A Christian group in Texas has begun taking photos of people's cars as they patronize "sinful businesses" and posting them online. 

In a "news alert" posted to their Facebook page, Texas Christian group Repent Amarillo announced they would be photographing vehicles that patronize strip clubs, porn shops, and gay bars and then posting the images to their page. "Think of it as God's public sex offender list," the post reads, adding, "so, if you want to know if your friends, husbands, boyfriends, co-workers, or family members are visiting these places then STAY TUNED!"

They're calling it the "Ephesians 5:11 Project" after a Bible passage which reads, "Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them." 

It's the brainchild of Pastor David Grisham, who you may remember as the guy who tried (and failed) to burn a Qur'an a couple of years ago, leading to the creation of the "Dude, You Have No Quran" song. 

In fact, it was God who gave him the idea to expose people in the first place: "I base what I do on what the Lord tells me to do. Sometimes the Lords tells us to do something to get attention." Which, I guess, makes God kind of a dick. 

David has previously been accused of calling the employers of people who frequent a local swingers club in an attempt to get them fired. David denies this accusation, and claims he only called a swinger's employer one time, because he was concerned that the employee might be about to drive while drunk. 

He has also been accused of starting a Facebook group to post the personal information of local swingers. Which, again, David denies, saying that the group was actually started by another member of his organization, who has since been dismissed. 

(Via Reddit)

@JLCT

Dear Hollywood Wax Museum,

I recently visited your Los Angeles location and was exceptionally disappointed with what I saw. 

Upon entering, I was greeted by your Tom Hanks in Castaway waxwork. It was not very good. Scary, even. 

I have never seen Castaway, so there may actually be a scene in which Tom Hanks becomes blind in one eye, but I doubt that is the case. 

But it wasn't just your Tom Hanks that was awful. It was all of your waxworks. They look like something from the nightmares of a person who has been blind since birth and has no real concept of what human beings look like. 

Some time ago, I watched a documentary about a ship that sank in the Baltic Sea. There was this one shot that has haunted me since, where they showed the beautiful, blond wife of one of the people who had gone down with the ship. She was standing on the shoreline, looking out into the Baltic Sea as it slowly dawned on her that she would never be seeing her husband again. There was a sadness in her eyes that haunts me to this day. 

Your Cameron Diaz looks identical to how that looks in my head. I am genuinely surprised she hasn't yet sued for defamation. 

Some of your waxworks are so bad that I would never have had even the slightest of clues who they were if I hadn't been explicitly told. Like this beautiful goth woman who, apparently, is meant to be Hugh Jackman. 

However, credit where it's due: your Steve Jobs waxwork was actually very good. I'm not entirely sure why you decided to suspend him from the ceiling on wires, though, but bravo. 

Beyond just looking really, really, really, really shitty, your waxworks have a larger issue: you have, without exception, managed to depict each celebrity as a character in their least memorable movie. 

For instance, you chose to depict Adam Sandler, star of The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore, and dozens of other films that people have actually seen (or heard of) as his character from the movie where it rains gumballs. Google tells me, it is called Bedtime Stories. 

Pierce Brosnan, who has played James Bond multiple times, is shown as his character in The Thomas Crown Affair. (For a millionaire art thief, he is wearing a VERY cheap suit.)

You put Sean Connery and Daniel Craig, who, again, have both played James Bond, as their characters in The Hunt for Red October and Cowboys & Aliens, respectively. 

And Michael Caine, who recently played Alfred in that super popular Batman reboot, is shown as his character from The Cider House Rules. 

It's almost as if you have some kind of supernatural power to predict which movie is going to be the least enduring of an actor's career.

You should sell this ability to movie studios. Like, they could call you up and say, "Hey, we wanna make a comedy western with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson—does that sound good to you? Like the kinda thing you'd wanna make into a waxwork? Yeah? OK, cool, we're shutting it down." You could save them hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

I realize that these things are probably pretty expensive to make. But come on, guys... The Cable Guy? That has been nobody's favorite Jim Carrey movie for almost 20 years now. How much could it possibly cost to toss a Hawaiian shirt on this thing and make it Ace Ventura?

It's not like you're incapable of change. Judging by the surroundings and private investigator badge, this used to be Keanu in Constantine. Judging by the plaid shirt it's currently wearing, you made the wise decision to change it to Speed Keanu instead. 

So why are we still having to look at Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes–era Mark Wahlberg? 

I can understand why you wouldn't put in the effort to change things up—the place was PACKED when I visited, so I guess you have little incentive to do anything. 

Unless... Wait. Are you guys trying to piss people off? Is this an elaborate troll? 

But you have both Nacho Libre AND Tropic Thunder Jack Black...

Holy shit! That's it, isn't it? You're trying to annoy people. 

Why else would you take Indiana Jones, one of the most beloved movie characters of all time, and position him so it's impossible to get your photograph taken with him without including Shia Labeouf?

Or your Star Wars room where you put Leia, Yoda, Darth Maul, and Han Solo up on a balcony where nobody could get their pictures taken with them, to make room for:

Jennifer. Fucking. Garner. Now, you must know she isn't in Star Wars, right? And you must also know that no living human is as broad-shouldered as this waxwork? 

Very good, you guys. You really had me going for a minute there.

Yours, 

Jamie Taete

@JLCT

For the second ever Munchies episode shot in LA we chose the gentlemen from Mexicali Taco & Co., Esdras Ochoa and Javier Fragrosso. We wanted to do an episode on Mexicali because we stopped there after a shoot a few months back and were blown away by how good the food was without a whiff of pretension. Take one bite of their shrimp tacos or the carne asada "Vampiro" you are transported to a new level of tacqueria consciousness where there is no going back to greasy meat and sub par tortillas.

The Mexicali crew decided to take us a wildly varied food tour around LA. The first stop was supposed to be at Daily Dose Cafe, they were closed, so we just headed to the Park's Finest. We have never filmed at a Filipino restaurant before, let alone a Filipino BBQ spot. Johnny, the owner, tried to do us in by unloading every imaginable dish, with highlights being the BBQ tritip with horseradish cream sauce and the traditional coconut beef. After saying our goodbyes we headed west to Beverly Hills to the country's only Kosher Mexican restaurant owned by the country's only hockey-playing Japanese-Mexican gourmet chef, Katsuji Tanabe. Here we had "carnita" tacos, the McKosher Burger, and Fried Chicken and Waffles. Chef Tanabe braises beef in duck fat to mimic the taste and texture of pork, which gives his clientele an idea of the flavor profile of the original dish. These guys were is such a serious food coma when we got back to Mexicali, that it took all they had to whip up more food and eat it for our greedy camera. Enjoy!

Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil circa 1967. Photo courtesy of Iconographia archive

On March 28, 1968, students in Rio de Janeiro began protesting against the high price of food in a student restaurant called the Calabouço. The military regime set up by an earlier coup d'état was in its fourth year of power and President Costa e Silva’s authoritarian rule had begun to take hold. During the protests, a Brazilian teenage student named Edson Luis was shot in the chest at point-blank range by the military police, who showed up to disperse the protesters. In the wake of his death, several antimilitary demonstrations were held across Brazil, the largest being the March of the One Hundred Thousand, which took place in Rio on June 26 of that year.

At the frontlines of the march were artists from the Brazilian intelligentsia, including two young musicians from Bahia in northeast Brazil, named Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, who were at the vanguard of Tropicália—a counterculture arts and music movement that emerged in 1967 as a reaction to the dogmatic elitism of the left, the authoritarianism of the military, and the socially oblivious lyricism of bossa nova. Influenced by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but creating an amalgam of rock ’n’ roll and the Brazilian folk of the northeast, Gil and Veloso, along with Tom Zé, Gal Costa and Os Mutantes, came up with a new avant-garde style that was highly inspired by cultural anthropophagy—the "eating" of others' ideas.

The movement only lasted a couple of years before being clamped down on by the military. With the introduction of an extreme decree called Institutional Act Number Five, they jailed Caetano and Gil amid a spree of sentencing and torture directed at thousands of people, including leftists, activists, and students. This brutal era of persecution also targeted then-Marxist rebel and the current president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who—45 years later—finds herself at the center of a nationwide dissent against inadequate public services, government corruption, and what many believe to be unnecessary expenditure on the forthcoming World Cup and the Olympics.

Tropicália as a movement is now considered to be over, but the idea of it remains. Marcelo Machado, a Brazilian filmmaker who was a teenager during Tropicália’s heyday, pays tribute to this special era in Brazilian culture with his new documentary, Tropicália. I gave him a call to find out more about the movement.


The band Divino Maravilhoso. Photo courtesy of Paulo Salomao

VICE: How’s São Paulo right now? What are your thoughts on the current demonstrations?
Marcelo Machado: The new government hasn’t changed the way politics is managed, and most of the politicians don't really represent the people who elected them. They only care about their own interests and those of the corporations. Social programs created better conditions for the poorest, but I can't agree with a government that spends millions on events that won't really change Brazilians’ lives instead of fighting corruption. We can’t be a real developed country with just bread and a circus.

Sure. Going back a few decades, can we talk about the political climate in which Tropicália was born?
In the 1950s, we had this dream of modernization; we were fighting very strongly to build our democracy—we’re still fighting for a stable democracy in Brazil. President Juscelino Kubitschek [who ruled Brazil from 1956 to 1961] was a very modern man. He was responsible for the construction of the modern capital, Brasília. His successor, Joao Goulart, having leftist ideas, suffered a military coup d'état in 1964. The military was afraid of communism.

However, in the period between 1964 and 1968, they left a bit of room for the opposition in the streets. But in late 1968, they took away all the civil rights, shut down all the protests, and press censorship began. They put people in jail and tortured the "enemies." The dream of modern Brazil suddenly collapsed. My movie documents exactly that period, when the military dictatorship shut off all freedom of opposition.

Edson Luis was killed during this period. What was the significance of that incident?  
Edson was protesting against the condition of a students’ restaurant [Calabouço] in Rio when he was shot by a policeman and died in March of 1968. His death and funeral brought thousands of students to the streets in a series of demonstrations that [culminated in] the March of the One Hundred Thousand in Rio, which is considered one of the main reasons for the introduction of AI-5 [Institutional Act Number Five, a military decree overruling the nation’s Constitution].

Os Mutantes performing at Fundação Padre Anchieta, a Brazilian organization for educational radio and television programmes, in 1969.

Do you think there are similarities between the March of the One Hundred Thousand and the ongoing nationwide protests initiated by the Free Fare Movement?
There are some similarities. The protest Edson took part in was about food prices, and now the students are complaining about transport [fares], both demanding better life conditions. And what the students started spread out to different segments of our society. But it's important to remember that 45 years have passed, and Brazil is now a democracy. So the protests are happening in a completely different political environment.

Interestingly, the left wing at the time was against the Tropicalists. Why was that?
Those we could call the “left” were engaged in a political movement against the military dictatorship; they were making music charged with political ideas, with explicitly leftist lyrics. Tropicalists didn’t agree with the traditional left, they didn’t want to do what nationalist and leftist musicians were doing with their lyrics—just talking about poverty and starting a revolution. The Tropicalists’ point of view was more complex; maybe they were inclined more towards the left, but they said, “We need to understand that the world is not just left and right.”

This was a very avant-garde position, if you consider that we’re talking about the 1960s. It was the Cold War era, and there was a dichotomy in the way people understood the world, in terms of left and right. What the tropicalists talked about was really difficult to understand for the Brazilian [people]. When Caetano and Gil were put in jail, even the nationalists and the leftists were surprised because they believed it should be them, not Caetano and Gil. Nowadays, our interpretation is that maybe the military wasn't about [being against] communism, but about being against "counterculture" and people with different attitudes, who could be seen as a threat.


Gilberto Gil and Caetono Veloso (front center) at the March of A Hundred Thousand. Photo courtesy of CPDoc Jornal do Brasil

Can we expand on cultural anthropophagy? It was a major influence on Tropicália, right?
It’s the idea of eating the other—the ideas of the other—to make yourself stronger. The [Tupi] Indians used to eat the Portuguese when they first came to Brazil, to become—as they believed—stronger. The analogy of the cultural anthropophagy was that you can put all the virtues of the foreigners inside you.

To take in all the virtues of others?
Yes. It’s an interesting idea. For example, I'm married to a Chinese woman, so I'm mixing my Brazilian influence with the influence of this strong foreign people, the Chinese. So sometimes I think that, in my life, I’m doing the same [cultural anthropophagy]. Sometimes people tend to think that when the Chinese come to Brazil, with their cheap products, that our industry will be done for because China’s industry is stronger. But I say no; they’re the new influence, the new people we need to mix with to become stronger and try to find ourselves in this new world. This is the idea.

Perhaps this is what the military was scared of?
Oh, yes. It’s one of the things they were really afraid of, for sure.

The trailer for Tropicália.

Can you explain the cultural and economic differences between Bahia, the birthplace of Tropicália, and Rio, the birthplace of bossa nova?
Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Tom Zé are all from the state of Bahia in northeast Brazil, and they met each other in Salvador when they were students. Salvador is the centre of Afro-Brazilian culture; it’s a black city with the heritage of the slaves of Africa. Also in the countryside of Bahia, you have the folk culture of the sertão from the arid regions where the countrymen work in very difficult conditions. Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, is a completely different reality: it’s the paradise—this urban beach, the old capital of colonial Brazil. I’d also like to add a third city to this equation, São Paulo.

In the 1950s, Brazil began to modernize and the car industry was making São Paulo the economic center. In Tropicália, you have these young people from Salvador who went south to Rio and started to see a new Brazil there. Then, during the specific period from 1967 to '69, they came down to São Paulo, where television was starting out and where the car industry was becoming important. So you have the story of people who come down from Bahia to Rio—the place of a smooth, nice life; the place of bossa nova. Then they come down to the neurotic and intense São Paulo.

So I think that Tropicália brings all these different Brazils together, expressing all the contradictions. When they came to São Paulo, they met Os Mutantes, who were pioneers of rock ’n’ roll in Brazil, and they were sensible enough to mix with these young rock ’n’ roll kids, then to say to us, “OK, music from Brazil now needs to have all the influences and the heritage of northeast Brazil, mixed with the influence from abroad.”

Can you tell me a bit about another piece of northeastern heritage—the folk culture of Pernambuco?
After the cane-sugar period, during the colonial era, Pernambuco was looking inward for many years. It combined Catholic and Afro-Brazilian traditions with many rural expressions. The ciranda [circle dances and songs] and the maracatú [heavy drum music and dance] are just two of the genres among them. So Pernambuco was the secret source of many traditions adopted later in Bahia, such as the frevo, another musical genre that influenced the trio elétricos, the music trucks that bring thousands of people to dance first in the streets of Salvador's carnival, then all over Brazil.

Caetano Veloso at the Divino Maravilhoso TV Show (Photo courtesy of Paulo Salomao)

In terms of lyrical content, how was Tropicália different to bossa nova?
There's a very famous bossa nova song with the title, “Love, a Smile, and a Flower.” Everything in bossa nova is romantic and nice—people sing about the sea, the beach, and the young and beautiful girl from Ipanema, you know? In Tropicália songs, you heard about the poor Brazil. Yes, there would be a beautiful beach, but there would be a hungry and poor child there. This was, and still is, a more accurate portrait of Brazil.

Yeah, Caetano Veloso did a parody of "Strawberry Fields Forever" as "Sugar Cane Fields Forever," right?
He was talking about colonization, because the sugar cane represents the old Brazil. First we were the land of the Brazilwood, then gold, then cane sugar, then coffee. At the time of that song, we were beginning to make cars and build Brasilia, a city that expressed our idea of how modern life should be. So when he talked about cane-sugar fields, he talked about the aspects of our culture that were resisting [change]. Brazil has always been based on commodities, even nowadays with meat and soya. Brazil is still struggling to be a modern nation, to have a service industry. But richness is still based on commodities, like the way cane sugar was a commodity at the time. When this old Brazil is done with, we’ll be modern.

Lastly, where do you think these protests will lead?
This is the question that most Brazilians are asking right now. My opinion is that the changes we really need won't come soon. Even though we’re a democratic country now, most of the bad habits that come from our colonization are [still] present in our society. It's a legacy that comes from the Portuguese colonization, which based the economy on slavery—with rules that preserved the privileges of just a few—and a strong Catholic mentality. We won't change the mentality and behavior of five centuries within five years. We’re just starting to walk the first steps, and I'm happy that young people want to go further.

Follow Esra on Twitter: @esragurmen

Want to learn more about the current protests in Brazil?

The Battle of Consolação

We Are Live Streaming Coverage of the São Paulo Protests

How Last Week's Celebration in Rio de Janeiro Turned Violent

One of my cartoons that, apparently, make me a less credible witness to my own rape.

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, one out of six American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. I am one of those women. I don’t think my story is particularly rare or special. It happens all the time—according to RAINN, a rape occurs in the US every two minutes. And just like 97 percent of rapists, my attacker walked free. I would like to share my personal account of what it is like to file a rape accusation, so if you haven’t gone through the process, you can learn about all the fun that comes with it. (I’m sure a lot of people, unfortunately, already have a pretty good idea of what it’s like.)

I’ll start at the very beginning: In early October of 2010, I went to meet my friends at a bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was around 10 PM. There was a guy hanging out in my little cluster of people who I wrongly assumed was a friend of my friends. He was socializing pretty well with the group, as if he knew a few of us, and I didn’t give it a second thought. I was drunk. There was some cocaine use going on. While I was outside smoking a cigarette, the guy came out for a smoke too, so we talked. I didn't flirt with him—I don’t really know how to flirt, and anyway, I wasn’t attracted to this guy in the slightest. He was about five nine with a thin yet muscular build and looked like he might be of Hispanic or Italian descent. Later, I’d describe him to the cops that way.

There was a disconnected look in his eyes, and at first I figured he was just shy and trying to connect desperately to others through drugs, as many people do. He didn't flirt with me either, nor did he show any romantic or sexual interest in me. He did ask me if I wanted to do a bump of coke in his car, rather than waiting in line for the bathroom inside. His car was right in front of us, and even though I was nervous, I climbed in. As soon as the doors were shut, he locked the doors and started the car. I demanded to be let out, and as he started driving, I told him to turn back and that my friends were waiting for me. He said, “Don’t worry. I’m turning back,” with a stoic expression carved into his face. He didn’t turn back. I kept asking where he was taking me, and soon he stopped responding.

He brought me into his spotlessly clean and creepy apartment where porn was already playing on multiple monitors placed around the room. I told him repeatedly that I didn’t want to have sex with him and that I wanted to go back to my friends. There was no ambiguity about the situation at all. I spent a lot of time pushing him off me. He threatened to kill me. He punched me. He pulled my hair when I tried to get away. Every time I told him to stop, he slapped me in the face. He repeatedly called me a "bitch" and a "whore." He ordered me to shut the fuck up. I ended up begging for my life. I even offered him money if he would just please not hurt me. The worst part of the ordeal was having to look at the massive “666” tattoo on his lower abdomen. I ran away as soon as I felt I had the opportunity to do so. He chased after me.

I didn’t really know what to do about the whole thing. I was scared to go to the police because it’s common knowledge that rape victims are often treated like shit, especially if they aren’t as virtuous as the Virgin Mary. I knew I’d be made to feel guilty about my intoxication, I knew I'd be asked about my misguided decision to willingly get into the car, and I already felt guilty and stupid about those things. A friend of mine convinced me that reporting it would be the right thing to do. Her advice was to look “as broken as possible. Don’t wear black eye makeup or dress stylish like you usually do.”

Now, I think I look like I’m about 12 years old without makeup, and it makes me feel naked, but I went to the police station looking sad and makeup-less about 24 hours later. The cops were nice and cool about the whole thing as I filed a report, then I went to the hospital and got a rape kit. Afterward, I was interviewed by a detective who kept asking me about what I was wearing at the time and who told me that this case would probably never make it anywhere because I was intoxicated. Instead of focusing on what was done to me, most of his questions focused on why I didn’t fight back harder and run away sooner. The answer to both was because I was afraid and operating on a kind of autopilot—I never imagined anyone would accuse me of failing to get away.

I went to see the same detective at the Special Victims Unit (the division that deals with rape) a few days later to look through pictures of convicts on their database. I spent hours scanning photo after photo of criminals to see if I could spot my guy. The detective was extremely discouraging about it, saying that it was a waste of time. He kept commenting to his buddies about how I looked like so-and-so from some other police unit—I couldn’t tell if it was a compliment or an insult but my intuition was telling me it was the latter. I was probably being sensitive, but I really wasn’t happy about having my looks talked about, since I was literally searching for my rapist. I could barely take care of basic hygiene needs at the time, let alone look nice for the cops, and I told him to please stop talking about my looks. He replied that he was doing me a favor by humoring my iffy rape case, and that if I continued to give him attitude he would just drop it.

A few days later, I got a call from a much nicer detective who was taking over my case—it had become an investigation into multiple rape incidents. Through my description of my rapist’s tattoo, the SVU was able to not only figure out who he was, but also link him to two other women who had been sexually assaulted. Because each incident was months apart, my new detective was convinced that this man was a serial rapist. He seemed to have an m.o. that increased in viciousness and intensity each time. The perp was arrested, and I chose him in the police lineup. During this time, I talked a lot to one of the other girls, who looked like a dark-haired version of me. She even had the same mole above her lip as I do, and like me, she didn’t know his name, just knew that damn tattoo. She had a boyfriend at the time of her assault, and he broke up with her because he thought she had cheated and made up the whole rape claim out of guilt. That dark-haired girl and I testified before a grand jury, and they felt there was enough evidence to move forward with a trial. The third girl, who had filed a complaint months prior, just wanted to move on with her life and skipped the whole process.

Meanwhile I had to deal with the ramifications of my rape that didn’t have anything to do with the cops or the courts. I initially only told a few people I trusted about what happened—I wanted to keep the situation on the down-low, since I was worried people would react in all kinds of ways that would make me uncomfortable. Well, that didn’t work out. Within a few days 60 or 70 people knew, and nobody wanted to hang out with me, out of fear that as a “rape victim” I’d burst into tears unpredictably or whatever. One of my best friends at the time told me she couldn’t be my friend anymore and wouldn’t even listen to me when I told her details about the assault. She said it was too heavy to hear, and claimed that what happened to me had given her post-traumatic stress disorder.

A few family members told me that they were grieving over me, because rape is a “fate worse than death.” Another told me that they were not shocked this happened to me because I was a victim by nature. “Some people are victims and some are predators,” they said. “You are a victim.” Some people actually seemed straight-up jealous because apparently I now had a “valid reason” to be depressed. These were acquaintances who were generally unhappy and they probably felt insecure that they only had minor relationship hassles and shitty bosses to blame their ennui on.

The rapist turned out to be well-off financially, and this was a problem. He got, as my new nice detective put it, a very good defense attorney, who appealed the grand jury’s decision and claimed his client didn’t have enough time to prepare to appear before the grand jury. I was told to prepare to speak again before a new grand jury, and the case kept getting delayed. I called the assistant district attorney handling the case over and over only to get vague answers about why it was taking so long. I lived with this thing looming above my head for a long, long time. It wasn’t until March of 2012 that I was asked to come in and speak again. The dark-haired girl had given up at this point, and no longer wanted to deal with the situation.

It was just me now, and the sexual assault claims of the other women were not allowed to be brought up in court. When I arrived at the ADA’s office the day I testified, the ADA, who was a woman, had a folder waiting for me. It contained “incriminating evidence” about my character that the rapist’s defense attorney had “dug up on me”: cartoons I had posted on the internet, “racy” articles I had published, and photographs of me.

One of the black marks on my record was a cartoon blog called Slutclock. The name is a vague homage to the 90s video game White Men Can’t Jump, which was filled with bizarre slang phrases like, “Catch you on the flip-flop, timepants!” According to the ADA, this would be used during a trial to insinuate that I referred to myself as a slut. Other things that were apparently relevant included a cartoon of a blob choking another blob captioned “Happy Violence Day,” photos of me at a shooting range, and a picture of my roommate holding a toy gun to my head. All of this, apparently, proved that I enjoyed rough sex. The toy-gun photo I had posted to Facebook because my roommate was making a joke about forcing me to write a summary about an art show that he was curating, and I didn't think there was anything sexual about the image, but the ADA told me that she found that one “particularly unsettling.” Also included were photographs of me in skimpy outfits at the Mermaid Parade and at Halloween, both occasions when nearly everyone in attendance is dressed sexily.

I was forced to defend what I consider to be pretty normal stuff that had nothing to do with that night. It’s not like I wrote a sadomasochism sex column—and even if I did, it shouldn't matter. I’d have preferred to be berated about my drug use, which was at least somewhat relevant. By way of prepping me for the trial we’d thought we’d get, the ADA also commented on my platinum-colored rocker hair and told me that I should have probably worn a wig or dyed my hair a tamer color. Then she added, “You do have a good job right now, so that will help give you credibility.”

As it turned out, after being grilled about this stuff by the ADA, it was ruled that the defense attorney couldn’t bring up the photos and drawings in front of the grand jury. It didn’t matter—they threw the case out anyway. They apparently thought I hadn’t fought back enough and I wasn’t bruised enough and I didn’t go to the police soon enough. I wasn’t particularly surprised by the result, but it left me feeling like the judicial system and society as a whole had let me down. I am a human being who wants to experience all that life has to offer and I feel I have the right to do so, as does any man or woman. I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about expressing myself artistically or through clothing. I especially shouldn’t have those expressions of myself thrown back in my face as an argument for why I deserve to be violated. Sure, I put myself in a stupid situation. I get that. But let's say someone was stupid enough to pass out on my doorstep and I decided to stab them to death, just because I had the primal urge to and they were there—I’d be convicted of murder, and rightly so. The victim’s lifestyle wouldn’t come into play at all.

I refuse to feel marked as damaged goods because of this ordeal. I think that attitude towards sexual assault is archaic and absurd. I think many people who have been raped are afraid to talk about what happened to them, but rape shouldn’t be a taboo topic. Some people have accused me of being borderline sociopathic about the whole thing and say I speak of it like someone might talk about eating a sandwich. But I can’t think of it as a catastrophic event. It’s something that happened to me, and I had to numb down the intensity of its effects to make it more manageable—that’s an effect of PTSD. I’m sorry if this is disturbing to read about, but a lot of people have to go through this. To pretend that these kinds of things aren’t happening is a lot more disturbing to me than talking about it.

Gina Tron is the features editor for Ladygunn Magazine and the creative director for Williamsburg Fashion Weekend. She is currently in the process of completing a book. Follow her on Twitter: @_GinaTron

More personal essays:

I Was a Suspected School Shooter

Go to Homeschool

Notes from a Hitter: How Football Battered My Brain

We'll never look at Canadian protesters the same way ever again. via Flickr.

When several protestors showed up at a Trudeau press conference a few weeks ago, nobody imagined that the protestors were actually just undercover Conservative party interns dressed as regular protestin’ Joes, with baseball caps and sunglasses hiding their eyes. And yet, as the Huffington Post elaborated on this week, several Tory conservatives showed up with terribly unoriginal (and obviously Conservative attack ad) signs reading, “Justin is in over his head” and “Justin <3s the Senate.” The report also named and provided details on each protestor after digging up their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. Apparently, the Prime Minister’s interns weren’t the only ones involved. Some of the party’s staffers were fake-protesting, too.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the PM’s office try to slander Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party’s new golden boy. Stephen’s minions have been hard at work since Trudeau has come to the forefront of the party. Their most ridiculous smear commercial features a clip of Justin undressing juxtaposed with Stephen in hard hat—ostensibly getting shit done—and slams Justin’s past as a camp councilor, drama teacher, and parliamentary truant.

More recently, the PMO was called out on their sloppy decision to tip off news agencies that Justin had charged a charity $10,000 for one of his presumably amazing speaking engagements—while asking for anonymity—to discredit Pierre’s son. A Barrie, Ontario news site refused the request for anonymity and wrote that someone from the PMO sent them the documents, making both the Liberals and the Conservatives look like dummies in the process.

But this is not the first time a Prime Minister’s office has tried sending out information anonymously to media. Jean Chretien did the same thing back in the 90s to mess with Jean Charest and his precious public image. But that doesn’t make it any better. People in the PMO are working on the taxpayer’s dime and we should expect a bit more of them than the sloppy prankster tactics they’ve concocted to ineffectively smear their opponents at every turn.

Sending out interns to pose as protestors is lame. The interns, of course, have been told not to talk to the media. So instead of speaking with one of Stephen loyal interns—none of whom responded to any of VICE Canada’s interview requests—I called up Jackson Byrne, a University graduate who spent two summers interning at two different divisions of the Ontario Liberal Party to see if this sort of thing was just part of interning duties. Turns out that during his first summer of interning he and a few fellow interns went to a provincial Conservative party convention and stood on the driveway, handing out flyers and holding up protest signs. According to Jackson, one of his signs referred to Tim Hudak, the anti-LCBO leader of the Ontario Conservatives, as a “Reckless Rookie.”

Jackson made it clear that this phony protest was not mandatory, and all of the fake protesters/real interns were demonstrating outside of work hours. Shortly after they arrived on the scene, some Conservative staffers came out and one was brandishing a video camera. “They asked us who we were. We said we were Young Liberals, which is true. It was after work hours so I didn’t feel like I was being unethical. But, we weren’t jumping at the chance to tell them we were from the Ontario Liberal party offices.”

So they were truthful, but ambiguous and did this out of choice. Did Harper’s interns have the same choice? It's not clear. Trudeau’s press conference was outside Parliament Hill and during a workday afternoon. A lot of the interns (and staffers) were dressed down in very generic, un-business-like clothing. One lady was wearing aviators and a ball cap, perhaps in an attempt to hide her face.

In Jackson’s political interning experience, he also witnessed Conservative interns doing the ol’ pretend-to-be-a-protester trick at a Liberal convention. “They basically ran around the hotel depositing pamphlets, because the hotel was full of Liberals. [They were] a pain in the ass… The impression I got, and I don’t think the NDP had any part in this (I didn’t have any interactions with them)… In terms of the PCs and the Liberals, they seem to have an agreement that we’re both going to screw around with each other a bit.”

Apparently, phony protesting is all part of a silly political game. These parties’ attempts at trying to screw with each other are very clearly a waste of time. If I were a political intern looking for a future in politics, I’d want to learn about effective political strategy, without having to sharpie-up a crappy protest sign and stand on the sidewalk yelling at my ideological adversaries.

It wouldn’t be overly conspiratorial to think that for Harper, this little stunt isn’t just about trying to make Trudeau look bad for the sake of the next federal elections in 2015. It’s may also be about trying to distract us all from the dodgy actions of the Conservative Senators and how they’re spending taxpayers’ money.

Evidently though, both the Liberals and the Conservatives share these juvenile political tactics. It’s a waste of money on both sides, but it’s most offensive when it’s coming from the country’s highest political office. Ultimately it shows how petty Canadian politics can be, and sheds a bit of light on how poorly our country’s most prominent political leaders delegate their human resources.

Tweet at Ken. He might respond. @kjrwall
 

For more on the PM and Conservatives:

Medical Weed Growers Are Ready to Fight the Conservatives

The Canadian Senate Is a Waste of Money

The Conservatives Don't Want Your Census Data

Oh shit, I've done it now. I've fallen into the mental quicksand that is trying to analyze Miley Cyrus and what the fuck is happening in her latest video, "We Can't Stop." I would like to ignore it and shrug it off as old news and not worth talking about, since it came out a week ago and that's like an eternity in internet time. But there seems to be no escaping Miley Cyrus 2.0, the former Disney Hannah Montana starlet who's transmogrified into a sexed-up, ganja-puffing, white-washed Rihanna. 

The video for "We Can't Stop" just broke VEVO's all-time record for views in 24 hours—even besting Justin Beiber, another child star getting ready to rebel against his child-friendly image. It's on the lips of every obnoxious Jersey Shore casting reject at every club that used to be playing "Call Me Maybe" on repeat a year ago. It's being discussed at length by bros who high five each other when they explain how much they want to fuck Miley now that they saw her half naked on all fours, ("She's 100 percent legal, dude!") It's being praised by the ironic music nerds who see it as a triumph of pop culture and Tin Pan Alley–like tinkering. And it's also being lambasted for its treatment of blacks, who appear in the video like accessories meant to signify authenticity, just as her tight white pants are meant to represent sexiness. Not to mention the fact that the whole thing feels like a blatant example of gross cultural appropriation, akin to the Pat Boones and Elvises of yesteryear.

What do I see in "We Can't Stop"? Pretty much all of those things. It's a catchy track, she's awkwardly sexy in the video, and the whole production is a marvelous example of the titillating power of the pop-music machine. But as a black man and a person who is concerned with the representations of hip-hop and black culture in the wider world, the cultural-appropriation stuff is what's been nagging at me. Given her statements about wanting to achieve a "black sound" during the production of the record—and considering the drug-referencing, butt-bouncing, gold-teeth-laden final project—it's hard not to come to the conclusion that Miley has a problematic view of what "black" is. Although whites appropriating parts of blackness to create something that borders on mockery is nothing new in American pop culture, Miley's situation seems to be a bit different. In the past, white musicians playing jazz or early rock 'n' roll could completely overshadow and outsell the black musicians who they were copying, thanks to institutional and societal barriers that kept those black artists from reaching a wider audience. But today, black artists don't face the same level of oppression when creating their art. There are probably more whites than blacks at any given Rihanna or Juicy J show. Does that mean I shouldn't be so concerned about this whole thing? I mean, fucking Obama, right? OBAMA.

To figure out how cultural appropriation works in a day when the playing field is different—I'm not going to say "equal"—I reached out to a guy who is much smarter than me. Professor Akil Houston of Ohio University's African American Studies Department has been dropping knowledge on the intersection between race and popular culture for a long time. As a DJ and hip-hop scholar, he is especially astute at parsing the goings-on of the rap world and how they relate to larger issues of politics and race. I sent him a few questions via Facebook about Miley and the video, and here's what he had to say. 

VICE: In your eyes, does the appropriation of "black culture," perpetuated through Miley's video by her taking on modern hip-hop tropes, come off as cynical or authentic? Does that distinction even matter?
Professor Akil Houston: It doesn’t appear to be either. It continues a long tradition of what bell hooks might refer to as "eating the other." Hooks noted that within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes like spice seasoning. It is used to liven up the dull dish that is mainstream/white culture. The distinction is important, as I think authentic images and references affirm, acknowledge, and embrace a particular culture. For example, consider the Beastie Boys and hip-hop. They were a lot more authentic and representative of true hip-hop culture than what passes for it these days.

Is there a connection in your mind between this video and the tradition of minstrelsy or Amos 'n' Andy and Pat Boone? How does this video fit within a historical context with particular attention to the appropriation and mocking of black culture by whites? 
Certainly there is a connection, that is why I state that it continues in a long tradition. There are some today that would argue as there were those in the days of Amos ’n’ Andy or Pat Boone, that these tropes, images, and appropriations are ways of widening the audience of such cultural productions. Yet the specter of race still haunts these images then and now. It says something about a society that cannot face the real thing but enjoys the pleasure of spectacle involved in mockery, even if it's assumed to be in jest.

When you see the black characters in this video, do they come off as a accessories or fully realized people? Is it important to make the distinction? And what does it say about Miley's intentions?
Miley and the black actors in the video are all props on the stage of visual pleasure. I think it's important to consider that these images function within the sphere of multinational corporate control so both the lead (Miley) and the accessories do not maintain a high level of autonomy in terms of imaging.

If a white person wanted to adopt and reinterpret a slice of black culture presented within hip-hop, how ought they go about it? How can a white artist be more like an Eminem, instead of a Pat Boone? What's the difference, or is there a difference?
I’m not so sure Eminem is the ideal model. He gets a pass because he is talented and has surrounded himself with people like Proof and Dr. Dre. These people lent him a level of legitimacy early in his career. Also his working-class background fits within the mold of certain notions of hip-hop authenticity. I would look at Invincible as more of a model. I think she represents the best of how to approach it. She acknowledges her white privilege, maintains a connection to the ideal of hip-hop, and on top of that, she is a good lyricist. 

Although it may be difficult to tell, as rap music and hip-hop culture have been gutted of most relevant social and political content by the current corporate structure, there is a difference. There is a great doc called Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity by Robert Clift that shows and details the difference between appreciation and mockery.

In the past, white artists have stolen black art and blinded the public from the contributions made by black artists. Today, this seems kind of impossible considering the prominence of black celebrities like Rihanna (who this song was originally written for, and is a clear influence on Miley). Is there any way that what happened in the early days of rock 'n' roll and jazz could happen today, where great black artists could get overshadowed by lesser-talented white imitators?
It never stopped. Though you do have more visibility for artists of color, the same kinds of dynamics still occur. The general public is unaware of artists of color who are punk, country, alternative, or any other label record companies use to identify them. To some, these artists appear as outsiders.

What does Miley's Cyrus's interpretation of what she has gone on record to call "black" say about her perception of black people and their culture?
She could stand to take a few African American–studies courses.

Is there a blame that should be placed on artists who work in hip-hop, such a Gucci Mane and Three Six Mafia, for helping mold the stereotypes that Miley presents in the video, even if their work is balanced by other elements that are conspicuously left out of her interpretation?
Absolutely. However our critiques of them need to be contextualized. Who makes these artists possible, why are their songs in heavy rotation, what labels and corporations are supporting these images and messages? Artists like Wise Intelligent, Public Enemy, One Be Lo, Bahamadia, and others have been putting out relevant images and messages that are not homophobic, sexist, and generally problematic for years. Yet they do not have the airplay or access as some of the groups you mentioned. It's not enough to be critical of the artists, though we should be—it must extend to the corporation that makes it possible.

Does the fact that Miley worked with some successful and respected black producers to create this song help give her legitimacy? How does the involvement of other blacks within the creation of this content assist in her authenticity?
Of course, if you have Blacks participating it gives a certainly level of credibility. "The song can’t be problematic because black people helped make it," is a flawed argument. But it does offer authenticity to those engaging in the pleasure of the song who do not want to feel uncomfortable about it.

Because rap has become one of the most viable commercial art forms, can we expect much more of what we see with Miley? How much of this turn for her in art is about money and cashing in, versus race? Or are those two thing impossible to separate?
Race, class, gender, it is not possible to separate these things. The notion of an R&B category was constructed around race. All artists have to negotiate the demands of the commercial marketplace. Even Madonna. Consider her career trajectory and the different stages of representation she has in her public performance. If Miley plans to have the longevity of a Madonna, we will see many shifts.

Is there a benefit that can be gained from Miley's video in terms of race relations? Could it perhaps introduce some new people to black forms of expression, which might spur them to discover more compelling and nuanced and authentic versions of what Miley is trying to do? 
Time will tell.

Word up. Thanks, Professor. 

@WilbertLCooper

More stuff from Wilbert: 

Hey Black Dudes, Why the Hell Are You at CPAC?

Black Man in a Dress 

'The Boondocks' Creator Aaron McGruder Tells Us About 'The Uncle Ruckus Movie'

Big Booties Don't Get into Rap Videos Without These Guys

It's been three hours since you ate two thick tabs of high-grade LSD, and the stuff is really kicking in. You sense this because everything and everyone around you looks weirder and progressively severe as the trip extends. This isn't your first time, but who are you kidding? You're no acid king. You're just another blip on the collective radar of untold millions of garden-variety psychonauts who occasionally swill that brain juice.

You are electric. Your brain is a supercontinent only partially charted. Your mind's eye is fire-hosing garbled and complex equations, proofs, and logical dead ends, and will do so for something like the next 10 hours, possibly longer. You are diving through bottomless fractals and honeycombs. You're scaling lattices and gratings as tall as mountains, and now you're tracing the filigrees and fretwork of the Relief of Time. You're plucking noise out of thin air, dammit, spreading the sonic detritus over your person like some strange sort of salve. You look down at your hands only to see how they've melted to the floor in small, fleshy puddles. You turn to your trip sitter, a trusted friend who appears now to be spewing fire so as to beat back a gaggle of ankle-biting, animatronic imps. The walls are breathing, you swear it. You're tripping. 

These are just some of the sort of open-eye distortions, occular tricks, and warped depth perceptions that color long, strange, at times painfully sublime trips down to the Laugh Farm. You're about a third of the way there by now and it's like you haven't even blinked (to say nothing of what you might also have smelled or even tasted to this point of your inner odyssey). What's foggier is why: acid, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, whatever—it's almost no matter. When you dose your head, why do your eyes pick up certain visual stimuli while blotting out others? Why do some otherwise everyday objects appear stranger or more fragile to you than others? Why do you swear on your life that you see stuff—things, people, the forces of nature—that simply would not be if you weren't nearing peak trip?

To find out, take a good, hard look at yourself tripping face. What you might find is that the why behind the crest and trough of a proper trip's hallucinatory wave is just as intense, even life affirming as the what, the raw visualizations themselves—perhaps even more so. And yet why? Why do we see we what we see when tripping? 

It's a riddle that's lingered for about as long as humans have been deliberately altering their minds with chemicals, which is to say for all of human history. To this day, even with ever-advancing brain-imaging capabilities, it continues to confound and intrigue scientists, researchers, amateur chemists, and committed psychonauts, alike. To pull just one take out of a growing corpus of rigorous psychedelic study, the question of why we see such things on psychedelics lays at the heart of a paper (PDF) published August 2000 in the journal of the Royal Society that plumbed the depths of the "striking" visual experience of seeing geometric visual hallucinations.

One look at its title ("Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex") and byline, which includes mathematicians from the Universities of Utah, Chicago, and Houston, plus researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the National Institute of Health, and what's clear is our understanding of why, exactly, we see precisely what we see (or what we think appears in our fields of view) when tripping rests as much on basic geometry as it does neurology, psychopharmacology and the cognitive sciences writ large.

All right, maybe not basic basic geometry. This is dense stuff. Are you up on Rayleigh-Schrodinger perturbation theory and nonlinear stability analyses the likes of Liapunov-Schmidt reduction? Because if you're neither a math ace nor on acid, working through the study may have you feeling like you are, in fact, tripping on LSD.

Not to say the paper doesn't deserve a close read, or that how I'm about to distill its findings does the study true justice. But the idea is that in modeling form constants using numbers and shape theory the researchers first posited that "patterns of connection" linking the retina, the visual cortex and its neuronal circuitry bore the wellspring from which classic psychedelic visuals bubble over. 

In the end, the researchers found a close relationsip between form constants, those geometric patterns regularly observed in altered states of consciousness, and planforms, or the contours of objects seen from above. These results hinged on the "detailed speculation" of lateral connectivity in the visual cortex, brain activity central to our ability to recognize an object, its contours, and how it relates with other objects.

As such, a curious possibility emerged. If "the cortical mechanisms by which geometric hallucinations are generated" are indeed housed in the visual cortex, the researchers wrote, it stands to reason that those very mechanisms responsible for psychedelia's geometric visuals are fundamentally akin to those that allow humans to make sense of contours and edges. Which would certainly cut an entirely new slant along the Edge. 

But don't just take my word for it. Go read the paper. It's a trip. 

It's also just one study. And though it's certainly true that claims of being at the threshold of a psychedelic renaissance in 2013 may not sound that crazy—Rick Doblin, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, recently told me that psychedelic research "is flourishing"—it's still difficult, particularly in the US, to obtain most research-grade psychedelics for clinical trial. Which is why something like The Visual Components of a Psychedelic Experience could be valuable to deepening our understanding of why we visualize what we do on doses. 

Read the rest over at Motherboard.

Photo by Carl Heindl.

Thursday marks three years since the G20 was held in Toronto. The summit of world leaders was also the scene of the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, after over 1,000 people were sent to a detention centre. In the meantime, the Arab Spring revolutionized the Middle East, riots popped up all over the globe, and here in Canada we had a bunch more protests of our own from coast to coast. These include over 100 days of tuition hike protests in Montreal, cat and mouse protests against police brutality, Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riot, Occupy, and the historical Native protest movement Idle No More. So, what have we learned about “riot culture” in Canada since the G20?

Lawyer Peter Rosenthal who represented well known shit-disturber Jaggi Singh pro-bono in the massive G20 conspiracy case said the main thing he gathered from the case “was the extraordinary expense and effort that police were willing to expend in order to monitor and charge activists.”

This is backed up by evidence from the US National Security Agency PRISM scandal that shows how Canada was working with, or at least receiving information from the NSA and British Government Communications Headquarters who were monitoring emails, phone calls, and Internet activity of diplomats during the G20 in Toronto. And as we told you before, it’s not a big reach to think that Canadians’ Internet and Facebook messages, especially those of activists, were being monitored as well.

Monitoring the real bad guys can lead to solid law enforcement work. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police caught the creeps who were going to derail a VIA Rail train in April, everyone in Canada was very excited that no one had to die over the homicidal desires of two losers. When these tactics target protesters and innocent people however, public dissent quickly rises. That’s why so many Canadians protested and convinced the Harper government to kill Bill C-30, which was supposedly designed to catch pedophiles, but also would have granted police the ability to monitor Canadians without warrants.

I spoke to Alex Hundert, fresh off of being arrested at a Tar Sands Line 9 protest in Hamilton, Ontario. He spent 14 months in prison and under house arrest after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges at the G20. He sees the crackdown on activism as a sign that the protests are doing their job: “If they are coming down on us that hard, if they’re trying to smash these networks, it means they’re afraid of them and the state recognizes that we are effectively building a movement that challenges not just their power, but the legitimacy of their power,“ he said.

On the other side Tom Stamatakis, president of the Canadian Police Association, said the biggest thing he’s learned from the G20 has been how helpful social media is for organizing protests, which conversely makes these protests easier to monitor through sophisticated law enforcement.

“In general we’re dealing with a different type of protester—much more aggressive, more intent on causing damage or baiting the police into engaging in some kind of conduct that later can be held against the police,” said Stamatakis who has spent time on the front lines of a Canadian riot or two.

While the G20 protests were certainly marred by the actions of the Black Bloc, who destroyed storefronts and set police vehicles on fire, the police are certainly guilty of some highly sketchy behaviour themselves. There were numerous incidents of excessive force used against protesters, journalists were arrested, and senior officers were quoted as telling the police force to “own the streets” during the G20 protests.

Abby Deshman a lawyer and director of the public safety program with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has spent the years since the G20 dealing with the fallout for activists. She said most of the cases against officers are still being held up in court three years later including a class action lawsuit set to deal with protester complaints en masse, before an Ontario judge court rejected it, saying it needed to be split up into individual cases.

On top of all this, the Conservatives just passed a law, that makes wearing a mask (be it a Guy Fawkes mask or a panda suit) at an “illegal protest” punishable by a sentence of up to a decade in prison. This anti-mask law was tested on the Quebec students before Montreal passed a bylaw of their own called P-6, that makes demonstrating with more than ten people illegal if the police aren’t notified in advance.

Deshman said the CCLA is concerned with the effect these laws have on the Canadian right to protest. “We have had decades of relatively successful peaceful public protests every day within this country, we really haven’t had the need for this kind of [crackdown on protesters] before,” she said.

Montreal activist and indie journalist Aaron Lakoff took it a one step further, and compared notifying the police about a demonstration to “giving the route of an action to an armed gang of drug dealers or to your neighbourhood bully.” He added: “the police have not demonstrated that they are there for our protection or our safety.”

Evidently the fallout from the G20 protest has not resulted in any positive changes. When you look at how police officers in Toronto were charged with cornering protesters in a tactic called “kettling,” and that Montreal has continued to use that tactic against peaceful protesters, you have to wonder: have we learned anything at all? Or are things just getting worse?

Tweet at @Joel Balsam if you want, he really likes Canadian politics.
 

For more on Canadian activism:

Teenage Riot: Montreal – Part 2

Wearing a Mask at a Canadian Protest Can Earn You a Ten Year Prison Sentence

Was Adam Nobody, a G20 Protester, Assaulted For Carrying An Explosive Water Bottle

Photo via

My senior portrait in my high school yearbook is bad. Stupendously, horrifyingly bad. Orbit-stopping, telethon-necessitating, encyclopedia-entry bad. Bad in a way that should entitle me to write it off on my taxes. Not bad in the almost-charming way that perfectly encapsulates a bygone pop-culture phase like “rRmember Old Navy?!” or bad in a blatantly misrepresentative way that belied some current or future attractiveness. Bad in a way that feels permanently branded to one’s identity, like an addiction to animal pornography or a manslaughter conviction. I imagined the women of the world meeting at some Bilderberg-type conference, with headphones and translators and a giant white screen that lowered from the ceiling so the yearbook picture could be projected onto it. WARNING: THIS MAN IS OUT THERE AND HE MIGHT APPROACH YOU.

My eyebrows were a sprawling, untamed mess. To call them “eyebrows” would be insufficient. They were something to be classified by a horticulturalist. I was sweaty. My skin was not pale so much as it was a sickly beige, as if my entire face was made of wet Band-Aids. I had braces. I deliberately left my hair “messy,” because I was 16 and believed this was “cool” and was going to “change everything,” except it wasn’t, and it didn’t, because I am not Mark Ruffalo, I am me, I am this, and this spent high school afternoons microwaving bowls of cheddar cheese and eating them with its fingers. I weighed 120 pounds. In the picture, you can see distinctly in my neck not just the outline of an Adam’s apple but a number of fragile throat parts. Afterward, as I walked from the platform where the pictures were taken, I saw waiting in line one of the coolest kids in my grade—cool, as measured by Number of Girls Fingered in a Stairwell. He looked down and realized that we were wearing the same shoes. Real, actual devastation has never been as discernable as it was on his face in that moment. Like it temporarily altered his perception of himself. Like my uncoolness was so immense that even the slightest similarity to it could briefly transfer that uncool-ness onto him.

I am 26 now, and my hair is less awful than it was then. I exfoliate. I have consumed several pieces of cauliflower. I own a tie. The picture exists only in the yearbook, which is in my room, in a box, in a closet. We hide and we change and we pretend the new us is the only us we have ever been.

About a month ago, Jon Caramanica of the New York Times said this to Kanye West: “You look at your outfits from five or seven years ago, and it’s like—” Then Kanye said to him, “Yeah, kill self. That’s all I have to say. Kill self.”

At various points in his career, Kanye West has dressed like Diddy at a Hamptons Party, Frat Bro at a State College Beer Pong Tournament, Divorced Suburban Dad Trying to Get Back Out There, Midtown Lothario, Late-80s Siegfried and Roy, David Byrne on a First Date. There were shuttershades, chinchilla shawls, aggressive graphic tees, brand name obsessions, shirts unbuttoned to his navel. Jerry Seinfeld once said, “All fathers essentially dress in the clothing style of the last good year of their lives.” Kanye West has not stopped redefining his style, perhaps because he is a man who refuses to believe that any year of his life can be the best, that any height, no matter how stratospheric, cannot be surpassed.

Implicit in change, in adaptation, is the acknowledgement that we have failed. We change to get better, to become something bold and singular. In 2009, on his VH1 Storytellers special, Kanye said, “So few, you know, hip-hop artists have ever advanced. Their songs, you know, on their seventh, eighth album, sound exactly like the songs on their first albums. More than an artist, I’m a real person, and real people grow. And I want to ju… sing my growth.”

Growth is inessential to the quality of an artist’s work (I will listen to Ghostface rap about trips to Pathmark on as many songs as he chooses to release), but the need to be understood as a human being, not merely as a delivery service, a bard, and to reveal such an unabashed desire to grow, in front of us, is valuable. Kanye is perpetually in kill-self mode, because to him, there is always a better self.

On “Eyes Closed” he raps, “Begging one of these fuckin fashion houses to hire me / They say I’ve been an asshole / I said if you acquire me / I can be a quiet me.”

He contains every fault, every landmine of our culture’s last decade: ugly polos, clothing with the names written on them in big bold letters, armchair political activism, sneaker obsession, falling defenselessly in love with a Kardashian, a fascination with Scott Disick, silly jokes about sitcoms, getting drunk and doing shocking things in front of pretty white girls, writing all-caps blog posts. He is constantly in search of vindication, to prove you wrong, to learn new things and REBRAND himself and I really mean it this time and ohbytheway fuck taxes. But he accepts this. He celebrates this. In a way, he is everything we wish we had the courage to try to become ourselves. Kanye West sent a picture of his penis to a woman and wrote a song about it.

He said this to Vibe magazine in January of 2009: “People always try to be so fucking perfect and I think that there’s some beauty in imperfection. People should embrace their flaws. Right now it’s all about the perfect six-pack. The perfect outfit. The perfect pitch. The perfect everything. And it’s like damn, your grandmother wasn’t perfect, but you still love her.”

Kanye went from backpacker to Jumbotron rockstar to messianic figure. He wanted to get Jay-Z’s attention, then to rise in the sky at Coachella, then to be Steve Jobs, to be a nucleus. Whether he has actually achieved this is secondary to the objective. This, to him, was a career trajectory. This wasn’t simply opulence or hedonism or some lordship in the rap game. Jay-Z has the world figured out, has its equations solved and written in scrolls. Kanye doesn’t want to take over the world. He wants to be gravity. 

Photo via

He has never looked as comfortable as he does when surrounded by people chanting his name, obeying him, telling him they love him and singing the words he wrote. It is likely that every artist responds to this, craves this, on some level, but few have ever made it so evident, including it in their measure of self-worth. Few have ever so incorporated the public in their own mythology—feeling WRONGED and wanting redemption, trying to convert the haters while simultaneously posturing to not give a fuck what the haters think. “We all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit it,” he rapped on “All Falls Down.”

During the Twitter purge that concluded with him apologizing to Taylor Swift, Kanye said, “the ego is overdone. It’s like hoodies.” And then, three years later, on last week’s Yeezus, he released a song called “I am a God.” He is all contradictions and remorse, making promises that he doesn't simply break but drops anvils onto. He apologizes, and then years later rescinds his apologies. It feels childish on some level, but invigorating in its honesty on another. Who among us has not done the right thing for the wrong reasons?

He is so willing to fail in broad daylight, furiously swinging his arms at the opposition, and then apologizing to them, in front of Matt fucking Lauer, in moments that border on paralysis. And then not giving a fuck again, in Hawaii, while he records an album about not giving a fuck. He is relentless. His love songs are about as subtle as a mariachi band playing on your front porch in a rainstorm. He is all ego—beautiful, explosive ego, fragile and loud at the same time. He lives a protracted adolescence while occasionally veering into something more. Then he makes an antagonistic remark about Asians or the shitty sedans normal people drive. His songs are not so much conventional narratives; they are him assessing his life, reflecting, commiserating, attacking, retreating and then fucking you on the sink.

During the Storytellers appearance, he said, “I’m an easy target, because I don’t fit in. I think through the gate. I think from The College Dropout, I was the only one in a polo in the midst of a whole bunch of jerseys, I was THE difference.” Kanye is wrong; the superficial is only a disguise. It is spectacle. But this desire to matter, to put yourself in a historical context beyond Top Five Dead or Alive” is something even us normals can identify with. “Haters” is in the canon of rap’s New Testament; it creates an artificial adversarial dynamic, and Kanye revels in this role more than anyone. He thrives as the renegade, all of that angsty contrarianism and smirking vengeance that sometimes involves hacking apart a Maybach and driving it around an abandoned lot to “Try a Little Tenderness.”

Robert Christgau, in his review of The College Dropout for the Village Voice, responded to Kanye’s critics with this: “They’d buy the Benz—so would I, Volvos don’t last as long—and probably the gold too. They’d say anything to get laid.”

Of course, you get the sense Kanye West wants it very clear than you can admire him, but you cannot be him. You cannot get laid like him. No one can.

There is a picture of Kanye West, from middle school or early high school, wearing a forest green gown and a white corsage, holding a cap and half smiling toward the camera, right there for everyone to see. It is peculiar and hard to believe: he looks just like everyone else.

More fun with pop culture - Miley Cyrus Needs to Take an African American Studies Class

Previously by John Saward:

Man Have Sex With Girl in Cave: Dissecting 'Giggolos'

Ryan Lochte is a Human Jåegerbomb

The Loveliest Chauvinist

John Saward likes O.V. Wright and eating guacamole with no pants on. He lives in Connecticut. Follow him on Twitter @RBUAS.

ENGLAND. Bradford. A Teddy Boy combs his hair in the Market Tavern. 1976.

Magnum is probably the most famous photo agency in the world. Even if you haven't heard of it, chances are you're familiar with its images, like Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War or Martin Parr's very British holiday-scapes. Unlike most agencies, Magnum's members are selected by the other photographers, so becoming a member is a gruelling process. As part of an ongoing partnership with Magnum, we will be profiling some of their photographers over the coming weeks.

Chris Steele-Perkins studied psychology before turning to photography. His early work focused on social ills in British cities, at the time working with the EXIT collective. His time with EXIT culminated in a book by the group called Survival Programmes. In 1979, he released his first solo book, Teds, examining the British Teddy Boy subculture of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. After that, Steele-Perkins started to travel more widely, photographing Africa, Afghanistan, and later Japan. A Magnum member since 1979, we talked to him about all that and his obsession with England.

VICE: Your background seems pretty varied, having studied things like chemistry and psychology. Has that informed your work at all?
Chris Steele-Perkins: I’m not sure about that. I was obviously searching for something that I wanted to do, so I started off with chemistry and I soon figured out that wasn't where I wanted to be. Psychology was interesting and fun, but again didn't feel right. It was during that time that I got to working for the student newspaper as a photographer and that kind of got me going. When I finished my degree, I realized that was the route I wanted to follow.

Going back to the psychology bit, it feels like you have a strong connection to the personal aspect of photography. Clearly you're shooting a lot of people, but you seem to really get to the soul of a lot of personal issues. Do you think studying psychology made you more easily connect with people and their plights? 
I think that's more to do with common sense, honestly. I could argue that the best connection psychology offered was the fact that it wasn't nuclear physics. It was a relatively easy course, I must say, which gave me a lot of time to develop my photography. I think my interest indeed is, without meaning to sound pretentious, the human condition. How people live around the world and in the world. I was also hugely influenced by the great humanist photographers; Kertész, Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Smith, people like that. They were a powerful influence early on, when you’re most influenced.

BANGLADESH. Villagers. 1972.

Your first body of work was focused on Bangladesh, on the poverty and despair you found there. But your first book was about Teddy Boys in England. What sparked that shift away from the third world, back to your roots in England?
The Bangladesh trip was the first trip I went on, and then I didn't travel much for ages. Having always been interested in England, I started on two projects without realizing how big they were gonna get three years down the line. One came out of a project on the Teddy Boy revival I was working on with a writer friend of mine for a magazine. After a night at the pub, we both agreed to stick with it and ended up with a book.

At the same time, I got involved with two other photographers in a little group called EXIT. They wanted to do a project on poverty in the inner cities of Britain so we spent a lot of time in poor, inner-city areas of Britain. That turned into a book too, Survival Programmes, many years later. Books always felt to me like the most satisfying way of producing a body of work.

Yeah, it definitely seems like you more than other photographers I know really gravitate towards making books. What attracts you to the book form? 
It's essentially the control. It's great to have a 12-page spread as you used to do in The Sunday Times Magazine, but you also get a whiskey ad in the middle of it and a Land Rover ad at its end. They choose pieces that you might not be too happy with and crop some of them and so forth. A book offers a cause, and if you don't like it it's because I've screwed it up for you. I can't blame anybody else.

I just felt like I wanted to make a statement at times and was lucky to find publishers who went along on that notion with me. Even now with the Internet and everything that it offers, I still feel that the book, which you can take down from a shelf, hold with your hand and sit down with, remains the best way of looking at photography.

Back to Teds, the book has had a second life of sorts as a document that has become influential in the fashion world. What are your thoughts on that?
If it is, that's great [laughs]. It was obviously a social document, and fashion is part of what's recorded in the whole process. It was the clothing, along with everything else of that lifestyle that attracted me to it in the first place.

Afghanistan. Weekly bathing for children in the orphanage in Kabul. 1994.

It seems like much of your work has been created through this deep immersion into the world of your subjects, whether it's squatters in Belfast or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Was that a conscious practice on your part or sheer luck?
It's conscious essentially. If you don’t connect with the subjects of your work, then nobody else is going to. And what you'll end up with is a bunch of sterile pictures.

Your work also seems to balance between reportage photography and personal work and art. I know the Film Ends project was more experimental and it seems your book Pleasure Principle had a bit of your own voice interjected and wasn’t purely subjective. How do you keep a balance between those two?
I've always felt I'm a subjective photographer even though I'm doing a classic reportage. The book I did on Afghanistan, for example, is on one level very classical—black and white—and it's about a war zone. But in fact most of it is dedicated to people going about their ordinary business. The shooting and the hurling of hand grenades is in there too, but in context—or at least my idea of context. 

The book to me is quite personal. It included text I've written about experiences I had along the way. I feel like I've always had one foot in the personal thing and the other in the willingness to look at the world out there.

AFGHANISTAN. Taliban fighters move against Masood's forces. 1996.

You joined Magnum in 1979. How did that come about?
Like I said, I had been working on mostly UK-based projects and Belfast was my one of my favorite experiences abroad. After that, I got the urge to see more of the world, and photography is a fantastic way to do that. I met up with Joseph Kudelka in London a number of times and he caught me out of the blue and told me I should submit a portfolio to Magnum. It also happened that I wanted an agency at the time. It all happened quite fortuitously. I had to be voted in like everybody else, but I got a good break and got accepted.

What do you feel might have been the effects on you working with Magnum, long run?
Well, it had a big effect I suppose, because I was pretty isolated in London. I got to meet a lot of people whose work I'd rated and in a sense compete with them during the golden age of magazine photography. The infrastructure to get things published was there, and it was just up to you to take the pictures. Which is what I wanted to do, to be out in the field. It sounds crazy now, but there was a time that I didn't even think about money. I just thought that all I had to do was come up with interesting pictures, and they would pay for themselves. That was an important step for me.

The other thing that proved important was the Magnum archive. The fact that your stuff goes in there and gets recycled and can come back on the cover of a book, for example, means you have yet another possibility of advancing your income. Which obviously frees you up to just do the work you want to do. It's what everybody dreams of, really.

ENGLAND. Sheffield. Phyllis Corker is a centenarian. DOB 3rd June 1907. In her room in a care home.

And you're still with Magnum and still working.
Yes. I am finding it harder to find the money to do some of the stuff I want to do, but the whole point of coming into photography was to do what I wanted to do rather than service other people's needs. That's what I intend to do till I drop.

Tell me about your new project, Fading Light. How did you come up with this subject?
It came out of a little article I read in the newspaper—a statistic about the number of people who were over a hundred years old. The issue of ageing populations in the Western world has been talked about for some time. That piece wrote that in the UK there were more than 10,000 people who were over a hundred years old.

Wow.
I thought the same. This is a new demographic that hasn't existed on the planet before, and I was just curious to see what these people were like. Also how I would feel about being in their position myself. So I decided to work on this series of portraits and interviews with centenarians in an attempt to document the phenomenon as it is emerging. There are probably 12,000 centenarians in Britain now, and there will soon be 20,000.

It came like many projects do for me. Something tweaks you and you can't let go. I followed that through and got the book published. It's actually not my latest project, that is one on a country of estates—a great sort of English country hall. That's something I've wanted to do for years, but finding the Lord who'd let me run around his place and do whatever I wanted wasn't the easiest thing in the world. I did eventually find a place called Holkham Hall, which is a great estate in Norfolk, and I spent about a year photographing life on it. As part of my broader interest in England.

It seems like you do these bodies of work other places, but you always return to England. What keeps you coming back? 
The fact that I live here. I do find England a bit better than anything in this world, which might be partly based on the fact that I am half-Burmese and I wasn't born here, but also kept coming back as a child. Maybe because I did not quite fit in early on. I feel it's always been a place I've looked at from the outside. It's an odd place with odd people, which continues to intrigue me. Whether I'm dealing with the lord of a manor, a 105-year-old lady, or some guy with a funny haircut who's threatening to punch me.

Click through to see more photography by Chris Steele Perkins.

AFGHANISTAN. Taliban fighters take refuge behind armour as they try to move up the Panshir valley against government forces. 1996.

AFGHANISTAN. Kabul. Children living and playing in an abandoned building. 1994.

N.IRELAND. Belfast. Catholic West Belfast, Falls Road. Hijacked vehicle burns in the background marking the anniversary of the British Policy of internment without trial. 1978.

GB. ENGLAND. London. The car-park of The White Hart, Willesden. 1976.

GB. NORTHERN IRELAND. West Belfast. Outside Divis Flats. 1978.

G.B. NORTHERN IRELAND. West Belfast. Street corner. 1978

BANGLADESH. Patients at a clinic. Taking a pill.

G.B. ENGLAND. Sheffield. Phyllis Corker is a centenarian. DOB 3rd June 1907. In her room in a care home.

Previously - There's More to Stuart Franklin Than the Most Famous Photo of the 20th Century

More from Magnum:

Jonas Bendiksen Takes Photos in Countries That Don't Exist

Peter van Agtmael Won't Deny the Strange Allure of War

Ian Berry Takes Jaw-Dropping Photos of Massacres and Floods

Cry-Baby #1: San Diego Police Department

(via Reddit)

The incident: A guy wrote some stuff on the sidewalk in chalk.

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: He was arrested and now faces jail time. 

Jeff Olson wrote the chalk graffiti on the sidewalks outside several banks in San Diego, California.

He wrote slogans like "no thanks big banks" and "shame on Bank of America," as well as the URLs of anti-bank websites. Again, just in case it's not clear, he wrote them in CHALK. 

After a "high ranking bank security official" complained to police, Jeff was arrested and charged with thirteen counts of vandalism. 

"I was encouraging folks to close their accounts at big Wall Street banks to transfer their money local nonprofit, community credit unions," said Jeff. "Free speech is protected. Just because you don't like what it says doesn't mean that you can't do it, If I had drawn a little girl's hopscotch squares on the street, we wouldn't be here today."

Each count of vandalism that Jeff was charged with carries a maximum penalty of 1[ year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Meaning Jeff could potentially spend 13 years in jail as a result of his chalk vandalism. For writing on a sidewalk. In chalk. 

Cry-Baby #2: Houston Police Department

(via Reddit)

The incident: A guy made a high school massacre joke on Facebook. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. Telling him he's a dick, maybe.

The actual response: He was arrested and has been in jail for the 3 months. 

Back in February, 18-year-old Justin Carter from Houston, Texas got into an argument with two people on Facebook about the game League of Legends. 

According to Justin's father, one of these people wrote, "you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head." To which Justin responded, "yeah, I'm really messed up in the head, I'm gonna go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still beating hearts. LOL JK."

This post was seen by an unnamed busybody in Canada who managed to track down Justin's address online. After looking it up on Google Maps and seeing that he lived near to a school, she called the police.

Several weeks later, on March 27th, Justin was arrested and charged with making a terroristic threat.

A search of Justin's home turned up no weapons. He has been in jail awaiting trial since. 

“These people are serious. They really want my son to go away to jail for a sarcastic comment that he made," said Justin's dad, in an interview with his local news station. Adding, "These kids, they don't realize what they're doing. They don't understand the implications. They don't understand public space."

If found guilty, Justin faces up to eight years in prison. 

Which of these police departments is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll:

Previously: Some cops who arrested a kid over a shirt Vs. A museum who thinks they're being discriminated against

Winner: The homophobic museum!!!

@JLCT

Conceptual writing is a field where, in the words of one of its biggest proponents, Kenneth Goldsmith, “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” Taking cues from Andy Warhol and Roland Barthes rather than big canonical ego heads we associate with “literature,” conceptualism builds more from auto-writing, assembly, curation, and filtration, than anything like plot, characters, or theme. The idea of the work is the work itself, sometimes to the extent that one need not even experience the thing to understand its shape. A lot of conceptual writing, then, could be explained quite briefly, while the execution of it might be quite tedious and massive, even impossible. The author, as Barthes might say, is completely irrelevant, and therefore, dead.

The big shithole that is the internet has become the ultimate fodder for manufacturing conceptual art. There has never been more information and more ways to generate, spread, and manipulate it, while the historical aura of the artist-as-presence continually deflates, or at least becomes more and more surrounded. How true any idea is, or how good or bad it is for where we’re headed, is ultimately both a complex and irrelevant question: we’re going there regardless. Which pisses some people off, and makes some people excited.

I think I’m somewhere in between. As interesting as any idea might be, I often find myself thinking: ok, now what? Cool that you took the time to think of that novel concept, and then to actually spend time and money bringing it to life, but was it really necessary? And isn’t it somehow just as ego-friendly to insist you make your idea a reality, a thing that can be touched and held and considered, instead of just thinking of it and moving on? Then, other times, it’s quite refreshing: it feels good to pick up a book completely free of necessary imagination, fancy narrative, the old dead tools of storytelling and myth making. The same way a diamond skull Damien Hirst shat out to invent money is beautiful as much in context as in the simple glinting grin of death, some conceptual works force your brain in odd directions simply by existing, and the clash between the feelings is maybe even more interesting than the work itself.

Here are three looks at recent works of conceptual writing that I took some form of pleasure in.

Boycott by Vanessa Place

Boycott immediately makes an impression in that it is housed in a blood-red sheath with a slit stabbed down the middle, at once both silently violent and sexualized. The back makes the book itself look like a work of art. The title, author, medium, detail, and ‘gift of the author’ are all listed like on a placard at a museum. Place’s most recent work has stretched the area where a book ends and performance begins. She recently became the first poet to read at the Whitney Biennial, and her performance came with a content advisory notice—a public acknowledgement that language can be dangerous. Holy cow. 

Inside the red slipcover are three slim brown pamphlets, unmarked on the outside. Inside, the paper is cream-colored, with each volume containing a different frame for what will come: Introduction & Epistemology, Ontology, and Ontic. The text itself, one realizes while reading, is familiar, if at the same time slightly off. Boycott takes its body from a group of famous iconic feminist texts, though all references to the feminine gender have been masculinized. So, for instance, the essay “Is There a Feminine Genius?” has been changed to “Is There a Masculine Genius?”; “pussy envy” has been turned to “dick envy”; a reference to Hannah Arendt has been changed to Hans Arendt.

The result is something strangely funny and offsetting at the same time. The discussion of the repression of men as artists seems absurd—insane, even—as if concocted from a completely alternate history in which men have been enslaved. How ridiculous to find someone pleating on behalf of the patriarchy in such a manner: “Man must write his self: must write about men and bring men to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…” For me, a straight white male, reading the texts as if these calls for strength were aimed at me felt at once ridiculous and embarrassing. On the other side of the fence, the arguments for men made in the voice of men had me rolling my eyes, feeling ridiculous, bored, regretful, commiserative, empathetic, violated.

Boycott takes bizarre pleasure in its deformation of gender structure by making it seem suddenly closer, grosser, than it ever has.

Seven American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith has made an extended career out of the concept of the author as filter rather than creator, making a spectacle by reorganizing the minute and the mundane. His project Fidget cataloged every minor movement he made during a 13-hour period, The Weather transcribed a year’s worth of weather reports verbatim, and another recent project called for a complete hard copy printout of the entire internet. Goldsmith is a firm believer that there’s enough text already in the world, and what makes an object interesting is its curation and presentation.

Seven American Deaths and Disasters represents perhaps Goldsmith’s most historically substantial text, if still completely of the idea that no new word by an author needs to be used. In the vein of Andy Warhol’s project of the same name, Goldsmith presents seven reinterpretations of media-saturated deaths: the John F. and Robert Kennedy assassinations, John Lennon’s murder, the Challenger explosion, Columbine, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. In each, Goldsmith transcribes and weaves radio reportage of the event to build a wholly different retrospective body, presenting each event in the language used to document it as it happened.

The result is surprisingly effective. Instead of the well-honed interpretations the benefit of hindsight provides, we witness the jarring events as if in real time. Reporters repeat themselves, fumble with language, and stutter, all in an attempt to parse the horror as it unfolds. Music of the time bleeds into commercials bleeds into the canned-like performance of pundits leading up to the event itself, and the chaos after. It is a uniquely affective historical catalog of time in language and seems alive in a way most other attempts at understanding atrocity could never be.

Night Moves by Stephanie Barber

Night Moves is a 75-page poem constructed entirely from YouTube comments on Bob Seger’s 1976 hit “Night Moves.” If you’ve spent any amount of time at all on YouTube, you’ll have some idea of the sort of existential range strings of words left by dozens of unrelated strangers could create. Surprisingly, though, the resulting body is more readable and multivalent than you might imagine. The anonymous and wide-open freedom, when orchestrated under independent Baltimore filmmaker Stephanie Barber’s eye, quickly culminates into a narrative built from sentimental dedications, troll-bait insults, wistful old folks angry over how music has changed, defensive teens, lurkers, hornballs, the incredulous, the sincere, and a whole other range of personalities that would only intersect with one another online.

I was pleasantly surprised at how immersive and addictive Night Moves turned out to be. Somehow—and perhaps this is part of the conceptual poetry movement as a whole—what would seem cliché or stilted if presented as someone’s original idea, takes on a whole new texture when offered as something found, the way a phone number means something different when found in a toilet stall. Dozens of little narratives and jokes and emotions rise out of the transom of people arguing over whether Seger sucks and meld into thoughts and questions about what happened to the people that we knew once, whether America sucks, how we all ended up wherever we are now. Knowing someone took the time to type out, “Pam I do not know where you are now. I think of you everytime I hear this song. I am glad my first night moves where with you. I hope you have a great life.” [sic] Followed by, “Yes, that line does, in fact, refer to perky teenage breasticles,” or even simple quasi-idiotic ungrammatical one-liners like “song kicks ass” or “FUCK BIEBER!!!!!!!!!!!!!” suddenly seem both genuine, insane, and true. Together it’s like a massive tombstone for everybody, carried in a very specific, buried nook of culture that is by default more genuine in its intent than most other kinds of words.

Previously by Blake Butler - Matthew Simmons, a One-Man Black Metal Band

@blakebutler

Shimpei Takeda was born in Japan and spent a lot of his youth in the Fukushima, hanging out in the shadow of the reactor that would later meltdown and cause one of the worst nuclear disasters of recent memory. Shimpei now lives in Brooklyn but his artwork still has strong ties to his homeland. He is currently working on a project entitled Trace: Cameraless Records of Radioactive Contamination, which deals with the unfortunate aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi. For Trace, Shimpei creates visually abstract images by collecting contaminated soils from the affected landscape surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. He then exposes the soils onto large sheets of film for extended periods of time, resulting in physical records of the disaster and its remains within the culture. This sounded right up our alley, so we spoke with Shimpei about his art.

VICE: What was your initial motivation for the project?
Shimpei Takeda: At first, when I found out the nuclear disaster occurred, I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Or perhaps I didn’t want to believe what was going on. I had been reading a lot and teaching myself about what was going on, about the nuclear industry, and about the effects of radiation exposure. I was also learning more about the politics behind the nuclear industry. I started to feel that I had to do something in response.

At the same time, I wanted to visualize the invisible disaster in some way. Seeing data visualizations of radiation in the air, soil and ocean didn’t feel real. I needed to see a physically solid record of the disaster. Then I started to realize that radiation, such as gamma rays and visible light, basically work the same way on photographic materials. On the surface of light-sensitive materials, silver halide darkens when exposed to electromagnetic radiation.

Also, there is the fact that I was born in the area around Fukushima. Doing an art project like this, while having a strong connection to the place, I believe, automatically makes a political message—even without saying too much. At the end of May 2011, I decided this was what I was going to do.

How did being from Fukushima affect the work? Do you still have family there?  How have they been affected?
Well, I was ignorant about the nuclear industry before March 11, and I never thought a nuclear disaster would happen in Japan.

I grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo. While growing up I would go to Fukushima every summer for New Years with my parents to visit my grandparents. We would go to the lakes and mountains to ski or to the hot springs. All those kinds of activities happened in Fukushima. Because of my history, I recognized a lot of the names of cities and places that I heard on the news. When I was listening to an NPR interview with a victim living in temporary housing in Fukushima, I noticed the dialect. It is the same as my grandparents. That kind of thing can really affect you. I think if it had happened somewhere completely different, some other location, I’m not sure I would have done this project.

My parents and sister are living in the suburbs of Tokyo. Both of my parents are from Sukagawa, 40 miles east of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. It’s outside of the mandatory evacuation zone. My grandparents and a lot of extended family are in Sukagawa and Koriyama. There was a lot of air, land, and water contamination, and subsequent food contamination, you can imagine how it goes. There’s a lot of stress and local businesses are heavily affected.

When and where did you collect the soils and make the exposures?
In December 2011 and January 2012, I collected 16 soil samples in 12 locations. I selected distinctly different locations in five different prefectures, all which contain a strong memory of life and death, such as temples, shrines, war sites, ruins of castles and my birthplace. Then I placed radioactive soils on 8x10 sheet films in a light-tight container, for a month. Every soil sample was in a separate container. Radioactive substances in the contaminated soil sample emit radioactivity to expose gelatin halide on the surface of photographic film.

How has each soil differed in terms of aesthetics?
I wanted to see how different soil textures could affect the image making. At the end, it didn’t really affect the results aesthetically, but some soil textures such as moss contain more radioactive substances than others. That is something that I realized after the first attempt.

Certainly, the more contaminated the soil is, the more the photographic materials are exposed. For each location I measured radiation level in the air and ground’s surface.

How much do aesthetics drive which exposures you choose to show?
Except for two locations, I only collected one soil sample from each location. So, I show every image from all the locations. My initial set of prints is complete with twelve images from twelve locations. Half of the images are almost black, but still something invisible is recorded, I believe.

How has this project transformed conceptually for you from its inception to now?
Conceptually, the project was developed within a day or two from the beginning. I wanted to create conceptual abstract photography work about the physical documentation of the nuclear disaster, with minimalist aesthetics.

When I was selecting where I was going to get the soil, I realized the history of the land is filled with wars and catastrophes. So I added this element, the memory of precious ancestors’ souls by selecting specific locations.

Is this work seen as controversial by any of the people in the Fukushima prefecture?
People in Fukushima found this project meaningful to them. They have been very supportive and thankful, which I found somewhat surprising. Of course, the fact that I have roots there helped.

How long do you plan to keep working on this project?
I am working on publishing a book. I will collect more samples to create work using the same process. I have a few other things that I would like to try, too. I’ll work on this for a while, a year or two at least. Who knows how long I will keep working on it? As much as I’d like to move on to the next project, I need to keep working on Trace until I feel it’s done.

Want more about radioactive stuff?

Inside the Abandoned Radioactive Towns of Japan

The Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl

Geriatric Nuclear Reactors Could Kill Us All

Kristie Muller, aka Baller, has been a stand-out photographer for as long as she's owned a camera. You might remember her from the "Infatuated" fashion shoot we ran a couple of years back that was sent to us by the Ardorous, an all-female photographer collective that Kristie is a part of. Having known her for a few years, I've always associated Kristie with being able to do things like take incredibly gaudy, faux-silk shirts with flames shooting out of them look brand new and interesting. Not a lot of people can pull that off! But odd fashion trendsetting aside, Kristie's work mixes the strangeness of the internet (an '@' symbol floating in a shallow pool), peculiar still lifes (rubber flip flops resting on a cement staircase), portraits of body parts, and funny modern garbage (flashy bubble jackets, those inflatable dancing figures you see at used car dealerships) in such a great way that I'm always excited to see her next set of photos. So anyway, here's a bunch of them for you to look through.

More photography from VICE Canada:

Thursday Friday Takes Fantastic Photos of Rappers and Girls

A Selection of Mark Peckmezian's Wonderful Photographs

The Ghostly and Intimate World of Claire Milbrath

Journalist Tim Pool recently joined the VICE editorial staff to cover breaking news, and his first assignment was to fly down to Istanbul and do a live stream of the protests against the construction of a mall in Gezi Park and Prime Minister Erdogan's Islamist policies. Tim also produced this documentary about the uprising, which includes interviews with protesters on the ground as well info about the failure of the Turkish media to properly give a shit about the situation.

Here's more on the situation in Istanbul:

Watch our documentary, Istanbul Rising

Occupiers Faced Down Cops in Istanbul's Taksim Square

Turkey Is Waging an Invisible War Against Its Dissidents 



Turkey's Weekend of Street War, Jubilation, and Bulldozer Joyrides