In honor of Child of God’s release on August 1st, I’m posting a 25-minute test I did for the film version of Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is my favorite novel. It marks the midpoint of his career, between the Southern Gothic stories of his Tennessee days (he grew up in Tennessee and went to the high school with painter Josh Smith) and his later border-based stories (The Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, The Road) after he moved to Texas and then to New Mexico.

In some ways Blood seems un-filmable. It is almost Biblical in its lapidary. His terse prose utilizes vocabulary only found in the crannies of annals of the Old West and the specialized spheres of working men. He captures the slang of forgotten peoples so deftly, it’s as if they were his barroom friends

I made my test for Blood Meridian three or four years ago. It stars Scott Glen, Luke Perry, Mark Pellegrino (Lost), and my brother, Dave. We shot it in three days in some place near Yosemite that is the Mule Capital of the world. If you know the book, you’ll recognize that this is the sequence where Tobin recounts how the Glanton gang met the Judge, a Satan-like character and Glanton's right-hand man. The gang was out of gunpowder and about to be caught by Apache warriors, whereupon they would be killed for lack of working weaponry. Check it out.

Photo of Picktou County via Miles Howe.
For a brief moment in June, a First Nations-led blockade of a burst effluent pipe in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, occupied a blip on the national news cycle. An effluent spill, likely in the tens of millions of litres, had covered a portion of a traditional Mi'kmaw burial ground, and had also flowed into the adjacent Pictou Harbour. I reported on it for VICE at the time.

Amongst the list of demands of the blockaders was that the province of Nova Scotia shut down and remediate the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility.

The blockade itself ended with a handshake between Pictou Landing First Nation Chief Andrea Paul and Nova Scotia Minister of the Environment Randy Delorey, along with a promise from the province to set timelines, beginning in 2015, to shut down Boat Harbour.

The immediacy and catastrophic nature of the spill itself, as well as the subsequent reaction from the Pictou Landing band, made the story ‘hot.’ The story of Boat Harbour, which rarely escapes tiny Pictou County, let alone Nova Scotia, is more of a 47-year ‘slow burn.’

To know the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility is to know the Abercrombie Point Pulp and Paper Mill, and vice versa. On all levels, from structural to economic, one could not exist without the other. And to know the mill and Boat Harbour is to know the town of Pictou and the community of Pictou Landing. Indeed, at times it is to catch a scent of much of Pictou County. Like any number of communities across this country that live and die with their mills, their stories are interwoven.

The Abercrombie Mill, now owned by global pulping pariahs Asia Pulp and Paper under a shell company known as “Paper Excellence,” is the last of Nova Scotia's so-called Big Three mills. Under the previous NDP Dexter government, we saw the Bowater Mersey mill breathe its last breath. The Port Hawkesbury mill now operates at a fraction of its heyday.

Not so at Abercrombie Point, where mill owners, who come and go, operate with a steady diet of government grants and loans.

Indeed, despite claims that the mill indirectly employs upwards of 1,000 souls—which is no small shakes in Pictou, population about 3,500—an action group called Clean Up the Mill estimates that if one were to subtract government funding from the mill's local economic output, Abercrombie would be a neutral factor, at best.

On the shadow side of the negative equation is all the lost money and blown opportunities that come with a mill that not only makes the county reek, but also blankets the skies with a mix of chemicals that—if federal guidelines of such were enforceable—would be downright criminal.

In 2012, the last year available statistically, the mill self-reported that it was sometimes thousands of percentage points over the federal thresholds for Substance Emissions and Critical Air contaminants.

Tourism and its spin-offs have rightly turned their nose at Pictou. And while one might ridicule the meagre take of a local B&B, or a fish and chip shack by the sea, communities to the south have done a tidy profit in trawling the waters of the tourist trade. Nova Scotia, remember, is blessed with the ocean and is steeped in colonial history. Tourists come eager for a lobster feed, a Maritime pace, a unique landscape and perhaps a little colonial re-creation—if a tad white-washed.

Pictou, the settling spot of the good ship Hector and its crew of Scottish migrants, is blessed with both history and the warm waters of the Northumberland Straight. But if Pictou is mentioned in tourism guidebooks Lonely Planet or Forbes, it is not in pleasant terms. Tourists are indeed warned to stay away, despite the fact that a re-creation Hector still lies moored in Pictou Harbour, if one can find it amidst the mill-manufactured smog.

The health of Pictou County itself is also in serious doubt. Nova Scotia, cursed with winds that settle foully from the industrial Eastern Seaboard of the USA, stands out amongst the provinces with its elevated rates of cancer.

But Pictou County, amongst Nova Scotia counties, is very sick.  

As documented by the Pictou County Health Authority, cancer incidences, including breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, and cancer-related deaths in general are all higher in Pictou County than the rest of Nova Scotia.

Pictou County also ranks far higher in acute coronary syndrome and coronary failure than the rest of Nova Scotia.



Jackson Beadle of Pictou Landing First Nation stands by the shores of Boat Harbour, snapping a photo of the effluent treatment facility that stands meters from his home. In the background are a series of aerators installed in an attempt to force oxygen into the water. The once-idyllic tidal estuary has been overwhelmed by oxygen-depleting wood particulate and effulent. According to Abercrombie Mill representatives, Boat Harbour receives approximately 70 million litres of effluent per day from the mill. Photo via Jonathan Beadle.
Disturbingly, Pictou County displays a higher incidence of stillbirths and infant deaths than the rest of Nova Scotia. The ratio of live births is also a troubling phenomenon, not commonly seen even on a global scale. For every healthy girl child born in Pictou County, there are 1.26 boy children born. The global rate is approximately 1:1.05.

But for 47 years the mill has trundled on. And the key to its success—if one might call it a success—most likely lies in the poisoned waters of Boat Harbour.

Briefly, the area was once a tidal estuary of vital importance to the Mi'kmaw people. Elders from Pictou Landing recall dipping baskets in Boat Harbour's waters and collecting a feed of smelts for breakfast. It was a source of life, of food, of medicine and of play.

After colonization, the unique beauty of Boat Harbour was not lost amongst the nature seeking and sun-loving crowd. It was the crown jewel in the once-bustling tourist trade along the North Shore, and in 1925 was shortlisted to be a national park.

Pictou Landing elders also recount the story of the day in 1967 when the Abercrombie Point pulp and paper mill began using the Boat Harbour tidal estuary as an effluent dump. Children contracted rashes from swimming in the waters.

Fish died on masse.

A pipe had been constructed from the mill, the mouth of which spewed out an estimated 70 million litres of raw effluent per day into the newly-minted Effluent Treatment Facility. In reality, the 'facility,' to this day, remains nothing more than a series of settling ponds for the effluent to cool off in before flowing into the tidal estuary and the Northumberland Straight beyond.

The exact chemical composition of the Abercrombie Mill's effluent remains a trade secret, which the Nova Scotia department of Environment will not divulge. Monitoring wells around Abercrombie Mill and Boat Harbour have, over the years, consistently tested above water quality thresholds for a wide variety of heavy metals, including, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, manganese, mercury, selenium, and zinc. That monitoring stations along the way to Boat Harbour have found these metals—metals needed for Abercrombie's effluent—would suggest that the waters and shores of Boat Harbour contain them as well.

Surface water contaminated with these metals has also been found to be running off into adjacent Pictou Harbour, where a 2005 scientific study found that healthy shellfish, when introduced to its waters, promptly contracted leukemia en masse due to municipal and industrial waste.

The link—the reason Boat Harbour has accepted an estimated 1 trillion litres of effluent into its maw—lies now in a 1995 indemnity agreement signed between the province and the mill.

Surmised, it states that if the Abercrombie Mill ever closes, the province of Nova Scotia, have-not Nova Scotia with a provincial debt now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, is saddled with the responsibility of cleaning up the 163-acre toxic parcel now known as the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility. The price tag associated with such a remediation, after 47 years of dumping, is unknown, but hefty to be sure.

So the mill trundles on and accepts a ten million dollar loan here, a ten million dollar grant there; smaller sums less likely to raise the public's ire above the general low din. While others close down, it cannot afford to. Boat Harbour accepts the mill's poison, while the mill has never once in its history been found to have impacted local groundwater, at least from a bureaucratic standpoint.

Bottom of the barrel proprietors are sought—and found—from faraway Indonesia. Their environmental crimes in their own country are well documented, but are ignored in lieu of photo opportunities with the premier.

Every four years or so, a political party of a varying colour promises to be the government to shut down Boat Harbour.

Caught in the squeeze, in a county far from the provincial radar, in a province far from the national radar, is the region the Mi'kmaw peoples once knew as Pik'tuk. Pictou. 


@mileshowe

David Shapiro and his Tumblr Pitchfork Reviews Reviews once felt “big on the internet.” Roughly five years ago, Shapiro—then fresh out of college with a shitty job and some self-esteem issues—started writing meta-reviews of the music reviews published on Pitchfork each morning.  As he commuted to a conservative clerical gig, he’d frantically type out ranting but sharp essays on his Blackberry memo pad (sans-capitalizations and with few paragraph breaks), deconstructing the music critics’ arguments and logic, and even commending certain reviews a “Best New Review” tag—a play on Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” symbol of indie gold status. From his office bathroom, he’d often write colloquial personal essays in the afternoon about his relationship with music, which are the only remaining fossils of his site today.

The website got very popular, earning Shapiro over 100,000 followers, writing gigs at The Wall Street Journal, Interview Magazine, and The New Yorker, as well as a profile of his Tumblr in The New York Times. Shortly after he stopped posting on Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, he wrote a screenplay and a novel, both which sold and made it out of production limbo. Despite the success, Shapiro has sworn off writing (save the occasional New Yorker piece), and has since finished most of law school and now works at a white-collar firm in Manhattan. 

His new book, You’re Not Much Use To Anyone, which comes out later this month, is a semi-autobiographical account of Shapiro’s life right out of college. It details the creation of Pitchfork Reviews Reviews and what was going on in his life at a time when he was especially insecure and looking for a form of authority and influence. 

The book’s main character, David, is both anxious and hyper-analytical—fanatical with trifling metrics of success like how many Internet followers he has, or ways his life doesn’t compare to the lives of Pitchfork writers he both idealizes and envies. So even though his Tumblr is just a Tumblr, he feels validated and important when people he was once infatuated with start paying attention to his thoughts and ideas. 

On a surface level, You’re Not Much Use To Anyone, sounds nominal: a physical book about a Tumblr about a music reviews website. But the story is a punchy and sometimes poignant read for any young person trying to figure out how he can become significant or simply noticeable to the people he/she admires. Over the course of a boozy, four-hour interview, we talked about his book being “almost desperate” to get you to finish it, feeling guilty about writing a semi-factual story about friends who didn’t sign up for being characters, and on his relationship with Pitchfork today.

VICE: The inspiration for your Tumblr and writing came from an unlikely source, but can you tell me about the actual inspiration for this book? 
David Shapiro: I was seeing this girl who was working on a novel and she wouldn't tell me anything about it. I felt a little resentful that she wouldn't share it. Later, she broke up with me. And I thought, what better way to get back at her then to write a book myself? It was months after I stopped posting on Pitchfork Reviews Reviews. I refilled my prescription for anti-anxiety medication prescription and wrote a draft in a week.

This must have been insane to pitch to a publisher. It’s a physical book about a meta-Tumblr. How would you describe it to someone with zero context?
[Laughs] I still don't even know how to describe it. I don't know how to talk about it. I don't have an elevator pitch. It’s a book about a blog about a popular music reviews website—after a certain point of shopping it around to publishers, I realized it was better to stay quiet during meetings and let my agent talk. 

To me, I mean, if you read the book, in many ways, Pitchfork is not the focus.
Definitely. You could say Pitchfork is incidental. In another time, it would have been... I don't know, like a car a magazine? It could have been written about any fountain of authority.

That's what I found really interesting. In a lot of ways, your book details the rise of social media as a platform for anyone to assert their opinion and influence.
Yeah, or throw rocks at the throne.

And it takes place between 2008-2010, as Twitter and Tumblr and even Facebook started to gain more authority as a legitimate platform for opinion and influence. Whether that's implicit or not, it does kind of evoke a certain technological zeitgeist.
Totally. In the book, David asks the character Mike what is the coolest platform to blog. If Tumblr didn't exist, I never would have written my blog, and obviously I never would have written the book. Even at the time, it seemed Wordpress or Blogspot was embarrassing in some way.

Or, like, having a Yahoo email account. Why is 2014 the best time for this book to be published? You wrote it three years ago, but do you think it will be more successful now than, say, 2020 or 2012?
I think if it had come out a lot earlier, it might have felt too soon. In a way, when someone like Tao Lin writes about Gchat, it feels like he's writing about a historical phenomenon, and so it stands on its own. Long after people stop using Gchat, Shoplifting From American Apparel could stand as like a cool document of Gchat and communication behavior during the time period it takes place in.

Wouldn't you say the same thing about your book and relationship to Tumblr?
Tumblr seems to be more popular than ever. I guess I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse anymore. I guess part of it depends on, like, what Tumblr winds up doing. I don’t know. There’s a reason I rarely mention Facebook.

Another one of the biggest themes of this book is about feeling guilty—about privilege, about not being good enough, about not pleasing your parents. It is riddled with a mixture between self-consciousness and self-awareness about those feelings.
When you are expressive of your own flaws, in a way, that makes it hard for other people to say critical things about you.

Would you call the character and story semi-autobiographical?
There are many things that are false in the book, but it’s certainly semi-autobiographical. I spoke to someone about it and they were, like, why didn't you just control-F “David” and change the name and not put your picture on the cover? But I just thought about the name—it would seem almost dishonest to change the name, because it's obviously somewhat autobiographical.

I feel guilty about a lot of stuff because I don't act in a way that's considerate of other people all the time. A friend who a character is based on said “I didn’t sign up for this,” meaning she didn’t ask to be the basis for a fictional character who does things she didn’t do. And I wonder how I would feel if someone were to write about me in the way that I did about other people. I'd probably feel so violated. I'd never say—I'd never disclose anything material ever again after I read something like this.

And you wrote a screenplay in the same year, too. The movie and the book don't really overlap in terms of plot, but they do in character and being semi-autobiographical.
They're based on different times in the character's lives.The script is about a person whose character is based on me who does things that I didn’t do. And, in a way, the book is a person who does things that I did, but isn't as closely based on me.

Do you think someone who is not from New York, not in your age group or socio-demographic group could relate to this book and feel connected to the characters and plot events if they're outside a certain bubble?
I think that anyone could really enjoy it because if someone is really passionate about something, then it can be entertaining to hear him talk about it and to see the intricacies that he sees. Plus, you can recognize that David’s passion is ridiculous. Like, the character has 200 Tumblr followers, and to the character, it's the whole world. It's this level of success that's unfathomable to him. 

If you've accomplished something in your life and you're, like, driving home from work, and you're really celebrating it to yourself, even if you stopped someone on the street and explained it to them, they would not see whatever you value in it.

So your character’s passion is posting on his Tumblr about Pitchfork articles and the sudden attention and authority he has which he didn’t have prior. Why didn’t you include any of the reviews or blog posts about Pitchfork in the book then? You refer to this Tumblr throughout the whole story, but we never get access to it.
Because those, to me, seem like the most boring parts—and so ephemeral. The most boring possible thing I could include in the book was the substance of what like the character is like writing about. Because it is boring!

The relationships are the more interesting part—the connections, the way of seeing how this eco-system worked was a more exciting thing to witness than the reviews. The reviews are so incidental. I felt like the more proper nouns that were included, the less the book would be readable in a year, two years.

Can you tell me about your relationship with Pitchfork? I know you’ve read it every day since you were 14.
It’s, like, somehow tied to my identity—as silly as that sounds. What you listen to defines your identity and Pitchfork was like my cheat code for alternative music, which made it feel cheap. I used them to develop my taste and identity.

But also, if you don't think of yourself as being successful, than whatever is successful becomes an object of resentment and enmity. That’s how I felt about Pitchfork.

Later, I think people in some positions of power at Pitchfork felt like I used them as a platform to draw attention to my other writing. Like, I exploited them for like a goal that really didn't have anything to do with them. And, and, maybe they don't care for me because of that, among other things. There are certain people to whom I wish the book didn't exist.

Do you ever wish you were a professional writer? You’ve said that this screenplay and book were the end of your writing career.
When you're a writer or a professor, you have to constantly be developing novel and challenging ideas. I think sometimes people are out of ideas and then they have to force it. I don't envy the position of having to generate novel ideas as a profession.

There's this one part of the book where you say you're at a bar and someone comments that you talk just like you write. And you reply that all people should be like that, and it really disappoints you when people who write on the Internet are different in person. Do you think that writers on the Internet should be consistent with who they are in real life?
Isn’t there's a Drake quote where he says sometimes I meet people who have cool Tumblrs, and then they turn out to be total turkeys in person. There's nothing lamer than being someone totally different in real life than you are on the Internet.

So then when you write freelance posts, you know, either for The Awl or for the Wall Street Journal or for the New Yorker, how does your approach to writing then change?
With The Awl, I wanted every sentence to be not the last sentence that someone could read before closing it. And I felt that way about the book, too. The book is almost desperate to get you to finish it.

It doesn't have to be instantly compelling because the anecdotes are short enough that even if you don't really care for it, you’re committing that much time. Once you start it, you're pretty much almost done. So why not finish it?

My book has an audiobook, and I talked to the director of the thing, and he said something about abridging it. I mean, how could you abridge it? If you abridge it, it's like a long magazine article.

Could you imagine the ideal voice for your audiobook?
A young Jason Alexander.

How do you think the media will respond to this book? What about your family?
I have a deal with my parents where they can't read it for ten years from when it's published. As for the media, I don’t think people will really care. Relevancy-wise, I think my stock is, like, way down. I think if the book had come out two or three years ago, it could have been a bigger thing.

Will you read your own reviews?
I can't. I will never read anything about the book. I would like people and critics to read the book. But I can't read anything about it because it feels too close to home. If someone doesn't like it, then they don't like me—you know what I mean?

David's book, You're Not Much Use to Anyone, comes out tomorrow but can be purchased now

Follow Zach on Twitter

The dark, Google-searching lair of your average Canadian.
After seeing our colleagues in the Netherlands and the UK use Google’s Trends application (a searchable compendium that shows which corners of the world search for particular terms most often) to figure out where their countries' kinks lie, we decided to examine Canada using the same highly scientific method of data journalism. Google has published web search data from 2004 onwards, but for the purpose of this investigation we only looked at searches made in 2014.

Below, you will find the results of our exhaustive research, wherein we plugged terms like “anal sex” into Google Trends to find out which provinces and territories had the most “regional interest” in particular topics. Regional interest on Google is decided using a top-secret algorithm that finds out exactly which parts of the country enjoy learning about putting things in their butts the most.

What we came up with at the end of it all is a veritable psychological profile, province by province, territory by territory, that provides a glimpse into the darkest corners of the Canadian psyche.

The results may or may not surprise you.

NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

Most searched for: pussy, porn, fire, teen, tits, free porn, salad, party, winter, expedia

It can get a bit isolating to be in Canada’s great, expansive territories, so it’s no huge surprise that a search for “expedia” to get out in the world would be the most prevalent in the Northwest Territories. It’s also completely within our expectations to see “fire” in the list, given that much of the territory is currently engulfed in forest fire infernos. But to take the #1 spot on “free porn,” “pussy,” “tits,” and “teen” truly shows that the NWT has a freak flag wider than the highways of Yellowknife to fly for all of Canada to see. Keep on jerkin’ it, NWT!

NOVA SCOTIA

Most searched for: murder, herpes, assassination, big cocks, BDSM, justin trudeau, ISIS, torture

Nova Scotia didn’t rank at the top in our Google Trends searches all that often, but when they did, they sure fucking went for it. First of all, the fact that they were fervently searching for both assassination and murder is a bit off-putting. Especially when you tie in the province’s fascination with torture, BDSM, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. But at least they keep their image somewhat clean by looking up everyone’s favourite teacher-turned-political-leader Justin Trudeau. Although, when combined with the province’s other fascinations, that may not be a good thing.

The reddish sand of PEI, where people search for fairly friendly things.

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND

Most searched for: weed, penis, torrents, weight loss, vagina, RCMP, shania twain, gay porn, russia, ice cream, depression, hockey, drunk, diarrhea, fitness, fun

Prince Edward Island: land of golden potatoes and the ginger locks of Anne of Green Gables. It’s also where, apparently, people are very concerned with their penises, poop consistency, personal fitness, and depression. Much like PEI itself, nothing here is overly controversial or shocking. Their concerns are quite within the realms of human normalcy, and that’s a good thing! You won’t find assassination trending in PEI, where all you have to do all day is eat potatoes, swim, and boil lobsters. Plus, it’s the hockey-searching capital of the country, which makes it the most pleasantly Canadian spot imaginable. Stay friendly, PEI.

SASKATCHEWAN

Most searched for: beastiality, dubstep, guns, nickelback, fisting, corner gas, residential schools, green poop, beavers, whiskey, ice fishing, strippers, suicide, racism, serial killer, testicles, condoms

Well, this is somewhat disturbing. Not only is Saskatchewan the most engaged in both dubstep and Nickelback, they ranked first in some of our most explicit searches: serial killer, guns, fisting. It also appears that green-tinged poop is most commonly inquired about from the prairies. Judging from this list, the province is also the most engaged in suicide and the depressing Canadian history of our residential schools. So is it surprising that Corner Gas makes the list as well?

Don’t fret, Saskatchewan. You still have strippers, condoms, and whiskey to keep you going through those long, prairie nights. We’re here for you.

NEWFOUNDLAND

Most searched for: cocaine, anal sex, vodka, hairy, BBW, acoustic guitar, skidoo, hunting, punk, gangbang, tattoos, literature, poetry, constipation, family guy, violence

Everyone knows Newfoundland is really fucking awesome, so we’re not too shocked to see cocaine, anal sex, tattoos, punk, literature, and hunting on their list. Seeing Family Guy and constipation here is a bit unfortunate, sure, but on the whole, Newfoundland’s top trends scream: this place does not give a fuck. Just be sure to eat more fiber before your BBW gangbangs, okay? Oh, and maybe spend a little less time with the acoustic guitar tabs.

Ain't no party like an Alberta party if you like hot pants, fleshlights, bleeding noses, and racist jokes!

ALBERTA

Most searched for: hot pants, fleshlight, nazis, LSD, pregnant porn, gonorrhea, pipelines, stabbing, black poop, bleeding nose, racist jokes, big butts, gaping, lube, penis enlargement, boob job, fake tits, EDM, snuff, kidnapping, meth

Alberta’s list is arguably the most terrifying. Nazis, pregnant porn, gonorrhea, black poop, and racist jokes? Jesus Christ, Alberta. At least you keep things light here and there with hot pants and EDM, but for the most part, the most violent inquiries charted really high in Alberta. Albertans also don’t seem to mind the anatomical enhancements of their fellow cowboys and cowgirls, given the popularity of penis enlargements and boob jobs. But the next time any of you non-Albertans visit the province, protect ya neck. Or, at the very least get some silicon blasted in you and learn a racist joke or two so you can camouflage yourself in a tense situation.

NEW BRUNSWICK

Most searched for: fart, crossfit, maple syrup, deepthroat, lesbian porn, amateur porn, mature porn, theft

Not only do New Brunswickers love the functional fitness obtained from a strenuous crossfit workout, they’re also super into regular people doing it on camera. New Brunswick also has a lot of older people looking for mature porn, or perhaps the people of NB can appreciate some older people banging each other on video. We're not sure why theft ranked so high in NB, but it seems like people are more concerned with deepthroating and maple syrup to really let the fear of having their shit stolen bother them too much.

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Most searched for: feces, MDMA, rave, gangster, heroin, hangover cure, NSA, booze, gin, knives, vegan, breast reduction, rock climbing, bitcoin, ayahuasca, dominatrix, science, meditation

It sure does seem like British Columbia likes to party, what with all the drug, hangover, and booze searches trending in the land of the mountains and the hippies. Given that ayahuasca, rock climbing, and vegan made the list as well, Trends has reaffirmed what we always knew: BC is the place to go if you want to connect with nature, hallucinate excessively, and climb a rock face.

It’s also interesting to see that the NSA ranks highest here—the people of BC must have a lot to hide, given their extreme interest in dominatrixes (who they presumably pay in bitcoin) and feces.

The prince of Ontario. via Flickr.

ONTARIO

Most searched for: drake, justin bieber, hoser, escort service, black jokes, how to murder, ashley madison, asian jokes, stephen harper, police brutality, small cocks, CSIS, interracial, tequila, autopsy photos, liberal party, NDP, conservative party, election, philosophy, panic attack, seeking arrangement

Boring ol’ Ontario keeps it predictable with their unquenchable thirst to learn more about the pop stars it coughed up from its puritanical gut. Despite siring international pop stars, Ontario’s inferiority complex stands firm, as evidenced by its abiding interest in small cocks.

Plus, it’s not that surprising to see so many Canadian politics searches rank high in the country’s most populated province. But there’s also a ton of darkness under the veneer of pop and parliamentary relations… How to murder?! Autopsy photos?! Ontario has some twisted and curious individuals.

It also seems like Ontario likes to cheat, find sugar daddies, and pay for sex; with Ashley Madison, Seeking Arrangement, and escort services all trending in the Big O.

That must be where the prevalence of panic attacks come from.

MANITOBA

Most searched for: poison, rick mercer, overdose, twerking, falafel, gangs, skateboarding, graffiti, stan, rough sex, sniper

Truly bizarre list, here. Not only is the province engaged in satan, gangs, and graffiti, but Manitobans also really love to execute flawless kick flips and have rough sex. Unfortunately for Rick Mercer, he’s popped up in the Manitoban mayhem right alongside twerking and falafel. Evidently, people in Manitoba have a really dark edge; but they also love garlicly wraps made with deep-fried balls of chickpeas! So there’s some balance.

QUEBEC

Most searched for: poutine, limp bizkit, golden shower, hallucination, mafia, fail compilation, jogging, masturbation, deep web, prison

Evidently, Quebec loves poutine and rap-rock. But besides that, they’re also the most engaged with the murky world of the deep web—where Silk Road, the internet’s most infamous black market, was born. In what may be a related search, queries for prison also rank high in la belle province, where people are also into peeing on each other, organized crime, flicking their bean, and watching people fail on camera. As if that wasn’t enough, the people of Quebec are also the most into hallucinating.

So, it’s like we’ve said before, Quebec Is Perfect.

The Yukon is a gorgeous, yoga-loving place.

YUKON

Most searched for: gold, mining, fishing, math, yoga, art, flights, travel

The Yukon is a gorgeous Canadian territory blessed with unbelievable nature and a very artsy population. That’s why we’re not surprised to see fishing, yoga, and art all trending in Yukon. Doesn’t this list make it seem like a paradise? Well, maybe. People there also seem like they want to leave pretty badly—with flights and travel ranking high. It’s also not surprising to see the history of the gold rush rank high in the Yukon. Overall though, the people of YT have the most pleasant searches in the country. Nice one, Yukoners!

NUNAVUT

Most searched for: nunavut

Sigh. Nunavut didn’t make the list with any of our inquiries, except for a vanity search of the territory itself. Care more about Nunavut, Canada! Just because they only joined the confederation party in 1999 doesn’t mean you need to ignore them. Here’s hoping to different results in 2015.

That said, if you look at the Google Trends data from 2004-now, rather than just 2014, Nunavut ranks #1 for searches of "pussy."

If you are riding the subway with Kalen Hollomon, there is a good chance you could later find a photo of yourself on his Instagram, naked from the waist down except for a pair of thigh-high pantyhose. The New York-based artist uses his iPhone and everyday scenes as the backdrop for his mixed media work. He takes clippings from fashion magazines, vintage porn, and illustrations and inserts them into real life.

Hollomon's ability to place cutouts like a pair of designer heels onto an unassuming cop or a man getting a blowjob in the middle of the street is seamless. Kalen’s work is comical to look at, but ultimately he is exploring the conventional rules behind gender, fashion, and commerce.

After gaining a following through his very entertaining social media, Holloman has worked with Vogue, Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Berlin, and now the fashion trade event Capsule. Capsule is a menswear show that travels around the world to cities like Berlin and Paris. It begins today in Basketball City in Manhattan, New York. The tradeshow will bring together innovative independent and high-end designers all with the backdrop of Kalen’s quirky collage work. Hit the play button above and enjoy VICE's exclusive premiere of Hollomon's Capsule Spring/Summer 2015 short film, Jackson.

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Sebastian Collett is a photographer living an working in Ashville, NC.

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A demolished bridge in Semenovka. All photos by the author

Pro-Russia rebels had blown the bridge at Semenovka two weeks ago, but there were still no signs. The road climbed steadily to the crest of the bridge, and then suddenly, there was no bridge. The little white Lada had been carrying a family of four when it went over. While most cars just plunged into the Bilenka River below, the driver of the Lada had been in a hurry, and we discovered the wreck on the opposite bank—leaking egg yolks, blood, and a gasoline rainbow. Looking up, I could see another family standing delicately above the void, peering down at what could have been, as a lone scavenger picked through the wreckage, searching for unbroken eggs.

It was local businessman Ilya Lazarenko who sent his crane to drag away the wreck. The act of removing one smashed car from a smashed landscape—to Ilya, it was progress. It brought his village just a little bit closer to the way it had been. He did this, even though he is convinced that the fighting will return. “Absolutely it will,” he insisted wearily. 

An official within the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) revealed to him in advance that the retreat of the rebel army from the adjacent city of Slavyansk was purely tactical: the DPR is massing their forces for a strike against Odessa. This was the same official who had accurately predicted the destruction of Ilya’s home at the crossroads of Semenovka. His house had been the large one with the red roof and the two cats—one piebald, the other black.

The home of Ilya and Nastya Lazarenko

Ilya’s wife, Nastya, had foreseen the destruction even earlier—in nightmares. They started last November, as protesters gathered on the Maidan. “Nobody was thinking about war then,” she added. Still, the visions came. She saw herself and her husband crouching—hiding from gunfire in the ruins of their home. She saw their betrayal, and their execution. “Maybe it means that will happen too,” she contemplated. “I don’t know. I never believed in dreams before this.”

“The official news is not reliable,” Ilya muttered grimly when asked about the status of the war. Reality had become a tenuous amalgamation of rumors, propaganda, and dreams.

There was that story about the crucifiction of a boy in Slavyansk’s Lenin Square. Both sides told it, shifting the blame. I heard it for the first time in a Kiev bar. In Odessa, school teacher Iryna Pietrova recited her version, adding that every time it’s retold, the boy gets younger and younger. “He was three years old, the last I heard,” she added. “By next year, I expect he’ll be a newborn.”

The DPR had another story from when they still held Slavyansk. Radio bulletins announced that Ukraine was printing new maps of the country without the name of their city on it. The implication was that the Ukrainian army intended to wipe Slavyansk off the face of the earth. After the city was retaken, I heard reports that sixty percent of the buildings were in ruins. I also heard that Slavyansk had survived nearly intact. I traveled to the area with a translator and a driver to find out for myself.

Past vast sunflower fields, sounds of distant artillery fire rumbled on the edge of Slavyansk. One Ukrainian soldier in motley camouflage and bandana skullcap speculated that an artilleryman had gotten drunk or become insane from the war and was firing at nothing. His friend said that they were clearing rebels out of a local forest. Another soldier assured us that it was the shelling of nearby DPR-held Artemovsk.

Our car shook as we raced through the city center over tank-tread-dented concrete. There were many broken windows, shot up storefronts, and artillery holes in buildings, though for the most part, the center was unharmed. It was at the outskirts where the damage was greatest. The Topopolyok school for special-needs children was in ruins, as were many of the adjacent houses.

Lena stands in front of her destroyed home in Slovyansk

Aleksandr and his wife Lena were shoveling rubble from their gutted home. The only possession spared was a lawn gnome. “This used to be a two-story,” Aleksandr said, shaking his head. The upper floor had completely disintegrated.

“It was the Ukrainian army,” Lena claimed. “I don’t know what they were aiming at. There was a rumor that rebels were in the school. It was only a rumor. Both sides were firing carelessly.”

“It was the DPR who did this,” another man insisted.

“Most people here don’t care which side wins,” a woman added. “We just want the shelling to stop.”

Unexploded mine in Semenovka

We passed through Semenovka next. Like the DPR story, it had nearly been stricken from the map. Residents stepped over unexploded rockets embedded in the ground, as an adjacent minefield exhaled the putrid stench of corpses whenever the wind shifted. Boney dogs drank rainwater out of shell-craters as they waited for their owners to return.

A 60 year-old man talked about hiding in his basement during the battle to guard his chickens. He accused the Ukrainian army of using phosphorous bombs—a type of incendiary banned by the U.N. “They made a fire that we could not put out with water,” he lamented. “It just burned and burned.”

Blown out apartment building in Nikolaevka

We weaved through craters on the road to Nikolaevka, near the front lines. We passed its bombed-out power station on our way to an apartment block in the center of town. The building had been eviscerated. A massive section had collapsed, forming a kind of jagged, open-air courtyard with the innards of each apartment exposed to the sky.

Standing on the road I could see into an old woman’s second-floor living room: her couch, her bookshelf, her decorative plants all huddled together away from the precipice. She was sobbing as she swept clouds of dust over the edge, through where a wall used to be. There was nothing else to do. She had been sweeping the same floor for days. The only thing she wouldn’t clean was the blood spatter on the wall beside the radiator. It was all she had left of her daughter.

Sergey sorts through family photographs

Her third-floor neighbor Sergey had been lying in bed when the explosion occurred. His mother, his girlfriend Oxana, and her friend were cooking in the kitchen. The ceiling came down on them all. Sergey and Oxana were trapped under bricks—calling out to one another until a Ukrainian rescue squad extricated them half an hour later. Sergey’s mother and Oxana’s friend had been crushed to death instantly. Oxana refused to ever return to the shell of that apartment, so Sergey stayed there alone, slowly sifting through an album of old photographs found in the wreckage. It took him a minute to realize that they belonged to his mother. He had never seen them before.

“Do you think this was gas?” he asked irately, gesturing at the emptiness around him. The remark referred to state news reports claiming that the explosion here was the result of a broken gas-line. “It was an airstrike,” he insisted. One by one, the residents opened their hands to display the fragments of shrapnel they had found at the scene. Nobody believed the official explanation.

Maxim holding up a gas-pipe

Another man from the building, Maxim, beckoned us to the rear of the complex. He hoisted up a heavy segment of what the crowd of onlookers insisted was part of a rocket. He grinned as he asked us, “Does this look like a gas pipe to you?”

Roc is a photojournalist working on his latest project, World Dream Atlas

Plaza de los Reyes, Ceuta. All photos by the author.

“Does Europe even know we’re here?” asks Aras Wali, as he rubs his eyes and shuffles uncomfortably in his tent, seeking out the shade. Aras is 26, but nine months of travel through deserts, roadblocks, and war-ravaged towns have left him sun-lashed, exhausted, and looking closer to 35. He’s a former private in the Syrian Army who fled his country after finding out he had to go to war with it, making the 370-mile trip across Syria while hiding from pro-Assad forces in the trunk of a car. After reaching the border with Israel, he moved overland through North Africa—to Morocco and then the Spanish-administered town of Ceuta, which he entered illegally, hoping to begin life again in mainland Europe. But it didn’t happen like that.

Aras is one of many Syrian refugees now stuck in Ceuta, a small town separated from mainland Spain by the intersection of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Detained by Spanish authorities on a routine passport check by Ceuta’s police, he and his fellow emigrants are unable to move toward Europe and unable to return home—they are trapped in limbo, waiting for Spanish authorities to let them leave. 

Aras Wali's card for "international" protection as a political refuge, valid for Ceuta only.

For individuals caught crossing into Ceuta illegally, the Spanish government follows one single protocol regardless of circumstance. Since they maintain no deportation treaties with neighboring Morocco, they are not legally allowed to send them back across the border. Instead, they are taken to stay in Ceuta’s Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes (CETI), an open-door, yet vastly overcrowded internment center where they are given food and a bed to sleep in, and allowed to stay until Spanish authorities decide what to do with them.

“If this were France, Germany, England, I’d have my documents already,” Wali tells me. “I have friends who live in Europe now and it was easy. I’ve been in Ceuta four months—still nothing. I cannot go back to Syria. I was in the military and I am a Kurd from Aleppo. If the army doesn’t kill me, the radicals will.” Wali is one of the few who have applied for asylum in Spain as a political refugee, and has been issued a red card, signifying “international” protection as a refugee, which is valid in Ceuta only, not the mainland, and must be renewed every six months. The actual process for granting asylum can take up to two years.

Deeba El Ali, 84, the oldest member of the group.

Wali once tried to reach mainland Spain by sneaking onto a ferry that runs between Ceuta and the Spanish town of Algeciras, but the police cuffed him, locked him up for two days, took his fingerprints, and then released him back into Ceuta.

Ceuta is only about 25 miles away from the rest of Spain, and the journey takes an hour by ferry. But its land border with Morocco is no joke. It’s marked by a 6.5-yard fence topped with razorwire, which runs just over five miles along the low scrublands surrounding Ceuta. The fence is patrolled by heavily armed Spanish security forces, and punctuated every half-mile or so by watchtowers with infrared cameras used to detected individuals trying to jump it under darkness.

Now, an 84-strong population of Syrian refugees like Aras who’ve made the crushing trip overland and managed to reach Ceuta have begun to camp in one of the city’s main squares, Plaza de los Reyes. Their makeshift camp, strewn with dome-tents and hanging laundry, sits in full view of the governor’s offices, and was erected about two months ago in protest over their detention and in an effort to draw attention to their wish of gaining safe passage to Europe. But Ceuta’s authorities continue to ignore them.

“These are terrible days,” Ahmed Hussein, a 24-year-old from a small town south of Aleppo tells me as we sit guzzling water in the North African heat. “Nobody’s listening. We’ve been camped here over 50 days. Nobody came to ask what the problem is. Nobody came to ask why we’re here. We have families, women, children… nobody is doing anything to help us.”

Ahmed Hussein

Before the war, Hussein was a student of economics at Aleppo University. He’s also a journalist trained by Dutch media company Free Press Unlimited who covered the early days of the Syrian revolution. When Syria began barreling into civil war, however, the company ceased funding the journalists they’d trained, and pulled out of Syria completely.

“I had to get out,” Hussein tells me. Through a network of friends and an uncle living in Istanbul, Hussein made contact with the Turkish mafia and began to enquire about smuggling himself into Europe on a boat from Turkey.

Refugees charge phones and laptops in cafes and snack kiosks to communicate with family in Syria.

“It was too much—the Turkish mafia wanted $100,000. I found that Morocco joined Spain through Ceuta. I crossed the Algerian desert on foot and came to Morocco. I tried to cross into Ceuta twice— first on a fake Moroccan passport, then a Spanish one. I didn’t even look at the name on it, but the second time I got through. And now, this,” he says, turning his hands upward. Hussein was caught just a few days after crossing the border, when Ceuta police conducted a routine inspection of his papers, and discovered that his passport was a fake. As we continue talking, I ask him what it feels like to be stuck in a country without any valid documents, unable to move forward.

"Every day is the same. Just waiting, trapped. It is like we have no right to pass, no right to stay, no right to be human. I never imagined this.”

Hussein’s story mirrors many of the other protesters’ camped in Plaza de los Reyes. Most have traveled overland routes from Syria through Israel, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Turkey and into Morocco. Those living Northern Syria, particularly around Aleppo, crossed into nearby Turkey and then took boats to Egypt to pick up the above trail across North Africa. Many hid in trucks or walked through the night with what they could carry, the trip taking anywhere from six months to two years. Hussein estimates that the financial cost for all the Syrians who’ve made it to Ceuta over the last two years comes to more than $200,000 in food, transportation, border bribes, and fake passports.

The religious practices of the group's muslims must still be strictly observed. At the moment it is also Ramadan, so many in the camp are fasting.

Alongside Spanish-administered Melilla, which sits 240 miles to the East, Ceuta’s main focus is often the giant barbed-wire fence separating it from Morocco, which is regularly stormed by Sub-Saharan migrants trying to reach Europe, frequently resulting in deaths. But Ceuta’s political refugees often go unseen.

Aras Ramos, 26, is another Aleppo economics student and a friend of Hussein’s. Like Wali, he is one of the few who has been issued a red card. I ask him how long he’s been in Ceuta.

“I’ve been here three months… my friend here, nine months. I don’t want to stay here ten months, one year, not knowing. My family is in Syria, I have to work to send money to help them. We have families in Europe—brothers or mothers in France, Germany, the UK. We should be there now. People say we have rights, but we have no rights here.” 

“I stayed in the CETI one month,” says Ramos. “It’s terrible there. Ten persons sharing a room. When one gets sick, everyone’s sick. No good air, no sleep, noise, children crammed into one room. One boy here broke his arm falling from a bunk. We felt like animals. My bed was completely black from dirt. I talked to the boss and all he said was ‘I don’t care, I don’t care.’”

So the Syrians left the CETI and gathered in Plaza de los Reyes, protesting the case for their right to pass to the Spanish peninsula. The oldest of the group is Deeba El Ali, an 84-year-old who made much of the journey by foot. The youngest was born in a hospital up the road from the Plaza just two weeks ago. Hussein lifts her out of the tent and places her in my arms, her hair wrapped in a blue ribbon, her eyes barely able to open.

The youngest member of the group was born three weeks ago.

“She’s very weak,” Hussein sighs. “This is a very bad situation.” He tells me how several of the young children have trouble standing unaccompanied due to lack of calcium and malnutrition. I ask about any aid the city may have offered and he shrugs. The Spanish Red Cross visited them with bottled water on a particularly hot day around a month back, but since then, nothing. Volunteers from a local mosque bring them food every night, but the city appears unwilling to help. 

“These are protestors who have voluntarily left the CETI,” says Jose Carlos Garcia of Ceuta’s town council. “They’re breaking the law on the misuse of public space with their tents and the city is compiling a case against them. We will be sending notifications to each one of them telling them they have broken the law. They have 15 days to appeal when their notifications are handed out. They can appeal or they can leave voluntarily. If they decide to stay, the city can ask for judicial authorization to take their belongings and remove them.”

“Remove the issue rather than resolving it?” I ask.

“There’s been a dialogue to try and take into consideration the people of Ceuta’s right to use the public space and the needs of the refugees. They can sleep in CETI every day and protest here. But protesting cannot give you more rights than not protesting.” I ask about the process of appealing, and what legal help the refugees might have, considering most can’t even speak Spanish.

“There’s no system in place for people like this. If there is a run-in between the city and the protestors, the city is not going to help.”

Up in the government offices, which overlook the camp, officials are even less willing to budge.

“These people have exited the CETI and are here in the plaza using their protest as a means of pressure.” Says the spokesman for the delegation of the Spanish government in Ceuta, who asked to go unnamed. “As long as their dossiers are not sorted through they're not going to get taken to the peninsula. We can't act under pressure because tomorrow we could have the rest of the collectives—like all the Sub-Saharans here— pressuring us with measures like this.”

“Barely any of them have actually asked for asylum in Spain,” he continues. When I ask why they are being forced to wait for incomprehensible amounts of time—some over a year—for a decision, he replies, “We respect the criteria of those who have been here the longest, leave first—but we can't have people think that this is the way to pressure the government into sorting their files out quickly.”

Back in the camp, the sun’s been burning all day and people are exhausted. They lie in the shade or wash their hair in plastic bowls, children chase pigeons. Some argue or sit smoking. I talk to one of the group’s older members—an ex-factory worker from the Kurdish south, with handsome stony features.

“Here, like Syria, Kurds like me don’t have rights. So we ask about democracy. No place is more democratic than Europe, we think. I came here to get my rights, but this is not democracy,” he says, stroking the head of the young child next to him. Opposite 24-year-old Khalid al Batar, a baker from Homs whose business now lies in rubble. The heat, boredom, and my persistent questioning are causing him to become increasingly agitated.

“We don’t want to stay in Spain,” he shouts, wiping the sweat from his neck. “Let the Spanish government give us one day to pass through and we’ll leave. From the beginning we just wanted to pass. It doesn’t take so much work, but nobody will listen. We have come from a war to see ourselves in a prison.”

Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky inside Toronto's Big Picture Cinema. All photos via Anthony Tuccitto.
Being a professional comedian can be fraught enough for personal relationships—most comics spend nearly every night of the week trying to convince strangers to like them, so it's no surprise that the complex emotional lives they lead often causes difficulties maintaining relationships. Naturally, being married to a comedian comes with its own host of problems. So, on paper, being married to a comedian who spends most of their time travelling while also being a comedian who spends most of their time travelling may be the Holy Grail of difficult—yet married comedians Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky have found a way to make it work.

They got married in 2008, and for several years lived the oft-separate lives of touring stand-up comedians—spending most of their time apart in hotel rooms across the country, seeing each other an average two days a week at home. That all changed in 2011 when, at the suggestion of podcast giant Joe Rogan, they launched a podcast of their own called Your Mom’s House, and began taking the show on the road.

Your Mom’s House is delightfully devoid of taboos—the show routinely features taped phone calls from Tom’s droll and poop talk-obsessed dad, Tom and Christina discuss their sex life freely (like the time they shopped for cock rings together, or when Tom said “You eat out of the trash,” to Christina during dirty talk), and the show uses odd, short user-submitted audio clips as a jumping off point for discussion. The show is a direct portal into a married couple’s conversation in progress. Your Mom's House is a constant, ongoing narrative between Christina and Tom, their listeners, and the conversation that goes on back and forth.

Your Mom's House fans (lovingly referred to as "mommies" or "jeans") are unusually devoted. Some have contributed artwork featuring the couple’s dog, Theo Huxtable, during the live podcast episode I attended, fans sing the show’s theme song with full-throated zeal, and pepper the show with (literal) shout outs to special moments from previous episodes.

For their part, Tom and Christina respond with equally fervent commitment—effortlessly spinning fan comments into hilarious and lengthy bits. In Tom’s words, watching the live show as a first-time fan can leave one like they’re attending a slightly unhinged sales conference. To me, it felt like being an audience member at a gathering for the world’s most jocular cult.

Christina and Tom visited our office in Toronto to talk about user-submitted clips that were too disturbing to air on the podcast, how they’ve managed to make bodily functions an integral part of their personal brand, and how some recent nonsense dirty talk became their latest catchphrase.

VICE: Have you guys ever received any user submitted clips for Your Mom’s House that were disturbing to have on the show?
Tom Segura: Yeah, we just played one the other day, it’s a clip called (link NSFW). Jordan, I don’t know how to say it, but he put his dick in his own ass and it’s pretty remarkable.

Christina Pazsitzky: Yeah, it’s pretty great.

Tom: It’s 20 year-old gay porn clip—because one of the venues we pull clips from regularly is porno because it’s obviously hilarious. We like audio where the listener is like, “What?!” We had a porn star named Julez Ventura. She had a clip where she said, “It wasn’t until someone said, ‘You have two in you, you have three in you’ that I was like, ‘Whoa! I’m proud of myself.’”

We really loved that clip and used it a lot. We reached out to her and she came on the show. It was one of the highest-downloaded episodes ever and she was amazing on the show. A big part of the reason she came on the show was because we announced that we wanted her and our fans hit her up so many times that she reached out to us.

In a similar vein, you guys are astoundingly open. At the show on Saturday, you were talking about shopping for sex toys and quoting things you said during sex. Do you ever worry about peeling back the curtain a little too far?Segura: Sometimes I think, “Well, the way I said that could be misinterpreted.” The thing for me is that my natural state is to be reserved and not share. Doing this show has made me become somebody who shares I’ve become so comfortable doing the show that it has led to me being somebody that talks about stuff.

Pazsitzky: Yeah, you’ve gained openness. And as someone who’s been on reality shows since the 90s, I know this generation doesn’t have a sense of public versus private. If you look at things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—there’s very little delineation between the two. And I think you start to realize, “Dude, if we’re talking this way, then chances are that there are couples that are doing the same things we are and what’s the fucking big deal?”

That being said, sometimes I’ll say something here during a taping at the house and Tom will go, “Oh, you don’t want to say that” or “You don’t want that out there.” And then we will go back and be like, “Alright, that wasn’t a smart thing to say about my family.”You don’t want to say something about where we live, the city or anything.

Fan art referencing the Toronto show, via Twitter.
Your fans are crazily devoted.
Segura: Yeah, it’s been great. We get a lot of gifts. Last Saturday, one guy took two flights to come to the show. Two other couples drove more than four hours, which is really nice to know they invested so much time into seeing us.

Pazsitzky: Yeah, it’s really nice. This lady made us pickles this time around and I had to smuggle them back from Canada.

OK. Here’s hoping customs doesn’t read this ever. Let’s talk about how you guys have made bodily functions one of your key tenants of your personal brand.

[Tom and Christina laugh and high-five].

How did that become your thing?
Segura: I think it became part of our lexicon because it happened separately in our households growing up. It was part of her experience with her stepdad.

Pazsitzky: Every morning, my mom and my stepdad would sit down and they would report how their bowel movements were. It was very normal for us to be like, “How was your shit?” And Tom’s parents, too.

Segura: I have vivid memories of my dad talking to me as a kid being like, “Did you take a big shit?” And I was like “Uhh… yeah” and he’d be like “Alright, yeah buddy, high-five!” He loves talking about it. You could ask him one question and he gives you a six-minute answer on wiping. He loves it.

Oddly enough, at the last show, this couple came up to us and the woman said, “Did your father have intestinal issues at some point?” And I go “Yeah, he had diverticulitis, he had his intestines removed.” And she goes, “When we discovered your show was when I was having intestinal problems. I had nine feet of intestines removed and I was really self-conscious of what was going on and your show made me feel comfortable and be able to laugh about shit issues.”

We never in a million years would have dreamt that our show would have that effect on somebody, but we were really thankful.

Tell me about this phrase that I keep seeing on your Instagram comments, “Show me how those big tits fart?”
Segura: [laughs] It’s a pure nonsense quote that’s directly from our lives and we talked about on the podcast. Were we about to do it?

Pazsitzky: Yeah.

Segura: Yeah. I was trying to be romantic, I was kissing her ear, blowing on her neck, and then I whispered in her ear, “Show me how those big tits fart.” And it’s definitely…

Pazsitzky: So stupid.

Segura: I laughed a lot. Then she brought it up on air, like, “Oh, here’s something Tom said to me” and we immediately had fan art, people started quoting it, people had their own shirts made. It’s really just nonsense, you know? I feel like silliness is maybe the biggest component of the show. It’s kind of reverting to being sixth-graders again.

Pazsitzky: It’s seventh grade humour.

Segura: You’ve got to make that Canadian—it’s Grade 7.

Pazsitzky: Sorry, Jordan.

I’ll survive. What would you say is the main takeaway of your marriage and podcast?
Pazsitzky: Look, there’s enough podcasts that are talking about heavy life shit—we’re gonna talk about taking shits. It’s more fun.

To learn more about Your Mom's House, you can visit their website here. To subscribe on iTunes, click here.


@jordanisjoso

All photos by CJ Gallopo

Since I moved to Los Angeles, I’ve made every effort to embrace the free-spirited California lifestyle: I now say the word “stoked.” I own a bunch of crop-tops. I’ve started buying cold-pressed juices that cost more than I make in an hour. But there are few things that feel more “west coast” than weed and yoga, and last weekend, I made the ultimate Californian gesture and tried the two together.

This was “420 Yoga,” or yoga for stoners. The class is the brainchild of a Liz McDonald, who teaches it every Saturday at 4:20 PM. I am neither a yogi nor a stoner, but McDonald invited me to visit the class anyway, alluding to the “come-as-you-are vibe” and insisting that I would love it.

I recruited my boyfriend to come with me, who was “totally stoked” to try it. As I dug out my yoga mat before class, he emerged wearing a tie-dye shirt.

“You can’t wear that,” I told him. “That’s, like, too on the nose.”

“No way. How much do you want to bet that someone else will be wearing tie-dye?”

I split a pot brownie in half and popped a piece into my mouth. “Fine. It’s a bet.”

We shook on it and got into the car. He wore the tie-dye.

Liz McDonald teaches "420 Yoga" every Saturday.

The 420 Yoga studio is housed in a maze-like complex, down a long hallway that’s flanked by art studios and workspaces. The studio might have been difficult to find if it weren’t for the overwhelming smell of incense, which led us down the hall to where a handful of yogis were already unrolling their yoga mats.

“Make a nest, people!” McDonald was cooing at the group as we walked in. She turned to see me.

“Oh, hi! Look, I’m wearing a shirt with palm trees, but don’t they kind of look like marijuana leaves?”

McDonald, who sometimes goes by the moniker “Yogangsta,” is not your average yogi. When she started 420 Yoga back in 2010, she wanted to help her students bridge the gap between body and mind, to heighten their awareness of sensation. She knows that there are doubters to her method, but she believes that if it works for you, then that’s all that matters. She’s the kind of woman who yells, “Fuck the yoga police!” without a hint of irony.

Perched beside McDonald was a small creature with a hairstyle not unlike Donald Trump.

“This is Prince,” McDonald told me. The dog trotted over to sniff my bare feet.

Liz McDonald shares a yoga mat with her dog, Prince.

With Prince on my heels, I entered the studio, which had a dozen paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. McDonald invited me to find a comfortable position, adding that the class always starts at 4:25, for those who may be on stoner time. I looked around. Behind me, a man without a shirt was clumsily attempting a handstand. Two classmates were chatting about being stand-up comedians. There was, to my dismay, a man wearing a tie-dyed shirt.

I unfurled my yoga mat and eased myself onto a bolster, with my back arched and my eyes closed. I could safely say, from the half-dead posture of my classmates, that most people were pretty baked. As I lie prone on my yoga mat, looking dreamily at the paper lanterns above me, I realized that I was pretty baked, too. At the risk of sounding like Maureen Dowd, weed brownies are powerful stuff.

Incense floats into the room while we relax into our mats.

An unknown amount of time passed in that position, with the gushing of breaths around me. I became aware of everything around me: the man behind me was just barely touching my ponytail with his feet; I could smell McDonald waving a stick of incense around the room, which she eventually secured to a clipboard.

“Let’s take a magical mystery tour of our bodies,” McDonald purred, as our cue to begin the class. “No sudden movements.”

We slowly moved forward into child’s pose, stretching our fingers out in front of us while the sound of wind chimes filled the room. In a normal yoga class, I find child’s pose fairly boring, but in McDonald’s class, it gave my head a rush. This wasn’t high-intensity yoga, but man, was I high.

After some gentle stretching, McDonald moved us into cat-cow positions, which she said would trigger a release of serotonin every time our spine elongated. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” she said with a chuckle. We made our backs concave and then convex, moving slowly and fluidly. 

McDonald gently adjusts my positioning.

It’s said that the dreadlocked sadhus of India smoked weed while meditating, in order to see God and be at peace. I saw the top of my yoga mat and collapsed into laughter.

McDonald came over and adjusted my pose, whispering in my ear to remind me to breathe. She gently pushed down on my back, and I felt my spine turn to jelly beneath her hands. “Niiiice and smooth, like spreading peanut butter on toast,” McDonald said. Toast. Oh my god, I wanted toast.

My mind was just beginning to wander away from me, fantasizing about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, when “California Love” came on and McDonald moved us into half-sun salutations. I don’t think Tupac was a yogi, but doing sun salutations to his voice was strangely befitting. McDonald started singing along.

The only outfit you need for "420 Yoga."

We were instructed to continue our sun salutations until the end of the song, but “California Love” has a ridiculously long outro, and it felt like it would never end. I was moving slowly, with every ligament in my body hanging heavy—and yet, I felt like I was riding a rollercoaster, with arms skyward, torso bent, and then shaping my body into a V before slithering onto the floor.

I was channeling the flow of Tupac.

As “California Love” trailed off, McDonald told us to assume our favorite pose from the sun salutation sequence. I doubled over and hung limp, feeling a tremendous rush of blood to my head, which felt full and heavy on my neck.

We lifted our bodies upright and we moved into tree pose, which someone in the class remarked was “so totally 420.” I normally have an excellent sense of balance, but I found myself remarkably unstable, and I could hardly stand for a few seconds without gradually tipping over.

“Breath down into ya roots, man!” McDonald said, in a Jamaican accent. “Breathe down into ya branches!”

My pathetic attempt at tree pose. Note the man in the tie-dye shirt.

So there I was, breathing and laughing and pretending to be a tree. The shirtless man behind me was taking tree pose very seriously, which I found hilarious.

And then, after a few more instructions from McDonald (“Feel the reggae in your bones! Be a tree!”), we slunk back onto our mats and settled into shavasana, which can only be described as a dead man’s pose.

“You’re like a perfectly rolled little joint,” McDonald remarked.

At some point, I felt McDonald’s hands on my face, as she spread a dab of essential oil underneath my nose and placed a beanbag over my eyes. We lay there for what felt like hours, our bodies melting into our yoga mats.

McDonald and Prince ease me into deep relaxation.

McDonald told us to imagine that we were on our own “magic carpet ride.” In my previous yoga experiences, I would roll my eyes at this kind of hippy-dippy talk. But somehow, when McDonald said it, I nodded my head in solidarity. I’m on a magic carpet ride, I found myself agreeing. Fuck the yoga police!

I was somewhere between a “yoga high” and REM sleep when something cold and wet poked me on the foot. It was Prince’s nose.

By the time McDonald encouraged us to “come back from our magic carpet ride” for the ending of class, I actually felt like I was floating above my body. Undoubtedly, I was much higher than when we started the class. Was it the yoga? Was it the brownie? Was it the yoga and the brownie?

I'm stifling laughter as we finish shavasana, which is really not supposed to be funny.

It took me a moment to come-to before I could slowly roll onto my side and lift myself back onto the ground. I felt heady again, but also lighter, as if I had shed half my bodyweight. McDonald came over, with Prince trotting beside her, and asked how I liked the class. All I could do was giggle and nod.

“She’s baked,” my boyfriend said, on my behalf. McDonald giggled.

I squinted at her, trying to remember what I had wanted to ask, but all I could come up with was a faint little laugh. “I feel awesome,” I told her. 

And it was true. I’ve never really bought into yogic lore, but I felt genuinely renewed—like I had been on a real meditative journey. On the drive home, I closed my eyes and basked in the sensation. After ten minutes of silence, I turned to my boyfriend.

“You won the bet, by the way. Can we go to In-n-Out?”

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Drag queen, rapper, and performance artist Christeene at 2012's SXSW

I recently received an email from Neil Diaz, an LGBT organizer in Austin, Texas, who was putting together a summer-long string of concerts at Rain, one of the city’s most prominent gay bars. He was sourcing acts from everywhere—gay and straight, local and national—and it was serving as one of Austin’s first queer-focused music series. Diaz hopes that his work will be successful enough that Rain will start booking bands on a year-round basis. “It would be a first time we’d have recurring live music in an LGBT venue,” Diaz wrote. "This made me happy but it also sparked my curiosity. In a city so known for its liberalism and its stages, why has it taken this long for LGBT artists to get a venue they can count on?"

There are some spaces, sure. Barbarella’s TuezGayz stands as one of the most popular nights in the city, but look at Mohawk, or Beerland, you’d never call these clubs prejudiced, but why haven’t we seen dedicated queer events at some of the spaces closest to the heart of the scene? Diaz is quick to point out that he’d never call the Red River stretch of clubs homophobic in any way, but to me, it still seems like we could be trying harder.

“When I first started going out in Austin and seeing the social side of gay Austin it was different,” says Chase Martin, who runs the Central Texas LGBT lifestyle website, The Republiq, “for one we’re the 'live music capital of the world,' but we didn’t have much going on for gay artists. For Fourth Street—which is where the majority of the gays go out—it’s unique that we have something at Rain. It’s been a while coming.”

Of course, Martin is quick to point out that for a lot of gay bars, live music just isn’t there clientele. Austin is a smaller city. We don’t have the physical density to produce something like the queer hip-hop movement in New York. Austin’s demographics aren’t too different from your average mid-size city, and that will always come with limitations. But we are the “live music capital of the world,” and we have a reputation to uphold.

Martin has organized LGBT music festivals before. His next will be occurring during SXSW next year, and those have always come with their share of complications. “You’re more likely to find out lesbians artists in Austin than out men, and some of those men are more studio artists and don’t play live too often,” he says.

“We always had a hard time filling the festivals out. We’d have a lot of straight artists who were very passionate about marriage equality, so we always let them play, but eventually you’d have so many allies playing that it doesn’t make sense for a queer music fest. It was always an uphill struggle.”

Sixth Street in Austin. Photo via WikiCommons

In some ways, blending everything together isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it’s better that Austin treats its music as a whole, instead of regimented niches. “I don’t really identify bands as who’s singer is gay or who’s drummer is gay,” says Devin Usher, who writes songs in The Blonding Dandelions. “If you’re playing indie rock or dance music or drunk bar music, sure, I might know which member is gay or trans or queer. But I certainly don’t lump them together in a scene.”

But Devin, who identifies as pansexual, is excited to play the Rain concert series, because he does find something special about having the LGBT community respond directly to his art.

“I’ve been in relationships with men and women, but a lot of the songs are geared towards men—love songs that I’ve written about men,” he continues. “We’ve had a good response with regular crowds, but I can only imagine that songs about being in love with another man is going to appeal more to that audience. I’m both curious and excited to see how that turns out.”

Right now the only opportunity for moments like that is at Rain, a gay bar that until very recently never had a reputation for live music. It’s separated from the rest of the scene in Austin, and the city could stand to get a little less hetero. Am I saying that your average rock club here would refuse to book a gay artist? Absolutely not. Would it be cool if every couple of weeks some of the dozens of venues in Austin would take it upon themselves to exclusively feature and lift up our LGBT musicians? Is it a little embarrassing that we had to wait for a gay bar to look after their own? I think so.

Hull or Gatineau, selon ce que vous préférez, is the gravy-filled hat of Ottawa where many underaged YOLO enthusiasts leave their suburban nests to experience some taboo territory. Aside from the stereotypically rampant Pepsi cans, empty poutine containers, and Belmont cigarette butts, you'll also find a town of welcoming and friendly Quebecers who are quite used to the ‘je ne parle pas Français’ types. French Canadians know how to party and you can tell by constant stream of events reeling Ottawans further across the bridge. Hull is something to experience when you are 17, and then laugh at when you’re 27, but you won’t know unless you come by.

In fact, I wrote a poem about it:

be sure to pack your toque

or be covered in puke

girls dance under nineteen

and scarf sketchy poutine

smoking 100 darts

and breaking 100 hearts

the strip is never dull

so i’ll see you in hull

Oh, also, everything you else you need to know about Hull is right here:



To see more of Jordan's work, click here.

Destroyed fishing boats at a Gaza port. Photo via Flickr user Oxfam International

The political climate surrounding Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza is increasingly disconcerting for a number of reasons, first and foremost being the mounting death toll and general suffering inflicted on innocent civilians. Lower on the "horrific” scale would be the portrayal of the bombardment in American media. Too infrequently do journalists make clear, for instance, that Israel is the United States' most generously-funded client state; taxpayers subsidize 25 percent of this prosperous power’s military budget. So at the very least, the US government is culpable for any Israeli attack on its besieged and blockaded neighbor. Without the military, political, and cultural support (almost) unconditionally provided by American elected officials, Israel could not wage such an audacious campaign.

Unlike in the United Kingdom and other places, where mainstream news anchors sometimes challenge the claims of Israeli government officials, US journalists generally take a meek and submissive approach. Allowing these officials to repeat their talking points uncontested is standard practice. But as Israel’s attacks intensify, there have been encouraging exceptions. Jake Tapper of CNN reacted with incredulity last week when Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said, "Disproportionality has nothing to do with a body count on both sides.” Tapper countered Dermer’s suggestion that such a huge discrepancy in respective death totals—some 600 Gazans to around 30 Israelis as of this writing—has no moral relevance. Nevertheless, variants of Dermer’s meme have taken firm hold in social media thanks to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) public relations “war room," manned by 400 volunteer college-aged students, which has proven quite adept at feeding highly shareable memes, graphics, and other propaganda materials into Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

In the CNN interview, Dermer reminded viewers that the “disproportionality” between the number of German deaths in World War II and the number of American deaths “didn’t make the Nazis right." But what this 8th grade history level analysis omits is that when critics point out the casualty discrepancy, they intend to posit that the threat allegedly posed to Israel by Hamas rockets is not quite as profoundly existential as the Israeli government’s rhetoric often implies. A total of 28 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire from Gaza since 2001. That is tragic, and prudent steps to protect Israelis from the attacks are reasonable—but for some perspective, in 2013, there were 303 traffic fatalities in Israel. A sense of proportionality means not overinflating threats to justify military actions that cause the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians, including many children.

In response to Tapper’s continued queries about Palestinian civilian deaths, Dermer conceded, “We’re not perfect,” which would likely not be tolerated as an excuse by Barack Obama’s domestic political opponents if his administration had used it to explain some US military campaign that claimed hundreds of innocent lives. Probably, Obama and his spokespeople would be expected to provide a better explanation for why children playing on the beach were bombed. But as Daniel Larison of The American Conservative notes, “the near-total ‘pro-Israel’ uniformity among conservative pundits” has meant that Republicans are “constantly propagandized on this subject in one direction” and therefore tend not to raise even a murmur of disquiet about the unrelenting killing of Palestinian kids. Despite their regular calls for attention to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East—including the truly outrageous expulsion of ancient Christian communities in northern Iraq by ISIS—US conservatives have offered nary a peep in defense of approximately 1,000 minority Christians subjected to bombing and terror, right alongside Muslim Gazans. Father Mario Cornioli, parish priest of Beit Jala in the West Bank, denounced Israel’s actions as a “massacre” in an interview with the Vatican radio service last week.

Progressive media have taken slightly more interest in the humanitarian calamity in Gaza, but still lag behind the rest of the world. As of Friday morning, July 18—more than a half-day after Israel’s ground incursion commenced—the words Gaza and Israel appeared nowhere on Mother Jones magazine's homepage (one headline photo essay was later added). A spokesperson for the outlet, Jacques Hebert, told me, “We publish our top stories each day typically at 6:00 am, and the Gaza story was one of them.” But still, as of Tuesday afternoon, the only piece on the liberal zine's homepage mentioning Israel or Palestine is about the threat posed by Anonymous hackers to the IDF (in fairness, Mother Jones did publish this worthy examination of US funding for the Israeli military earlier in the year).

Likewise, MSNBC political reporter Benjy Sarlin’s main Twitter analysis of the assault has been to point out an instance of “insane anti-Israel rhetoric,” and favorably link to commentaries by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg—a former IDF prison guard whom Roger Cohen of the New York Times once described as “Netanyahu’s faithful stenographer”—and Philip Klein, a polemicist associated with hardline neoconservative causes. In 2010, journalist Glenn Greenwald remarked of Goldberg: “The more discredited his journalism becomes, the more blatant propaganda he spews, the more he thrives in our media culture.” Klein has tarred critics of previous Israeli attacks on Gaza, such as former Congressman Ron Paul, as abettors of ”the global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel,” and regularly flings baseless charges of anti-Semitism at his political opponents.

One propaganda meme much heard of late is that those who make civilian suffering and death central to their analysis of this conflict are somehow by extension expressing sympathy with the hardline Islamism of Hamas or other militant groups. This is absurd. In fact, one can be generally “pro-Israel” and still deplore the Netanyahu government’s conduct for the simple fact that it will likely provoke further attacks on Israel, and further jeopardize the well being of ordinary Israeli citizens, who, like most Palestinians, simply wish to live their lives in peace.

Just as opposing the policies of Obama or George W. Bush don’t ipso facto make a person “against America,” there is nothing intrinsically anti-Israel about opposing the Netanyahu government’s military ventures, and anyone who suggests otherwise is engaging in pretty transparently fallacious reasoning. The notion that one must take sides in order to assess this conflict critically is infantile, and stymies the kind of inquiry that we would apply to almost any other contentious subject.

One factor that exacerbates this dynamic is that many view Israel as a profoundly metaphysical project, often with divine features, rather than principally as a state. (Every year hundreds of American Jews aged 18-26 take an all-expense-paid pilgrimage to Israel called Birthright—funded in part by billionaire GOP donor Sheldon Adelson—where they fraternize with IDF soldiers, hook up, and establish deep emotional bonds with the country. In fact, one of the IDF soldiers killed in the fighting was an American who "graduated" from Birthright.) A sounder way of assessing Israel’s conduct is to view it as a state acting in what it perceives to be its own self-interest. With passions so inflamed on both sides of this issue, it is often difficult to deploy dispassionate analysis; when discourse is fueled by angry emotionalism, there are almost always awful consequences.

Thought experiment: If a leading client state in, say, Southeast Asia, whose armaments were supplied by the US, repeatedly bombed and then invaded its immiserated neighbor, killing hundreds of civilians, how would the American public react? The client state would almost certainly receive at least a mild rebuke from an elected official or two. But this pretty much describes the current situation with Israel, and yet not a single condemnatory remark has been heard from Congress. Not a word, either, for the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who’ve been subjected to trauma and terror, and will likely suffer long-lasting psychological harm as a result.

Meanwhile, American politicians such as New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind—best known for dressing up with blackface for a holiday last year—have just returned from a solidarity mission to Israel. Hikind was pictured consulting with military personnel from the “Ashkelon war room” near Gaza. A spokesperson for Hikind, Yehudah Meth, refused to comment on the Assemblyman’s activities. Wolf Sender, liaison to the Orthodox Jewry for Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson, also made the voyage. Before Sender confirmed the trip, the DA’s office would not comment on his whereabouts. “The answer to your question is that no one is in Israel on behalf of the Brooklyn DA’s office or being sponsored by the Brooklyn DA’s office,” Public Information official Helen Peterson wrote to me. “If an employee is there it is on their own time and with their own funds.”

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), founder of the House Liberty Caucus and vocal critic of US military aid to foreign countries—and himself of Palestinian descent—did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Rep. Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat and one of the very few congressmen in recent history to utter even mild criticisms of Israel, said last week, “There are going to be too many innocent Palestinians killed in this” and dismissed as “feckless” the rockets fired by Hamas that allegedly pose such a severe threat to Israelis. But his spokesperson told me he was “not available” for further comment. Rep. Keith Ellison, one of only two Muslim members of Congress, co-released a statement calling for unspecified efforts to stop the “cycle of violence,” but offered no direct condemnation of Israel’s actions, and was said to be unavailable for further comment.

Through spokespeople, Democratic Representatives Donna Edwards of Maryland and Rush Holt of New Jersey declined to comment. Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, was unavailable. Patrick Newton, a spokesperson for Tennessee Republican Congressman John Duncan, said via email, “My boss votes always to support Israel and beyond that [...] this isn’t an area he covers in congress [sic] or something he is commenting on at the moment.”

A Senate resolution endorsing Israel’s assault was co-sponsored by, as usual, a broad bipartisan coalition including New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker, libertarian-leaning Rand Paul of Kentucky, progressive civil liberties champion Ron Wyden of Oregon and conservative hardliner Ted Cruz of Texas. Booker, a protege of celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach, took pains to describe the current violence as “Hamas-initiated.” (This doesn’t jive with the facts.) In other countries, politicians occasionally—gasp!—criticize the Israeli government’s attacks on children. UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has denounced Israel’s actions, characterizing them as “deliberately disproportionate” and having unjustly caused a “humanitarian crisis.” (It would seem that the word disproportionate doesn’t quite capture the moral dimension of purposely bombing civilians, but whatever.)

Another popular talking point propagated by Israeli PR apparatchiks goes something like this: ”The IDF does not deliberately target civilians, unlike Hamas.” But again, this logic doesn’t hold up. As Glenn Greenwald told me, “Slaughter can be so indiscriminate that it's tantamount to intent. Same under the law: gross recklessness can be viewed as intent.”

Moshe Feiglin, the Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, has called for the “conquer” of Gaza, “elimination” of undesirable occupants, and establishment of the territory as “part of sovereign Israel” to be “populated by Jews.” Hamas leaders have said similarly terrifying things about wiping out Jews and Israel (the latter being an objective that remains in the militant group's charter), but no one seriously thinks they have the capacity to achieve those archaic, contemptible goals.

Journalists face enormous pressure to stay silent in the face of the stalwart pro-Israel sentiment that permeates elite US political and media circles. Expressing basic moral revulsion toward the deaths of children, calls for ethnic cleansing by prominent Israeli politicians, and so forth is seen as uncouth, and has led to the sanction of renowned reporters. It does seem, though, that the weight of the human suffering inflicted by Israel is becoming too much to bear, compelling some high-profile journalists to prod Democratic Party figures on their staunch pro-Netanyahu views. (Former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank got all pissy on MSNBC Saturday when host Steve Kornacki asked a few minimally critical questions about Israel’s tactics.) What's more, US Secretary of State John Kerry was caught on a hot mic over the weekend mocking Israel's assertion that its attacks have been "a pinpoint operation." This client state has long enjoyed unwavering public support from the United States government, and has been carrying out its latest assault comfortable in the knowledge that the world’s sole hegemonic power has its back, no matter what. But, you know, nothing lasts forever.

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.

Image by Matthew Leifheit

The public story of Terence McKenna’s life—in my view, and by my estimates—is a ~450-page book, which could be titled One Version of Terence McKenna’s Life. It’s composed of Terence’s memoir, True Hallucinations (1993), his essays “I Understand Philip K. Dick” and “Among Ayahuasqueros,” certain sentences and anecdotes in dozens of his interviews and talks, and ~15% of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss - My Life with Terence McKenna (2012) by Dennis McKenna, Terence’s younger brother by four years.

In a lecture called “Surfing Finnegan’s Wake,” Terence referred to a book of literary criticism that told James Joyce’s 656-page novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), in a one-page version, a ten-page version, and a 200-page version. The following biography (which to some degree presupposes knowledge of Terence McKenna’s Memes) is my eight-page, fractal-inflected, short-story-esque version of One Version of Terence McKenna’s Life.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world. – Terence McKenna, 1987. [“Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature”]

1. Paonia, Colorado (1946-1962)

Terence Kemp McKenna was born on November 16, 1946, in “a Colorado cattle and coal-mining town of 1,500 people named Paonia,” he said in an interview in 1993. He elaborated:

They wanted to name it Peony but didn’t know how to spell it. In your last year of high school, you got your girlfriend pregnant, married her, and went to work in the coalmines. An intellectual was someone who read TIME.

It’s not known whether Terence read TIME magazine, but he did, at least for one issue, read LIFE magazine. The May 13, 1957 edition featured a first-person narrative, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” by Robert Gordon Wasson, a vice president at J.P. Morgan, about his experiences eating psilocybin mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico. The feature included watercolor paintings of the seven types of psychedelic mushrooms then known. In the unassuming, vaguely subliminal position of third—not first, second, fourth, or fifth—was a painting of four pale mushrooms, golden and bluish in areas, with this caption:

FIRST DISCOVERED in Cuba in June 1904,
Stropharia cubensis Erale grows on cow dung in
pastures.

Terence was age ten when the mushroom—with characteristic charm and earnestness, appearing bluntly in an unlikely venue via a mushroom-obsessed, New York banker—introduced itself, but he would not eat it for another 14 years.

*

Growing up, Terence was “the persecuted, bespectacled type,” he told San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. He subscribed to the Village Voice and the Evergreen Review—a literary magazine that published Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and others from 1957 to 1973. He wrote, in True Hallucinations, of his childhood:

My interest in drugs, magic, and the more obscure backwaters of natural history and theology gave me the interest profile of an eccentric Florentine prince rather than a kid growing up in the heartland of the United States in the late 50s. Dennis had shared all of these concerns, to the despair of our conventional and hardworking parents.

Dennis, Terence’s only sibling, wrote in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss that their parents enjoyed drinking alcohol. “But in our father’s mind, alcohol was not a drug; its effects were on the muscles, in his thinking, and not the brain,” wrote Dennis. He continued:

He viewed drinking as essentially benign... All drugs, on the other hand, he equated to heroin—all were addictive, destructive, and evil. Part of his attitude toward drugs resulted from an experience he had during the war (so he said). On a bombing mission over Germany, one of his crewmates had been badly injured by flak shrapnel, but when his buddies broke open the medical kit to give him a shot for his terrible pain, they found that, as Dad said, “Some hophead had stolen the morphine.”

2. California (1963-1967)

When Terence was 16, he convinced his parents to let him move to California, where he finished his last two years of high school at two different locations while living with an uncle and aunt in Los Altos, then a family friend in Lancaster. At age 18, in 1965, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. He was admitted into the Tussman Experimental College, a new program that, for 150 of Berkeley’s ~27,000 entering students, replaced the first two years of normal undergraduate curriculum. Dennis wrote about the program, founded by Joseph Tussman, a philosophy professor, in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss:

No grades were given; evaluations were based on intense dialogues with faculty members and fellow students, and extensive, eclectic reading lists that participants were encouraged to develop on their own.

By the end of his second year of college, Terence had amassed a library of 1000+ books. Three years later, in the summer of 1970, this library would be destroyed in a fire. Terence’s second library, which, at the time of his death in 2000, also contained 1000+ books, would also be destroyed by a fire, on February 7, 2007. The contents of this second library can be browsed here.

3. New York City (Fall 1968)

After leaving his undergraduate studies and traveling in Europe and North Africa, living for a time in an archipelago in the Indian Ocean called the Seychelles, Terence found himself in New York City, trying to sell a book he had written. He referred to this book in True Hallucinations as “a rambling, sophomoric, McLuhanesque diatribe that was to die a bornin’, fortunately.”

Seated at an outdoor restaurant in Central Park with the only person he knew in New York, Terence, as he wrote in True Hallucinations, talked about an idea his brother—”some sort of genius”—had “that some hallucinogens work by fitting into the DNA.” The idea was startling and had “a ring of truth” he couldn’t ignore. “The political revolution has become too murky a thing to put one’s hope in,” he told his friend, referred to as “Vanessa” in True Hallucinations. “So far, the most interesting unlikelihood in our lives is DMT, right?”

“Reluctant agreement,” said Vanessa.

“Reluctant only because the conclusion that it leads to is so extreme,” said Terence. “Mainly that we should stop fucking around and go off and grapple with the DMT mystery.” But he had already committed to a “hash thing in Asia in a few months.”

4. Asia (1969-1970)

Terence lived and traveled in South Asia for around a year, studying the Tibetan language and smuggling hashish. Late in August of 1969 one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments was intercepted by US Customs. Terence’s reaction, from True Hallucinations: “I went underground and wandered throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia, viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the latter.”

He lived for a time in Taipei, then taught English in Tokyo, then lived in British Columbia for three months, during which (1) he and his brother, along with two friends, planned a trip to South America in search of the DMT-containing plant preparation oo-koo-hé and (2) his mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer six years earlier, died.

5. La Chorrera (1971)

On February 22, 1971, in the Colombian Amazon, a little more than 24 hours after arriving in La Chorrera following a “four-day walk through the jungle,” Terence and his brother had their first Stropharia trips. “I knew only that the mushroom was the best hallucinogen I had ever had and that it had a quality of aliveness I had never known before,” Terence wrote in True Hallucinations. “It seemed to open doorways into places I had assumed would always be closed to me because of my insistence on analysis and realism.”

On March 4, the McKenna brothers performed “the experiment at La Chorrera,” which involved using ayahuasca, psilocybin, and the human body’s vocal cords and DNA to create, as Terence in True Hallucinations quoted Dennis’ journal entry from that day, “a solid-state hyperdimensional circuit that is quadripartite in structure.”

Terence returned to Berkeley on April 13, but three months later, in July, went back to La Chorrera with his girlfriend, named “Ev” in True Hallucinations. Stropharia cubensis was scarcer this time. He gathered spore prints and brought them to America.

6. Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide (1976)

In 1976, five years after “the experiment at La Chorrera,” an intriguing book, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide by O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric, appeared. The book was written by the McKenna brothers under pen names. In less than 100 pages it provided “precise, no-fail instructions for growing and preserving” Stropharia cubensis, “the starborn magic mushroom.”

This was their second co-written book. The first, The Invisible Landscape, which was published a year earlier—and sold “no more than 1500 copies,” Terence said in 1993—examined what happened at La Chorrera and introduced Timewave Zero. “I regard Timewave Zero as a fascinating model of a previously unmodelled system—which is human history,” said Terence in a 1996 interview.

7. “Ranting and raving” (1980s)

In the early 1980s Terence began giving talks at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California as well as at other venues and events around the country. How did this begin? An interview from 1993 offers one answer:

Interviewer: So you lived on the royalties of the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide alone?
Terence: And something which we should probably describe as "consulting."

Interviewer: I see [laughs].
Terence: [laughs loudly]

Interviewer: [regaining composure] Well, I guess that's what I was shooting for with that question.
Terence: Yes, there was a lot of "consulting" in the '70s [laughs].

Interviewer: How did your success with the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide steamroll into a career?
Terence: As the new age got going, say '80, '81, '82, I just found it incredibly irritating, and I was busy consulting and staying home and I also had small children, but I just thought it was such a bunch of crap.

Interviewer: Talking about crystals and such?
Terence: Yeah, the crystal, aura, past life, channeling business, and I said, you know, why don't these people check out drugs? What's the matter with them, my god? And finally someone persuaded me to say that in a public situation, and it's been constant ever since.

By the late 1980s he was married, with two children. Due in part to his “innate Irish ability to rave [which] had been turbo-charged by years of psilocybin mushroom use,” he wrote in True Hallucinations, his popularity had increased—he sometimes spoke now to audiences of around 1,000 people—and publishers were “suddenly interested in his work.”

8. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992)

The first book Terence published without his brother’s collaboration was a collection of six interviews, four transcribed talks, and seven essays: “Temporal Resonance” (in which Terence observes: “The experience we have of time is much more closely related to the description that we inherit from a tradition such as Taoism [than Western science]”), “Among Ayahuasqueros” (“a reflective diary” of Terence and his future wife Kathleen Harrison’s 1976 trip to the Amazon), “Mushrooms and Evolution,” “The Voynich Manuscript,” “Wasson’s Literary Precursors” (on Gordon Wasson, “the Abraham of the reborn awareness in Western civilization of the presence of the shamanically empowering mushroom”), “Plan/Plant/Planet” (“The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous”), “Virtual Reality and Electronic Highs (Or On Becoming Virtual Octopi).”

Terence explained the book’s title:

When the medieval world shifted its worldview, secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of classical Greek and Roman approaches to law, philosophy, aesthetics, city planning, and agriculture. Our dilemma will cast us further back into time in search for models and answers.

9. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (1992)

Terence’s second book expanded on an idea introduced in “Mushrooms and Evolution,” that hallucinogenic mushrooms have been used by humans for “perhaps tens of millennia,” and that the interaction “is not a static symbiotic relationship, but rather a dynamic one through which at least one of the parties has been bootstrapped to higher and higher cultural levels.” It also elucidated the histories of sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, opium, tobacco, heroin, and cocaine.

10. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise (1993)

With his third book, “a chronological narrative of a story that is both true and extraordinary”—a beautiful, poignant, delightful memoir, in my opinion—Terence finally, at age 46, externalized the version of the story of his life that most people now know. True Hallucinations, which Terence called “the easy-to-read narrative anecdotal version of what The Invisible Landscape is the no-holds-barred, all the footnotes, all the citations [version of],” focused on his experiences at La Chorrera, but also explored the years before and after that, and briefly examined his childhood. He wrote of “the every-colored stars.” He wrote of “imagining what one can imagine.” In one passage, he described what he felt while smoking a joint in 1971 on a boat on the river Putumayo:

The flow of the river was like the rich smoke I inhaled. The flow of smoke, the flow of water, and of time. “All flows,” said a beloved Greek. Heraclitus was called the crying philosopher, as if he spoke in desperation. But, why crying? I love what he says—it does not make me cry. Rather than interpret pante rhea as “nothing lasts,” I had always considered it a Western expression of the idea of Tao. And here we were, going with the Putumayo’s flow. What a luxury to be smoking, again in the tropics, again in the light, away from the season and places of death. Away from living under Canada’s State of Emergency, on the edge of war-bloated, mad America. Mother’s death and coincidentally the loss of all my books and art, which had been collected, carefully shipped back and stored, and then had burned in one of the periodic brushfires that decimate the Berkeley hills. Cancer and Fire. Fire and Cancer. Away from these terrible things, where Monopoly houses, waxy green, go tumbling into fissures in the animated psychic landscape.

On May 22, 1999, Terence had a brain seizure and collapsed at home. A CAT scan revealed a tumor in his right frontal cortex, which was diagnosed as a “glioblastoma multiforme,” a rare form of brain cancer. He died on April 6, 2000 at age 53.

*

“I’ll try to be around and about,” he said in September 1999, addressing an audience at a psychedelics conference in Kona, Hawaii. “But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.”

Where is Terence McKenna now? What is death? Is it, as Terence once suggested, “a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that, for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable degree of freedom”? What is the imagination? Next week, in a post titled “Death and the Imagination,” I’ll try to answer these questions.

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