These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE Photo Issue.

These recent photos by Paris, TX-based photographer Cole Don Kelley were included as a portfolio in the 2014 VICE photo issue. Check out more pictures from the magazine here.

The Australia First Party's headquarters in Tempe, Sydney

It’s probably a wise idea to run far away when a stranger grins and compliments you on your “vampire neck.” Or you could just go into a strange house with him. This is what I found myself doing last month, after a clash between a bunch of masked activists and the extreme-right Australia First Party.

The invitation, to visit the party's Sydney headquarters, had come from Jim Saleam—the head honcho of a notorious organization with links to neo-Nazi factions. I was too curious to knock the offer back.

Jim Saleam, current chairman of the AFP

One of the first things I saw upon entering the building was about a dozen mannequin heads. They were scrawled with swastikas, names, and other grotesque markings. When I took photos of the heads, with Saleam's permission, the guy who admired my neck (I think he liked my pale skin) growled on the sidelines. He said that if the decision were up to him, I wouldn't have been let into the house at all.

A bunch of mannequin heads marked with swastikas, fake blood, and the names of AFP members and people Saleam knows. Picture taken inside the AFP building

This animosity was juxtaposed with the jokey friendliness of a nearby dude dressed in a costume-shop Arab outfit. He smiled while holding a fake gun and a sign scrawled with the words “Back from Iraq." This was definitely one of the stranger Saturday afternoons I'd had in awhile.

The AFP’s lounge room/conference room/screening area

To any self-respecting political mover and shaker, the inner west suburb of Tempe doesn't seem like an inspiring base from which to launch and sustain a serious political movement. Yet it's here that Saleam bought this house—situated behind a grimy, navy-blue shop front—and filled it with the hopes, dreams, and delusions of his beloved political projects. He’s lived there for decades and appears to cast an eye over everything that happens inside, like Philip Seymour Hoffman's cultish leader in The Master. (RIP, Phil. Sorry to bring you into this.)

When I dropped by Tempe at about 1 PM, I realised I'd missed the main event: a tense confrontation between anti-racist protesters and a group of über-nationalists known as the Party for Freedom. The former group appeared to include members of the Socialist Alternative and various anarchist groups. They successfully hijacked a Party for Freedom demonstration at the nearby Marrickville Woolworths, which intended to target the supermarket's celebration of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Cosplay enthusiasts Becca, Karen, and Patrick. Patrick, the editor of cosplay digital magazine Beyond Cosplay, organised a meeting/counter-protest to take place at the Tempe Hotel at the same time as the protest outside AFP at 1 PM

Following the ruckus, a local stream of average Joes and their more gung-ho counterparts joined other protesters in Tempe for a second counteraction against an Australia First Party forum. Said forum was about “the ethnic cleansing” of white Australians by universities, thanks to their allegedly cashed-up, globalist-minded international counterparts.

The Australia First Party gathering understandably stayed put behind the police stationed outside Saleam's house (although one of the suspected neo-Nazis was reportedly involved in a violent scuffle with an anarchist later that day). The demonstrators had masks and black-eyed stares—they could've come straight from a V for Vendetta screening—and attitudes to match. “Stop taking photos of me,” growled one young woman as I snapped away on my camera. Her eyes glinted through her mask’s two small holes as her head almost butted up against mine.

Protester on Princes Highway outside the AFP building

Some of the less radical protesters included a group of cosplay enthusiasts. They thought they could start a dialogue with the party, but many of the Tempe locals weren't so idealistic. A guy named Waleed—known to everyone else as Wally—told VICE that the neighborhood presence of Saleam and his compadres probably contributed to the closure of his business, Waleby's Cafe.

Jo, a University of Technology, Sydney, student with Tanzanian heritage, and Wally, a Tempe local born in South Africa who owned the now closed Waleby's Cafe

“He never, ever bought a coffee from me," said Wally, who’s originally from South Africa. “I was wondering, why isn't this guy coming to get a coffee? I have a beautiful shop. These people did not support me. It's so strange. It's only now that I realize what's happening.” His fellow protesters nodded sadly with comprehension. “I approached him one day and said, “I'm Waleed,’ and he said ‘Oh yeah, all right’. And I didn't know! Until I stepped back and saw the big flag.”

The party flag was definitely among the less unsettling objects I found after following Saleam into the house. The Australia First Party’s dining room was covered with the messy remains of a lunch spread. The walls were painted a lurid green and decorated with romantic impressionist paintings by Fred McCubbin and Tom Roberts. And that dude with the “Back from Iraq” sign introduced himself as "Sheikh Rattle and Roll." "Get it? Like the song! Make sure you get the pig in the picture,” he said. 

A man dressed as a figure he calls “Sheikh Rattle and Roll." Picture taken inside the AFP building

Saleam said the grisly mannequin heads weren’t really his. He blamed “the anarchists” for lobbing them over the wall outside the house, as well as impaling a few others on his barbed-wire fence, at around 3:30 AM that morning. “We accept it as political warfare,” he said. “I'd like to catch them, but I don't want to hand them over to the police. I'd much prefer it if some of our guys touched them up and they never came back.”

A vandalized garage door at the front of the AFP building. Saleam suspects anarchists or Social Alternative members.

“Touched them up” was not the first unexpected phrase to crop up amongst Saleam's otherwise well-mannered academic speak (he has a PhD, after all). He compared the difficulty of “weaning Australia off” the international student program to being a heroin addict. “You go off heroin, and you could quite die,” he said. “It takes a while to wean yourself off it. Entire structures have been made that are now hooked into the global economy. Absolutely hooked in.”

Another proponent of this agenda was Party for Freedom chairman Nick Folkes, who was also inside the Tempe home. Folkes is a 30-something dude with the inquisitive face of a 10-year-old and the easy nature of a suburban dad on the ballet run. This sense of affability may well have helped him sell at least a dozen others on the idea of rallying against Ramadan inside their local supermarket.

Nick Folkes, current chairman of the Party For Freedom

The Party for Freedom has no official ties with Saleam's lot, but Folkes shares many of their views. He told VICE that “the alternative category of politics is growing” and more Australians are coming around to his views. “We believe that multiculturalism—what's been happening in the last 40 years in Australia—has been a complete failure, especially with Islamic culture. It's so incompatible. I don't know what I share with the Islamic types, and promoting Ramadan is promoting Islam. That means female genital mutilation, honor killings, terrorism, and Sharia law.”

A shop front in Enmore addressed to Sergio Redegalli, who has become well known in for his anti-multiculturalism views. Folkes says he'll be speaking at the Party for Freedom social club soon.

To most outsiders, the comparison of supermarket produce specials with the most radical aspects or interpretations of Islam seems heavy-handed. Nevertheless, Folkes delivered his message with the strange calm of a person wholeheartedly devoted to his beliefs—no matter how grandiose, manic, or unfathomable. This is a political approach arguably more salable in an age of voter existentialism, hung parliaments, and “Fuck Tony Abbott” T-shirts.

The window of the now-closed Waleby's Café on Princes Highway

After I left the house, I waited for the 422 bus and snapped pictures of the for-sale sign outside Wally's now defunct café. It was hard not to reflect on the hotbed of racial, political, and ideological tension hidden in Tempe, a suburb arguably like any other suburb in Australia. I'm actually a newcomer to Sydney, so I feel that I know and understand far less than long-suffering locals like Wally. Unlike him, my white vampire neck was welcomed into the Australia First Party headquarters.

Follow Kristen Daly on Twitter.

The Jean Dame gym, located in Paris's Second Arrondissement, reeks of a singular mixture of feet sweat and armpit effluvia. In the middle of the tatami, two sumo wrestlers bow to each other, getting ready to fight. Legs spread wide, butt up, they're trying to concentrate before the fight starts. The only sound comes from the rain splashing on the windows.

Suddenly, the sumotoris put their hands on the ground and hurl themselves at one another, grunting. Each wrestler tries to grab his opponent, throwing a few slaps to confuse him and force him out of the dohyō—the circular ring where they fight. In Jean Dame, sumotoris are all amateurs, and under the traditional mawashi—a belt wrapped around the waist and crotch—they all wear boxer shorts.

Professional sumotoris weigh about 330 pounds. Here, no one even gets to 200 pounds. These guys don't dream of becoming professional sumo wrestlers either—they work in bookstores or in IT services. Paris Sumo gives the average man a chance to swap his tie for a belt to wrap around his ass.

"Sumo is not attractive to people who want to start practicing a martial art. It can't be useful in real life, because it is only about forcing the opponent out of the ring," explains the club's founder, Antoine Marvier.

Romain performs a bow before a fight.

The simplicity of sumo never prevented Antoine from being fascinated by the sport. In 2009, while chatting to other sumo enthusiasts on sumo forums, he decided to found the club . People around him were both surprised and amused. “You don't look like a sumo. You're too skinny,” people would say. Or: “You'll have to wear a thong that will go right up your butt!”

Sumo isn't particularly well know in France. To follow professional competitions, you have to scrabble online for a streaming site or subscribe to Kombat Sport—the only channel broadcasting sumo tournaments in France. Whereas thousands of people already practice sumo in Eastern Europe, in France there are only a few competitors. Jean Dame is the only place you can practice the sport, which means the sumotoris of the Paris Sumo Club have to be resourceful. Antoine crafted the dohyō and the mawashis himself.

Before getting on the ring, today's fighters—Guillaume, Mathieu and Alain—warm up. They briefly discuss the last book they read and Japanese culture. After performing a few "chikos"—the pre-fight position—they do what they call the “roasted banana” and the “Mexican slug”: They try to move forward while being on their back, without using their arms or legs. “It was hard to find a name for these moves,” says the coach. He invented these exercises, adapting the warm-ups as new members joined the club. He also searched for tutorials on the internet.

Antoine and Romain fighting

The dozen members also know they will probably never get into a Japanese arena. “We are light-years away from what is done in Japan,” says Bastien, the member who is the Japan expert among the group. All of try to follow the tournaments, but Bastien took it a step further: He's so far written two essays on the topic, one of which is on the “Globalization of Professional Sumo Wrestling.” His knowledge helped him become a consultant for Eurosport—a job he kept for five years, until the channel stopped broadcasting tournaments in 2007.

He's already been to Japan six times, where he was impressed by how the wrestlers trained. “When you get there, it feels like Sparta! They train for hours, covered in sand. It looks very tough.”

Bastien, wrestling with Guillaume

The Parisian sumotoris are no Spartans, but they don't neglect the warm-up either. Like with any other sport, if you are not careful you can easily be injured. “We have members who broke a rib during a warm up,” warns Antoine.

To him, sumo is the full-contact wrestling sport par excellence. “You're have to get close to your opponent, and you have to grab him and force him out of the ring.” There are no weight classes, which means a wrestler could face someone twice his weight. The fights are quick; they usually last less than 20 seconds.

Romain and Antoine warming up

Next to the dohyō, Romain catches his breath after a fight. Like Bastien, he's visited Tokyo too: He went to Ryogoku—the heartland of professional sumo, where the wrestlers train. He liked how sumo mixed sports and tradition.

“When I got back and heard of the Paris Sumo Club, I just couldn't believe it. I wanted to try, but I was scared that they would laugh at me because of my weight.” He's now been coming every Sunday for three years.

In Paris, the ceremonial is shortened too: They don't throw salt on the ring before fights, and they perform shorter bows. “If we wanted to follow the tradition strictly, it would take too much time,” says Alain, a 50-something with Real Madrid's Marcelo's haircut.

That's why the French sumotoris take liberties. Romain even brought his wife once—women's access to the dohyō is forbidden in Japan. “She's got the fighting spirit, so she liked it. But it's true that it's very rare to see a woman here.”

A few new members join every year out of curiosity, but the main goal for Antoine and the others is to make sure the club will go on. Once, while in Lyon promoting the club, they approached Jacques Chirac and tried to get him to join. But he never showed up.

Antoine Marvier believes there is only one thing that could help sumo develop quickly in France: “It needs to become an Olympic sport. A lot of people would try it if it did.”

Denver band Blue Rider performing at a house show unconnected with the Underground Music Showcase. All photos by Glenn Ross

If you want your money
Better stand in the line
'Cause you'll only end up
Picking up nickels and dimes
-The Kinks, "Powerman”

Who owns a community music festival? The sponsors, the organizers, the ticket-holders, or the bands? And when you call your event an “Underground Music Showcase”—the title of Denver’s 14-year-old local music festival—are you obligated to adhere to all the weird rules and intricate politics of indie culture, no matter how big you get?

My city’s beloved Underground Music Showcase began in the early years of George W. Bush’s first term, back when Denver looked more like Detroit than San Francisco, and smoking marijuana could still land you in prison. In the eyes of the world, the Denver indie-music scene was little more than a footnote in a Neutral Milk Hotel biography; this was before DeVotchKa recorded the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack and Elvis Costello was Tweeting about Esme Patterson. Back then, the UMS hosted only a few bands and a couple hundred people. It was a modest affair co-founded by the Denver Post’s music editor, Ricardo Baca.

After Baca and others moved the festival into the various bars, clubs and shops along Denver’s Broadway Avenue, the event swelled in size, bringing in armies of musicians and drunken revelers to the rapidly Brooklyn-izing neighborhood. It was the show every band worked toward and every fan’s summer lead up to. “I’d always modeled The UMS as a mini-South by Southwest,” says Baca, who has gained some national fame as the Post’s first marijuana editor.

After expanding into multiple days encompassing hundreds of bands, the newspaper took control of the event, removing Baca and replacing him with corporate-finance man Kendall Smith. This year, severe cuts in payments to bands led some musicians to boycott the event, either publicly or quietly. They coalesced around alternative neighborhood shows and parties that don’t require a UMS bracelet. A clear narrative had formed: the corpulent capitalists were feeding off the workingman’s art, but the proles wouldn’t stand for it.

But the reality was much, much more complicated.

“As far as the business end of it, when you’re in a band, all you are is just a beer salesman,” Aaron Collins says to me on Thursday, nursing a 10 am mimosa at Sputnik bar, one of dozens of UMS venues along Broadway Avenue. His band, A. Tom Collins, is a top-billing local group for the festival (which begins seven hours from the time of our chat, hence the roaring of alcoholic engines), yet were offered a fraction of the payment this year compared to the year before.

One of the many alternative house shows going on in Denver's Baker neighborhood during UMS

Getting musicians to open up about money is like getting your grandmother to talk about sex: there are things that could be said, but etiquette prevents you from feeling comfortable saying them. Collins notes that his band could be making a lot more money playing the same venue outside of UMS, but also quickly adds: “I don’t deal with the money. It would make me more jaded than I already am. I’ve been in bands since I was 13, and I just assume we’re gonna get fucked. The music industry is built off of fucking the artists.”

Despite the economic shifts, the underground in UMS was stronger than ever this year.

Located only one block from Broadway Avenue, my house exists within the trenches of this four-day festival, where booze is absorbed like oxygen and sweat stains are most definitely in fashion. Four days, four hundred bands, and enough marijuana to stuff God’s pillowcase—UMS is a marathon of the senses. Unlike being corralled into zoo-like conditions for Lollapalooza in Chicago or Coachella in California, this grand bacchanal is within my urban backyard, affording my neighbors and I the decedent opportunity to have melodies tumble into our ears as we traverse the sidewalk to buy more cigarettes.  

Many who don’t live nearby set up residence for the weekend at various non-stop house parties, which sprout all over the neighborhood throughout the festival, featuring live music at all hours of the night. The Baker neighborhood becomes a networking orgy, a landmine field of ex-lovers and potential job opportunities. Being exposed to that is good for everyone—whether you're a musician, journalist or just a scenester with Mommy issues.

“The more people that pay attention to something, the more it funds projects for that community,” Denver songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff tells me later that afternoon, nursing cider-ale in his backyard. The sound of UMS amps and kickdrums begins rumbling from nearby. “Yet with the less attention and less pressure, people put on great shows because they don’t give a shit.”

Rateliff has become one of the biggest names in Denver music over the last few years, receiving mainstream praise within the hallowed pages of Q magazine and the New York Times. Last year, the reunion of his former band, Born In The Flood, was a mainstage attraction, with Governor John Hickenlooper drunkenly singing Rateliff's praise in a rambling introduction.

Rateliff’s success is the carrot dangled before bands who agree to play UMS. Previously, acts were always thrown some small payment, along with bottomless cups of beer and extra passes for performing in multiple groups. This year, many bands were paid either 50% less than in previous years, or not at all. Kegs of beer were replaced with two drink tickets, and passes were limited to one per musician.

As the popularity of the festival has grown, the value of playing UMS has come to reside almost entirely in the exposure, rather than financial compensation.

“For many of these bands, playing UMS is going to be the biggest audience they’ll play to all year,” Collins pointed out to me earlier in the morning, noting that the large shows he’s played at UMS contributed to the notoriety his band enjoys today. At the same time, he notes that paying the bands something is a good gesture of recognition for anyone putting on a show. Cutting everyone’s pay with no explanation was a dick move, and poor PR to boot.

“I have opted OUT of playing The UMS this year,” Denver musician Joshua Trinidad, who had played every UMS since 2005, posted on Facebook a few days before the festival, causing a daisy-chain of idealistic scorn and support. “I am a big supporter of this festival and the community connections it has built over the years. However this year I don't agree with the new business model that the festival has adopted; not paying musicians and forgetting the important relationships they have built over time.”

Trinidad went on to play three shows in Baker over the weekend, but all of them werehouse-shows at non-UMS venues—none of which pay bands, but also don’t ask a cover. Other musicians I spoke with had similar feelings, but were aware of the social force that UMS has become in the Denver music scene, and either agreed to play for little or no money, or quietly declined to be a part of the festival. Strong feelings permeated the scene, but few people other than Trinidad wanted to go on record in opposition to UMS.

Adam Baumeister of Meep Records cuts a vinyl 45 of me drunkenly reading a Dave Eggers story about dogs.

Having an overwhelming sonic buffet to choose from on the first night, my friends and I are like hyper children forced to wait another hour before opening presents on Christmas morning. Not being actual kids, we use drugs to both enhance and temper our enthusiasm. Adderall is traded for cigarettes, and lines of coke are separated with a press badge. Two blind friends of mine decide to try mushrooms for the first time, which makes navigating the crowded sidewalks an interesting adventure. A local musician records me reading a Dave Eggers story aloud, and cuts it directly onto a vinyl 45 before my bloodshot eyes.

Wandering the streets, so many bands look suspiciously to me like closet Evangelical Christians disguised as a indie-folk musicians. So much wonderful; so much terrible. Psych-rock band Tjutjuna plays faster than the speed of consciousness, while the cello-sporting math rocker Ian Cooke explores the dark side of Twee. Stumbling toward a 1 am comedy show, I see a girl with aqua-blue hair for the twenty-eighth time tonight, and ask aloud to no one: Is sea-punk still a thing?   

Adam Cayton-Holland about to record his My Dining Room Table podcast for a live audience at a Tiki bar

Swaying on my heels at the UMS comedy stage, I struggle to hear the stand up comics over the sound of a crowd half-deaf from rock music talking throughout each set.

“Have you ever been to Denver? Now there’s a drunk place,” I suddenly remember Marc Maron asking Todd Barry on his WTF podcast. “There’s good crowds, but people get just shitfaced there.

This kind of thing tends to go unnoticed at a rock show, but Adam Cayton-Holland has to corral the audience like an overworked nanny, spoon-feeding the drunken crowd joke after joke. While today he’s a professional comic appearing on Conan and @Midnight, Cayton-Holland’s barroom open-mic roots are in full employ this evening, never missing a beat lest the audience’s attention wander like cabbage-brained spider monkeys.

After four nights of this, our brain chemistries are depleted, and I begin to take stock of what reckless children we all reduce ourselves to during UMS, and what an invaluable luxury that is. No other time during the year are we afforded the opportunity to casually bump into almost every single person in the Denver music scene, enjoying a (seemingly) consequence-free world of intoxicants and hookups within this buffet of sound stretching ten blocks down our very backyards.

The musicians have a fair argument to make when it comes to being paid to perform, though a larger context has to acknowledge the infinite amount of work, financing and risk that goes into providing us with this hipster-Vegas playground each year in July.

Earlier in the week, I was on the balcony of the Denver Post offices, overlooking Broadway Avenue with the Rocky Mountains in the distance. Standing next to me was current UMS director Kendall Smith, referred to earlier in this story as “corporate-finance man” due to his career before taking over the music festival.

Denver musician Maria Kohler outside a house show

I’d been interviewing musicians about the pay-cut to UMS bands and was prepared for a confrontational vibe. Standing there, I thought of Hunter Thompson’s story about interviewing a wealthy British man in Columbia who repeatedly hit golf balls into the villages below his penthouse while sucking down gin. After all, here was (supposedly) the face of all that was going wrong with the UMS, the man who had snatched a humble little festival from the arms of its idealistic founders, and turned it into the cultural equivalent of a 5 Hour Energy commercial.

But I didn’t meet that man, because he does not exist.

“The challenge that we’re faced with is trying to grow the audience for the Denver music community,” Smith told me. While he refused to discuss the specifics of band compensation, the implication (albeit never directly stated) was that funds that had previously gone to local bands were now being diverted toward getting larger headlining acts, such as this year’s draw, Blonde Redhead.

“We call ourselves an ‘independent music festival,’ though clearly we have label acts and indie acts,” he said, explaining that by growing the festival, you grow the exposure for the Denver music scene writ large. “The question is: What is too big? The answer is different for everybody. Are people happy that Paste magazine and BrooklynVegan are writing about UMS? I’m not sure. Since I took over, my goal has been to continue the path of creating a destination festival, which ultimately strengthens the scene.”

The main stage at UMS

The narrative that I, and many musicians I spoke with, held onto was that Kendall Smith had commodified UMS with this tactic, altering the tide of local support in favor of national recognition. But UMS co-founder Ricardo Baca defends the emphasis on local acts, and has been impressed with Smith’s handling of the festival.

“Kendall often talks about maintaining the original communal spirit of The UMS, and he has,” Bacca tells me. “While that original spirit was certainly rooted in camaraderie and music and community, it was also about ensuring there would be another UMS the following year. Each year we would bring in larger national bands to compliment our talented stable of local artists.”

Smith adds that any net proceeds that come from the event are deposited into the Denver Post Community fund, which provides millions of dollars in grants to local charities. In light of this, it’s difficult to accuse him or anyone else at UMS of picking musicians pockets in to fill his own Scrooge McDuck vault.

Smiths’ background makes him an easy target when looking for a reason why UMS is loaded with sponsored advertising yet has no money to pay local bands. But considering he abandoned a lucrative career in economics to direct a Denver music festival that gives its proceeds to charity, I hesitate to make him a scapegoat. My fellow attendees and I may disagree with him about what’s best for the Denver music scene, but his intentions seem as pure as anyone else’s.

IItchy-O in their non-UMS performance on Broadway Avenue

In modeling the festival off of South by Southwest, there’s certainly the risk of mainstreaming the process of corrupting a regional community. But there’s also the groundwork being done here to draw enough ancillary shows that Denverites might soon enjoy a weekend of entertainment without even purchasing a wristband.

Jim Norris, owner of Mutiny Information Cafe bookstore, received a city permit this year to shut down an off-street of Broadway and host his own 60-band, free of charge event. Even he said this year was the “the best UMS we’ve ever had.” His event concluded with the electro-psych marching band Itchy-O, which paraded down the sidewalk of Broadway accompanied by Japanese dragons and a flame-shooting hearse. This stunt, along with Norris’ event, could be viewed as a confrontational protest against the commodification of a community gathering—or maybe just a badass thing to do.

Either way, the original spirit of the Underground Music Showcase remained intact this year, providing us all with the opportunity to blast our ears and livers with some heavy spirits in the company of our closest friends and some of the best musicians the world (or at least Denver) has to offer.

Mutiny Information Cafe collects donations for UMS underpaid musicians.

Josiah Hesse is a journalist from Denver, Colorado, covering the local music, comedy, marijuana, and political landscapes. Follow him on Twitter.

It was just after she’d had her first child that Janet Bloomfield realized she didn’t want to go back to work and pay some nanny to raise her kids. She had gone to college to study film theory and assumed, like practically every American woman does, that she would start a career before marrying and having a family, but that wasn’t how things turned out. She met a man, fell in love, and stayed at home.

She didn’t feel ashamed of this decision, nor did she feel denied in any way—a close college friend of hers nicknamed Pixie had wound up in a similar situation when her son was diagnosed with some severe health issues. But other people, especially other women, apparently had a problem with Janet’s choices. She felt that her friends were disdainful of her and thought she was crazy or stupid to rely on a man for her income; they insinuated that her husband would “trade her in for a younger woman,” and that she would wind up broke and abandoned.

Janet and Pixie started writing letters back and forth while Pixie’s son was in intensive care, where Pixie wasn’t allowed to bring her cell phone. They talked about how housewives had fallen out of cultural favor, and about how Janet was a “victim of parental alienation,” as she would later say—her parents had gone through a vicious divorce and her mother had turned her and her three brothers against her father. In October 2012 these paper and ink musings became a blog, JudgyBitch.com, with Janet writing rants and Pixie doing the graphics and maintaining the back end.

Trading cards courtesy of Europa Phoenix, who draws illustrations for the Honey Badger Podcast. 

As she was starting the website, Janet was searching for answers as to why her peers disliked stay-at-home moms and why her mother had had the power to separate her from her father. She found herself exploring a part of the internet that was full of complicated theories about social hierarchies, propaganda, and gender bias, in the process reading story after story of men being discriminated against in family courts and custody battles. Respect for traditional family structures was waning. The very concept of the family, in fact, was now regarded as a means by which men oppress women.

As she read more, disparate threads started clicking together—all these things were the result of a systematic vilification of the male gender. The misinformation, the lies, the poison, it all came back to radical feminism. Even her film-theory courses had taught her to watch movies through a feminist filter. She gradually acquired a set of beliefs with the help of a loosely organized online community of thinkers and writers called the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM).

Her new worldview ran counter to the way people were supposed to think and talk about gender and society. As she used her website to strike back against feminism, people got angry, which was fine with her—the more animosity she got for pushing boundaries, the more boundaries she pushed.

Janet Bloomfield. All photos by the author

Today Janet is a slender blond just entering middle age who’s far more affable in person than on the web, where she is fierce, self-assured, and cutting. Even as she adopted her strident views, she didn’t share them with her neighbors in her small town out of fear of the imagined consequences. “My husband could lose his job,” she told me. “I don’t need all my kids’ teachers, and all the parents of their little friends, treating them differently because of my views.”

In 2013, Janet found a welcoming home for those views in A Voice for Men (AVFM), a popular MRM website run by a man named Paul Elam, who founded it in 2009 and has become known for his provocative stances and language. She started to comment on some posts, and after reading her blog, Elam ended up reaching out to Janet about republishing some of her work, giving her a platform.

Other women were popping up on the site at Elam’s invitation, and he began referring to some of these feMRAs—female men’s rights activists—as Honey Badgers, a reference to the viral YouTube clip about the indomitable “crazy nastyass” creature that fights off snakes and bees and “doesn’t give a shit.”

Later that year, three of these women formed the Honey Badger Brigade, a website and podcast on which they discussed men’s rights, feminism, and geek culture. Janet became a regular on the podcast, putting her at the heart of the YouTube channels, blogs, vlogs, subreddits, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts that make up the MRM. Though the movement is all about defending men and boys from social misconceptions, discrimination, and feminism, in an odd twist it's the female activists—pissed off, extremely well read, and spoiling for an argument—who are driving the conversation.

Portraits of some Honey Badgers on a table at the men's rights conference in June

The origins of the Men’s Rights Movement are murky. If you go back you can find mentions of groups like the League for Men’s Rights in late 19th-century London (it advocated against the “encroachment of women”) and Der Bund für Männerrechte, or the Federation for Men’s Rights, which formed in Vienna in 1926 and focused on divorce and paternity rights but also “fighting all the monstrosities that have come from the emancipation of woman.”

The modern versions of Der Bund für Männerrechte formed as a backlash to second-wave feminism and the burn-your-bra career gals of the 1970s it inspired. The most notable organization of the era was the National Coalition for Men, which still exists today and seeks to “promote awareness of how gender-based expectations limit men legally, socially, and psychologically.” The idea that men are oppressed by society was later championed by Warren Farrell, whose 1993 book The Myth of Male Power inspired Elam and many other current-day men’s rights activists (MRAs).

The most common concerns of the MRM include:

(1) The family court system, which activists say frequently forces men to pay too much alimony while not considering their feelings when awarding the custody of children;

(2) Government programs that assist only women rather than both genders, especially those that give aid to female victims of sexual assault—MRAs claim that men who suffer the same abuse are often ignored;

(3) The right to opt out of raising a child, since, some MRAs say, women can opt out of a pregnancy;

(4) False rape accusations, which MRAs think don’t get enough attention from a culture increasingly inclined to believe women who say horrible things about men;

(5) Fighting back against radical feminism, the ultimate evil as far as the movement is concerned.

These aren’t mainstream issues, but the modern-day MRM has acquired a constituency online that its forebears couldn’t have dreamed of. “We are growing exponentially because of the difference in modern communications,” Janet told me.

The internet, of course, has made it possible for people to broadcast their words to the entire globe without the restrictions that come with finding a publisher or being part of a larger organization. The floodgates are open, and everyone is free to write and disseminate long-winded manifestos, form tough-talking groups, and break away from them into increasingly splintered factions when disagreements arise.

Thus, you’ve got run-of-the-mill MRAs like most of the readers of AVFM, but you’ve also got a constellation of related online phenomena: the pickup artists (PUAs), who concoct elaborate systems for interacting with and seducing women; the anti-PUAs, who feel ripped off by PUA gurus promising to get shy young men laid but don’t deliver (they achieved notoriety recently because Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter, frequented one of their forums); Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs), who have vowed to stay away from women entirely, often after being sexually traumatized or otherwise abused; and Red Pill, a catchall term for those who see the world as being dominated by women and oppressive to men, and exhibit some of the most extreme language of anyone affiliated with the MRM. Not all of the men who adopt these labels belong to organizations, but the most prominent group in the US is unquestionably AVFM.

Karen Straughan

Karen Straughan, also known as GirlWritesWhat, is one of the most popular polemicists in this manosphere. She has more than 67,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, and her 2011 vlog on “Feminism and the Disposable Male” has been watched more than a million times, making her royalty among feMRAs. By day, she is a 41-year-old divorced waitress and mother of three. The self-educated bisexual woman used to make ends meet by writing erotica for women, and she discovered the MRM when she and a few other authors decided to troll a men’s issues forum—where she had something of a road-to-Damascus moment when she realized she had more in common with the forum dwellers than her fellow trolls.

You’re probably familiar with men’s rights and the backlash it inspires among feminists and people who think MRAs merely use new language to justify ugly old beliefs. Hardly a month goes by without a wave of semi-prominent blog posts about the latest controversy ginned up by the MRM and its opponents, and the more venom that gets thrown at them, the more the MRAs—and the Honey Badgers in particular—spit back.

For instance, I realized during one of my conversations with Janet that she was the author of a particularly fucked-up post titled “Why Don’t We Have a Dumb Fucking Whore Registry? Now That Would Be Justice,” a piece she penned in response to the much-publicized 2013 trial of two small-town football players in Steubenville, Ohio, who were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl who had passed out after drinking at a party. “That is a tragedy for the boys, for justice and for the victims of actual rape,” she wrote of the verdict, adding: “Comparing a stupid, drunk, helmet-chasing whore who gets fingered while passed out to an actual rape victim is completely and utterly absurd.”

When I talked to her about the case, she used it to illustrate the need for women to be cautious about what situations they get themselves into. She told me she rejects the “feminist notion that girls should be able to behave however they want and nothing bad will happen to them.” Janet went on: “If we try to tell our girls to be aware of the dangers out there and be responsible, we are said to be slut-shaming or victim blaming.”

We managed an academic dialogue on the subject during our conversation, which is quite rare, as both MRAs and their detractors tend to reach for hyperbole immediately upon encountering one another. “There is very little willingness on the part of gender feminists to engage in real debate,” said Kristal Garcia, a Honey Badger who has had irreparable rifts with several friends over her involvement in men’s rights.

It may seem strange that Kristal would accuse the other side of being unreasonable when her own team includes people who would refer to a teenage sex-abuse victim as a “whore”—but those within the MRM say they’re merely responding to all the mud that gets slung at them, and men in general, by feminists. Inside the internet bubble they inhabit, that’s simply how you talk.

Paul Elam

When I first encountered Janet and the Honey Badgers on the internet, like many people I found a lot of what they said outrageous, even disturbing. But I couldn’t stop watching the online back-and-forth between these women and the feminists who abhorred them. The ridiculous internet gender-war circus was better than anything on Netflix, so I kept on clicking, prepared to root for the good guy and boo the villain.

As I read their posts and watched their vlogs, it struck me that the feMRAs, especially Karen and Janet, were articulating their theses surprisingly well, more so than many of their male equivalents. Like most MRAs, they’re essentially egalitarians who are in favor of discarding traditional gender roles; Janet is a staunch liberal who supports LGTB rights, legal abortion, and civil liberties for all. I wanted to find out how these clearly intelligent women could say the things that they did, and Dean Esmay, AVFM’s managing editor, helped me contact them after vetting me over the phone. Soon I was chatting with the Honey Badgers about everything from Jay-Z and Solange to Sharia law to rape allegations. I eventually got invited to the Honey Badger Brigade podcast by Alison Tieman, one of the group’s founders, and came to know a lot of feMRAs.

It’s unpleasant to defend people who throw around words like cunt, bitch, and whore while talking about gender, but I must admit that in my conversations with them the Honey Badgers drew my attention to things I had never thought about before and even convinced me some of their grievances are legitimate. I now believe male circumcision could be described as “genital mutilation” and we shouldn’t be so casual about performing it. I also think that society is too eager to accept women being physically violent in relationships, and that we need to start talking about due process in regard to rape allegations, even if the conversation is uncomfortable.

Almost against my will, I found myself liking the group and marveling at their diversity. There’s Alison, who is sweet, even meek, in the flesh—she tends to draw her shoulders up and lean forward like she’s about to blush—but in front of the webcam she’s confident, funny, and expressive. There’s Kristal, a voluptuous black woman who vlogs from her pink-walled apartment in New York City; in a previous career as a sex worker she discovered that her male clients “couldn’t be themselves in the outside world” and that “sex shaming mostly comes from other women.” There’s also a pair of younger Badgers: Jess Kay, who looks like a bubbly alterna-rock chick (she has verses from three different Incubus songs tattooed on her arm) and who got into issues facing boys after her son was born, and Rachel Edwards, who started a “nerdcast” offshoot of Honey Badger Radio to discuss geek culture from a feMRA perspective.

These women live mostly on the internet, and many track YouTube hits, retweets, and blog visits closely. JudgyBitch.com has had “2.3 million views in just under two years,” Janet boasted to me. “On a bad day, I get 3,000 hits; on a good day, it goes up to 5,000.”

At any given time, female authors have at least three articles on AVFM’s front page, along with a link to the latest Honey Badger Brigade podcast and a banner for Karen’s YouTube channel. That's a heavy female presence for a site dedicated to men and boys, and Janet has struggled with the question of whether their prominence helps or hurts. “It’s a tricky knife’s edge to walk,” she said of being a feMRA.

Jess seems to be a bit more pragmatic. “Unfortunately society listens to women more than men,” she told me, “and if we can take advantage of that to get some equality, well, then, good!”

A more pressing issue—at least when it comes to getting the mainstream to take the MRM seriously—is the insane heights the online rhetoric often reaches. For instance, when I first googled “men’s rights” and “MRA,” one of the first things that came up was something Elam had written, a “satirical response” to a piece on Jezebel, the feminist website that’s a common MRM foil. “In the name of equality and fairness, I am proclaiming October to be ‘Bash a Violent Bitch Month,’” Elam wrote in the post, which was originally published in 2010. He went on, emphasizing that he wasn’t serious but clearly intent on stirring up shit:

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women—to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

[…]

Now, am I serious about this?

No. Not because it’s wrong. It’s not wrong. Every one should have the right to defend themselves.

[…]

But it isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.

Though this sort of language probably helped AVFM get called out for misogyny by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2012, the general consensus among the MRAs I’ve encountered is that bombast like Elam’s is worth it—the tone might alienate a few potential allies, but it also brings a lot of attention to the issues. (In the case of the quote above, the issue is that the media treats violence against men as a joke.)

“There is a lot of over-the-top, strange, hyperbolic, polemical, deliberately provocative stuff in this movement,” Janet wrote to me one day. “Do I agree with everything anyone who calls themselves an MRA publishes? Are you fucking nuts?!? Of course not. But I realize that those early, angry movers were utterly essential to the movement emerging. And now, we are in a different place in the dialogue and the conversation needs to shift a little.”

One of the more notable results of this “shift” is that more and more activists have referred to their cause as the Men’s Human Rights Movement in an effort to emphasize a link to the broader notion of human rights.

“There have to be reasonable and rational calm voices in this movement.” Karen said. “But it’s not going to be very effective if that’s the vanguard.” Janet, Karen, and the rest of the Honey Badger Brigade themselves at the forefront of that vanguard, the tip of the spear that will pierce through all the illusions of feminism, one diatribe at a time.

Alison Tieman

In December, Elam announced that he and other MRA leaders were organizing an MRM conference—the movement’s most significant IRL manifestation to date—at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Detroit, a choice he said was symbolic. “If we wanted to find a city that was an iconic testament to masculinity, we’d need look no further than Detroit,” Elam wrote. “It is a city teetering and struggling for its footing. It is seeking, like many men, to find its balance and its place in the world again. Also like men, it is in trouble as most of the world looks the other way.”

News of the gathering outraged feminists and other MRA antagonists, and on June 7, a few hundred people took to the streets of downtown Detroit to protest the shit-talking bloggers. They called on Hilton to refuse to accommodate the group they claimed promotes “hate speech.” AVFM announced it was getting death threats from feminists (a claim the group’s opponents viewed with skepticism), crowdfunded more than $25,000 to cover additional security it said was necessary, then said the conference was going to have more attendees than the Hilton could deal with. So the conference decamped from the Motor City and all its symbolic heft to a VFW hall in St. Clair Shores, a suburb to the north.

Alison responded to the hubbub with an emotional lament on her YouTube channel. “Even discussing men’s problems—this society can’t handle it, can’t tolerate it,” she said, close to tears. “How is that a patriarchy?”

The conference would be the first time for most of the Honey Badgers to see one another in person. It was also their first opportunity to meet Elam and other MRM legends like Erin Pizzey and Canadian senator Anne Cools, who both spent the 1960s and 70s opening up women’s shelters before breaking from feminism and spending years arguing for paternal rights, shared parenting, and recognition of the fact that mothers, not just fathers, hurt their children.

Before the event started, Elam told his followers in a blog post that members of the press and “ideological opponents” of the MRM “will be listening, eavesdropping, and if they can, gathering things to harm us with,” and warned that “ANYONE sitting around trash-talking women, men, making violent statements, even jokingly, will be brought to the attention of security who will issue ONE warning (or less). After that, they will be directed by security to leave.”

This was clearly just a PR strategy, however—Elam had no interest in toning down the rhetoric to appeal to Middle America.

“No one at AVFM is seeking approval from mainstream sensibilities,” he told me. “I don’t do political activism. I don’t lobby politicians. The only thing I do is make an appeal to the consciousness of men and women. For me this is not about getting laws passed. I don’t want ‘the Violence Against Men Act.’ I don’t think those things are solutions. My goal is simply to allow men and women an alternative worldview.”

This raises a tricky question: Under all that page-view-grabbing vitriol, what do MRAs want? Are they trying to change the world or just speaking to an increasingly embittered choir? It seems unlikely that the MRM, in its current state, will metastasize into political viability, partly because so many activists have an aversion to how politics is practiced in the real world. Trying to get legislation passed would inevitably mean softening the tone and would force the MRM to compromise on some issues. And it’s way more fun to cause a ruckus.

From left: Hannah Wallen, Kristal Garcia, Rachel Edwards, Alison Tieman, and Karen Straughan at the AVFM conference

Whatever the goals of the conference, the reality didn’t match up with the ambitious ideals of the MRM’s countless vlogs and articles. Tickets to the two-day event cost $300, but it felt low-rent and poorly organized. Rows of fluorescent lights glared down on cracked linoleum and the 200-odd people who parked themselves in hard-backed chairs for nine hours of lectures punctuated with a few short breaks and lunch. No refreshments were provided except for a catered dinner on the first day and pizza for lunch on the second, both of which came with a suggested donation.

But to the attendees, many of whom rarely get a chance to interact face to face, it might as well have been a World’s Fair. Janet spent her days at the back of the hall manning the social media hub, tweeting rapid-fire updates, arguing with MRM critics, hashtagging #noMRA, and trying to provoke feminists by keeping track of how many times she used the word whore.The Honey Badger Brigade, meanwhile, sat in a mostly empty room upstairs, their brightly colored merchandise standing out against the wood paneling like a rainbow lollipop. There were buttons and T-shirts created by Alison, who works as an artist and designs the Brigade’s graphics, and trading cards that featured heroic renderings of the Badgers by an artist named Europa Phoenix. Janet and the rest might have been anonymous in their hometowns, but they were bona fide celebrities in the VFW hall.

On the second day of the conference, Karen took the stage and announced, “My name is Karen, and I am an anti-feminist.” As she began breaking down the “historical inaccuracies” of feminist thought, it was clear she was a rock star, a big fish in a small pond of angry men. In the audience, the other Honey Badgers sat together wearing white T-shirts printed with her face. “We needed an assertion of the rights of women,” Karen conceded, but added, “We do not need a women’s movement that blames men.” There was wild applause.

Afterward, the Honey Badgers returned home, in most cases to lives in which they can’t express their views for fear of becoming social pariahs. Kristal in particular was disheartened. “I was finally able to have conversations on men's human rights, equity, and egalitarianism without someone jumping to incorrect conclusions,” she told me. Now it was back to the blogosphere.

Yet their work online is bearing fruit, a few conversions at a time. At the conference I got to talking to Rachel, the young Honey Badger, about how she’d joined the movement, and she recalled the first time she saw Karen’s videos—as she watched, she told me, she thought, Oh, man, I want to be like her when I grow up.

Alex Brook Lynn is a filmmaker and journalist from New York City.

Photos by Julian Lucas

The recent influx of children and adults arriving at the US border has thrust immigration onto center stage yet again. Every busload of immigrants seems to be met by hostile protesters, who characterize the immigrants as disease carriers, job stealers, and criminals. This type of discourse isn't new: conservative policymakers and the less-informed masses have long stereotyped and dehumanized these groups of people. But between the discussions by politicians and protesters, it can be too easy to forget that, at the heart of the drama, we're talking about actual human beings.

Organizations like the Border Angels are helping to support the forgotten people living in the nightmare debated by pundits on Fox News every night of the week. "Whatever happened to give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses?" says founder and president Enrique Morones, of the organization's pledge to improve the situations of those who he says immigration law forgets.

He took me to a place where it's possible to see, first hand, the trauma of families torn apart at the heart of undocumented immigration. At the most western point of the US/Mexico border, just south of San Diego, is a place called Friendship Park. Here, a fiercely sturdy 20-foot steel wall slips from the land into the ocean, marking in no uncertain terms the line between the two countries. It’s rife with unsettling symbolism.

US Border Patrol mans a tiny section of the fence, where families separated by the triple-layered steel can interact with one another, between the hours of 10 AM and 2 PM on weekends, through dense mesh holes not quite large enough to poke a finger through. “Sound waves are the only things allowed through the fence,” says Bishop Dermot Rodgers, who comes here every Sunday to run a joint religious ceremony along with another pastor on the Mexican side of the fence.

Children play with their siblings and cousins through this wall, poking glow sticks back and forth, giggling and gripping onto the steel bars. For many, this will remain the only way they can see their mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, and grandparents for the foreseeable future. 

For Alicia, a 57-year-old mother and grandmother, the existence of aid organizations like the Border Angels is imperative. She lights up when we talk about her family. Her 26-year-old son and 27-year-old daughter both reside in the US. Alicia has a baby grandchild who she likes to talk about in typical grandma-brag style, with bright eyes and an unrelenting smile on her face. She sports a bright pink T-shirt signifying her work with a group called the DREAMers’ Moms, which supports mothers who are deported or are facing deportation while their children remain in the US on temporary visas under the 2008 DREAMers reform.

In 2006, after having lived in the US for 28 years, Alicia was deported when a handful of unpaid traffic tickets landed her in jail for five days, and then on a federal bus back to Mexico the day of her release. She’s been living by herself in Tijuana ever since, while her entire family—children, brothers, sisters—remains in the US, where she can never return unless her case is successfully appealed by a lawyer with the organization.

The numbers are pretty daunting. There are over 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, and around 1,000 people are deported every day. A common problem lies in the fact that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is in the business of deportation. It’s their job to kick people out of the country quickly.

According to Karla Navarrete from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, there is an ongoing problem of people not being informed of their full rights and thus reaching a premature and unjust fate. She says that too often undocumented immigrants, who have been handed over to ICE after being picked up for something as small as unpaid traffic tickets, are intimidated into ending the matter on the spot by signing their own deportation order.

In reality, they have the right to refuse to sign and remain in the country while they await their rightful day in court. Once in front of an immigration judge, if they are properly represented, Navarrete says that it’s possible to put forward a discretion request to ask permission to remain in the US with their family, or to argue that there was no “moral turpitude” involved and thus deportation is unjust punishment.

Of course, this is a costly exercise and the court does not appoint legal aid to unrepresented immigrants in spite of the heavy consequences of deportation. Immigration judges famously get an average of seven minutes to decide a family’s future, as reported earlier this year by the Washington Post. This is why life sentences are often handed down through the clogged system with a lack of fair process. From here, human beings fall between the cracks, become lost, and are separated from their families and livelihood with minimal chance to appeal.

This is what happened to Robert, a happy looking man of 58 years. He wears a red cap and thick reading glasses frame his face above a white goatee. He tells me through the fence that he migrated from Mexico to the US with his family when he was a six-year-old child. Throughout his adulthood, Robert worked as a legal US resident in high responsibility positions or various US airlines. He has a wife and children in the US. But after a rough patch turned into a run-in with drugs, then a botched plea bargain landed him in jail for petty theft. He was deported to Mexico, a country he hasn’t known for 52 years, due to "a lack of funds to hire proper legal representation from the beginning" to deal with the charge without facing deportation. "I felt my world had ended then and there," says Robert of his court-ordered fate.

He speaks with an unwavering American accent about how he has been stuck in Tijuana for one year, and how he makes a living by working in a local call center by day. He helps translate a conversation between myself and another woman there, and tells me with his head held high about his active involvement with three organizations: the Border Angels, DREAMers’ Moms, and the Deported Veterans Support House.

He doesn’t once complain, and tells me instead that he is persevering with his case in the hopes of being reunited with his family back in the US. "To be honest with you, the only thing that I can come up with is that for some reason God wants me in Mexico at this time," Robert tells me. "But I'm going to keep fighting. I don't care how many times they deny my petitions, I'm never going to give up. This is not my home. It's not my home."

When the Border Patrol officer howls at 2 PM that the park is closed, an elderly woman cries as her two sons carry her back to her car. She's been interacting through the mesh holes with her young grandchildren. A young man in his mid-20s goes back to his own car and breaks down in tears. Having only just heard about this visitation spot and with legal status preventing their loved ones from crossing into the US or for them to return to Mexico, this was the first time either of these people had seen their loved ones in 15 years.

The pain of families forced into indefinite separation is palpable here. We’re rarely told their personal stories; it’s easier to objectify than try to understand. Humanity is often wrenched away and replaced with broad-sweeping, impersonal and often factually incorrect terminology like “illegal immigrants” and “criminal aliens.” This poses a significant problem when the issue at stake is—quite literally—a humanitarian one.

Follow Shanrah Wakefield on Twitter.

Cory Arcangel photo by Bennett Williamson

Cory Arcangel is a computer programmer, composer, and artist who manages—again and again—to make work that is both funny and thoughtful. The native New Yorker is one of those rare artists who manages to mess with pop culture without it being stupid and to screw with high culture without it being boring. If you've seen him recreate atonal modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke using YouTube videos of piano-playing cats, you'll know what I mean.

His latest project is a book, Working on My Novel, based on his Twitter profile of the same name. He created it using a web crawler that recorded every time someone used the phrase “working on my novel” on Twitter. It’s a rich mine of laughter and sadness. Some of the tweets seem like they come from sincere, wannabe authors—others less so. My favorites include:

"I'm going to spend the next week diligently working on my novel and reevaluating some of my most fundamental beliefs"

"THAT'S WHY I'M WORKING ON MY NOVEL SO I WON'T FEEL SO PATHETIC ANYMORE"

"Currently working on my novel and listen to really nice music. Yeah I'm a writer deal with it."
 
“// - Working on my novel and watching Family Guy. Oh yeah!!”

“Now that I have a great domain name I can start working on my novel”

I caught up with Cory to have a chat about his book and the internet in general.

VICE: An issue that surrounds this book is the internet as a seductive enabler of procrastination. How do you feel about that?
Cory Arcangel: One thing that’s really fun about doing what I do is that I get to float apart from culture, in a way. I'm interested in things that are happening. As things change, opportunities to pivot or manipulate are thrown up. I like any kind of change. Since the internet has radically changed, even in the last five years, to me it’s only great because I’m always thinking, 'Oh, that’s cool.'

Also, I feel like the word “procrastination” is too strong. Just because you’re on Twitter saying stuff, it doesn’t really mean you’re procrastinating. The status update has become such a fluid part of culture.

Just because someone’s tweeting, it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something.
Yeah! I don’t think it’s a “yes or no” proposition any more, it’s just a thing now… When I was a teenager, I’d go to the mall and the big thing then was what T-shirt you wore. Usually it was a band and it was designed to advertise what you wanted people to think you were associated with. For me, that was Metallica and there were all these social things attached to that. When I’d see kids in a Megadeth T-shirt, those kids would scare me because Megadeth was a whole different level. And then, if those kids saw kids in Slayer T-shirts, they’d probably be scared of them.

I feel like stuff online now is part of the same thing. When you’re tweeting, even if you’re tweeting about watching TV, you’re saying, “This is part of who I am.” A lot of this stuff is about what it means to be alive today—to participate in and create culture.

A selection from Working on My Novel

How did you approach everyone featured in the book?
Doing this novel was mostly writing and conceptualizing software that would enable this process to be administered. I wrote a Twitter crawler to record every instance of the phrase “working on my novel.” That crawler ran for almost two years and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. There were a couple of thousand tweets and I went through all of them and rated them. Then, I had to write a software content management system that would invite them and allow them to agree to be in the book. I wrote a couple of personal messages per day, so no one thought I was a spambot.

Did you ever imagine what the novels they were working on might be?
I have to say, not really… I was more imagining the scene of the writing. People listening to new age techno or having the chillest moment of their life, or tearing their hair out. It wasn’t the novel they were working on; it was the emotional state they were in at the time that interested me.

There’s a kindness and sympathy that runs through the book but a lot of the enjoyment comes from how ridiculous most of these people are, like the guy who’s watching Family Guy at the same time, or the guy who says, “I’m a writer, deal with it!”
Those are two good examples. When I was a kid, I could only do homework watching TV. I still can’t concentrate unless my headphones are on. I don’t think the Family Guy tweet shows some inherent flaw, that’s like my life.

Are you just saying this because you don’t want to get sued? Come on, man…
Haha! No! I mean, I’m an artist and my whole life is trying to understand what it means to make stuff. Being an artist is weird because there are no rules. One day I can make a book, the next day I could write an essay or do a show. And to me, that is really frightening and hard to grasp sometimes. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what that means and these people, with their tweets, are voluntarily putting themselves in the same position.

“I’m a writer, deal with it!”
I’m totally down with that! Plus, “Deal with It” was that really great meme.

Do you think anyone featured in your book would go on to write a good novel?
Yeah, I’m sure a couple of them. I feel like some of these people might have big followings. I remember when I was doing it, I did notice that some of the people had plenty of followers or had a publisher on their bio.

I think I enjoyed the book in a few ways but I was definitely laughing at these guys quite a lot… Like the guy who talked about looking like a hipster in a James Dean shirt.
Yeah, that was in the culture section of the novel. It’s divided into sections, which are marked by teapots and broken up by theme and tone. The culture section leaned heavily on contemporary culture, so you have a mention of Bagel Bites and Barnes and Noble.

And there’s a section that’s troubling and has the tweet, “THAT'S WHY I'M WORKING ON MY NOVEL SO I WON'T FEEL SO PATHETIC ANYMORE" in it…
Basically the way the book goes is that it starts off chill, it goes to culture, there’s another section, and then it goes to just “Working on my novel”, which is a punchline section. Then it gets really dark and there’s a lot of creative struggle. And then it goes to triumph. It’s designed a bit like a rollercoaster.

A selection from Cory's "Sorry I Haven't Posted" project

I connect this with your “Sorry I Haven’t Posted” project [a collection of people apologizing for not posting on the internet]…
Yeah, that was the very early, similar project.

And I suppose it’s about whether the Internet makes self-expression more of a struggle or if it’s just another dimension of it?
My intuition tells me it’s just another dimension. Instead of fretting about what T-shirt you’re going to wear to the mall, you have a hundred small anxieties about what you’re doing every seven minutes… If you talk about red wine, or Arctic Monkeys, you’re basically saying, “I am associated with this.”

The teenage analogy is apt here because you project an image until eventually you become it. Walter Pater said that, “the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.” Finally, after a lot of trial and error, you get to something you find acceptable…
It’s interesting. I like to think of the same thing as, if you throw 100 darts one of them is going to hit the bull's-eye.  

Yours is a neater and less pompous analogy.
In my career as a fine artist, it’s just about throwing as many darts as possible. But I never thought about that analogy in terms of social media. That the more you tweet, the more you’re refining. You’re always testing who you are or who you want to be. Or what’s more likely, is a new social media site comes out and you have to do it all again. I’m not on Instagram because I just don’t know if I can do it again. Twitter was my social network.

It was your Paris.
The one I really loved.

Do you think at some point, the term “digital artist” will drop away?
Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about a book. I think it’s happened. I was a computer nerd at a time when it was a little more rare, so people use that as an angle on my work but I think with a younger generation it’s such a fluid part of what they do that they don’t even bring it up, which I think is pretty cool. The art students at my school hated computers. I think it’s great that it’s different now.

How do you think some well-known novelists of the past would fit into Working on My Novel? Like, Proust.
I don’t know about Proust but Thoreau would be one of these guys writing, “Life’s good #onthepond.” With like a tweet location for Walden Pond.

Haha. But of course, he found even mid-19th century America too much in terms of stimulation.
He’d be on LiveJournal still.

I’d like to see a follow-up to Working on My Novel where we get to see what’s happened to the novels. A kind of “Where are they now” type thing.
Yeah! And it’s a book, so it won’t disappear, like a lot of the technology it might have been based on.

Good point. Thanks, Cory.

Cory Arcangel's Working on My Novel is out now through Penguin. Get it here.

Follow Oscar on Twitter

These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue.

Rose Marie Cromwell is a photographer based between Brooklyn and Panama. See more of her work on her website.

Bushra, who has lived with her family in Domiz camp for 2 years, declined to have her picture taken however offered a photograph taken in Syria before the war.

Bushra

I met Bushra while wandering through Kurdish Iraq’s Domiz camp in the pouring rain. Carrying grocery bags and strolling through the camp’s grid of mud alleyways in flip-flops, the chubby, middle-aged woman grinned at me. “Do you want to come in from the rain?” she asked cheerfully.

After guiding us through several swampy boulevards, Bushra lead us to her corrugated-metal home, pulling back the makeshift door and ushering us in. We quickly went from howling wind and torrential downpour to a snug and dimly lit single-room home. Several layers of rugs keep the tent dry and warm, and flat cushions line the walls. Kurdish flags and posters of Massoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, hang from the walls. 

Bushra returned from the improvised kitchen area of her tent, proudly gesturing through her new home. “This is our home. We’ve been here for two years. We built it ourselves, with our savings,” she said, handing us hot tea. “My father worked in construction.”

Bushra is the perfect image of a matronly woman. She dons a floral hijab and a bright dress that hugs her plump belly and hips. She plops down on the cushion closest to the door, motions for us to do the same, and begins to tell us her story.  

“I walked here from Syria. Two years ago, my entire family—who live in this tent—and I walked together across the border. Before we had even gotten to Iraq, I fell and broke my hand,” said Bushra, who hails from the majority-Kurdish town of Qamishli in northeast Syria. She, her sisters, her sisters-in-law, and all their children trekked across the border in the snow. “I had to walk the rest of the way with a broken hand.”

After being processed through the crossing at Semalka, Bushra and her family were transported to the Domiz camp, located in Iraq’s northern province of Dohuk. Domiz has now become, for all intents and purposes, a small city. Its unpaved alleyways each have street names and are lined with grocers, cell phone shops, and even jewelers. Residents are given permits to work in the city of Dohuk, just outside the camp.

As the oldest in the family, Bushra has become the matriarch. Her toddler son, who was following her as she brought in her groceries from the rain, sat curled at her lap. Her nieces and nephews popped in and out of the tent, asking her questions about impending meals and locations of other family members. She politely refused to answer our questions about the apparently missing elder males in the family—including her husband—but is keen to explain how she helps support the family.

“I make these handicrafts,” she said, proudly bringing out small knit hats, gloves, and other accessories. Bushra teaches community classes to the other refugee women on how to make the small crafts; she sells her own work in Dohuk to feed her children.  

But as soon as our conversation turns to her family’s former life in Syria, Bushra’s bright face clouds over and her tone grows darker.

“We’re all here; almost no one is left in Syria. We were dying of hunger there,” she said, rushing through her words.

“Syria’s gone. It’s just rivers of blood.” 

In a corner of Santa Fe, one of Bogotá’s seedier neighborhoods, a woman named Luz Marina runs a nursery for the children of prostitutes who work in the city’s red light district. She charges $5 to look after babies and young children while their mothers sell their bodies, often for between $15 and $30.

When the mothers can’t pay, Luz Marina doesn’t make a fuss, looking after their children for free. Over the years, women have left babies with her and never returned. For all her work helping children, she receives no assistance from the local government—she does it because nobody else will.

Richard Wiseman. Photo by Brian Fischbacher

If you don’t know his name, you’ll probably know Richard Wiseman’s videos. They’re those handy YouTube clips—all of them still racking up millions of views—that teach you how to successfully hustle strangers into buying you drinks (or just how to win a bet, depending on how much you like swindling people you don’t know).

But Richard is much more than the oracle of online betting advice. The professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, a magician, a skeptic, and a best-selling author, he’s been called “the most interesting and innovative experimental psychologist in the world today.” His brand of psychology touches on everything from magic and the principles of luck, through the deconstruction of myths around paranormal phenomena and astrology, to undertaking international experiments with the aim of finding the world’s funniest joke.

I met with him in Edinburgh to chat about some of that stuff.

VICE: Hey, Richard. How did you first get into magic?
Richard Wiseman: People get into magic young. They know either it’s for them or it's not—there’s no middle ground. I got into it when I was about eight or so, then did loads of kids' parties where I was entertaining kids not much younger than me. Then, when I studied at the University of London, a friend and I—another psychologist, actually—decided to put together an act as street performers in Covent Garden.

Your YouTube videos touch on psychology, magic, pop culture science, and academia. How do you bring all those together? It seems like a tricky balancing act.
I think it is. My professorship is in the public understanding of psychology, so it’s my job to do that. I look at interesting aspects of psychology, then try to reach out to the public. It's a kind of balancing act between simplification, which is fine, and dumbing down, which isn't fine. You try to simplify things, to get people energised and excited so they understand a little more about what’s going on. For me, it’s about finding platforms to do that. 

Presumably there's plenty of crossover between magic and psychology.
Yeah, in a way magic tricks are little psychology experiments, because they have to work and fool the person every single time, unlike most [psychological] experiments.

My friend conducted an experiment recently. She left an old chipped mug on the wall with a sign saying, "Don’t move this; it's an art installation." It got moved a lot.
Ah, that’s interesting. So the question would then be, "Why?" Is it that the sign draws more attention to it and people actually notice, or that they don’t like being told what to do? One could do experiments to find out which of those is true. You could get another sign that says, "Do not move this mug," instead of, "Do not move this mug; it’s part of an art installation," and that will tell you how much the words "art installation" matter.

10 New Bets You Will Always Win—one of Richard's "Quirkology" videos, which have amassed tens of millions of views on YouTube

I think the mug eventually disappeared.
So someone has an extra chipped mug in their cupboard. I heard of an experiment yesterday where they’d dressed mannequins as homeless people, and people were giving more money to the mannequins dressed up as homeless people than to homeless people.

Why?
Because they felt uncomfortable [with real people]—because you have the embarrassment with an actual person. 

You have a show at the Edinburgh Fringe about lucid dreaming—teaching people to control their dreams. Can you tell me about that?
There are actually three shows. First is a musical I’m doing about a ghost hunter called Harry Price, which is fun. We’re then doing a psychological show where people are led through a series of experiences with no performer, which is quite a challenge. I’m also doing the Night School talk, which is about work on dream control, and that’s related to an iPhone app called "Dream On," which plays sound clips when you’re asleep, the theory being those influence your dreams. So yes, it’s going to be a busy August.

You’re also speaking with Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, this summer and you’ve previously spoken to Derren Brown. Would you say there's a cohesion between your respective work—a kind of pop culture approach to psychology? 
Well, I think there's been a rise in—I don’t know what to call it, whether it’s skepticism or an interest in science, or being nerdy. Certainly when I started out the audiences were fairly small; then, since about 2001, they started to build up, and you noticed a movement come through. I think Derren and Jon are part of that. I think people are interested, in the loosest sense, in science, and in new ways to look at it.

Wiseman talking about his "Dream On" app

I read that you have night terrors, but instead of finding them terrifying you just search for what was causing them?
I had night terrors for about a year. You sit up in bed suddenly and think there’s a demonic presence in the room. You’re in deep sleep at the time, so you just go straight back to sleep afterwards. It’s if you’re sleeping next to somebody; that’s when they get disturbed. So I can either imagine there’s a demonic entity in my room, you know, following me around from one hotel to another, or I can simply say, "It’s something in my mind creating this." But what might it be and how do you use that kind of interpretation to reduce it?

It's the same thing with sleep paralysis, where you wake up paralyzed. Once you realize it’s a very normal thing—you’re coming out of dream state, which is why you’re paralyzed—the whole experience, though unpleasant, at least isn't so terrifying. 

What's your attitude towards the supernatural? I was having a conversation the other day about how ghosts could be glitches in time.
Yeah, there have been a few things like that—there have been theories about ghosts somehow being trapped in the fabric of a building, and if you play certain sounds you’ll get them out of the building—the Stone Tape hypothesis. And there’s been the trapped-in-time idea.

A lot of that comes from technology—whenever a new piece of technology is invented, you then use that to try to describe ghosts. So when Edison came up with the idea of the phonograph—that you could sort of record a voice—people started to think maybe you could record ghost voices using it, and they would put it in haunted locations to try to detect ghosts. Often when technology comes along it makes us less rational instead of more rational. We use quantum mechanics, or whatever, and we’re like, "Oh yes, that might explain ghosts."

So, interestingly, we always try to find explanations for these things—explanations that aren’t merely saying, "We’re just frightening ourselves in our heads." 

Finally, can you tell me a story that isn't in any of your books?
I can tell you the worst thing that involves sort of magic thinking. I had a small photocopier in my house pretty early on, so it was sort of unusual then. This kid and his mom came to stay. He was five and he did a really beautiful, intricate line drawing. When he left the room I popped it in the photocopier and made a copy, and I put the original in the envelope. I put the copy on the table and said, "I’ve got this trick to show you."

I took the copy, ripped it up, put it into my envelope, pulled the other one out, and said, "Look, it’s come back together." He thought that was wonderful, then took the original, ripped it into eight pieces, gave it to me and said, "Do it again." So you have to be careful, because I remember thinking that I really didn’t think that through. Once you genuinely believe your magic envelope is magic, why wouldn’t you want to do it again?

Follow Hope on Twitter.

Sylvester and Matt. All photos by Walter Pearce

Walter Pearce recently stopped by the VICE offices and offered to take some pictures at Paris Fashion Week, where he was going to model in a number of shows. I immediately recognized him from that Eckhaus Latta poppers ad, but more importantly, his photographs seemed unique to me, given what most photographs of fashion shows look like. But these pictures are singular in the driest way possible—Pearce seems to find himself in some pretty spectacular situations, but his pictures rarely depict the spectacle at hand. While press photographers clamber and trample one another, all trying to get the same view of the model on the runway, Walter Pearce instead focuses on the fire extinguisher in the corner of the room, the shoes of people waiting to enter the show, a crack in the ceiling of the staging area. He also photographs people he meets along the way, employing a style that is both heavily vernacular and unselfconscious. Maybe it's just the expatriate factor, but to me, Pearce's landscapes might call to mind a sedated Berenice Abbott. Maybe his still lifes are an anesthetized Atget, his portraits a blasé Brassaï. To all of these comparisons, add a healthy measure of post-Warholian detachment, and an aesthetic that is unmistakably contemporary. Welcome to Paris, the city of lights, the fashion capital of the world! Now, let's look at the floor.

Rick Owens show

Paris

Backstage at Gosha Rubchinskiy

Ciccolina

Comme des Garçons showroom

Comme des Garçons showroom

Paris

Comme des Garçons showroom

Document magazine party

Dust magazine party

Free food at the Comme des Garcons showroom

Masses magazine party

Gosha Rubchinskiy

Gosha Rubchinskiy at Ciccolina

Mark Hsu at Dries Van Noten party

Masses magazine party

Masses magazine party

Masses magazine party

Matching at Masses

Matching outside of Rick Owens

Paris

Paris

Rick Owens exterior

Masses magazine party

Saint Laurent Paris show exterior

Saint Laurent Paris show

Paris

Undercover party

Showroom boy

Walter Pearce is an NYC-based photographer, writer, and model. Follow him on Instagram for more dry moments from exciting places, and plenty of selfies.