Nick (left) and JB

This is Nick and JB. They have autism. They also have a fairly amazing music show.

Each week the two men host Hot Tracks on WCET-TV, a local access channel in their hometown of Hudsonville, Michigan, that has been running for 12 seasons. The friends and co-hosts riff on popular music and one another, rating songs on a five-star scale before ending the show with a very pure, very real, very hard dance.

Andrew Bedinger and James Grochowalski grew up in Grand Rapids, a 25-minute drive away from Hudsonville. When James got a part-time job at WCET-TV after high school he saw Nick and JB's show and decided he was watching something special. Initially, he and Andrew simply picked their favorite clips and uploaded them to YouTube, where Nick and JB developed a small but dedicated cult following.

Their first clip, “Hot Tracks! (Safe & Joyous Halloween),” was uploaded in 2009. Since then, Andrew and James have spent five years filming JB, 38, and Nick, 29, in spare moments between paid film projects and other work. They released Musical Minds, their documentary about the pair, online last March. I caught up with Andrew via Skype to talk about making the film and the future of Hot Tracks.

VICE: Hot Tracks has been going strong for 13 years now. What do you think is its enduring appeal? What about it appealed to you and James?
Andrew Bedinger: Other than the fact that people just laugh like crazy when they watch it, Nick and JB are an incredibly interesting pairing. They’re like an old married couple when they do the show, playing off each other. It’s something that could be kind of complicated and difficult, but the atmosphere of the show is so fun and light. When we came across “Dragon Force” we knew we had to make a documentary.

Did you realize it was going to take five years to make when you started it, or was it something you looked into and then thought, We need more time with this?
We weren’t quite sure how we wanted to approach it, what we wanted to focus on. We were fascinated by the guys but didn’t know how to frame their story. Once we got started, our biggest barrier was not really knowing how to end it, because both Nick and JB have a very simple, succinct routine that they do, and they’ve been living that way for years and years. Nothing has changed for these guys in the past ten years. So once we captured their routine we were like, "What do we do with this? What’s the story?" It took us a long time to figure out a story that was good enough for them.

Were Nick and JB into the idea of the documentary right away?
Oh, yes. They were absolutely crazy about it. JB especially. I mean, he thinks he’s just fully famous, that everyone knows who he is. When we pitched him the documentary he was like, “Of course, yeah, this is gonna be great.” Nick was that way, but then he kind of got in a mode of like, “I’ve been too into myself and how famous I am,” so he pulled away for a bit, but then got back on board.

Watching it, it felt like the documentary that you guys were making and the documentary that JB and Nick thought you were making was kind of a different thing. They seem to think it’s a story about two celebrities, that the public is clamoring for more info on Nick and JB. What was it like working with that disjuncture?
Yeah, at first they both sort of presumed it was like a Cribs-style thing. JB literally mentioned Cribs when he was showing us his place. I think that was their mindset at first, and we took a while to say specifically to them, “You know, this isn’t really like that; it’s a documentary about your lives and what it’s like for people with autism.” Once we talked a bit about making it educational for people to see sort of a day-in-the-life of a person with autism, they were really into that angle and kind of dropped the Cribs thing. So it was a little strange at first, but I think they had a great sense of humor about it, and it adds some humor to certain parts of the documentary, I think.

The humor element is a really interesting—and fairly fraught, for me at least—part of the viewing experience of Hot Tracks and the documentary itself. Watching both, there’s this question of when, how much, and how hard to laugh. How do you feel about the level of humor and levity in the show?
That was another hard thing for us. When you just watch the clips without any idea of their backstory, they seem sort of funny and crazy, and when you get to know them more, you know they do want you to laugh, but they don’t always know why they’re making you laugh. It’s a very fine line on the show, and it’s a very fine line in the doc too, because we obviously never wanted it to come across as though we’re making fun of the guys or people with autism as a group. We wanted it to be fun, because they’re fun. We wanted to keep the tone in line with who they are as people. We interviewed people like Faith, who works at the station, who talked about asking herself, you know, "When should I laugh?" and Nick and JB saying, "We want you to laugh—we’re trying to be funny. It’s OK."

That was a very freeing part of the documentary to me. It was kind of a relief.
Yeah, it’s crucial. We struggled a bit with where to put that in the film. We wanted to start it off with the viewer a bit confused as to what they were seeing, so we ended up putting it in fairly far along into the film to disorient the viewer and let them come to some of their own conclusions before revealing more and making them question those conclusions, maybe. It would have been a disaster if people saw the film and thought we were making fun of anyone. What we wanted to bring across is how their lives are every day. We wanted to capture a slice of their life without messing anything up. They’re funny guys, and they enjoy when people are laughing, so we tried to keep it light.

Are you still in touch with the guys?
Absolutely. I get a call almost daily from them, just to say… something. They’re great guys. We hang out every few weeks or so.

Have they seen the film? Do they like it?
They have. They really loved it, which we were nervous about because it goes into a lot of personal detail, especially with Nick, who, you know, struggles with his relationship to women and all that stuff. So we weren’t sure how that would go over, but he thought it was good and honest. He liked the fact that it will be a good tool to help people understand autism.

Did you have any personal connection to autism before you made the documentary?
Neither James nor I really had any major connection, and starting into the process I didn’t know a whole lot about it. This has opened up a lot of doors for us in terms of educating ourselves during production of the film. My relationship with Nick and JB now—we’re extremely close. There wasn’t much of a connection before, but being part of their lives, talking with their families, doing a bunch of research, it was a great learning experience for us, and we’re very invested in the educational side of it too. I really hope people see the documentary and decide to educate themselves more about autism.

How does it feel to finish something you’ve been working on for more than five years?
It’s a relief. It was a long project and it’s been something that we’ve been working on as a passion project on the side throughout the years, so it feels good that it’s finished, but it’s also a bit sad. It’s been part of my life for so long, but it’s time to move on to something different. I don’t necessarily think the documentary is done, either—it’s online, but it doesn’t feel final. We want to do film festivals and things, to see where it can go. So far the reaction has been very positive, and we’re always open to the idea that if something were to come down the pipeline with Nick and JB that we could pick up the cameras and get back at it.

The film's been out for a few months now—how has it been received?
It’s funny—now that the film is getting some interest, having conversations with people in film or people who are interested in it, hearing them quoting Hot Tracks or the documentary to us feels crazy. It’s been part of this tiny, inner world for so long, and now it’s out there. And people seem to like it.

Watch the full documentary here.

Corallimorphs, from which Coral Morphologic derives its name, are thought to have evolved without skeletons in order to adapt to climate changes.

In Miami Beach people shop for produce at two feet above sea level. The setting for this activity is a Whole Foods in South Beach. This particular Whole Foods was built on what is now the lowest inhabitable plot of land in Florida. In the surrounding area, only a few feet higher and resting on dredged-up land that was once deep-blue saltwater, is a sprawling assortment of condos, hotels, schools, parks, and small businesses that withstand flooding that grows worse every year.

The common denominator is that every square inch will, at some point, succumb to the ocean.

One mile south of the Whole Foods is a small strip of the bay known as Government Cut. The waterway was dredged and formed in the early 1900s to allow easier access to the Port of Miami. A century later, the port stands as the 11th-largest shipping-container destination in the United States. Despite the port’s continued success, the dredging ships have returned to dig up more—their gigantic steel claws scooping up chunks of seabed like a sludgy arcade-game prize.

Across the water, on the mainland, stands the deserted but still imposing building that formerly housed the Miami Herald. The half-demolished and dilapidated structure is perched on the edge of Biscayne Bay, at a relatively impressive elevation of five feet.

In 2011, the Malaysian conglomerate Genting Group, the parent company of Resorts World Casinos, expressed its intention to build a new casino on the property, even though it is still illegal to operate one in the state of Florida. Fueling the controversy was a rumor that the casino would be accessible only by boat or helicopter, which some people took to confirm suspicions that Genting’s proposal would merely serve as a playground for the rich.

Disputes over the project size halted construction and, ostensibly, the dream of persuading officials to change the gambling law. The property is now slated to be a massive mixed-used commercial and residential behemoth. For now it is only an ominous structure, its south side looking like a postapocalyptic nightmare spilling its concrete guts toward the bay.

Just south of the Herald’s former building is a lazy cut of water 1,000 feet long and 300 feet wide called the FEC boat slip. It separates the American Airlines Arena, home to the Miami Heat, from Museum Park, a recently opened and attractive green space on which the new Pérez Art Museum Miami resides.

The FEC slip has a rich history, as it was part of the original Port of Miami, built by Henry Flagler in 1897 and used until the harbor was relocated in the mid 1960s. Nowadays it mostly collects trash and debris sent over by the dredging of Government Cut. In many respects, it’s Miami’s equivalent of Manhattan’s East River. It’s also the place where, in May, David Beckham announced his intention to build a sprawling new soccer stadium—a 25,000-seat manifestation of soccer’s growing popularity in the United States.

At the suggestion of Miami Mayor Carlos Gimenez, Beckham’s backers planned to fill in the FEC slip and occupy it along with the southern portion of Museum Park, after their previous plans for a similar construction at the Port of Miami were rejected. Dollar signs were floated, talks began, and the public reacted.

Among the opposition was Colin Foord, a local marine biologist and the co-founder of the scientific-art endeavor Coral Morphologic. Wanting to get a closer look at the prolem, he pulled a Kramer and went swimming in the slip. More specifically he went snorkeling, and there among the clog of underwater detritus he discovered a sewage-enveloped ecosystem that had grown along the seawall protection boulders that the city had installed in 2006. Coral Morphologic calls these strange breeds “urban corals.” Over time, as the slip turned into the mess that it is, its native marine life was forced to adapt to its deteriorating conditions. As the Miami New Times pointed out in an article about Foord and Coral Morphologic’s work, “Studying such ‘urban corals’ is key to understanding the effects that climate change is having and will have on both human and animal life.” In other words, if these corals can make it here, they can make it anywhere.

After deliberation the city put the kibosh on Beckham’s stadium dreams for the FEC slip, and his group is currently reevaluating their potential investment while searching for a new location. Though Coral Morphologic’s findings were not necessarily the smoking gun that prevented the slip from being filled in, their voices were heard, support for the corals’ preservation along the historical boat slip grew, and the issue crawled forward from the murky depths onto dry land, politically speaking.

Jared McKay, co-founder of Coral Morphologic, cleaning and maintaining one of the lab’s sea anemone displays

Foord and Coral Morphologic partner Jared McKay have been studying Miami’s “urban corals” since 2009. That’s when Foord discovered a rare staghorn-elkhorn hybrid coral growing in Government Cut, along the artificial shoreline of Fisher Island. This set the duo’s course of study, making them realize that if these corals were able to grow within Miami’s city limits, on man-made structures and in terrible living conditions, they may hold the key to saving corals elsewhere, across a wide range of habitats.

Part of what makes the group’s work so unique is that their research underwater is a small part of the equation. In their lab, located in the neighborhood of Overtown, tray after tray of vividly bright fluorescent corals, sea anemones, zoanthids, fish, and crustaceans fight for the attention of grow lights hovering above them. At Coral Morphologic, corals and coral-related creatures are hybridized, categorized, grown, documented, and ultimately sold to private aquariums around the globe. Since founding their operation in 2007, the pair have discovered and identified four new species of zoanthids—small, flowery, pod-like relatives of coral that look particularly trippy under colored light. The Miami Vice zoanthid, with its range of striking colors (the original a combination of pink and blue, like the eponymous show’s titles), is Coral Morphologic’s proprietary brand.

Not content with being the self-appointed stewards of Miami’s overlooked subaqueous ecosystem and turning this ambitious prospect into a successful business, they have developed their work into an art form that spans the disciplines of photography, filmmaking, sculpture, and installation. The naturally mesmerizing animals are typically photographed and filmed individually in extreme macro and under a special actinic blue light (similar to a black light). Watching the elegant corals interact with their surrounding environments is as mesmerizing in an uptight white-walled gallery as it is on a laptop screen in the college dorm of the biggest stoner on campus.

The videos are sped up a number of times to serve the attention span of the internet age, after which McKay composes a score for each video that includes noises from inside the lab as well as sounds emitted by the corals themselves. A collection of Foord and McKay’s early coral films, Natural History Redux, was recently released online. Selections of these shorts were screened at Miami’s Borscht Film Festival and projected large-scale on the facades of buildings during Art Basel; their photos, films, and sculptures have been displayed in numerous gallery shows. The pair have also collaborated with artist Bhakti Baxter, wrapping tollbooths at the Port of Miami with enormous photos of their zoanthids—an undertaking that was recently featured in Americans for the Arts’ Public Art Network Year in Review for 2014.

Coral Morphologic’s works are not just simple portraits of their lab specimens. Foord and McKay view them as ways to expand the existing mythology of coral, touting their symbiotic relationship with Miami and their importance to the existence of it as a destination. Fittingly, the actual process of growing these corals, their lives on display in the lab, is part of the art.

“A lot of ideas that guide the way they grow the corals and the way they shoot them—those are all choices that they make,” said Lucas Leyva, a Coral Morphologic collaborator. “They’re curated and presented in a certain way. There’s something really intense about your art being a living thing that you cloned and you provide the context for it and the story behind it.”

Foord and McKay have been best friends since attending middle school together in New Hampshire—a relationship that carried over into high school, where they immersed themselves in punk and DIY culture. As Foord put it, they spent much of their time “hanging in the kitchen, eating chips and salsa and talking about life,” formulating their own ideals about the world around them. “We were friends of the cool kids,” McKay adds, “but we weren’t the alphas of the cool kids, so that gave us perspective a little bit as outsiders to analyze what was going on, like who’s screwing who. That sort of started this descent into armchair psychology of why people do the things that they do.”

Growing up, Foord spent his free time building a miniature aquatic zoo in his childhood home’s spare rooms, with the full support of his parents. By the time he’d sent off his portfolio to college-admissions boards, he had amassed a large collection. “My senior year, I had about 400 gallons of aquarium in my bedroom,” he said. Foord enrolled in the University of Miami, where he was displeased but ultimately unsurprised to find that his undergraduate classmates’ main interests were studying dolphins, turtles, and whales. As a life-form, corals have been largely understudied. According to Foord, some of his professors—and others in academia—opposed cultivating corals in tanks, essentially equating it to researching captive whales.

“You have to understand, most of what we know in coral biology has come about with the advent of scuba diving, so this is all after World War II,” Foord explains when I ask about his university experience. “It really wasn’t until the 60s that people started to recognize that corals are fluorescent.”

Colin Foord documenting his subject’s slow movements through time-lapse video

Corals naturally fluoresce but are not bioluminescent, so their bright colors are not visible in the spectrum offered by direct sunlight. With the help of actinic lights, however, corals shine as brightly as the most psychedelic black-light poster. Fluorescent lights weren’t introduced until 1939, though, and blue LED lights weren’t available until the mid 90s. Why corals fluoresce is still an unsolved mystery for scientists. Foord and McKay continuously seek new information.

“Coming to Miami and wanting to study corals and thinking, What a perfect place about the opportunities I’d have through my formal education—they just didn’t exist at that time,” Foord said. “Meanwhile, there is an entire aquarium hobby that exists as its own economy, separate from the academic world of science. And believe it or not, most of the major breakthroughs in equipment technology and general coral husbandry just came out of trial and error by hobbyists.”

Like most scientists and artists, Foord and McKay are passionate about their work. When asked for the most basic breakdown of why coral populations are rapidly dying across the globe, instead of giving a succinct and easily digestible catch-all answer like “pollution,” Foord’s response is convoluted and tangential. One reason leads to another and on to another. His rigor and enthusiasm carry over into email as well. Tirades morph into indictments of corrupt, red-tape politicians and business owners who are selling off Miami as its ecological foundation is quickly being destroyed and eroded past the point of no return. Throughout our correspondence, I’d often wake up to lengthy, midnight-oil emails detailing the minutiae of the importance of what he and McKay were doing and whom they were up against. Much of this discourse concerned dredging—specifically a dredge that was happening soon.

While the city began to execute its plans to re-dredge Government Cut, making way for post-Panamax supertankers utilizing the expanding Panama Canal, Foord and McKay were vying for approval to save and relocate the massive amount of corals that had grown on the seawalls formed by prior dredging. The US Army Corps of Engineers, who are carrying out the dredge, had planned to remove all corals over ten inches in size, which would have left behind thousands of smaller corals that Foord and McKay view as highly important, both for aquaculturing and for studying the largely unknown nature of their adaptive characteristics.

Corals are legally protected, and removal of them in Florida or the Caribbean requires an extensive permitting process, basically meaning never. In the instance of the dredge, however, the Corps of Engineers deemed the specimens growing in Government Cut “corals of opportunity,” granting Coral Morphologic and researchers from the University of Miami the chance to save as many as they could within a brief window of time.

Finally, Foord and McKay received news that the city would allow Coral Morphologic to transplant corals rescued from the dredging site to a large artificial reef about a mile away from Government Cut. And while city, state, and federal officials seemed to support their endeavors, when it came time to issue permits the government took their sweet time—almost more time than the coral had to be saved.

The rescue dives were originally slated to begin in January 2014, and Foord and McKay dropped everything to prepare for the challenging task at hand. Then nothing happened, so they waited. And waited. In early May they were told the permits were to be issued at last—and, what’s more, they’d have until July 15 to complete the rescue, more than enough time to work. When the permits were actually issued, on May 24, they were then told they had only until June 6 to save as many corals as possible.

Racing against the clock, navigating dangerous tides and passing ships, Foord and his assistant were able to rescue a significant amount of corals. “That was the hand that we were dealt,” Foord said, “and I think we did an incredibly good job, given the circumstances. I’m proud of the work that we did.” They’ve now focused on the transplant reef. Having already cleaned it in preparation for the transplants, their main mission is to protect it from coral-suffocating silt kicked up by the dredge. It’s a job that’s proving more and more difficult every day. In late July, Coral Morphologic, along with Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper, filed a lawsuit against the Corps of Engineers for failure to responsibly monitor sedimentation while dredging. The case is ongoing.

Two specimens found in Coral Morphologic’s lab, Zoanthus and Montastraea, provide income, research opportunities, and hours of entertainment.

The Weird Miami Tour, run by artists Naomi Fisher and Jim Drain, is a seasonal Sunday bus tour of Miami that visits non-traditional, somewhat esoteric locations. It was on one of these tours that Coral Morphologic first met Alberto Ibargüen, the president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, one of the country’s leading arts endowments. At the time, Foord and McKay were in the process of building out the lab where they’re currently based and in the meantime working out of their home.

“The foyer, the dining room, the living room, the sunroom were all full of coral, in water, under special light,” Ibargüen recalled of the duo’s early backroom setup. “I thought, Well, this qualifies as weird Miami. And it was all very beautiful. We then walked about four blocks away to what was going to be their new lab, and they showed a video that was something of an a-ha moment for me.”

Ibargüen proposed that Coral Morphologic project their videos onto buildings during Art Basel, the tropical winter prong of a trio of influential and profitable art festivals that also take place yearly in Switzerland and Hong Kong. Of course, Foord and McKay were ecstatic about the possibilities.

“From very early on, the idea of projecting corals onto limestone was a really important part of our artistic practice,” Foord said. “That stems from the idea that the cement and the limestone that compose the buildings of Miami are actually fossilized corals from eons past, when Miami was underwater. To project the corals back onto these buildings, it references the geologic past, the present technological future we’re in, and a potential future. If sea levels continue to rise, the corals will have no problem coming right back in and cementing themselves onto the concrete, onto themselves.”

Ibargüen was formerly the publisher of the Miami Herald. He retired from journalism in 2005 to take the reins of the Knight Foundation, a private foundation formed by the Knight family, of the Knight Ridder newspaper company. Begun as a means of cultivating journalism and the arts in the communities in which Knight Ridder newspapers were based, the foundation funds such endeavors in eight cities, including Miami, Detroit, and Akron, Ohio, while advising on the endeavors of 26 others. The mission of the Knight Foundation, and that of Ibargüen and vice president Dennis Scholl, is to make art accessible to people and places that might not otherwise encounter it. “Art in general,” Ibargüen clarified. From education to poetry festivals, the idea is to bring communities together through art.

“I cannot imagine a time when art does not have relevance in the development of a community,” he told me. “Art that explains who we are, art that inspires us to be better, art that shows you other ways of thinking, art that stuns, art that makes you human. These are not theoretical sentiments. I really don’t think I’m passionate or sentimental about it. I’ve seen it.

“Seventy-five percent of people who live here were born someplace else. Fifty percent were born in another country. We need connectors; we need to find lowest common denominators to help us bond and attach to place; we need to develop roots, because it’s such a young community. I don’t care whether it’s Gloria Estefan or Beethoven; I don’t care whether it’s looking at a master painting or something that somebody down the street just provocatively put together. I think that’s the beginning of the conversation, and it begins to create a sense of community and create the kind of groupings that will determine what is the future of Miami.”

One morning before a dive, I hung out in the kitchen at the lab while Foord laughed with his two assistants, Allan Cox and Max Ivers, who had recently come aboard to manage the zoanthid side of the business. Cox also serves as Foord’s dive partner, an important relationship that requires a great deal of trust. Foord was mixing up a portion of dried coral powder and orange juice, at once a calcium supplement and a funny aside that’s only partly a joke—that he’s trying to become one with the coral.

The evening before my departure, the group had suggested that I experience the coral lab in full bloom. In complete darkness, we shined handheld blue lights on each of the tanks, slowly drifting from coral to coral. The calm and quiet that overtook the room, the reverence the group collectively shared for the creatures, the startling beauty that emanated from the fluorescence all combined to create a feeling of the sublime, like the experience some say they have standing in front of a Rothko or others may have observing the Northern Lights. A powerful rush of beauty and adoration washed over me. Adding to Coral Morphologic’s mystique is the fact that its lab was once the site of a small Pentecostal church. The bubbling tank filled with their collection of zoanthids sat over what was once the pulpit. A sense of spirituality permeated the space.

On my last day in Miami, I left the lab to meet Harold Wanless, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, where he’s worked for the past 43 years. We spoke on a bench in South Pointe Park, situated at the southern tip of South Beach and a short walk from the lowest-sitting and most flood-prone Whole Foods in the world. He looked around at the jet skis whirring behind him and shirtless runners passing by and sank into a sad smirk. “We haven’t faced up to reality yet, and I don’t know if we will,” he said. A portion of his academic research has focused on modern environments, specifically the type found in South Florida and the Bahamas, and sea-level rise over extended periods of time—particularly the way in which reefs, barrier islands, and swamps respond and adapt to erosion and dredging. He spent the last few summers in Greenland, studying the melting ice sheets.

“Back in 2007, we put out a forecast for Miami-Dade County that we would probably have three to five feet of sea-level rise this century, which puts Miami in a very serious situation,” he said. “But with the information that’s come out this year on the accelerating melt in Antarctica, the lack of topography to hold back the ice, and the same in Greenland, we’re probably looking at more like seven to ten feet or more by the end of this century, and that’s absolutely shocking. We sit on amazingly porous limestone. You can build all the dykes you want, and it might keep out a storm surge, but it won’t keep out water coming in underneath and flooding, inundating the land. It’s over; it’s as simple as that.”

Foord shares Wanless’s bleak view of the future, but when it comes to the corals attached to Miami’s buildings, he is more optimistic: “Miami used to be a coral reef. The highest elevation in Miami is Cutler Ridge, which was a fossilized coral reef, so all of Miami was once underwater. Miami Beach was just a barrier island with mangroves on it. It was a real estate experiment by some rich guys to sell the vacation dream, and they did a very good job of it. People have made billions of dollars. In the future there’s going to be a certain point in time when that real estate bubble pops in Miami, when people have to rethink whether even having a house is sustainable for more than five or ten years before there’s going to be another major hurricane. We’re surrounded by water. This is what makes Miami Beach so relevant, because it is, to use the parlance of our time, a YOLO kind of place. It’s here today, gone tomorrow.”

Photo from the Grassy Narrows blockade. Image via Facebook.
Steve Fobister Sr. is from the Grassy Narrows First Nation in northwestern Ontario. Since the late 1960s the community has been living with the aftermath of a 10-ton mercury spill in the Wabigoon River system.

Last month, Fobister began a hunger strike to draw attention to how his community still struggles with mercury poisoning from the spill. Fobister was two days into the hunger strike when he met with Aboriginal Affairs Minister David Zimmer. Fobister demanded the establishment of a treatment centre for people suffering from mercury poisoning, a review of the compensation process for residents, and improved health care agreements for mercury victims.

“I think it went pretty well, I think we met on common ground,” Fobister said of his most recent meeting with the minister. “I think they are very committed.” Fobister says the ministry told him they will work at championing a review of the Mercury Disability Board—a body set up to determine who has been poisoned by mercury and who will receive benefits. Fobister also says the ministry told him it would look at improving the level of compensation victims receive.

Many Grassy Narrows residents, including Fobister, still live with mild to severe mercury poisoning side effects. It's a problem so severe and the effects so rare that this week, scientists from Japan are travelling to the area to study the effects on the people there. In fact, Japanese scientists were among the first to study those effects back in the 1960s. 

Yet Fobister, who suffers from severe mercury poisoning, receives just $250 a month from the Mercury Disability Board. He's one of the lucky ones. Recently, VICE reported that since its creation in 1986 the Mercury Disability Board processed 1,008 applications for benefits, but only 193 people are receiving compensation.

According to Fobister, the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs told him they would look at all previously denied applications. “They’re going to revise all applications for those who were denied,” says Fobister. “For those who should have gotten compensation, especially for the people who are very ill and were not compensated.”

Many Grassy Narrows and Wabaseemoong members feel they are unfairly being denied compensation. VICE also reported that in the last year 72 First Nation adult members were assessed (36 Wabaseemoong, 36 Grassy Narrows), but only one person was approved for compensation.

Whatever was told to Fobister, the ministry now insists the Mercury Disability Board already has a process for unsuccessful applicants to reapply every two years. Any changes to the Mercury Review Board will need approval by Wabaseemoong First Nation and the federal government first. 

So far no one from the ministry has contacted Wabaseemoong First Nation. Aboriginal Affairs wasn’t immediately available to confirm whether they have been contacted.

Long-time Grassy Narrows activist Judy Da Silva says the ministry's sudden change of tune is no surprise. “Zimmer was making those promises under [the threat of] that hunger strike,” Da Silva says.

According to Da Silva, the ministry found out about Fobister’s plan to initiate a hunger strike before it even happened. She says a ministry representative called her and asked whether Fobister “is in his right mind.” Da Silva was livid. “I said, ‘He is. He is very smart, he is very intelligent.’”

Da Silva did note, however, that Fobister suffers from the debilitating effects of mercury poisoning. 

Fobister believes that in time, his condition will only worsen. He says he can't understand why his community must fight when communities like Walkerton, Ont made national headlines for their E. coli outbreak in the year 2000.

“It’s almost like environmental discrimination, compared to what happened in Walkerton.” 

@marthamaiingan

In the late 40s, Ingrid Bergman was the coolest, hottest, and most talented lady around Hollywood. She saw some Italian neo-realist films by Roberto Rossellini, wrote him a letter, starred in a number of his movies, and proceeded to have a scandalous affair and marriage with him. In each film, Bergman experiences some sort of deep existential crises in the midst of political and social upheaval. Since every major player who worked on those films is dead, Martin Scorsese (who was heavily influenced by the films) gives us the 4-1-1 on the three movies in this short doc and it’s fucking fascinating.

Since 2004 independent Atlanta-based record label Geographic North has been releasing a steady catalog of what I believe to be the music of the future. It's all shoegaze, dream pop, synth, kraut, soundscape, art punk, musique concrete, dance, drone, minimalist, and various other forms that combine analog with electronic. Geographic North’s bands include a Sunny Day in Glasgow, Soft Circle, Belong, and Landing, and while it might be difficult to assign a common tonal label to the artists, each brings something strong and rare, and were hand-picked with the eye of an aural fetishist.

The amount of care and thought involved in each release is staggering, but I guess you have to go the extra mile when you’re still selling music as limited edition vinyl and cassettes in 2014. Serial subscriptions are available for the completionist in need of a regular fix, and for the cheapskates Geographic North streams all of their releases for free online.

As someone who has trouble finding new music that doesn’t make me want to burn my stereo, I have been consistently impressed by the level of quality in this label’s releases. Each album is not only pleasing, but provoking, fully realized, honed to shine. I’ve yet to hear a thing they’ve put out that didn’t give me feels in one way or another.

I should also mention that label founders Farbod Kokabi and Farzad Moghaddam make up one half of perhaps my favorite Atlanta act, Lyonnais. Their sound is by turns a cross of Joy Division, Spacemen 3, Boredoms, Can, Beak>, and several others I can’t quite place.

Below I’ve taken a brief look at some of Geographic North’s most recent releases, each available for free streaming on their website, and many available for purchase as an IRL physical object.

[GN 20]
Hiro Kone
Fallen Angels

Hiro Kone is the recording moniker of NYC-based artist and musician Nicky Mao, formerly of Effi Briest and Up Died Sound. The opening track, “Jungle,” initially sounds like a domed swimming pool being lifted off the ground by a helicopter piloted by robots, a feeling that passes away seamlessly into the second track, “Ferry Home,” a spare but dark landscape navigated by melodies animated somewhere between a computer having a childhood and the soundtrack to Fire Walk with Me. The arrangement of the album is fantastic, relying on ambient experience and texture as much as the rigor of its components. There is an odd sense of propulsion and immersion at the same time, as if the further you allow your brain to settle back into the mutation, the further forward you are thrown. This could be the music to the greatest quest video game ever coded, one day when Xbox learns to alter a player’s senses.

[GN 19]
Auburn Lull
Hiber

I can’t sleep to music because I require monotonic feedback, but Auburn Lull, a five-piece from Lansing, Michigan, creates sound that makes sleep seem like somewhere real. Minimalist in arrangement, and wide open in breadth of reach, Hiber works like Music For Airports or certain tracks by Eluvium, in that I can put this tape on and feel like I am not doing what I am doing, that time does not exist. Fans of Brian Eno’s sound constructions and people who want music that can change the entire demeanor of a room will be well served by this album. It is of that rare breed of album able to actually improve a listener’s environment, and what more could be asked of music than that.

[GN 18]
James Conduit
Two Lines Thick

I’ve never understood dance music, mainly because most dance music sounds like it is designed to drive your car over a cliff to, or to have unnecessary surgery to. Thankfully, the way in which James Conduit’s music relates to the gyrational genres is more like Dance Music For People Who Don’t Want To Dance. Conduit builds spare but driving frames of sound out of synth and percussion, using the space of repetition to allow a feeling of improvisation and dysfunction to the flow. Previously related to School of Seven Bells and Bear in Heaven, Conduit uses the beat as an apparatus to invoke the listener through field after field of complimentary rhythms and melodic accents, resulting in a great soundtrack to laying on the floor and letting your mind go completely blank.

[GN 17]
Lotus Plaza
Overnight Motorcyle Music

2012’s Spooky Action At a Distance by Lotus Plaza, the offshoot outlet of Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt, was one of those records that after the first listen felt almost too familiar to be real, like I’d been listening to it for most of my life. Mirage pop might be a word to call it, a holographic Pavement. Overnight Motorcyle Music only bears the more ghostlike edge of that connotation: the first of the two tracks, “Indian Paintbrush,” is a 14-minute composition consisting entirely of effects-laden guitar, where guitar is used as a piano, as a pulse, and a stairwell. There is no beat but the spiraling melody somehow continues to open up, like what my brain feels like when watching Last Year At Marienbad or something. I like music that feels like a tunnel that had been hidden in other music, like a layer I couldn’t hear before, at last revealed.

[GN 16]
Tinniens
Dub Guns

If machines have emotions—and I believe they DO—Tinniens might be the best elucidation of how it feels for a computer to age. Formed by two members of the indie dream pop band Landing, Dub Guns finds their talents deconstructed and reordered, stacking layers of percussive loops and ambient droning with lilting melody, occasional lyric fragments, and fuzzed-out leads. The result is something like what I imagine pop music will sound like after everyone is dead and the radios can play whatever they want to make themselves happy while the wind rolls the dirt across the empty ground and the sun burns and language is a relic. For once, a composition that came from shoegaze that doesn’t sound like the dumb younger brother of Slowdive who only ever listened to bands trying to copy Slowdive. Shoutout Tarkovsky pop.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

All photos via Alexandra Morton.
British Columbia says there's nothing to fear about the mysterious, blue, waxy sheen floating on the lake below the mine tailings disaster. You know, the one that spilled 14.5 million cubic metres of toxin-laden mining waste slurry into the river system on Aug 4.

“It was poked with a stick,” an environment ministry spokeswoman told reporters on Aug. 22, and it was declared likely “organic.”

But local residents and a marine biologist say the still-unknown bluish-green film burned their skin like a jellyfish sting.

The substance appeared in the weeks since the collapse of a massive dirt dam holding back Imperial Metals Corp.'s toxin-filled copper mine tailings. The disaster flooded local Hazeltine Creek with a sludgy torrent of 10 million cubic metres of tailings water and 4.5 million cubic metres of sediment.

Driven by skepticism after government tests repeatedly declared the lake water safe to drink and local fish edible, marine biologist Alexandra Morton traveled to ground zero of the accident with her own sample kit and research equipment.

There, local residents alerted her to something amiss floating on their supposedly “drinkable” lake water.

“There's a number of residents in the area who were concerned about it because they had touched it and it caused a drying sensation on their arms and it burned their fingers,” Morton said. “In transferring it from my net to my jars, I got it on my fingers—and it does burn.

“It feels like a jellyfish sting. It looks like oil, but it breaks up. It kind of acts like hot wax put on water; it forms this stiff film.”

Marine biologist, Alexandra Morton.
Morton, who holds an honourary PhD in science from Simon Fraser University and a bachelor of science from American University, took her sealed sample jar to a laboratory in Vancouver to be analyzed.

“When we got there the jar was clear," she said. “You couldn't see this blue film anymore. But when you opened the jar, there was a hiss of escaping steam. So whatever it was had gone into a gas form.”

She also reported the substance to an official with the Interior Health Authority, who replied with this message:

“Thank you again for alerting us about the blue film that you are observing on Quesnel Lake,” wrote regional director of health protection, Roger Parsonage, on Aug. 19. “ I would appreciate whatever assistance you can provide in getting this message to people who have suffered health effects from exposure to this substance. If possible, see their healthcare provider for a diagnosis.”

In a conference call Aug. 22, environment minister Mary Polak downplayed any health risks from contact with the sheen.

According to an environment ministry memo dated Aug. 21 and addressed to the assistant deputy minister of the Environmental Protection Division, government researchers found the substance in an area of Quesnel Lake covered in floating woody debris carried down from the dam collapse.

“Upon visual inspection of the blue sheen, the sheen was poked with a stick to determine if

natural or related to petroleum spills,” wrote Deborah Epps, the ministry's section head for provincial water quality. “The sheen broke apart and did not flow back together. This is indicative of plant or animal decomposition. If the sheen swirls immediately back together, it is from petroleum.”

The letter says there was no odour, but did not mention whether it had tested for burning or stinging effects on skin. Epps said a sample was sent to a laboratory and tested for lignins and tannins, which would indicate plant origins. The results found that the levels were “below the drinking water guideline.”

“Based on the field observations and lab results, the blue sheen is a result of the decaying vegetation/trees in the lake due to the tailings breach and does not impact human health at this time,” she concluded.

Nonetheless, Morton questioned the government's nothing-to-see-here response to what has been called the worst tailings pond disaster in Canadian history. Should authorities be so quick to rule out the possibility that the waxy, burning sheen might be related to toxins released with the disaster?

“They might be right, but here's the thing,” she quipped. “The people of Likely, the town below this, don't believe the government. They're not drinking the water.”

In addition to the blue mystery film, Morton investigated the area where once the tiny Hazeltine Creek flowed downstream of Mount Polley mine. Now, she said, the creek-formerly-known-as-Hazeltine has been transformed into a giant mud hole many times wider than the original stream—one covered in bear, moose, deer, and bird tracks.

“I walked up to what was Hazeltine Creek and is now this canyon of toxic waste,” she recalled. “It's all shades of grey, there's grey water coming down. It burns your eyes, it burns your sinuses and your lungs.”

According to Environment Canada's National Pollutant Release Index (NPRI), Imperial Metals reported that since the mine opened it had pumped into it at least 406 tonnes of the deadly poison arsenic, 475 tonnes of the heavy metal cobalt, 46 tonnes of selenium and three tonnes of the neurotoxin mercury, among a basket of other toxic heavy metals.

However, after conducting a series of its own tests—through an independent laboratory, officials said—health authorities announced water in most areas of Quesnel Lake and fish were within the safety guidelines for human consumption.

That, despite tests of whitefish, lake, and rainbow trout that showed increased levels of a number of toxins present in the mine tailings, including selenium levels that exceeded the guidelines in fish livers and gonads. In high doses, selenium can worsen the risk of skin cancer and heart problems, but apparently you'd have to eat a whole cup of gonads and livers to worry.

Fish flesh also had higher-than-normal concentrations of arsenic, copper, zinc and manganese—but according to authorities, still within the consumption guidelines.

“These results are to be expected for fish from Quesnel and Polley lakes,” minister Polak declared. “The flesh of the fish remains safe to eat.”

Morton and other critics have another explanation. In the face of a massive failure in one of BC's major revenue-generating industries—mining—the current business-friendly provincial government wants to “downplay” the scope of the disaster.

“They didn't want people to panic,” Morton alleges. “They didn't want the stocks of this company to crash. That's what they're protecting.”

It’s interesting to note that Imperial Metals Corp. donated nearly $234,000 to the BC Liberal Party since 2003, including $3,000 for the election campaign of the current Minister of Mines Bill Bennett, who compared the incident to an avalanche.

Also of interest is the fact that the company's majority shareholder (and Calgary Flames owner) Murray Edwards, Canada's 18th richest person, held a private million-dollar fundraiser for Premier Christy Clark in late 2012.

Likewise, AMEC—the engineering firm that was in the process of heightening the Mount Polley tailings dam after the original engineers distanced themselves from its design—donated $221,010 to the BC Liberals since 2000.

Suspicious political contributions aside, the health concerns are very real and present. Morton fears the toxic sediment from Mount Polley that has settled to the bottom of the lakes will affect the millions of wild Pacific salmon currently swimming upstream from the sea, about a quarter of them destined for Quesnel Lake, she said. She lowered a GoPro camera and a sample-collecting device into the lake, and it turned up a cloud of fine, silt-like solids.

“This sediment is so fine that it's going to resuspend itself into the water for generations,” she warned. “It will probably be thousands of years before this thing is all washed down into the Strait of Georgia. This company has to clean it up."

@davidpball

Photo courtesy of Eron Gjoni

When you talk to Eron Gjoni, the guy whose tell-all blog entry about his ex-girlfriend sparked the recent flare-up of the notorious Quinnspiracy debacle, it's hard not to sympathize. He doesn't want to be seen as part of "the sexist crusade to destroy game developer Zoe Quinn." While interviewing him, I liked him as a person. Still, the fallout from his mistake has been like the outbreak of a drama virus, and the symptoms are intense misogyny and general internet discontent.

In the past couple weeks, if you don’t follow games, you probably didn’t pay much attention to the final release in the second run of Walking Dead games, or the well-reviewed latest release of Diablo III on PS4. Still you might have noticed the embarrassing anti-feminist drama from the gaming world spilling over into non-gaming news sites and onto your twitter or Facebook feed. That’s because this has been an incredibly bad month for gamers.

You know the very end of The Lord of the Flies? When that British Navy guy is standing there, looking at the boys screaming and chasing each other, and he scolds them for their bad behavior, and they all look at each other like, Jesus, we killed someone, and the book is just over? That’s the world of video games right now.

How bad is it? Leigh Alexander of Gamasutra says it’s pretty much over:

“Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad. These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers—they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no “side” to be on, there is no “debate’” to be had. There is what’s past and there is what’s now. There is the role you choose to play in what’s ahead.

Why so apocalyptic? Game discourse has become a fucking mess. An all-out, screaming shitfit that never stops.

On Wednesday, gamer punching bag Anita Sarkeesian got harassed and threatened for the umpteenth time by gamers who were angry about being called out for their misogyny. This time, she was driven out of her house by death threats. Her ongoing YouTube series isn’t always perfect, but it has never once done anything to merit a two-year campaign of anonymous threats.

Then last night, while that was in the news, I edited and published a short article by Allegra Ringo about Vivian James, a new mascot created by 4chan to thwart proponents of social justice in gaming. When I woke up the following afternoon, gamers were harassing her en masse on Twitter.

The Gamer internet has been on the war path lately, weeding out what it perceives to be corruption in games. Just after venting their "anger at feminists and SJWs trying to dictate what's in games and screeching when things don't meet a 'diversity' quota," gamers voice their rage at journalists who "get a lot of freebies from game companies to do their job." And how gaming news sites are "gossip magazines at best." To approach gaming as someone who writes for the internet means getting tarred with that brush, and to be a woman intensifies it. 

One relatively meek voice in the chorus of screams, however, had a more specific, and less shrill goal: Don't vilify Eron Gjoni. Gjoni was instrumental in the Vivian James story in ways I won't rehash here, but suffice it to say while he had wanted to warn the internet about a woman, his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, he says he in no way wanted to attack women in general, and if forced to pick a side (and it seems like he'd rather not), he allies himself with the social justice side of things. In Allegra's piece, he was a nastier character than he wanted to be considered. 

I got in touch with Gjoni, and he seemed very decent for a 24-year-old who had just sparked an anti-feminist shitstorm with a blog post about his ex-girlfriend. I told him how I viewed what he had done: "Your ex is a prominent figure in the video game world, and you put the details of your breakup online. Is that fair?" He said no, but his version didn't contradict mine:

“My ex is a prominent figure who presents herself as one of the only strong voices for equality in the video game world. She presents herself this way so that no one believes her to be capable of doing the selfish and harmful things she does to professional and interpersonal relations in order to advance through the ranks while twenty thousand people look up to her as a paragon of virtue. I wrote a blog to warn those who will be romantically or professionally involved with her (usually both) that they should exercise caution around her, and to let her fans know that they should find a new voice to act as the spokesperson for equality in games.”

While we chatted I very much wanted Gjoni to tell me that the way he was being turned into a martyr for men's rights activists and 4chan users disturbed him, but he never really did. He resisted aligning himself against either side. He seemed to want to be a calm voice, but one that was setting the record straight once and for all. He wanted the world to know that Zoe Quinn was not to be trusted or harassed, and that Vivian James, the female gamer mascot was imperfect, but that he liked her. This was one of the more fascinating parts of the conversation (This is edited, but here's an unedited transcript of our Skype conversation. Parts that I agreed would be off the record have been removed):

VICE: What do you think of Vivian James? Do you like the character?
Eron Gjoni: I think she's like a politically correct version of 4chan. And yeah, I kinda like her. But I may be biased, because she probably wouldn't exist were it not for the blog.

Is she basically a mascot for female gamers born out of spite for a female gamer?
Well, The Fine Young Capitalists [are] making a t-shirt with a tagline along the lines of "I don't care if you're queer fat ugly or gay, if you play video games, you're alright with me,” which, is at face value kind of a collection of words 4chan might be inclined to use as pejoratives. But upon further inspection [it] is a message of acceptance, and denounces things like body negativity or homophobia.

They would say "land whale" and "unfuckable" and "a faggot.”
Right, but, they don't limit themselves when it comes to slurs.

Vivian James. Image via the Fine Young Capitalists' Twitter account 

They sure don't. Does Vivian James—in your mind—use slurs?
In my mind, she uses terms which might be offensive in some contexts, in naively non-offensive ways, but she'd probably say something like "that's gay" to say "that's undesirable" without meaning any offense to gay people.

Would she say the n-word?
I don't think she'd say that, no. But she is a fictional character, and [The Fine Young Capitalists] is very progressive; so basically, absolutely not. She wouldn't say anything which is unequivocally offensive, or else TFYC wouldn't allow it. I imagine they'd allow some character quirks though. Things which are socially speaking, not okay, but they can, like, make other characters that correct her or shun her for the naive offenses. […] She strikes me as the type of person who means no offense, but has the contextual caution of a high schooler or something.

So she might use the odd slur, but she's just young, and doesn't know better?
Yeah, basically. […] Not sure as to the point of this line of questioning though. I don't have any creative control over her character design. 

Not to get psychoanalytical, but I can't help feeling like Vivian James' tendency toward hate speech that comes from a place of naïveté is being projected onto her by someone with a guilty conscience. 

Gjoni wanted to steer the conversation away from misogyny and toward the aforementioned nepotism and corruption in gaming and games journalism. At the heart of the issue for those who insist that Quinn is the villain is the idea that she traded sex for positive press, or maybe just screwed her way into positions of influence. "There are people who are legitimately concerned about games journalism, who don't fall into either camp, and they also get brushed away," he said.

I alluded to the severity of the constant harassment and his reply circled around on itself. "Yes, that's happening, but it's not the only thing happening, and it should be the thing most discouraged in terms of coverage. One side will point to the publication and say, 'Look, these MRAs are attacking us,' and form into groups and make it worse," he said.  

It seemed like he wasn't seeing the forest for the trees, so I gave him my unsolicited opinion: "While there are these issues, corruption with journalism, and all that, there's this huge mountain of misogyny," I told him. "So, when we non-gamers look at gaming culture, we have a tendency to point at the huge mountain."

"There is yeah. I'm just personally of the opinion that continuing to frame it as just that, is going to make it more about just that," he said, "but you likely have more experience with these things, so I should probably defer to your judgment."

I didn't tell him the rest of my opinion: I think some of this belief in corruption and nepotism is misogyny. Gaming is a business, and in any business, people don't all get to the top, win influence, or get their project greenlit because their work is the best. They get there by hook or by crook. Men can commodify representations of female sexuality to sell inferior games, and that's making an honest buck, but if some women get to the top by commodifying their own sexuality, that's corruption? Fuck that.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

A Rio Favela. Picture by Brian Mier

In June, Brazil found itself awash in tourists, ambling about like walking sacks of cash. Some 3.7 million visitors—including 600,000 (mostly white, mostly rich) foreigners—flooded the country for the month-long 2014 World Cup, spending an estimated 6.7 billion Brazilian reals ($3 billion). In Rio, tourists competed for just 55,400 hotel beds—and as is traditional anywhere with tourists, were completely ripped off. Those who were priced out took to the beaches with sleeping bags. Come June, the Copacabana was studded with bare-footed superfans.

But what about the tourists with thirst for knowledge as well as beer, who wanted something more authentic than the fan zones? Some visitors opted to pass their time in the cozy confines of a bona fide Brazilian favela, like Rocinha, which lies in the southern zone of Rio and is perched on a pretty hillside—and which, just three years ago, was invaded by thousands of elite “pacifying police” and their armored vehicles, as part of an effort to box out ruling drug gangs and bring the rogue neighborhood back under the control of the state. In June, tourists in Rocinha slept in shaded guesthouses, where they dined with welcoming host families and took organized walks along winding residential streets. Many booked their slum rooms online and then reviewed their stays on Tripadvisor.

Two decades ago, Rio’s favelas were touristic no-man’s-lands: wracked by poverty and crime, and subject to the bloody caprice of armed drug traffickers. In 2008, the government began an aggressive “pacification” process that was meant to win back the slums. Critics called it a “counter-insurgency”. Things got much calmer in the favelas, though drug gangs remain and military occupations continue and reports of police abuse increased in the lead-up to the World Cup. By 2013, Brazilian ministers were promoting slums as must-see tourist attractions. Now, about 50,000 people do favela tours each year in Rio alone, says Mark Watson of the UK-based charity Tourism Concern. Most cost about $40 and last three hours—though specialty tours like "Favela Funk Party" (slogan: "Be a Local. Don’t be a Gringo!") might run longer. On its list of top Things to do in Rio de Janeiro City, Lonely Planet says, “the once arduous journey in and out of the favela is now a breeze.”

So-called slum tourism—AKA poverty tourism, reality tourism, poorism, misery tourism, exotic tourism or poverty porn—is on the rise the world over. This leaves lots of people feeling awkward. Is the slum tourist necessarily a voyeur? Are slums tours inherently exploitative? Does it make you a dick to stuff yourself with a picnic on scenic outskirts of an impoverished shantytown?

The last few years have witnessed a slew of oh-my-god-that’s-outrageous news articles, which pick up on the very real sense of exploitation, but it's not really as simple as all that. Modern slum tourism began in the 1980s in Apartheid South Africa. But rather than being yet another example of how black South Africans were being exploited by white people, they actually arranged the tours themselves. They showed people around their racially segregated townships—in part, to educate their white compatriots about how black people lived. When apartheid fell, the tours were used to demonstrate how everything still wasn't totally fixed yet. Today, up to a quarter of visitors to South Africa (some 400,000 tourists a year) go on “township tours.”

But if you go further back in time, it's easy to see why people feel uncomfortable about poorism. Britain has a long history of gawking at poor people. An 1884 New York Times article explained: “the latest fashionable idiosyncrasy in London” was “the visiting of the slums… by parties of ladies and gentlemen for sightseeing.” Long before the gentrification of Hackney, upper class Brits would don “common clothes” and venture out into the East End. Before long, a parallel mania hit the Bowery district of NYC, where voguish New Yorkers could see “Hebrews,” “squalid negro neighborhoods and “tenements... crowded with sweltering humanity.” The author of the NYT piece advised against wandering too far into the slums—for reasons of safety and also since “sensitive olfactories” might be offended. One modern poverty themed hotel in South Africa has managed to solve this problem by allowing guests to experience the authenticity of a stay in "the only Shanty Town in the world equipped with under-floor heating and wireless access!” These days you can experience poverty without even bothering to look down your nose at any real poor people.

Today, people go to Manila’s Smokey Mountain slum, to watch “scavengers” rummage through piles of trash. Or Kibera, Kenya, whose slum excursions are reportedly gaining popular ground over wildlife tours. Or Bwaise, Uganda and its infamous red light district. Here people take slum selfies and remark that the residents show a such a great entrepreneurial spirit, in spite of it all. Hopefully, they then feel that they have successfully transcended on-the-path tourism.

How do the residents feel? In a beautifully written New York Times op-ed from 2010, Kennedy Odede, then a junior at Wesleyan University, described the tourists who used to visit his hometown of Kibera:

I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly, a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on... Slum tourism is a one-way street: They get photos; we lose a piece of our dignity.

More recently, slum tours have been slammed for making poverty seem exotic, misrepresenting local customs, exploiting residents and doing not much of anything to improve things on the ground.

But is it all so very bad? According to the University of Potsdam’s Dr. Fabian Frenzel, who has researched favela tourism, the answer is, "No". Frenzel says that initially, most favela tour operators initially came “from outside the favela”—and kept profits outside too. But that has changed. Many companies now employ residents and encourage tourists to buy stuff from local shops. Criticism of the favela tour concept has also pushed companies to give more to the communities (some have set up sister charities)—and to be more financially transparent. Today, cagey tourists who aren’t quite sure whether slum tours are kosher are reassured by self-aware tour operators who promise to portray slums in their uncomfortable entirety—and to work collaboratively with locals. Appeals to responsible and sustainable slumming themselves become part of the marketing pitch.

Frenzel says that many Brazilians are “surprised by the attention—which has to do, historically, with a lot of disregard” for favelas. Some are grateful for a steady flow of tourists, which makes it harder for the government to cover-up areas of impoverishment and for police to hide the effects of their aggressive pacification campaigns.

Of course, these same benefits can be double-edged, or just plain bullshit. Tourism Concern’s Mark Watson says that companies often exaggerate the amount that they donate to communities. In other situations, tour companies fund their own schools or orphanages—but then treat them as open-door pit stops for slum tourists. School classes are disrupted so that kids can sing for visitors. Orphans are doled out to whoever wants to pay to cuddle impoverished babies.

But at the macro level, creating jobs and stimulating economies is a good thing. The World Trade Organization stresses, “Tourism in many developing and least developed countries is the most viable and sustainable economic development option, and in some countries, the main source of foreign exchange earnings.” In 20 of the world’s 48 least developed countries, tourism is the first or second source of export earnings. Even that poverty themed hotel in South Africa is creating jobs.

Maybe it’s a good thing that people want to learn more about how people in the rest of the world live. Or maybe people should already be savvy enough to realize when their custom has negative consequences. Is it any better to travel somewhere poor and spend your entire time on a beach while pretending that slums don’t exist next door? I hate to say it, but going to Rio and drinking beer while ignoring the favelas doesn't make you a paragon of virtue. I guess the debate will continue, but it's safe to say it's more complicated than knee jerk cynicism will allow for.

Follow Katie Engelhart on Twitter.

Photos by Carl Wilson

Meet Oscar Candon. He’s the guy walking into your party and drinking all your booze, before totally winning you over by being every cheeky silver-screen younger brother come to life, all wrapped up in the form of one 22-year-old Parisian skater. A fairly new member of the Emerica Europe and Supra teams, he’s still managing to stand out among his more seasoned teammates, which is probably because he’s got more energy than E.ON and the kind of technical ability you’d expect from someone who’s already been skating for 12 years. 

I met up with Oscar recently before the Supra demo at Hackney’s Frontside skatepark, where we had some morning beers and a chat about nerves, French musicians and the stupidity of penny boards.

VICE: Hi, Oscar. Introduce yourself to the world.
Oscar Candon: I’m Oscar, I’m 22 and I’ve been skateboarding since I was ten years old.

What's it like being pro after all that time?
I wouldn't say I’m a "pro", because I haven’t got my name under a board yet. But I do make a bit of money from it. I’m basically an amateur who hangs out with legends [laughs].

Where’s the weirdest place that skateboarding has taken you?
Ethiopia, last year. That was crazy! Ten days in Ethiopia, trying to skate. There’s nothing to skate over there, so we spent more time searching for spots than we did actually skating. Just being there was like, “What the fuck?” It really makes you think, seeing people there and understanding how they survive.

We’ve been all over the world and there’s always crazy shit happening on tour. But out of everywhere, Paris is the best for girls, for sure.

What do you like to do when you’re not skateboarding or trying to pick up girls?
Play guitar and go fishing if I can. Sweden is the best for fishing; we have a family house there—a little house near the lake where we get pike and perch. I try to go there every year and have some quality time in the forest. I love the silence and the patience it takes. Being alone on the lake calms me down a bit.

What kind of music do you play?
I love to play blues. My dad's a guitar teacher, so I learned the blues from him. I like some of the old shit, but I also love the 60s stuff. I listen to Neil Young a lot, but not too much because I’d probably get depressed. There’s this old French guy called George Brassens who I really like. He’s dead now. He tells stories and he was pretty much against everything, which is cool. I like to choose the music on my skate parts; I had Black Sabbath on my last one. I went to see them in Paris a few months ago – it was so good. Motorhead are the best band, though – so much power!

Do you ever want to play in a band?
Nah, it’s too much pressure playing in front of a crowd 'n' shit.

Is it not the same as doing a big skate demo?
Yeah, but I’m looking at my feet when I skate [laughs]. I never get nervous before I go out in front of a crowd of kids; I just drink a beer and go for it.

What do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t skateboarding?
Hmm, well, before I was making money from skateboarding I was a carpenter. It’s a really noble job because you’re working with wood, and wood is a really good material to work with. But waking up at 6AM to go to work... I don’t miss that at all. I have no idea what I’d be doing—I’d just be miserable.

Oscar Candon for Emerica Europe

You skate pretty hard and fast – what’s your worst injury?
I’ve done loads. Broke my knee, broke my foot, broke my ankle...

Has it ever made you reconsider what you do?
One time I thought about stopping. I was out for six months, got back on my board and, after ten days, broke my fibula. So six months out, ten days back skating, then broken fibula—so no skating for another four months. On the way to the hospital I thought, 'Fuck this, it’s too much.' Then, when I was in there, I was just waiting to skate again—I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Once you get into this lifestyle I don't think you can go back to normal life.

What makes you happy?
Beer, good times with my friends and the sun. So England doesn’t really make me happy—it’s too cold. I just stay in touch with the good people in my life and stay away from the assholes.

What’s the worst thing about skateboarding today?
Penny boards are a bad thing! I saw a lot in fucking Shoreditch while I’ve been here. People don’t even ride them! They’re fucking dipshits [laughs]. It’s not practical, either; it’s a little shit board, you can’t even ollie up a curb. It’s a fashion accessory. Fuck that. I’m really not into that. If they were into skateboarding they’d realize that bigger boards exist for a reason.

In Paris, the image of skateboarders is being pissed on because of the fashion thing. Loads of guys have penny boards – all these assholes ride them around, and people just see that and think it’s skateboarding. It used to be the street kids.

Do you think you’re an athlete?
Fuck no! Athletes don’t drink beer and smoke a cigarette before they go out and compete, do they?

I suppose not. What advice would you give your 16-year-old self?
I’d tell him to stop smoking weed so much! Fuck weed—it makes you a lazy bastard. Just stick to the beers [laughs]. Do you want a beer?

Yeah, I'd love one – cheers. So finally, what's next?
I’m working on a KR3W section, then I’m going to Poland, Bulgaria, Berlin, Helsinki, Copenhagen, touring Belgium... then I’m going home! And when it starts raining in France I’ll head over to Barcelona. I’ve got nothing to complain about!

Perfect. Have fun!

Follow Jak Hutchcraft on Twitter.

Romeo and Juliet works because of the forbidden aspect of their love. Of course, there’s Shakespeare, whose poetry adorns the narrative like the arias of angels, expounding on the meaning of life, sounding the depths of love, and exploring what it is to be a human being with emotions to express. Shakespeare takes the story of ill-fated lovers and uses it to open the box of human existence, to show us that the connections between humans are more elevated than the automatic copulation of animals or the pollination of flowers because of the poetry pricked by the emotions of intimacy. But beneath all that, on a storytelling level, the fact that the two lovers are so in love but aren't allowed to be together creates the engine for everything else that happen. It's the obstacle of the feud between the families that takes abstract ideas about love and turns them into a gripping narrative that favors emotion over intellect.

Generally speaking, watching two people fall in love is boring unless there are some obstacles put in their way. Even Kim and Kanye, who seem happy and made for each other, have the looming specter of the public eye and the media putting pressure on their not-so-private lives. If they shut themselves off from cameras and attention—if they stopped giving us salacious glimpses of their beautiful, outrageous lives and we stopped demanding those glimpses—theirs would be a very different love. It’s a relationship initiated in the public eye, developed in the public eye, and consecrated in the public eye; now, like any interesting love narrative, we wait to see if they live happily ever after. It's like watching NASCAR: the vicarious excitement we feel watching great feats, but also the shameful frisson that excites us when disaster strikes—the horrible human desire to see the other shoe drop. I personally hope that Kim and Kanye live happily until they die, but because their story has become a narrative larger than the love between them—one that we all watch, willingly or unwillingly—it is fraught with the narrative need for conflict. We can’t just let them be happy, and they can’t just be happy. There needs to be sparks.

The obstacle in Romeo and Juliet (feuding families) can be transferred to anything: race, as in West Side Story, where the poetry of Shakespeare is successfully replaced by the music of Leonard Bernstein, the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, and the choreography of Jerome Robbins; age as in Lolita—ha ha, a little bit of a joke, but not really—where the driving force behind the book is Humbert Humbert’s forbidden attraction to a pre-teen nymphet. Even something like Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, at least in my interpretation, is a love story about a man who has to resort to necrophilia in order to find intimacy, and of course, outside of the sphere of art I’d find such a thing disgusting, but within the frame of the narrative I find it to be a portrait of the universal human need to be with another person and having that need thwarted. Brokeback Mountain is a beautifully crafted film, but at it’s core it's propelled by the motor of forbidden love. In many ways it is a conventional love story, but because the usually hetero lovers are recast as two gay cowboys it's a fresh telling of that old tale. The gorgeously shot documentary about horse fucking, Zoo, also banks on forbidden love. One of the last kinds of forbidden love to be explored on screen: incest. (Don’t worry, I’m trying.)

That being said, here’s a little video based on Romeo and Juliet that I directed. It was shot by my main man, Bruce Thierry Chung who is still at NYU after six years—someone tell that boy to graduate. The music is by my band Daddy, the RISD arts school band I started with Tim O’Keefe and Andy Rourke from the Smiths, that also features former Xylos singer Monica Heidemann; get ready for the album later this year, or early next year. Anyway, enjoy.

Working at home is one of the greatest pleasures in life. A lot of people only appreciate it when it’s a brief reprieve from being in an office. They quickly find that prolonged periods in your own apartment can make you a little stir crazy. But if waking up at 11 and typing in bed until 5 in the afternoon is a recipe for crazy, then I’m completely out of my fucking mind. It’s the only way I can live.

Going into an office provides structure, and within that structure are motivators to make sure you do your work. The most fundamental is the fear of losing your job. This is a great motivator in the short term, but it’s absolutely not sustainable for a human being. Several years of playing the politics necessary to hold a job can really screw a person up. I’ve met people like this, and it’s never pretty. They often complain about how they don’t get to do the things that made them love their work in the first place, never realizing that not getting fired is a full-time job.

Because I work on my own, the fear of losing my job doesn’t exist for me. Instead, I’m faced with the task of motivating myself to work. Whether I like it or not, the best method is guilt. I know that I’m free to stay up as late as I want, smoke weed the moment I wake up, and take a two-hour break in the middle of the morning to watch four episodes of Seinfeld back to back. I also know that I will feel like a lazy sack of shit afterward. There’s no one standing over me and tapping their watch, so I have to keep reminding myself that my own time is my own money. That’s still not enough to make me sleep like a normal person.

I loathe waking up early in the morning. It is one of the most unpleasant feelings ever and it is beyond me why the world has decided that 9 AM is a good time to start hustling. Even those who say they are morning people would probably sleep a few extra hours if no one was breathing down their neck. My theory is that morning people are just people who drink coffee. There’s no way you can like waking up unless you have a powerful, addictive stimulant to do the heavy lifting for you.

Rather than the clockwork schedule that seems to grind so many into the ground, I follow whatever weird pattern my body chooses. Usually, this schedule is inconsistent with the revolutions of the earth. On one day, I’ll crash at 4 AM, on the next at 5 AM, and so on, sleeping and rising an hour later each day. Inevitably, my pattern will match up with normal society for a day or two, and suddenly all my guilt is gone. But before long, I’m going to bed at sunrise again. Even though I prefer the chaos, it makes me feel kind of shitty. As detached as I am from the cycle of life around me, some element of me just wants to be on the same schedule.

Whether through guilt or sheer stoned will power, I always manage to get a lot done. I attribute my productivity to steady blazing throughout the waking hours. It’s the ultimate cure for a creative block when you’re in your own space. Being high in an office doesn’t have the same freeing effect. Instead, it turns into paranoia that your coworkers might discover you’re stoned or that you’ll say something exceedingly weird to someone important. At this stage in my career, anyone that I work for likely knows that I’m usually high. In many cases, that’s exactly the perspective they want from me, but I can’t express it when I’m surrounded by alert, sober people. It feels like an inappropriate place to be high, and in my mind places like that shouldn’t even exist. Beyond smoking, I need to be able to twiddle a joint in my teeth while I’m typing, and break up a nug with my fingers while I’m thinking. Anything less, and I’m just churning out strings of dry sentences.

A few people have told me that this is a terrible work ethic. Those who blindly follow the universal timetable can’t imagine a life where every day is different and time flows unconstrained by convention. For me, following a schedule isn’t living at all. I’m doomed to feel out of sync with my environment for the rest of my life, but if the price of normalcy is routine, then I prefer to remain an oddity.

Follow T. Kid on Twitter

Photo courtesy of the author

A lot people on the internet are dumb. This we can take for granted. But dig a little deeper, and behind your standard pickup artist or generic troll you’ll find another, more considered, breed of moron. These people are not hastily brainstorming which tabloid journalist’s tired career to revive via an onslaught of illegible sexist drivel; instead they see themselves as campaigners for social justice. These internet vigilantes are intent on scrubbing the world clean of anything remotely offensive to absolutely anyone anywhere. They make cartoons like this. They are the human equivalent of a red correcting pen.

I’m pointing this out because of nail varnish, weirdly. More specifically, a nail varnish that some North Carolina college students are developing that will enable people to dip their fingers into drinks and find out if they've been suddenly transformed into a Rohypnol on the rocks. This is a pretty "whatever" idea as long as you're cool with using your finger to mix your drink—which to be honest most of us are because it's often halfway down our throats trying to bring up the eight shots of tequila we knew weren't a good idea for a weeknight. Unfortunately, the invention has been hit with a barrage of fury from across the internet, and I’m not completely sure why.

This is not an unbelievably earth-shattering concept. Nobody has suggested installing microchips into immigrants that explode when their visas expire, or mandatory mood rings for people with bipolar disorder. Sure, there are a bunch of issues at play, particularly whether this product could potentially encourage the dangerous idea that a woman who isn’t wearing it is putting herself at risk. But a hyper-awareness of that kind of horribly sexist, victim-blaming mentality should not stop research into products that simply make you feel safer in a situation where you may otherwise have felt vulnerable or concerned.

Basically I think this idea is a) fine and b) nowhere near as problematic as the UK government's rape awareness posters that featured a (unforgivable phrase alert) “scantily-clad” woman with mascara dripping down her face.

Photo via Flickr user bronx.

As somebody who writes online and tweets and identifies as a feminist, however, I appear to have drastically missed the mark. The BBC reported yesterday that a whole lot of people have been outraged by the invention of this safety precaution, and not because the scientists have failed to release an extensive color chart. The BBC also noted, quite hilariously, that "the inevitable internet backlash came from a surprising source—anti-rape advocates," as though they initially expected to be dealing with a group of pro-rape advocates furious that people might have a new way to stop them from attacking women. I can imagine the product's inventors rolling their eyes in anticipation: “Just wait til the rapists get wind of this guys, it’s going to get pretty rough on Twitter.”

But no, so far the pro-rapists have kept suspiciously quiet. Instead, we have a lot of people who are actively interested in gender politics and feminism denouncing this invention. Why? Well mainly for a lot of reasons that are absolutely true, but in no way related to one another or even practically enforceable. The most annoying and widespread response has been along the lines of, “Hey, instead of making women wear this nail varnish, how about you just DON’T RAPE THEM,” as though, if these armchair activists had the power they deserve, there would be study-groups of rapists across the world being lectured and read blog posts from Jezebel, their palms glued to their foreheads in disbelief, wondering how they could ever have been so gross and inconsiderate.

I don’t mean to devalue the work of those anti-rape activists, obviously, but when somebody’s response to the news of a product that might help ensure the safety of a vulnerable person is: “WELL HOW ABOUT YOU ASK THE RAPIST TO WEAR THE ANTI-RAPE NAIL VARNISH” it’s hard not to wince. Yes, of course in an ideal world the rapist would be apprehended before he even became a rapist and nobody would rape anybody ever. But unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world. Not yet.

Rape prevention nail polish sounds like a great idea but I’m not sure how you’re going to get men to wear it

— Andrea Grimes (@andreagrimes) August 26, 2014

Arguing in absurdly simplistic moral absolutisms makes you sound like a five-year-old struggling to grasp the concept of crime. Equipping people with the tools to better look after themselves is not the same as victim-blaming or advising them to take “preventative measures.” What’s sad is that these and other safety measures—rape whistles or mace, for example—are largely only marketed towards females. Maybe if more people started talking honestly about how men are also at risk from both physical and sexual violence, it would feel a lot less like women were being blamed for simply being women.

Finally, it’s important to remember that this nail varnish does not claim to prevent rape but simply detect the presence of a drug. And you know what? That’s pretty useful. A study of American college students put the rate of attacks carried out on people who have had their drink spiked at around 5 percent.

And yet, despite this relatively low percentage of actual rapes, the act of spiking of drinks seems to happen depressingly regularly. Basically, a lot of scumbags are apparently pretty willing to try their luck. I have at least two friends who’ve had to be carried into taxis from nice bars with pizza ovens and seasonal beers because they suddenly blacked out and fell over. Both described the ordeal as overwhelmingly embarrassing because everybody assumed they’d just got super wasted on their own when they said they were going to the bathroom, which really sucks. The quicker you can identify that you’ve been spiked, the sooner you’ll get the serious attention you need. And if that means wiggling your finger in a drink to see what color it turns, so be it.

Someone once gave me the advice to stick to the middle of the road if you’re walking down a quiet dark street because you’ll know immediately if someone’s approaching you. It works (do it). Maybe that strips me of my divine right to walk on the sidewalk, but it doesn’t feel like a huge sacrifice in order to be significantly more alert. Obviously in an ideal world the creep who might approach me would have been advised to walk in front of a bus, but until I see a squishy mess of a rapey psychopath under the wheels of my local, I’ll stick to doing whatever the hell I want to feel safe—and so should you.

Follow Bertie Brandes on Twitter.

Laganas is a sun-kissed village on the Greek island of Zante. It's the kind of vacation destination where it takes ten minutes to get drunk, another ten to reach orgasm, and an eternity to get over all the horrible things you've done to both your body and your soul in the space of just a few days. Which I guess is why it's become a Mecca for sexually depraved English tourists.

It’s 4 AM and I'm wide awake in Laganas, lying sober on a shoddy bed in a shoddier hotel room. My bed is the kind that comes covered in hairs, courtesy of the previous tenant and their guests. If you’re lucky, the hairs are long; if not, they're the short, curly debris of clumsy oral sex.

The night I've had is one of those where you find yourself wishing your vacation was already done. Of course, if you were Greek you would never dare express this; the sea and the sun hold a nearly religious significance to modern Greeks, and to even suggest that you're not enjoying yourself while on holiday is tantamount to sin.

In truth, however, all I want to do is go back to my clean house, slather Greek yogurt on my charred back, and throw up all the luminous alcohol I've been served over the last few days.

On my first day here, I optimistically perceived public sex on the streets and sidewalks as a sign of sexual liberation. Maybe us Greeks did still need Westerners to show us what modernity is, I thought to myself.

By the second day, those thoughts had pretty much vanished. That night, I saw a girl sitting legs akimbo on top of a bar while others jostled to get within groping distance. It was like they were playing slapsies to win their fingers a place inside her vagina. By my third night in Laganas, I felt like I was in a village full of sperm that were too drunk and too sunstroked to figure out which egg they should head for.

Tonight, thank God, someone vomited on my shoes so I'm here, much too early in the morning, being kept awake by the sex moans of the young lady next door for the fourth night in a row.

I understand that if I were still a teenager all of this libido and chaos would probably turn me on. Maybe I've just grown up and turned into a stuck-up asshole. Or maybe, just maybe, I've chosen to take a holiday in a really annoying place with people who don't yet and may never understand the concept of limits.

Every summer, young people from Britain, Germany, Australia, and Italy board EasyJet and Ryanair flights to some Greek island with a mission to spend a few days crawling around half-naked on its streets. Because we've been told our economy needs the tourism, for years locals have turned a blind eye to the foreign debauchery by largely staying away from places like Laganas, Faliraki in Rhodes, or Malia in Crete. But in the age of social media, that has become impossible.

Above is a collection of the best/worst things I've seen posted by tourists holidaying in Greece. For what is not done in public is not done at all.

Image by Ben Thomson

Everyone has to make a living. Some do this by making garish gifs of young women gratefully covered in jizz, alongside phrases like “stop jerking off” and “horny bitches in your area.” One of those people is a young Jewish lady: an illustrator and graphic designer who didn’t even know what “amateur” meant when she first got into the porn banner game.

Adi Aviram was on vacation in Berlin and needed a job that didn’t require her to speak German. There weren’t many options. Then Adi’s friend, who worked in online trafficking, hooked her up with a job designing porn banners. At least she got to use her degree. VICE spoke to Adi about the initial thrill and then depressing reality of Photoshopping "amateur" sex all day long.

VICE: What did you do before you started designing porn banners?
Adi Aviram: I studied visual communication. I’m a graphic designer. So, when I started doing banners, apparently I was making them too good. The girls were too pretty, and the text was, like, Helvetica! It wasn’t unlike American Apparel ads. Actually, American Apparel isn’t that far from porn.

Adi’s earlier, more glamorous attempt

Why do porn banners usually look so cheap and crappy?
In the beginning, I sent my banners and the trafficker told me, “it’s too pretty. The picture needs to look homemade”. He introduced me to this amazing keyword: “amateur”. It opened up a whole new world of pictures I could use! I had no idea. When I started, I didn’t know the genres.

So you didn’t even know the search terms they were asking for in the briefs?
Yeah, they’d send me an Excel table in all languages, with words like “ugly needs cock”. You know, really amazing, smart stuff, like “Asian hot pussy”. And I’d need to put the image with that phrase. One day it’s BDSM, tomorrow it’s MILFs. My boss told me all the time: ‘keep it as amateur as you can’. It all needs to be extremely ugly, so people believe it’s real and it’s an amateur website—and then they click more!

I had to do it in a lot of different languages—Russian, I don’t know why Russian! And he told me “just Google Translate it!” And I said “but it won’t be right”, and they said “no, it’s not supposed to be right, because then people click it more”. The amateur design wasn’t only for porn websites—it’s for dating and chat windows. If you see a selfie picture of someone, you would rely on it more than a studio picture. It seems like the girl exists.

Adi at work. Photo by Noa Flecker.

Could you just use anyone’s picture in a porn banner?
Yeah! I found a picture of myself on a website once. I was in the army, and someone said to Google “hot Israeli soldier”. So I did and I found it, and it was the ugliest picture. Me, tired, in flip-flops next to my shampoo bag, sitting with a gun. And it was this American “Jewish hot soldiers” website. It’s not a porn website, but it’s creepy. It’s disturbing. It’s on Google now, you know? If it’s there, it’s not under copyright. It’s a pretty grey area. I could use your Facebook pictures, like the ex-boyfriends who put up pictures of their exes.

The image Adi found of herself online.

Was it hard to get used to porn banners being your only source of income?
Absolutely! It opened me up to this whole world. I never was aware how much humiliating stuff guys are exposed to through porn. When you’re with a guy, intimately, sometimes it’s like why is he doing that? You’re just wondering about stuff they do? It’s all from porn. It’s just so fake—even the homemade stuff.

Can you remember making any banners you found quite confronting?
Sometimes I needed to make gifs, so I’d have to watch a movie. Mostly the BDSM was surprising for me. We think it sounds hot, getting tied up, you know? But it’s horrible! She’s all tied up in a really unsexy way. She’s all purple, because the blood can’t flow through her veins—purple and red. Such a big audience are exposed to it. It’s really depressing. It’s made me really depressed for a while, thinking—this is what people watch, daily?

Did you ever get to make fun banners?
I dunno. It was funny to me in the beginning, but it’s difficult to talk about the fun parts, because it’s pretty heavy after a while. I enjoyed making gifs. Gifs are funny. The hentai type—always a good comedic relief. I made gifs of a naked Snow White. The cartoons are okay to handle.

How do you know if your banners are being successful and getting hits?
My trafficker does that stuff. I just make it pretty and let the men handle the business stuff. I work closely with the trafficker. They tell me at the end. It’s all Excel tables, so you look at that and learn how to make the banners work better.

What makes a banner successful?
You know the font, impact? It’s the meme font. And they’re supposed to be written with spelling mistakes. It’s not that it looks homemade, as much as something is disturbed about the picture, so you look at it and you click. It’s all about catching the eye. It’s psychology. Low, low psychology. Also, really simple, stupid sentences, like “fuck the neighborhood sluts” or “hot MILFs”. MILF is nice! Strong independent women—I really like this genre! It’s much nicer.

We also did fake Facebook messenger stuff, like: Giselle19: ‘I’m bored, wanna come teach me new stuff? Making their chat names—that’s fun! Like “pussycat19”. But they always changed what I wrote in the chat window! They’d say, “it’s not in the creative, you should stick to that”.

So you had to do it by the book?
It’s funny. I’m a girl, so I thought I could do the text in the messenger box, and they said, “no, people will think it’s fake”. They replaced it with sentences that they wrote, always with a smiley face and really cute. So, every time a guy’s clicking on the girl to chat, “oh Pussycat19, she’s sounds really hot”, it’s always a guy that’s written it. In the end, you’re all gay. It’s all men to men, and girls have nothing to do with this. They’re just the face and they have no control. It’s all really homoerotic.

Do your parents know that this is your job?
I told them I did the banners. When they visited me in Germany, I had to work. They were like “are you doing it for porn?” and I was like “no, no, it’s for casinos.” I would never tell them. We’re a Jewish family, we talk about nothing!

Now you’re back in Tel Aviv. What are you doing there?
I’m working for the news channel. There’s a war here now, so I am writing subtitles for the news.

You’re subtitling the war?
Yes! 

It seems like all of your jobs are all really depressing.
Yeah, they are really depressing. I’m actually an illustrator, but there’s no money in that during wartime. People don’t pay for art: they pay for sex and war.

Follow Ash Berdebes on Twitter.

In Rosario, Argentina's third most populated city, slums known as villas miserias are beset with poverty and crime. As narcotics use has grown among the city's population, it has spawned a violent drug war that is little known outside of the country.

Local drug dealers have managed to infiltrate the police, Rosario's economy, and its society, especially through the supporter groups, known as "barras bravas", of the city's two soccer teams: Rosario Central and Newell's Old Boys. And in the villas, the gangs have setup fortified kiosks, known as bunkers, where drugs are sold at plain daylight all over the city.

In early August, Bulletproof Stockings made headlines for performing the first women-only show at Arlene’s Grocery, a rock  venue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Dalia G. Shusterman and Perl Wolfe are the founding members of the New York-based all-girl indie band. They are also followers of the Lubavitch sect of Judaism, which is why many sites have attributed their single sex show to the Jewish law of Kol Isha. The law states that women cannot sing in front of men. But Dalia and Perl say that Jewish law has nothing to do with their girls-only gigs.

I met with Dalia, 40, and Perl, 29, at their apartment in Crown Heights Brooklyn a week after the big show. Perl wore a gray floor-length leopard skirt and blue leather moto jacket. Her eyeliner was flicked into the perfect cat eye. Dalia wore a similar outfit—a denim jacket with a black skirt and bright red lipstick. Both looks were in line with their beliefs concerning modesty, but they still looked like they played in a band.

In the middle of their family room strewn with children’s toys and religious paraphernalia, sat a pearl white drum set and a Yamaha keyboard. I sat with them at their dining room table as they shared with me how they came together to form Bulletproof Stockings and the criticism they received after their gig at Arlene’s.

“We are not doing it for religious reasons. We can play for anyone, but Jewish men are not supposed to listen. So it is totally on them,” said Dalia. “According to the law, we can stand on Kingston Avenue and sing our hearts out. We don’t do that because we don’t want to put men in an awkward position. But more than that, we do this to create a space for women."

Dalia discovered her talent for drumming at age 16 when she played a pair of bongos on stage at an Earth First festival in Washington, DC. The experience led her to play on the streets of the capital and eventually leave home to play in New Orleans. The Big Easy opened up numerous opportunities for Dalia, who eventually went on to tour internationally as the drummer for the band Hopewell.

Dalia was raised modern Orthodox, but lost interest at a young age. It wasn’t until five years later during a trip to Brooklyn to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot that she met her future husband and returned to her religious roots.

“When I met him, I had one more gig with Hopewell. Then my relationship with the band totally disintegrated. I wasn’t ready to give up music, so I started singing cabaret at the Bowery Ballroom. Eventually I started doing Sabbath again and making Jewish friends, which I never had. It is a crazy story because he was one class away from becoming a Rabbi and I had just stepped off of the tour bus. When he met me, I didn’t know what color my hair was and I was wearing fishnets,” said Dalia.

Perl grew up in Chicago in a Lubavitch family where she began classical training on the piano at age six. Her mother had hopes that she would play piano professionally, but she wasn't into it. She went on to study psychology with the goal of becoming a social worker, but took a break from school after her first divorce at 21. Perl moved to New York, where she pursued make-up fulltime at Bloomingdales. It wasn’t until after her second divorce at age 25, that she discovered her ability to write music.

“It was a crazy time. I was struggling religiously and emotionally. After contemplating a lot I decided, I am a Hassid, this is my life. I thought, I am going to form a women’s band and take over New York. It was strange after months of not keeping Sabbath or Kosher. The music helped me realize how my beliefs are a huge part of who I am. I wasn’t trying to write about anything specific, it was just coming out,” said Perl.

In 2011, Dalia moved to Crown Heights with her four sons after the sudden death of her husband. A mutual friend suggested Perl reach out to Dalia and shortly after meeting, they formed Bulletproof Stockings. The name was inspired by the thick style of stockings worn by certain sects of Hasidic women.

“We had a funny moment when we first met. We have both been previously married so we both cover our hair with wigs. I had a wig head on my dresser. When she came in she said, ‘What is that for—dress up?’ Since I am a single girl, she hadn’t thought that I had been married before,” Perl said.

Since 2011, Perl and Dalia have recorded an EP and are currently working on their first full-length album. The music paired with Perl’s soulful vocals produce a sound that falls somewhere between Cat Power's You Are Free and Fiona Apple's When the Pawn… They also play traditional religious melodies.

“Most of our music is original, but we throw in Hasidic melodies as well. With a more secular crowd we are like, When do we hit them with the Hasidic? But people love it. More secular people come over and rave about the Hasidic stuff,” said Perl.

Over the past two and a half years, Bulletproof Stockings have played shows for their community and at women’s universities and festivals. But Arlene’s was the first time they rocked a well-known venue. According to them, it has been difficult for places to agree to turn away half of an audience. Dalia and Perl had to hit the streets to gain signatures supporting their women-only show for Arlene’s to move forward with their performance. To their surprise, the night of the show brought a packed crowd, many intrigued by the novelty of a Hasidic all-girl band playing to an all-female crowd.

“We are making a conscious choice as two adult women to cut out half of our audience because we see how women are moved by an environment like that,” said Perl. “The energy is totally different. The girls are much nicer to each other. It is like a sisterhood.”

Although many women have been excited about the idea of a single sex space, Bulletproof Stockings has received a lot of backlash about their decision to close their shows to men.

“We had someone tell us we should make an apology to the people of the United States because we are such bigots,” said Dalia.

“Guys are really having a hard time with it. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact we are Hasidic. A lot of people have misconceptions. They say we are oppressed, because we are just 'baby machines,'” said Perl. “People are also running away with the feminist thing, saying we must hate men or be lesbians. No one is really getting what we are saying. We just want an all girl party. Is it that big of a deal?”

Many women have also accused Bulletproof Stockings of banning lesbians and transgender people or assuming that you must follow their rules of modesty to attend their shows.

“I think the main point that is getting brushed over is that our shows are for women. People ask can lesbians come? Can transgender people come?  If you’re a woman, come to our shows,” said Perl. “What if a guy comes in drag and gets in? Do I have to dress modestly? Can I come if I am not Jewish? Judaism does not preach that anyone else needs to keep the Torah.  We don’t enforce our laws on other people. We are who we are and hopefully girls will be excited and find inspiration in that. The more diverse our shows, the better.”

The ladies of Bulletproof Stockings are scheduled to play another women-only show at Matchless in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on September 10. 

Follow Erica on Twitter

Image via YouTube.
In paying attention to news about women this week, I felt like I was on some serious drugs. And I wasn’t, for the most part. There are many things I felt like I must be hallucinating this week, but two stories stood out to me.

For one, the Harper government continues to deny the high murder rates Indigenous women are facing, despite another death of a 15-year-old girl. They’ve rejected every request for an inquiry, whether it’s from Indigenous leaders or the UN, and they are now suggesting the government implement “a national DNA-based missing person's index.”

In other news; a much less important, but nonetheless weird occurrence, went down at the Emmys, when the president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences placed Gloria from Modern Family on a rotating pedestal to show off his commitment to “diversity.”

What a world.



Image via Greg Gallinger.

Another Indigenous Girl Dead, Another Blind Eye Turned

Tina Fontaine was murdered a week and a half ago, and her body was found stuffed in a bag at the bottom of the Red River in Winnipeg. It’s salacious to write it that way, I know, but that’s what happened. According to the Globe, the same thing happened to a female relative on Fontaine’s mother’s side of the family in 1988, and the case remains unsolved.

Following Fontaine’s death and renewed calls for an inquiry, Stephen Harper might as well have told Canada it’s not his problem. He said it’s up to police to handle missing and murdered Indigenous women, not the federal government, and that most of these cases are solved.

“We should not view this as sociological phenomenon,” he said at a news conference. “We should view it as crime. It is crime against innocent people, and it needs to be addressed as such.”

Now, premiers and Indigenous leaders are calling for a roundtable—rather than a public inquiry—in hopes of involving the federal government. Brad Wall says it’s irresponsible for governments to let the death of a 15-year-old Aboriginal girl, and so many deaths before hers, slide.

But an inquiry, as the feds are describing it, is not an action. It is a question, a passive investigation. And we already know what’s wrong here: too many Indigenous women are being abducted and murdered. There have been 1,181 cases since 1980, according to the RCMP. Indigenous women make up 4.3 percent of the country’s female population, but they represent 16 percent of all female homicides from 1980 to 2012, and 11.3 percent of missing women during that time period.

An inquiry will likely be hogtied in red tape and sanitized by legal jargon. It will be, at best, a set of stats and recommendations. It won’t stop the violence. One could argue that an inquiry is the first step to action, but in this case, I’m afraid, an inquiry would be an impotent step taken simply to shut people up. This is a matter requiring a sense of national urgency. We need a concrete plan to stop the rampant murders of Indigenous women and girls, and the voices of those women need to be at the forefront.

After Fontaine’s death, justice minister Peter MacKay (the jolly old fellow) said the government believes appropriate measures include “aboriginal justice programs” (aimed at offenders) and a national DNA database of missing persons.

Dr. Sarah Hunt, a member of the Kwagiulth band of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, has worked on Ingidenous anti-violence and justice projects for over 15 years. Her response to Mackay’s plan in the Globe and Mail sums up the situation quite well:

“I would argue that these efforts serve to distract from root causes by focusing on indigenous people themselves as the problem. [We are] living in a society that condones violence against indigenous women, where killers face few deterrents, and where missing women are blamed for putting themselves ‘at risk.’ Surely tracking indigenous girls’ DNA so they can be identified after they die is not the starting point for justice… An inquiry will only help if it has action attached and if it shifts power into the hands of indigenous women, meaning it is led by indigenous women.”

Yes, exactly. It seems Canadians have been paying more attention to racial strife in America post-Ferguson, and I’m happy to see it. But if we’re going to get invested in that fight, we should also be tuned in to the treatment of Indigenous people in our own country.

Screenshot via MTV.

Sofia Vergara Poses As Piece Of Meat, Bey Preaches Feminism At Dueling Awards Shows

On Monday night, Bruce Rosenblum, president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, asked Sofia Vergara to stand on a revolving pedestal as a symbol of the Emmys’ supposed “diversity.”

Placing a Latina woman on a twirling lazy Susan in front of a crowd of people and televising it does not signify a commitment to diversity. In no way is diversity a top priority for the Emmys, and that is clear to all. Year after year, the awards do not honour nearly enough women or people of colour. Only 26 percent of this year’s nominees were women. Behind the scenes, women make up 28 percent of roles for network television.

This of course speaks to the larger issue—reasonable, multi-faceted, human representations of people of colour are still alarmingly scarce on television. (Orange Is the New Black does this incredibly well, and though it garnered five nominations, it didn’t win in any category). Women and people of colour still aren’t being hired as directors, either. Rosenblum is either ignoring his failings, or trying to pacify the apparently stunned public by flaunting the spinning Vergara like a particularly curvy slab of donair meat, (sorry, I’m from the maritimes) prepped for consumption.

After watching the clip, I could only hope that Vergara was in on the joke, and had mounted the pedestal and gestured like a game show lady out of irony. Sadly, this wasn’t the case—she later said critics need to “lighten up” and have more of a sense of humour. Now, while I don’t find the incident funny, it’s not my place to judge the reasoning of an adult actress who agreed to do a stunt for a man with influence over her career. Nothing wrong with exploiting a system that exploits you, if that’s what you see fit. Do your thing.

That said, it is my place to judge how women are treated in the entertainment industry, and I disagree with Rosenblum’s tactic. The display was an ignorant and blatantly sexist act. It was also unclear to me exactly what kind of diversity he was trying to claim he upheld. Is Vergara “diverse” because she is a woman? Because she is a woman of colour? Either way, women and people of colour are well aware when we are being used as tokenistic emblems of white male anti-racism. When it happens, many of us are not amused.

Rosenblum would have done better to address why diversity on TV is important, and outline steps the Emmys are taking to correct their past transgressions in this department. But the only point he managed to get across to me was that women of colour are objects to be enjoyed, little more.

Thankfully, though, Queen Bey put on the perfect contrast of a show at MTV’s Video Music Awards the day before. She gave a 16-minute performance that left tears and snot all over my keyboard. Then, two thirds of the way, some of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDx speech quoted in her latest single, “Flawless,” flashed across the screen:

“We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings, in the way that boys are. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.”

Adichie defines “feminist” for us as, simply: “the person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”

Bey then struck a power pose with the word FEMINIST blazing in the background. She is not called Queen Bey for nothing.

It’s time for Rosenblum and those like him to take heed of Bey’s messaging, spare us the pseudo-concern, and give credit where credit is due.


@sarratch