Beatriz Preciado

In 2008, Beatriz Preciado published Testo Junkie, an unclassifiable essay that turned the academic world upside down and placed her as an international reference on what happens when you take testosterone outside a medical protocol or even outside a gender re-assignment protocol. She tests this thesis by using self-managed testosterone intake as a tool of "gender-hacking"—breaking into the gender codes that prescribe our social identities.

Testo Junkie was recently published in the US, which presented me with the perfect excuse to get in touch. Although Beatriz agreed to talk to me about her thesis, she’s not very fond of the press. As we head to a café she tell me that "VICE is the best of the worst." I call her Beatriz and she corrects me: I should call her Beto. She smells like man and flowers—a gardenia in a suit.

VICE: Hi, Beto, thank you for agreeing to this interview. It’s an honour. Can you talk to me about your idea of using the body as an archive in Testo Junkie?
Beatriz Preciado: Thinking that the body ends where the skin does is ridiculous, and yet that's how we think. Instead of talking about the "body," I use the term “body archive.” I see the body as a cultural and political archive, with images, narratives and practices stored in it. Our body is small but the wider somatic apparatus is gigantic.

What happens when testosterone comes into play?
It is about your willingness to make your body a place of commitment. How you are perceived collectively, how you are built collectively—because, even if you independently decide to take testosterone, it’s never a completely individual act. There is a network involved; someone is going to smuggle it and you have to do it knowing that there will be side effects—that is, you will be viewed differently by society.

Obviously, when you take testosterone there are molecular changes taking place in your body, but above all there is a shift in your social position. So testosterone is to do with the management of your own body, but it goes way beyond that.

Photo via Wikicommons.

In what sense?
We have been inventing new organs since the 15th century. The fallopian tubes, for example, didn’t exist in 1614, neither did the ovaries or the uterus. Before that, the whole thing was thought of as a flowerpot from where babies came out. We have gradually invented, and I say "invented"; we have created a set of images and narratives that have allowed us to assess the body in a different way and to produce another body. In these times of epistemic crisis, the most important thing is that all of a sudden some improper uses of body production techniques appear and allegedly disempowered groups begin to appropriate a set of body techniques to produce something else.

Just like the girls on our Beautiful Liverpool documentary—who injected melanin to get tanned, despite admitting it makes them feel ill when they take it, and even knowing that they might get a skin cancer.
You see? Melanin. It’s absolutely fascinating. When I began taking testosterone, there were some precedents like Michael Jackson who show that the management of our own bodies is so encoded that, for example, a person having a darker pigmentation is immediately racialised. They are subjected to social, cultural and political pressures. You can never have the body you want because this is not all that the body is about.

There are a lot of stories going around about the re-appropriation of Testogel; people taking it for sex parties, for instance.
No! This has alcohol! One of the interesting things about Testogel or testosterone, and one of the reasons why it does not work as a recreational drug is that you can’t use it without previous planning. You must be disciplined and have some knowledge of these practices.

I kept a diary of my practices with testosterone: I know which day I used it, which day I didn’t, how much I used and why. If anyone wants to party in let's say a month, they should start taking testosterone now—250mg a week, every two weeks for about four weeks—in order to be high on the day of the party. If you take it today only, all you’ll have is a tachycardia and you won’t even be able to move. And if you drink a beer, you will be climbing the walls and when you get home you’ll be knackered. It’s pointless.

I think we’re going through an experimental period. There is a wild use of testosterone, but I suppose in 20 years there will be a whole new management field which will probably be under the control of the pharmaceutical companies.

In the book you speak about "being with testosterone."
One of the keys of gender, sexuality and race is that they are not linked to "being," but with "doing." It is a practice. Sex is a practice, gender is a practice. Taking testosterone is a body practice, just the same as doing bodybuilding. When I talk about "being with testosterone" I mean building your body through the specific practice of taking testosterone. You could say the same for "being with prozac" or "being with a cigarette."

Gender production practices are hugely standardised, codified and have always been under the control of a group of powers. My trans friends know a lot more than my doctor. So, how am I supposed to ask my doctor? Last time I spoke to my gynaecologist and told her I was going to take testosterone off the protocol, she asked: “As a birth-control method?” It’s as if I had told her that I was going to have sex with a lamp.

I think these kind of thoughts about hormones and the body are not exclusive to transsexuals. Birth control pills might reduce your sexual drive. It’s something I’ve talked about with women who take it for their transition and with women who use it as a contraceptive and it happens in both groups. That should be stated clearly, with gigantic letter in the prospectus. Less libido and more vulnerability.
It’s essential to know the drug’s side effects, including body refeminisation, and how that corresponds to the aesthetics of femininity within heterosexuality. There are also other side effects which have to do with the management and restriction of feminine desire and feminine libido – of feminine sexuality. That’s what we’re not paying attention to: the massive use of the pill since the 1960s, when it was invented and produced and it became the most used drug in the history of medicine. The use of testosterone, however, is scarce and anecdotal.

Photo via.

Why is there so much fuss about testosterone and not estrogens or with other types of hormone treatments, when they seem equally fucked up to me, or even worse? Can we say there’s "a testosterone black market?"
I’m glad you present the question. If there is a testosterone black market it’s because testosterone is socially and politically confiscated and because the hormone management is completely asymmetrical. It’s as if testosterone were a political drug and because masculinity and heterosexual virility are socially an up-and-coming value. Imagine the social and political consequences if we think that any girl from the suburbs could say, “Your monopoly is over.”

What's interesting is that I published my book Testo Junkie a few months ago in the US, and it seems there is a huge controversy now among feminists every time I go there. The transsexual community there has received my book quite positively and intensely. However, there are some feminists who think my view is misogynist with respect to femininity or estrogens. 

But you first published Testo Junkie in 2008, in Spain. What’s the situation right now? Do you think some people have a better understanding of what you do now?
I’m in quite a difficult situation because there are people from regulatory transsexual groups who take a very critical eye to my use of testosterone, and that shocks me. It’s like testosterone could only be used within a gender reassignment protocol. I consider that a counterdiscipline. There are political disciplines that are totally accepted, like the fact that you must take the pill if you have been assigned the female sex, even if you’re a lesbian. That’s the way it is. The medical institution doesn’t want to admit that you might want to use hormones strategically.

The idea of sexual reassignment is ridiculous, first off because sex doesn’t exist. It’s as if I told someone that races don’t exist. Probably most of the people would say, “Obviously. It is a cultural invention with a set of somatic descriptions which makes us think that racial differences exist.” Racism exists, and sexism exists. Sex doesn’t exist, it is a historical fiction.

Screen grabs via Fox 8 News

"Our water is in trouble," was the ominous threat Toledo, Ohio had to deal with this past weekend when Mayor D. Michael Collins declared on Friday that the city's water was infected with toxins from algae-infected Lake Erie and unsafe to drink or bathe in. The consequence on the local news was mostly people lined up in the parking lots of high schools, loading bottles of water into their cars. No one shriveled up and died.

It was the highest-profile American city in a while to face this kind of toxicity in its water, and it's not necessarily time to get all Doomsday Prepper in response to this, but we all might want to take a long, hard look at the event some Toledo residents called "Aguapocalypse."

People in California, where there's large scale agriculture, and a big problem with water scarcity, should pay special attention.

"It was definitely a crisis," Amy Spradlin, a dietetic technician at Toledo Hospital told us. "The kitchen was chaos, the patients and babies couldn't get bathed. Food was minimal. We had a three-day emergency meal plan but it's never been needed longer than a few hours. Everyone was just really annoyed."

Obviously, though, when the water runs out, things are going to take a turn toward the dystopian. It's not often that the supply of drinking water in a developed country suddenly gets threatened, although unfortunately natural and man-made water shortages are plenty common elsewhere. 

Amy Spradlin observed some of this: "Lines were out the door. People were driving to other states and counties for water. I saw one guy selling bottled water out of his back yard for $25 a case."

While it hit home this past week for Toledo, it's been a story years in the making for everyone whose water comes from western Lake Eerie. The authorities have known there's been a menacing presence floating just beneath the surface, and it wasn't kept secret. Last year almost the exact same thing happened for a couple days in nearby Carroll Township. 

As before, the immediate threat wasn't algae in the water, nor the bacteria that thrive in the algae bloom, but the toxin, known as microcystin that shows up as a consequence of the bacteria. As opposed to a parasite that can be boiled, or chemically neutralized, microsystin is like something from a comic book: impervious to most treatments available to consumers, and made more concentrated by hot water.

And can it kill you? You bet. In 1996, a similar situation caused 26 deaths in Brazil, which is all the more reason that hoarding clean water was more than just a precaution.

"I bought the last supply at the store I stopped at," local radio personality Becky Shock told us. "Really more of an inconvenience than anything else. Nothing to panic over. You just had to brush your teeth with bottled water, take care of pets with bottled water, and wait for it all to pass. Restaurants were closed for the most part, some of them could run using strictly bottled water and so they stayed open, some bars stayed open. After the first 12 hours, stores started getting shipments back in."

To suddenly be told that the water is undrinkable produces an emergency that, to all appearances, looks like a drought, when in fact, the problem is agricultural pollution. Nutrient pollution, a consequence of large scale agriculture, dumps high concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen into the air and water, according to information that's been on the EPA's website for at least two years.

According to a study in the journal Microbial Ecology, the effect isn't tied exclusively to Lake Eerie. Fertilizer runoff, particularly the heavy-duty chemical fertilizers responsible for the insane crop yields we in the industrial world have come to depend on, have environmental consequences wherever they're used. The increased fertility might sound like a plus for biodiversity, but it isn't. The study points to evidence that, "high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in freshwaters may favor the growth of toxic Mycrocystic strains over nontoxic ones." In other words there's a clear link between fertilizer runoff and toxicity.

Still, since safe water from a few hours away could be schlepped into Toledo without much trouble, its safe to say the carnage never escalated to Walking Dead levels. In fact, Toldeo's emergency was an opportunity, Shock pointed out, to observe the community coming together. 

"There were water distribution points set up for free, and the National Guard brought in trucks. Lots of volunteers, especially with the Red Cross, were manning the distribution centers, and the United Way and the Red Cross were delivering water to residents who weren't physically able to get out to pick it up. People went to the Humane Society and donated water, because you were supposed to keep pets away from it. And the neighboring Jerusalem Township Fire Department donated water to the Toledo Zoo 'for their water-loving residents, like the penguins.'"

While things never really went south for Toledo, places like California wouldn't fare so well—and yes, climate change could be a factor. Another report prepared by UC Santa Cruz after studying the effects of rising temperatures on California's heavily agricultural Central Valley, refers to cyanobacteria and their associated toxins as "growing contaminants of concern." It points out that with global warming, "cyanobacteria [have] a direct competitive advantage as they generally grow better at higher temperature than do other phytoplankton species such as diatoms and green algae." 

California's existing drought, in combination with a toxicity-related shortage, could be a much bigger problem than this has been.

Still, in Toledo some people brushed off the crisis because the effects were hard to see. "Everybody thought they couldn't buy water but they could get it everywhere," said resident Frank Saucedo. "It was really stupid." 

Although the water has been given the go-ahead for the time being, Spradlin isn't jumping in. "We can shower and drink it but I don't trust it yet. It's still green."

Follow Grant Pardee on Twiter here and follow Mike Pearl here.

(Image via New Jersey Department of Corrections)

Activist Assata Shakur is laying low. Somewhere in Cuba, the 67-year old African American – born JoAnne Chesimard – is still hiding out, 40 years after she was branded a fugitive. Shakur was a prominent female member of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, and became the subject of a nationwide manhunt after she was named the prime suspect for a string of bank robberies and "execution style" murders of New York City police officers in the early 70s. 

Shakur was eventually apprehended on the New Jersey turnpike in 1973. A routine roadside check by state troopers Werner Foerster and James Harper turned into a gun battle that left two out of five people dead, and a whole lot of unanswered questions about who was responsible. Travelling in a car with Zayd Shakur (born James Coston) and Sundiata Acoli (born Clark Squire), two other well-known activists at the time, Shakur ended up with three bullets in her body and one arm paralysed almost beyond recovery as per reports from Vibe magazine, NPR and Shakur’s own account in her recent autobiography. But the FBI and the American mainstream press (including Fox News, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger and the Associated Press) offer up a different story.

According to the Feds, Shakur shot and killed police officer Werner Foerster in cold blood and then tried to flee the scene. She was eventually convicted of Foerster’s murder in 1977, but served two years in prison before she was broken out in 1979, lived underground for five years, then escaped to Cuba in 1984.

It wasn’t until May last year, though, that Shakur made history when she became the first woman to land on the FBI’s Most Wanted terrorist list – joining such company as plane hijacker Mohammed Ali Hamadei and Saudi national Ibrahim Salih Mohammed Al-Yacoub. “Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer execution-style,” said Aaron T Ford, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark Division, in a May 2013 press release regarding Shakur’s upgrade to the list. “Today, on the anniversary of Trooper Werner Foerster’s death, we want the public to know that we will not rest until this fugitive is brought to justice.” Why, decades after her escape, and well into her sixties, was Shakur suddenly deemed to be a renewed threat?

To understand how this petite woman from Queens, New York came to threaten the US government as much as men reportedly linked to Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, you have to backtrack. You’ve got to connect the dots between rappers like Common and Chuck D name-checking her in song, the wider context of the black power movement and the frisson of tension between black revolutionaries and the state. Only then might can you make up your mind about Shakur: Is she friend or foe? Fugitive and felon, or heroine to the children of the black power and civil rights struggles?

“You don’t get Assata Shakur lessons during Black History Month in elementary school, with the images of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King,” says writer and blogger Mychal Denzel Smith with a laugh, over the phone from New York. “It just wasn’t stuff I was exposed to. But in my teens, I started listening to hip-hop, and listening to more artists that weren’t necessarily getting all the radio play. I started hearing Assata’s name mentioned in those folks’s rhymes.” Born in 1986, Smith wasn’t of the East Coast generation that would’ve been somewhat familiar with Assata Shakur’s face from the "wanted" posters the New York Daily News plastered around the city when Shakur was charged with a spate of crimes in the late 60s and early 70s.

Instead, it was rappers whose music was released by the Rawkus Records label – Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch – that piqued Smith’s interest in Shakur’s story, as well as Common and Cee-Lo Green’s "A Song For Assata", out in 2000. Tupac gave Assata a shout out in "Words of Wisdom" and was both her godson and the stepson of her brother, Mutulu Shakur. Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother, was in the Black Liberation Army alongside Assata Shakur. Her connections to music extend further, with poet and rapper Saul Williams (who starred in the recent Tupac-tinged flop musical Holler if Ya Hear Me) name-checking her left and right. “If you want to understand Tupac, read the autobiography of Assata Shakur,” he told Noisey’s Drew Millard earlier this summer. “That’s his aunt, and read what’s happening with her right now, via the state of New Jersey. She’s listed as the number two most wanted terrorist in America today… for something that went down in 1976, based on COINTELPRO.”

Yeah, about that. From 1956 until 1971 the FBI collected information for its anti-terrorism counterintelligence programme, dubbed COINTELPRO. The programme grouped the Black Liberation Movement, Black Panthers and other black nationalist organisations with the communist party of the US, socialist worker’s party and the Ku Klux Klan – terrorists, in the bureau’s view. It wasn’t the most constitutional programme at times. Or, in the FBI’s own words, “although limited in scope… COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticised by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.”

COINTELPRO’s cover was blown when a March 1971 break-in at an FBI bureau uncovered hundreds of documents, detailing the surveillance that various groups had been placed under by both the FBI and local police forces. For example:

(Scans via the FBI)

Together, the government and local law enforcement covertly monitored, anonymously called and relentlessly arrested black power activists (often on charges “pushed against” them). They also used radio stations and newspapers to deliberately skew public opinion. Tactics like these demonstrate the sort of threat to national cohesion that Assata and other black nationalists represented at the time; clearly enough of a worry to warrant running a 23-city wide programme like COINTELPRO.

To rapper Akala, raised in a pan-African tradition in London, it was Assata Shakur’s status as a black, female radical that pretty much encapsulates her place on the most wanted list. “She is a threat,” he tells me, on a sticky July afternoon. “But she’s not a threat in the way the FBI and the American government want us to believe she’s a threat. She’s a threat in that she represents the one that got away. Pretty much every other black revolutionary of her era was killed, imprisoned, silenced, put in exile.” Akala lists a flurry of names, ranging from Huey Newton and Malcolm X to Geronimo Pratt and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaking with the sort of weary impatience that sounds as though he’s made (or laboured) this point before, Akala continues, “When the American government says Assata Shakur is a threat, they mean what she represents – a black woman who refused to compromise in any way, shape or form with white supremacy and escaped to the 21st century ‘maroon’ camp of Cuba (as she calls it) – is a threat.”

Akala hits on a basic point, reiterated by 20th-century American history academic Dr Anna Hartnell: Shakur’s place on the list is both totally ludicrous and completely logical. “Why the US government want to flag this up now is both mysterious and disturbing,” Hartnell writes in an email. When we speak over the phone, she elaborates: “If they really were pursuing her for what they say they’re pursuing her for, it doesn’t make any sense. She was a large figure of threat, and the United States government are asserting the fact that they are still interested.”

They’re still interested because Shakur’s beliefs go against the American narrative of progress. She experienced a different America to the one that apologised and made amends for slavery, coming out on the other side as a post-racial beacon of exceptionalism. In her view, the story of a nation built on white supremacy and black enslavement couldn’t be that simple. “America says that it’s the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the greatest nation to have ever existed. And it needs a history to match. So you tell this story so it doesn’t look so bad,” says Mychal Denzel Smith, articulating the perspective Shakur worked to debunk.

Shakur represents a challenge to that perfectly formed narrative. For the FBI, that level of dissent just isn’t acceptable. Her survival over decades that saw other radicals imprisoned, murdered and snuffed out goes against the bureau’s plan to “neutralize" and "frustrate" the activities of black nationalists. As such, perhaps it only makes sense that they’re still on her tail, and that she’s still laying low.

Assata: An Autobiography, by Assata Shakur with forewords by Angela Davis and Lennox Hinds, is available now from Zed Books priced £8.99. There will be a launch event for the book on August 21st at the Black Cultural Archives with rapper Akala, performance poet Zena Edwards and others.

Tshepo is a Guardian journalist and tweets a @tnm___

More stuff on the Black Power Movement: 

We Interviewed Tommie Smith About the History Behind the 1968 "Black Power" Salute

The Amazing Lost Legacy of The British Black Panthers

The Black Undercover Cop Who Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado

Jari Koivisto and his fiancée Susanna at home this year during house arrest (Photo by David Mac Dougall)

It doesn't look much like prison. At 7 AM each morning Jari Koivisto leaves the new-build home he shares with his pregnant fiancé on the outskirts of Helsinki, and goes to work at a car rental company. Every day at 5 PM he comes home again. But with an ankle monitoring bracelet, strict curfews, drugs and alcohol tests, and frequent visits from the ominously-titled Criminal Sanctions Agency, this is how the 28-year-old is serving his six months of house arrest.

Jari lives this way because he has refused to do mandatory military or civilian service. Amnesty calls them prisoners of conscience and their numbers are small but growing. Last year, Finland sentenced at least 40 conscientious objectors to prison or house arrest. That's up from 12 the year before.

From age 18, Finnish law requires all men to undertake a period of military service. The length of service time varies, up to about a year, and every recruit goes through basic training before being assigned a job in the army, air force or navy. For a country like Finland, which has not been at war since April 1945, the numbers of men who go to military service remain robustly high, fuelled by national pride and a sense of wary pragmatism towards an 500 mile border with Russia to the east.

Around 25,000 young men undertake military service each year, or close to 80 percent of those who are eligible. Another 5 percent opt for civilian service—working in an office, or volunteering for a charity—and roughly 15 percent are exempted on medical grounds.

So the number of men who are sentenced for objecting to all forms of national service is tiny. But in a country like Finland, which finds itself at or near the top of any number of indices—for press freedom; global education ranking; best place to be a woman; least fragile nation; world's happiest country—it's somewhat surprising that anyone at all would be jailed for their political or moral beliefs.

Back in the Helsinki suburbs, Jari is determined to stick to his curfew, although prison service staff told him most people screw it up one way or another. His arrival and departure times from home are monitored by an electronic ankle tag—made in Israel—which is tied into a base station and monitored regularly. Before the sentence started, Koivisto had to submit a list of places he would likely visit, such as relatives' homes, specific shops, the gym, or the health center. He can't stray from his approved list. The way he spends his 15 hours of free time each week are agreed one month in advance. So, if he wants to visit his sister or go for a run, or get a haircut, that has to be approved in advance by the Criminal Sanctions Agency. In June, Jari had a celebratory whisky after Midsummer, a Christian solstice festival that Finns tend to approach with gusto. When agents arrived the next day to test him, they found traces of Lagavulin 16-Year-Old Islay single malt in his bloodstream. That earned him a warning. Any more transgressions and he'll be thrown in jail for the remainder of his sentence.

"I definitely think I've done nothing wrong," says Jari, stuck inside with his fiancé on one of the hottest days of summer in Helsinki. "How can a country imprison someone based on political or moral reasons?" He knows that sort of treatment happens regularly in countries like Iran, Belarus, China or Syria, he just doesn't expect it in a country as outwardly respectful of human rights as Finland. He's also aware the punishment handed down to him is far more comfortable than in an authoritarian state – by any definition of incarceration, this is not a harsh prison experience.

But it turns out that Koivisto is something of a feminist, too. His reason for refusing national service speaks to a core tenet of Finland's national identity: gender equality. Jari chose a custodial sentence, rather than national service, because he believes the law itself discriminates against men.

"The biggest thing for me is equality of the whole system. When you think about Finland's constitution, there's no discrimination," he says. While women can volunteer for military service, the mandatory service law only applies to men. And this is the perceived injustice that Koivisto is fighting against. "If the government forces me to do military service they should make women do it too, based on equality."

For their part, the Finnish military seems to agree – up to a point. "Gender equality has been a cornerstone in Finland of post-independence history and still is," said Captain Ville Kostian, a staff officer from the Finnish Defense Command's Personnel Division, citing a UN report from July which ranks Finland at number 8 on the Gender Development Index. However, "the current generation of young men is sufficient to meet the Defense Forces' general needs," he adds.

Soldier during basic training at Helsinki's Santahamina barracks, 2009 (Photo courtesy of Tiina Möttönen / Finnish Defense Forces)

Finland does have women serving in the professional military; some 700 apply to join each year. But making the military service law gender-equal, applicable to both men and women, would be a huge undertaking in terms of infrastructure and budget commitments for the Finns, who cling to their cherished national service operations in the face of widespread military restructuring and swingeing budget cuts. Other countries, like Sweden and Germany, have abandoned theirs. "Training of both gender, men and women, the whole age class, would require more resources," concludes Kostian.

In the past, Finland didn't have much of a problem with a civilian or quasi-military role for women in society. During the country's Winter War (1939-1940) and Continuation War (1941-1944), a quarter of a million Finnish women volunteered in an organization called Lotta Svärd, named after the wife of a fictional literary soldier. The Lotta Svärd women filled the jobs of men who went to the front to fight the Russians, and worked in hospitals tending to the wounded; or as air raid wardens, lookouts, and in one case manning an anti-aircraft battery position. The Lotta Svärd organization was disbanded by treaty stipulation with the Russians after the wars ended, but there is certainly precedence in recent Finnish history for the mass induction of women into some form of national service.

Of course, not all male conscientious objectors are cheerleaders for the feminist cause of gender equality, like Jari.

In downtown Helsinki, Henri Sulku is enjoying the unusually hot summer weather while he can. The 23-year-old political science student was recently sentenced to 173 days of house arrest, which is set to begin during August.

"Officials say it's because I broke the law. As I see it, the act of refusal is an act of expressing one's ideology or ethical position," says Sulku, whose main motive for refusing national service is "both anti-war and anti-authority." He'll be subject to a range of controls, electronic tagging, curfews and tests, but still be allowed to attend classes at Helsinki University, where friends, he says, have been "quite supportive."

Before tagging and home detention became an option a few years ago, conscientious objectors simply went to prison. One of the most infamous prisoners in the last decade was Henrik Rosenberg, one half of popular Finnish rap duo Fintelligens, who performs under the name "Iso H" (Big H). Rosenberg had a string of hit albums to his name when he was sentenced to 197 days in prison in 2006.  

"I knew from the start that all total objectors go to prison," says Rosenberg, who is now 35 and still works in the music industry. "I wasn't nervous or worried, only annoyed that it took almost two years for the legal process." That lengthy legalistic foot-dragging is a complaint of many objectors. They know they'll eventually end up with a custodial sentence, it just takes a while to get to that point.

Cover art for Iso H solo album, in a mocked-up prison cell, 2007 (Photo courtesy of Henrik Rosenberg)

Rosenberg served his time at an open prison in Helsinki. This was no hard labor camp—he was on day release to go to his recording studio, and the prison sauna was fired up every night except Mondays—but it was still a restriction of liberty.

The rap star's sentencing sparked a wider debate in Finland, as Iso H wasn't shy about giving media interviews to explain his reason for refusing national service. He wasn't anti-war, but against the concept of forced service of any kind. "I think it made a lot of people think and question the rationale behind conscription. The discussion is not over yet, but I think I managed to nudge it in the right direction."

It's not hard to provoke a discussion in Finland about the subject, especially in a sauna or after a couple of shots of murky brown Fisherman's Friend-flavored vodkas. The very idea of military service is inextricably linked to national identity, patriotism, independence, and "sisu"—a Finnish word meaning gutsy, stubborn determination and drive. Everyone has an opinion on whether the system works or not. Whether women should undertake some form of national service. Whether women should be in the military at all. Whether Finland's military doctrine—of mass-infantry call-up in times of war—isn't outdated and poorly suited to the realities of modern warfare. Whether exemptions for Jehovah's Witnesses, Olympic athletes and NHL ice-hockey stars are fair.

For now, public opinion is not on the side of the objectors. A petition that aims to overhaul the system has so far failed to gather the minimum number of signatures required to trigger a debate in parliament; and a Defence Ministry poll carried out last autumn showed 68 percent of Finns support the current model of national service and military conscription.

It's a safe bet to say that everyone in Finland knows someone who is currently doing their military service. One friend has been posting pictures on Facebook: the fresh shaved head of a new recruit; the obligatory selfie in olive drab camo. "There's a Finnish saying, 'armeija tekee miehen,'" he tells me by email, during a weekend furlough. "The army makes the man."

With such ingrained attitudes, Jari Koivisto and other prisoners of conscience might be fighting the system a while longer, and it's a battle they may never win.

"I'm not against defending our country," says Koivisto, "just how we go about doing it."

@davidmacdougall

On the third episode of The Jim Norton Show, premiering August 6 on VICE, Jim will sit down with Whitney Cummings, comedian and co-creator of the CBS series 2 Broke Girls, for a discussion that could never happen on a traditional talk show.

All illustrations are re-creations of four-hour-workday flyers from the 1930s and 40s. Original images courtesy of Industrial Workers of the World

Alex is a busy man. The 36-year-old husband and father of three commutes each day to his full-time job at a large telecom company in Denver, the city he moved to from his native Peru in 2003. At night, he has classes or homework for the bachelor’s in social science he is pursuing at a nearby university. With or without an alarm, he wakes up at 5 AM every day, and it’s only then, after eating breakfast and glancing at the newspaper, that he has a chance to serve in his capacity as the sole US organizer and webmaster of the Global Campaign for the 4 Hour Work-Day.

“I’ve been trying to contact other organizations,” he says, “though, ironically, I don’t have time.”

But Alex has big plans. By the end of the decade he envisions “a really crazy movement” with chapters around the world orchestrating the requisite work stoppage.

A century ago, such an undertaking would have seemed less obviously doomed. For decades the US labor movement had already been filling the streets with hundreds of thousands of workers demanding an eight-hour workday. This was just one more step in the gradual reduction of working hours that was expected to continue forever. Before the Civil War, workers like the factory women of Lowell, Massachusetts, had fought for a reduction to ten hours from 12 or more. Later, when the Great Depression hit, unions called for shorter hours to spread out the reduced workload and prevent layoffs; big companies like Kellogg’s followed suit voluntarily. But in the wake of World War II, the eight-hour grind stuck, and today most workers end up doing more than that.

The United States now leads the pack of the wealthiest countries in annual working hours. US workers put in as many as 300 more hours a year than their counterparts in Western Europe, largely thanks to the lack of paid leave. (The Germans work far less than we do, while the Greeks work considerably more.) Average worker productivity has doubled a couple of times since 1950, but income has stagnated—unless you’re just looking at the rich, who’ve become a great deal richer. The value from that extra productivity, after all, has to go somewhere.

It used to be common sense that advances in technology would bring more leisure time. “If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful,” Benjamin Franklin assumed, “that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life.” Science fiction has tended to consider a future with shorter hours to be all but an axiom. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 best seller Looking Backward describes a year 2000 in which people do their jobs for about four to eight hours, with less attractive tasks requiring less time. In the universe of Star Trek, work is done for personal development, not material necessity. In Wall-E, robots do everything, and humans have become inert blobs lying on levitating sofas.

During the heat of the fight for the eight-hour day in the 1930s, the Industrial Workers of the World were already making cartoon handbills for what they considered the next great horizon: a four-hour day, a four-day week, and a wage people can live on. “Why not?” the IWW propaganda asked.

It’s a good question. A four-hour workday with a livable wage could solve a lot of our most nagging problems. If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn’t be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn’t be able to pollute as much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower carbon footprints. Less work would leave plenty of time for family and for child care, ending the agony over “work-life balance.” Gone would be the plague of overwork, which increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, has devoted his career to undoing the “nationwide amnesia” about what used to constitute the American dream of increasing leisure—the Puritans’ beloved Sabbath, the freedom to ramble that Walt Whitman called “higher progress,” the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Hunnicutt’s latest book, Free Time, traces how this dream went from being thought of as a technological inevitability, to becoming the chief demand in a century of labor struggles, to disappearing in the present dystopia where work threatens to invade every hour of our lives.

Hunnicutt himself has the bearing of a Whitmanesque sage, with a thick gray beard and a full-bellied chuckle. “These dreams seem to be completely forgotten, lost in a mad scramble for work and money,” he laments.

There’s a hint of what happened in an essay that the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” By 2030 he expected a system of almost total “technological unemployment” in which we’d need to work as few as 15 hours a week, and that mostly just to avoid losing our minds from all the leisure. In the meantime, however, “avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still,” Keynes believed. “For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

With this, he proposed a deal with the devil: Trust in greed for a while more, and it would save us from itself. To illustrate, Kenyes made the rather anti-Semitic observation that, just as the Jew Jesus brought access to eternal life into the world, the Jews’ genius for compound interest would produce so much plenty as to deliver us all from wage slavery forever. Keynes didn’t expect, however, that like most deals with the devil, the devil had the upper hand: Greed managed to suck up most of the benefits of almighty progress for itself.

Hunnicutt has spent much of his career detailing exactly how. Over the course of the Depression, pressure from the captains of industry turned President Roosevelt against shorter hours. He made sure that the Black-Connery Bill for a 30-hour week, which had passed in the Senate, would die in the House. With the help of Keynes’s own notion of deficit spending, FDR’s New Deal set the goal of employing everyone “full-time,” and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 enshrined the eight-hour day as the norm. That was to be the last in a century of reductions. The onset of the Cold War meant that those in the labor movement who kept calling for shorter hours were derided as subversives and communists. Fewer and fewer workers were able to join a union at all. Every hour of work became more and more productive, while the owning class gobbled up an ever greater share of the benefits.

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything—from environmental destruction to prison construction—for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.

The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.

The more we are told to value work, meanwhile, the less it’s actually worth. When women began entering the workforce, two incomes started to be necessary to support a family, and women are still stuck doing the bulk of housework and child care. Overtime has become mandatory for many people, and having a part-time job usually means having to work one or two others.
“Some workers got shorter work hours, but what they didn’t get was stable pay,” says Karen Nussbaum, who directs the AFL-CIO affiliate Working America. In what’s left of the labor movement, nobody is even bothering to ask for shorter workdays; it’s hard enough to win a living wage, paid sick days, a bit of vacation time, and parental leave. Compared with when she began organizing women workers in the 1970s, Nussbaum says, “the crisis is different—more acute and more widespread.”

You’ve heard of The 4-Hour Workweek, surely. Or at least you’ve seen it in an airport bookstore, with businessmen glancing sidelong at the cover as if it were a lingerie catalog. It’s a lonely yet best-selling fascination, the hope that by working smarter, not harder, one might join author Timothy Ferriss among the “New Rich” with some solid investments and a modicum of maintenance. And it can happen—but only to a lucky few among the million-plus suckers who’ve bought the book.

The idea of the four-hour workday that workers imagined a hundred years ago was different. It was for everyone—the natural consequence of advancing technology. But in the decades since World War II, capitalism has not handed over a shorter workday freely. The coming kingdom of leisure used to be considered a mainly technological problem; it has turned out to be a political one.

The Industrial Workers of the World considered shorter workdays with no cut in pay to be, in the words of one pamphlet, “THE Revolutionary Demand.” The so-called Wobblies recognized that fewer hours would make sure workers reap the benefits of progress rather than let them trickle upward. To win an eight-hour day around the time of the First World War, IWW-organized loggers in the Pacific Northwest blew a whistle and walked off the job when eight hours had passed. A recent IWW pamphlet suggests another tactic to highlight the impact of long workdays on families: Have workers’ children picket outside the job, carrying signs about how much they miss their parents.

In the past few months there have been small indications of progress. After much pressure from organized labor, President Obama announced stricter federal rules on overtime pay; meanwhile, the government estimated that millions of workers might switch to part-time rather than full-time jobs because they can buy their own health insurance through the new system. Congressman Paul Ryan quickly expressed fears that, with affordable coverage, “the incentive to work declines.” Just the thought of the non-rich working less than all the time, and still having health insurance, was an affront to his idea of the American way. He actually said, “It’s adding insult to injury.”

In this way, the most practical approach to winning shorter workdays may be to detach necessities, like insurance, from employment. Peter Frase, an editor of Jacobin magazine and one of the shorter workday’s most capable advocates, calls for a universal basic income. People able to cover their essential needs could choose for themselves how much they want to work as a supplement to that. But unless there are powerful, disruptive movements demanding such measures, politicians and other elites will keep on claiming that there isn’t enough to go around.

Workers in countries with stronger labor organizations know better. Gothenburg, Sweden, is experimenting with a six-hour workday for municipal workers, while in France, where a 35-hour week is already common, unions are trying out a rule against checking work email after hours.

The time-saving gizmos that Benjamin Franklin hoped for are here. But rather than liberating anyone, they’ve become a clever disguise for corporate greed to sneak ever more into our days and nights. Few subcultures revel in staying at the office after hours so much as Silicon Valley engineers. But who really benefits from their late nights of coding?

It’s probably the same people who prevent Silicon Valley’s underlings from forming a union, who don’t mind a single mother working two jobs, who expect you to check email at all hours, who say we need more growth rather than let the unemployed lighten whatever work already needs to be done. Those who believe these profiteers from on high, and who neglect to organize with their co-workers, are stealing the four-hour workday from themselves.

Image via Flickr user swanksalot.
While mainstream media outlets have reported on how detrimental Bill C-36 will be for sex workers, very little has been said about the fact that the bill will also target elderly people and people with disabilities.

These groups are frequent clients of sex workers, because of the myriad of reasons why the elderly or disabled have trouble discovering fulfilling sex lives. That’s where sex workers come in; they provide intimacy and human affection.

Jillian Hollander owns Cupid’s Escorts in Toronto, and she says many of her clients have disabilities. Due to the stigma and assumptions that surround certain disabilities, visiting sex workers is the only time some of them have sex. With the introduction of Bill C-36, Hollander reached out to clients to share how they’ll be affected. One client, who uses a wheelchair, explains how that affected his life when he was a teenager:

“My hormones raged and like anyone, my wants and wishes grew,” he writes. “I soon learned though, that for most, my wheelchair equaled a barrier or, they just assumed no [sexual] function.”

The client didn’t provide his name. Hollander says some clients have already dropped off due to fear caused by the bill, or lack of understanding that the bill is not yet law. This particular client thought that as he aged, and as people learned more about those with disabilities, the intimate partners he desired might come. But he says people told him they were afraid to be with him because they didn’t know what to expect.

“By my mid-20s, I was still not in the role I so badly wanted. I was well liked and accepted but stuck in a platonic, nearly asexual perception by most. Many of my other more disabled friends had already turned to services just to get a little of what it seemed everyone else got. They accepted it. They understood it was only a fraction of what they craved but... it still helped.”

Initially, he thought going to an escort service was “giving in and giving up,” or that others felt going to a service was the only option for someone who uses a chair. He held out for a long time, but still, most people didn’t regard him as “sexually capable.”

Now, he goes to an escort service. He hasn’t given up on being in a relationship with someone outside of sex work, though, but chooses to see his time with sex workers as preparing him for relationships down the line, and learning how to please women in bed.

“It's not all about sex. It's about being beside someone, learning my body, learning theirs, and so much more. I have likely been better prepared for actually being in a relationship because I turned to these services, than I ever would have been had I had no experience while waiting," he said. “Using these services and meeting these women has simply offered me a safe, decent, conduit by which to get a little piece of a much larger want.”

The same, of course, goes for some older people whose partners have lost interest in sex. One man I spoke with recently (we’ll call him “Anthony,” so his wife doesn’t find out), routinely sees a couple of women for sex near where he lives in the Whitby-Oshawa area in Ontario.

The 59-year-old tells me he’s generally happy with his wife. She’s his best friend. But she hasn’t been interested in sex for years, and it was leaving him stressed out and lonely. He recognized that she had the right to refuse sex if she didn’t want it, but felt he needed to seek it out somewhere.

He started finding women on review boards. From there, he was led to Backpage, and he would call or text them from there. He always sees independent escorts, opting not to go through an agency.

“I’ve been married 30 years. I have two kids and a house, a mortgage, and a job. The busier and older you get, the sex drops off at home. For me, I wanted more, but my wife didn’t.”

Anthony’s wife was happy with doin’ it once every couple of weeks to once a month, but Anthony wanted it once or twice a week. After some time, he accepted that they had different libidos. He started visiting massage parlours, and after three or four months, he decided to see an escort. He’s been seeing a couple of women once per week since January.

His wife doesn’t know about his extracurricular sexcapades, and he says he doesn’t plan to tell her. If the government makes him a criminal, though, he says he’ll be hesitant to see any new girls, and he’ll be more nervous about meeting with the women he’s already established pleasurable business relationships with. He says he worries about police stings.

He echoes what many sex workers have said: Bill C-36 does not differentiate between sex trafficking and those who are in sex work by choice.

“I’m not looking for children or people forced into slavery. I’m looking for consenting aduls," Anthony told me. "The girl I’m seeing now is 33, she’s been making a living for years as a stripper and masseuse, and now she’s an independent escort.”

“This is her job, this is how she’s raising her family and paying for her home and lifestyle, and they’re taking that away from her, too. She’s been doing this since she was 18. She doesn’t have a high school diploma. What’s she going to do if this goes through?”

I ask what steps Anthony plans to take to help stop C-36. He says he answered the poll the Department of Justice sent out earlier this year, and made it clear he disagreed with it. Though many Canadians did the same, he says he’s sure that will do “absolutely nothing.”

“It’s just a way for the government to say ‘Yes, we spoke with the people.’ I’m sure so many people against it for religious or moral reasons probably responded.”

“If they think I’m ever going to vote Conservative again, they have another thing coming—if they’re going to do this to me.”

Regardless of what the government tries to push through, though, Anthony is convinced that the bill will be thrown out due to the fact that it’s unconstitutional.

The judgment, he says, needs to end. His visits to escorts are therapeutic, and they leave him feeling a more relaxed, happier man.

“It’s something I enjoy doing. I have total respect for them and what they do. They’re like a bartender; they’ll listen to your concerns. You talk to them. I enjoy it. But if they criminalize me, I’ll have to change the way that I operate.”

@sarratch

These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue.

These pictures add to an ongoing body of work in which Michael Marcelle casts his family and their small town on the Jersey Shore as characters in a bizarre and vibrant horror movie. 

Read an interview with Michael Marcelle about his work here

While mainstream media has remained focused on the torching of six RCMP cruisers, the violence inflicted upon not only members of the Warrior Society but many others on October 17th is largely overlooked. Or perhaps taken for granted. Here we see Aaron Francis, center, as the RCMP begin their final sweep of the encampment. Photos via the author.
On Tuesday, July 29^th, after over nine months in custody and an extended trial which took place over the course of several months, Mi'kmaq Warrior Society members Germaine 'Junior' Breau and Aaron Francis were finally sentenced for their involvement in an RCMP raid of an anti-shale gas encampment near Rexton, New Brunswick in October last year.

The Mi'kmaq Warrior Society acts as an independently-run defence force for the Mi'kmaq peoples, the largest group of Indigenous peoples in the Maritimes. From time to time, as when community members from Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick requested their assistance in dealing with overly-aggressive RCMP and an American-based gas company unlawfully seismic testing on traditional lands, the society comes to the aid of embattled reservations.

It is important to note that the Society also maintains a distance from Indian Act-appointed Chiefs and Councils. It is “treaty-based'' in that its political affiliation, if it can rightly be called such, lies with the treaties of peace and friendship that exist between the Crown and the Mi'kmaq peoples and their Indigenous allies. None of these treaties cede the traditional territory of Mi'kma'ki, which ranges from Newfoundland to Maine, upwards to the Gaspe peninsula, to the Crown. Meaning that title of these lands rests firmly in the hands of its Indigenous inhabitants.

In the end, after the Crown negotiated with the defence team of Alison Menard and Gilles Lemieux over numerous lesser charges (a full list of which can be found here), presiding Judge Leslie Jackson found Breau guilty of one count of criminal code section 88—possession of a firearm, and five counts of pointing a firearm at a peace officer. Francis, for his part, was found guilty of one count of firearm possession, but was found not guilty of the four major charges against him, all related to allegedly tossing Molotov cocktails.

While the Crown sought a sentence of five years for each man, Judge Jackson sentenced both Breau and Francis to 15 months, meaning that with time-served both men will be reunited with their families and communities in a matter of weeks.

The case, to be sure, was politically charged on a variety of angles, the least of which is the province of New Brunswick's investment and championing of the shale gas industry. After a multi-million dollar provincial expenditure for RCMP escorts and security for SWN Resources Canada's staff and equipment and the culmination of which was the inter-provincially managed and executed raid of October 17, 2013, in which hundreds of RCMP from across the country participated—by the end the province had very little in the way of arrestable and chargeable peoples to show for it's gambit.

Nor has SWN—the Texas-based gas company that New Brunswick is so eagerly courting—come away with what it desires.

Despite a promise to return in 2015 and a tongue-in-cheek "thanks to the people of New Brunswick" in a final goodbye press release, SWN Resources Canada did not manage to complete all of its planned seismic testing activity for 2014.

Not by a long shot.

Two of SWN's four seismic 'lines' were completely abandoned after a shot-hole driller—a piece of equipment estimated to cost around $380,000 —was torched, and other equipment destroyed by unknown, but fiercely anti-shale gas, vandals. No arrests have ever been made in connection with these blows to SWN's deep, but nevertheless pregnable, pockets.

Indeed, 2013 was the third year that SWN attempted to make good on its multi-million acre exploration lease in New Brunswick, and neither it nor the province have much to show for it in terms of usable seismic data.

And despite their best efforts at a public campaign meant to spread the gospel of hydraulic fracturing, which included sponsorships of high school science shows and the like, the outlying rural regions of New Brunswick that have been the focus of SWN's efforts have proved resilient to pro-shale gas spin. And year in, year out, their anti-shale gas populace has demonstrated itself to be hands on and battle-ready.

Germaine Breau, on the morning of October 17th, 2013. In the pre-dawn hours, RCMP aimed a 'maximum confrontation' style raid at an encampment in a field adjacent to seismic testing equipment along highway 134, near Rexton, New Brunswick. The mandate of the RCMP was to liberate the testing equipment belonging to American-based company SWN Resources. Whether they needed to coordinate an inter-provincial raid, costing taxpayers millions of dollars to do so, is rarely discussed in polite company.
No, the only card really left in the ruling provincial Conservative party's hand—after seeing its own popularity tank in the popularity polls after its brutish handling of the shale gas issue and others—was the opportunity to make an example of two young Indigenous men who were involved in the October 17, 2013 raid; Breau and Francis.

In that regard, Judge Jackson, in giving both young men a sentence of 15 months, managed to dodge something of a political hot potato. His decision might also speak to the political bankruptcy of the New Brunswick Conservatives, in terms of lack of judicial influence.

If Jackson were to find the men guilty and sentence them to years in prison, he would risk providing usable material to those who take existing and binding nation to nation treaties seriously.

Breau and Francis, in their own right, are considered to be prisoners of a 500-year war of colonization; their only crime being the defence of their traditional territory against an invading corporate and Crown agenda given muscle through the RCMP.

On the other hand, despite a harsh upbringing documented in their respective 'Gladue reports'—the detailing of family history that a defence can submit during sentencing to ask for leniency for Indigenous offenders—for Judge Jackson there did remain the sticky situation of gun handling and pointing, which remained no-nos for anyone not wearing a police uniform on the morning of October 17.

I did not see Germaine Breau point a gun at anyone on the morning of October 17.

My attentions that day were more focused on being caught in the cross hairs of numerous pistol and assault-rifle wielding men crouched in ditches and creeping through the dewy field where we had been camping. It was not the first time that men sanctioned by the state had trained their guns on me, so it isn't like my worldview came crumbling down.

But it is also a day I won't forget.

If Breau did point a rifle, as the court has found him guilty of, the fact that this action has received the vast majority of the public's attention speaks to a general acceptance of state violence and warfare over the rights of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples, when organized into their own security force, to defend themselves using the state's own techniques, are imprisoned. Or worse.

As for Judge Jackson, to simply give the men time-served would come dangerously close to endorsing acts of weaponry against peace officers, if done so in the ongoing fight for unrecognized treaty and water rights—both currently acknowledged, if not embraced by all, in the anti-shale gas movement in New Brunswick. Jackson did admit that the context, the fight for water, was relevant to the sentencing, which is likely the best nod the veteran Judge could give to the cause in this, 2014 New Brunswick.

No, time-served would be one step too far at this moment in time, where Crown law and order remains the best legal option available, at least for the dominant class.

So Jackson deftly danced the middle ground, with a barely noticed stutter step towards Indigenous sovereignty.

It's still not alright to point guns at cops, even if they have pointed at you in a pre-dawn raid on your campsite, but the context and the offender's history and upbringing does matter. And thankfully nobody got hurt on October 17, an RCMP effort organized for whose planning for maximum RCMP confrontation with what had until then been a peaceful protest that I write about in more detail here.

In any case, with about 14 months already served, Breau and Francis will be out of prison in a matter of weeks, and will yet catch the calming breezes of late Mi'kma'ki summer, 2014.


@mileshowe

People having a good time at the 2010 Arab International Festival in Dearborn, MI. Photo via Flickr user Omar Chatriwala

For two weeks, Arab-Americans in Dearborn Heights, Michigan have issued increasingly loud complaints alleging that the city has systematically denied their access to absentee voting ahead of today’s primary election. But on Friday afternoon, local civil rights leaders were dismayed when Michigan’s Republican Secretary of State’s office responded to their worries with a letter announcing that the state did not see any wrongdoing in local election procedure, and that they were instead opening a criminal investigation into would-be voters themselves.

“All procedures are properly being followed”, the state’s letter asserted of the Dearborn city clerk, who has been accused of obstructing the voting of Arab-Americans. The letter quickly turns the blame—and the weight of a criminal investigation—onto the voters. “It appears clear that hundreds of AV [absentee voter] ballot requests have been illegally handled, solicited from voters, and submitted to the clerk’s office by a small number of individuals,” says the August 1 letter. The investigation, it adds, “may result in criminal charges against those involved.”

Coming just days before Tuesday’s primary election in the ethnically diverse Detroit suburb, the state’s announcement has heightened calls for federal oversight of the vote. Walt Prusiewicz, the embattled city clerk who initiated the Secretary of State’s investigation, told local press that the majority of questionable ballot applications submitted to his office appear to belong to people of Arab descent.

Civil rights activists and voting advocates fear that stirring the specter of a criminal investigation could not only distract from their original grievances of ballot denial but also discourage the city’s robust Arab-American community from turning out to vote. “Raising those kind of terms, like ‘criminal charges,’and ‘criminal convictions,’ can be really suppressive,” says Sharon Dolente, Director of the Michigan Election Coalition. “I can’t say what the state’s aim is here, but if you’re a community that’s been at risk of punitive reactions in interaction with government, you’re not going to want to keep interacting with them.”

Arab-Americans in Dearborn Heights have legitimate reason to worry. After last year’s primary in the neighboring city of Hamtramck, the Bangladeshi community came to the defense of three men ensnared by state officials in a voter fraud prosecution over allegations that they criminally handled absentee ballots (a forth man was charged several months later). In recent decades, Hamtramck’s Bangladeshi and Arab-American communities have grown larger and more influential, attracting the attention of the Republican establishment. The men in Hamtramck were charged with various felony counts not for actually defrauding voters, but for bringing absentee ballots to the elections office on voters’ behalf without being properly authorized to do so. By Michigan election law, this is technically illegal. Community leaders launched protests, calling on the government to end voter harassment and accusing the state of enforcing the voting rules against a community that has received inadequate education about Michigan's complex voting laws.

In 2000, Hamtramck faced a successful lawsuit by the US Justice Department accusing the city of systematically suppressing Arab-American voters. In that case, the city’s election officials singled out Arab-Americans, challenged their legal status , and required them to take oaths of citizenship as a condition of voting. No white voters were required to take the oath, the Justice Department found.

Michigan's Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, who announced the criminal charges against the Hamtramck men, still heads  the agency that is investigating the Dearborn Heights’ election. Unlike in Hamtramck, this new voting inquiry does not involve actual ballots; the alleged misconduct in question is subtler in that it centers on the applications people must send in to receive a ballot. The state’s criminal investigation seeks to uncover whether these ballot applications were handled or solicited by anyone who was not authorized to do so.

Secretary of State Ruth Johnson has been going after minority voters since she was sworn in. Photo via Flickr user Joe Ross

VICE recently investigated a prosecution in which the state of Georgia is seeking convictions over similar forms of improper ballot handling. In 2010, after the small town of Quitman’s black community won its first-ever majority on the local school board, the state launched a massive probe into the election. The investigation did not produce evidence of actual fraud, so Georgia officials built their case instead on proving that 12 African American get-out-the-vote activists broke the rules by carrying ballots to the mail for voters and assisting them without the proper authorization. VICE tracked down several Quitman residents whom the state alleges are the victims of voter fraud, and each rejected the state’s claim, asserting that they voted successfully for the candidate(s) of their choice.

Four years after the Quitman election, the group still faces numerous felony charges. It is widely believed among Quitman residents that these charges have been employed to suppress the surging electoral participation of African Americans, who overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates.

As in Georgia, voters in Michigan are facing criminal allegations in a state where top Republicans are fixated on voter fraud (they also seem to have a thing for shutting off Detroit residents' access to water). Civil rights organizations argue that conservatives oversell the threat of voter fraud to justify discriminatory voter ID laws. Johnson, the Republican secretary of state, came under fire in 2012 for citing shaky statistics on supposed voter fraud to plug her own controversial voter ID program. Her proposal included a provision—vetoed by her fellow Republican in the governor's office, Rick Snyder—to require voters to reaffirm their citizenship on ballot applications.

Dolente of the Michigan Election Coalition says that voter education should be a top priority in communities that may be less accustomed to the state's arcane voting procedures.

In Dearborn Heights, a city with a growing Arab-American population, the recent saga began last month when would-be voters began complaining that election workers were obstructing their efforts to attain absentee ballots. Amid the allegations, the embattled city clerk resigned, but then abruptly rescinded his resignation. Friday’s announcement of a state criminal inquiry appeared to deepen the distrust, and local advocates held a news conference outside Dearborn Heights City Hall imploring the federal government to monitor Tuesday’s election.

“Sadly, and what seems to be the case today, the number one response historically to valid claims of voter suppression is the all too common story of voter fraud,” Fatina Abdrabboh, Michigan director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said at the press conference. “Historically, voter fraud claims are raised only after credible claims of voter suppression, as we have in this instance. ”

Follow Spencer Woodman on Twitter.

Allude sweater, Cassandra Verity Green top, ZDDZ shirt

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ART DIRECTION: MILLICENT HAILES
STYLING: JOSIE HALL
Stylist's Assistant: Stephanie Davies
Hair: Jake Gallagher
Make-up: Mona Leanne
Models: Gemma and Edie at Profile

Ground Zero cardigan, Cassandra Verity Green dress, Dr Martens boots from Beyond Retro

Joseph sweater, Steven Tai top, Beyond Retro leggings

Joseph dress, vintage boots

vintage top from Rokit 

ZDDZ tops and skirt, vintage boots

Christian Cowan-Sanluis top and trousers

ZDDZ sweater, Joseph trousers, vintage boots, Taransufoma by Viktorija Agne glasses

The buried lede in the hoopla over whether Drake’s new album title Views from the 6 meant the rapper was “trying to make ‘the 6’ happen" is the fact that the local rapper who Drake got the term from is emblematic of a new young, multicultural creative class in Toronto connected through a loose structure of local rap shows, parties, and streetwear stores, websites, and forums. Near the top of this phalanx of burgeoning young, diverse artists stands photographer Elie ‘Visionelie’ Jonathan.

Born in the Congo, Elie spent a few years in Paris as a child before settling in Montreal for much of his early life. In 2006, he moved to Toronto to learn English. In 2013, he attended the Ontario Academy of Design and Art for Graphic Design before opting to take a break. Last year, he started photographing architecture around Toronto with a focus on symmetry on his iPhone. He uploaded the photos to Instagram, where he quickly garnered a prodigious following. Before long, he expanded his oeuvre to include portraits, urban exploration, and reflective photography.

This versatility has become his greatest strength. Elie has the ability to take shots that are directly breathtaking—as well as shots that seemed designated for quiet rumination. The unifying theme of all of his work is careful composition and a moody aesthetic that has become his trademark.

Elie’s clarity of vision is already attracting commercial attention. Earlier this year, he was selected to shoot parts of the Weeknd’s XO Lookbook (he’s also shooting images for the Weeknd’s King of the Fall tour), and he was recently tapped to produce work for Canada’s leading luxury retailer, Holt Renfrew. Other national and international retailers are coming around, each eager to have a slice of Elie’s rapidly expanding body of work for themselves.

We met up with Elie at the Ontario Academy of Art and Design in Toronto to talk about developing his aesthetic, being a part of a new generation of Toronto artists, and how he got linked up with the Weeknd’s XO crew.

VICE: You started taking pictures last year, what prompted that?
Elie ‘Visionelie’ Jonathan: I don’t know, man. I just saw a lot of people I looked up to in New York who were doing it. It got me thinking, This is cool. Why can’t someone do this in Toronto?

Anybody in particular?
Honestly, I was just into people who would take dope pictures of architecture that focused on symmetry, where everything was razor-sharp straight. After seeing a bunch of pictures like this, I started thinking, I can do this. Or at least, I can try to do this. And I started doing it. Soon after that, it was like, oh shit, this is actually working. I found the initial batch of photographers who inspired me through Flickr, but it was Instagram that really set things off for me, though. It felt like there weren’t very many people in Toronto taking the kind of symmetrical architecture photos I wanted to.

How quickly did it catch on?
I was just shooting with my phone when I started in September. Shortly after that, I received a message from Instagram asking if I wanted to be listed on a  “suggested follows” list. I accepted, and almost immediately my follower count shot up. It was a trip. It got me thinking that I need to keep providing visuals for people.

In December, I got my first camera and really started learning about how to use cameras effectively. I began constantly shooting on my phone and camera, then editing on my computer, and repeating the process. People started paying attention to it and it felt like something I really should pursue. 

You have a good diversity of shots—architecture, rooftops, urban exploring shots, portraits...
Yeah, I know. Now I’m focusing on balancing everything in terms of the style of shot, while showing other sides of the aesthetic I’m trying to develop. I want to show that I can shoot more than one style.

What would you say your aesthetic is?
I’d say it’s something that focuses on clarity and represents a certain type of “urban” Toronto youth—sort of moody, occasionally bright, very reflective. It’s an aesthetic a lot of people in the city relate to.

You’ve done a lot of like urban exploring. How and when did you start doing that?
After exploring the subways, it made me want to learn more about the city. I want to find more spaces to shoot. I was seeing dudes in Hong Kong that have urban exploring groups and it just got me thinking we don’t have our own, maybe I should try this.

Then we started finding ways to get into places, and once again, I was hit with a whoa, we’re actually doing this feeling. It’s captivating because you get to see things that every day people don’t see usually. I like how this kind of work forces us to stop, move a little slower, and focus on things that most people wouldn’t otherwise notice. The biggest thrill is getting a comment from someone saying, “Yo, I never noticed this location that I pass by every day could look like this.” Or “I didn’t know you could do that with this subway station.” For me, that’s exploring—showcasing how beautiful a place can be.

Sometimes you’re in such a rush to chug down that coffee and get to work that you miss the little things that can make life beautiful, aesthetically and atmospherically. That’s what I’m trying to bring—I’m trying to get you to take a simple view of the sky and appreciate the natural complexity it offers.

It feels like you’re capturing a certain type of Toronto. It’s very youth-skewing and internet-based, but it’s also a certain twentysomething cultural aesthetic.
Yeah, I’m trying to represent the interests of my generation. I try to frame all of my work with that in mind—even down to the angles and colours I use. I want the city to seem vibrant and alive, which is what I see it as.

You seem to be making the jump from Instagram hype to commercial success. There was a recent MTV profile of you, you’re shooting the XO Lookbook, and you’re doing work for Holt Renfrew. Instagram is obviously very important to you, but are you trying to branch out and get more commercial work?
For me, Instagram was just a way to show the aesthetic and what I could provide if it was real work—very portfolio-like. I’m using not using Instagram to branch out per se, but as a place that encourages me to constantly produce work while pursuing other opportunities.

It’s been great to start doing work with Holt. It’s great to see a company catch on to your work and see what you’re really about and then reach out to you through the internet. That’s the great thing about the world we live in now—you can really capitalize on it if you have any sort of creative ideas that you can showcase through social media without really giving away the whole concept of your style.

And how did the XO people reach out? Through Instagram?
We have mutual friends and we followed each other on Instagram. Eventually they reached out and said, “You should start working with us.”

They’re also part of that new Toronto generation of young creatives.
Yeah, the young Toronto that’s working at establishing a new view of what the city is. It’s dope to just be allowed to work with these guys ‘cause they’re pretty established and “up there,” compared to kids at OCAD like me. They’ve got a lot of stuff going for them—they’re international stars. It’s dope for them to reach out to someone like me and allow me to experience some of what they’re doing.

What do you have coming up in the next little bit?
I’m just trying to settle down, you know? I’m trying to focus on working with people I can grow with and continuing to send proposals to companies for work. My main thing now is to do more work. Do more photography, more branding, and anything else that’s creative with different companies and people. And I’m focused on continuing to grow,  pushing myself to expand my work so I don’t get stagnant. I’ve always been focused on trying to produce refreshing work so my stuff doesn’t get tired. I’m focused on producing stuff that people can relate to or provide new looks at things they would otherwise ignore. I’m just trying to take baby steps and keep progressing.

To follow Elie on Instagram, click here.

 @jordanisjoso

Illustrations by the author

N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is an illegal, psychedelic tryptamine compound found in the human body and at least ~60 species of plants worldwide. Rick Strassman, MD, described it as “the first endogenous human psychedelic” in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000), and in an interview in 2011 said that DMT “seems to actually be a necessary component of normal brain function.” Terence McKenna (who, “more than anyone,” Strassman wrote in 2000, “has raised awareness of DMT, through lectures, books, interviews, and recordings, to its present unprecedented level”) called DMT “the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science” and “the commonest hallucinogen in all of nature” in his 1994 lecture “Rap Dancing Into the Third Millennium.” McKenna wondered why theology had not enshrined DMT as “its central exhibit for the presence of the other in the human world,” and said:

Why this is not four-inch headlines on every newspaper on the planet I cannot understand, because I don't know what news you were waiting for, but this is the news that I was waiting for.

*

McKenna first smoked DMT as an undergraduate at Berkeley in early 1967. He had experience with LSD—ingesting it “once a month or so”—and other psychedelics, but as he said in an interview in The Archaic Revival (1992):

It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience. DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so.

From 1967 to 1994, McKenna smoked DMT—an orange, crystalline, earwax-y substance that “smells vaguely of mothballs”—30 to 40 times. He described composites of his DMT trips in “Rap Dancing into the Third Millennium,” “DMT Revelations,” and “Time and Mind.” Below is my composite of McKenna’s three composites, arranged chronologically, with approximate amounts of time, in minutes and seconds, elapsed since the initial toke of DMT, vaporized in a glass pipe:

0:00. First toke. Colors brighten, edges sharpen, distant things gain clarity—”there is a sense as though all the air in the room has been sucked out.”

0:10. Second toke. You close your eyes and “colors begin racing together, and it forms this mandalic, floral, slowly rotating thing”—”usually yellow-orange”—which McKenna called “the chrysanthemum.” Then “you either break through it, or you require one more toke.” (“The leather-lunged hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department.”)

0:20. Third toke. The chrysanthemum parts. There’s a sound of “a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of flame,” and “an impression of transition.” Then ”it’s as though there were a series of tunnels or chambers that you are tumbling down.”

0:40. You burst into this “place.”

In one composite, at this point, McKenna said: “And language cannot describe it—accurately. Therefore I will inaccurately describe it. The rest is now lies.” And later: “I mean you have to understand: these are metaphors in the truest sense, meaning that they're lies!” McKenna’s awareness of and engagement with this aspect of DMT increases my interest in his DMT accounts. In one lecture, he said:

The reason it’s so confounding is because its impact is on the language-forming capacity itself. So the reason it’s so confounding is because the thing that is trying to look at the DMT is infected by it—by the process of inspection. So DMT does not provide an experience that you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some sort of hyper-dimensional inflation instantly, and then, you know, you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can’t be downloaded into as low-dimensional a language as English.

The place, or space, you’ve burst into—called “the dome” by some—seems to be underground, and is softly, indirectly lit. The walls are “crawling with geometric hallucinations, very brightly colored, very iridescent with deep sheens and very high, reflective surfaces—everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy.” McKenna said:

But that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited—that the immediate impression as you break into it is there’s a cheer. [...] You break into this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf-machines...made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. And they say, “Hooray! Welcome! You’re here!” And in my case, “You send so many and you come so rarely!”

0:50. You’re “appalled.” You’re thinking “Jesus H. Fucking Christ, what is this? What is it?” McKenna observed:

And the weird thing about DMT is it does not affect what we ordinarily call the mind. The part that you call you—nothing happens to it. You're just like you were before, but the world has been radically replaced—100 percent—it's all gone, and you're sitting there, and you're saying, "Jesus, a minute ago I was in a room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on me, and, and now, what's happened? Is this the drug? Did we do it? Is this it?"

1:00. The elves, or “jeweled self-dribbling basketballs,” come running forward. They’re “singing, chanting, speaking in some kind of language that is very bizarre to hear, but what is far more important is that you can see it [which is] completely confounding!” And also, something is “going on” that over the years McKenna has come to call luv—”not ‘light utility vehicle,’ but love that is not like Eros or not like sexual attraction,” something “almost like a physical thing,” “a glue that pours out into this space.”

1:10. Each “elf-machine creature” “elbows others aside, says, 'Look at this, look at this, take this, choose me!’” They “come toward you, and then—and you have to understand they don’t have arms, so we’re kind of downloading this into a lower dimension to even describe it, but—what they do is they offer things to you.” You realize what you’re being shown—this “proliferation of elf gifts,” or “celestial toys,” which “seem somehow alive”—is “impossible.” This “state of incredible frenzy” continues for about three minutes, during which the elves are saying:

Don't give way to wonder. Do not abandon yourself to amazement. Pay attention. Pay attention. Look at what we're doing. Look at what we're doing, and then do it. Do it!

4:10. Then—“and only 5 percent report this,” McKenna noted—“everything stops and they wait, and you feel, like, a torch, a spark, lit in your belly, that begins to move up your esophagus.” Then your mouth “flies open and this language-like stuff comes out.” It’s sound, but “what you’re experiencing is a visual modality where these tones are surfaces, shading, colors, insets, jewels, and you are making something.” The elves “go mad with joy.”

4:40. “The whole thing begins to collapse in on itself, and they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye.” There’s “a ripple through the system, and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart.” (Once, “as the pull-away maneuver began, all the elves turned simultaneously and looked at” McKenna and said “déjà vu, déjà vu.”) McKenna added:

And often it’s very erotic, although I’m not sure if that’s the word. But it’s almost like sex is the surface of which this is the volume. And I’m a great fan of sex; I don’t mean to denigrate it. I mean to raise DMT to a very high status.

5:00. “You’re raving about it.”

7:00. “You can’t remember it.” You say “this is the most amazing thing, this is the most amazing thing, this is—what am I talking about?” McKenna thought DMT “might have a role in dreaming,” in part because “the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away—at the same speed.” McKenna discussed this in an interview:

There is a self-erasing mechanism in it. I have the feeling that you find out something there that is so contra-intuitive that you literally cannot think of it sitting here. So as you go from there to here, there comes a moment where it slips below the surface of rational apprehensibility.

*

The experience of DMT was, to McKenna, “of a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave.” He said it was not a drug, but “something masquerading as a drug.” The experience of it, he said, would be different for everyone, but “in some form at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic it will be.” He provisionally concluded:

This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the “it's only a hallucination” thing—that horseshit is just passé. I mean, reality is only a hallucination for crying out loud, haven't you heard? So that takes care of that—it's only a hallucination. What we’ve got here, folks, is an intelligent entelechy of some sort that is frantic to communicate with human beings for some reason.

McKenna described the DMT entities, among other names, as “translinguistic elves,” “friendly fractal entities,” “elf legions of hyperspace,” “tykes,” “meme traders,” “art collectors,” and “syntactical homunculi.” He presented his theories regarding what these entities were, some of which I have outlined below, “without judgment,” he said, because he was “not sure.”

1. Extraterrestrials

They could be aliens—”you know, evolved around a different star, possibly with a different biology, may not even be made of matter, came across an enormous distance sometime maybe long ago, has some agenda which we may or may not be able to conceive of, this is it—the real thing.”

If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society, and it had ethics that forbade it from landing trillion-ton berrelium ships on the United Nations plaza—in other words if it were subtle—I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication. You would say, “Let's analyze these people. OK—they're kind of hard-headed rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called "getting loaded" and when they get loaded they accept whatever happens to them, so let's hide inside the load and we'll talk to them from there, and they'll never realize that we're of a different status than pink elephants.

2. Entities in a parallel continuum

Another possibility, which “is maybe closer to, friendlier to pagan notions,” is that “there is a parallel continuum nearby, essentially right here.” McKenna elaborated:

Call it fairyland, call it the Western Realm—whatever you like—but you don't go there in starships. You go there through magical doorways which are opened via ritual and things like that. That is a possibility as well. Certainly human folklore in all times and places—except Western Europe for the last 300 years—has insisted that these parallel domains of intelligence and organization exist.

3. Dead people

A third possibility is that “what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort.” This was “hair-raising” to McKenna, who reached this speculation “reluctantly.” Some of his evidence for it:

These things... have a very weird relationship to human beings. First of all, they love us! They care for some reason. Whoever and whatever they are, they're far more aware of us than we are aware of them. Witness the fact that they welcome me. So is it possible that at the end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we're about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma—what we're about to discover is that death has no sting.

4. Humans from the future

A fourth possibility is the entities are “humans from some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two-and-a-half feet tall, so I would put it rather far in the future.”

DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000) by Rick Strassman

Rick Strassman (b. 1952), in many ways, took an opposite angle on DMT than Terence McKenna did—at least in McKenna’s lectures and writings—but discovered things that, I think, were equally, though differently, bizarre and unexpected and overwhelming and profound. In 1990, Strassman began “the first new research in the United States in over 20 years on the effects of psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, drugs on humans.”

From 1990 to 1995, Strassman administered ~400 intravenous doses of DMT to 60 heavily pre-screened volunteers with extensive experience with psychedelics. He documented the results—in fascinating detail, because it “was important that other people knew how to wind their way through this maze,” the two-year, labyrinthine, sometimes Kafkaesque process, involving syncopated interactions with the Human Research Ethics Committee, the FDA, the DEA, and other institutions, of gaining approval to do the studies—in DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which was published in December 2000, nine months after Terence McKenna died.

Strassman’s book included these observations, discoveries, and speculations:

1. DMT is “the simplest psychedelic” and “exists in all of our bodies and occurs throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. It is a part of the normal makeup of humans and other mammals; marine animals; grasses and peas; toads and frogs; mushrooms and molds; and barks, flowers, and roots.”

2. “Compared to other molecules, DMT is rather small. Its weight is 188 ‘molecular units,’ meaning that it is not significantly larger than glucose, the simplest sugar in our bodies, which weighs 180.”

3. “Twenty-five years ago, Japanese scientists discovered that the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. I know of no other psychedelic drug that the brain treats with such eagerness. This is a startling fact that we should keep in mind when we recall how readily biological psychiatrists dismissed a vital role for DMT in our lives. If DMT were only an insignificant, irrelevant by-product of our metabolism, why does the brain go out of its way to draw it into its confines?”

4. “Once the body produces or takes in DMT, certain enzymes break it down within seconds. These enzymes, called monoamine oxidases (MAO), occur in high concentrations in the blood, liver, stomach, brain, and intestines. The widespread presence of MAO is why DMT effects are so short-lived. Whenever and wherever it appears, the body makes sure it is used up quickly.”

5. The pineal gland—which is “unique in its solitary status in the brain,” in that all the other parts of the brain are paired—may be where DMT is produced in the human body: “The most general hypothesis is that the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives.”

6. The pineal gland of older life forms, like lizards, is called “the ‘third’ eye” and has a lens, cornea, and retina. As life evolved, the pineal moved deeper into the brain. Finally: “The human pineal gland is not actually part of the brain. Rather, it develops from specialized tissues in the roof of the fetal mouth. From there it migrates to the center of the brain, where it seems to have the best seat in the house.”

7. The pineal gland “becomes visible in the developing fetus” at 49 days, The Tibetan Book of the Dead “teaches that it takes forty-nine days for the soul of the recently dead to ‘reincarnate,’” and forty-nine days, Strassman wrote, is “nearly exactly the moment in which one can clearly see the first indication of male or female gender.”

The DMT trials resulted in an unexpectedly high number of encounters with entities in seemingly “freestanding, independent levels of existence.” Strassman wrote he was “neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences. Neither, it seemed, were many of the volunteers, even those who had smoked DMT previously.”

These beings were described as “jokers,” “clowns,” “the entities or whatever they are,” “DMT elves,” “cartoonlike people,” “some presence [which] was not hostile, just somewhat annoyed and brusque,” “aliens,” “guides, “helpers,” “reptiles,” “mantises,” “bees,” “spiders,” “cacti,” and “stick figures.” When participants opened their eyes, the reality of the DMT space overlapped with the hospital room they were in, they reported.

One of the more shocking experiences was by a volunteer named, in the book, Ken. It’s not a representative experience, but I include it here as a kind of counterpoint—equally appalling but wholly different in other ways—to McKenna’s experiences. Notice that, in both accounts, the experience lasts only five minutes.

[Ken] settled down at about the 5-minute point, but grimaced and shook his head. Within a couple more minutes he took off his eyeshades and stared straight ahead. His pupils remained large, so Laura and I sat quietly, waiting for him to come down further. At 14 minutes, looking shaken but keeping some composure, he started [talking],

There were two crocodiles. On my chest. Crushing me, raping me anally. I didn’t know if I would survive. At first I thought I was dreaming, having a nightmare. Then I realized it was really happening.

I was glad he didn’t have the rectal probe in place, this being a screening day.

Tears formed in his eyes, but stayed there.

“It sounds awful.”

It was awful. It’s the most scared I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted to ask to hold your hands, but I was pinned so firmly I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t speak. Jesus!

Ken’s experience was anomalous in terms of what he said occurred, if not in shock-factor, despite—as you read above—the “rectal probe” that was amazingly and actually necessarily, it seemed, used on volunteers during the study and that only one person, named Nils in the book, refused: “The probe was about an eighth of an inch in diameter; it was made out of rubber-coated wire and was quite flexible. It went in about four to six inches and rarely caused any discomfort, except in those with hemorrhoids.”

Strassman attempted psychological models of explanation—Freud, Jung—but those didn’t fit. His research, which eventually included psilocybin, ended in 1995 after, among other difficulties, his former-wife was diagnosed with cancer, his “Buddhist monastic community” began criticizing his research and “withdrawing their personal support,” and he was denied permission to relocate the research setting to somewhere less harsh than the inside of a loud, unpredictable hospital, which in an interview he called “the most distasteful, in some ways, possible place for people to have huge trips.” In 2007, Strassman was asked in an IRC chat discussion: “What is the purpose of DMT in the brain? Why do we have it naturally in the first place?” He answered:

I think we need something in the brain that does what seems to happen to us at various times in our lives.  Like silicon in computer chips, DMT is the best material for the purpose of seemingly providing access to free-standing non-corporeal realms.  On the other hand, since we are all making DMT all of the time, it may also mediate our perception of everyday reality.

*

Terence McKenna said in a 1989 interview in The Archaic Revival: “One of the things that interests me about dreams is this: I have dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works. To me that’s extremely interesting, because it seems to imply that one does not have to smoke DMT to have the experience. You only have to convince your brain that you have done this, and it then delivers this staggering altered state.”

And in “DMT, Mathematical Dimensions, Syntax and Death,” he said:

I once had a fortunate opportunity of being able to turn a very prominent Tibetan lama onto DMT—a name that you would recognize, although not one of the top five, but a more wizened, older, stranger character. And I, you know, he did it, and I said, “So what about it?” You know, these people, these Tibetan Buddhists, have a pretty good map of the territory. He said it’s the lesser lights. He said you can’t go further than that without breaking the thread of return. He said beyond this, there’s no returning. And so, in a very real sense, it’s a look over the edge. But then even that doesn’t solve all the mysteries. I mean, what is it about this wish to convey a language that is seen? What’s that all about? Is it that perhaps language has always been a gift from the other?

*

As profound, extreme, confounding, and astonishing as DMT was to McKenna, it arguably wasn’t the compound he aligned himself with, advocated, or talked about most. In my view, this would be psilocybin—the topic of next week’s post—which is found in ~200 types of mushroom and, when inside the human body, breaks down into psilocin, which differs from DMT by the addition of one atom of oxygen.

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Marni Kotak during her six-week long performance, Mad Meds.

For most people, significant life events are usually private affairs that take place in the company of a select group of loved ones. For performance artist Marni Kotak, however, reality and spectacle are inextricably intertwined.

In October 2011, Kotak gave birth to her first child in front of an audience, as part of a live performance at the New York Microscope Gallery. Following the birth of her son Ajax, in February 2012 Kotak was diagnosed with postnatal depression, hospitalized, and put on medication.

Kotak has now returned to the gallery for her latest exhibition, Mad Meds—a live performance during which she will be gradually weaning herself off of the drugs she was prescribed whilst in the hospital.

I spoke with her about turning her life into a show.

VICE: Hi Marni, could you describe the space that you’ve created in the gallery?
I have created what I call, "A Shrine to My Madness." The curtains and bedding are covered in imagery from the Tivoli Bays Nature Reserve around Bard College in New York, where I went to undergraduate school; the walls are painted gold and I gold-leafed a real hospital bed.

I believe that exercise is really important for mental health and it’s often not part of a stay in a psych ward, so I also gold-leafed an elliptical machine and weights. I call that piece "Work It out at the Hospital."

There’s also a waiting room called "Waiting for Wisdom"—everything in it is printed with the imagery from Tivoli Bays. Finally, I have two sculptures hanging on the wall in the space: one is called "All the Meds I Took," which are the pill bottles of all the medication that I’ve taken since February. So the space references an actual hospital but it's actually an effort to reconceive the space.

"A Shrine to My Madness"

What is the significance of the colors you chose?
I chose gold because I feel that, first of all, the experience of madness should be seen as akin to a spiritual journey rather than something that needs to be feared and hidden away in white rooms and hospitals. I feel like it’s something that needs to be embraced by society, maybe as a right of passage, and there should be rituals around it. So everything is gold because it is a shrine—hence the name "The Shrine to My Madness."

The other side is that everything in the space is gold and green, as a way for me to comment on the money behind the pharmaceutical industry but trying to invert it and say: “Instead of these drugs being valuable, how about we take my real experience of going through this process as what is really valuable?”

How are you addressing this stigma that our society has attached to mental illness?
By being so open about my own experience. What’s been really interesting for me is that close to 90 percent of the people who have come into this exhibition have sat on my bed and I feel like I’m holding some kind of confessional. People are telling me about their own experiences with mental health struggles and medication. I heard that 1 in 4 Americans have a diagnosable mental illness but I think that the numbers are even higher. That is my experience here, anyway.

"Waiting for Wisdom"

I read in a 2013 report, that nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug so it seems very high.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Abilify, an antipsychotic medication, is the number one selling drug across all categories in America. Even more than blood pressure medication. So that to me, the idea that there is that many people on that powerful of a drug, is astounding. I feel like they’re being overprescribed.

What are your thoughts on this strong relationship between the public and prescription drugs?
The author Robert Whittaker wrote this book Anatomy of an Epidemic, and it’s about the relationship between the prescribing of drugs and the growing number of the disabled mentally ill in America. I feel that we’re in a time of overdiagnosis and over-prescription of pills and I don’t feel that the side-effects of these pills are being explained enough to the people who are taking them.

From what I’ve experienced (and from talking to others who have been on medication), doctors seem quicker to prescribe medication to combat the side effects of another medication, than think twice about prescribing that first drug. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is obviously profiting largely off of this. Plus they have financial relationships with the psychiatrists that prescribe the drugs so it’s all tied together in that way.

"Abilify Wean"

So is it possible to wean yourself off of prescription drugs?
Yes, I’m definitely trying to offer that up as an example and create that dialogue. I've got this piece I call "Abilify Wean," in which I’m using the liquid form of Abilify. It helps me control every intake, so I can wean off of it really, really slowly. I want to get these ideas to the general public so that there’s more models for how to take drugs.

What can visitors to the exhibition expect to see?
I’m here during the gallery hours and they’re totally welcome to sit down and have a chat with me. I might be resting in the bed but sometimes I’m working out on the elliptical or with the weights. I also have a journal and I sometimes get massages from a masseuse who comes in. I might try and incorporate some other people from the community to come in as well and do sessions with me like yoga, acupuncture, things like that.

"All the Meds I Took," a medicine cabinet showing all of the meds taken by Marni during her stay at Beth Israel Hospital in February 2012.

After the public birth of your son, some critics called you narcissistic. How would you respond to that?
I guess one simple response is that when I do these things, I think about them as larger than myself. I’m thinking of myself as kind of like a vessel for other people to accustom themselves to these processes.

If I wanted to get attention there’s probably much better ways to do it, you know? I’m taking these risks and I’m doing things that I really believe in; they’re not easy ways to get attention.

In his most recent book, Alain de Botton speaks about art as therapy and how it’s great that artists are stepping away from “art being for art's sake” and remembering that it needs to be relevant and direct. What do you think about that?
I do believe that art needs to be direct and relevant. I bring real life into the gallery space with my work, which I find makes it highly relevant. And the process of coming off of the medication in this manner is very therapeutic for me, because it’s the way that I want to do it for myself.

And do you hope it will be therapeutic for other people as well?
I hope so, that’s what I’m going for.

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