Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

Lady Business: I’m Sick of Doctors Who Try and Talk Me Into Hormonal Birth Control

0
0

An image of an IUD, via WikiMedia Commons.
The Intrauterine device (IUD) is going mainstream, and stories about its resurgence are everywhere. But that doesn’t necessarily make them easy to get.

The IUD, if you’re not familiar, is a T-shaped birth control device that is implanted into the uterus, and they’ve been embraced largely because of their success rates and reversibility.

About 30,000 IUDs were funded in Colorado in the past couple of years to provide lower income young women with long-term contraception. The result? A 40 percent drop in teen pregnancies between 2009 and 2013. They’re also the preferred method of contraception for family planning providers. This is an interesting little factoid for me because when I tried to procure one, the doctor at the clinic I went to (which specializes in birth control, by the way) looked at me like I’d asked her to insert a hamster into my uterus. She then fear-mongered me out of it by jacking up my anxiety, and tried to peddle either the pill, or the Mirena, a hormonal IUD.

Let me be clear that I told her I’ve decided to cease taking the pill because I feel that the additional hormones are no longer appropriate for me. I feel the mood swings associated with them have been exacerbating my anxiety and periodic depressive episodes, and told her as much. I told her a copper IUD is the best fit for me. Here is what she said to me:

“It will really, really hurt. Like, really. Some people don’t think it will, but it does.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. And I did know. I had done hours of research prior to the appointment. But by this time she started in on how much pain my poor, unsuspecting uterus would be soon to endure, she had put so much stress on the ever-so-slightly higher chance I would become impregnated that I was already terrified. The chances of pregnancy with a copper IUD are 97 percent, as opposed to the pill’s 99 per cent. But seriously, most women either miss them every once in a while, fail to take it at the same time every day, vomit one up without thinking about it, go on antibiotics every now and again, rendering the pill less effective, etc. When human error is taken into account, the 99 percent, I think, is largely the stuff of fairy tales.

Anyway, by this time sweat was dribbling down my temples. I had sprouted a slick, sparkly sweat moustache. My hands were shaking ferociously. I asked her where the bathroom was. “Why don’t you lie down?” she asked. “I NEED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM,” I said.

I went. I vomited. I reluctantly dragged my ass back into her scary little hyper-sanitized room. I was still under the illusion that I might get this thing inserted today and stop worrying about condom failure and impending pregnancy doom.

“I wasn’t even done yet,” she said, after asking me if I was okay. She asked it with the warmth of a particularly bad-mannered government employee working the late shift at a call centre.

“I didn’t talk about how there’s a possibility of perforating the uterus, because we can’t see what we’re doing up there.”

I asked for a drink of water. She gave me warm apple juice.

By this time, I had determined that this woman absolutely was not inserting anything whatsoever into my uterus.

I want to be perfectly honest: I was very nervous before going into the room. The anxiety wasn’t provoked entirely by the especially careless bedside manner. And further, I absolutely do not blame her for being clear on the risks involved with IUD insertion and its aftermath. It is her job to make sure I know what I’m doing. It is her responsibility to let me know, and I appreciated the frankness.

My issues with the visit are threefold: there was little to no mention of the benefits of the copper IUD, and no effort made to help me feel more comfortable. Further, there was zero mention of the plethora of risks associated with the pill. She spoke of it as though it were children’s Tylenol. The biggest issue for me is that I’m not alone in what I experienced during this particularly awful clinic visit. Non-hormonal contraceptive options in Canada are virtually never discussed, and doctors, let alone the average person with a uterus, are sometimes not even aware of the alternatives. At a place that dubs itself a “centre for birth control,” is it so crazy to think all contraceptives may be treated equal? (I’m not the only one to be met with skepticism for my choices, either. My friends have had similar experiences to this. One friend was told she was too thin for an IUD. Another, after suffering through seven iterations of the pill, was told she was too young at age 24).

While this doctor scared the bejesus out of me, she also repeatedly tried to peddle the benefits of hormonal contraceptives. Lighter periods! (I wasn’t concerned about the prospect of a heavier period. Periods are things people with uteruses deal with all the time. Not scary!) The pill is not so invasive! (I was already familiar with the pill, I wasn’t concerned about the invasive nature of the IUD, and I have begun to feel that hormones are, actually, invasive for my body. Which I made clear).

While the dangers of the IUD were preached for about half-an-hour, when she gave me the prescription for the Pill, not so much as a cautionary peep was made. This, despite the fact that blood clots, stroke, heart attacks, and high blood pressure are potential side effects. What’s more, it’s also been shown to sometimes cause depression in those who are prone to it. Why are the Pill’s effects on our minds and bodies not made clear before it’s doled out to us like candy? Frankly, her insistence was a tad suspicious, and I’m not the first woman to feel this way after requesting an IUD.

Getting back to the doctor’s office, she wound up with a spiel about how the pill I’d been taking, Alesse 28, had one of the highest concentrations of progesterone, and she gave me a script for a pill with a lower dose. Yes, she talked me out of an IUD and back into considering the pill, even though I’ve been off for a month and noticed a marked difference in my emotional stability and well-being. Before, I would cry or snap incredibly quickly. While I’ll always be a, shall we say, temperamental person, those symptoms have eased up considerably, and I feel happier and more comfortable.

As for the pill, I’m not a hysterical purist going on a mass crusade against it. I took it daily for 11 years, and it agreed with me in some ways. For many people with a uterus they’d prefer to keep pregnancy-free, it’s an ideal choice: it keeps their skin clear, regulates severity and duration of their periods, and prevents pregnancy. But I also think women should be given an even choice between the pill and an IUD, whether copper or hormonal. The pill should not be the only contraceptive ever suggested.

Despite the fact that the perils of the copper IUD were castigated at length, nothing was said about the potential casualties of the Mirena. The two have the same shape, and I’m pretty sure that in the off chance I’ll have my uterus perforated, I’d like to have it done in such a way that would not also involve extraneous hormones, please.

(Oh, and also, there’s a huge lawsuit surrounding Mirena in New Jersey right now in which literally hundreds of plaintiffs are suing because they were not warned that the device can spontaneously migrate post-insertion. Some of the complications of that in the plaintiffs include uterine perforations, organ damage, scarring and infertility. Naturally, none of this was mentioned.)

For the record, I’m still getting that IUD in a couple of weeks, and I’ll let you know how it goes. But I will be going to Planned Parenthood, and not to this judgey doctor lady.

In the meantime, like so many women I know who can’t find a desirable form of contraception, I’m just praying for the condoms not to break.

@sarratch


Finding Bergdahl - Part 3

0
0

On July 14, newly promoted Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl returned to a dull desk job at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. It’s not quite the life of adventure the 28-year-old Idaho native had hoped for when he joined the army, but in between processing paperwork and coming to terms with a society he hasn’t been part of for five years, Bergdahl concluded his second military investigation. It was led by Major General Kenneth Dahl, the deputy commanding general at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State.

The first investigation into Bergdahl’s disappearance, conducted shortly after he went missing in 2009, concluded that the then private deliberately left his tiny base, leaving behind his weapon and body armor. The previously classified report also concluded that Bergdahl did nothing that would stop him from being promoted, receiving five years of back pay, or being put back on active duty. Bergdahl can now speak for himself to help the Army understand whether he was outright kidnapped (perhaps while taking a crap), went temporarily AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave) and then was abducted, intended to desert and was then kidnapped, or some heretofore unconsidered fourth scenario in which he wound up in the possession of his captors.

When considering these matters, it is important to distinguish the legal definitions of AWOL versus desertion of duty in wartime. The only real clues that have been offered to the public so far have been press debriefings and the release of a selection of personal notes, emails, and recollections of conversations that seem to clearly depict a young man disenchanted with military life. There’s nothing particularly unusual about Bergdahl’s sentiment in the context of America’s longest and perhaps most convoluted war in history, but did he plan on simply vanishing from his tiny group of 25 fellow soldiers posted in the remote and hostile Southeast of Afghanistan? If so, why? The answer to this question, if it’s even the question to ask, will go a long way to sate an enraged public that is demanding the truth.

In fact, the only thing we know with absolute certainty is that Bergdahl sensed that there was some greater adventure awaiting him outside the walls of his base, and on the moonless night of June 30, 2009, Bergdahl joined three Afghans and wandered into the hinterlands without telling anyone.

Part 1 of this story details the frenzied search for Bergdahl. Part 2 takes us inside the motivations and questionable actions of the players involved on both sides of the kidnapping, and its aftermath. In this third installment of the increasingly complex tale of the fate of Bowe Bergdahl, we will meet the Taliban who were swapped for him.  And it may turn out that Bergdahl spent five years as a prisoner in a hellhole simply because of political agendas.

Retired General Stanley McChrystal, the wide-net, pinpoint action leader of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force at the time of Bergdahl’s kidnapping, defended the military’s response: “After [Bergdahl] came up missing, we did a huge number of operations to stop the Taliban from being able to move him across the border,” he said in a June 4 interview with Yahoo News. McChrystal was privy to the wide-reaching—and often disorganized and contradictory—intelligence gathered in the search for Bergdahl. His advice for the enraged masses? “We’re going to have to wait and talk to Sgt. Bergdahl now, and get his side of the story.” This is coming from a man who led the hunter-killer teams of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a man of action whose legacy of leadership includes having hunted down and killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al  Zarqawi, whose activities in Iraq helped destabilize the region and killed scores of Iraqis. McChrystal is also unequivocal about America’s need to secure the release of prisoners of war; however, he’s dubious of the largely inexplicable method and decisions that resulted in Bergdahl’s release. “There will be a lot of discussion on whether the mechanism for getting Sgt. Bergdahl back was right—and I’ll leave it to people to argue that.”

Labeled by some as dangerous terrorists, the five senior associates of Taliban leader Mullah Omar exchanged for Bergdahl had very separate and relatively minor trajectories when compared with the thousands of much more deadly captives who had already been released from prisons in Afghanistan to secure a peace deal—a deal that will hopefully allow the US to pull virtually all of its troops out of the country by 2015 with a political arrangement with the Taliban in place. We will also delve deep inside some of the Herculean, on-again, off-again negotiations that eventually led to Bergdahl’s release. A narrative emerges that suggests Bergdahl’s release was compelled by a chain of uncoordinated events that rapidly intertwined into a perfect storm of forced decision making—an 11th-hour Hail Mary to rectify a shitshow, and one that may have forced his commander-in-chief to break the law.

But make no mistake about it: Bergdahl may have broken the law, too. The residual political heat and pressure coming off his release, and subsequent accusations of collusion with the enemy, have netted Bergdahl a pro bono lawyer who also has moonlighted as a visiting lecturer at Yale, where he teaches military law. Bergdahl’s potential savior is Seattle-based Gene Fidell.

No stranger to controversial cases involving the armed forces, Fidell previously represented disgraced former Guantánamo chaplain James Yee, who in 2003 was imprisoned on espionage and other charges after a customs agent found a list of detainees and interrogators in his personal belongings. The initial accusatory narrative was that Yee, who had converted to Islam in 1991 (long before his service), was an extremist sympathizer—until his charges were downgraded to a mishandling of classified information. He eventually received an honorable discharge, but is still awaiting an apology from the US government.

Fidell also defended Wikileaks pariah Bradley Manning and has been a harsh critic of Guantánamo in general. Since before President Obama took office, Fidell has criticized how the US government has handled detainees since they were brought into Gitmo in 2001. Fidell has described the parameters of torture defined in the Bush administration’s "Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States" memo as "a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency, a road map for the Pentagon [to avoid] any prosecutions.” His wife, Linda Greenhouse, won a Pulitzer in 1998 for her reporting on the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

In other words, Fidell has no problem going to the media to state his case and will not do so unless he is certain they will listen and reflect.

The great irony is that while Fidell’s background dictates that he sees the continued release of Gitmo prisoners as correct in the murky realms of international law, he now finds himself on the other side in his defense of an American battlefield detainee who was held without charges in a country outside the technical jurisdictions of “war.” Bergdahl barely served two months in Afghanistan as an active private, contributing to a great cause from which he would later be repelled. What he could not have known is that his rash decision to leave his base, and the subsequent effort expended to bring him back, would have a singular impact on the conclusion of America’s longest war. He was America’s sole POW, and later became an imagined vessel for hearts and minds—one who is starkly contrasted by what amounts to 5,000 or more prisoners of war held captive by the US in its decade-long campaign in Afghanistan.

All along, the US was careful to maintain Bergdahl’s “active duty” status, which positioned him squarely outside the realm of civil law and under the military’s more rigid Uniform Code of Military Justice.

While the penalty for willful abandonment of duty during wartime is a serious crime punishable under court-martial, the US military hasn’t condemned a wartime deserter since Eddie Slovik was executed by firing squad in 1945. “They're not shooting me for deserting the United States Army,” he said in the face of his impending execution. “Thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an example out of somebody, and I'm it because I'm an ex-con. I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that's what they are shooting me for. They're shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old."

You may find it interesting to note that CNN recently sought and was quietly denied a 15-year-old police record relating to the Bergdahl family on the grounds that the release of any portion of the requested document would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Any major or further persecution of Bergdahl would have a significant political impact as others would begin to dig into why exactly Bergdahl sat without hope for five years, easily in reach of the military—and perhaps more importantly why Bergdahl’s analysis of the war after only a month in the country matched exactly that of his commander-in-chief after ten years of deliberation.

The “intent not to return” is critical in proving the legal definition of desertion—a decision that it appears Bergdahl’s kidnappers negated when they bundled Bergdahl into a Toyota sedan and drove off with him into the hinterlands. It is also an intention that after nine hours of answering questions (with Fidell present), only Bergdahl could incriminate himself on, and given the pedigree of his lawyer when it comes to the military, this scenario was unlikely.

This frame from the Taliban propaganda video released on Friday, December 25, 2009, purportedly shows US soldier Bowe Bergdahl. AP Photo/Militant Video

To understand the rage over the release of five formerly “high-ranking” Taliban from Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, it is essential to grasp their importance, or, more accurately, their lack thereof.

Guantánamo Bay is a leased US naval base situated on the communist island of Cuba. The facility known as Camp Delta was opened in January 2002 to hold battlefield detainees (a.k.a. terror suspects) during interrogations, after which they would either be cleared or imprisoned indefinitely. The idea was this facility was for “dangerous” prisoners who, if released, would continue attacking Americans, and therefore the laws and rights of America do not apply.

As soon as it opened, Gitmo was quickly filled with Afghans and foreign fighters captured in the initial 2001 attack on Afghanistan by the CIA and Special Forces. Many of the men had been held in ad hoc sites, including hospital bays on Navy ships, black sites in foreign countries, or in secret prisons until Gitmo was open for business. The official line was that the island prison was simply the most efficient way to hold on to foreigners who went by a bewildering laundry list of aliases. Legally, the foreign facility at Gitmo was created because America simply did not know who was a terrorist, who was a freedom fighter, or even who was an innocent farmhand who had just been turned in maliciously for the US bounty.

Before and just after 9/11, “al Qaeda” or “the Base” was a loosely defined organization, and its association with the Taliban seemed symbiotic. In the very first days of the war in late 2001 and early 2002, American paramilitary operators issued bounties on the heads of foreign fighters, the most famous being the $10 million for Osama bin Laden (which was eventually increased to $25 million), down to a mere $5,000 for run-of-the-mill jihadists. The early enthusiasm for finding suspects was also a way for locals to settle scores or for frustrated intelligence agencies to punish recalcitrant prisoners. America was not officially “at war,” but we were damned sure going to "get our man." President Bush sought “justice” and was fond of using Western-film vernacular to describe the hunt for “who did it." Without any trial or formal evidence, in September 2001 the United States made Osama bin Ladin their target. He was wanted dead or alive. There were networks of people, according to President Bush, and their goal was to “defeat the freedoms we understand." Accordingly, the Wild West mentality was extended to Green Berets riding to victory on horseback and the Taliban—perfectly cast with eye patches and black turbans—being brought to justice. 

Foreign nationals aged anywhere from 13 to 89 who had been caught on “battlefields” around the world soon flooded into Gitmo's cells and prison yards, though only 8 percent of them were later determined to be bona fide al Qaeda by the US. This lawless facility and brutal late-night camera-phone dispatches leaked from places like Abu Ghraib in Iraq soon became a glaring beacon of American injustice in what was quickly being viewed as a blatant war of misguided revenge. Suspects were held without charges and submitted to soul-searing torture methods that twisted hearts and minds into a specter of neoconservative regret. At this point, not even the Executive Branch was suffering from the delusion that things were working out.

As early as May 2006, President Bush began stating his intention to close Gitmo. By 2008, shutting down the legally questionable prison and restoring an acceptable level of legal treatment to its prisoners was a major election platform. But despite President Obama’s promise to shutter Gitmo during his 2008 campaign and beyond, it still remains open and in full operation while the decade-long war that made it necessary draws to a close. Currently there are still around 150 prisoners holed up there, half of which have been perpetually scheduled and rescheduled for release for years. The very presence of foreign nationals held without charges for more than a decade is a black mark on the concept of American justice and the nation's mandate in what is less and less being called the "War on Terror.”  

In addition to Gitmo, the CIA continues to maintain so-called black sites where suspected terrorists are kept after being kidnapped from one country and flown to another. In this hazy, ill-defined post-9/11 world of non-uniformed combatants, there still exists the continuum of truly evil people and those who are completely innocent. In the rapidly evolving and spreading world of Islamic violence, extinguishing an al Qaeda insurgent from a member of a nationalist insurgency in the field is becoming more and more difficult—unless, of course, those suspects were not only unrelated to 9/11 but also frozen in time thanks to being taken off the battlefield. Bergdahl was a uniformed soldier captured and held by the Taliban, the former unrecognized government of Afghanistan, for five years. But he was kidnapped and never allowed to be processed in a normal prisoner exchange or release—something that would be typical of traditional wars. 

The five talibs swapped for Bergdahl were at one time members of the aforementioned unofficial government of Afghanistan, and they all have one thing in common: At one point or another, each and every one surrendered to or was working with the Americans or CIA. The caliber of intelligence proffered from these exchanges may never be known, because they were all kidnapped and eventually held without charges in Gitmo. Essentially, we turned the “good Taliban” into "bad Taliban."

The Taliban Five, as they have come to be known, were involved in an earlier conflict to liberate Afghanistan from warlords and criminal gangs. Some have history that goes back to the war before that, in which, from roughly 1979 to 1989, Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government fought against fundamentalist mujahideen in the countryside. In the end, these talib fighters were forced to flee from their homeland to the refugee camps of Pakistan.

America was the major ghost player in this proxy extension of the Cold War, beginning with its support of seven groups to train and arm young men recruited out of sprawling mud-house camps from Quetta, in Pakistan's south, to Peshawar, in the country's north. Efforts accelerated in 1986, when the CIA provided surface-to-air missiles using secret British SAS trainers and increased the funding of logistics groups like the Haqqani Network. The Wahhabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia matched us dollar for dollar, bankrolling young men like Osama bin Laden, who funneled Arabic-speaking jihadists into Afghanistan to kill Afghans and Soviets. The Islamic State of Pakistan and their ISI intelligence group were the “cut-out” for these covert funds, which is unsurprising considering they would favor ethnic and religious groups that supported their Pashtun and Sunni view of Afghanistan. The tribes that controlled the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan had become tactically efficient and well armed.

Mujahideen forces were finally able to ambush and dismantle the Soviet supply network that had allowed landlocked Afghans and Russians to advance in the region. The Soviets, resigned to what was quickly becoming a dead-end war, decided to create a 400,000-strong local security force before pulling troops out. On February 15, 1989, a decade after the USSR had parachuted and dropped into the area, the last Russian troops rolled their trucks and armor across the ridiculously named Afghanistan–Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge, north of Mazar, in a highly publicized event.

Soviet funding for the Afghan government and its security forces continued until 1992, when paychecks to the military and police were cut and the entire country collapsed into chaos. Local ethnic groups, a large swath of whom would constitute the CIA-backed Northern Alliance in America’s War in Afghanistan ten years later, began pulverizing Kabul and fighting among one another for power. Anarchy reigned from 1992 until 1995, when the Taliban rolled in from Pakistan and headed north.

It wasn’t until 1996, when the Taliban arrived in Kabul and took it over without firing a shot, that Afghanistan finally found peace—at least temporarily. Then the Taliban unwisely decided to conquer north of the Hindu Kush. The Taliban were potentially only weeks from victory until the events of 9/11 allowed the CIA the justification it needed to expand its support of the Northern Alliance and America’s longest war commenced. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden escaped into Pakistan. The penniless and now defeated Taliban, once allies of America, realized that the presence of Osama bin Laden and his foreign mercenaries had destroyed their dream of an Islamic, Pashtun-ruled Afghan nation. Many fled home, some went back to Pakistan, and some quickly made the best deal they could with their old 80s jihad friends, the Americans. 

This time line was at the forefront of the Taliban Five’s minds when the deal for their swap for Bergdahl was made. They see themselves as fighting for freedom from foreign meddlers, de facto prisoners of war waging a 30-year battle for sovereignty. If the conflict with America is over, then they are no longer combatants, and they should go home. In late 2001, all of these men viewed themselves as part of the Afghan government—a government that had just surrendered on the battlefield. The winners were the old post-Soviet coalition mujahideen government of the Northern Alliance (which by this time had been relabeled the United Front) that included General Dostum, the Tajik forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Hazar, and the CIA-funded flunkies.

By November 2001, the Taliban army was routed by massive US bombings and merciless Afghan attacks. The first official Taliban surrender was held on Friday, November 22, 2001. In early December, the tenuous rule and rudimentary ground forces of the Taliban had been geopolitically recalibrated. This resulted in surrenders in Mazar, Kandahar, and other regions. By mid December, Osama bin Laden, his family members, and a group of approximately 50 fighters had crossed over the Spin Ghar mountains and into Jalalabad. By early January 2002, Mullah Omar had fled for Pakistan.

The five mullahs who were eventually swapped for Bergdahl constituted the nexus of this confused rout. Mullah Noori, the former tailor, farmer, domestic worker turned governor of the north, and Mullah Fazl, who was the Taliban's deputy defense minister, had surrendered to General Dostum at a videotaped ceremony in Qala-i-Jangi on November 22, 2001. It was a surrender that began on November 15 as the Taliban were surrounded in Kunduz. They had seen firsthand what US airpower could do to mechanized columns and untrained troops in fixed trenches. They were finished.

Mullah Noori, the governor of Balkh Province under the Taliban, after surrendering to General Dostum in a ceremony with the CIA. Taken during an interview with Robert Young Pelton in November 2001, Koda Barq, Northern Afghanistan. Photo by Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Mullah Noori is typical of an unsophisticated “senior” Taliban. His father was an iman at a mosque in Shajoy, not too far east of where Bergdahl disappeared. Although labeled as a “mullah,” or religious leader, Noori spent his youth doing odd jobs and reportedly only spent two years studying the Qur'an—far less time than it usually takes for one to earn the title. Looking for work in 1999, he went to join the Taliban army, but rather than join the military wing, at age 33 he ended up as houseboy and guard for senior talib governor and commander Mullah Abdul Kabir.

Kabir was an original member of the Taliban’s Quetta Shura and became military commander of the east. In early 2000, Noori must have stayed awake at his post for a week straight, or tossed a particularly tasty plate of naan, because he was soon sent up north to work for the governor of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani. Osmani was Mullah Omar’s right-hand man, whose claim to fame was overseeing the destruction of the Bamyian Buddhas in March, 2001. Noori knew how to read and write well, and had a knack for solving tribal disputes, mostly over irrigation. By the summer of 2001, Noori was promoted to governor of northern Afghanistan—just ahead of the American invasion. Noori may have been book-smart, but he had never fired a gun or even held a military position when he met military commander Mullah Fazl for the first time during the surrender talks in Kunduz on November 17. He just didn’t want to get killed. 

Fazl is the most senior military member of the Taliban Five. In direct contrast to Noori, he had completed six years of religious training while living as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan. In 1996, at the age of 27, he traveled to Kandahar to join the Taliban as a foot soldier. By 2001 he had risen from a simple grunt to commanding 3,000 men. He was promoted to head of the army primarily because, a few days earlier, the Americans had vaporized his boss, Mullah Razzak, in an air strike. He coordinated his rapidly dwindling talib army with Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) chief Juma Namangani, who commanded the 1,200 or so foreign fighters in the north. Terrorized that he would be obliterated like his freshly dead boss, he fled to Kunduz and eventually surrendered in a deal negotiated by local Pashtun horse trader Shamshullah.

Unlike his four fellow and now infamous Gitmo inmates, Fazl is a bastard. His war crimes are well documented by the UN, and if anyone can claim to be justified in their anger over a bad apple in the swap, Fazl should be the focal point. These are crimes he can easily be put on trial for in an international forum. Sitting in Gitmo simply sheltered him from justice for a decade and a half.  Among his alleged crimes is being in charge of Taliban military operations when eight Iranian diplomats were executed in Mazar-i-Sharif. He was also in charge during the murder of hundreds of Shia Hazara in Yakalong at the hands of Mullah Dadullah and his men. I personally witnessed the charred bodies of Hazara civilians, still locked in their shop stalls and burned alive by the Taliban.

Traveling from Kunduz to the 19th-century garrison of Qala-i-Jangi, just west of Mazar-i-Sharif, mullahs Fazl and Noori cut a deal with the then head of the Northern Alliance/United Front, General Dostum, that allowed them to return home in exchange for handing over the foreign fighters under their control to the UN. It was clear to everyone that the foreign fighters, who had brought about the downfall of the Taliban, were relegated to a unpleasant ending. Some were killed by American air strikes that targeted a Mazar-i-Sharif all-girls school they had taken over; others who had been trapped in Kunduz drove to Mazar-i-Sharif and were disarmed only after a lengthy Mexican standoff. Taken to the garrison of Qala-i-Jangi, they then staged a horrific uprising and were all wiped out except for a few dozen survivors. During my time in Afghanistan, I had many conversations with mullahs Noori and Fazl in the Soviet-built Koda Barq suburb next to Qala-i-Jangi fortress. They confirmed that the mullahs were dour, dull, uneducated, and unrepentant men. Their early association with and loyalty to Mullah Omar far outweighed any intellectual or meritorious reasons for their position.

After the bloody Taliban-prisoner uprising at Qala-i-Jangi was put down by December 1, 2001, the two recently converted “good guy” Taliban mullahs, Noori and Fazl, began to get comfortable being chauffeured around to cut deals with the remaining Taliban stragglers who were hiding out in Pashtun-controlled pockets up north. In January and February 2002, I traveled along with General Dostum, his ramshackle army, and a US Special Forces detachment to extinguish one hot spot after another; the metallic-gold painted, Taliban-stickered Land Cruisers driven by the surrendered mullahs were a common sight. The mullahs came in handy in helping Dostum to cut peace deals between the Northern Alliance and local Taliban groups. The three others traded for Bergdahl had a slightly different history: They were captured while trying to save their skin by using their connections to betray Mullah Omar and the Taliban. In hindsight, this move will not endear them to Mullah Omar during an expected homecoming to Afghanistan next year.  

According to a “SECRET” Gitmo file—part of the massive dump thanks to former Army Private Bradley Manning—one of those three, Abdul Haq Wasiq, even asked for a GPS unit and instructions on how to contact the CIA once he located Omar.

Robert Young Pelton and General Abdul Rashid Dostum with the mullahs at Qala-i-Jangi, viewing the destruction after the battle in late November 2001

It’s debatable how long the mullahs could have continued to bring stability to the north, but it was clear that the US had a different agenda. All the former Taliban who would one day be known were suddenly and roughly renditioned. They were ushered aboard the USS Bataan, stationed off the coast of Pakistan. Wasiq had traveled to Kandahar with the intention of selling the location of Mullah Omar to the CIA. But in November 2001, the day after making this offer, Wasiq was arrested. Questioned and held for a year, the two mullahs and Wasiq showed up at the new Gitmo facility on January 11, 2002.

It is not coincidental that the list of Taliban prisoners the Afghan High Peace Council compiled and recommended for release as a gesture of good faith is identical to the prisoners the Haqqanis had been demanding in exchange for New York Times reporter David Rohde, and then Bergdahl.

From Mullah Omar’s point of view, these men had never declared war on America, were never officially charged with any crimes, and were thankfully preserved in the time capsule that is Gitmo while most of their madrassa alma mater had been splattered across some rocky outpost by Maverick missiles.

As outlined in Part 2 of this story, there was a sixth man whom Mullah Omar wanted back in exchange for Bergdahl: an electrician turned small-time Taliban commander, Awal Gul, who died of a heart attack inside Gitmo in early February 2011. Gul had personally handed his letter of resignation to Mullah Omar, a year before the Americans were on the ground in Afghanistan, but was suspected by the US of helping bin Laden escape from Tora Bora. Gul was captured by Special Forces–backed warlord Hazrat Ali, who was also suspected of aiding bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan while simultaneously accepting “suitcases full of cash” from the US in exchange for a dog-and-pony show during which he had very little direct interaction with his American “allies.” Unfortunately, Awal Gul had been instrumental in convincing local Taliban commanders in Jalalabad to surrender to US forces with the hope of landing a position in the new government. Gul’s militia, however, vehemently disagreed with the terms of a deal that would result in all foreign fighters being handed over to the US. Ali provided a de facto compromise to these negotiations by arresting Gul with charges that he was a supporter of al Qaeda.

The final three talibs also included Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa, a family friend of the post-invasion Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and the policeman, farmer, and smuggler Mohammad Nabi Omari.

Like Karzai, Khairkhwa is a member and former leader of the Popalzai tribe. The Karzais supported the Taliban in its early days, to the point that a young Hamid was handpicked by Mullah Omar to serve as the Taliban’s representative to the UN. The US even issued a “démarche," or State Department diplomatic order, to Karzai in 1996 in a failed attempt to persuade the Taliban to extradite Osama bin Laden.

Luckily, Karzai passed on the official Taliban government position and hitched his star to the CIA. During the Taliban era, Khairkhwa was appointed interior minister and later became governor of Herat Province, even though he had no formal education. In Herat, Khairkhwa was the main liaison to Iran, and some say a “major opium drug lord” who controlled western Afghanistan.

When the Taliban was defeated by US forces in 2001, and it looked as though Karzai could become an international player, Khairkhwa fled to Pakistan and asked Karzai for a job and protection. Karzai referred him to his brother, Ahmed Wali, who was running Karzai’s deals, minding his PR, and serving as a liaison to the CIA out of the Pakistani border town of Chaman. Then the Pakistani Border Authority arrested Khairkhwa on his way to meet Wali Karzai and his CIA handlers. After being detained in Pakistan for five months, he was flown to Gitmo.

Mohammad Nabi Omari is the only member of the Taliban Five who can be directly associated with the Haqqani Network, which held Bergdahl for all those years, and he was arrested much later than the fellow talibs with whom he was imprisoned at Gitmo. A former policeman, he resigned from the Taliban to return to his life as a farmer near Khost.

According to his "SECRET" Gitmo file, in the spring of 2002 an Afghan friend of Omara’s introduced him to a CIA officer named Mark who gave the former talib $500 and a cell phone. The idea was that Omari would travel to Pakistan, where he would try to link up with his boss, the head of Taliban intelligence, and find Mullah Omar. After a few meetings with CIA handlers at the airport and no action, his handler had him arrested and sent to a prison in Bagram. For whatever reason—perhaps his interrogators were not getting the answers they wanted—Omari was shipped off to Gitmo by October 2002. Under interrogation, it was discovered that Omari was not only aligned with a CIA warlord, Pacha Zadran Khan, but also involved in smuggling weapons and men across the border. According to his leaked Gitmo file, Omari has not been a good prisoner, with 37 infractions ranging from throwing his crap in the face of guards to generally being a dick. He is the bad boy of the Gitmo Five and probably the only one who will be back in business running contraband across the borders.

Omari was arrested on September 14, 2002. What seems to be missing from the Gitmo Five narrative is that all of these men had proved their eagerness to betray Mullah Omar and the cause—even if that might have been a ruse to save their own skin. 

Despite the attempts of the media to portray the Taliban Five as dangerous terrorists, it is safe to assume that none of the five prisoners used as bargaining chips either for peace talks or the safe return of Bergdahl were captured with blazing machine guns in hand, or in the confusion that follows a malfunctioning suicide vest. 

One other common factor is that at the time of their arrests in early 2002, the Taliban Five were badly educated, 30-something toadies who had moved up the food chain by virtue of their direct bosses being eliminated or fleeing. Ergo their immediate desire to find employment or security with the “enemy."

This frame taken from a Taliban propaganda video released Saturday, July 18, 2009, shows Bergdahl as a POW. AP Photo/Militant Video

So let’s get back to the question at hand: Why did it take so long to swap five aging and traitorous Mullah Omar sycophants who surrendered while fighting a long forgotten war? Why were five former members of the Taliban used as a bargaining chip for Bowe Bergdahl? 

We now know that these talibs were part of a prisoner deal for David Rohde, the kidnapped Times reporter, back in early to mid 2009. We know that the Taliban quickly inserted Bergdahl as a way to release prisoners within days of his kidnap in June 2009. We know that our own president very publicly promised to close Gitmo in his 2008 election campaign and even set a time line of a year to release or deal with all detainees. We now know that Bergdahl was being held a few miles inside the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and that the military and CIA received frequent updates on his condition, location, and jailers. So why wasn’t Bergdahl rescued or quietly swapped for the five former Taliban?  

The answer is disturbing. Bergdahl became a tainted political pawn that the military viewed as a traitor, a man who had willfully abandoned his post, possibly joined the Taliban or al Qaeda, and might be a stinging embarrassment once rescued. CENTCOM had used SEAL Team Six (DEVGRU) to rescue Captain Richard Phillips, an American missionary in Somalia, and other high-risk ventures. Why not a uniformed soldier held by terrorists?

To understand, it is important to look at Bergdahl’s status and evolution in the public eye versus the private, secret opinion of his liability. Bergdahl, who, along with his previously known negative views of the war, had been described by Dewey Clarridge’s sources as “declaring jihad” and joining the Taliban, would dramatically contrast the American military mantra of “winning” in Afghanistan. 

Then, in early July 2008, the Haqqanis bought Bergdahl. It is common for kidnappers in Afghanistan to negotiate a piece of the ultimate ransom payments or accept cash for handing over a high-value snatch. The Taliban’s ideological strategy had been flanked by the mounting American “surge," the same surge that had brought Bergdahl to Afghanistan and was making the US military and intelligence community nervous. Although Obama made the commanding officers of Afghanistan tip over like dominoes, Generals McKiernan, McChrystal, and Petraeus fell on their swords to convince the administration to assign them more troops. And they got them.

The Taliban were actually being cleared out of areas they had once controlled, and the American military presented hard proof to the Pakistanis of their complicity in fortifying the Taliban. All along the border areas, Pakistani Taliban thwarted their government. Pakistan realized that the proxy virus they had helped incubate might now be infecting them. Osama bin Laden was confined to a large compound near the main military nexus of the country, and Pakistan began to make life difficult for the exiled Taliban in Quetta.

Although Obama had been elected in 2008 while supporting the fight in Afghanistan as the "right war," he soon found out it should have been fought in Pakistan. Privately, Obama knew it was time to tamp down the fire. Polls showed that 70 percent of the members of the Democratic Party opposed the war, and half of America wanted out. But the public announcement sounded very different. On March 27, 2009, three months before Bergdahl’s disappearance, Obama publicly announced that America needed a “stronger, smarter, and comprehensive strategy” in Afghanistan. He then hung himself on the horns of a dilemma, escalating a war he knew he was going to lose. He announced the appointment of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan with the goal of pressuring Islamabad to stop supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Haqqanis while telling General Petraeus to step up attacks inside Afghanistan. He authorized 17,000 troops out of the 30,000 requested by General McKiernan and began a halfhearted surge. Obama also said that "we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces." Or the exact same strategy the Soviets took when they decided they would bail on Afghanistan when they were only five years into their ten-year war. It had taken America eight years to come to the same conclusion, and it would take at least three years longer to get out.  

What the public didn’t know was that Obama had decided it was time to bail on Afghanistan. He gave Petraeus a one-year window to see results. Holbrooke was secretly tasked with finding a way out by setting up peace talks between the US and the Taliban.  But how do you negotiate the end of a war with an insurgency that was winning? 

In May 2011, a fifth video of Bergdahl was sent out. It went mostly unnoticed. The election cycle inspired promises of troop drawdowns starting in the spring. The military in Afghanistan and the CIA in Pakistan were dealing with the tidal wave of backlash from the cross-border raid to kill Osama bin Laden, who was discovered living a few blocks from a major military installation. The US Special Operations community had shown they could very easily find, reach out, and touch any human in any hostile location. So why not Bergdahl?

Interpreting the silence from the unpopular government as inaction, a frustrated Bob Bergdahl decided to circumvent the government and go public with the full scope of his son's story. He stopped shaving when Bowe was kidnapped, growing his beard in solidarity, and began studying Pashto as he contemplated heading to Afghanistan himself to find his 26-year-old son. He then produced a homemade video in which he was wearing a salwar kameez, the traditional garb of Pakistan. He described Mullah Sangeen and the Haqqanis as “sheltering” Bergdahl as a guest. He referenced all detainees, from both sides of the war, as being the crux of how to solve his son’s—and his country’s—involvement in a battle that no one seemed to be capable of winning. “I feel that I have to do my job as his father,” he said. “I’m working toward a diplomatic and humanitarian solution.” 

A brass POW bracelet used during the Vietnam War rests on a red anodized-aluminum POW bracelet for Bergdahl. PRNewsFoto/Memorial Bracelets

Bob Bergdahl then made a widely publicized appearance on Memorial Day at a POW event during Rolling Thunder, an annual gathering of half a million motorcyclists in Washington, DC. He addressed the crowd, saying, "So help me God, we will not leave you behind.”

That June, not coincidentally, Michael Hastings, the same man who had torpedoed General McChrystal’s career and Bergdahl’s best chance for a rescue in “The Runaway General” for Rolling Stone, wrote a 10,000-word follow-up of sorts on Bergdahl’s kidnapping. The article, “America’s Last Prisoner of War,” depicted Bergdahl as being under intense mental pressure as part of a sad-sack group of soldiers. Hastings portrayed Bergdahl as confused and disappointed and, without any hard evidence, suggested that Bergdahl had abandoned his post. Despite this, support to bring back Bergdahl became a mantra of the anti-Obama right wing as T-shirts, rubber bracelets, stickers, and other items to bring attention to Bergdahl’s plight appeared. Getting Bergdahl back became a rallying cry for veterans and the patriotic. His long absence and continual abuse by his captors was largely and increasingly blamed on President Obama. Bergdahl was now a political weapon of the right wing to show the inaction, incompetence, and lack of military conviction of the Democratic president. Bergdahl had become a symbol of Obama’s inability to successfully prosecute the War on Terror.

Unknown to most and only revealed in hazy rumors, the unthinkable was occurring: America was rumored to be in peace talks with the Taliban, further inflaming the idea that Afghanistan might be another Vietnam, another war in which lives and treasure were wasted.  The general public did not realize how much Bowe Bergdahl had become the focal point of those talks. Mullah Sangeen, Bergdahl’s minder, was put on the US terrorist list.

But then Bergdahl attempted to escape. Using his survival skills, Bergdahl had spent months building up trust with his captors. By the summer of 2011, Bergdahl was allowed to walk around unchained. He learned basic Pashto and then suddenly escaped his captors for a period of three days and two nights. He tried to hide in a ditch covered with leaves after failing to find any civilians to aid in his escape. On September 27, 2011, the US made moves to show the Haqqanis and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence that they meant business by capturing Haji Mali Khan, the most senior member of the Haqqani Network next to his eponymous patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani, in a joint operation conducted by US and NATO forces inside Afghanistan. A month after Mali Khan had been captured, he was designated a terrorist. This meant he could then be treated very differently from what he was—a POW—and held in any CIA black site his captors desired, where he would be subjected to “enhanced” interrogation methods.

By late 2011, Bergdahl’s future looked hazy, if he was even still alive. Behind the scenes, the major turning points and bungled political moves to negotiate the release of Bergdahl were kept hidden from the American taxpayer. The Taliban also insisted on absolute secrecy to hide their departure from their previous hard-line stance. If the Taliban rank and file discovered that Mullah Omar was selling out the dream of a caliphate, there would be a mutiny.

America was also undermining its hard-line stance against the Taliban. While American and NATO troops were fighting and dying for the surge, well-dressed diplomats were undermining their efforts in Bavarian luxury homes and plush palaces. And Bowe Bergdahl, the focal point around which this whirlwind of diplomacy and duplicity spun, remained lonely, abused, and waiting in the forests of North Waziristan. 

Continued in Part 4, coming soon.

One of the Stars of '10 Things I Hate About You' Started a New Religion

0
0

All photos by Amir Magal

Sitting in the heart of Venice Beach, California, is a church one block away from the iconic Gold's Gym and a stone's throw from the new Google offices. The building represents the neighborhood's storied history with religion—it once housed a standard Protestant congregation before becoming a Hare Krishna temple, and then, a new age brand of Christian fundamentalism. But in May, the property got a new and very peculiar occupant. Hollywood actor Andrew Keegan—best known for his role in the 90s film 10 Things I Hate About You—leased the building to start his own new age temple and spiritual movement called Full Circle. The church now has a growing body of followers, some of whom have dedicated their lives to his mission.

Videos by Brett Mazurek

When I visited the church, I was greeted at the door by a man who said his name was Third Eye. He quickly introduced me to the community pet Krishna, a giant talking parrot. Third Eye explained that he was part of the “inner circle,” comprised of eight core members, all of whom are led by the founder Andrew Keegan. Each member is “enlightened” and has come together to initiate change. While they are cooperative, Keegan is the official leader who has, as Third Eye put it, the “ultimate say on all things.”

I met the rest of the inner circle, who told me they believed I came through the “vortex” created by Keegan's energy (in some ways, that's not entirely incorrect). A member of the group named Stav introduced himself to me, noting that he grew up with Keegan's 10 Things I Hate About You co-star Heath Ledger in Perth, Western Australia. He made sure to tell me about this connection while also rattling off the names of famous surfers, Victoria's Secret models, and sports stars, as well as other Hollywood celebrities that he's “tight with.” Stav is a member of the core inner circle and is not ashamed to let his worship of celebrity be known.

They described their movement as “advanced spiritualism” or “the highest spiritualism founded on universal knowledge.” When I pressed them about what exactly that meant, Third Eye said something about cosmic energy and ayahuasca.

Later, Third Eye invited me to attend a special evening of music at the church, where I met Keegan and his girlfriend Leah. She hugged me, while Keegan gave me a complicated brother-man series of handshake maneuvers before drawing me into an embrace. Venice Beach's burner community was out in full force for the evening, wearing their desert-inspired Lord Of The Rings costumes. Everyone came to see new age musician Nahko Bear, but he couldn't make it. Instead, some local artists were asked to take the stage and sing songs about cutting up their credit cards and using mantras to pay their bills. This was only one of the many events Keegan threw that week—from concerts, to political gatherings for new age self-help gurus (viz. Marianne Williamson’s bid for congress), to sit-ins, and workshops on the latest colon cleanse.

We stepped outside so Keegan and Leah could smoke American Spirits, and they told me that their goal is to promote the individual becoming truly themselves outside of defined boundaries. The actor was wearing a pork pie hat and an Indian scarf; his girlfriend was adorned in a white silk kimono.

“Synchronicity. Time. That's what it's all about. Whatever, the past, some other time. It's a circle, in the center is now. That's what it's about,” Keegan explained, regarding the church's name, Full Circle.

A few weeks later, I sat down with Keegan after one of his Sunday services. The meditation at the service had involved water crystals, which participants used to focus their energy to bring an ending to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. “We’re very, very aware of the shift that’s happening in the mind and the heart, and everybody is on that love agenda,” Keegan told me after the ceremony. “We’re very much scientifically, spiritually, and emotionally aware of how it works, meaning that there’s power in the crystals, there’s power in our hearts, there’s an alignment, there’s a resonance... and it transfers through water.”

Like many religious converts, Keegan's spiritual transformation came after a traumatic experience. The actor said he was first awakened on March 11, 2011, when he and two friends were attacked by what he describes as gang members in Venice Beach. One of them pulled a gun on his manager, and after a full-on brawl, Keegan had to go to the hospital for stitches. “The significance of this occurrence is that it happened at the same time the tsunami hit Japan,” Keegan said. He then related this incident to a series of odd events, which he believes play a large role in how “synchronicity” brought him to realize his true calling.

“I had a moment where I was looking at a street lamp and it exploded. That was a weird coincidence,” he said. “At a ceremony, a heart shaped rose quartz crystal was on the altar and, synchronistically, this whole thing happened. It’s a long story, but basically the crystal jumped off the altar and skipped on camera. That was weird.” Keegan explain that these were some of the incidents that led him to conclude that “the mission is to take the war out of our story, which is essentially peace but activated peace.”

While Third Eye and his fellow members see Keegan as a visionary and a leader, the actor said his community is not cultish. “I very much speak what comes through [while] in the collective. We create a resonance of balance and equality of the crew,” he explained. “When you feel those chakras aligned, there's guided messaging coming in. If there is something of spiritual ego within that, it must not exist.” His followers assert that each core member has a “lot of creative latitude” in the community, but in the end, the star has the ultimate say in the decision-making process.

The shift in Keegan’s ambitions—from stardom to spirituality—shows how the culture of celebrity is not all that far off from religion. Hollywood is an industry focused on manufacturing deities, personas to be both revered and reviled, just to make a buck, like every religion in the history of the world has done. Celebrities enamor us and hold us captive in the haloed glow of their Instagram filters, whether it is Kim K’s latest “belfie” or the Platonic ideal of family life represented by Brangelina. When Kanye West declares himself a “god,” it means something, because in the modern world, celebrity is god. The special worship Keegan received on the  bedroom walls of high school girls in his youth is an overt form of deification. And so Keegan’s transfiguration from teen heartthrob to spiritual guru is not only unsurprising, but maybe even expected.

Andrew Keegan in his most famous role.

To be sure, Keegan is not the first celebrity to get mixed up in the business of cultivating new religions. Los Angeles has been at the epicenter of various new religious movements since the inception of Hollywood. Aimee Semple McPherson gave Pentecostalism a boost with the help of some old Hollywood magic, counting members like Charlie Chaplin, Milton Berle, and Anthony Quinn, who also played sax in the church's choir. More recently, Hollywood has seen the rise of Scientology (a true celebrity religion) and the Kundalini movement started by Yogi Bhajan, which has its biggest center in Los Angeles and boasts followers such as Demi Moore and Gerard Butler.

Celebrity religious figures like Tom Cruise (a saint in Scientology), Jim Carrey, and David Lynch are all vocal advocates for Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (the Pet Detective even went viral with a recent “spiritual talk”), and there's a slew of celebrities who have adopted pseudo-spiritual babble (like Gwyneth Paltrow's “conscious uncoupling”).

We can now add Andrew Keegan to the top of that list. But his spiritual ambitions are currently in jeopardy, as the building his church is housed in went on auction on August 10, which could potentially affect his lease agreement. He is unsure if he can win the bidding war in the rapidly gentrified neighborhood of Venice Beach. Keegan’s budding movement is about to receive its biggest test, one that challenges the core tenets of his philosophy—the power thought has to move to the world.

Follow Shyam Dodge and Shanrah Wakefield on Twitter.

A German Guy Wants to Give You a Bunch of Money for Nothing

0
0

Photo courtesy of Michael Bohmeyer

What would happen if we didn't have to worry about making a living anymore? Would people just sit on their asses all day or actually do something meaningful with their lives? Michael Bohmeyer, a 29-year-old founder of a tech startup in Berlin, wanted to find out.

After he stopped working earlier this year to live off the $1,300 he makes from his startup each month, Bohmeyer says his life has radically changed. So he started “My Basic Income”, a new initiative looking to raise enough money to pay someone $1,300 a month for a year, no strings attached.

Through crowdfunding, the initiative has already raised more than the $16,000 goal. On September 18, they're going to announce the lucky winners of that wad of cash at a party in Berlin.

I spoke to Bohmeyer to find out what he hopes will come of this and how his life has changed now that he doesn't need to work.

VICE: Would you say you’re a lazy person?
Michael Bohmeyer: I’d say that, but I don’t think being lazy is necessarily a bad thing. Other people probably wouldn’t call me lazy. I work a lot—even more so now that I don’t need to work for money. I even discovered a passion for washing the dishes.

You said that having an unconditional basic income has radically altered your life. How so?
After I stopped working earlier this year and started living off the approximately $1,300 I get out of my company, I just wanted to put my feet up and do nothing. Instead, I found a crazy drive to do things. I had a million new business ideas, I take care of my daughter, and I work for a local community radio. I buy less shit, I live healthier, and I'm a better boyfriend and father.

Because you have more time for your girlfriend and daughter?
Because I'm more laid-back. The pressure is gone. My working conditions were great even before, because I was running my own company and could pretty much do what I want. But making money was tied to conditions. Now, I do everything I do because I want to—and all of a sudden it’s twice as much fun.

Do you ever get bored?
I wouldn’t have the time. “My Basic Income” is keeping me busy 20 out of 24 hours. I’m not kidding—I barely sleep. All of a sudden I have these insane amounts of energy, because I'm doing 100 percent what I want to do.

So ever since you stopped working for money, you've been working your ass off. Kind of ironic.
Totally. It’s also funny how I got there. After I had stopped working for pay initially, I thought I’d have to immediately find a new project. I rented an office, made a to-do list, and showed up in the morning. After stressing myself out like that for a month and not getting much done, I thought, Wait a minute. What the hell am I doing? So I actively made myself do nothing for a month—I watched the sky, no cell phone, no books, nothing. It was physically painful. But after a while I could do it.

You want to pay someone a basic income of $1,300 a month for a year, no strings attached. What do you hope to prove or find out by doing this?
I was pretty astonished what not having to work did to my life. It would be presumptuous to make assumptions based on my experience, but I think that everybody has crazy potential that could be triggered by not having to worry about income. Don’t get me wrong, I think making money is awesome. To work and be paid for it—that’s great. But not to work for the sole purpose of making money. I got bored by the debates we're having about this issue and how they are not going anywhere. So I thought: Let’s just try this and see what happens instead of waiting around for politicians.

Through crowdfunding you've raised close to $32,000 so far—enough money to finance two basic incomes for a year. That’s two people not having to worry about getting by. Still, it doesn’t say a lot about what would happen if none of us had to worry about that.
Sure, my project is totally dumb for two reasons. First it’s limited to one year, so you still have to worry about making a living next year. And secondly, of course it makes a difference if it’s just me not having to worry about money or if nobody around me does.

So no, it’s definitely not representative. But at least we get a whiff of what having a basic income might feel like. And we're having a discussion about this. Because it’s not just about the two who are actually going to win this. It’s also about the 21,000 people who wrote on the website what they’d do if they had the money. They aren't looking to put their feet up. They want to continue working without having to stress so much—they’d like to volunteer more or start their own company. I think all of these things would be pretty rad for society.

So what do you think would happen if we all had basic income tomorrow?
At first, nothing much would change. But in the long run we’d see people making freer choices, because they wouldn’t have to make decisions based on economic pressure—only based on what they actually want. They’d have time to actually think about what it is that they want or they are good at. Now, you're just trying to get through school quickly so you can get a good job.

OK, you are talking about privileged people with university degrees who actually expect their jobs to not just pay the rent but also be fun, rewarding, and fulfilling. What about the underpaid who are cleaning toilets, working in call centers, or taking care of the old?
I'm not just addressing the privileged here. Having a basic income puts everybody into a better position when it comes to negotiating with their employers. The guy cleaning the toilet could say, "Nope, not doing that any more." The employer could then say, "Let’s automate this and we’ll only have self-cleaning toilets from now on."

Yeah, but it’s hard to automate taking care of children or the old.
Exactly. In these cases, we’d finally have to ask ourselves what we value in society. We’ll have to start paying these people way better. I think having clean toilets is important. It’s work that needs to be done, but it is done today at the expense of people who can’t afford to get another job. And I don’t know anyone who’d say child care isn’t important—yet we have people doing this work for the lowest possible pay, because no profit is to be made.

I’d actually like to be a pre-school teacher. But when I think about what I’d make compared with working in IT, I ask myself, why should I? With a basic income I can now reconsider this option, because with that plus the pay I’d earn an OK living. I'm pretty sure I’d make a better pre-school teacher than IT guy.

The group of people advocating a basic income is a pretty mixed bunch—from leftists, member of the Green Party, and anthroposophists to Milton Friedmanites and members of the German Liberal Party. Where on this spectrum do you fall?
Nowhere. Basic income doesn’t fit this left-right diagram. It’s partly socialist, because it’s about giving everybody the same. It’s also individualistic, because it’s about lean government and less bureaucracy. It’s neither left-wing nor right-wing; it’s a third road. 

Today, politicians use it as a sociopolitical tool to get people to do what they want them to do. I think this strategy has gotten old, and it’s not working. Let’s give people some money and see what they do with it if they can decide for themselves.

What about your own agenda? Aren’t you also trying to prove a point?
Yes, but on another level. I think you can only achieve change by letting the people advocate their change. You can force people to do something they don’t want to do, but you can’t convince them. And most of all, you can’t force them to take jobs that aren’t there.

"The myth of full employment and the idea that everyone who doesn’t have a job is just not trying hard enough." What do you think of that?
That’s bullshit. In modern capitalism you can never have full employment. Having a reserve army of unemployed workforce at all times is necessary to keep the low-pay sector as a low-pay sector. There just isn’t enough paid labor for everybody. At the same time we are forcing people to take jobs that aren’t there. That’s just cruel.

Any other myths you’d like to bust?
People say, "Of course I would continue working if I had a basic income, but the others wouldn’t." That’s where I want to start. I want to show that most everybody would do something useful with their lives l if they had the money—it’s not just you. People want to contribute. You just have to let them.

People say a lot of things when asked. It doesn't mean they are actually going to do it.
Sure. But if you look at the 1.4 million people we already have in Germany today who could rely on welfare but prefer to work even though their job doesn’t pay enough for them to make a living—I’d say we can be fairly sure that people aren’t generally looking to be lazy. Even with the system we have now.

We Went to Marc Emery’s Welcome Home Party

0
0



Marc puffing and chatting inside of Toronto's Vapor Central. All photos via Aaron Wynia.
Marc Emery has been back in Canada for less than 48 hours, and he’s already exhausted.

In 2005, the DEA marched into Canada and arrested Marc on charges pertaining to his marijuana seed-selling business, which made heavy use of the United States Postal Service as part of its distribution network. In 2009, after a lengthy court battle, Marc pleaded guilty, and in 2010, he was sentenced to five years with time served.

During that time, he was bounced from a prison in Georgia to one in Mississippi, he said he read a book a week, learned to play bass, had a subscription to the New York Times and 25 other magazines, was never fucked with by other inmates, and according to him, routinely turned down offers to get high at 4:20 by other inmates, because he was scared of the “terrible, terrible things” that would happen to him if he failed a drug test.

So after that bass-playing, weedless, incarcerated ordeal, Marc returned to Canada on Tuesday to greet a mob of media and marijuana enthusiasts—one of which was dressed like a giant pot leaf—to give a speech in Windsor, Ontario (the port of his return) at 4:20 PM.

It’s been non-stop ever since.

Last night, I arrived at Vapor Central, a weed lounge in downtown Toronto, where several prominent marijuana activists were hosting a welcome home party for Marc. I had heard there was going to be a Marc Emery roast by a gaggle of local comedians starting at seven (that plan was quickly kaiboshed) and at 8 PM, I was told Marc would be arriving. Eight turned to 8:30, as I received text messages from his wife Jodie saying that Marc was in a deep sleep and couldn’t be woken. Unsurprisingly, being fresh out of prison, especially when you’re a cult figure in the Canadian weed community, is a very tiring process.

I finally met Marc in the basement of a gigantic head shop called THC next door to Vapor Central with Damian Abraham—y’know, the guy who screams in Fucked Up—and we went down to the basement, where they store the plant fertilizer, to chop it up about Canada’s new medical marijuana system. (The whole conversation will be online soon in a new episode of our series Canadian Cannabis).

Marc chatting with Damian Abraham, lead singer of Fucked Up and host of "Canadian Cannabis."

One of the major things we touched on, is Canada’s new medical marijuana system, which you can see the inner workings of in that Canadian Cannabis doc I just mentioned. If you’re not familiar, Canada has embraced a system of “licensed producers,” which are Health Canada-authorized weed manufacturers that are allowed to sell dried buds, and dried buds only, to doctor-approved medical marijuana patients.

That system sounds OK on paper, but it has a long way to go.

The new system, called the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR), was originally designed to completely strip the right to grow from medical marijuana users, an intent that has been partially reversed by attorney John Conroy. Plus, by only providing dried buds, it alienates any patient who prefers to ingest cannabis via edible, oil, or juice—the preferred methods for cannabis using children and seniors.

Marc, however, is optimistic about the MMPR. He refers to it as a “compromised increment” towards legalization. And, reminded us that more marijuana is being grown today than ever before. That, Marc says, is a victory. And it’s hard not to see why.

Marc Emery has spent most of his life fighting for marijuana legalization. He’s been pushing for logical laws and reasonable controls on marijuana for so long, that he reminisced over a time when the idea of shutting down a park on April 20 (4/20, duh) to smoke weed all day sounded insanely risky. Marc talks about handing out copies of High Times in front of police stations when Canada had a ban on marijuana publications. He says he’s been arrested in most Canadian provinces for smoking that cheeba.

Marc autographing a vaporizer.

So, an imperfect, but semi-legalized, marijuana industry in Canada is obviously a big deal to a guy who has been fighting for decades, and who just gave up half a decade of his life for the movement. But it’s hard not to see the rose-coloured optimism as a vehicle for grassroots, political lobbying, serving the larger goals of the Emerys’ own political careers.

During the course of 2014, I spoke to a lot of weed activists for Canadian Cannabis, and many of the most prominent ones are very deliberately getting behind the Liberal party. At the 420 rally in Toronto, chants of “Vote Trudeau” rang out from the stage. Pierre’s son says he’ll legalize if he gets into office, and the Emerys, who appear to have a bittersweet relationship with the Liberals already, are helping to galvanize what they believe is a very powerful Canadian lobby: the stoners.

Even with a mob of marijuana users behind them, the Emery’s advocacy work has not been received with open arms. Marc’s support of the Liberals has been used as an attack point by the Conservatives. Marc got Justin in trouble when he wrote about smoking weed with the Liberal leader in a blog written from prison. Jodie, meanwhile, seems poised to run for the Liberals in the Vancouver East riding, but apparently they’re afraid of getting behind her, because of what the Prince of Pot might say next. It’s a weird situation, but even still, Marc is very much motivated to push weed-lovin’ Canadians to the polls in 2015 to vote Trudeau.

After we finished our interview, we headed up to Vapor Central, where over 300 highly attentive smokers were waiting for Marc to speak. Vapor Central organizers shushed anyone who talked, and scurried towards anyone standing and blocking the view of others to make sure they sat the fuck down. I’d never seen a more attentive crowd of weed smokers in my life.

Marc in front of the Vapor Central crowd.

Following an introduction by his best friend Dana Larsen, the owner of popular weed compassion club, The Dispensary, in Vancouver, and president of the Sensible BC movement, Marc took the stage, flanked by two Canadian flags.

Marc’s supposed exhaustion melted away instantly, as he fed off of the subdued (but clearly engaged) energy in the room. Ostensibly fueled by the sheer excitement people felt from seeing the guy from their “Free Marc” T-shirts and stickers standing before them, a free man, who hasn’t been back to Canada (or gotten high) in over four years, Marc spoke for close to 40 minutes.

He talked about the amount of times he’s been arrested (28), the pundits in the Canadian press who have called him an “idiot” and an “obnoxious jerk” (Warren Kinsella, Margaret Wente), but who could never challenge him on his understanding of the facts, and said that once marijuana was set to be legalized, it will take the Minister of Health “five seconds” to remove it from the schedule of controlled substances.

According to Marc, even at a time where marijuana possession charges are actually on the rise in Canada, the marijuana movement has “never had it this good.” And, in the grand scheme of things, maybe he’s right.

There are now 13 licensed, legally operational, Canadian medical marijuana factories cranking out weed as you read this, which can easily be transitioned to recreational marijuana distributors at the drop of a hat. The writing, it seems, is on the wall, provided the Liberals can win and stick to their promise.

After 35 years of advocacy, it seems as if Marc Emery’s self-appointed job as Canada’s Prince of Pot may nearly be complete. As he prepares to tour the world to speak with politicians and academics about marijuana policy, his job at home might possibly be over soon.

As he himself said last night, if you’re sick of hearing about Marc Emery, or of hearing Marc Emery speak, his time in the spotlight may expire after the next election. And perhaps, at this point in his life, that’s exactly what he wants.


@patrickmcguire

Print's Not Dead: Thirty Years of Dalkey Archive Press

0
0

For the past 30 years Dalkey Archive has quietly and consistently been a vital aesthetic cornerstone in print. Each year the publisher produces a new stream of titles sourced from all over the world, extending one of the most ambitious catalogs in literature. From canonical cornerstones like Gaddis, Barth, Barnes, Ashbery, and Huxley, to lesser known or more contemporary masters such as Hawkes, Infante, Kiš, Gombrowicz, and Reed, and through a world literature series focusing on Catalan, Norwegian, and Turkish writers, among others, the archive maintains a colossal library of important works available all under one roof.

What’s more, Dalkey Archive has done all of this with little regard for its own sustainability—it keeps all its titles continuously in print, regardless of commercial success, focusing instead on giving life to works it finds culturally valuable. It’s sort of like a museum in that way, a source intent only on providing sustenance for major works that may have disappeared, or never appeared at all.

The best way to dig into the archive is perhaps to go to its website and start clicking around, but in the meantime here are some titles I got a lot out of and recommend.

Geometric Regional Novel, by Gert Jonke (Austrian Literature Series)

I originally ordered this book based entirely on its title, which seemed to suggest a novel mimicking how a computer would describe a fantastical location it had dreamed up and then tried to generate. Which is actually not far off from how this book actually works. Essentially it is a catalog of styles depicting the odd and often puzzling behaviors found within a town seemingly ruled by an anti-logic somewhere between Kafka’s impossible dilemmas and Borges’s theoretical puzzle games. Jonke is a master of describing insane social contraptions—such as forests you are told to fear because of an invisible enemy, lists of arbitrary laws you could never begin to keep track of—with a mathematical finesse, more interested in exploring the space of the world than necessarily driving along what happens in it. The world of the Geometric Region, then, works like an impossible video game you could never begin to complete, full of historical precedents and surrealistic laws that build of the landscape a world that could exist nowhere else but in the word. It’s like looking into a petri dish designed by Dalí, where the logic of why things are the way things are is full of so many stories there is no story left to follow.

Tripticks, by Ann Quin (British Literature Series)

If you’re into Kathy Acker or William S. Burroughs, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be all over Ann Quin, who appeared between those two in lineage and produced four book-length works of fiction before drowning herself at age 37. Quin was a quiet but major player among the British experimental novel scene, malforming various strands of the new novel movement into something between modernism and stream of consciousness. Tripticks, her last book, is perhaps my favorite, as it takes the American road novel and shreds it into a thousand different styles. Tripticks employs punk language, interview transcriptions, cubist landscapes, cartoon panels, letters, list-descriptions, insane definitions, science-fiction physics, gunplay, absurdity, and confessionalism into a dark and twisting narrative that changes direction as fast as you can keep up, kind of like an actual road narrative should be. It’s rare to find a book with so much manic energy that is still able to move you forward into a story overflowing with information and laced with a contemporary sadness that transcends its era into now with lines like, “Any attempt to pump life and humor into such a corpse as you have become is like fucking a mattress.” For people who got all excited about the rerelease of Renata Adler’s Speedboat last year, to me this one goes twice as far.

The Magic Kingdom, by Stanley Elkin (American Literature Series)

I’ve recommended this book so many times over the years, mostly because a one-sentence description of its premise makes it one of the easiest books ever to sell: the father of a recently deceased 12-year-old persuades the Queen of England to pay for him and seven terminally ill kids to go on a free vacation to Disney World, a last treat before all the other children die. It’s easy to sell to someone with dark tastes, sure, but what’s most refreshing about this willfully insane plot is how incredibly Elkin is able to twist the dark with the absurd, and the absurd with a strange sense of emotional depth, somewhere on the register of David Foster Wallace in his ability to transcend via description. Elkin’s dying children are in no way morose; they are often wild and strangely witty, allowing the orchestration of huge scenes as the grieving father steers them around the fun park, trying to maintain some sense of hope and self. It’s somehow equally hilarious, moving, surreal, brutal, and touching at once, whorled up in a cauldron of scenes fueled by one of the more overlooked American masters. 

The Other City, by Michal Ajvaz (Czech Literature Series)

Essentially, The Other City begins in a bookshop, with a man finding a particular title full of rune-like writing he has never seen before. In his exploration of the text and its aura's effect on his mind, he finds himself on an unraveling quest to a world contained between all the blank places among the everyday that most people overlook. The walls and beings of these spaces and people are, in Ajvaz’s gaze, all around us but hidden, essentially buried in broad daylight, perhaps underneath a cap in the ground or along a railway hidden underneath our feet. These worlds are connected to our own, and yet resemble a dream. The environments in The Other City are constantly on the cusp of the surreal, lacing everything that seems common with fantasy: sharks swimming in snow; massive flower ceremonies intersecting with ski lifts that bisect the city; strange animals with human properties; mazelike buildings; books within books; worlds within worlds.

Alix’s Journal, by Alix Cleo Roubaud (French Literature Series)

Alix Cleo Roubaud is perhaps best known as the young wife of integral member of the oulipo movement Jacques Roubaud. In the years following her death by pulmonary embolism, however, she has become recognized for her haunting photography, as well as the journals that chronicled the depression she experienced through the later years of her life. As its title implies, Alix’s Journal is set up as a journal, containing fragmentary accounts of her daily life as a bored young wife, though rather than stolid move-by-move narration, the text is by turns philosophical, depressed, minimalist, sentimental, pragmatic, death-obsessed, in love, drug-addled, objective… all in all meshing together stream of consciousness with matter of fact. Roubaud was an alcoholic and an insomniac, and much of what comes out of her seems half mired in dream, half in reality: “a dead rose sitting on my desk,along with a still life of negatives,prints,a sugar bowl,pots of ink,old postcards,recent unanswered letters,and a silent black camera,capped and dusty don’t do it,” Roubaud writes, in the typo-laden reportage of her world; “nightmares,all violent.” Rendered privately, not for direct publication or online, Alix’s Journal provides perhaps the most aesthetically modern relic of self-reportage possible.

Europeana, by Patrik Ouředník (Eastern European Literature Series)

Eurpoeana bills itself as “an eccentric overview of all the horrors, contradictions, and absurdities of this century.” It’s an ambitious statement, but somehow the book follows through. Ouředník boils down the strangest details of some of the most terrible and hellacious scenes to have taken place on earth, from plagues to World War I to contemporary racism and sexism, in just 122 pages. It’s almost guidebook-like, so flat and factual while at the same time describing the true evil of man, like a quiet parade of terror you find waiting in your sleep. I bought Europeana at a book fair one day when the editor working the table pointed at it and said, “Read the first sentence; you’ll buy it.” The first sentence is: “The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers.”

Other recommended titles:

Magnetic Field(s) by Ron Loewinsohn
Trio by Robert Pinget
With The Animals by Noelle Revaz
Project for a Revolution in New York by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford
Nightwork by Christine Schutt
Assisted Living by Nikanor Teratologen
Autoportrait by Edouard Levé
The Complete Butcher’s Tales by Rikki Ducornet
Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel
The Journalist by Harry Mathews
The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter

The Coming Robot Apocalypse Looks Like a Bunch of Spreadsheets, Not Killer Drones

0
0

Image via Flickr user Tim Regan

Francis Fukuyama’s claim that history ended in 1992 has long since ceded its prescience. These days, Ray Kurzweil claims that non-biological computing power will reach exponential growth starting around 2045, propelling humanity to its rightful destiny as a species that can cheat death itself. Whether these claims are true, or whether they’re part of the same obsession with the perpetually-imminent End Times that haunts many evangelicals, is less important than more mundane realities of ever-increasing computing power. Specifically, what do we do when all our jobs evaporate?

A Robot Apocalypse won’t arrive with a bang, nor a red-eyed Terminator crushing a human skull, but it’s already upon us in the form of a slow, steady drip. Most of us don’t even see the robots, who are generally algorithms and software programs as diffuse and impersonal as the internet itself. George Jetson worked an hour a day, two days a week. While much of his existence was fully automated, the only robot in his life was a sass-talking maid. We, who inhabit a world of greater and greater inequality (or so says French economist Thomas Piketty), should be so lucky. 

The Pew Research Internet Project asked almost two thousand technologists and analysts what they predicted for the year 2025, a future so close that it could be just after the conclusion of Hillary Clinton’s presidency. The prospect looks pretty bleak. Fully 48 percent thought “robots and digital agents [will] displace significant numbers of blue- and white-collar workers,” while the rest seem to believe that human ingenuity always wins the day. That rosy belief might be undercut when even Larry Summers, as big an architect of the system as they come, plainly asserts that Piketty’s grim predictions of the future fail to take in the “devastating consequences of robots, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and the like for those who perform routine tasks.” When consummate insiders prognosticate doom, maybe the sunnier words of people on Silicon Valley’s payroll should be taken with a grain of salt.

Image via Flickr user Carlos A. Smith

There appears to be a new economic order on its way. It goes by the emoticon-friendly name of the “sharing economy,” and its golden promises are legion. Sharing one set of power tools among neighbors sounds upbeat and sensible. And defraying some of your enormous rent by periodically letting strangers review your hospitality and the fluffiness of your towels is most enticing. To teachers without tenure or retirees without pensions, supplementary income might be a lifesaver.

But in some ways, that new order is crueler than even the dreariest cubicle farm. Corporate America has viewed labor as its biggest liability for decades now, and data-driven CEOs are sharpening the cudgel. Former GE Chairman Jack Welch once said the ideal business would involve placing every factory on a barge so that it could be towed to wherever the law was most hospitable to capital. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is actually trying to implement this. Less fantastically, so is Uber’s Travis Kalanick. His hostility towards human drivers, whose contractual employment is but an expendable waystation on the way to a post-human transportation grid, is well-documented. Kalanick breezily told an audience at the CODE Conference in May that as self-driving cars become a possibility, yes, Uber’s workforce will be history: “I would say to them this is the way the world is going. We have to find a way to change with the world.” 

Let’s be clear: the sharing economy isn’t exactly the same thing as artisanal guilds. And the potential phase-out of part-time Uber drivers won’t be like the disappearance of centuries-old trades, neither for its overall economic importance nor the more romantic reason of seeing age-old skills die off. Almost nobody becomes an Uber driver unless they have to—and that goes double for TaskRabbits. These are shitty jobs that college-educated people are forced into because their professions have been gutted, and any job stability they might once have enjoyed has been eviscerated. What’s being destroyed here might have little sentimental value, but it’s the type of contingent, piecemeal, on-call or freelance income people turn to when traditional means of employment have failed them. And even its days are numbered.

Image via Flickr user Don DeBold

You don’t even have to be replaced by an actual robot to feel the heat. The New York Times’s Jodi Kantor had an superb article on how major retailers use advanced software to schedule employees based on a number of factors, keeping those companies “nimble” (to use a favored buzzword) but all but guaranteeing that workers’ schedules are capricious, erratic and outright destructive of their personal lives. Such invisible automation choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of [Starbucks’] 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing. Managers are often compensated based on the efficiency of their staffing. 

In other words, the better you are at messing with your underlings’ lives, the bigger your bonus. Flexibility, the article notes, is usually considered a boon by professionals with office jobs; for some, the right to telecommute once each week is practically expected in the terms of their employment. But as it’s frequently a tool for maximization of profit at the expense of workers’ income stability, its disruptive side may not appear in economic statistics. No jobs are created or destroyed if a store’s employees are ordered to work 35 hours one week and 20 the next, even if the actual employees are barely hanging on. Unemployment statistics look to become even more hollowed-out and skewed than they already are.

Techno-utopians aren’t confronting their immiserating dystopia very honestly. If anything, disruption is celebrated to a fault, and if Airbnb quietly tosses hotel chambermaids to the wolves, well, that’s unappealing grunt work, anyway. The Pew Internet study’s most pessimistic forecasters have lots of fascinating tidbits to chew on, but they essentially agree that every job that can be automated will be, a trend that will go far beyond peripheral or admin or “pink-collar” positions such as X-ray technician or paralegal—something tech’s cheerleaders are reluctant to broadcast, for obvious reasons.

Whole categories of white-collar employment may be seriously undermined. One place to start might be those captains of capitalism themselves, the financiers. A lawsuit filed against Barclays in New York over its habit of secretly giving preferred clients a few milliseconds’ advantage over their competitors reveals just how little input homo sapiens have in the way money is made off of money. Ditto the intricacies of Bitcoin mining. Why do we need the humans at all? Has Wall Street been able to use its vast wealth and clout to shield itself from the same forces it unleashes on the rest of us without mercy? Given its propensity for disaster and the fact that it’s apparently thoroughly automated already, why not dose them with their own medicine? And can they even stop it if they tried?

Herein lies the potential silver lining. At the risk of spinning hedge fund managers as the canaries in the coal mine, surely there is some hope when doctors, lawyers and analysts see their incomes reduced, their stature threatened and their futures jeopardized. Here we come to an event horizon where globalized capitalism either eats itself alive or restructures itself fundamentally. Neither outcome would be smooth—in fact, worldwide upheaval sounds likelier. But the alternative is for more of us to succumb to the macroeconomic equivalent of carbon monoxide, indefinitely. The future we were promised, of limitless leisure kept afloat by a few breezy hours of work each week, looks more distant than ever. You might not even get a robot maid out of it.

Follow Peter Lawrence Kane on Twitter.

The Ferguson Protests in Photos

0
0
The Ferguson Protests in Photos

Our Man in San Fran: I Spent the Day with a Man Who Says He's Been Stabbed 13 Times

0
0

This is the third in a four-part series on housing the substantial homeless population in San Francisco, featuring stories from the people living on the margins of life in one of America's richest cities. Click to read Part 1 and Part 2.

Jeff was born in Fontana, California, home of the original Hells Angels. “They called it Felony Flats ever since I was a kid," he said. “I had to fight for my skateboard, my bike, everything, man.” Of all the rooms I’d been in so far, Jeff’s was the most expressive—every piece felt like a part of the man himself, from zombie-stripper playing cards, to a life-sized melted wax skull, to worn skateboard decks bolted to the walls as shelves. 

The room itself is an 8-by-10-foot unit on the corner of Market Street, overlooking the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Project. Jeff has lived there since he was released from prison in 2005. 

Everything seemed to flow out of him in massive waves. Out of his ink-covered throat, he spouted long and meandering stories in a sandpaper voice as his scarred-up arms would hold out another piece of iconography to examine: a greaser tchotchke, a gold tooth, a weathered photo of his mother. Jeff is clearly troubled in many ways, but we're sharing his story as a reminder of the harsh realities that many homeless face every day.

VICE: Where’d you get that scar?
Jeff: This one I got at a doughnut shop on Seventh and Market. This one got tattooed over.

How many do you have?
Man, I’ve been stabbed like 13 times. I'm 50; I shoulda been dead five times over by now.

How’ve you been stabbed that many times?
By not giving a fuck [heavy coughing and laughter].

How were your parents?
I was raised by my mom because my dad was too crazy. Sometimes I’d be playing in his car, and I’d find a gun under the seat. But my dad’s side of the family was into some other stuff that shouldn't be written about, and I really love my mom. I’m a mama’s boy, but my dad’s half Danish, so I’ve got that berserker blood. Since I was a little kid, I’d go into blackouts. See red, and it’s all bad.

Did you go to school?
No, I got kicked out of the whole Fontana School District when I was 15. Dude, my record was inches thick. But when I was a kid they wanted to put me in mentally gifted minors, that’s why I be reading, like, Milton and, you know, like, Dante—The Inferno, you know. Nietzsche. “A full and powerful soul not only copes with losses, robberies, or painful deprivations. It will emerge from these hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness." Nietzsche, 1888 [more heavy coughing].

Everything is subject to our perception, and to a great extent we’re a product of our environment. Me growing up in Fontana, in the dirt, tumbleweeds, rocks, and dogs—some streets you don’t ride your bicycle down 'cuz they got a pit bull named Satan that will, man, tear you to pieces. So moving up to Marin was total culture shock, and I used to come over here to Frisco. I used to rent rooms at the Columbus on Golden Gate and Columbus, right there on the corner, for, like, 12 bucks a night.

How much does your room now cost?
For me? My friend got me in here, Seamus. Great guy, but he’s dead now. I pay a certain amount of my income, but right now I’m on disability because my back is shot out from roofing. And because I went over the handlebars at 70 miles an hour, wide open in fifth gear. And then playing football, I got stovepiped twice.

Stovepiped?
We used to bang heads, right? To see who could get their helmets most marked up. Like, if you saw somebody’s helmet had a bunch of colors on it and bangs on it, you knew they were a hitter. And I was a defensive end, I was a beast. But so, if you don’t have your head up, if you have it down, it’ll compress your spine and knock your vertebrae out of place. That’s stovepiping. I got eight verts knocked out of place the first time, and then five the second time. But I loved bangin’ heads.

Jeff displays a stab wound

When did you come to San Francisco?
Like in '81. When I came over here, I was managing this apartment building and selling heroin on Hyde and Eddy. That’s where we made the porno.

Wait, what?
Yeah, I made a porno with Ellie Mae for ForbiddenSex.com, and I was like, “If I die today, I’ll be a happy man.” But remember when Gavin Newsom started housing all the homeless? Well, he was just down there by himself on Seventh and Market, and I just wanted to say, "Hey, thanks for all you’ve done for the homeless, you’ve done a lot for my friends, and blah, blah, blah," and he says, “What can I do for you?” and I was shocked. I told him, “I’m on the street, strung out on heroin, sleeping on the sidewalk, and I need to get indoors and on methadone." So he called the Homeless Outreach Team, told them, “I’m sending a guy over there." I went down, and half an hour later I was in a van. They were taking me to the Warfield [Theater]. I stayed there for a month or two. Then I got a new prescription, and I took six Somas and six Phenergan, and that’s when I woke up in the house in the Marina, and that’s when it all went bad. I got a new prison number at 40.

What happened to you?
Well, my car got stolen, with all my supplies and money in it for my roofing business, and I was taking pills. I was shooting a ton of heroin, and I had a couple drinks. Next thing you know, I wake up and I’m on my back. I look over, and there are these two BART cops looking at me. I tried to stand up, and WHAM, I fell right back down. SFPD showed up, ran my name, saw I had a warrant, and they took me in.

For what?
I had a warrant in Marin for possession. There, I didn’t sleep for 38 days. That’s when I told my old friend Dave, the head of the probation department, “Dave, I’m not gonna bullshit you, but I’m in a bad way, and I need to get out."  He told the judge, “Your Honor, I don’t know how this is gonna sound, but I have known this man, personally, for 20 years. And he has some very important business he needs to attend to, and I will vouch for him," and he got me out. At that point I was on methadone too, cause I was shooting 4 grams of heroin a day, just to stay well. I was getting like 25 bucks for like a half a gram, so that was a $200 a day, minimum, habit.

What did you do after getting out?
I came here, found my mom again, and I got clean. And I’ve been clean. It was just something I needed to do. I’m not a kid anymore. And it’s an expensive habit [heavy laughter]. I guess it’s been like nine years. Wow. I never really thought about it. Man, I was like 150 pounds with six teeth. I got a gold one now!

What’s the worst you’ve seen down here?
There’s a bathtub down the hall… a couple people died there. My buddy Jack, he died in his room. Shoot, when I was managing that apartment on Hyde and Eddy, Melissa hadn’t seen a guy in two weeks, and she’s like, “Let’s go check on him," and we went in his room, and they had these big Murphy beds that fold down, and I see these feet sticking out of the closet, and I’m like, Oh, shit. Homeboy was still alive, though! The paramedics said that he said something about the Giants in the ambulance, and then he died. He’d been lying there for so long that when they pulled his arm off his body, there was a sore there. I’ve seen some shit.

Any ODs?
I’ve saved a few; you just gotta breathe for them, that’s the trick. Tilt their head back, close their nose, put your mouth on theirs, and just blow really hard right into their lungs. I had to blow into Rigo’s mouth for four hours to keep him alive. He snored like a freight train, and his heart would go BUH-BOOM, BUH-BOOM, and then it would slow down, and he’d go out again. He wanted me to make him a shot, so I made him a shot, like I would do, right? Which was like 80 [mg] and some oil, and that dummy did it, and man, he was like my best buddy, he worked for me, and he had like the key to my place. His mom treated me like family, called me mijo. I was like a son to her. But my other buddy, he got into a fight; I seen him get shot right in the heart. With an Uzi.

Where do you get an Uzi? What happened?
Anywhere, shit—Chinatown, Bayview, East Bay, Oakland. But so, there’s this little party, and Shirley’s kid was trying to sleep, and Adam and Stash were about to get in a fight, so Rabbit comes in with this Uzi, and he hasn’t slept in like ten days, and he points the Uzi in Stash's chest and says, “Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out, all right?” and Stash just grabs the gun, twists it, yanks the clip out, and goes, “Now what are you gonna do, punk?” and Adam just went POW, shot him right in the heart. He fell straight back, BOOM, his head hit the door so hard. I walked up, and I looked into his eyes, and he was out cold.

Fuck, then what?
All these girls start screaming and crying and freaking out; people are hiding everywhere. Jason, this kid, he’s crying, I go “Man, shut up, stick your finger in the hole, stop the bleeding." Heh, it wasn’t even bleeding, I was just being an asshole. I hit 911 with my fingernail, and I went and grabbed our 12-packs out of the freezer, wiped my fingerprints off of everything, you know, and then I hid in SoCal for three years because they wanted me to testify. But yeah, that was fucked up, to see Stash get shot. He had a lot of potential. Watching people OD. Get shot. Get stabbed. Robbed. All that kinda good stuff. It can get ugly, some of these places.

That's rough, man.
I’ll tell you, I've had some ups and some downs, but the downs make the ups seem that much more up. And right now, in my life, I mean, I’m having it my way. I really am. I’m getting older, I’m not drinking, I’m clean, I’m doing what I want to do. Sometimes I’ll take my board out on Sunday when the streets are closed and go carving all around. This thing flies. 

Next week, we talk to an SRO resident who alleges that he holds the record for the most successful attempts to break into the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

My Life with Lindsay Lohan: A London Writer’s Shocking Confessional

0
0

Matt “Wolfboy” Connor

Matt “Wolfboy” Connor’s literary zines—self-published and recently made into a compilation by De Stijl Records—are like what John Fante would been writing about if he were a music-obsessed, skateboarding hardcore kid turned babysitter turned (student) nurse.

For like Fante, Wolfboy has had many jobs, travelled to many places and encountered lots of curious situations. But nobody’s life can be encounter-filled constantly, so he expounds on the mundanity of daily life by exploring the details of existence with what some might call an obsessive-compulsive disorder. By virtue of doing that, he can be talking about a Felt B-side for four pages and it somehow ends up coming out as a treatise on broken hearts and getting to the bottom of why girls can be so mean sometimes.

He is friendly with Palace Skateboards, sometimes nanny to London’s rock "n" roll royalty and his new book is called Friends of the Family and has Lindsay Lohan on the cover, because these are the kind of people he rolls with sometimes—in between volunteering at homeless shelters in LA (where he met Lohan) and falling off his bicycle.

VICE: Hi Matt. How’d you get started on this crazy road where you ended up meeting Lindsay Lohan?

Matt Connor:
I was 13, but can’t remember what it was about now. All I do remember is that an English teacher complimented me on my writing, which got me saying I wanted to be a writer whenever adults asked me what I wanted to do with my life. This was partly because this was the first time a teacher complimented me on anything.

Writers tell stories, but there are as many types of writers as there are stories. At first, most of my writing was informed by this idea that the writer was a "reporter," a "recorder of information." In my case this largely consisted of writing to bands I had read about in fanzines, asking them questions that they would answer on a cassette which I would then transcribe, trying to shape 45 minutes worth of hums, ahhs, and silence into coherent text. This transcribing, editing, cutting and pasting was my writing at the time. My interview with UK Hardcore mavericks Extreme Noise Terror (complete with portraits of the band hand-drawn by the late Phil Vane on the back of the return letter) was one of my early short stories. Now, I can see that I was practicing what I am still practicing today, even though my methods have developed, for better or worse, the more I have read and have written.

What made you wanna become a writer? What were the books or films or records that made you wanna do that?

In the beginning, my knowledge of writers went as far as the Shakespeare we were meant to read at school, plus a bit of Kerouac, Burroughs and Bukowski that I probably read about in Thrasher. I tried to emulate things I read in fanzines, and things I'd seen on the counters of record shops, or had been sold by lone men or women at gigs. The NME of the time was also a big influence, and I remember being caught reading it at the back of maths, the teacher genuinely bemused that I was reading a "newspaper." This made me want to be a reader, too.

From quite early, I associated being a writer with a sort of freedom; being able to escape the drudgery of my actual life in a small town. What I gleaned from the aforementioned books, for better or worse, encouraged this idea. What freedom meant, or what I would actually do with this freedom if I was ever granted it, I had no idea.

Until one day, when I was invited, as an older friend’s guest, to a terraced house in Bolton, where the owners of Manchester's Eastern Bloc records lived. In their front room they had a mini ramp. It didn’t matter that you had to bend over to avoid banging your head on the ceiling when you were stood on top of it, or that it was only six feet wide and a few feet high. Because these were the first adults I had known who weren’t either my parents or schoolteachers. And they had a ramp, standing where I had only ever previously seen a television and sofa. This I now associated with freedom.

The cover of 'Friends of the Family'

You worked at the adult video shop Dreamy Lips in Soho at some point. Perhaps this foreshadowed your meeting with Lindsay Lohan—she appeared in that film The Canyons with adult performer, James Deen.
I moved to London on the premise that I was attending university, but really I moved here for the skate spots, music, books, art and culture which I had read about. It was my roommate who first had the job in Dreamy Lips, and he introduced me to the shop’s elderly Maltese proprietors.

Looking back, I can see that working in there was the culmination of reading a lot of American crime fiction (Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Raymond Chandler, etc). In my head, I had created the impression that a writer’s life, if he is going to be a proper, "authentic" writer, needs to be gritty and a little bit of a messy. This can be problematic, because it can, and nearly did, get in the way of any actual writing.

For example, I didn’t actually write anything during this period, and just behaved as if I might be working on something. People succumb to all kinds of ghastly habits that they can stay stuck with years later. Fortunately, I only worked in a dirty video shop for a year, and I now know that you can be just as good, or as bad a writer, even if you’re a babysitter. 

Soho’s changed quite a bit since your days there, eh?
The Soho that I gravitated to, the one that is all alleyways, illegal drinking dens and neon lights, does seem to have shrunk. Things have been tidied up, but essentially people are still the same. For example, all the male prostitutes used to congregate in Burger King in Leicester Square. That’s where they went, and so would you if you were looking for their company. While they don’t hang around there now, or with the advent of the internet, have to, prostitution has not gone away. It has just changed. People still fuck and get fucked regardless of Jamie Oliver opening up a new restaurant.

Hopefully, the world is always going to be equally terrifying and exciting when you're stepping into it as a young adult for the first time. I’m sure it wasn’t any better in the 1960s. Your parents were just younger, and if they had been older, they would have moaned just like me about how things aren’t as good as before. For example, I am now at the age when I sometimes overhear people reminiscing about tiny moments in history, where I realise I was also in attendance. Sometimes I even read about these events in magazines or newspapers. It’s always about how you want to remember it, which is fine.

Take the Pistols playing at the 100 Club—I wasn’t there but you won’t be able to convince me that everybody who was in attendance had that same experience they now chronicle in all the official punk history books. What about the people stuck outside, or those being sick in the toilets, or those stuck at the bar? Was everybody in strict agreement that they were taking part in a pivotal moment in history, so shouldn’t drink too much in case they were later expected to recall the evening in minute detail? Maybe it's because I have always been the guy stuck at the bar. I saw Blur once at the pub—they weren’t very good then, and they aren’t now.

As well as your meeting with Lindsay Lohan, music plays a really big part in these stories. What got you into music as a kid?
It wasn’t just listening to the music that was a fun thing to do—it was everything that went with it. For starters, I had to find a record shop—once I exhausted Woolworths, the nearest one was 25 miles away. This meant travelling to the city alone for the first time in my life. I would find the record shop I was looking for, and then hang around the counter or the section I was most interested in. A couple of times I got lost and was robbed by local kids.

In these shops, I would meet others like me who had made similar journeys. Some of these people were slightly older, so their influences were already wider than mine, and these would be shared out among us. Eventually I made friends with the staff at Eastern Bloc records, who were nice enough to interrupt playing promos destined for the Hacienda to play me the latest hardcore 7”s, much to the frustration of the DJs gathered at the counter. I now look back upon these men (including Martin Price from 808 State) as my teachers.

Every new record I discovered made me want to be a writer, because writing about them (and more importantly thinking about writing about them) was my way of expressing enthusiasm—I still didn’t dare to dance.

Why do Oasis crop up in the book? What was that first wave of Oasis mania like? Did you experience it? It was almost like the Lindsay Lohan mania.
Definitely Maybe came out the year I stopped attending university. Oasis' first album is the sound of a band taking their first steps outside of the bedroom/rehearsal room they had been writing the songs in. Songs written when they were still living at home, dreaming of big houses, immortality, hotels, what goes on in London and generally being a rock "n" roll star. What they would do with their freedom once they had secured it, was always going to be their business. 

Until I dropped out of university I felt that, even though I had moved to London, I was still living in my proverbial bedroom—listening to the same records, reading the same books and eating the same food. Until 1994, I hadn’t ever drunk coffee or eaten couscous. Suddenly, I not only drank coffee and ate couscous (mixed with tinned tuna), but found myself collecting glasses in a gay club and smoking cigarettes. Before that I worked in a launderette and lived on cheese and onion sandwiches. It was as if, like Definitely Maybe, I had also finally arrived that year.

But while I liked the first album, I felt no pressing need to actually be at the concerts. I went to the Olympia one as a friend’s guest, and it was pretty boring. I remember wandering around thinking "Is this it?" You had to reassemble what it was supposed to sound like in your imagination—the sound was that bad. Alex Higgins and the singer from The Only Ones were at the after-show, I remember.

Kate Moss is a fan of yours, right? How did she get a copy of one of your zines?
I’m not sure she is a fan, although she has had my fanzines pushed upon her as presents by mutual friends. Like books at Christmas—who knows what happens to them. I am a nanny, and the children I look after are friends with her children. I once had to pick up the children from hers, and while she got ready she put on the Peter Kaye Christmas Special, before making me a vodka and tonic. I remember thinking that to be in that position could be seen as enviable – especially since, looking back, I would have been being paid hourly at the time. But she got ready, we went to the kids party, lost each other and life goes on. The children are now older and don’t need picking up from people's houses any more. And I don’t get invitations to go on my own.

The life you have lived—with all the different jobs and travelling all over, working and being friends with artists – has been kinda wildly bohemian, but not in the Rolling Stones 1960s sense. Do you know what I mean? Do you consider yourself a bohemian?
I don’t know about that, really. I haven’t really had a proper career, just a succession of jobs that have never paid more than the minimum wage. And I’m now 43 and back at school studying to be a nurse. I suppose you could call that being a bohemian. Whereas once I found this lack of direction frustrating, I am now glad of the experiences I've had doing different things, especially when, at a certain age, I saw others who had focused on one thing: "succeed."

I feel very successful, although for a while back there I doubted this, and I would have been happy just to be richer. Not any more. I think it’s very important to be positive. Now I think that the real creativity lies in how you survive without doing yourself in, while remaining creative. Some of this has to do with the company you keep. How you go about it is your business, but it’s important to figure out.

I hope people have got this far down the article cause of the Lindsay Lohan headline. What happened the time you met her?
I think she was in the same building as me for a while but we never actually met.

Cool.

This book about Lindsay Lohan is available for £3.50 in the UK and £4.50 worldwide from Oogabooga in Los Angeles, Good Press in Glasgow and Dolon Books in London.

Wolfboy's Greatest Hits compilation is available here.

Follow Andy on Twitter

VICE Shorts: I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'Master Muscles'

0
0

Efren Hernandez’s Master Muscles has a very literal sense of humor. He obscures the traditional set-up and punch line formula by basically being all punch line. His film Muscle Man plays out like a highlight reel of a severely dysfunctional couple whose home videos have found their way onto Youtube. Many of the jokes stem from the ridiculous domme/sub relationship between the two characters: a nebbish, balding white man and a strong, spunky muscular black woman. What begins like a simple home video turns into a show of strength and a battle of egos between real life body-builder Jehina Malik and director/actor Efren Hernandez. 

The strengths of the short are hidden in its simplicity. The frenetic structure, offbeat pacing, and shitty equipment offer an intimacy that allows the film to shock and surprise with its antics. The cuts from Efren to Jehina, slashing couches with knives to eating dinner with forks, and blaring metal music to silence somehow exemplify all of life's incongruities. Whether Hernandez meant do that or just lucked out is tough to determine. But regardless, the film is a trip and I bow to it. Master Muscles. Master Muscles. Master Muscles.

Director Efrén Hernández was born in 1989 and lived in Los Angeles until he moved to New York City to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Now he makes his living as a chef and creates movies when he can. Master Muscles was an official selection at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. I reached out to Efren to see if he could drop some insight on his funny little film. Check it out. 

VICE: Directing and acting in a film about you getting dominated by a muscular black woman seems like an odd way to make your cinematic debut. What do you think?
Efren Hernandez:
I guess it's a little weird. It's been with me for such a long time that it's not odd to me anymore. I also couldn't see myself asking someone to play the part. It seemed like a hard thing to ask an actor to do and conceptually it felt like it needed to be me. I think it works [laughs].

Where did you meet Jehina Malik? Was it love at first fight?
I met her sister first. Her sister was a basketball player and I was doing camera work on a web show called Pimp My Website. It's like MTV's Pimp My Ride, but no Xzibit and it's about websites. She was the guest. She told me about her family and mentioned her sister was a bodybuilder. I asked her if I could meet her because I had already written a version of the movie by then. Then I met her at a bar and when we ordered beers she told the bartender, "I don't know what it was, I drank it here last week." The guy had no idea what she was talking about, so she walked behind the bar, opened their refrigerators, looked around, and pulled out some kind of strawberry beer. They all let her do whatever she wanted. I fell in love after that.

The camera work, casualness of your performances, and the free-wheeling spirit of the film give the impression of a documentary. But it's a narrative. Was your intention to convince people it was real?
No, not really. It was a way to make a movie with no resources. We had no money and maybe three or four people on set at all times. So I just thought up of something that would work within those constraints that would be entertaining and could still be appreciated on a more conceptual level. I draw a lot from internet videos. So part of the initial idea was to make a movie where if you just took out every individual scene, it could be a Youtube video. I have gotten a lot of people asking me if it's real and if Jehina's actually my girlfriend. That's a really cool response to get but it also makes me paranoid that people don't think I actually know how to make a movie. Which I probably don't, but I like to think I can fake it pretty well. 

How much of the film is improvised? 
We improvised a lot. I had too much footage. Then I sort of forgot about the script and started cutting it all down until we had the version of the movie we have now. At some point, I looked back at the script and realized we unknowingly cut it really close to the script. I'd say it's about 80 percent scripted and the rest is improvised. 

Was it a collaborative process with Jehina?
Chowing down like a mother is one of my favorite lines and that's all Jehina. It was definitely collaborative. When I first met with Jehina about the movie, we worked out what our relationship in the movie would be like and she never stopped treating me that way. She still treats me that way. Instead of a hug, I get a headlock which you'd think should feel embarrassing but I think it's pretty cool. We both shot the movie together, shared the camera, and she would remind me of my lines when I forgot them. She knew the script better than me at some points.

She's tough.
When we were on the beach, I was a little worried about people seeing us doing the thing where she rides on my back like a horsey. I remember her saying something like, "don't be a little bitch, let's do this." That might not be what she actually said, but that's what I remember hearing. That's a really cool thing to hear your actor tell you. I'm really grateful I got to make the movie with her.

What are you working on now?
I'm making another short film right now. This one's about conjoined twins. It's called Ham Heads. I have a Kickstarter page up for it. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

It’s Time To Learn About the Female Prostate

0
0



Screencap via Google.

VICE recently published two articles that both happened to reference the female prostate. This caused quite a stir in the comments section with several readers left incredulous at the authors’ seemingly poor grasp of human anatomy, with the general message being, “Women don’t have prostates. VICE sucks now, etc.” Instead of starting a flame war on the so-called ins and outs of the female anatomy, we asked Kara Crabb if she wanted to respond by writing her own guide to the female prostate. Here’s what she wrote.

One of the great things about having access to the internet is the unbelievable wealth of information that exists, literally, at the touch of your fingertips. As a person in the 21st century, in North America, I use search engines to learn about things that I’m curious about on a daily basis. One thing that I have been curious about in the past is whether or not females have prostates. I was curious about this, because I heard the fluid excretes from “g-spot” stimulation, but I also heard that it secretes from a gland homologous to the male prostate. Ultimately, I just wanted to optimize my body’s potential for having fun.  

Screencap via Google.

I will use this example (my curiosity about reproductive anatomy) to show you how to type words into an internet search bar for the goal of acquiring new information.  

1. FINDING A SEARCH BAR

Usually people can find this intuitively, but if you haven’t had much experience with technology, or if your brain works in a different way than the rest of civilization, it might be a little more difficult. Search bars seem to be available as soon as you open an internet browser. They are usually located at the top right side of the window. I like to use Google Chrome’s toolbar because I like the colors, layout, and monopolization of virtual behavior—but it’s up to you! As long as you can use a keyboard (or speech-recognition program) you can do it!

Screencap via Ask.

2. THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE THE SEARCH ENGINE TO LOCATE

This part can be a bit tricky. Since search engines use your language to sift through a massive archive of text, there can definitely be miscommunication challenges to overcome. Example: What if I wanted to learn about a concept that I didn’t know the right word(s) for? What if I wanted to learn about sexual determination in fetal development but all I knew were the words “girl,” “boy” and “baby?” I probably wouldn’t get the search results that I wanted, because I’m a fucking idiot, but maybe I would get something close enough to start my long and intensive journey towards personal betterment.  

Screencap via Google.

3. THINK ABOUT WHAT SOURCES YOU SHOULD TRUST

Arguably, you shouldn’t trust any source because everything is a lie and human perception decieves us continually, but for the sake of culture, let’s pretend we need to assume certain characteristics about reality in order to participate in verbal dialogue. Who or what should I trust?

Well, based on what I know from being alive, “science” is something my culture values, and most science experiments are conducted at universities, so I think I should trust the studies of researchers from universities. While this does narrow my selection of sources, I still have to take into account that humans are insane and language likes to compartimentalize “truth,” by principle, it seems, I guess, maybe.

Screencap via Google. 

4. TRY USING AN ALTERNATIVE SEARCH BAR

If you realized that you’re getting boring results, try typing words in other places. Since it’s 2014, we have access to a lot more interesting platforms of text mining. I like Ngram Viewer because it searches text from publications throughout history. Here you can see that the term “Skene’s gland” was likely invented around 1890.



Screencap via Google.

Here you can see the term “prostate” was being used in publications even before 1800.

 

Screencap via Google.

I think this shows an interesting quality of modern medicine. At least one century after the gland was acknowledged in males, the homologous gland was acknowledged in females. It wasn’t until 2001, that it was finally accepted as the same thing.

Let’s mine some more things!

Here we can see that public interest in “female ejaculation” has decreased over time, but boasts regional interest in Kenya. What does this mean? Do males control the world? What was it called before it was called “female ejaculation?” “Fun time?”


Screencap via Google.

Here we can see that “Skene’s gland” has only been of interest in the United States, and out of the last eight years, pretty much only during 2013. I think this means women have been crushed by Western medicine for too many centuries, but who am I to judge? I’m just a blogger on the internet.

One last note: it’s important to realize that the internet is a gift from the universe. Just like the human prostate, it should be shared by everyone, no matter what sex, and milked relentlessly until we can no longer function. It’s easy to type in something dumb and get a quick result from a shitty website that will infect your computer with viruses, but the more thorough and considerate your search-inputs are, the better rewards will come from this magic Metaverse. 

@karacrabb

Growing Greener Grass

0
0

Photos by Emily Brady

According to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Energy Policy, the carbon footprint of a single gram of cannabis grown in a closet-sized hydroponics unit is "the same as driving seventeen miles in a Honda Civic." To put that in perspective, every time Snoop declares "We gonna smoke an ounce to this,” that's—as any good herb dealer knows—28.3 grams of indo getting rolled up, to the tune of 481 Honda Civic miles. Just enough, coincidentally, to drive from Snoop's home in Los Angeles to Northern California's legendary Emerald Triangle, long famed for producing the world's finest outdoor marijuana.

Back-to-the-landers first started growing ganja up there in the 1960's, after seeking out cheap homesteads in a remote, ruggedly beautiful area that had recently been hard hit—economically and environmentally—by the cut-and-run tactics of the logging industry. Not only didn't those early hippies see any harm in tending a few pot plants alongside their vegetables—to get high off, and to help make ends meet—they actually believed deeply in cannabis as a medicine, a sacrament, and an alternative to petroleum, alcohol and synthetics.

Only now, half-a-century later, sad as it is to say, their beautiful dream has been transformed by materialism and official malfeasance into a Golem that sucks the land dry amid a very worrying drought; poisons wildlifespoils hillsidescontaminates rivers, spills diesel, and creates serious fire hazards. All because the state of California, nearly twenty years after voters approved legal medical marijuana, still refuses to regulate the cultivation of cannabis in any meaningful way. And when Mendocino County (one third of the Emerald Triangle, along with Humboldt and Trinity) implemented an innovative zip-tie program in 2010 to effectively tax and regulate outdoor growing—including requiring responsible environmental practices—the Feds came down on them with a vengeance.

And so what's been left behind is a laissez-faire fantasy land where the invisible hand of the black market decides whether or not it's a good idea to divert a barely trickling stream in order to water your hundreds (or thousands) of chronically thirsty pot plants, or how much rat poison is too much when growing a medicinal herb, or if the diesel generator powering the massive indoor “bud factory” you've erected in the middle of nowhere requires a containment tank (vs. “fuck it”), or if leveling off that hillside could lead to some nasty mudslides down the road, or how much chemical fertilizer you can dump onto the land before it causes massive algae blooms downstream that threaten everything from bears to salmon.

According to the organization Grow It In the Sun, The disproportionately high price of cannabis under prohibition has set the stage for these remote watersheds to become 'sacrifice zones' for short-term profits. [...] This marijuana mono-economy is now totally pervasive in the Emerald Triangle.” 

Of course, if pot prohibition incentivizes High Intensity Discharge (HID) lights with huge carbon footprints indoors and lawless environmental degradation outdoors, the situation should be much better in Colorado, where the Department of Revenue licenses and regulates medical cannabis growers, and now does the same for the state's recreational marijuana supply. But according to Kayvan Khalatbari, a leading legal cannabis entrepreneur in Denver, things remain far from optimal in the Rocky Mountain State.

“Right now, you have four and a half million square feet of cultivation facility space in Denver County alone,” He tells VICE, “and the pressure that puts on our electrical grid, and our water supply, it’s just massive.”

Khalatbari co-owns and operates Denver Relief, one of Colorado's longest-running marijuana retailers, plus a national cannabis industry consulting firm, three pizza shops and a burgeoning stand-up comedy empire. So he's a “real business person,” albeit one with deep roots in marijuana culture and activism. 

“We’ve been working really progressively, I like to think, for the last year, on sustainable technologies and methodologies,” He says, “including how to create incentives for the rest of the industry to adopt technologies that generally will be more expensive on the front end than they'd like.”

According to Khalatbari, too many of his competitors retain a prohibition-era mindset that stifles innovation and long-term investment. And so, the first wave of legal marijuana cultivation in America has largely taken the technologies and protocols of the bootleg era and scaled them up.

Enter a commercial cannabis production facility in Denver today, even one of the best run operations, and you'll see pretty much the same HID lights you'd find in a twelve-plant basement garden set up by a crafty teenager in Des Moines, Iowa. Lights that were designed not for growing plants, but for illuminating parking lots and ball fields, according to Neil Yorio, a former NASA scientist who now serves as a technology advisor for Denver Relief.

“It's my opinion that most growers are pretty much just following dogma,” Yorio says. “They all clone or seed their plants under fluorescents, vegetate under metal halides and flower under high pressure sodium. And when I ask: Why do you do that? Their answers always vary, but really it's because that's what they were told, or what they read in a book. So these growers are using technology that's old and energy wasteful, because it was the best technology available at the time they began using it. But when you look at things from a purely scientific perspective, cannabis can be cultivated in a much more efficient manner, with a far better outcome in terms of yield and quality.”

Yorio and his colleagues at NASA first got interested in grow lights back in the early 1990's while researching ways to design and build a bioregenerative life support system capable of “using crop plants in a sealed environment to keep humans alive in space, on the moon, or on Mars for long durations.” At the time, LED technology hadn't progressed much past tiny clock radios, but tasked with developing highly efficient, highly durable, lightweight, powerful lights suitable for space missions, Yorio and his team saw their potential.

Just five years ago, he wouldn't have recommended LED's for commercial marijuana cultivation, because the technology hadn't advanced far enough, but today, he says, his company Lighting Science offers “a robust, commercial grade fixture” that puts out sufficient light for growing high-grade cannabis while offering significant savings on energy use, water use and maintenance.

“When Neil first asked if we'd R&D test his new LED fixtures, we initially told him the exact same thing we’d previously said to a million other LED providers, 'No, thanks.'” Khalatbari recalls. “Because in the past, LEDs just haven't matched up to high-intensity discharge lights. But then we looked at Neil's background, and some white papers he brought to the table, written by Bruce Bugbee, a Utah state professor.”

Denver Relief eventually installed Light Science's LED fixtures in a small portion of their existing grow space on a trial basis, agreeing to run “three full tests comparing them apples-to-apples with HID lamps.” The results showed the LED fixtures produced equal or better results in terms of yield and potency, with energy savings of around 25% on lighting, plus additional savings on maintenance, cooling and water. 

At that rate, conversion to LED pays for itself rapidly for existing commercial growers, and the technology makes even more sense for those building new facilities from the ground up. Khalatbari says that's why he's currently expanding his own use of LED fixtures, and also recommends them to consulting clients in Canada, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Illinois, and Massachusetts.

“But that’s just one piece of what we’ve starting doing with Neil,” he says. “There’s also an ex-NASA colleague of his at the University of Maryland who really wants to dig into water conservation options for the cannabis industry. So he's just come here and installed sensors and other tracking devices to remotely monitor and measure our water use, soil moisture, transpiration rate, plant temperature, and what we’re pouring down the drains.”

One immediate goal is developing alternatives to using reverse osmosis to “clean” tap water before it reaches plants, since that process wastes two gallons of water for every one gallon it produces. While the bigger picture calls for bringing together a broad coalition of industry, consumers, government, utilities and academia to share information, set goals and develop environmental best practices. Xcel Energy, among Colorado’s largest utilities, has already sent efficiency experts  into marijuana cultivation facilities, to analyze their energy use, and offer rebates designed to push growers towards better methods and technologies.

“There haven’t been many studies of cannabis sustainability, and that presents a challenge,” Janet Burgesser, of the City and County of Denver's Department of Environmental Health tells VICE. “We’re basically starting from scratch to come up with these overall impacts and how to reduce them.”

Burgesser, who “didn't know a heck of a lot” about marijuana cultivation when the state first started regulating medical cannabis, now works together with the industry to help reduce its outsized impact on the area's energy grid and water supply (which Xcel estimates at “150-200 gigawatt-hours per year, or about one half of one percent” of total annual electric sales). She doesn't see direct government intervention as likely in the near future, but instead hopes that a message touting the combined social and financial return of adopting green practices will yield results.

“When I first started visiting these marijuana businesses, they were very open to working with the Department of Environmental Health,” She says. “They'd all tell me, 'We’d like to save money and reduce our impacts, we just don’t know how yet.' So hopefully people like Kayvan can demonstrate what's achievable and convince others to follow.”

Of course, when it comes to conserving energy and promoting sustainability, nothing comes close to growing cannabis in the sun—provided you've got a suitable climate and sound environmental practices. Remember, the serious problems up in California's Emerald Triangle aren't inherent to outdoor marijuana cultivation, but instead stem from the current grey market's unfettered incentivization of short term profit and total lack of effective regulation.  

Outdoor growing also costs a lot less than indoor, which is why the long-term future of legal cannabis in Colorado may lie in large-scale greenhouses with supplemental light. At least until the federal government's all-out ban on marijuana ends, and interstate cannabis commerce opens up, allowing the nation's marijuana supply to be grown wherever conditions prove most suitable—just like any other other commercial crop.

In the meantime, green-minded ganja consumers can opt to do their part by supporting eco-friendly marijuana cultivators. For most of the country, reliably sourcing herb grown in this manner remains something of a pipe dream due to the “take it or leave it” nature of most illegal marijuana sales, but the good news is that when marketed effectively in legal states, the pot buying public does seem willing to reward those who strive to produce Mary Jane without harming Mother Earth. 

According to Rick Pfommer, Director of Education at Harborside Health Center in Oakland, California—the nation's largest cannabis retailer—sun-grown marijuana grew from 5 percent to over 20 percent of their total sales in 2012, the first year they adopted the term to describe their outdoor and greenhouse-grown offerings. And sun grown buds not only tread lightly on the planet, they also offer a superior medicinal product with a longer lasting high. 

“Sun Grown cannabis contains many more cannabinoids than its lamp grown counterparts,” Pfommer wrote in a recent essay for Cannabis Now magazine. “As more states legalize, those with a stake in the future, and I believe that is all of us, should be demanding that the cannabis they consume has been grown with as little ecological impact as possible. And the only way to ensure that is by using the sun.”

Follow David Bienenstock on Twitter.

How American Cricket Farmers Raise Bugs for Us to Eat

0
0
How American Cricket Farmers Raise Bugs for Us to Eat

Cry-Baby of the Week

0
0

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: TW Jenkins

Julion Evans, Kendall Capers, and Pastor TW Jenkins. Screencaps via KSDK

The incident: A church found out that a man they were scheduled to hold a funeral for was gay.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: They canceled the funeral. 

Last week, 42-year-old Julion Evans died of a condition called amyloidosis. He was due to be buried at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Tampa, Florida—a church that he and his family were members of. 

The day before the funeral was scheduled to take place, someone from the church called Julion's mother to tell her that the funeral was canceled. She received the call during Julion's wake, while she was standing over his coffin.

According to KSDK, the church canceled after noticing in Julion's obituary that he had been married to a man. 

TW Jenkins, pastor of New Hope, spoke with a reporter from the network and confirmed that they'd canceled the funeral because Julion was gay. "I try not to condemn anyone's lifestyle," he said. "But at the same time, I am a man of God and have to stand upon my principles." Which suggests TW could stand to try a little harder to not condemn lifestyles.

The pastor had also agreed to be interviewed on camera by KSDK, but refused to answer the door when a reporter went to speak to him. So maybe he's just kinda flaky when it comes to making plans. 

"Regardless of our background, our sexual orientation, how can you wait that long and put someone in a bind when they're going through a loss?" said Julion's widow, Kendall Capers. 

Julion's funeral instead took place at a nearby funeral home. He and Kendall had recently gotten married in Maryland. They had been a couple for 17 years. 

:(

Cry-Baby #2: Alicia Rae Hanson

A stock photo of some short shorts via Wikimedia Commons

The incident: A woman wore short shorts to a party.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: Another woman beat the shit out of her.

Back in June, 25-year-old Alicia Rae Hanson was at a company barbecue organized by a tree service company in Snohomish, Washington.

According to court papers filed last week by Snohomish County prosecutors, Alicia was not too happy with the outfit being worn by an employee's girlfriend. 

Alicia is alleged to have confronted the woman about her shorts. According to court papers, she began "claiming that they were too short for the barbecue and acting in an aggressive manner." 

A few minutes later, Alicia allegedly ran up to the woman and punched her, knocking her to the ground. Witnesses say she then jumped on top of the victim, before repeatedly hitting her in the face and pulling her hair out. 

Onlookers pulled the two apart and called the police. According to a report in the town's local paper, police arrived to find "a pile of blond hair extensions on a table," which had been pulled from the victim's head.

Alicia was arrested and charged with felony second-degree assault. Her victim sustained broken facial bones and bleeding from her eye in the attack. 

At the time of press, no news reports mention how short the short shorts were.

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here. Thanks.

Previously: A woman who cried because there was mold in her burger buns vs. a woman who called the cops because her son was watching porn

Winner: The porn mom!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter


What I Learned from Having My Drink Spiked with GHB

0
0

Photo by Nadja Brenneisen

You have to be pretty sick to take GHB voluntarily – the dosage is very hard to get right. Even sicker people use the anaesthetic in order to drug women and then rape them.

In the last 18 months, I have been unknowingly given GHB three times in doses that knocked me out. Here's what I learned from each horrific experience:

LESSON ONE: DON'T LEAVE YOUR DRINK UNATTENDED

Alternatively, keep the lid of your next Starbucks Frappuccino and convert it into a drink shield.

The first time I was drugged was at Kanzlei – a club in Zurich I would have never gone to out of my own free will. But birthday girls get to pick the bar, and it was not my birthday. After walking around the club for a bit, I decided that the bar area seemed to be the place where I would most likely have a good time so I set up camp there. During a visit to the toilet, someone must have added an extra secret ingredient to my drink.

I came back, emptied my glass and decided I fancied a dance. I felt good. The dots of light on the floor were brighter than before and flickered. I danced with them, in them and suddenly felt violently sick. I ran to the bathroom and collapsed in a cubicle. Which was actually a stroke of luck in that it kept me from getting raped.

LESSON TWO: NO MATTER HOW GREAT A GUY SEEMS, YOU SHOULD ALWAYS DRINK FROM HIS GLASS

I met the guy at a party – he seemed okay, but I wasn't immediately convinced so we went on a few dates. I wanted to give him a chance to convince me he was at the very least a worthwhile one-night stand. Needless to say he fucked that up.

One night we were drinking white wine at his flat. It tasted weirdly salty, but we were eating salty snacks so I didn't think twice about it. A napkin fell on the floor and I made a move to pick it up but somehow I couldn’t. My head was completely clear, but I had no control over my body. I tried to speak but my tongue was too heavy. It was as if a glass ball had enveloped me and muffled every sound I made. I recognised the feeling immediately – the same as in Kanzlei. And suddenly a penis was dangling in front of my nose.

I also knew that very soon, my nose would be hitting the floor. Still, my body wouldn't do as it was told. It's amazing what your brain can do in an emergency. Mine saved me. I pulled myself together as best I could, ordering my brain to make my legs work at once. Somehow, I made it to the bathroom.

Inside, I immediately shut the door and turned the key. The tiles were hard, splitting my head open and giving me a concussion. The next day, I added the psychic low and the temporary loss of faith in the whole of humanity to the damages.



Photo by mripp via flickr cc

LESSON THREE: KNOW THE SYMPTOMS

Last Halloween, my best friend threw a party at her house. A poorly dressed Spiderman put a drink in my hand, which I shared with another friend. A little while later, people decided to move the party on to a club.

I’m normally a calm and collected person but by this point I was bizarrely aggressive. On the way to the club, I made out with a gay guy so violently that afterwards my mouth hurt.

My memories from the night are like watching a film in a crumbling time lapse – frames stopping and starting to move again, sometimes fast and then suddenly extremely slowly.

I was standing on a street and a shopping trolley appeared from somewhere. I put it in the middle of the road, which was less than helpful for the guy passing by in a car. When he pointed this out, I went at him, both verbally and with the odd kick against the car. Later, I was either thrown out of the club or decided to leave myself – I don’t remember. I have no recollection of anything that happened after my argument with the driver.

Fourteen hours later, I came to at home. Apparently my flatmate had picked me up from the street behind the club and brought me back. I pieced together the puzzle of the night before: Turns out that, somehow in my intoxicated state, I had recognised the effects of GHB so I made sure there were people with me at all times during the night.

I felt really fucking sick. My heart hammered at my ribcage and I was terrified that my head was going to explode. Nausea would be a gross understatement when describing the intensity with which I vomited. That day I couldn’t even drink a glass of water, while the next three days were spent in depression.

And then my friend with whom I had shared that fateful drink was on my doorstep. She had the same vile headache and was missing memories from the evening. She said that as she staggered to the toilet half-conscious that morning, Spiderman had crept out of her bed and the flat.   

The cruel thing is that you can’t protect yourself. Knowing how GHB works and tastes has saved my arse since then, but I had to be drugged three times to get there.

Don't let that happen to you; Trust no one and shield your drink. If they do get you, go to the hospital as soon as you realise what happened. A bit of intravenous rehydratration and medication can go a long way when the fear of dying makes you wanna kill yourself.

Miley Cyrus' Instagram Account Is Better Than a Million Art Museums Combined

0
0
Miley Cyrus' Instagram Account Is Better Than a Million Art Museums Combined

Canadian Cannabis: Canada's Medical Marijuana Program Is Hurting Patients

0
0

In this episode, we visit with medical marijuana patients young and old, in Vancouver and Toronto, to chat with them about how they're unable to receive affordable and specific access to the types of cannabis medications that relieve their very serious symptoms. We also take a few of our new friends to Mega Ill, Canada's one-and-only medical marijuana infused pizza parlour. Enjoy.

People In Tillsonburg, Ontario Thought My Wedding Lanterns Were UFOs

0
0



Image via Instagram.
Last weekend, on a beautiful day in Fort Dover on Lake Eerie, I married my high school sweetheart.

We were blessed with a beautiful day, there was tons of food, we had about 175 people there, and everyone was drinking and having a good time. Then when it got dark, we went down to the beach to set a big fire. There were a bunch of people gathered around, and we lit some stupid, fucking Chinese lanterns.

I think it was my wife’s idea to do it, but I thought it was pretty cool. You see those things in movies. So we fucking lit them—there were about 35 or 40 of them, maybe a little more. We lit a bunch of them at first, then another wave, then another wave, and that was it. Then two days after my wedding, my buddy Facebook messages me and is like, “Have you seen this fucking link?” It’s a YouTube video where these people who live in Tillsonburg, Ontario—which is right fucking where the lanterns were being lit in Port Dover—think they’re fucking UFOs.



Tillsonburg UFO drinking game: take a swig everytime someone says "what are they" or "oh my god." Image via YouTube.

In the video, these lights are fuckin’ flying over their heads, and she’s freaking out thinking it's Armageddon, as if Will Smith’s coming to save her. “They’re orbs, they’re UFOs!”

They disabled comments on the video, so no one could be like, “Oh, those are just lanterns.” Because I guess my wife’s sister tried to contact them and they were like, “No, Tillsonburg’s too far away, the wind was blowing the opposite direction,” all this shit. And I’m just like, “Well, when we lit them, they traveled—within 30 seconds of lifting them up into the air—across the fucking lake in like 30 seconds. So going another 40 kilometers probably took maybe four minutes of flying in the wind.” And then these people didn’t want to believe it.

I think it’s amazing, first of all, that people in Tilsonburg think UFOs exist. Great! That’s amazing. Aliens. I’m down for that. But they’re just cheap Chinese lanterns.

I’m sure those lights in the sky could be scary if you had no context of what was happening… but I don’t believe in UFOs. I wish I did, but I don't. And now, I think all the UFO sightings in the world have just been Chinese lanterns. I would like to analyze all of the UFO sightings in the world, to see if there were any weddings nearby and if so, see if they were lighting any fuckin’ Chinese lanterns.

To the people who thought our wedding lanterns were alien spacecraft: I’m really sorry that we lit lanterns at our wedding. I’m sorry that you guys maybe didn’t graduate high school. Tillsonburg, you guys are cool, but you guys were trippin’ out.

It’s the funniest thing in the world to be 40 kilometers away, and directly affect someone else’s life to that degree. It’s insane. That person is forever going to believe that our lanterns were UFOs, and that’s alright with me.


@mattydeathbro

This Artist Is Having Sex with a Different Guy Every Day for a Year

0
0

Mischa Badasyan in a promo shot for "Save the Date" (Photo copyright Andrea Linss)

What is art? If I cover my naked body in Liam Gallagher quotes and sing Blur songs outside The Wag Club, is that art? Because it sounds like it should be, but the lines are so distorted that it’s hard to really say for sure. Take Mischa Badasyan, for example. He’s a Russian-born performance artist who, for his latest piece, has decided to sleep with a different guy every day for 365 days. This, he says, is art.

Admittedly, there’s more to his “Save the Date” project than thrusting. Mischa is also taking dance lessons so, at the end of the year, he can perform what he calls “the dance of the loneliness.”

I spoke to Mischa to find out what gave him the idea, and how exactly he’s going to find 365 guys to sleep with.

VICE: Hey Mischa. So, tell me about "Save The Date."
Mischa Badasyan:
 "Save the Date" is going to be my hardest and most sophisticated performance so far. For one year I'm going to be immersed in loneliness, with people and the city. For 365 days I'm going to meet, each day, someone new, and discover the other´s stories. Alongside meeting people I'll work with sound, photo, and video installations, and create different public performances worldwide.

OK. Where did this idea come to you?
I was inspired in Milan in the Center of Contemporary Art. [The French writer, photographer and artist] Sophie Calle was my muse, and she inspired me for this project.

Right. But what inspired you to have sex with 365 people?
I wanted to make a piece that exaggerated my feelings and my emotional state at the moment. So far I've never been in love. In this performance, I'm going to share and give all my love to people.

So why is this art and not just sleeping with a load of people?
Sex is just a method to express my idea. Apart from this, a lot will happen, both for the public and for the end exhibition. Like, I will take some dance classes for the whole year and I will create a dance piece for the end of the project—dance of the loneliness. It's a processional art that deals with the relational aesthetics—aesthetics existing only in the relationships with someone that I meet.

Does the sexual element of "Save The Date" excite you?
Of course. I might get totally crazy, or enjoy it so much that I turn into a prostitute. I'm working with a nice project called Pornceptual [NSFW link]. It's a community of people who are creating a new image of sexuality and porn, our body and our sexual behavior. Together we are going to make some performances and video projects.

Cool. So what kind of relationships are you hoping to build with the people you sleep with?
I don’t really know what's going to happen. I had experiences by dating guys that sometimes don’t even show up at the date, or after speaking for a few minutes they reject me. It's also a relationship, and it's still a date for me. But I'm hoping to have very beautiful and crazy meetings—romantic ones, or just crazy sexy ones. Anyway, I'm trying to be very honest to everyone and enjoy each guy I meet.

What's your view on sex in general?
Sex isn't penetration for me. Sex is an emotional state. It is a feeling and it is contact. I define sex as totally free and very open. One friend of mine just told me recently that he had sex with his eye lashes. It's so beautiful and very romantic. I wish for myself this kind of sexual experience in this project.

Are there any limitations with what you're prepared to do?
I think I'll understand [what they are] during the process. Of course I have my limits. Being open doesn’t mean doing everything.

Finally, how are you going to find all these people to sleep with? It sounds like a pretty intimidating task.
Yes, it's very difficult. I might get into this supermarket attitude that means I won't see any personality behind the person I meet, but just [see them as] a sexual object. I'm afraid of it, but it will happen at a certain level. But it's possible to find a lot of guys on the different gay portals and chats. I've had a lot of gay applications that I'm going to use throughout the year.

Cool, good luck with it. Thanks, Mischa.

Some more stories about unique approaches to sex:

I Went to See My Friend Lose His Virginity in Public

This Brazilian Girl Auctioned Her Virginity

The Woman Who Trains Dogs to Have Sex with Humans

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images