Turkey either didn't cover the protests (Turkish CNN infamously broadcast a documentary about penguins while the streets were full of CS gas) or echoed the exact sentiments of what Erdogan was saying, it's clearly impossible for those living in the centres of Istanbul, Ankara and other major cities to ignore the protests. Ozgur Mumcu, a professor of international law at Galatasaray University in Istanbul, says that ordinary Turks are beginning to realise "that the misinformation about these protests might mean that they were also misinformed about the Kurds". If nothing else, these protests are exposing the extent of the Turkish media's self-censorship.  

So after an exhausting, sleepless weekend of clashes – and after 130,000 tear gas canisters had been fired across the country – things have quietened down in Istanbul. In an act of defiance that people hope won't lead to police intervention, Taksim Square and other small squares in Turkey's major cities are now punctuated with solemn, motionless "standing" protesters – a symbolic and passive wave that's caught on over the last week.

And this contemplative mood has also led to various neighbourhoods organising packed-out general assemblies in parks across the city. People are figuring out what's been achieved and what to do next. "And the Kurds are involved in this process," says Sarphan. "It feels like the symbols of the past have fallen away and the symbol of 'resistance', if you will, is now the major thing in Turkey. We're only a few days in, but the future might hold a new politics – Turks and Kurds together."

However, it will only hold out if the police don't interfere. "People are furious," Sarphan continued. "If we're terrorised again, it's likely things will flare up. I hope not." Professor Ozgur Mumcu thinks that the main achievement is the birth of a new culture of politics, but – not quite as youthfully optimistic as Sarphan – he isn't sure this wave of national indignation will last and, if it fizzles out, the catalyst for change between the Kurdish community and the rest of Turkey will be lost. "It will probably fade out in a week or so," he says, "just as Occupy Wall Street did, or May 1968 in France."

But Angel, getting up from the tarpaulin to greet some friends who'd just arrived from her hometown, seemed pretty hopeful about the future of relations between the Kurdish population she comes from and the rest of her country. "We all now properly recognise each other. And this is good; this is really good."

Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @jonwiltshire

More stories from the uprising in Turkey:

Istanbul Police Tear-Gassed a Memorial March This Weekend

Talking to Besiktas' Bulldozer Joyriding Fans About Their Role In the Turkish Uprising

The Battle for the Heart of Istanbul Is Raging On

Watch - Istanbul Rising

Members of the New Black Panther Party at a rally in Trenton, New Jersey. Photo by Bob Jagendorf via

After being leaned on by his country’s constitutional courts, President Robert Mugabe finally said that he’ll hold elections in Zimbabwe by the end of July. Or, at least by August 14... Despite the fact that practically the whole world thinks of him as a genocidal dictator who will have to cheat his way to victory at the polls, Mugabe has received some unlikely firsthand support for his election campaign from a group based in America—the New Black Panther Party. Some members of the NBPP recently traveled to the country, ostensibly on a “fact-finding mission,” but, in reality, to support Mugabe, a man they consider to be a “legendary liberation hero of Zimbabwe.”

“Our mission to Zimbabwe was both political and spiritual in nature,” official NBPP spokesman Chawn Saddam Kweli tells me. “The New Black Panther Party is pan-Africanist in ideology and scope. We believe that we are duty-bound to link up with our brothers and sisters in our motherland of Africa."

Based in Texas and led by Attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz, the NBPP preaches a doctrine of racial segregation, racism, and violence. The group was founded in 1989 by breakaway members of the Nation of Islam. Although its recruits do follow a modified version of Huey Newton’s ten-point program, the NBPP is in no way a successor to the original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which formed in 1966 to combat racial inequality in America.

To gauge how far removed the message of the NBPP is from that of the original Black Panther movement, the Huey Newton Foundation has offered an insight into these “neo-Panthers” in an open letter with the fairly emphatic title, "There Is No New Black Panther Party."

“As guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party, the Foundation, which includes former leading members of the Party, denounces this group's exploitation of the party's name and history,” it reads. “They [the NBPP] denigrate the party's name by promoting concepts absolutely counter to the revolutionary principles on which the Black Panther Party was founded.”

Just in case the Huey Newton Foundation didn't express their disdain for the NBPP clearly enough, the letter goes on to compare the NBPP to the Ku Klux Klan.

Members of the original Black Panthers holding a demonstration in Washington. Photo via

So, in what way exactly will these detached New Black Panthers support Mugabe’s reelection?

“We regard his excellency, the honorable President Robert Mugabe, as the only remaining visible pan-Africanist in power since the murder of Libyan President Colonel Muammar Gaddafi,” says Kweli.

“Tens of thousands of young Zimbabweans have so far registered in order to vote for President Mugabe in the coming elections. Our goal is to inform the ignorant masses in America of the struggle of the Zimbabwean people, of the good work of President Mugabe and his cabinet toward the upward mobility and maintenance of Zimbabwe.”

Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister of Zimbabwe and direct political opponent of Mugabe, of course disagrees with the claims that the dictator has helped Zimbabwe progress as a nation. He told the Zimbabwe Mail recently that Mugabe is the one person responsible for the country’s economic meltdown, due to his “financial mismanagement.”

Mugabe’s financial mismanagement includes the wanton printing of money in 2008, which caused massive hyperinflation—to the point where the country once had only $217 in its bank account. The agriculture industry was decimated when Mugabe ordered his troops to seize almost every commercial farm owned by a white person, and thousands of Zimbabweans were turned into internally displaced people when the slums they lived in were destroyed. The unemployment rate in Zimbabwe is now estimated to be higher than 70 percent. That means around 9 million of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people are out of work. Of course, in the long run, a lot of this is due to the ongoing effects of colonialism, and the economy in Zimbabwe is actually stabilizing. Nevertheless, it's difficult to see how this tallies with the NBPP line that Mugabe has overseen a period of "upward mobility."

Quanell X, leader of the New Black Panther Party in Houston, Texas. Photo via

Despite all of this, Kweli goes on to say that the NBPP support Mugabe’s violent land reforms (which often involved torture) against “white criminal settlers.” I ask Kweli what the NBPP make of Mugabe’s other human rights atrocities, such as the politically-motivated mass murder that he instigated at Matabeleland in 1982. An estimated 20,000 innocent people were slaughtered under Mugabe’s command.

“We echo the sentiments of the honorable Robert Mugabe, who said in 2000: ‘The killings and atrocities that took place in Matabeleland in the 1980s were reckless and unprincipled.' It was wrong and both sides were to blame,” says Kweli. “To his credit, at least he was man enough to admit where he was at fault and make public adjustments to correct the wrong. America today still benefits from the institution of the transatlantic slave trade and the loss of 600 million Africans over the past 6,000 years and 500-plus years of our black holocaust in America.”

That America could do more to acknowledge the death and destruction it has caused by slavery, invading other peoples' land, and committing its own acts of genocide, is a given. But to praise a man in the same breath who also murdered tens of thousands of his own people seems unfathomable to me.

The NBPP’s pro-Mugabe tour did have a brighter side to it, though. They apparently “adopted an orphanage full of black children” while in South Africa (or "Azania," as Kweli calls it—Azania being the ancient name for South Africa).

They also teamed up with the nationalist Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania. Together, they toured the slums of Zimbabwe, where the NBPP held talks and educated listeners about apartheid, the Sharpeville Massacre, and colonialism. The fact that the New Black Panther Party is a far-right organization that frequently spreads a message of racial hatred casts a shadow of doubt upon what exactly it was they were teaching. Kweli himself tells me, “We believe the white man is absolutely disagreeable to live with in peace when it comes to black people and the sharing of wealth and power.” A few hundred years ago, he’d have a point, but it's kind of unnerving that this ideology is being spouted in 2013, especially in a country like Zimbabwe, where people are still very much affected by genocide, racial segregation, and colonialism.

King Samir Shabazz at a rally in Trenton, New Jersey. Photo by Bob Jagendorf via

Kweli tells me, however, that the NBPP only promote violence as self-defense. However, this seems to be in complete conflict with the sort of message the NBPP’s “National Field Marshal” King Samir Shabazz spreads on a regular basis.

“You’re going to have to go into the goddamn nursery and just throw a damn bomb in the damn nursery and just kill everything white in sight that ain’t right,” he was once heard to say during a media appearance. With his own personal brand of Nazism, King Samir Shabazz is the uglier side of the NBPP. He seems solely committed to spreading hate. “I would love nothing more than to come home with a cracker’s head in my book bag,” is another one of his many outbursts. This ridiculous rhetoric is the kind of thing that the right-wing white folk of America love to pounce upon and scream “Terrorist!” at, but surely Shabazz isn’t serious? After all, he’s yet to actually start lynching the people he hates so profoundly—unlike the KKK, who committed over 3,000 racially motivated murders in their day. 

Kweli reassures me: “It’s not people like him [King Samir Shabazz] you devils got to worry about. It’s the ones who are less vocal who hate you the same, or worse, than him. All of us in the New Black Panther Party do, however, believe in peace when possible and violence when necessary.”

For someone who called me a devil and essentially said that violence against whites is inevitable, Kweli seems relatively friendly. “The NBPP have plans on making more positive outreach efforts a reality, to enhance the hope and joy of black people all over Azania, for a better future," he tells me. Which doesn't sound that bad at all, does it?

Part of this program of positivity, he tells me, is a webcast the NBPP have arranged with Mugabe in June. He will deliver a keynote address, titled: “President Mugabe Speaks to the World On the Future of Africa and Land Ownership.”

One seemingly immediate problem here is that land ownership isn't a topic that Mugabe has traditionally spoken very positively about. Nevertheless, the blurb for the broadcast—which will take place on the NBPP website—assures us that it will provide Mugabe with “a platform in North America to speak to his supporters and also answer his critics.” I wonder how he will answer them? By simply not advocating the deaths of white landowners? I guess that would be some kind of improvement.

Larry Pinkney. 

In the media, some have failed to acknowledge the disparity between the NBPP and the original Black Panther Party when reporting on their antics. While it's true that the NBPP dress up in a similar black military uniform, don black berets, and even use an almost identical logo as the original Black Panther Party, given the evidence, this is clearly a dumb mistake to make. For further clarification, I spoke to original Black Panther, Larry Pinkney, about the new party using their name while cavorting around Zimbabwe with Mugabe.

“The utter defamation, distortion, and disfiguration of the people's history, and the name, legacy, objectives, and the accomplishments, not only of the original Black Panther Party, but also of organizations with whom the original Black Panther Party worked—including the Peace and Freedom Party, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, the White Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society—by the hate mongering, the so-called New Black Panther Party is sickening beyond words,” he said. It may not surprise you to learn that Larry is now a political activist and writer.

“Why did the so-called NBPP go to Zimbabwe to sow their seeds of enmity, fear, division, and distrust? Whose interests are really being served by their activities?" Larry continued. "Africa—be it in Zimbabwe or any other African nation—has its own very serious problems, which are only exacerbated by the visitation and insanity of the so-called NBPP. People cannot effectively fight racism and exploitation with more racism and exploitation!

"Surely, the so-called NBPP is very cognizant of this. It is disgusting that they are spreading their hatred to Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the African continent.”

While it’s evident that the NBPP have some backwards ideologies, are they really that dangerous? While out patrolling the streets, are they really looking to shoot down innocent bystanders because of the color of their skin? Kerry Patton—security, terrorism, and intelligence expert, and author of Contracted: America's Secret Warriors—doesn’t think so.

“Do I see them as a threat? Not really,” he says. “But if I felt any threat existed from them, it would be on the micro scale related to the populace in which they operate, which is not nearly as large as some would like to believe.”

Patton was keeping surveillance on a single NBPP member who stood dressed in semi-military uniform outside of a polling station in Philadelphia last year. This incident resulted in a court case being brought against the NBPP for voter intimidation, which was later thrown out at the last minute by US Attorney General Eric Holder.

Patton tells me the NBPP recruit specifically stated that he was there to “ensure no violence exists around the polling station.”

“We actually chuckled at one another through some jovial remarks we made to break the ice,” says Patton. “His actions were not intimidating, at least to me.”

Jovial remarks and laughs outside the polling station—not quite the militant behavior that King Samir Shabazz rants about. No bombs in nurseries, no NBPP uprisings in South Africa. The NBPP aren’t terrorists, despite talking like terrorists and being branded as such. Nevertheless, as Larry Pinkney says, Zimbabwe has some very serious issues to contend with—issues that the NBPP, or any other outside group, can’t fix. The people of Zimbabwe should of course feel empowered and have their voices heard and be entitled to what is inherently theirs, but if history is anything to go by, the New Black Panther Party’s lobbying for more hate, more racial segregation, and more genocide is probably not the way to do it.

Follow Jake on Twitter: @OiJake

Robert Mugabe Is Having a Tantrum Again

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Shouldn't Robert Mugabe Be Dead Already?

Happy Birthday, Robert Mugabe

Steve Jordan with a headset on. The headset is probably playing a Drake/Arcade Fire mashup. via CBC Radio 3.

When the Polaris Prize began in 2006, its long list used to read like a who’s who of obscure new talent that was only familiar to the most obsessive of Canadian buzz band aficionados. But in the past few years, that trend of discovering young blood quickly moved towards rewarding people like Feist, and bands like Arcade Fire, tens of thousands of dollars that they have graciously donated to charity. Prize money aside, the focus of Polaris has evidently shifted away from rewarding up-and-coming acts to shining more praise on acts that don’t necessarily need it. Or at least that’s how a lot of cranky music nerds have come to look at it all.

According to Polaris Prize founder and director Steve Jordan, the inclusion of mainstream artists into the Polaris lists is a byproduct of the Canadian music industry being in fitter, happier, and more productive shape. While this might be cause to celebrate, it also means that your favourite electro-filth-folk band is never, ever going to win the Polaris Prize. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Anyway, I spoke with Steve Jordan about how Polaris has evolved, and how the prize is not designed to be a charity for the indie scene—whose very existence he suggests is a suburban legend. Because, what is a genre anyway, right?

VICE: One criticism that’s plagued Polaris since its inception is that you only have ears for indie music. What do you say to that complaint?   
Steve Jordan: Are Drake and The Weeknd, both of whom were recently nominated, indie acts? When people say indie, I don’t know what they mean. The idea of indie has more to do with the listener’s own political or fashion sense, you know. It doesn’t really describe anything. I don’t know what it means. I bet you can’t describe it to me?

Uh… orchestral elements, sweltering major-7 chords, 80s synths. Hipster fashions. I don’t know.   
You’re struggling to describe it to me.

I’m a little curious why you’re so curious about my definition.
I care because you’re a writer, and the term is an invention of writers. You never get an indie rock band saying, “I’m in an indie rock band," until some journalist writes it first. But ultimately I think the real question should be what’s good? That’s all we’re trying to say at Polaris.

Well, obviously some of the recent nominees are not indie, in the sense of being independent from major record labels. It’s also debatable whether these acts, Drake especially, need $30,000 of Polaris money. Isn’t that making the prize’s purpose redundant?
This whole notion that Polaris is a prize to give money to the needy is completely off. It’s not why we exist. I can understand why people see it that way when they see that the water supply for Drake’s entourage costs about what we would’ve given them in prize money had he won last year. So, I completely understand why people think that the rich shouldn’t get more money. But I would respond to that criticism by saying, check out our mission statement, which is to highlight what the critics say is the best album of the year.

Part of the issue seems to be that the Canadian music scene is at a commercially more vital moment than it was around the time the Polaris Prize was established. Relative to its history, what do you think the state of the music industry is like today?
I think it’s in a great place. The system that’s been built over the past ten to twenty years is something to behold. Canadian music is something to be proud of, and furthermore, it’s become one of our most important and successful exports. I would put it up there with lumber, potash, and Alberta's oil sands. 

Do you think Polaris has had anything to do with this development? 
I would never say that we’re solely responsible. Not to use too hippy of a reference, but there’s a rainforest kind of thing in the Canadian music industry where all of the organisms, the bands and funding sources alike, live off each other. Certainly artists who get a lot of attention like Arcade Fire, Feist, Metric, or even Austra end up bringing as much international attention to Polaris as Polaris is bringing to some of the lesser-known artists on our list.

There’s also a conservative position that subsidization eases the pressure on artists to find an audience for their work. How do you respond to that argument?
That’s a pretty blanket statement about conservatives. I know quite a few who are actually arts funding supporters. Even Rob Ford, during this latest controversy, went on record as supporting the arts. Heritage Minister James Moore follows Polaris, is a fan of many of the artists nominated, and is very vocal about that. I think what you’re talking about, that argument, was circling around much more about ten years ago.

Dropping the argument’s political baggage, how do you respond to it? It’s a popular concern about the consequences of arts funding in general.  
My perspective is if you’re a patriot and want your country to excel, it’s not really about supporting things that are popular. A population is only as healthy as its art, and there are a lot of popular things that are unhealthy, Bum Fights among them. (Laughs). Don’t you remember that series of videos, Bum Fights?

Yes, I sure do.
A population is only as healthy as its art. Especially in a country that, you know, outpunches its weight when it comes to what we contribute culturally to the world. There have been arts cuts under a lot of governments, but I doubt they’ll ever cut it entirely. It’s just too important.

Doesn’t the commercial success of many Polaris nominees show that the effect of the prize has been the opposite of what conservatives might’ve predicted?
I don’t want to confuse people with what Polaris ends up doing for artists, and what our mission is. Our mission is only to highlight what critics say is the record of the year; and in doing so, creating a conversation surrounding Canadian music. And whereas that conversation was maybe happening on a small-scale before, now more people are participating in that discussion. And anything else it does, like enhancing someone financially, or giving career opportunities to someone who is nominated. It’s all great, and it’s all by design, but it’s not the primary mission, which is to get people to take notice of the records on the list.    

Help me out here—what are some of the other criticisms leveled against Polaris over the years, and how have you responded?
If someone has a reasonable concern or question about how or why we do something, we’re usually pretty good about considering it. But most of the criticisms we’ve addressed amounts to saying that the thing that I like didn’t get nominated and therefore Polaris is corrupt and out of touch. We have internal discussions all the time about the prize and its rules, and we’ll still often re-tweet criticisms about bands that didn’t end up on our list because we’re about the whole conversation.

Then there’s someone like Paul Lawton, who I know VICE interviewed a while back, who has a popular Tumblr called Slagging Off that knocks Polaris. He may have had some good points, but they’re lost in a sea of mistruths, and lack of research. One of the things he said in that VICE article is that six people got together in a room to decide the winner. And it’s like, no, it’s not six people, it’s 11 people. Maybe that doesn’t make a difference to some people, but it certainly makes a difference to us. In one of his other bones of contention he says that no one criticizes Polaris, because no one wants to lose their spot on the jury. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what happens. Not only do we encourage open debate, we get it all the time internally.  

But you know, the Internet breeds negativity. I can’t explain the phenomenon. Because really we’re trying to do something positive here, and I think we’re succeeding.  

Previously:

Meet the Guy Who's Slagging Off the Canadian Music Industry

How does a cricket become an artist? Try placing it in one of Harvey Moon's drawing machines where its movements will be tracked by a camera and turned into original works of art. Bugs Draw for Me, just one of Moons' impressive setups, are "happy collaborations" built in his Chicago studio where he creates the system, a set of rules, and allows a machine to do the rest.

Read the rest over at The Creators Project.

Greek men murdered by German paratroopers in Kondomari, Crete in 1941. (Image via)

In early April of 1941, the German army defeated Greek forces along the country's northern front. Where Greece had spent the previous winter in jubilation after successfully fending off the Italians, they now experienced existential horror at the inevitability of occupation by the Axis powers. The terror was so strong, in fact, that the prime minister shot himself just days before the Germans marched into Athens.

And the three-year occupation of Greece did indeed prove to be hell on Earth, most notably for the famine that wiped out more than 300,000 citizens, but also because it hosted some of the worst atrocities committed by German troops during the war. This included the raping and pillaging of villages, and the systematic execution of able-bodied men, and, in some cases, women and children.

The occupation of Greece tore the nation apart so much that when Axis powers left in 1944, the country soon broke out into a three-year civil war over the ensuing power vacuum.

Today, more than 70 years since the beginning of the occupation, Greeks and historians are pointing out that, aside from the question of unpaid reparations, Germany still owes Greece on two other counts: debt owed on a forced loan Germany took from Greece, and the returning of ancient artifacts stolen during the occupation.

Last April, Syriza, Greece's second largest party, raised the issue with Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitris Avramopoulos. Avramopoulos agreed that the matter must be decided once and for all by an international court. It was the first time a Greek official had publicly made such an announcement.

Experts are estimating that, all told, Germany owes approximately €162 billion ($211.5 billion), including interest. However, the general accounting office in Greece refuses to make the number they've come up with public.

As of right now, Germany is remaining tightlipped. Their minister of finance, Wolfgang Schauble, is brushing the issue off, simply telling reporters that the debt was settled years ago. He said that Greece should stay focused on the path to reform, which includes the €240 billion bailout—accompanied by several waves of admittedly ineffective and crippling austerity measures—Greece took to pull itself out of debt.

Manolis Glezos, Syriza MP and journalist, during an interview at his home office.

Schauble's comments were news to Manolis Glezos, an MP for Syriza who has been fighting for reparations and the repayment of debts since 1946. Glezos became an international hero when, in 1941—a month into the occupation—he and a friend snuck up to the Parthenon and stole the Nazi flag. He was later captured, tortured, and sentenced to death—not for the last time.

In response to Schauble's statement, Glezos made some official comments of his own: "When was it over? How was it over? And why?" Schauble didn't respond to Glezos, who I sat down with at his home for a two-hour interview. "Actually, for Schauble to make this statement means that he is cornered," Glezos told me. "And of course he tries to escape this issue by using different tricks."

Schauble may or may not have been alluding to the Two Plus Four Treaty of 1990, which, according to a representative at the German Embassy in London, brought about "a final regulation of legal and international issues concerning Germany and WWII. It was made clear that there will be no further peace treaty or reparations issued after that treaty. The treaty was accepted in the Charter of Paris on November 21, 1990 by all CSCE [Conference on Security and Co-operation of Europe] countries, including Greece."

I read over both documents and neither, to the best of my understanding, mention anything about World War II or reparations. When I pointed this out to the embassy contact, his reply was rhetorically disappointing.

"I'm not sure it's actually in the treaty, Gregory,” he emailed me. “But it was a general understanding of all the parties involved that this treaty should be the final word on all legal and political matters connected with WWII. That's why it was put to the approval and endorsement of the CSCE conference in Paris two months later."

The rounding up of Jews in Thessaloniki in July of 1942. (Image via)

If this were the case, you would think that the treaty or the charter would mention such understandings specifically. The closest thing I can find in the actual charter in which any connection to forgetting all about WWII might be construed comes in the opening lines: "Europe is liberating itself from the legacy of the past." Equivocal at best. Although the charter also mentions this: "Economic liberty, social justice, and environmental responsibility are indispensable for prosperity."

If history and legal records show that Greece is indeed the only country yet to be fully compensated by Germany after WWII, then the notion of social justice certainly does come to mind.

Schauble, in his comments, might have also been alluding to a 1960 payment made to Greece in the spirit of reparation for 115 million deutsche marks (about $77 million). But, as German historian Hagen Fleischer pointed out in an interview with Deustch Welle, "The Netherlands, which suffered much fewer losses, received a larger amount of money."

Fleischer, among other legal experts, believes the forced loan should be Greece's sole focus at this stage. Early on in the war, Germany and Italy actually forced the Greek government to help finance the occupation. The loan was legally drawn up, and Greece forked over billions of drachmas on a monthly basis. In fact, as evidence of the loan's legitimacy, Germany made a few payments before the war was even over, and now—if you tack on interest to all those years—the remaining balance is staggering.

Yiannis Stathas, Syriza MP.

"It's not about the money; it's about humanity," said Yiannis Stathas, an MP for Syriza who presents himself as a representative of the working class. "It's like if I were going to kill someone and not be punished for it."

Stathas is from Distomo, one of the worst sites of German brutality. On June 10, 1944, Axis troops, frustrated at the resistance from nearby guerrilla factions, invaded the village and murdered 218 people, including pregnant women, babies, and the village priest. The bloodbath still haunts the village today. Stathas remembers his grandmother and the rest of the women in her generation always wearing black clothes, and has stories about a lot of people who suffered psychological fallout, losing their minds in the years after the massacre.

None of the soldiers involved in the massacre ever faced any sort of punitive action.

"This isn't just a matter for Greece, but a global issue," Stathas told me.

During our sit-down in his office, Stathas explained that this is a separate issue from the economic crisis and the austerity measures Greece has been struggling with the past few years. To connect the two would send the wrong message, he said. "The people who have committed these crimes must pay so that justice can be served. In this way, people who are planning to do such crimes again must know they will be punished."

Stathas mentioned that particular extreme groups—not unlike the Golden Dawn, with its fascist leanings and neo-Nazi links—typically arise during periods of economic strife. "We should send a message to these people," he said.

Glezos went on to suggest alternative ways in which the German debt might be paid back, such as Germany providing free education to Greek students or covering the contracts of its public works companies in Greece.

German troops raise the Nazi flag on top of the Parthenon in Athens in May of 1941. (Image via)

"We don't want to grab Germany by the neck or put them in a noose, only to come and discuss with us how they will repay these loans," Glezos said. "We don't hate the German people, but even if they owed one single mark, they must pay it as a guarantee that, in the future, they will not commit such crimes again against humanity."

Zoe Soteriou, a teacher in Athens, believes that most Greeks are afraid to push the issue, fearing that it could make a bad situation (the recession and austerity measures) even worse. "We want to react in a way, and everyone wishes to do it. However, people are afraid that the worst is coming toward us, that this is just the beginning of something bleaker," she said. "Germany is at an advantage right now. They cut the pie and give out the pieces, and we are like beggars."

Her colleague, Christos Kribas, agrees that perhaps to approach the issue now is bad timing. "You must have face value. Right now, unfortunately, we're not much," he said, mentioning that Greece currently has a bad reputation. "We have to shake this image. We shouldn't have unrealistic goals, but to be practical. Politics is a give and take dynamic—not 'I want this,' or 'I want that.'"

More stories about Greece:

The IMF's Admission That Austerity Has Failed Is Going to Make the G8 Pretty Awkward

The Greek Government Tried and Failed to Close Their BBC

Greece's New Anarchist Generation Is Being Tortured by the Police

Photo by Megan Roniger

Some New Orleans artists travel far and wide, enhancing the city’s well-deserved rep as a incubator of innovative music, but other acts achieve fame and pack rooms without ever having to hop in a van. Rappers Ballzack (real name Rami Sharkey) and Odoms (Adam Bourgeois) have never even left Louisiana, but have a huge following in the world’s music capital. There’s a reason they don’t travel often—if you ain’t from New Orleans, you may not understand a thing the surrealist suburban hip-hop duo say.   

Ballzack and Odoms rap mostly about the West Bank, which is the big chunk of New Orleans that exists across the river from the city’s more renowned areas. “The Wank,” as East Bankers call it, is a much different creature than the French Quarter. Though lacking touristy charms, the West Bank is nonetheless deeply New Orleanian—while walkability and unique flavor defines New Orleans as y’all know it, the West Bank is like most of America: big, busy roads and strip malls. Meaning you need a car. Meaning until you’re 16 years old, you’re stuck. For a decade, Ballzack and Odoms, both in their 30s now, have been making music that harkens back to their West Bank childhoods and the art of conjuring fun out of suburban nothingness.

Odoms and Ballzack grew up (or never grew up) near each other on the Wank, but first bonded later in the dorms at Lousiana State University over Hot Boy$ records. Their first album, 2002's Knucklehead Memoirs, featured songs like “The Pencil Crack Tournament” and “Monkey Handjobs,” and they went on to experiment with live instrumentation on Chipmunk Dream Machine and recorded a New Orleans bounce record with Jay Yeunger of White Zombie. Each release contained “hit” songs that never got any play beyond local college radio but nonetheless sold shitloads of drinks for a lot of New Orleans clubs. Because few artists have ever gone out of their way to glorify West Bank life, Ballzack and Odoms enjoyed a giant local following from the beginning, and their audience grew exponentially after Ballzack and Odoms created Lil Doogie, a puppet that Odoms sometimes hides behind while brandishing a hotheaded attitude and thick West Bank accent (think the laid-back slur of an old-school Brooklyn dock worker).

I recently sat backstage with Ballzack and Odoms at One Eyed Jacks in the French Quarter just before the release party for Ballzack and Odoms Present: Ace N Ernie (a concept album about a pair of heavy metal heshers who decide to record a rap record—it’s better than it sounds) to discuss the Wank, riding a puppet’s coattails, and why they don't think regional rap is a bad thing.

VICE: How would you explain the West Bank to outsiders?
Ballzack: It all starts at the river, where shit is real old—the farther out you go, there’s more suburban-type new shit. But there’s also more Cajun spillover, more of like a coon-ass thing. [“Coon-ass” is a common word for Louisiana good ole boys.]

People who live in the heart of the city see all the outskirts as “white flight” destinations, but that’s really not an accurate depiction of the West Bank. It’s still majority black over there.
Ballzack: When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to go to someone’s house and hear racial slurs, but then they'd go out in public and get along with other races. It’s like it’s not hate, it’s just another way to rag on somebody. Whoever is the minority is going to get ribbed. I’m Lebanese and Palestinian and in high school they would sing [to the tune of Run DMC’s “Mary, Mary”] “Rami, Rami, why you Muslim…” I got it from black people and white people. But I couldn’t help laughing, because they loved me, they were friends. I did start getting paranoid about it after 9/11. People coming up and saying shit to me. Like I worked in this kitchen the chef came up to me and said [adopts West Bank accent], “Fuckin Rami dude, be careful out there, some dudes they goin’ around lookin for people like you.” Before that I’d never thought that was a possibility, ‘cause I’ve been here my whole life!

Ballzack you’re from Gretna, and Odoms you’re from Harvey. What is the difference between the two towns?
Odoms: You go into Gretna and you see Gretna-lookin people.
Ballzack: Well, there's more old people [in Gretna]. And more a sense of history. The West Bank feels more coon-assy as you move away from the river: you start off at Algiers, then Gretna, then Harvey is that many more degrees more coon-ass, and then you get to Marerro where it gets really y’atty. [Coon-asses often greet each other with “Where y’at” and so are called “y’ats.”] Then you get to Westwego and you’re like, “Where am I?” Once I became a teenager there were times when I thought [living in the 'burbs] was terrible and I was like, “Mom, Dad, why are we here?!”

But isn’t that terribleness the cornerstone of the humor in your songs?
Ballzack: When we started it was like, “How ridiculous would it be to glamorize this when there isn’t anything glamorous about it?” But then, there were things we were proud of…
Odoms: Like the Vietnamese food.
Ballzack: We were glamorizing something we felt like a lot of people were shitting on—we felt the need to defend it. If you’d tell people you were from the West Bank people would look down on you. They say, “Oh, I’ve never been there.” Or, “Oh, I had to go there once to exchange something at the Gap, ‘cause it’s closer to my work.”

What was the music scene like across the river?
Ballzack: My dad was an immigrant who owned corner stores, bodegas. He had one in the St. Thomas projects, another in Fischer projects on Whitney. He would throw events they would call “DJs,” where he’d hire a DJ to come play in front of the store, because it would draw business. It was rap and bounce—my dad didn’t like rap, he would hire them to get business in the store. So I would hear this stuff and be like, “This is crazy.” He used to rent a building from DJ Jubilee’s brother, and TT Tucker would come to the store and get on the mic. My dad would bring these dudes’ demos to me. MOBO records and the group UNLV were really our introduction [to hip-hop], especially when we realized how funny it is. It is so funny, the New Orleans rap were listening to. Meanwhile, I was listening to metal and shit with my buddies. The new album Ace N Ernie is a tribute to that time.

How do you think your music comes across to people who don’t know anything about the West Bank?
Ballzack: A lot of people like it but a lot of people don’t understand it. To some people it seems important to make these definitions: “They’re not black and they’re doing rap” or else, “They’re comedians doing rap.” I’ve had a couple people who wanted to manage me say, “You’re too regional.” And I’d say, “What about Compton, man?” I learned what Compton was by listening to the records.

How can you be opposed to people calling your music “comedy”?
Ballzack: It’s not punchline-style jokes. I always wanted it to be more surreal or absurd. It’s not the Smothers Brothers. “Comedy rap” sounds so corny. But then maybe [our music] is corny and I’m just being sensitive. Not that I want to be a legitimate hard rapper, I just wanted it to be considered something else. Surreal, maybe. But I didn’t want it to come across as Bloodhound Gang. The local rap I was listening to was really funny, like saying, “I’mma hit you from the back for some Popeye’s.” That’s fuckin’ funny. And to me there was not much difference between that and my version of acting stupid, acting the fool.

I remember opening for you guys and having never heard of you, and you packed the Mermaid Lounge. You said you had been making music for a long time, but I’d never heard of you.
Ballzack: Well at first I was calling all the venues in town and being told, like, “That sounds dumb.” We had to work hard at first. I spent all my whole paycheck on fliers—back when people were allowed to flier in New Orleans—and I put them everywhere, even on the car of some girl who’d rejected me. She called me and was like, “You got a show? I didn’t know that.” I said, “Oh, one of my guys must have put that flier there.” I made it look like we had a street team, though it was just me being creepy. The first shows were mostly people who knew us. But there was a crowd of people we had no idea about us and who were weirded out.

Lil Doogie is your most famous creation. Can you explain who he is?
Odoms: He’s a West Bank puppet. I do the voice. He’s an asshole, but he’s got a nice heart.
Ballzack: He tries to pretend like he’s hard and shit but inside he’s tender.
Odoms: He’s a virgin. He’s really scared to fight, but he loves to talk shit.
Ballzack: He’s like a lot of dudes we grew up with.
Odoms: Doogie packed the main room at the House of Blues, by himself, without Ballzack and Odoms.

Does Doogie have fans separate from y’all’s?
Ballzack: Oh lots.
Odoms: And they do not like us. We put our new “Backwards” video on the account that Doogie is on cause it has all these subscribers, and the comments are like, “If y’all not putting Doogie in the video then I don’t know why you’re makin’ videos.”
Ballzack: Doogie caught on in a really weird way. We’d get scary dudes with like teardrop tattoos sending us emails.
Odoms: Dude with like no shirt on in his Twitter picture, with tattoos all over him. And a lot of local rappers hit us up to have Doogie in their videos. The only one we did was Partners-N-Crime.

Ballzack: Everyone else was people we hadn’t heard of. But shit that we’ve tried to tap into and haven’t been able to, Doogie has been able to tap into without trying. 
Odoms: And I remember we were at Oakwood Mall or something, and some dude came up and was like, “Man, I really want y’all to put my truck in the next Doogie video; I got Jason, Freddy, and Chuckie airbrushed on my truck.”
Ballzack: People have gotten Adam’s number God knows how.
Odoms: They've called my parents’ house asking for me.
Ballzack: They said, “A friend of ours ain’t doing well and he loves Lil Doogie and we were wondering if you could come cheer him up. Like, call him and act like Doogie.” Adam’s had to do that for many people.
Odoms: I need to change my damn number.
Ballzack: Doogie’s like the Saints, all races love Doogie. People leave comments like, “I know he fucking white, but he cool as fuck.” Especially the video with Doogie rapping, they have to preface it like, “I know this is supposed to be a joke, but Doogie go hard!”

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.  

Previously: My Elementary School Students Are Terrific Music Critics

A vandalized version of Wrongbar's "don't be an idiot while you're at our awesome establishment" sign. via Flickr.

Last October, the perpetually up-and-coming Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale (also the home of the Toronto VICE offices) was hit with a surprise temporary ban on new bars and restaurants, while city staff conducted a study on Queen West nightlife on the strip from Dufferin to Roncesvalles.

These kinds of measures are becoming increasingly popular in North America: In Sarasota the city council approved one such ban, and then changed their minds; in San Francisco a ban was successfully passed; Bloomington considered one, but decided against it; residents of Encinitas, San Diego have been pushing for one; and you're seeing similar discussions happening in every city experiencing gentrification. Some have pointed out that the results are rarely what proponents are hoping for, but that hasn't diminished the appeal of these types of measures for people who see busy nightlife as a problem that needs to be fixed.

After a year of emotionally charged and divisive debates, the ban in Parkdale is about to end, and now city council will consider the recommendations of the Queen West Restaurant Report on July 16. However, other city councilors are already expressing enthusiasm for the idea of implementing similar changes in other neighbourhoods, making this case potentially just the beginning of much larger changes to Toronto's nightlife, and possibly a model that will inspire other cities as well.

Gord Perks is the local councillor pushing for the changes, and he's already got a reputation for opposing nearby nightlife. Most famously he caused controversy over his attempts to block Wrongbar's 2010 extended liquor license for that year's Gay Pride celebrations, as well as opposing the bar's efforts to increase their capacity (he failed at both). Nevertheless, while he can sometimes come across as opposed to all nightlife, he insists his concerns have more to do with ensuring there is a diversity of businesses that serve the people who actually live nearby.

To try accomplish this goal, the report recommends dividing Parkdale’s bar and restaurant-heavy strip of Queen West into four sections, and prohibiting a bar and restaurant concentration of more than 25% in any one of these small areas. Depending on how negotiations go with the provincial authorities, this may end up applying to both licensed restaurants and ones that don't serve alcohol, but preferably just those selling booze. The most eastern end of the strip is already over that percentage, but existing licenses would not be affected.

Perks believes that the influx of new bars and restaurants in the area are driving up rents and threatening to create a monoculture of nightlife with no daytime uses serving those who live in the area. However, many critics have pointed out that restricting new liquor licenses is only going to increase the value of the ones that already exist, which could just as easily lead to an acceleration of this process of commercial gentrification.

“That claim may or may not be accurate, but I would dispute it because it's based on a market model where Parkdale is the only place you can get a liquor license in Toronto,” Perks insists. “If you're saying a commodity will have its price increase because of scarcity, you have to look at what the market actually is, and the market is all of downtown Toronto, not just Parkdale. I can sit down with any economist in Canada and they'll agree with me.”

It is important to point out that these proposed changes will be re-evaluated in three years to assess the economic impact. While perhaps overly certain of his own opinions on how to control the market forces of gentrification, Perks admits that this is an experiment. Besides, while it seems naive to expect that within a two minute walk you should be able to expect some ideal mixture of businesses, the 25% cap still leaves a lot of room to grow outside of the Brock to Nobel area that was identified as a problem, with a 33% density of bars and restaurants.

However, while that stretch is unquestionably the busiest, it's also far from the nightlife monoculture that it's been portrayed as. There are four larger bars, but most of them are really just overgrown pubs. There are about a dozen restaurants that don't operate as bars, and three small bars mixed in alongside them. There's also a soup kitchen, a few hair salons, some jewelry shops, a multicultural community centre, a couple vintage stores, some clothing boutiques, a mosque, an appliance store, a sewing workshop, an alternative health clinic, a real estate office, a dentist, a fire station, a floor covering store, and a couple of convenience stores. Compared to most neighbourhoods, even this “problem area” is exceptionally diverse, and that's not even counting the galleries, recording studios, and community services that are immediately adjacent.

You'd think a study like this would attempt to compare Parkdale to a more ideal mix, but Perks bristles at the suggestion that a more scientific method could be used to determine whether there is indeed a crisis.

“Planning is as much an art as it is a science, and if we make it strictly into a science we would create a city no one would want to live in,” he says. While that’s all well and good, Perks also dodged my attempts to get him to identify the daytime-use businesses that are supposedly being forced out by bars, or to get him to explain why Parkdale deserves a smaller concentration of bars than similar mixed-use neighbourhoods elsewhere in Toronto.

Eddie Chan, who is bar manager at the Beaconsfield (just outside of the study area) and co-owner of the Parkdale coffee shop and gallery Mascot is able to offer some rational as to why this situation is deserving of special attention.

“The thing that’s different about Parkdale is the concentration of low income. If you look around Mascot, there is nothing for the local kids to do. Now I don't think these proposed changes are actually going to help that either, but you have to try something.”

While it's the proposed concentration restrictions that are getting the most attention, it's actually the latter part of the report that could potentially have a much larger impact on the city, especially if similar measures are adopted across downtown. The recommendations are to further restrict new patios, to heavily restrict the sizes of any future dance floor and performance areas, and to restrict all new bars to a narrow one-floor storefront size. While a bar owner could attempt to get variances to these restrictions, Perks is clear that they would have a very hard time opening up anything resembling a music venue in Parkdale ever again, and that new patios would be extremely unlikely as well.

“I personally think we have too many patios, so I would oppose any new ones. And if you want live music, go to Wrongbar. Sometimes the Sister has bands too, and so does the Cadillac Lounge.”

Given the huge influx of new local residents moving into condo towers nearby, it seems a bit naive to think that demand for entertainment is going to go down. But this is an experiment, and one we should be watching closely, since this battle is much bigger than just Parkdale.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @benjaminboles

Previously:

The Waldorf Hotel's Condo War

Condos Are Destroying Art Galleries on Queen West

I have been working on some projects with Agyness Deyn for a while. We had previously collaborated on a shoot for Elle where she and Natalia Bonifacci had dressed up like James Dean and Sal Mineo and we shot them around the pool at the Chateau Marmont. Another time I went with Agyness and a group of friends to Magic Mountain. We pulled numbers out of a hat before every ride to pair up. The idea was to make out with our partners and film it. Shortly after that trip, Aggy told me she wanted to do something with me based on Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc. 

At the time I was shooting Oz in Detroit, where I would be for the next six months. While I was there, Aggy and I developed the Joan of Arc idea and settled on a modern-day mash-up, Dreyer-style (silent, tons of close-ups, etc.). We decided that the majestic and widely photographed turn-of-the century Michigan Central Station—now abandoned and covered in graffiti—would be the perfect setting. But we couldn’t make the dates work for Aggy. Instead we ended up shooting a crazy version of Othello in the train station. In our version it is Emilia who is the mastermind behind Othello’s—and Iago’s and Desdemona’s— downfall; she is Othello’s lover and uses her husband’s jealousy to take down the Moor et al.

Then Aggy got married (much love to her and her husband) and became too busy to do Joan of Arc. Natalia Bonifacci became our Joan. Gucci was opening a new store in São Paolo, Brazil, and we thought a video would be the perfect way to help inaugurate it. Joan of Arc would be perfect. But now we had two new elements involved: Gucci and South America.

Videos that deal with fashion are great because you get to use all the toys you normally use when working on a film, including all the best clothes and working with beautiful performers, but you don’t have to worry about narrative in the same way. With feature films there is the constant pressure on the goal of entertaining audiences with things like stories and fleshed-out characters. Short videos do not have these restrictions and offer more freedom to embrace collage techniques because the audience doesn’t need to be emotionally grounded in the place of the piece in the same way they are expected to be when sitting through a feature-length narrative. 

For our purposes, this sort of mash-up style is exactly what we needed to commuincate through the visuals. Joan connects to a higher power in our piece, but it is a higher spiritual power mediated though contemporary media. Of course, Joan of Arc today is communing with a simulacrum of God, embodied by Dreyer’s version of Joan, played by Falconetti. It is the actual previous film that she looks to for release from the abuses of the Earth’s demons (played expertly by the ATL twins).

Our Joan is the guest at a Michelangelo Antonioni kind of party, where the smallest things mean everything, and the break up of a marriage is tantamount to the flaying of one’s soul. Our Joan is attended by an angel, but this is an angel of the utmost beauty, suggesting that there is something very physical about transcendence, or the idea that the ideal can only exist on the higher planes of digital construction—within videos, photographs, or online, in general.

We all move further into the immortal manufactured realms of digital life and away from the decaying Earth of mortal embodiment. Joan can’t last on Earth, but she can escape and live forever in her martyrdom because it is captured on video. 

VICE.com will be premiering  La Passione in full tomorrow at 2 PM EST. 

Follow James on Twitter: @JamesFrancoTV

Previously - 'Man of Steel': The Super Movie

For more film stuff on VICE:

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

Jason Banker and Elijah Wood on ‘Toad Road’

Terrence Malick’s Crisis of Faith

Photo by Blair Hopkins

According to Cosmopolitan magazine, watching porn together can be a great way to spice up your sex life. I've found watching pornography with girls to be a mixed experience, at best. Even when it's her idea it's still an emotional minefield. I find it's better to let her pick the video because I know that when it's my turn to find a two minute internet clip I will be judged based on my selection. First and foremost, the featured performer should not be of a different ethnicity or have larger breasts or different colored hair than my lady friend. In fact, it seems that it should look exactly like her. Really, it ought to just be a video of somebody else having sex with her. Otherwise I run the risk of provoking, "Oh so that's what you really want to see? Some Asian girl with big tits?" which, of course, is exactly what I wanted to see.

Not very long ago, I was involved with a woman who happens to earn her living having sex. I wasn't paying her, though I have paid for sex before, not with money and never in advance but oh I've paid. My relationship with Jolene was short, fairly casual and emotionally intense. We first met for drinks at a worn down, gay bar in Oakland, California. We'd found each other on OKCupid. I knew what Jolene did for a living before we met in person, since she'd written on her profile, "I'm a sex worker aka prostitute." We talked and drank for several hours and eventually found ourselves making out in her car, which is a pretty typical ending for an OKCupid date.

Getting paid to pee on people is pretty much the best thing ever. #sexwork

— ho-lene (@jolenestarshine) May 28, 2013

Jolene is not what you would typically have in mind when you picture an escort. That is to say, she is not a blonde, co-ed with breast implants and a blank expression. She is a striking, intelligent, six-foot, redhead, full-figured with the kind of transgressive haircut you see on artists and professional agitators. You could just as easily picture her getting handcuffed by the police for protesting globalization as you could picture her getting handcuffed to a bed frame.

We hung out seven times and usually spent five or more hours together, mostly talking, drinking and smoking. There are, of course, anxieties about sleeping with a sex worker. No matter how lacking in moral judgment one may be there are certain statistical facts about the prevalence of STDs amongst people who make their living in that industry. Then you put on a condom, have sex and nothing terrible happens (at least in our case).

I suspect I would have a hard time being a prostitute myself, for a few reasons, one of which is that I believe it entails having to sleep with a lot of unattractive clients and I told Jolene as much. "You just have to find one thing about them that's appealing and focus on that. Sometimes it's really hard to find something physical you like about them." She said that many of her clients were awkward and had trouble relating with women and often wanted someone to laugh at their jokes as much as suck their dicks. "I, more than a lot of the girls I know, provide a girlfriend experience," which is perhaps one of the most heartbreakingly humane depictions I've heard of what a call girl offers.

Porn is better when you're jacking it to someone you don't know.

Jolene is loosely associated with San Francisco's experimental, avant-porn scene and has appeared in several titles. At one point, she suggested that it would be fun to watch one of her XXX videos, which I thought was a brilliant idea. There was no way she was going to get jealous and everything she’d done was a lesbian scene so I wouldn't just watch her getting railed by some other guy, but when the proposal was made I was walking out the door on other business.

A couple of days later, I became curious and went looking for Jolene's porn on my own, which I thought was maybe a little creepy but I didn't dwell on it for too long since looking at porn always feels kind of creepy. I tracked down a teaser clip fairly quickly and discovered, much to my surprise, that her scene partner was an ex-girlfriend of mine. This particular ex, Zoey, had left me emotionally wrecked about five years previous and my reaction upon seeing the video was complicated. Here is an incomplete list of parsed emotions: shock, jealousy, arousal and guilt, the end result of which was an overwhelming sensation of nausea.

Sex is arguably the most intimate physical act. Seeing a woman I once loved plunge her hands inside another woman inverted that intimacy, making it alienating and public. When having sex with someone I have the sense that I know something about them that no one else does, even if it’s just the way she cries out or the look on her face while she’s getting fucked. Once the act of sex is streamed online that shared secret evaporates.

Furthermore, seeing my ex engaged in sapphic sex summoned up feelings of inadequacy regarding my own gender and her apparent preference e.g., "Well I guess what really satisfies her is to slap another woman’s ass until it turns pink and then powerfuck that young lady with a dildo." I also felt unwelcome as a viewer, knowing that this particular porn was not made for the male gaze. I should mention that I never actually stalked Zoey after our breakup but my thoughts did run toward the obsessive, perpetually keeping an eye out for her around town and holding imaginary, unresolved arguments between the two of us. Seeing this video of them together made me feel like I'd hid out in Jolene’s closet to peep on her sex life, only to discover she was going to screw my personal walking trauma.

Portrait of the author, post-break-up.

I felt no sense of betrayal or resentment towards Jolene. Those feelings would have been unfair, but one's reactions are not entirely voluntary, fairness aside. The next time we were together she again suggested watching one of her videos and I responded, "Yeah, I actually got kind of curious and I found a clip of your stuff on my own.” "Oh, did you?" she said in a sultry tone.

"Yeah, and in the one I found where you were partnered up with my ex."

"Oh!"

"It's fine. It was just sort of unsettling."

"Who was it?"

"Her porn name is Zoey."

"Oh yeah, I don't really know her that well. She seemed cool though."

"Yeah, she's cool. I just don't want to watch you guys have sex."

That pretty much spelled the end of my ambitions to watch porn with a woman. My initial complaint was that they get jealous and insecure about what I might "truly want." I thought I'd found the magic loophole through that knot only to discover that the loophole only tied the knot ever tighter and it was somehow wrapped around my balls. Jolene and I eventually went our separate ways and I haven't talked to Zoey in over five years. I still look at porn on occasion, although I'm trying to wean myself off that the same way I have with most of my other addictions and obsessions. It's hard to kick completely because having a laptop basically means I carry around the world's largest porn collection in my backpack.

@NotMilesK

For more naughty sex talk:

Belladonna's Dick Sauce (Animal Style)

Compromises for the Woman Who Refuses to Shave Her Pubes

Tips for Celebrating International Masturbation Month