All images via author.
Drumheller is a scrappy old coal-mining town that hugs Alberta’s Red Deer River, situated in a parched valley peppered with dino kitsch. Cartoonish cement dinosaurs stand amidst a smattering of dive bars, motels, souvenir shops, and places with names like “Dinosaur RV Park” and “Jurassic Laser Tag & Arcade.” Right next to the visitor centre, there’s a fibreglass and steel T-Rex they call the “World’s Largest Dinosaur.” It’s about four times the size of the real thing, and you can pay $3 to climb some stairs to look out at the weatherbeaten town and surrounding badlands from its toothy mouth.

Out in those crumbling cliffs of grey, brown, and black sedimentary rock, I meet University of Calgary paleontologist Dr. Darla Zelenitsky and PhD student Kohei Tanaka. Hunched over a slab of sandstone perched halfway up a precipitous mudstone slope, they pick, scrape, and sweep around a large protruding jawbone with awls, brushes, hammers, and a generator-powered air scribe, applying glue as they go along to keep the porous bone from disintegrating. It’s part of a massive Edmontosaurus that the team is working to uncover.

“The animal would have been roughly the size of the largest predators at the time,” Zelenitsky shouts over the whir of the generator. Petite and blonde, Zelenitsky punctuates her sentences with a disarming laugh. An expert on dinosaur eggs and embryos, she is also one of only a handful of women working in this male-dominated field.

Dr. Zelenitsky and Kohei at work.
This adult duck-billed dinosaur, she says, was probably between eight and nine metres long, and weighed between three to four tonnes. The species roamed in large herds, clipping vegetation with their sharp beaks, then grinding it to a pulp with thousands of teeth aligned in the back of their jaws.

“It’s going to take the rest of the summer to get it out,” Zelenitsky says of the metre-long skull. “It’ll be technically challenging because the sandstone is so hard, but the bones are very well-preserved, and no one’s found a skull like this in decades.”

71 million years ago, Drumheller stood near the western shore of the warm and shallow Bearpaw Sea, which once blanketed North America’s prairies. Sharks and gigantic marine reptiles dominated these waters, which were bordered by crocodile-infested swamps and densely forested floodplains. There were herds of hadrosaurs (like the Edmontosaurus) and horned ceratopsians (like the Triceratops), as well as packs of fearsome T-Rex esque Albertosaurs. Pterosaurs took to the skies, and our early rat-sized mammalian ancestors scurried underfoot. Dinosaurs aside, the area would have looked a lot like coastal Louisiana. Imagine it: sunny beaches, an hour-and-a-half east of Calgary.

"It was a very different environment from the badlands of today,” Zelenitsky says, looking out at the moonscape of parched cliffs, deep coulees, and strange tower-like hoodoos.

Alberta’s badlands contain some of the richest dinosaur fossil sites on the continent—–if not the world. Hundreds of specimens have been unearthed in the province over the past century, including several incredibly rare ornithomimids with preserved feathers and a colossal parrot-meets-punk pachyrhinosaur skull Zelenitsky’s team found within the town of Drumheller last year (you can see a video of them excavating it here). Many of the province’s best fossils are on display just outside of Drumheller at the very impressive Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology.

In essence, the bands of colour that can be seen in Alberta’s badlands provide researchers with a cross-sectional view of millions of years of prehistory, showing how different areas changed over time. Generally speaking, darker coal layers are indicative of swamps, greyish mudstone represents areas in and around bodies of water, while yellowish-brown sandstone comes from prehistoric beaches and riverbeds. A dinosaur that died in water, sand, or mud stood a good chance of being buried, then preserved. The badlands’ eroding cliffs expose their graves.

Outside of Drumheller, it’s not too hard to find bits of prehistoric wood, amber, and shattered orange-brown dinosaur bone scattered amidst rock, grass, and cacti. (Watch out for sinkholes and old mineshafts!) You can even find fossilized leaves. Intact skeletons, however, are much more difficult to come by, and clues of their existence can be almost imperceptible.

“Some people think that dinosaurs are found in soil, but actually they are preserved in ancient rock,” Zelenitsky says. “Almost nothing was exposed when my field assistant found this skull a few weeks ago. There was just a little bit of brown bone sticking out of a sandstone concretion. It was unidentifiable at first, so we excavated until we realized what it was.”

With the exception of a few power tools, paleontologists have essentially been using the same techniques to uncover dinosaur fossils since the late 19^th century. The Edmontosaurusskull Zelenitsky is working on, for example, will have to come out in pieces. After the disarticulated bones are gingerly revealed with hand tools and the air scribe, they’ll be covered with plaster jackets to protect them for transport. Zelenitsky then plans to remove them in small blocks with the help of a rock saw before chiseling further into the cliff to see if other parts of the animal remain. Back in the lab, a technician will likely spend years using dental picks to scrape the hard sandstone from the bones to prepare them for study.

“You have to be very patient to be a paleontologist,” Zelenitsky says. “Otherwise you run the risk of damaging the bones.”

With paleontologists, this patience seems to be borne from intense passion. Zelenitsky says that every paleontologist she’s met has been fascinated with dinosaurs since childhood. And she’s no exception. She tells me of collecting marine fossils as a kid in her native Manitoba and her obsession with Godzilla films.

Tanaka, her student, pipes in. His first movie, seen as an impressionable seven-year-old in the industrial heartland of Japan, was the 1993 classic Jurassic Park.

“I always dreamed of working with dinosaurs,” he says. “But I had to go abroad to study as there aren’t many dinosaur fossils in Japan!”

Zelenitsky was working on her Master’s with legendary Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie when the film came out.

“It was thrilling to see them animated,” she says of Spielberg’s CGI monsters.

Jurassic Park created a surge of interest in paleontology, though most scientists will tell you that it should have been called Cretaceous Park (very few of the animals in the movie actually lived during the earlier Jurassic geological period). A fourth instalment in what sadly became a very shitty movie franchise will be coming out next summer in 3D, but, missing an opportunity to be on the vanguard of science, none of the dinosaurs in Jurassic World will be feathered.

The Edmontosaurus display inside the visitor's centre.
Since their initial discovery in northeastern China in the mid-1990s, feathered non-avian dinosaurs have revolutionized the field of paleontology. Many researchers now believe that most —ndash; if not all – dinosaurs had feathers (soft tissues like skin and feathers are rarely preserved), and that they evolved for purposes other than flight (such as courtship, insulation, and/or camouflage). That’s right. Those murderous packs of Velociraptors in JP (which were actually Utahraptors, because a Velociraptor would have only been slightly larger than a turkey) could have had brilliant multi-coloured macaw plumes—– the vision of which has actually been giving me terrible nightmares that mix the worst of Jurassic Park and Stephen King’s It.

 “When you know that birds evolved from dinosaurs, it makes you look at them very differently,” Zelenitsky says. Such revelations have also sent more crazed creationists into overdrive. Some of her American colleagues, Zelenitsky says, actually receive harassing e-mails and telephone calls.

“That kind of thing doesn’t happen so much in Canada.”

Paleontology, Tanaka adds, can reveal how evolution actually works. It can also teach us about the effects of climate change.

“Climate change has always occurred, but it’s become much more rapid,” Zelenitsky says. “Paleontology can look at climate change in the past to make sense of its effects on plants and animals today.”

The chief culprit, of course, is CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels. And we still have a lot to learn. n… On the prairies above this eroding badland valley, oil-rig pumpjacks bob like big drinking birds, thirstily sucking crude from the depths of prehistoric decay. 


@dsotis

All photos via the author.
It was the hottest day of summer, the sun was at its highest peak, and about 20 Raelian women were gathering around Mount Royal to promote gender equality by taking their shirts off.

As I was walking to the mountain to report on this magical event, I started thinking about skin cancer and how I’m probably going to have skin cancer within the next two years. A man on the street overheard me talking about cancer, and started to tell me about his cancer! He was on his way to the clinic to get chemotherapy. He started telling me about his life, where he grew up and where he went to school. When I asked him what he studied, he said: “I actually studied to become a priest.”

What a coincidence! I told the priest that I was on my way to a Raelian demonstration. He laughed and called them total lunatics, saying that their leader Claude Vorilhol, who claims to be able to speak to aliens, “out of his mind.” He also told me ol’ Claude, aka “Rael,” was ostracized from several countries for being so radical. As the priest continued talking to me, I could not help but notice that the other side of the street was completely shrouded in shadow and that this man was actively walking in the path of the sun with a large, growing lesion on his skin—where I assumed he was receiving injections. The man continued to complain about his life and life in general and, because of the tonsil cancer, his voice became extremely aggravating to me.

When I told him that I had to go because I was late for the Raelian demonstration he stopped and waved dismissively. “Well, you aren’t missing much,” he said.  

The Go Topless movement was founded by Rael, a French ex-racecar driver who I think got high once and believed the experience was really profound. The “UFO religion,” with an estimated 90,000 members worldwide is largely based in Quebec and South Korea.  If you have been thinking about joining a cult lately, and if you like looking at bare breasts, then this is definitely one you should consider, despite what the weird guy on the street told me. 



Go Topless has been reprimanded by the media as a superficial publicity stunt since its establishment in 2007. When I arrived on the scene, Raelian men and women were parading around a statue holding signs about “equal rights.”

I watched a mother enter the park with her infant-in-stroller and, immediately upon seeing the topless women, she took off her shirt and bra and swung them over her head like a flag of victory. It was as if she’d been waiting for this moment all day, her swollen, milky breasts freely bouncing in the open air. Everyone cheered for her. Then I think she realized it was a part of something culty and steered away in the opposite direction.

After the parade swooped around the statue, they configured into a disorganized circle, holding signs and handing out flyers on the grass. The Raelian symbol was scattered throughout a frenzy of male photographers and what I assumed to be journalism students. Earrings, necklaces, and t-shirts, bared the Star of David conjoined by a swastika, with dreamcatcher-like feathers dangling from its sharp edges. 

Within two minutes of approaching the circle, a topless woman wearing a large sun hat grabbed my arm and said, “Are you a journalist?”

“Yes,” I responded.

She led me to a group of busy women with clipboards. There I met Sharon, the head of The Raelian Association of Sexual Minorities. Sharon told me that they have been promoting transsexual rights since 2004. I was impressed, considering how increasingly topical it is becoming in 2014. Sharon and I talked about what it meant to be in a cult. She told me that she believes cults are everywhere in society, and that Rael is a prophet who can speak to aliens. I asked her which book of Rael’s was her favorite and she told me she couldn’t decide. Then I asked her which book she would recommend to me if I was going to choose one to read, and she said “the first.”

Intelligent Design was written in 1973 when Claude was just 27-years-old and without any formal education. Sharon seemed to be excited by this quality. When I asked her why she liked it so much, she said, “Everything just made sense.” Sharon admitted that the symbol had a powerful affect on her too. She explained to me that because she grew up in Israel, the swastika had a devastatingly negative impact on her psyche. When she saw the two symbols merged together and decontextualized as a symbol for peace, it was cathartic for her conscious memory.

I had to agree with Sharon; Rael seemed quite charismatic and—depending on your point of view—progressive.

I was curious about the specific elements of belief, which seduce people into worshipping one particular human being as a deity, just in case I too decide to start a cult when I turn 27. I tried interviewing some Raelian bystanders but they were very apprehensive and uncomfortable. One older man, wearing a white outfit and hat, avidly repeated that he did not wish to discuss his beliefs and directed me again to the women with clipboards. The older man was attractive, with peaceful eyes, and I felt sincerely disappointed by his rejection.

“It sure is hot outside,” I said, waving the collar of my trench coat up and down.

“Why are you wearing that?” he said.

I walked over to the group of women with clipboards again and interviewed a Raelian registered nurse named Nadia. I wanted to gain a better understanding of the religion’s ideology since they didn’t seem too concerned about recruiting members. Nadia was marginally defensive when we first started talking. She said, “We are normal people with normal jobs.” I was aware that Raelianism is a paradox, described as an “atheist religion,” and that many of its values support the advancement of medicine and technology. For instance, a surgeon and Raelian counselor in San Fransisco have joined forces in treating victims of clitoral mutilation. 

I still didn’t understand what was so attractive about the label however. I asked Nadia about the regular functions of the Raelian community: the international conferences, the online meditations, the self-published literature. From what she was saying, it reminded me a lot of working at American Apparel in 2006. Rael was actively political with sensationalist beliefs that defended marginalized populations and in turn generated many loyal supporters. Maybe they just need better PR?

As the crowd expanded, six female participants, who seemed to be getting bored, sat down on some blankets and started eating granola. The crowd of male photographers went wild—silently clicking buttons on their iPhones.

“It’s important to separate nudity from sexuality,” said Sharon. “Tribes in Africa, South America, and all over the world do it.”

I stared at the middle-aged topless women on blankets, sharing food, lounging, looking like Greek goddesses. Sharon continued explaining why it was important for men to see women topless, saying that it is unnatural for men to repress their hormones, by concealing the female body. All of my fantasies about going back in time and being born into a matriarchal tribe came rushing through my skull, uncontrollably hypnotizing me toward the blanket.   

As a journalist, I thought it was appropriate to capture the perspective of the marginalized group of women. I sat down next to the women with my trench coat open baring my breasts, and they started cheering for me.

“How do you deal with this?” I heard myself say aloud.

I was so overwhelmed by the frenzy of males I could hardly construct a thought.

“That’s right, how do we deal with this,” repeated a woman beside me. She extended her Raelian hand and I avoided making contact. I looked up at the photographers in awe. The panorama of seething males, obstructing the horizon, was a surreal phenomenon of incalculable perversion.

None of the males were talking. All I could hear were camera flashes, body movement, and muffled laughter. It is a really strange way to be objectified. What gratification could exist taking photographs this way? Is everyone just bored?

Or rabidly hydrophobic?

When I stood up I thanked the Raelian women for trying to change the world. Even though they support some schizophrenic racecar driver from France, I still think it’s nice that they’re attempting to manipulate this social structure, which I too believe is flawed. Maybe someday when I start my own cult I will be able to amass their eager fellowship and start charging mandatory tithes (of which there are none in Raelianism).

For now, I will rescind back into my normal life with my normal job, scheming the means of language and persuasion in a way that provides me with sustenance. Secretly, while making zero effort to achieve my dream, I will always be burdened by the fantasy of breastfeeding in a circle with my girlfriends as the men go away to hunt.  

@karacrabb

There are plenty of six-letter words that start with N: "normal," "nipple," "nephew," "nannie," and "nobody," to name a few. But we all think of the same word when we see an image like the one on the T-shirt above. With the seemingly limitless number of shootings targeting young black men in America, the sentiment of anxiety and loss is not limited to hellish, militarized locales like Ferguson, Missouri. Death among black youth is leaving a track record that no one—except maybe some reactionary whites in suburban St. Louis—can possibly be proud of. It's also instilled an impressionable fear in those whom police violence impacts the most: young people of color.

Today, even if black youth are able to escape state-sanctioned death, you can't blame them if they feel destined for prison, as one out of every three young black males will go to jail at some point in his lifetime. Nwoko, a student who grew up in the country’s most segregated city—Milwaukee, Wisconsin—created this piece as a response to the relative silence that surrounds modern racism. What started out as a canvas that sold for $700 is now known as "the shirt white people can't wear.” I called her to chat about the shirt and its jarring imagery.

VICE: So you’ve been getting a lot of heat for this, huh? How do you feel now?
Nwoko: I was just relieved that it made people talk. Because that’s one of our biggest problems—people don’t want to talk about it. This piece is about that realization. There are a lot of people who want to say racism does not exist, and I was one of those people.

How did you get from thinking racism is nonexistent to making a shirt about it?
I’m black, and my family is white. I was born in Milwaukee, adopted at birth. Most of my life I didn’t feel strongly about race. In my family, the philosophy was race doesn’t matter. I never felt different until people outside of my family or people from school told me I was different. I was rejected by my peers, but I was more accepted by my white peers just because I talked “white." Like, "Are you white or are you black, because you talk white? You’re white. Oh, your family’s white? You’re white.” It’s been a shocking realization. Some people have the privilege to be able to ignore it, but when I walk into the room, people see a black person. When I talk, people hear a white person. I think that all comes from there being only one idea about what black people are.

What does it mean for people to see a black person?
Most of what I’m taught about who black people are is negative. Especially the way that black people are portrayed in the media, it’s just something I can’t believe. I don’t want to believe that people assume those things when they see me, before they even know who I am. I’m a woman, but I have short hair, I wear baggy clothing, and I’m almost six feet tall. I’m confused for a teenage boy a lot of the time. If I pull up next to somebody and they have a stand-your-ground bumper sticker, I’m scared. Stand-your-ground means that you can shoot somebody because you fear for your life, and if someone is racist they might really fear for their life if they see me. How many bullets need to be put in my chest before I'm not scary anymore?

Why Hangman?
Hangman is a game that I learned in childhood, and it’s actually a really morbid game. We play it on the chalkboard at school. In that way it says something about innocence. My research that I’ve been doing has sort of been a loss of innocence. The image of lynching and the N-word brings history and the present into one image. The hangman piece is a litmus test. It’s like, make of this what you will. For the white people who are outraged, it’s like, you need to re-examine your own reaction. That’s what I hoped this piece would do. N-I-G-G-E-R is the N-word. That’s as far as we go. We don’t say the N-word loudly. It’s like, don’t talk about it, don’t let anybody know that you talked about it.

The picture started out as a painting. How did it become a T-shirt?  
I screen-printed the image onto white T-shirts because a friend wanted one. When he wore it, other people wanted one. Really it was just a supply-and-demand thing. But as I was screen-printing them I was thinking, Who is going to wear this T-shirt, and what are the reactions going to be? What does it mean when a black person wears it vs. a white person vs. a Latino person vs. an Asian person? Who is willing to wear this T-shirt?

The original canvas by Nwoko

Are you willing to wear it?
I don’t think I’m willing to wear this T-shirt. I think activist is an honorable title, but I'm not there yet. Up to this point, I’ve basically had a white mentality. I did not want to be a part of it all; I didn’t think that the message applied to me. I thought the message was extreme. I think that there’s this big division between people who want to talk about race and people who don’t. There are people who think that the big solution is to not talk about it. I recently heard Morgan Freeman say that.

Morgan Freeman said that?
Fuck, it makes sense. I worked in the film industry for a short time, and I could not believe how they typecast people. Morgan Freeman has played a lot of roles, like in Shawshank Redemption, where his race was not the role. He says, "Stop talking about it. I’m not a black man, you’re not a white man—I’m just a man." I think that’s where we need to be, way down the line, but we can’t just go there. I was there, I developed this denial to the fact that I was black, and it protected me, but only for a while. I don’t think the solution is to forget the history, or to keep it in mind all the time, either. I think the solution is to learn how to talk about it. I am still learning. 

Why do you think people are so afraid to talk about race?
It’s a double-edged sword. Women have similar issues, like any group that feels oppressed. If you say, 'Don't assume I’m underprivileged because I’m black,' that’s one thing. If you say, 'Hey, you need to respect the fact that black people still experience oppression,' then that’s another thing. It’s hard to talk about these issues without contradicting yourself or being perceived as contradictory. 

How do you think living in Milwaukee impacted the piece?  
Milwaukee is not special. The majority of Its public schools, whose students are predominately people of color, have white teachers. What you learn about black history and black culture up through high school is really not much. Even our parents sometimes forget that they have to teach us things about our culture. It’s hard to talk to kids. Now that I’m older, my parents and I are having great dialogues about race, but as a kid, part of me is glad that they didn’t.

How have white people reacted to the piece? 
So far white people have had far more negative reactions than black people. The negative reactions with white people came more from the the T-shirts than the painting. The T-shirt is getting the phrase of “the shirt white people can’t wear." It means something different when a white person wears it. Not because it inherently means something different but because of the assumptions that surround it.

But we all think of the same word. I’m glad we all think of the same word, because it means we share the same history. It means that the history is very much relevant today. Especially with the number of shootings on black teenagers. It’s modern-day lynching. When you play Hangman, the idea is if you guess wrong, you draw a body part. I think this piece is just a consequence of society. It’s like, I didn’t mean to hang that man, I didn’t mean to. It’s just that no one else would spell it out for me.

Photo by Michael Fleshman

The citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, deserve better than Al Sharpton. A world-class scumbag with criminally under-acknowledged ties to the Mafia, the FBI, Rudy Giuliani, Nixon administration shysters, corrupt business tycoons, and endless other seedy characters, Sharpton had the gall this week to castigate Ferguson residents for allegedly expressing too much anger at the police over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown. That Sharpton is being held up as some kind of moral exemplar, authorized to lecture people on proper behavior, is truly a sick joke. In a sense, though, you have to admire the guy’s brazenness: Few street preachers end up advising the president.

Sharpton may have conceded agreement with Senator Rand Paul last week that the militarization of local law enforcement represents an undesirable trend, but the good reverend lagged well behind the libertarian right in coming to the realization that equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan could be used for problematic purposes when transferred by the federal government to departments across the country, free of charge.

Sharpton’s tardiness in denouncing police militarization is perhaps partly explainable by the fact that, per his own reckoning, he literally operates as a proxy for the Feds—namely the Obama administration. CBS's 60 Minutes reported on this posture as such: “He's decided not to criticize the president about anything, even black unemployment that's twice the national rate.” Since acquiring his own MSNBC show, Sharpton—a former FBI informant, it was revealed in April—has regularly glommed onto highly charged controversies (such as the killing of Trayvon Martin) by presenting himself as a sort of de facto emissary between the White House and the “community” he purports to represent.

Sharpton postures as a fearless critic of state violence, but one can’t simultaneously be an honest broker about what’s going on in Ferguson—the federal government at Obama’s direction is complicit in extreme terror, escalation, and civil liberties infringements—while simultaneously affirming that the chief executive of the federal government ought to be off limits for scrutiny.

“Sharpton has a long and well-documented history of leveraging his civil rights profile for his own benefit,” journalist Wayne Barrett, who chronicled his travails for 37 years at the Village Voice, wrote on the sordid occasion of Sharpton’s 2011 ascension to the 6 PM MSNBC time slot, replacing Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks. Uygur had garnered excellent ratings in the preceding months, so the removal seemed somewhat puzzling—until Uygur revealed that network executives summoned him to a cartoonishly melodramatic closed-door meeting in which they issued a threat: Think twice before saying anything that might upset certain unnamed “people in Washington.” Uygur didn’t do that, and not long thereafter, he was replaced by Sharpton, a reliable peddler of pro-administration talking points.

Sharpton now enjoys a larger audience than ever before in his long, stupid career. In 2013, he made use of this privilege by moderating a probing segment titled "Should President Obama Be on Mount Rushmore?"

At times, Sharpton has certainly helped provide needed services to traumatized, grieving, and financially despondent victims of NYPD violence. But he has all too frequently used such endeavors to promote lies and slander, always to the convenient effect of heightening his own stature. The 1988 Tawana Brawley disaster is among Sharpton’s most high-profile scams, and is cited on a regular basis by the conservatives he purposely enrages. During that shameful saga, Sharpton served as lead spokesman for a batty team of NYC lawyers that claimed the Ku Klux Klan, Irish Republican Army, and other dark forces were involved in covering up the rape of a 15-year-old black girl. The entire story was ultimately exposed as a hoax, and the district attorney Sharpton falsely accused of being one of the attackers successfully sued for defamation.

Sharpton also thrust himself to the fore of Eric Garner’s police-caused death this summer. NYPD officers threatened, surrounded, and then seized Garner in an illegal choke hold, in broad daylight, for doing nothing more than standing on a Staten Island sidewalk. The coroner’s office declared it a homicide; locals were distressed. Given Sharpton’s longtime residency and activism in the city, that he would intervene after such an incident may seem reasonable enough.

Well. At the Garner funeral service on July 23, which I attended, Sharpton delivered a bombastic address. In it, he paid special attention to the individual who recorded Garner’s fatal police altercation, which showed incontrovertible proof of officers’ unprovoked aggression. Sharpton invited the young man up to the altar of Bethel Baptist Church in Downtown Brooklyn and heralded his courage—the only problem was that he kept misstating the man’s name as “Ramsey Ortiz” instead of “Ramsey Orta," indicating just how little attention Sharpton apparently pays to the pesky details of the causes he inserts himself into.

At an August 22 rally on Staten Island for Garner and Mike Brown, Sharpton cautioned the assembled crowd against formulating any systemic analysis of police misconduct in their neighborhoods, recommending instead to focus merely on the few “bad apples” who tarnish an otherwise valiant department. This logic is completely fallacious, and Sharpton thus distracts from the crucial task of assessing NYPD violence on an institutional, policy level.

Sharpton went on to warn any rally-goers who might be tempted to stir up trouble, “Don’t piss on my party,” then announced he’d be leaving his own event early to depart for Washington, DC. Janaye Ingram, executive director of National Action Network (NAN)—otherwise known as Sharpton’s personal corporate slush fund—later declined to provide details when I asked where exactly he had gone.

Al Sharpton speaks at the US Department of Agriculture. Photo via the USDA

According to the veteran journalist Barrett, despite the self-anointed “reverend” title, Sharpton has never actually administered a church. Still, he was invited recently to stand alongside Cardinal Timothy Dolan at a summit convened by Mayor Bill de Blasio, where the duo discussed “healing” strategies for NYC minority communities in the aftermath of Garner’s homicide. Dolan—another pandering, blusterous, hyper-partisan, power-worshipping clerical charlatan—has proved an awfully auspicious partner for Sharpton. Both men live opulent lifestyles. Sharpton infamously lavished his then girlfriend, who was also executive director of NAN, with luxury hotel stays valued at $4,000 per night—not to mention “a Mercedes, a Caddy, a $7,000 Rolex, mink coats, David Yurman jewels, and a Trump apartment.” (Dolan has a mansion on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.)

That someone with such an extensive record of deceit, lying, and fraud as Sharpton now occupies a position of such prominence says a lot about the fundamental ethical rot at the heart of elite US political culture. In all likelihood, the people who enable Sharpton privately find him a complete moron, but nevertheless understand his vacuous bombast is good for business. Such people therefore offer restrained praise for Sharpton in public, appear at his fake charitable functions, and pretend that he represents some kind of oh-so-very important “voice.” Shortly after the Uygur-Sharpton switcharoo, Phil Griffin, Sharpton’s boss at MSNBC, was bestowed with the NAN “Keepers of the Dream” award. (Two years later, NAN honored former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, granting him the opportunity to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. in defense of the department’s relentless stop-and-frisk policy.)

This duplicity goes back decades. Sharpton’s impetuous “campaign” for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, today largely forgotten, was regarded at the time as such a joke that almost no black people supported him. He finished a distant third in the heavily black South Carolina primary, which Obama himself won four years later by 29 points. (Sharpton also lost two thirds of the black vote in his home state.) Demonstrating his lack of backing among the demographic on whose behalf he claims to speak, the charade mostly served to get Sharpton on TV, which ended up paying big dividends.

After the phony presidential effort folded—he won laughably few delegates—Sharpton went on to enjoy a successful run as a regular Fox News talking head. The relationship made perfect sense. His overbearing, obnoxious persona allowed for topics with racial dimensions to be simplified into straightforward, easily digestible narratives. Issues of police violence already disrupt the typical partisan paradigm, because it’s not something like Obamacare, where the two parties have a vested self-interest in endlessly trumpeting their unchanging position one way or another. Countless Democrats heap worshipful praise on the police at every opportunity, and often provide them with more taxpayer-funded goodies than Republicans, but would be embarrassed to tout those accomplishments before black audiences. As senator, for instance, Vice President Joe Biden spearheaded the 1994 “crime bill” that played a major role in facilitating the transferal of military equipment from the Pentagon to podunk little police forces that never in a million years would have legitimate use for armored vehicles or rocket launchers. (“The Western Foothills of the State of Maine… currently face a previously unimaginable threat from terrorist activities,” one sheriff’s corporal recently proclaimed in defense of his application for federal funds.)

Despite the outsize importance that black voters assign to criminal justice issues, national Democrats have virtually ignored the policy preferences of their surest constituency in this arena. Sharpton’s primary function appears to be misdirecting black folks’ absolutely justifiable fury into votes for politicians who might systematically neglect their concerns but nonetheless pay requisite homage to “the Rev.”

Therein lies the danger of Sharpton injecting himself into situations like Ferguson: His unwieldy rants have the effect of inflaming tensions, and not the productive kind of tension that might eventually manifest in substantive change. Instead, he fosters an aura of cheap partisanship, which only reduces the likelihood that marginalized communities suffering under violent police regimes will secure any meaningful amelioration of their hellish predicaments.

As Ferguson shows, so many matters involving race today are in dire need of robust and honest public discussion. Sharpton inhibits this process. He is a self-aggrandizing fraud, and though it’s true that conservative media’s fixation on him is usually ridiculous and condescending, it’s equally true that his current prominence is thanks to all manner of major US political figures, including Mike Bloomberg, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, Condoleeza Rice, and especially Barack Obama, who adulated the bogus reverend twice in four days a few months ago.

Al Sharpton on an "education tour" with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Photo via American Solutions

From the Donald Sterling affair, to the 2004 Haiti coup d’état, to the 2000 Florida recount—Sharpton apparently feels that he has a constructive role to play in virtually every major world controversy. But if anything is impressive about Sharpton, it’s the sheer breadth of his hypocrisy. That so many powerful actors are eager to countenance his bullshit really sucks, most of all for the besieged people of Ferguson. Meanwhile, the sleazy “reverend” keeps laughing all the way to the bank.

Now that it’s clear the main aim of National Guard forces deployed to Ferguson by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon was not “ensuring the safety and welfare of the citizens,” as Nixon originally claimed, but instead to help reinforce and fortify the already militarized local police, will Sharpton call on the commander-in-chief to order swift redress? Seems unlikely.

Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter.

It’s easy to forget that before Iggy Azalea and Nicki Minaj... Before Missy Elliott, Eve, and Gangsta Boo... Even before Lil Kim defined a certain type of American icon, there were pioneer female MCs who fought to make hip-hop a safe space for women to express themselves through rhyme. 

This past August, those founding females of hip-hop and some of the most important women in the rap music biz descended upon Martha’s Vineyard for the second annual Summer Madness Music Festival & Conference. With a guest list that included everyone from Monie Love to MC Lyte, it made perfect sense that this year's festival bore a "Ladies First" theme. According to Sean Porter, one of the event’s co-founders, the event was a "celebration of all genres of black music" intended to "counterbalance all of that negative imagery surrounding African American women."

The time felt right. There's a lot to celebrate and discuss when talking about women, race, and hip-hop these days. In 2013, no black artists topped the Billboard 100 charts, while a white artist like Macklemore nabbed the Grammy for Best Rap Album. This year, magazines claimed that Aussie newbie Iggy Azalea and her interpretation of a Southern black drawl "run hip-hop" after dropping a couple hot singles. Not to mention, we've seen plenty of white asses in Sports Illustrated get celebratel, while an album cover featuring a single bulbous black ass wearing a pink thong caused controversy and uproar across the web.

So instead of high-fiving everyone at the conference over how awesome hip-hop is, I took the time to ask a bunch of rap's female OGs about gender in hip-hop and the impact of the so-called "white-washing" of the culture. And who better than Native Sons member and Queen Latifah protégé, Monie Love?

VICE: You established yourself as an MC in the UK with hits like "Free Style/Proud" before coming overseas to join the Native Tongues. Did you feel like there were rules to hip-hop coming here?
Monie Love: I really felt like a fan of the culture. It wasn’t just about rhyming for me because before I was rhyming I was actually a B-girl. I was spinning on my back, I was pop-locking, I was breaking, so I transcended into being an MC. I always embraced the entire culture, not just the music entity of it. When I came to this country it was easy for me to mesh and blend into people that I met in the boroughs of New York because they knew I had this respect for the culture. They all saw me like, Who is this little girls from England? Oh, she used to be a B-girl? Ok. They allowed me in embraced me, which is definitely a blessing.

Is it harder or easier for rappers to be accepted into the hip-hop community now?
These people are spoiled. They’re spoiled. They’re spoiled from the pavement that was already paved before they got here.

Who are “they?”
Everybody! There are a lot of young groups and artists that come out and are basically like, I want to make it big, and I want to sell records and I want to move out of the hood. That wasn’t what we were doing in the beginning. You have to have a reason to do something. You have to have a reason to why you want to go to medical school. To study to be a doctor or a surgeon or what have you. It’s the same thing with being an MC and with being a part of a functioning culture. There’s four elements to it: there’s DJing, there’s MCing, there’s graf writing and there’s b-boying. For me it was a natural transition—I went from one and I transcended into another. A lot of these kids want to put records out now and they don’t come from any of that. They have no interest in any of that, so therefore it’s like there’s no purpose for doing this. What’s your purpose for doing this? You don’t really love it, so why are you doing it? That tends to allow a listener to hear, ok this person is here today and gone tomorrow because they’re not really in love with what they’re doing.

So hip-hop just turns into a get rich quick scheme.
Absolutely. For a lot of people it’s a money thing and that’s why I say there’s a lot of people out here that are spoiled because they’re basically like Yeah, I just want to sell a bunch of records so I can get up out the hood. It’s more than that. You have to have a purpose for doing anything.

Are there real MCs doing it for the culture? Do those people exist now?
The okeydoke rappers is fucking it up for everybody else. They’re messing it up for the people that really do want to be a part of the culture and a part of the art. They do, unfortunately. It’s the same thing with women. It’s like when there are two or three women that are like look at my butt and look at my boobs, unfortunately men then tend to generalize women and then you walk past a bunch of men and they’re all doing the whole googling, oogling, argling and unfortunately it’s like, no—I don’t like that type of attention. They’re conditioned to stereotype because they’ve seen six other women that want that attention. Then here comes the one behind the six that doesn’t want that attention, but unfortunately the men are already conditioned by the previous six. Same thing with hip-hop. Same thing with MCs. There are so many people flooding the market that care nothing for the culture, that know nothing about the culture, don’t care to even listen or learn anything about the culture—I just want the bread real quick. The general public gets conditioned by that and there are a lot of really prolific artists that get lost in the sauce.

Like who?
Kendrick Lamar is not brand new. Kendrick Lamar has been here. He’s paid his dues and nobody was listening. I swear I thank the stars and I thank god that this boy had something in him that allowed him to continue to persevere the shut doors because that boy had a lot of shut doors. He was K. Dot. Remember K. Dot? Everybody wasn’t listening to K. Dot. There were a certain group of people who knew who K. Dot was and were like Yo there’s this little kid from LA named K. Dot and he’s dope, but the masses were not paying attention to him. Honestly he could’ve been on some, you know what, eff this. Nothing’s happening, I’m done with this. But he didn’t and I thank god that he didn’t. I would say it took him a good 5 years.

And then Macklemore beat him at the Grammy’s.
But I’m not mad at Macklemore. Macklemore is a hip-hop lover. You can’t be mad at a hip-hop lover. I don’t care about what color you are, you can’t be mad at somebody because they love hip-hop and they cultivated that into what they’re doing. Most of the people that are mad at Macklemore for his success at the Grammy’s are the people putting out the bullshit. I saw this guy on Vine and he had this thing where he was going “Are. You. Gonna. Finish. Your. Peanut. Butter.” and I was like that sounds like the rap today! Those are the folks that are going to get mad at a Macklemore for incorporating content into his music? What are you mad at him for? I’m not mad at Iggy Azalea! I’m not.

So you listen to a lot f the new hip-hop?
I have to give my kids props. I have a daughter that’s 23 and I have a daughter that’s 17 and they keep me grounded and up to par on the newer stuff that’s coming out. I don’t shut them out like Oh I don’t want to listen to that. I’m 44, I listen to Big Daddy Kane. No, I got my stuff but my kids keep me clued in on what’s going on. There’s a girl named Doja Cat—love her. I just told her that on Twitter. I’m such a fan of people that I’ll hit them up and be like Oh my god I love you, you’re awesome. I don’t believe in one woman at a time. That is the most crappiest—who came up with that?!

Some old guy probably.
An old sexist toothless man. When I was on the charts and when I was up for a Grammy two years in a row, so was Salt-N-Peppa. So was MC Lyte. So was Queen Latifah. There was us on the east coast in New York and then on the west coast there was Oaktown 3.5.7 and J.J. Fad all out at the same time, all selling their records at the same time, all touring through the United States and overseas at the same time. I don’t come from a place where it’s one woman at a time. I don’t believe that.

Do you ever mentor young artists?
Whoever wants to get anything from me, I’m welcome to give it. I’m not like, no, I’m not giving no advice. I love it. If anybody wants to rip a page out of my book—no problem. I love it.

Follow Lauren on Twitter

All images courtesy of the Clean Energy Council

There was a time in the 1980s when Australia lead the world in solar technology. To begin with, Australia receives more solar radiation per square foot than anywhere on the planet, and that presents an obvious advantage. But the true catalyst was geography: two thirds of the country consists of uninhabited desert. This posed problems for engineers tasked with constructing a national telephone network in the early 1970s. The solution was to build remote relay stations powered with solar energy, which at the time was a fledgling, expensive technology. By 1978 however the national provider, Telecom, had developed reliable solar cells that could be installed affordably across the country where they’d be infrequently maintained. International recognition came in 1983 when Perth, WA was tapped with hosting the Solar World Congress.

Fast forward to 2014 and Australian solar power is in a very different place. This week a proposed solar farm with 2000 dishes—capable of powering 30,000 homes—was cancelled amid uncertainty about the future of renewable energy. This comes at a time when every one of the country’s proposed solar farms are on hold and coal operators push legislation to strangle solar proliferation. So what happened?

“Power generators and NSPs (network service providers) are scared.” Says Giles Parkinson, who is the editor of the green news site, Renew Economy. “There will always be a grid, but it’s just a question of where that power comes from. Now we’re at the point where rooftop solar, subsidised by solar farms, are becoming a cheaper option. You see this with the internet affecting telcos, to digital cameras and film - it’s inevitable with new technology. But in Australia it's catastrophic because we used to be leaders, but we're now going backwards.”

Like most of the world, Australia swings between climate disavowal and action. In the 1980s Australian solar power was federally funded. Then in the mid-90s the incoming government scrapped the Energy Research and Development Corporation. Broadly speaking coal became the energy source of choice, until July 2012, when Australia introduced a fixed price tax on carbon emissions. This carbon tax was part of a slate of climate initiatives called the Clean Energy Plan, which also legislated that 20 percent of electricity would come from renewables by 2020.

Now the weather-vane has swung back, with a center-right government coming to power in 2013, promising to repeal the “job destroying carbon tax.” They succeeded on July 17, and although they reluctantly retained the binder on renewables, they placed the entire program “under review.” According to Dr Richard Corkish, who is the COO for the Australian Center for Advanced Photovoltaics, “under review” is clever wording as it “effectively achieves the same thing as a repeal.”

Here’s why: for a proposed solar farm to get financing, they need a signed power purchase agreement from a distributor, stipulating exactly how much power they’ll buy. But given distributors are no longer required to buy renewable energy, and given their business models are threatened by solar, they’re not signing the agreements. The result is that solar farms don’t get built. According to Dr Corkish this is what happened to the aforementioned solar farm. “We were hoping they could hold out until the review finished,” he said. “But uncertainty is enough and the investors ran. It’s a terrible shame.”

According to Australia’s Clean Energy Council, there are four large-scale solar farms currently under construction and another 13 in development, all with uncertain futures. As their Acting Chief Executive, Kane Thornton, explained via email, “Australia’s Renewable Energy Target is the critical policy for all renewable energy projects. While large scale solar projects also receive support from other Australian Government programs, without the Renewable Energy Target they wouldn’t get built.”

Not only is financial uncertainty putting solar technology on hold, generators and distributors are pushing legislation to repress it which, according to Giles Parkinson, is “basically a conspiracy.” As he says, “none of the incumbents want to see more solar. Generators are fucked and they know it. NSPs will eventually profit from solar, but they’re focused on the short term, so they’re resisting.”

One example is in the northern state of Queensland, where power companies from July can charge their customers “an additional amount… for the purchase of electricity from renewable or environmentally-friendly sources.” There are several conditions to this, but the upshot is that companies can now charge heavy solar consumers (mostly businesses) around $500 for every service, including meter readings. This piece of legislation, which is basically a deterrent to solar, was quietly approved at the behest of the state’s coal lobbyists with very little scrutiny.

This suppression of solar is widespread says Dr. Anna Bruce, who is an engineering lecturer with the University of New South Wales. “NSPs are doing all they can to stop it. They’re capping the amount of solar power that can be fed into the grid in certain areas, and they’ve introduced bans on exporting. The justification is that we need the network. If every home installs solar, the network won’t exist.”

But wouldn’t this behaviour attract the attention of some sort of consumer watchdog? Apparently not. Bruce claims that technological progress has outstripped the warning systems of advocacy groups, but Giles Parkinson says it goes further. “In Australia, we have this unique situation where regulators are run by state governments, and they see their role as protecting the incumbents, which are often the state power companies. It’s a hopeless conflict of interest. Just a classic example of aging white men who don’t understand the future.”

Despite the gloom about the short term, most exponents of solar seem positive about the future. The consensus is that while governments come and go, the market will always demand the cheapest option. Eventually, it’s hoped, solar will plunge power companies into something called the death spiral. This is essentially when solar and battery technology allow consumers to use far less grid power, which will force costs onto an exponentially shrinking customer pool, which will encourage more to install solar. The grid will still exist, but customers will be using insufficient amounts of power to necessitate traditional generators, leaving solar farms to fill the gap.

If that sounds a little too much like hacktivist optimism, Parkinson insists Australians can at least claw back on the solar science front. “We’ve got the fundamentals,” he says. “Lots of sun, expensive electricity, and smart people. We’ll get there.”

Follow Julian on Twitter

The existing statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Tavistock Square, London

On a visit to India in July, UK chancellor George Osborne announced that a statue of Mahatma Gandhi would be erected in Parliament Square. You can criticize Osborne for a lot of things, but you’d have thought his decision to build a statue of a globally revered peace-loving icon of Indian independence would be fairly uncontroversial.

However, alongside all of Gandhi’s notable achievements, he also used to do stuff like getting girls and boys to bathe and sleep together, chastely, as a kind of celibacy experiment. He also slept naked next to women—including, in one case, his grandniece—to test his own restraint. It’s this aspect of his character that doesn't wash too well with 82-year-old Dr. Kusoom Vadgama, founder of the Indo-British Heritage Trust, or Bhai Amrik Singh, leader of the UK's Khalistani Sikh Federation, who described Gandhi as a "sexual weirdo."

I gave Dr. Vadgama a call last week to talk about the campaign she’s launched against the proposed statue.

VICE: So how did this all begin?
Dr Kusoom Vadgama: I've been aware of the unjust treatment of women [in India] for many years. In Delhi over two years ago, an innocent women was killed and raped on a bus. The abuse she suffered was horrific—it pierced through my heart. There has also been another incident where women were hanged. These men want to abuse and destroy the spirit of women. When the chancellor, George Osborne, went to India they decided to announce the erection of a Gandhi statue in Parliament Square. First of all, there's already a statue of Gandhi in Tavistock Square. And secondly, no man has the right to abuse or use a woman’s body to satisfy his own whims.

In Gandhi’s case he wrote in his own autobiography that he went to sleep with his grandniece. When you [test] how much you can control yourself by going to bed with a 16-year-old, I think it’s bizarre. I don’t know if you’ve looked up Gandhi and his sex life, but you will be shocked. He is one man. I just feel I have to speak on behalf of woman all over the world about what men do to dominate and destroy the lives of women. We’re not pieces of furniture. I will do my damndest to stop this statue going up.

But Gandhi also helped with the emancipation of women in India.
That’s the irony of it. Everyone joined him because it was the culture of a movement. People hammer on about how great he was, but he insulted women. He used to tell little boys and girls to bathe together. It was also exposed that he went to bed naked with his grandniece and people at the time were disgusted. 

Dr Kusoom Vadgama

OK, but does he not deserve some recognition for all the great stuff he did?
I’m not denying he did a great deal. But in India people are brainwashed to believe that the history of India begins and ends with Gandhi. He was not the only one. His iconic status has risen as if nobody did anything else at all. If he wore a bowler hat and a suit nobody would take any notice of it, but he designed clothes to associate with the poor. In India you are born with Gandhi because the first time you look at the money, Gandhi’s face is on it. The whole system is focused to a degree of mass hypnotism. For me, I feel it's the women who have been insulted and degraded to a degree by a man who is meant to be the saintly savior of India. He has been overrated and he has to be put down to earth and treated as a normal person. Don’t put him in Parliament Square. He is a symbol of what women don’t want.

So why do you think he's held in such high regard?
In India we have a habit of worshiping people—like if you're rich, beautiful, or a film star. Gandhi was a horrible man to his family. He ill-treated his wife. He didn’t even tell her he was going to be celibate. Yet as a schoolgirl I was absolutely behind him. If he went on a fast, I went on a fast. Anything he did, I would do. I was so jealous of the two girls that went around with him. He was my god. But he has insulted the culture and women of India and the world. We got our independence, now we want our dignity.

Gandhi in 1939. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

I’d say the majority of people like Gandhi, so have you had much opposition to your campaign?
The initial reaction is always, “My god, I didn’t know that.” Then after it’s explained they give me their support. Many people locally are supporting me. I just can’t believe it. It's also important that the Indian diaspora here have some kind of role model, but does Gandhi inspire you? Overall, people have been supportive and shocked when I tell them [about his sex life.] Although, one of the fundraisers for the statue had a go at me and said, "What men do with women isn’t anybody’s business.” I accept that, but I said, “I am drawing a line when it involves a teenager who is his blood relation.” 

You’ve just started a petition, too, right? How’s that going?
It's a petition personally to George Osborne and has just gone online. There's already a Gandhi statue two miles from Parliament Square—why [do they need another]? Maybe they want to impress the government in India, or it might be to do with the trade benefits or something. I have already sent George Osborne two letters and am just about to write a third one.

Has he replied?
No. I wrote the second letter in the full knowledge that he would neither reply nor do anything to stop the construction of the statue. But I’m going to keep going. This is a very serious mater. I want to say, "Enough is enough."   

Follow Chris Giles on Twitter.

Earlier this summer, Relapse Records—the extreme music label responsible for breaking, among others, Mastodon—announced that it will release the debut album by mysterious black metal project Myrkur, which is Icelandic for “darkness.” Pitchfork compared Myrkur’s sound to Norwegian black metal staples Ulver, our own Noisey added on to the praise, and MetalSucks said, “she should have dubbed herself whatever the Icelandic word for ‘awesome’ is.” Black metal hasn’t produced an exciting new voice in years, so why did Relapse’s announcement provoke a collective howl of discontent from the metal community?

"Somebody smash this cunt's face with a brick. Its a fucking weak Wolves in the Throne Room rip by some cunt who doesn't even fucking listen to black metal. Drums sound terrible. Hobbes, you might listen to "black metal" but you have got to be the weakest representation of a true black metal fan there is. fucking false ass poser bitch go listen to Conqueror or Beherit or fucking Blasphemy you fucking pussy piece of shit. I would kill you IRL for saying this is almost good, bitch motherfucker"

-Commenter hussie on Lambgoat about a month ago (Grammar has been corrected -Ed.)

Myrkur’s careful and enigmatic PR campaign has kept a very tight lid on the identity of the person behind the album; pretty much the only thing we know is that Myrkur is an unnamed Danish woman’s solo project. Cultivating a mystique around one’s artistic identity isn’t unusual, but Myrkur, as one writer puts it, “seems to have dropped from the sky.” Who is Myrkur, and why does she make metalheads so furiously angry? The answer has to do with some unsurprising old problems and a handful of disturbing new trends in the world of extreme music.

Once online speculation had narrowed down the list of candidates, internet savvy metalheads figured out that Myrkur is probably the nom de plume of Amalie Bruun (this interview with collaborator Brian Harding from last year is certainly compelling evidence), a New York-based Danish scenester best known as one half of Ex Cops, a duo dealing in slick, frankly boring Brooklyn alterna-pop. Still shrouded in confusion, this semi-revelation nonetheless sparked controversy, re-igniting the tired conversation about authenticity, the dead horse that extreme music fans most love to beat. As one Stereogum pundit put it: “We can only assume that this is a product, not art.”

Let me be straightforward and state for the record that I am one of the people incredibly psyched for Myrkur’s debut. Myrkur’s two singles, “Nattens Barn” (Danish for “Child of the Night”) and “Latvian Fergurð” (that crossed ‘d’ at the end is the Viking letter ‘eth’; like a lot of black metal acts, Myrkur seems to be really into Norse mythology) hold incredible promise. This is well-crafted, melodic, bare-bones black metal in the Scandinavian tradition (think Mayhem, Enslaved, and Ulver, whom Myrkur cited as influences in a brief interview earlier this month). As a female black metal practitioner in an extremely male-dominated world, Myrkur has the potential to be more than an appealing oddity; the strength of her music suggests she is an emerging innovator in the field.

A guy having metal feelings. Image via Flickr user Ramsey Beyer

Rather than condescendingly argue that Myrkur’s music is “feminine black metal,” I bring up Myrkur’s gender because, as part of her signal value, it has game-changing potential to bring black metal to a listening audience beyond the extreme metal community. There have always been women in black metal and extreme music, but few have had complete control of their public image (Laina Dawes’ book What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal is an excellent discussion of that very problem). Myrkur’s impact is possible thanks to the generations of metal musicians and fans who endured the scene’s disinclination to accord them the respect and voice to make the form in their own image. For too many, being a metal fan has meant coping the label of “metal chick” and other infantilizing diminutions that echo the scene’s general discomfort with women.

But Myrkur is not the first all female black metal project to make an impact; in 2003, Japanese power trio Gallhammer (the name is an homage to early Swiss extreme metal masters Hellhammer) burst onto the stage. Despite producing three solid studio albums of gloriously primitive black metal (including 2007’s Ill Innocence, which belongs in every decent record collection), Vivian Slaughter, Risa Reaper, and Mika Penetrator were for a long time viewed as an aberration in the scene, primarily considered a novelty act: Look, girls playing black metal!

"It matters because Relapse have made a point to hide the authors’ identities because they knew nobody would support them otherwise. Authenticity matters a lot to the metal world. Metal fans want to feel as though their passion for the music is shared by those creating it and not manufactured like commercial music. Since the people behind Myrkur are pop musicians with the backing of a PR agency and the project has no history or real reason for why it would be signed to Relapse, we can only assume that this is a product, not art. Relapse Records is deliberately misleading consumers."

-Commenter Joe Smith on the Stereogum article.

Perhaps wisely recognizing that it is impossible to negate her gender’s impact on her place in the scene, Myrkur has taken a different approach to her public image. The release of Myrkur’s second single was accompanied by a short film in which Myrkur wanders around a nature setting best described as an animated Caspar David Friedrich painting--probably upstate New York--while expounding on her profound appreciation of Norse goddesses and arch Romantic truisms about how truth springs from nature. Appearing in a ghostly white nightgown, her identity concealed by the unkempt blonde hair covering her face, she is unmistakably female, even if the styling is more “unsettling wood sprite” than “hot metal babe.” But by controlling the focus on her gender—by attempting, as it seems so far, to make it part of her otherworldly claim on darkness instead of an impediment to her sonic brutality—Myrkur makes an effective attempt to redirect her listeners’ attention to her music.

It’s hard not to read the nearly-immediate backlash against Myrkur as a reminder of the scene’s seemingly bottomless capacity for misogyny, but the black metal community’s beef also has to do with a misguided belief in authenticity. There’s a long proud tradition of nerds claiming ownership of their particular cultural niche in the face of a potentially broader audience (I’m sure Rome’s cultural elite were into orgies way before the Caesars discovered them). What sets black metal apart from most other subcultures is its dubious claim to fame.

Twenty years ago a handful of Norwegian basketcases loosely affiliated with record store owner and Mayhem guitarist Øystein Aarseth (better known as Euronymous) burned down a couple of ancient wooden churches and were for one hot minute the most feared teenagers in Scandinavia (due largely to predictably hyperbolic news coverage). When ringleader Christian “Varg” Vikernes brutally murdered his former friend Euronymous (and went to jail for fifteen years. The maximum prison sentence in Norway is twenty-one years), the origin myth was solidified. These days Vikernes lives the survivalist life in rural France, spewing racist shit and posting photos of himself brandishing Viking weaponry online, but his legacy has been established. By murdering Euronymous, Vikernes gave black metal the power to do exactly what shock rocker GG Allin said was his mission all along in the last interview he gave before his death in 1993: “I want rock and roll to be dangerous again.”

In an essay about bands and labels that have begun catfishing audiences by concealing the identities of recording artists (Swedish Ghost B.C. and its faceless mass of Nameless Ghouls being perhaps the most prominent example to non-metalheads), Stereogum’s resident metal scribe Michael Nelson describes Myrkur’s first single with careful praise. “It shouldn’t matter if the entity called ‘Myrkur’ is in fact one woman living in shadowy Danish isolation or if it is an elaborate, market-tested experiment emerging from the darkness of the Scandinavian studio owned by Max Martin.” It shouldn’t matter, but it does. I would argue that the coming of Myrkur is making rock ‘n’ roll, or specifically black metal, dangerous again because it challenges the genre. Myrkur is creating a new persona within the rigid confines of black metal and so far she’s been pretty convincing.

Follow Theis Duelund on Twitter.

Chris Reynolds Gordon (bottom right) and Heaven SX co-founder, Eva

Chris Reynolds Gordon is kind of like Britain's answer to Dan Bilzerian. Only, where the latter made his name playing poker, throwing naked women off roofs, and rapidly becoming Instagram’s most-followed misogynist, Chris has managed to get where he’s at without any of the awkward social media machismo of his American counterpart.

He's been a millionaire; he’s gone broke. He’s owned property around the world; he’s been homeless. He was a junior national 800 meters champion; he’s met with Vladimir Putin about trading rough diamonds. Now, before hitting his 30th birthday, he’s turned his and his friend Eva’s “Heaven SX” concept into one of London’s most popular “elite” sex parties.

In light of the Killing Kittens group—probably the UK’s largest sex party brand—recently inviting Heaven SX into its fold, I thought I’d catch up with Chris to find out his thoughts on how he makes his money.

VICE: Hey, Chris. So, first off, run me through what happens at a Heaven SX party.
Chris Reynolds Gordon: It's like going to any normal bar or club—you have people dressed up looking nice, chatting, laughing, getting to know each other. Then, a little bit later on—at about 12:00 or 1:00 AM, when the mood’s right—the girls will go and get changed into lingerie. It's a bit of an awkward moment, with all the guys chatting and sitting with each other, then all these girls come in looking super hot and the atmosphere changes and people start disappearing.

Why do you call it “elite”?
I went to quite a lot of parties in the past, and everyone was calling them elite. But then you'd see, like, 50- or 60-year-old people who weren’t that attractive. Not that there aren’t attractive people in their 50s and 60s, but these weren't people you'd stereotypically think of as attractive. It's really quite a shallow thing, though, because what is good looking? Basically, the hottest [people] we wanted to play with just got together—everyone who was a 10 on the hot chart. The average age is also quite young. There's nothing else like it.

How many people do you have applying for each one?
When we have a big party we'll have 100 applications a day for a week or two. And then it will taper off to about 20 or 30. We have selection parties that can be for up to 120, or even 200, people, and then we have actual members’ parties, which are like 30 people. Basically, we’re just going on the shallow: looks. That why I don't really choose, because I don't think it's fair for one person to cast an opinion on what's hot and what's not.

We've been talking for five minutes and you’ve already mentioned the word “shallow” a couple of times. Do you feel bad about the parties?
Yeah, it's really awkward because obviously it is a shallow thing. But even Tinder is about as shallow as it gets. You don't want to upset anyone, but if you're going to a party for the best-looking people, then unfortunately 95 percent of the people who apply don't actually get in.

So what kind of people are applying?
They're just normal people, like journalists, actors, actresses, models, nurses, doctors, and lawyers. I'd probably say teachers, doctors, nurses, and lawyers are the naughtiest group, to be honest. Especially teachers. We’ve had some parties where guests wore masks and had no mobile phones at all. We've also had one party where we had some very, very VIP people in the acting and music industry.

But it’s mostly couples coming, right? What does that say about attitudes toward relationships?
I think it's saying people are becoming more open and honest. It has positive and negative points; I’ve seen couples where it's brought them closer because they don't need to cheat. If you've got a guy jerking off to porn and he's not thinking of his wife, he's thinking about this girl—but he actually loves his wife and would never run off with anyone. It's kind of the same thing, but they’re present. I’ve seen a couple who were married for six months and they were swinging.

Looking at your Facebook feed you remind me a bit of the British Dan Bilzerian. What do you think of that comparison?
I've heard it said before. Photos that have happened and things that go on… it's very wild for some people who haven't experienced it, but for me it's quite normal.

Chris in his running days

Before all this you started your career in athletics, right?
Yeah. Pretty much the first day I stepped onto the track I was the fastest 1,500 meter runner in the country. I won several national titles and was faster then Seb Coe and Steve Cram for the age I was at. I was the fastest 1,800 meter runner in Europe for my age at 18. Then I had a massive falling out with my family for a year and a half. Before, my dad was my coach; now, I was sleeping in the back of a car and eating fish and chips. It all went completely out of the window. I fell apart. I was almost suicidal—I couldn't cope with not being the best.

Then you came into money in quite dark circumstances?
Yes. When my mom died—when I was 21—I inherited $600,000, which I invested into training to be a trader. My account skyrocketed, trading FTSE 100 and then FOREX. I did very, very well, and when Lehman Brothers went down I made an astronomical amount of money. I decided to put it all into property. I had six properties in Dubai, four in Morocco and two in Egypt at the age of 22, and I just wanted to focus on my running. Then this massive recession hit and I lost everything. At the time, I had around a $5.3 million net worth, but being paper rich is very different to having money in the bank. If the economy hadn't crashed as it did, I wouldn't be working right now.

Chris with Russian State Secretary Pavel Borodin

I've seen a photo of you with Russian State Secretary Pavel Borodin. What's that about?
I met Vladimir Putin and Pavel Borodin. I wanted to trade rough diamonds but I knew nothing about it. This was back when things were good. I had a very good bank manager at the time, but he said he couldn't give me proof of funds, and nobody would talk to me without proof of funds. So I got some very big diamond buyers to give proof of funds and, long story short, I had a state's enquiry that said I was good for $390 million when I was about 23.

I flew to Russia with the documents in my bag, signed off by this bank. I went to the Kremlin and stayed at the President's Hotel, which is where I met Putin and Borodin. We talked in his office; they thought I was this super rich guy—it took a lot of balls to do. It was stupid, but I wanted to be the best and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there.

But you got a bit ahead of yourself?
I was definitely fake it before you make it at that point. I was 23 meeting some serious people. But I'd rather do that then say, “What if?” My idea of death is thinking, What if I hadn’t given it my best shot? After I lost my money I was homeless and in and out of youth hostels until eventually things started going well again.

Finally, how big is your sex party network?
Well, there's one social network with around 8 million in Europe, and another with 16 million. In the UK you've got groups with tens and hundreds of thousands of people just in London. It's beyond belief—you would not believe it. In my contract now I just have to fly to places like Miami, Ibiza, and New York and go to parties and bring people in and help with bringing it forward and making it the best I can make it. 

Follow Cass on Twitter

Photo by Chris Turgeon

The Internet is still mad at Henry Rollins. Dee Slut, however, is not—even though Rollins beat Dee Slut out of a job singing for Black Flag back in 1981. Luckily Slut (aka Dave Turgeon) got the booby prize of becoming a New Orleans legend by singing for punk band The Sluts on and off for the last 35 years. In between, Slut played and toured with every notable punk band of the era, and decided that Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye was a “dickhead.”

On the occasion of Rollins becoming a pariah—and the re-release by Jeth-Row Records of the Sluts only album on sexy pink vinyl—We spoke with Dee Slut about his Black Flag tryouts, his relationship with Rollins, and his own Rollins-esque thoughts on the many, many suicides he’s suffered through.

VICE: So give me a brief history of The Sluts.
Dee Slut: I’d just dropped out of high school, and the New Orleans music scene in the late 70s was really good. And we were like, man, we need to start a band. We made a lot of angry music, but it was satire. The first night of practice we were throwing out one-liners and put em all together and we wrote, “Mom’s Cunt.” My mother would come out to see us, and she never took it personally. Black Flag stayed at my mom’s house and shit. She was a good band mom.

Will the Sluts be playing any shows to promote the new record?
Well, Die Rotzz is my band now: Die Sluts. But I broke my back and now I have to have surgery. So, I don’t know if I will be doin another show because I don’t want to do it half-assed, you know? I’m not a real singer so I don’t think people are coming out to see me sing as much as they’re coming to see a show. I’d feel fraudulent if I came out with a walker. Time will tell. 

I recently read a recent interview where Ian MacKaye said that when Black Flag lost their original singer, they immediately called you up.
That dickhead. That worthless dickhead.

Who, Ian MacKaye?
Yeah. I wouldn’t speak for him now, but back then he didn’t help us at all. I remember, we rolled into D.C., Ian MacKaye’s town, and Black Flag and the Sluts were looking for shows. We lived in D.C. for three weeks, starving for a show, and he just wouldn’t help us. The last night we were there, playing a show, I said from the stage, “Our last song goes out to Ian MacKaye and it’s called ‘Fuck You!’” And we played our song "Fuck You" which was just running around giving everyone the finger and saying "Fuck you!" Satire, you know.

How did you first meet Black Flag?
The Sluts were just playing a lot of big shows in New Orleans with all the touring punk bands. That’s how we got to know The Minutemen. We did I think three tours in California—some of them just us, some shows with Black Flag. I was back in New Orleans working on a Sluts tour when Chuck [Dukowski, bass] and Greg [Ginn, guitar] called me and said they wanted to put their singer Dezo [Cadena] back on rhythm guitar—so Greg could kinda go crazy on his--and have just a frontman singer. So they flew me up to New York and we recorded the album that was “Damaged.”

So somewhere there’s a version of “Damaged” with you singing instead of Rollins?
Yes, it’s on tape somewhere, unless they threw it away. But it sounded like Black Sluts. I heard the album and was like, “It doesn’t sound anything like y’all.” I guess they were hoping I could sing or something [laughs]. Whereas when Henry came in, he sounded like the other singers they had had. He was the sound that they wanted.

How did they eventually tell you that you hadn’t made the cut?
We met at a café to talk about it the last morning I was in New York. Henry was sitting in another booth. But there were never any hard feelings with those guys. They gave me a shot, recorded it, and it didn’t work out. I ended up being great friends with them and toured a lot with them. They were a huge help to us. I had a great time meeting Dez and Robo. It was a great experience. It taught me the inside of what it takes to do the whole record, touring, dedication kinda thing.

The fact that I liked to burn didn’t go over too well either—I smoked pot and they didn’t like that.

Really? I always heard that Greg Ginn was a pothead.
Well, maybe he had been and they all had stopped? Or maybe he became one later but Robo and Dez would sneak off to a little park and go burn and say, "Don’t tell the guys!" I remember we were riding to a show in Pittsburg—we played the Electric Banana, and that was the one show I did with them, and they introduced me as the next singer and that was pretty cool, and we did “I’m tied to a clock” [“Clocked In”] and a couple other songs. I wish I had a tape of that too. But then on the way back I smoked some weed in the van and they freaked out, “Put that out! Put that out!” and I was like, “All right, sorry guys.”

After all that, what was your relationship with Henry Rollins like?
Absolutely no problem at all. Henry was real quiet. I kind of always understood him to be into that sort of D.C. straight edge skinhead thing. He was just quiet, and very serious.

Most people today know Henry Rollins today as a motor-mouth. He pissed off the entire world the other day by calling Robin Williams a coward for committing suicide.
Suicide is extremely personal to me. My godfather, supercop hero, blew his fuckin head off. My sister killed herself. My best man killed himself the week before my son was born. My bass player hung himself on Mardi Gras day! [breaks down, almost crying] Hatch Boy from Shell Shock, a good friend of mine, went down a beautiful row of oak trees down in Chalmette and blew his head off in a van. And it’s like, ‘What the fuck dude? Why did you do that to me?’ And it makes me sick to hear people say how, "he’s at peace," like it’s some beautiful thing for him. Because in reality what it does is, it shatters multiple lives, the last stupid mistake that you make. People who kill themselves [Begins to cry] destroy lives and people and affect them for the lifetime!

I think the judgmental tone of Henry Rollins’ piece is what pissed everyone.
[Regains his composure] If you are a family member, the last thing you want to hear is that the person who checked out is a coward but saying it’s the coward’s way out? I got no problem with Henry Rollins saying that. I feel sorrow for the ones that chose that way out, but they leave us in a living hell. And to show it as a peaceful solution makes me fucking sick! If Henry Rollins saying "fucking coward" stops even one little kid from thinking he’s a bad motherfucker. [begins to cry again] I hope some kid looks at that and says, "I don’t wanna be no fuckin punk."

I mean, Robin Williams, you just checked out on your kid, man. Right now I’m waiting for major back surgery, and I’m over cutting fucking trees every day so my son’s wedding will look nice when he’s getting married. You’d do anything for your kid. And checking out? I’m really sorry Robin Williams kid has to deal with that. I certainly don’t want to judge him or his family.

But I still get mad at all these people who check out on me.

Follow Michael Patrick Welch on Twitter.

Dr. Herbert Kleber, an anti-marijuana doctor who has served as a paid consultant to Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Image via YouTube

As Americans continue to embrace pot—as medicine and for recreational use—opponents are turning to a set of academic researchers to claim that policymakers should avoid relaxing restrictions around marijuana. It's too dangerous, risky, and untested, they say. Just as drug company-funded research has become incredibly controversial in recent years, forcing major medical schools and journals to institute strict disclosure requirements, could there be a conflict of interest issue in the pot debate?

VICE has found that many of the researchers who have advocated against legalizing pot have also been on the payroll of leading pharmaceutical firms with products that could be easily replaced by using marijuana. When these individuals have been quoted in the media, their drug-industry ties have not been revealed.

Take, for example, Dr. Herbert Kleber of Columbia University. Kleber has impeccable academic credentials, and has been quoted in the press and in academic publications warning against the use of marijuana, which he stresses may cause wide-ranging addiction and public health issues. But when he's writing anti-pot opinion pieces for CBS News, or being quoted by NPR and CNBC, what's left unsaid is that Kleber has served as a paid consultant to leading prescription drug companies, including Purdue Pharma (the maker of OxyContin), Reckitt Benckiser (the producer of a painkiller called Nurofen), and Alkermes (the producer of a powerful new opioid called Zohydro).

Kleber, who did not respond to a request for comment, maintains important influence over the pot debate. For instance, his writing has been cited by the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police in its opposition to marijuana legalization, and has been published by the American Psychiatric Association in the organization's statement warning against marijuana for medicinal uses.

Could Kleber's long-term financial relationship with drug firms be viewed as a conflict of interest? Studies have found that pot can be used for pain relief as a substitute for major prescription painkillers. The opioid painkiller industry is a multibillion business that has faced rising criticism from experts because painkillers now cause about 16,000 deaths a year, more than heroin and cocaine combined. Researchers view marijuana as a a safe alternative to opioid products like OxyContin, and there are no known overdose deaths from pot.

Other leading academic opponents of pot have ties to the painkiller industry. Dr. A. Eden Evins, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a frequent critic of efforts to legalize marijuana. She is on the board of an anti-marijuana advocacy group, Project SAM, and has been quoted by leading media outlets criticizing the wave of new pot-related reforms. "When people can go to a ‘clinic’ or ‘cafe’ and buy pot, that creates the perception that it’s safe,” she told the Times last year.

Notably, when Evins participated in a commentary on marijuana legalization for the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the publication found that her financial relationships required a disclosure statement, which noted that as of November 2012, she was a "consultant for Pfizer and DLA Piper and has received grant/research support from Envivo, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer." Pfizer has moved aggressively into the $7.3 billion painkiller market. In 2011, the company acquired King Pharmaceuticals (the makers of several opioid products) and is currently working to introduce Remoxy, an OxyContin competitor.

Dr. Mark L. Kraus, who runs a private practice and is a board member to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, submitted testimony in 2012 in opposition to a medical marijuana law in Connecticut. According to financial disclosures, Kraus served on the scientific advisory panel for painkiller companies such as Pfizer and Reckitt Benckiser in the year prior to his activism against the medical pot bill. Neither Kraus or Evins responded to a request for comment.

These academic revelations add fodder to the argument that drug firms maintain quiet ties to the marijuana prohibition lobby. In July, I reported for the Nation that many of the largest anti-pot advocacy groups, including the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions for America, which has organized opposition to reform through its network of activists and through handing out advocacy material (sample op-eds against medical pot along with Reefer Madness-style videos, for example), has relied on significant funding from painkiller companies, including Purdue Pharma and Alkermes. Pharmaceutical-funded anti-drug groups like the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and CADCA use their budget to obsess over weed while paying lip-service to the much bigger drug problem in America of over-prescribed opioids.

As ProPublica reported, painkiller-funded researchers helped fuel America's deadly addiction to opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin. These academics, with quiet funding from major pain pill firms, encouraged doctors to over-prescribe these drugs for a range of pain relief issues, leading to where we stand today as the world's biggest consumer of painkillers and the overdose capital of the planet. What does it say about medical academia today that many of that painkiller-funded researchers are now standing in the way of a safer alternative: smoking a joint.

Johnny Ryan's semi-popular comic book saga, Prison Pit, is an animated movie now, so everyone should immediately go buy and watch it. Johnny's been doing comics for VICE for the last 34 years, so we are morally obligated to promote any project he has a hand in.

It's exciting to watch Johnny's horrible monster-men wiggle around the screen and murder each other in the most awful ways that the most awful man on the planet could devise! The first chapter is on YouTube, so take a look: 

Here's a little interview I did with Johnny Ryan, whom I hate very much. He hates me too. See just how much in this interview.

VICE: Why animate Prison Pit? If it's so great, then won't an animated adaptation just be a lesser accomplishment?
Johnny Ryan: I was concerned about adapting it into a color cartoon, but the guys at 6 Point really fucking nailed it. I think in some ways it's better than the book.

How specifically is the Prison Pit movie better than the book? 
There's a few scenes that I think are more effective in the animation. The one where the guys are falling down the tube at the beginning, the vag-maggot scene, the revelation of the cock, etc. Also the music is amazing. Hive Mind did a spectacular job.

Does the world no longer need the Prison Pit book now that we have the cartoon?
The world needs more Prison Pit, not less.

How involved was Johnny in making this thing?
They took the book and used it as the storyboard. And they had me involved all along the way giving notes, and input, etc.

You have a pretty all-star voice cast for this movie. Was there anyone who was hard to get for this? Was everyone involved already a fan?
I think the only cast member that knew me beforehand was Blake. I knew he was perfect to play Jizzra the jerkoff monster. He's a great actor and he jumped off a roof.

Did Blake jump off a roof to help with Prison Pit or was it related to some other thing
He jumped off the roof of a 666 story building and screamed "PRISON PIT" and landed in a dumptruck full of werewolf corpses. He broke every bone in his dick. That's his level of commitment to this project.

I noticed that the colors are significantly darker than the colors Johnny typically uses in his comics. Tell me about that decision.
Prison Pit is an entity that lives separate from my previous AYC or VICE work in most aspects, including color.

Is the plan to animate the entire Prison Pit series?
If there's enough support, the plan is to keep going.

How many different voices did you consider for CF?
I think there were like 2 or 3. I thought we would have to audition wrestlers or death metal singers—I didn't think we'd find a regular actor who could pull it off. But when they sent me James Adomian's audition, and I thought he would be perfect. That guy's a fucking maniac behind the mic.

Is there any possibility of seeing your other comics turned into animated things? Loady, Blecky, Boobs Pooter?
Only if someone with a bunch of money and an animation studio asks me.

Do you feel happy now that you're rich and famous?
I will only be happy when you finally tie your balls to the space shuttle and fly directly into a champagne supernova in the sky.

You don't like me very much do you Johnny. Why is that?
You suck.

What could I do to make you like me?
Die.

Have you gotten a cease-and-desist from Superjail yet?
Have you noticed how your sister is a WAY better artist than you? Why do you think that is?

Can we talk outside of the interview for a second? Don't bring up my sister. Her career has totally eclipsed mine and no part of me is at all okay with that. 
Don't bring up Superjail.

How would Cannibal Fuckface kill me if he got the chance?
He would suck your cock 'til you died.

Is it possible to kill CF? Is he immortal?
We'll find out in book six.

What was CF's mother like? Was his dad at all like him? Was he born by conventional human means?
This sounds like a good opportunity for Prison Pit fan fic.

Who would win, CF or Lobo and what would that fight be like? CF or Wolverine? CF or Bloodwulf? CF or Deadpool? CF or Marv from Sin City? CF or Hellboy? CF or Scott Pilgrim? CF or Boobs Pooter? CF or Workaholics? CF or Greg Mishka? CF or the Undertaker? CF or Worf?
No matter who wins, we lose.

Go to the Prison Pit site to get the movie or some other junk. Go to Fantagrapphics to buy the comic. 

All photos via the author.
Whether you love it or hate it, there’s no denying the cultural impact Game of Thrones has had on TV-watchers worldwide. For the past three years, fans have become helplessly immersed in the medieval world of sex, power, little people, and dragons. During every season, doe-eyed masses unite on Sundays in hysterical excitement to watch their favourite medieval characters stab each other in the back in an elaborate and unpredictable dance. I understand the appeal, but I find the widespread obsession more interesting than the actual show.

That’s why I didn’t hesitate to plan my visit to a “Game of Thrones-themed kinky burlesque circus fetish party” in Montreal the second I heard about it. What happens when a widespread obsession of fantastic nerdery meets the underground world of fetish costume parties? Everyone knows how nerdy fetish people can be already, but when they’re mixed together with the world of epic swordplay and wizardry, I knew I was going to be in a bizarrely fun night—the fact that it wasn’t exclusively Game of Thrones, but open to all fantasy and sci-fi, would only add to the weirdness.

Exploring this new world by myself, however, seemed like an intimidating task; so I went on Tinder to see if I could get a date to share the experience.

Surprisingly, just a mention of Game of Thrones on Tinder was getting people pretty excited. It was going particularly well with Nadine, a recent McGill University graduate:

“Sounds fun,” she said, “or at least really weird.”

We met the next day at my house before walking to the costume shop together. She sat perched on my couch with a bag over her shoulder. Her smile curled up into dimples as we shook hands and took in the other person’s IRL self. With her freckles and big brown eyes, she seemed like the last person to get done up in fetish fantasywear and frolic around in the dark. She held herself a bit like she was at a job interview with her back straight and her hands sweaty, but something seemed familiar and endearing about her. She was beautiful.

We shuffled down the street to the shop and filled the air with our necessary introductions. She told me that she got on Tinder to meet girls, because it’s hard to tell in real life if other girls are into you. As we walked around the shop looking for medieval clothing, we found out neither of us were really into Game of Thrones and laughed.

“It’s OK,” she said. “Game of Thrones is only one of the themes for this thing. We could go for Alice in Wonderland instead.”

We ended up leaving with Mad Hatter and Alice costumes and hugged goodbye on the street corner.



Nadine and I in "full" costume.
The next night we sat drinking rum and coke in our costumes before the event, and I began to see the adventurous side of her that was eager to try this. She told me with a smile that her friend had gone to a party ran by the same organizers—Cirque de Boudoire—and that things were definitely going to get weird.

We walked through the Saturday night streets of downtown Montreal and were hit with a barrage of catcalls, chirps, and honking horns. I strode forward in my top hat and she walked beside in her striped Alice skirt. Nadine’s cheeks were flushed and she seemed determined to get there.

The event description read, “A fantasy event by and for sexy, open minded & creatively kinky people,” which ultimately left both of us completely lost. I wanted to be adventurous and explore this strange intersection of interests, but what if we were way in over our heads? Would I end up being thrown into a cage and beaten with a wizard staff, while my date was forced to shout ancient Greek poetry at me? Probably not, but I couldn’t rule it out.

We asked a few women outside of the club next door to take a photo of us before we went in. The bouncer looked at our costumes, gave us a knowing nod, and pulled up the rope for us to go inside. 

We got our tickets at the kiosk and walked through the turnstiles toward the shooting laser beams and pounding music. Men with earpieces and matching collared shirts patrolled the floor of the big open foyer, and the woman at the coatcheck gave us a warm, professional smile. Was the normalcy of the staff just compensating for how fucked up the inside was going to be—or had we read this entire situation incorrectly?

We stepped cautiously into the main room and looked around. It was dark except for the stage, and it smelled like latex and fog machine residue. A few hundred figures pulsed to the heavy trance music, and the stage was decorated with a giant “FANTASYLAND” backdrop. We stepped closer and a half-naked man dressed as a goat darted in front of us, scaring the shit out of me.

As we merged with the crowd, we realized that everyone else was also wearing some kind of intense, elaborate half-naked costume and ours were starting to seem half-assed. I looked like a bad magician.

Some of the outfits we had to compete with.
There was a commotion in the corner so we went to go check it out. A woman with leather boots was being tied up and hung by suspended ropes. An unenthusiastic pirate guy spun her around and tied her limbs together in different combinations. I asked the guy beside me covered head to toe in latex with a zipper over his mouth if I could take a picture of him.

“No, thank you.” He said with a polite and timid voice, as his zipper shook back and forth.

We got beers and saw what else we could do. I got bodypainted and we watched a guy make a boob painting. The vibe in the room seemed oddly pleasant and proper. The costumes were impressive and shocking, but we felt strangely underwhelmed.



Getting my body painted.
“Someone told me about this room that’s not being used,” Nadine shouted in my ear, “Do you want to go?”

“Yes.”

She led the way upstairs and we passed a sign that read: “No photos in the Fetish Play Area.” I felt that this room was exactly what I had been excited about, and afraid of.

We passed through the doorway holding hands and inched forward. The faint sound of smacking drifted towards us, and the flashing lights from the stage below licked up the side of the balcony to give us a faint image of the room. It was about the size of an RV, and smelled like sweat and rubber.

About six figures were crouched, head-down on these leather benches scattered around the room. Some were being punished by other dark figures, and others were just crouched there, presumably waiting for someone to do the same to them.

In the middle of the room was a cross with a guy tied to it. He was getting whipped. To the left, a line of women (and a few men) were bent over the balcony, receiving various forms of punishment from the people behind them.

Our attention was drawn to one particularly sexy girl with a dog collar on, who I had seen on a stripper pole earlier. She was being carefully attended to by a hairy, chubby man with wings and glasses. He held a kind of frayed rope in one hand, which he was lightly running over her perfect ass. He moved on to light flicks with his wrist, and pinched the middle of her cheek with his other hand. She glanced back with grimaced ecstasy and let her hair fall on her face. His glasses were fogging up—but he carried on with the focus of a neurosurgeon.

Nadine watched this unfold with yearning eyes and I wondered if we could somehow join.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Do you think we could borrow your rope when you’re done?”

He looked at me attentively as a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead.

“You know, I wish you had asked me earlier but I actually borrowed this one myself so I just wouldn’t feel right lending it to you without this person’s permission. Sorry.”

“No, no, that’s OK. Thanks.”

After the friendly dungeon master told us we couldn’t use his buddy’s rope, we did a slow circle past the crouched bench people, who all looked kind of bummed nobody was tickling them with ropes. We saw the guy getting whipped on the cross and found an open bench near the back. I spotted the full body latex suit guy watching silently from the corner with his arms crossed.

Nadine mounted the bench on all fours and looked back at me like Go ahead, it’s OK. I started half-heartedly spanking her with her striped skirt lifted up. Being a BDSM noob, I didn’t know what else to do other than keep spanking, How would the nice dungeon master spice things up? I thought. Then a girl in a white dress tapped me on the shoulder.

“Can I hit your girlfriend?”

I was about to say, “Yeah, of course!” But I realized how insensitive that would be, so we leaned on either side of Nadine towards her head and asked. Nadine nodded vigorously and I stepped away to let them do their thing.

The girl’s courtesy quickly hardened into a wicked aggression as she started smacking Nadine softly at first, then harder than I did. Her boyfriend and I watched in incredulous silence as our dates shared this animalistic energy. She stopped after a minute or so and thanked us both profusely. Nadine flipped the hair off her flushed, happy face and gave me a kiss.



Some fellow revellers. 
Now that the ice in the BDSM dungeon had been broken, I wanted to test my own sense of adventure. I walked up to the dude beside the cross and asked him if he could whip me.

“Yeah, sure, no problem!” He said with a warm smile.

I turned around, took off my shirt and put my arms on the cross. I felt the whip lightly touch my back, then recoil and make contact again. He started hitting my back faster but still very lightly. It almost felt relaxing, like I was getting my back scratched. Given how the other interactions had gone in this room, I trusted this guy and wasn’t worried that he was going to go past my comfort zone.

I looked forward and saw the horned goat guy from earlier chatting casually with a guy wrapped in chains. The guy was lightly whipping my legs now, and I decided that this was all I wanted to take from this. I turned around and shook his hand to thank him.

“No, thank you,” he said.

It was really hot in the room, and Nadine and I had finished our beers, so we decided to go to the washroom to get some water. She came into the men’s washroom with me and pulled me into a stall. We started making out and she pulled my pants down. She put on condom on me with her mouth and flipped up her skirt.

We shook the bathroom stall as we really got going, and I realized that my top hat was still on and visible above the stall door. With my pants around my ankles visible from below the door, there wasn’t much left to the imagination. You could hear people washing their hands and shuffling around, just feet away from us.

We finished and walked out of the stall, adjusting our clothes to a scene of guys pretending to have not just witnessed sex in a washroom. We filled up our water cups again and avoided eye contact with everyone on our way out.

We walked out of the theatre around 3 AM into the loud streets. We saw some homeless people shooting heroin in an alleyway and had to dodge a sea of wasted bros trying to grab my hat. One of them told Nadine they wanted to tear her ass up, and another called me gay.

Compared to the strangely safe, judgement-free, and respectful environment of a BDSM dungeon, the outside seemed like war. Not a single person had crossed our boundaries at the sex party. We were not hit on, and there were no predators. It seemed their shared ‘dark’ passion actually fostered a deep sense of mutual respect and forced us to take back all our preconceptions. I fell asleep with my arm around Nadine, wondering what the guy who whipped me does for a living.


@keefe_stephen