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

Missouri Football's Rape-Culture Problem

0
0
Missouri Football's Rape-Culture Problem

The Worst Thing About SeaWorld Is How Fucking Boring It Is

0
0

By now, you've already seen (or at least know about) Blackfish. And you know that public opinion has turned pretty significantly against SeaWorld. 

Over a year after the film's release, people are still mad about it. In the last few weeks, a Huffington Post article titled "The End of SeaWorld" has shown up on my Twitter and Facebook multiple times. If the article is to be believed, SeaWorld, as a company, is "finished."

As a person who has never been to SeaWorld, I was unsure if its closing would be any real loss, so I decided to spend a day there to find out.

I was worried that the park might end up being really fun and I'd have to write something about how awesome it is and give them a bunch of free positive PR, but—spoiler alert—the park turned out to be a steaming pile of dog shit. Phew!

The highlight of the park, without question, is the moments spent walking from your car to the entrance, before you find out that a ticket costs an insane $84. It's all downhill from there.

Upon entering, the first thing that greets you as you is a series of aquatic-petting-zoo-type things where you're able to touch sea creatures.

Or, more accurately, lift sea creatures out of the water and prod them while your parents take photos rather than telling you to put them back in the fucking water. Like this starfish. 

Every once in a while, the teenage girl supervising the pool would remind everyone not to take the creatures out of the water because "they need water to breathe!" But her requests, for the most part, fell on deaf ears.

Beyond the petting pools, there are enclosures featuring animals that are just to look at. Like this turtle, which had some kind of raw, bloody wound. 

When someone in the crowd asked what was wrong with it, the girl manning the enclosure said something about antibiotics, before pushing the turtle back into the water and out of sight. 

Now, I know that the only reason people care so much about the orcas is because a very popular documentary was released telling them they should feel bad for them. And, really, there's no difference between these animals and the pandas down the street at the San Diego Zoo, or the chickens being sold as nuggets in the onsite restaurants. Any animal being exploited is a giant bummer. 

That said, it would be impossible to watch Blackfish and not feel extra sad when seeing these animals swimming in an endless loop, existing as little more than backgrounds for selfies. 

The main draw of SeaWorld is, of course, the shows.

I suppose I'd never really thought about what happens in a SeaWorld show before actually attending one. My entire exposure to them previously had been in five-second montages in travel documentaries and commercials. Which, honestly, made them seem quite exciting. 

However, the amount of things a killer whale is able to do to entertain people who are sitting above the surface is limited to exactly one thing, which is to jump out of the water before quickly falling back in. 

And as impressive as it is that their trainers are able to teach these animals to do that on command, there are only so many times that it's entertaining to see an orca jump out of the water for a second. And if you're anything like me, that number of times is exactly once. 

This is something SeaWorld seems to be aware of, as they've done a lot to try to dress up the shows. After tossing a bunch of bells and whistles on to the act of jumping-out-of-the-water-for-one-second, they manage to polish this turd into a performance that lasts more than 20 minutes. 

The show starts with a SeaWorld trainer coming out and asking for "members of the US Military past and present and its allies from around the world" to stand up. We, as an audience, were then asked to applaud, as patriotic music blasted out and a trainer explained that "SeaWorld is not only committed to men and women in uniform... but the world we all share."

Which, up until that point in my life, was the corniest thing I had ever seen.

It would be hard to overstate how horrifically, offensively trite the music that began playing next was. The best way I can think to describe it is to imagine that there were a Christian remake of the TV show Glee, and they were doing a Lion King on Broadway tribute episode featuring vocals by Donny Osmond (and Donny had been castrated prior to recording).

You can listen to the full soundtrack here. Here's a sampling of the lyrics: 

Many times it happens, just by surprise,
Out in the world, in front of your eyes—
You see a little kindness, someone who lends a hand,
The caring, sharing spreads like a vine,
When they return the kindness, passing it on down the line.

Even the guy who's in charge of rewriting stuff for Kidz Bop to make it more kid-friendly ("Out in the club / And I'm eatin' that grub / And you're not gonna reach my telephone") would describe it as "a bit much."

The rest of the show was filled in with SeaWorld trainers dancing and delivering messages about the importance of conserving the environment. Throughout the show, the trainers fake-grinned so hard they were almost incapable of speaking. 

It's the kind of children's entertainment thought up by people who never speak to children. The kind of people who burst into tears over someone's commitment to Sparkle Motion

The second show I went to see was the dolphin show, which was more of the same. More animals jumped out of the water, and more dickheads danced around on the sidelines to saccharine, patronizing music. 

This time around, there was a plot of some sort. I'm not totally sure what it was. Something about a girl jumping out of her bedroom window and then befriending someone who was dressed as a parrot in order to protect the environment? IDK.

I can imagine that, in the 60s, when the park had just opened, this would've been like that scene in Jurassic Park where they see the brachiosaurus for the first time. But, in 2014, it definitely isn't cutting it. The kids watching this show are kids who grew up with the internet, kids who have 3-D TVs in their homes, and a device in their pocket that allows them to watch any movie ever made. You're gonna have to come at them with something a bit more impressive than animals repeatedly jumping to a soundtrack that sounds like it was written by Trey Parker to make fun of Christians. 

I assume they're probably making a lot of money out of this venture, but you have to really wonder if it's really worth ruining the lives of some animals and having the entire world hate you for it.

Beyond the shows, there are a few rides—a rollercoaster, a gondola, a couple of water rides. Nothing massively exciting.

Despite the fact that SeaWorld is in Southern California, the people who designed the park never thought to make any kind of shade to stand in while lining up for the attractions. I visited the park on a quiet day when I never waited more than 20 minutes for a ride. But still, by the time it came to actually boarding, I looked and felt like I'd just run a marathon. I can't imagine how un-fun it would be on a busier or hotter day. 

And that's pretty much my entire day at SeaWorld: two shows, two rides, and a bunch of hours spent staring at sad-looking animals. I'm not sure what the antonym is for the word "recommendation," but whatever it is, that's what I would apply to a trip to SeaWorld.

I feel that, if you're gonna abuse animals for the entertainment of others, it should least be entertaining to others. I'm not saying that would make SeaWorld acceptable or justified, but at least maybe the $84 entrance fee might sting a little less. 

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

We Met the Star of 'Samurai Cop,' One of the Best (and Worst) Action Movies of All Time

0
0

Original photos by Micah Brooke

Samurai Cop is one of those rare, weird relics of the VHS era that you almost never see anymore. They come from a time when films were shot on actual film, and when all you needed to score international distribution was a buff American ninja, naked girls, a shootout, and a poorly edited car chase. Dialogue, plot, and character were secondary. Many such films ended up lost to time, an embarrassing footnote in some actor or director’s past. A very select few, however, are unearthed by film historians, by treasure hunters with a taste for the obscure and unintentionally hilarious.

So it's certainly a bizarre twist that Samurai Cop has not only found incredible cult success 25 years after it’s release, but filmmaker Greg Hantanka is now in the process of assembling the original cast for a sequel, which is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. But rather than go on at length trying to explain just what makes the film so magical (or why a sequel would be absolutely batshit amazing), I tracked down the film’s star, Matt Hannon, at the film’s encore screening at Cinefamily in Los Angeles so he could explain the Samurai Cop phenomena from his own perspective.

VICE: How would you explain Samurai Cop to someone that had never seen it before?
Matt Hannon: The actual movie itself? It was basically intended to be a low budget Lethal Weapon rip-off. And capturing what was hot in the 80s, with the buff bodybuilder guy, the long hair, that look. That’s what it was basically intended to be from Amir [Shervan, the original director], and obviously it became… what it became. The “classic” that it is now.

Did you ever think that you’d be hearing about that film again, decades later? 
No, because I had to basically wrench that VHS copy form Amir’s hands with that timecode! And I thought, Well OK, I have a copy. I’ll try to pull whatever scenes I can get out of it. I knew he never had the money. He never theatrically released it. So I figured, well this is great. It's just gonna go away. But then YouTube came around and here I am.

So there was never any kind of release at all then? 
No. And we were always having to come back, there was always more to do, more to shoot. You know, I cut my hair short at one point. I thought, OK, now it’s done. And I think it’s just going to go away, he doesn’t have the money to release it and that’s basically where it ended up. In that vault, hidden away until Greg [Hatanaka, founder of Cinema Epoch and producer/director of Samurai Cop 2] stumbled upon it just by happenstance, like so many other movies before it.

At what point did you realize it was really gaining steam as a modern cult classic? 
I would say probably around '09. I had always sorta watched from a distance. Every once in a while I’d Google Samurai Cop, because I knew YouTube, as it started to gain popularity, had different scenes from the movie on there. So then I just kind of read the comments and laughed. It was all absolutely dead on. Everything that they were posting was exactly what we were thinking. This is ridiculous, you know—just the dialogue, everything. I didn’t actually realize that it got to the “cult” status until Greg had called me, after I did that YouTube post with me saying that I’m alive and well.

Oh, right. What was all that about people thinking you were dead for two years? Where did that rumor come from? 
Yeah, there’s another actor by the name of Matt Hannon who had passed away, and apparently people were trying to find me or research where I was. I had basically dropped off the radar. And he had done some film work, so they assumed he was me. So when he passed, the rumor spread and some people tried to go to his hometown in Ohio and get in touch with his family and find out if this is the right guy. So apparently they were convinced it was, so for two years I’m thinking, “Oh this is great!” I’m dead, I love it. Now I don’t have to worry about it. But then my daughter, who’s 22 now, came forward and said, “Dad you should let ‘em know that’s the wrong guy." So I basically outed myself. But she’s the one that made me.

How do we know that you’re not a ghost? Can you prove that you’re not a ghost?
No. I would like to! I’d like to wake up from this nightmare! But I can't.

What was it like working with Amir Shervan as a director? Was he self-aware that his filmmaking skills were… questionable?
Yeah, I think he was actually really serious. And obviously being from a Persian background and with his filmography, I think he just really thought he was making great American cinema. Which, when I first met him, was what I though was headed into as well. But as it unfolded, you just realize wow, this guy, he’s really limited on funds, the money that I thought he had, he didn’t. And then as all of us basically just went well, you know what, let’s finish this, not just walk away. Because you could tell it was going downhill. But then, we kind of enjoyed filming every day once we knew what it was becoming. And we all honestly thought there’s no way this is ever going to get released. But let’s just do it, let’s see what kind of footage we can get out of it as actors starting out. Which was what it was supposed to be, it was never supposed to be what it is now! Which is like, beyond what I would have ever thought it would become.

Director Amir Shervan

Did you even get to spend much time with the script before you started filming? Or was it just handed to you on set?
Yeah, he gave us a script. He wrote and directed everything. He gave it to me and prefaced it by saying, “Take a look at it, if you want to change something we can later." That never happened. We went word-for-word, that’s what you see up there on the screen. It’s all of Amir’s writing, so that’s why its so… You know.

So I take it he didn’t allow for improv?
Never. Very rarely. I think there’s maybe two improv lines in there that we talk about on the Blu-ray release that’s coming out at the end of the year. But yeah, other than that, it was very strict. He would say, “No! You have to know it and say it exactly like this!” Like the classic “son of a bitches” line. I purposely explained to him over and over, we wouldn’t say it like this! We’d say, “I’m telling these sons of bitches” And he kept saying, “No, no, no. Just say it ‘son of a bitches,' it’s better. I’m telling you son of a bitches!” So you surrender, you give respect to the director and then, it is what it is. [Laughter] That’s what people keyed in on. Like, “Oh my god.”

Let’s talk about the wig. What’s the story with the wig you’re wearing for half the movie? 
We started filming in June of ’90. Amir said it would take three weeks. We finished in August. What he considered to be principal photography. Then in September, October, he said "Come back, let’s do some looping pick-up shots." So we did that. Then he said in November, “We’re done. We got enough Matt, thank you so much. I’ll get you the tape as soon as I can.” I cut my hair really short and did new head shots and was moving on.

So then he called me in December or January and said, “Matt, I need you to come into the office.” I thought, Oh great! He’s gonna give me my tape. And I walked in and he flipped out. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!” I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, “You cut your hair!” I said, “I know, why?” “I have more to film!” he says. So, he just immediately stormed out of the office with me, threw me in his car and drives me to Hollywood and Vine to the first wig shop and grabbed, apparently, whatever he thought was close to my hair. And he’s like placing it on my head and combing it straight. And I thought OK, fine, I guess he maybe has some distance shots where you cant tell. But you can see there’s just all kinds of close ups. 

Sounds like he really got you in a bit of a pickle there. It really adds a lot of character to the film though, in my opinion.
Well, yes! And I’ve toiled with that over and over, if I took away from the seriousness of the movie. But then there’s so many other things besides that wig that I can't take responsibility for. I mean production-wise, the script, the dialogue, characters in the movie, reaction shots, it is on it’s own—just a classic in every respect.

Much of the appeal of the original Samurai Cop is in the unintentional humor that comes through in the final product. How do Gregory [Hatanaka, the director] and Rich [Mallery, the writer] intend to recreate that magic while working with the handicap of knowing that they’re making a silly movie? 
I don’t know if they’re going to try to. You really can't. I’ve done half a dozen interviews now and kind of pulled back the curtain to what was really going on. Prior to me coming back to life, so to speak, people could only guess, What’s with the wig, why this, why that. And even though I’ve come forward and explained a lot, I really don’t thing it took away from the magic of the film. They still, I think, are loving what they’re seeing even though they now know a little bit more. I don’t know if that could be replicated though. There’s a fine line to temper that, how to duplicate it. You just can't.

Many of the main cast members are returning for the sequel. Will the wig be making an appearance as well?
Oh no, I hope not! I mean, my real hair looks like a wig now, but yeah. That’s really up to the directors and the writers, whatever they come up. I’m surrendering again. If they think something like that would be funny to put in there then yeah, but I don’t think so.

Were there any really great or funny moments from that shoot that didn’t make it into the final film?
Well no, Amir really had no outtakes at all. He put everything up there. Everything was one-shot, and his film was so valuable—whatever he shot he really used and you see that. The way he splices scenes together and edits things without any transitional elements, just very guerilla.

So there aren’t any outtakes or even alternate takes?
Uh-uh, never. Very rarely did we ever do anything over and over again. Which is why you had to know your lines and say them right. And there’s a couple of flubbed lines that you hear some of the actors doing, that normally you would say “Oh, you screwed that, let's start over.” 

But his response was?
Oh, he’d flip out. But most every actor that worked on that, they all knew their lines. I mean, I had those huge, long monologues. As you see me speaking those lines, you can tell in my eyes that I’m just so disgusted with what I’m saying, beside the fact that I could be having the wig on to add to it! So I purposefully was giving him the worst performance ever.

The speech in the restaurant…
Right, the “son of a bitches” one! That was ridiculous! Because we didn’t even do it that same day. And we were in Amir’s office, which wasn’t any bigger than the booth we're sitting at right now, with just me on a wall. That’s why you’ll see three or four of us doing scenes with the same background. Because Amir just… And again this is after the fact where I’m like, “Why didn’t you cover this in the first place?” But it just made no sense. It rambled on. The scene that I had with Jannis [Farley, Samurai Cop’s love interest in the film], any of the love scenes. Anything we do together is just way too long. The love scenes are just ridiculous, and uncomfortably long, but Amir wanted to sell that sex. And he’s down off camera going, “Now kiss her slow, Matt.”

So you hated the parts where you had to make out with the sexy babes then?
No, I loved the girls! But by having him off camera giving me direction and whispering in my ear as I’m doing it...

What can the readers to help make Samurai Cop 2 a reality?
If they’re true fans, they should really just get behind it right now and show some support for the Kickstarter. I think the things that they’re giving away are things that the fans really want—the t-shirts, the DVDs, the posters. If you’re that diehard of a fan, there’s even people calling in that want to be in the movie, in scenes with me. And of course that’s a different pledge level. And they’ve been waiting towards the end, as they always do with these things. I think you’re going to see a lot of the money coming in in the last couple of days. People that are putting it off saying. “I’ll get to it.”

We’re down to just over a week now though, so I think if you’ve been on the fence about it or thinking about it, now’s really the time to jump in. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. And the writers and the producers, are fans of the movie also. It’s not like they just came out of nowhere, Greg Hatanaka, the director, has a lot of his own personal resources invested in this. He’s been around for years, he’s done movies with John Woo, lots of action stuff. He knows what he’s doing. And I think that we’ll not disappoint the fans when we release whatever it is that he’s come up with.

Follow Jeremy Azevedo on Twitter.

Wait, Why Hasn't NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Been Fired Yet?

0
0

Thumbnail screencap via CBS News on Youtube

Roger Goodell needs to be fired. It’s that simple. There’s such a litany of reasons why he should kick rocks that I'm not sure where to start. His alleged involvement in the cover-up of concussion-induced CTE, his draconian punishments for recreational (and sometimes state-legal) drug use, and his support of the racist Washington team name—the one journalists aren't even allowed to type—all spring to mind. But of course most recently, there's been his tragically incompetent mishandling of the NFL’s domestic violence epidemic. Not to mention his ongoing disregard for the health and well-being of retired veteran players, the fucking lockout, or his Mr. Burns-esque war on referees

Fuck Roger Goodell.

As a lifelong football fan, (for the Green Bay Packers, so double fuck Goodell for the Fail Mary) it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to watch the sport I love. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on that subject. Dozens of stories, in print or onscreen, point out the moral quandaries one confronts when supporting a game that is mired in arch hypocrisy, victim blaming, and stubborn ignorance— all stemming from the commissioner’s office. 

You might think it's just a game, but context matters: Every NFL player’s dream is to win a Super Bowl. Most won’t even make the playoffs. However, those who do, receive post-season bonuses in the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The athletes who suit up are often the best of the best the NFL has to offer, and they are handsomely rewarded for their abilities by the League. Given all this, a question arose in my head.

Just how many players that have received these bonuses have also been arrested or otherwise implicated in violence against women? How many Super Bowl winners have struck their wife or girlfriend with the same hand that now bears a Super Bowl Ring—the ultimate achievement in America’s most popular sport? And how many did it under the ham-fisted rule of Roger Goodell?

Using USA Today’s NFL Player Arrest Database (a necessary thing that exists), I compiled the names of any player that fits that description. The results were more surprising than I expected. 39 men have made the playoffs in Goodell’s NFL who have also been arrested or summoned for a crime against a woman. Super Bowl winners include Ray Rice, Erik Walden, Will Smith, Michael Boley, James Harrison, Tony McDaniel, and Rocky Bernard. This list doesn’t even include Super Bowl winners like Terrell Suggs, who was merely accused of punching his fiancée in the neck in front of their fucking kids. You can look over the whole list I've compiled here.

16 of the men are still in the league, while the 17th, James Harrison, retired a week ago. He went back to the Steelers to retire. The Steelers, of course, are Quarterbacked by the Bill Cosby of the NFL, owner of as many Super Bowl Rings as on-the-record sexual assault accusations, Ben Roethlisberger.

One of those men still in the league was the first case of domestic violence Goodell had to deal with, less than a week after becoming commissioner. That man is Miami Dolphin Randy Starks, whose fiancée actually lost some of her fingernails during the attack (By the way, whoever keeps up the USA Today database is doing a great job, but change your fucking verbiage, dude. Calling a fight between a woman and a 6’3 305 lb man a “scuffle” is incredibly tone-deaf).

The most recent addition to this list is, of course, 49er Ray McDonald. Over Labor Day weekend, he was arrested for beating his pregnant fiancée. The person most likely to be added to this list? Denver Safety TJ Ward, who was accused of throwing a glass at a female bartender. Barring another Peyton Manning neck injury, he will soon make his first playoff appearance.

Despite all this evidence, despite repeated calls for his resignation from Senators to perhaps the only respectable windbag at ESPN, Goodell, somehow, remains commissioner. He, a pathetic excuse for a leader, is the steward of a roughly 10 billion dollar a year industry. His callous demeanor, T-1000 eyes, and backwards approach to anything involving emotion should make him ripe for scapegoating. It’s truly a mystery why, after so many fuckups, and now outraged pundits beginning to advocate for a boycott, a group of old white billionaires have yet to turn on him to save themselves and their fortunes.

Who can stomach a guy who is so lenient on violent acts against women? A man who, in his staunchest critique of this kind of violence, said

You do not have to be convicted or even charged of a crime to be able to demonstrate that you've violated a personal conduct policy, and reflect poorly not only on themselves, but all of their teammates, every NFL player in the league, and everyone associated with the NFL. 

But he seems to have no problem with the fact that it's an empty platitude, considering that—for one—Carolina Panther Greg Hardy was found guilty of assaulting his girlfriend this July, and yet, will suit up next Sunday against the Lions.

Three days before the Super Bowl involving Ben Roethlisberger, during the season he was suspended after being accused of sexual assault, noted NFL lackey Peter King quoted Goodell as saying he "doesn't feel any connection'' to Big Ben and that “Not one, not a single player, went to his defense.” Goodell ended up reducing Roethlisberger’s six game suspension to only four.

Next month, the NFL trots out its dumb pink uniforms, “supporting” a breast cancer charity that is troubling at best. Ostensibly, this is to promote awareness of women’s health. Yet, this becomes another in the long line of Roger Goodell’s hypocrisies. How many of the men wearing these pink uniforms have been protected by the commissioner’s office for themselves harming a woman?

Maybe next October, Goodell should propose that players wear black and blue uniforms, to raise awareness of the NFL’s backwards treatment of violence against women. 

In the meantime, we’re stuck with Goodell and his ludicrous policies. Let’s face facts: a boycott of the NFL doesn't look likely, but if we, fans and media, continue to call for his resignation, while at least entertaining the idea of a boycott, we might actually achieve something. Roger Goodell works for the NFL owners, and they’ve proven they don’t care about people who work for them. However, if the uproar gets loud enough, they will be forced to protect the one thing they truly care about: their money.

Follow Josh Androsky on Twitter.

Yes to Scottish Independence—and to the End of British Neoliberalism

0
0
Yes to Scottish Independence—and to the End of British Neoliberalism

I Had the Leader of ISIS Cursed by a Hong Kong Sorceress, and It Almost Worked

0
0

Photos by the author

Hypermodern Hong Kong is chock-full of superstitions.

Four old women gather every morning beneath an overpass in the glitzy shopping district called Causeway Bay to set up their shrines. They erect statuettes of a hodgepodge of Chinese deities, mixing and matching characters from Buddhism, Taoism, and local folklore. There's Guan Gong, a folk hero worshipped by both the police and triad gangs; Buddha, who blurred the lines between god and guru; Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy; and the Monkey King, equal parts prankster, disciple, and protector. Incense stays lit until past dusk, and the women offer supernatural protection to anyone who stops at their stations. At the same time, they confer misery, misfortune, and general unpleasantness to the personal enemies of their clients.

The ritual is called da siu yun in Cantonese, and it means "hitting villains." Each woman has her own variation of the ceremony, but it really boils down to striking paper “villains” with shoes, lighting Taoist sigils and paper charms on fire, and chanting a spell or two as the smell of smoke clings to every garment. One of them even tells fortunes by tossing fake antique coins and consulting a Taoist text.

At least one of the street sorceresses admits it's a hustle, but at least it comes with a show. They put their hearts into the performance, and tourists love it.

The cops don't chase away the women because they've used the space for decades, and no one can even tell when their predecessors invented the ritual. It's one of those things that has been in the city since a time that stretches beyond memory, and the Hong Kong government even declared the custom a part of the city's "intangible cultural heritage."

In fact, villain-hitting was revived as a popular way to express civil discontent.

The local populace has, for years, been dissatisfied with their political leaders. Rising real estate prices, attempted pro-Beijing education reform, and a widening wealth gap are just a few issues that stress out Hongkongers. But it's their current quest for universal suffrage that really has them riled up.

"Nowadays, almost nobody comes because of personal grudges," one of the old women said. "When they line up, they are coming to us to curse the Chief Executive." (The Chief Executive is the top political leader of Hong Kong, sort of like the mayor.)

And line up they do. Once a year, typically in March on a day that the Chinese lunar calendar specifies is good for this sort of thing, the queue can stretch around the block, and waits can last for hours. As half a million people hit the streets to ask Beijing to honor the promise of hosting open elections in Hong Kong, some call on the supernatural and focus their ire on the city's leader. Unlike the rest of China, Hong Kong guarantees much greater personal freedom. Whereas this sort of collective criticism of a political leader might lead to unpleasant consequences in Mainland China, Hongkongers are able to practice freedom of speech without the worry of repercussions—most of the time, anyway.


"We've hexed [the Chief Executive] thousands upon thousands of times, even more than that," the sorceresses said. “Sometimes we charge extra to hex him because he's a 'major character' that requires more work, but people still want to do it. Everybody just hates him.”

Then they reminded me of their fundamental purpose, and asked, "So are you going to curse someone, or are you just going to ask questions and take pictures of us?"

I'm easygoing, and live a relatively frictionless existence. I don't have enemies and am generally at ease with the universe, so I tried to think of the most odious, most hateable, most repugnant person in the news right now. There were plenty of contenders, but one stood out.

I put a curse on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of IS, Swiss watch connoisseur, and possibly the most vile man alive.

The youngest sorceress let loose a spell from her lips as she cursed his head, his face, his eyes, ears, mouth, gut, hands, and feet. She smacked him with her shoe thirty-odd times, and burned him in a metal canister beside her shrine. She said nobody had ever given her a name in English. I told her that it was actually an Arabic name, but that wasn't an issue. “What's the problem? Sorcery is sorcery,” she said. Her equal opportunity attitude for the supernatural reminded me of John Constantine.

And then she asked me for $7.

I awoke the next day to the breaking news that al-Baghdadi had been killed in a drone strike. I couldn't wait to give the sorceresses news of their godlike powers, but before any feelings of excitement or elation could really sink in, the news turned out to be a photoshopped photo being reported in the wake of real drone strikes that killed other ISIS members, but not al-Baghdadi.

So the curse didn't work—not yet at least—but what about the wave of hexes directed at Hong Kong's top politician every year? Doesn't that amount to a lot of bad mojo? “Of course not!“ My sorceress laughed as she cooled herself with an old straw fan, nursing lukewarm water from an old plastic bottle in the exhaust of roaring double-decker buses. “But if things don't go well for him, he deserves it.”

Villain-hitting isn't a dying tradition, but it's not exactly a booming profession either. It has competition from an app for villain-hitting, with iPhones in essence replacing the sorceresses, but without the smoke and incense. Aside from the occasional tourist who stops by, things get busy only for a day or two in March, so why do they still show up every day?

“We're in this for life, it's what we know how to do,” one of the sorceresses said. “Even Li Ka-Shing [the richest man in Asia] consults a feng shui master for his business. We do the same things as the big-name grand masters, just for everyone else.” Then she cracked a smile.

“So which terrorist do you want us to hit today?”

Photos of My Grandfather Dying

0
0

A portrait of my maternal grandparents. My grandfather had just been diagnosed with cancer.

These photos were taken over a period of five months, starting in December 2013, when my grandfather was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was the first time someone in my family was going to die, and since I had a hard time dealing with the imminence of death, I decided to document the final months of his life. In order to do this, I returned three times to the countryside where I grew up and where my family lives (a small village in Burgundy, France)—the third time the culmination, with the funeral.

I had a very hard time accepting the idea of death—I couldn't even attend the funeral due to an anxiety attack—so I found solace behind the lens, documenting all the different aspects of this final event in someone's life. During my visits to the hospital, I often walked around the wards, meeting other patients and coming across the same themes that myself and my family were confronted with during this period: alienation, agony, abandonment and also eventual numbness, acceptance and inner peace.

However, to me, the central theme of this series is the wait. In The Stranger, Camus starts by saying "Maman died today." Nowadays, this kind of detachment and finality are uncommon—despite the certainty of death, we are all stuck waiting in an ageing society, with medicine that prolongs our lives, but doesn't necessarily make them better.

Visiting my grandparents home. Statues.

Click here to view all of the photos.

VICE: How close were you to your granddad? What kind of a man was he?
Johann Bouché-Pillon: Out of all my grandparents, he was the one I was closest to. He was a very warm person, he loved cooking meals for the family and taking care of his garden, and it's from him that I learned to love these things also; what some might call the "simple pleasures of life".

Did the project bring you closer to him? Some of the photos are unbearably sad. I can't imagine being that close to someone you love while they're suffering so much.
In the beginning, around the time I took the first picture, he didn't know he was going to die – the doctor had only told my mother, so he was still himself. Documenting his last months didn't necessarily bring me any closer to him, though. It just helped prepare me for what came after.

How did the disease affect his personality? Was he still capable of humor once he knew it was terminal?
When he was told that he was going to die, his humor understandably deteriorated with the disease, so he became difficult to be around, up to the point where he had to be hooked to morphine—albeit in "agony".

In the text you sent me, you talk a lot about the idea of death and having a hard time accepting it. During the project, were you forced to wrestle with any thoughts about the possibility of an afterlife? Are you a religious person at all?
Personally, I'm not a religious person, and I've never believed in the afterlife. I found all the rituals surrounding the death of my grandfather a bit forced, in the sense that they seemed to me as pragmatic as the payment of the hospital fees or the rent of the hearse – just another thing that needed to be done.

Finally, how do you feel emotionally when people look at these photos? How have others responded?
I haven't shown it to many people, but I've been surprised by the reaction of those I have shown it to. I was expecting a bit of a backlash due to the nature of the subject, but I have gotten mostly positive comments.

Taking these pictures was obviously a very intense experience—you're so close to the "end", so to speak, and you're capturing a moment that might be the last in someone's life. Sharing this series with people allows me to better preserve that feeling.

Okay. Thanks, Johann.

Find more of Johann's work at his website.

Click through to view the photos.

Mother.

Waiting.

In the nursing home.

Brave old world.

Raymonde, my great aunt at the nursing home.

My great aunt's roommate, Babette.

The grip.

Listening.

Agony.

Faith.

Love.

Tomb of my grandfather.

The peacock.

Visiting my grandparents' home—dead cat.

Mammy.

The Far-Right Paramilitary Group Hanging Out in Kiev's Soccer Stadium

0
0
The Far-Right Paramilitary Group Hanging Out in Kiev's Soccer Stadium

Why People of Color in New York City Still Don't Trust the Cops

0
0

Eric Garner’s body lies in a casket during his funeral at Bethel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, on Wednesday, July 23, 2014. AP Photo/New York Daily News, Julia Xanthos, Pool

On July 17, New York City police officers surrounded Eric Garner, an overweight, asthmatic black man, near his home on Staten Island. According to Garner’s neighborhood pal Ramsey Orta, the cops were hassling Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, because they thought he was involved in a street scuffle. The police’s version of the incident is that they approached Garner for selling individual cigarettes—“loosies”—which is illegal because the government doesn’t collect taxes on those sales.

As captured on video by Orta, Garner complained about routine NYPD harassment and was subsequently placed in a choke hold by a plainclothes officer named Daniel Pantaleo. With his head being smashed against the ground and the cops holding him down, Garner cried out, “I can’t breathe!” nine times—you can watch the video on YouTube yourself and count—to no avail. He was pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later, and the video quickly went viral. It bears a horrifying resemblance to the climactic scene of Radio Raheem getting murdered by the NYPD in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—Lee even created his own mash-up of the two scenes after Garner’s death.

Almost immediately, cries rang out that Garner was a casualty of “broken windows” policing. That’s the theory that says going after minor quality-of-life offenses like graffiti, subway panhandling, and illegal cigarette sales helps discourage serious crimes like rape and murder. It’s the brainchild of criminologist George Kelling, who co-authored a 1982 Atlantic article that remains a sort of manual for modern policing in America. Broken windows was popularized by William Bratton, the NYPD commissioner in the 90s under Mayor Rudy Giuliani who has taken up his old post under the new mayor, Bill de Blasio. The mythology holds that it was the chief factor in the city’s incredible turnaround since the high-crime 70s and 80s—though many criminologists disagree.

While the police obviously would prefer to have avoided the accidental killing, Garner’s arrest was the result of a deliberate strategy—the New York Daily News reported on August 7 that NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks III called for a crackdown on loosie sales in Staten Island in early July, days before Garner’s death. When the cops started hassling him, they were just following orders.

The worst part about all of this is that the NYPD was supposed to be getting better at reaching out to minority communities. De Blasio campaigned against the previous police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and his department’s notorious practice of stopping and frisking young black and Hispanic men in hopes of deterring gun violence—a policy that had actually been getting scaled back long before the new mayor took the helm in January. Nevertheless, disproportionate numbers of blacks and Hispanics continue to be cuffed for low-level marijuana offenses, and the cops have drawn ire for arresting teens for break dancing for spare change on subway cars.

“Kelly and Bratton are pretty much the same,” David Dinkins, who became the city’s first black mayor after being elected in 1989, told me. “And that’s where it is, really—the police commissioner.”

Broken windows is back—Kelling is even serving as a consultant for the department—and targeting the same people as before: young, poor minorities.

“There is no getting around the fact that a significant portion of the minority populations in New York City—blacks and Latinos—feel they are being inappropriately targeted by the NYPD,” Bratton conceded to me in an interview conducted when he was still in the private sector last year. But he defended the department's traditional focus on people of color, whom local cops often point to as the source of most violent crime.

Kelling backs him up. “If anyone thinks that Bratton is now interested in criminalizing youths or African Americans, they’re just dead wrong,” he told me. “At one particular time, the story was that the Irish were committing a large number of crimes. Another generation, we had the Italians committing a large number of crimes... Right now, we have a terrible problem of African Americans killing each other and some Hispanics killing each other. If you want to stop the killing, that means you have to deal with that population, and that is not inappropriate racial profiling.”

The problem is how the police have chosen to “deal with that population.” The Garner killing has been followed by a deluge of photos and videos, mostly obtained by the Daily News, that show cops committing spectacular acts of malice against minorities: dragging a naked black woman out of her apartment and leaving her exposed in the hallway, for instance, or placing a pregnant black woman in a choke hold for barbecuing on her sidewalk. Bratton conceded after Garner’s death that the cops should be better trained in restraining subjects. That might be helpful, but it wouldn’t address the core problem.

“This is the kind of thing countries on a watch list do to their citizens. They sweep through a neighborhood and lock people up for junk,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a veteran New York City cop and prosecutor who served on de Blasio’s public-safety transition committee and is now working alongside Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson. “The scandal is why this arrest was being made, and who the policymakers are that allowed this to happen.”

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

The Golden Zone: Hunting a Hit Man in Mexico

0
0

All photos by Rose Marie Cromwell from the series ‘Everything Arrives’

We were hunting a man who got paid to kill people. He was bisexual, and his preferred weapon was an Uzi submachine gun that left its victims nearly unidentifiable. He was employed by a powerful organization with a lot of money to spend and even more to lose—and somehow, at age 23, I found myself in Denver in my beat-up Subaru, doing surveillance on the apartment of the killer’s girlfriend, hoping he’d show up, hoping he wouldn’t.

Her apartment was on the first floor of a complex on the edge of the city. Beyond it the plains stretched to the mountains, soft with smog, and every afternoon I’d park my car in the space facing her unit. Up in Boulder, my girlfriend had left me months earlier, and I lived in a motel room in the shadows of the Flatirons where I wrote fiction every morning, an act that was making me less a participant and more a witness, but if I had considered the risk I was now taking I would probably do it anyway. I was a young and reckless recorder of others, traits my boss must have seen immediately as fitting the kind of work he did on the side and sometimes needed help with: Christof and I worked together in a halfway house for convicted adult felons out of the Cañon City penitentiary, and he also owned a bounty-hunting business that specialized in going after people who’d done terrible things. This one had a $250,000 price on his head.

The man’s girlfriend was ten years older than I was. She wore Nike sweat suits and kept her dark hair in a braid down her back. From where I parked every afternoon, I had a direct view of her profile as she sat on the couch and watched television. Sometimes she’d be reading something at the same time, a book or magazine in her lap, and every few seconds she’d glance up at the screen I couldn’t see. Because of the time of day, I assumed she watched soap operas. She talked on the phone a lot, too, the cord a long one she pulled from the kitchen behind her. Every hour or so, she’d go back there and return with what looked like yogurt or a plate of crackers or a glass of something to sip. Most of the time she’d be watching TV, talking on the phone, and reading all at once. Sometimes she’d hang up, set the magazine down, and walk to the bathroom. I’d watch her turn on a bright fluorescent light, a red shower curtain hanging there, and then she’d close the door.

I’d stare and wait. It was something I was used to now. But it wasn’t me waiting; it was the other me, Christof’s associate with the fake name, that’s what it felt like, as if I were watching myself the way I was now watching characters come and go on the page, a dangerous thing to do, for these were real people with real guns, people who would not tolerate being watched.

A half-moon glowed weakly over Olas Altas bay. I was leaning on a concrete seawall peering down into the pale darkness at rats on the beach. They were shadows of movement below, scurrying from the cracked shells of coconuts, an empty Pacífico bottle, a withered palm frond, and the carcasses of roosterfish and dorado that had been thrown off a boat when the sun still shone over Sinaloa and the Sierra Madres and this port of Old Mazatlán.

Christof stood beside me in his white linen suit. He was over six feet and 230 pounds and wore a straw cowboy hat tilted back on his head. In the darkness his handlebar moustache looked blacker than it was. He was reciting a Neruda poem in Spanish. The air smelled like dead fish and crumbling concrete and the sea.

It would have been easier if we’d found our killer in Denver, but the word from the US Marshals was that he’d been seen in Mazatlán, a place outside of their jurisdiction but not ours. The plan was to find him, then give the location to Christof’s Mexican friends, who would capture him, tie him up, throw him on a boat, and sail up the coast to the waters off San Diego so the US Marshals and DEA could pick him up, that promised six-figure bounty so unreal to me I didn’t even think about it. Now I was leaning on the seawall along Avenida del Mar in the moonlight, listening to Neruda and the scurry of rats and the lapping of the water along the sand. Christof and I had just come from a gay bar called Caballo Loco, a place our killer had been many times before. It was a small one-story building set in a hillside of mimosa and morning glory trees. Christof told me the Mazatlecos called them trees of the dead. If you drank from the waters near them, you’d go crazy. Maybe I was already crazy.

The bar was warm and dim, its window shutters open to the salt air. The floor and walls were tiled with brown porcelain, blue flowers, and vines painted along the edges, and a jukebox in the corner was playing Julio Iglesias, the room crowded with men, some standing at the bar, others sitting in twos at small wooden tables that held a burning lantern and their glasses of beer or jiggers of tequila or snifters of brandy. Some were smoking, others were kissing or holding hands, and I didn’t like how a muscular man at the bar kept looking me up and down, his eyes lingering on my ass as Christof and I found a table and sat down.

Christof wore leather sandals, that white linen suit, and an open-collared silk shirt. In the low flickering light of the table, he looked healthy and gay. Which is what I was supposed to be, too—just a gay tourist with my boyfriend in a bar on the water. Again, the boundary was weakening between my imaginary world on the page and my real life, what I was doing in this bar in Sinaloa, simply allowing myself to drift into the skin of another, this time a gay man with a name that wasn’t my own or even the one the federal and state agents knew me by. Just before we flew to Mazatlán, Christof had sent me to Denver to pick up the latest mug shots of our killer. I stood in an office on the 37th floor of a skyscraper overlooking downtown Denver and the plains. The agent was in his 50s and wore a pink shirt and gray tie, the handle of his gun an oiled walnut. He was standing behind a counter. He slid the sheet of photos over to me. “Be careful down there. These aren’t nice people.”

I thanked him and left. In the elevator I studied the killer’s face. I’d seen his picture before, but these were clear close-ups, and it was like seeing the face of a cousin who’d died before you were born, the awakening sense of being connected somehow, sharing something you barely knew you had. He was 29 years old, half Italian, half Irish, a kid of the streets who had turned his rage into a job, and he was handsome in the way the mill-town brawlers I’d grown up with were handsome, something cut or chipped or broken off his face, this breaking worn as defiantly as a family name.

A shirtless teenage boy came to our table. He held an empty tray at his side, and Christof ordered a brandy for himself and a soda water for me. For this trip I wasn’t drinking. It was a decision that had seemed to rise out of the Mexican earth soon after we’d landed. It hadn’t been a long flight, but how could we have arrived so soon at a world so far from our own? We sat in the back of a white shuttle van, and I stared out at the glare of sun on scrub and mesquite among the low rolling hills. Off in the distance was a brown ridge, at its base a grove of thorn trees, Christof told me. Then he pointed out a tall strangler fig, and in its shadow a jackrabbit raised its nose and disappeared.

Then came the homes of the poor. Tiny shacks made from discarded or stolen street signs, sections of billboard advertising Carta Blanca or Coca-Cola, corrugated tin for the walls or half a roof, the other half open or covered by a ripped tarp or construction plastic or canvas. Beside one was a rusted-out Datsun pickup truck, two boys squatting in its shade in the dirt. They were barefoot and shirtless, their black hair dusty, and they were playing some kind of game at their feet with rocks or rusted bolts. Then we were in the narrow streets of Mazatlán, the stone and plaster walls of shops and houses, many with enclosed courtyards in the shade of coconut palms, flowers snaking along the tops of walls and spilling over: cardinal sage and spider lilly, pink trumpet and mala ratón. Again, words Christof gave me, and I was learning this about words: Once you knew the names of things, you saw them clearly for the first time.

The driver’s window was down now. I could smell car exhaust and frying tortillas from the marketplace, El Mercado in the Centro Histórico. Even these words from a language I did not speak, they too had the power to make me more here in Mazatlán, and so when Christof asked whether I wanted a cold cerveza I heard myself saying, “No, I want to stay awake.”

Now the moon was low, and Christof and I were walking away from the rats on the beach back to the hotel. We’d stayed at the Caballo Loco for that one drink, long enough to see our killer was not there. Two tables over sat the only other white man in the place. He was small with gray hair he’d combed to the side, his lavender button-down shirt pressed, his hand in the hand of a Mazatleco my age. He had long black hair cut unevenly, and he wore a dirty T-shirt, ripped jeans, and sandals. On the way out, Christof stopped and said hello to the American, who was drunk and began to talk openly about himself, as if our very presence demanded that he confess he was a retired professor from Minnesota here on vacation. The Mazatleco beside him wasn’t smiling. He looked up at us as if we were interrupting him in his work.

Outside, we waited for our pulmonía, one of the open-topped taxis that ran day and night from Old Mazatlán to the Golden Zone. Christof said, “That young man with the professor.”

“Yeah?”

“He probably has a wife and kids.”

“And he’s gay?”

“No, he’s poor. He does what he has to do.”

We stepped out of the pulmonía and into the Hotel Belmar, its plaster facade pink and white, its arched entrance open to the sea air. During a Carnival ball in 1944, the governor of Sinaloa was shot to death in the lobby. His murderer had used a .45-caliber pistol, its bullets still sunk in the tiled column after having passed through the governor’s torso. Now, as I walked by that column, I stopped and looked again at those nickel-size holes. I pushed my fingertips into them, felt cool mortar and wood, a tiny fragment of lead; there was so much to know and to have known, so much to do and have done, and one life was just not enough to live it all.

The next morning I sat in the shade of a fan palm in the Mercado Pino Suárez. I was sipping hot coffee and watching Christof pass out gifts to Los Sordomudos, the deaf-mutes of Mazatlán. They were boys who lived in the street, the oldest maybe 18, the youngest nine or ten, and because Christof had been coming here for years and was fluent in sign language as well as Spanish, he’d befriended them, would bring them new Converse and Nike sneakers, T-shirts and shorts and socks. They were crowded around him in the morning sun, a dozen or more thin brown boys laughing and speaking with their hands and faces, two or three of them peering over Christof’s shoulder to see what else he’d pull from his plastic trash bag. Christof was clearly happy doing this. He was sitting on a bench, his face shadowed beneath his straw cowboy hat, laughing, speaking slowly in Spanish for the lip readers, handing out box after box to boys whose feet may not even fit into shoes they were already pulling on without socks.

There was a breeze from the water. I could smell frying tortillas and coffee, dead fish and cigar smoke and sweet mala ratón. The marketplace was filled with men and women and kids, most of them working their vendor carts, one heavy with raw cuts of beef and pork on ice, others stacked with papayas, mangos, and bananas. From where I sat I watched a tall tourist buy a coconut from a Mazatleco, who then cut it in half and squeezed lime juice onto it and sprinkled it with salt and chili powder and handed it to him on a paper plate. There were carts of woven sombreros hanging on hooks, folded shawls striped orange and yellow and the dull red of sunset. There were beaded necklaces and crucifixes and carved figurines of Jesus next to a rack of black T-shirts with hot-pink lettering: Mazatlán. In the shade behind me, old men sat on a short stone wall talking and smoking cigars and spitting down at their feet. At their backs was a stand of banyan trees, their gray roots clawing up their own trunks like the ghosts of ancestors refusing to leave, and high in the branches was a parrot, its squawk lost in the voices below, the honking pulmonías in the street, a guitar strumming Spanish chords, and was that really an iguana walking languidly under the sun not far from my feet? Was Christof really showing the mutes photos of our killer? Yes, he was, for nobody paid attention to these homeless deaf boys, he told me. People said and did anything in front of them because they didn’t see them as full human beings. But if you gave Los Sordomudos a day and a night and our man were still here, they’d know where.

Twelve hours later, we were in the back of a covered taxi driving down a rutted country road. The driver took it slowly, his car bouncing in and out of dips in the packed dirt, and Christof was drunk and singing a love song in Spanish. The driver ignored him. In the months I’d known Christof, I’d never seen him drunk. It seemed a strange thing to be, under the circumstances.

We had just eaten marlin tacos at an open-air restaurant in the Plaza Machado, and while Christof was drinking margaritas, I’d kept to soda water. My abstinence was beginning to feel like a pose of some kind, but there was an easy clarity that came with it, a constant alertness, and now that I knew we would be hunting our killer out in the country, I’d gotten nervous and wanted to stay as ready as I could. I told Christof I’d feel better if we had guns.

“Why?”

“Because he does, doesn’t he?”

Christof narrowed his eyes at me, pursed his lips beneath his mustache. At another restaurant across the plaza, a mariachi band was moving from table to table, their black sombreros tilted way back on their heads as they played.

“Gun energy invites gun energy,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never needed a gun.”

“What if we see him at this place in the country?”

“We call my friend.”

“Does he have guns?”

“Oh yes, many.”

At the next table, an American woman laughed and leaned in closely to her date. She kept one finger on the rim of her wineglass, and she was speaking softly to him, smiling, and I heard myself say to Christof, “I’m curious what it’s like.”

“Qué?”

“To pay for it. To drive someplace and pay a stranger for it.”

After dinner Christof hired a taxi. On the way out of Mazatlán, as we moved farther from the water and deeper into the side streets, there were the homes of the working poor, one-story, two-room shanties of bleached timber and cracked plaster, of scrap and stone behind fences of rusted wire or battered planks, fan palms leaning over them like sullen teenage boys. Some didn’t have electricity or running water, and dogs lay in cool dirt near the stoops, and it was like being on my hometown streets again, everything pervaded by a gut-sick giddiness that only trouble could be found here. And then eight or nine young men were piling into the bed of a pickup truck, each of them carrying a rifle or shotgun or pistol. One had a red bandanna tied loosely around his throat. We could see them in the shine of the taxi’s lights as they sped off, two or three glancing back at us like we were a half-forgotten memory, the wind blowing the hair around their young faces.

“The fuck is that about?”

Christof took in my question. He was in his white linen jacket again, and he turned and asked the driver something in Spanish. The answer was only two or three words.

“Sí, sí.” Christof looked back at me. “Drugs. One gang going off to fight another.”

Then we were driving through low, dry hills in the moonlight, moving in and out of ruts in the road. Christof was singing “Cucurrucucú Paloma.” Somewhere behind us to the west, away from the tourist hotels of the Golden Zone, those boys could already be shooting at other boys, and if I’d been raised here with nothing, what could have kept me from doing the same thing? Was aiming your shotgun at another’s chest and pulling the trigger that much different from punching and kicking him in the head?

Yes, I thought, and no, but they were on the same continuum you fall into after breaking through that part of yourself that once broken stays broken. What I’d known, though, felt small compared with how these boys were living and dying, and when the driver stopped in front of a half-abandoned motel in the darkness, I felt young and vulnerable and now too reckless for my own good, especially when the driver turned the taxi around and drove away, his headlights jerking up and down through our dust, which hadn’t even settled yet.

We stood in front of a cinder-block compound. At the far corner, bugs flew at an exterior light shining onto weeds and a steel barrel cut in two. Beyond that lay the sign for this place, its letters too rusted to read. A soft blue light glowed on the other side of the open doorway. Freddy Fender was singing on the jukebox, and Christof and I stepped inside.

The blue light came from a neon sign for a tequila I hadn’t heard of. It hung over the bar to our right, the bartender nodding at us as we came in, the stools empty. Scattered throughout the room were small folding tables and mismatched chairs, and it was so dark that at first I didn’t see the women sitting along the wall, 12 or 13 of them. Some were smoking and talking under Freddy Fender’s song, and when it ended I could hear their voices, the everyday sound of women chatting in a hair salon, and now more music began to play, something with more brass, the singer’s Spanish tiredly festive.

Christof and I sat down at a table in the center of the empty room. A woman walked over in a loose T-shirt and jeans, and in the bar’s blue light I could see she was older, in her 50s or 60s, her lipstick black in that blue. She was explaining something to us in Spanish.

“Sí, sí,” Christof said to her. He nodded his head and said something else, and the woman turned and went to the bar. I asked him what she’d told him.

“The house rules.”

I looked back at the women. Some were sitting, others standing. Most were in short skirts or tight dresses, and even in that blue shadow I could see the dark smear of their lipstick and eyeliner. Every one of them was staring back at us.

“What are the house rules?”

“We have to pick which one we want. It cuts down on infighting among the señoras and señoritas.”

The older woman set a brandy in front of Christof and an iced drink in front of me. I told her gracias and sipped soda water and lime juice, and now I wasn’t as curious as I’d been back in Mazatlán. Choosing one would be like picking a cut of meat from a vendor in El Mercado. Choosing one would not be choosing another. And how could I even be doing this? This would only help to enrich the son of a bitch they worked for; this could only help run the machine that exploited them. I wasn’t even aroused at the thought of being with one of them; there was only my desire to know what it felt like to be doing this, to stand and walk through the blue darkness to a line of women against the wall, to move quickly for the one with short hair and a pretty face who smiled at me and dropped her cigarette onto the floor, stubbing it out with her high heel as she stood and took my hand and led me back to our table.

I’d done it before my adrenaline could back up on me, before I could think much more about it.

There was another woman beside Christof. She was plump, her shoulders bare, her cleavage pushing up out of her dress. She was speaking Spanish loudly over the music, her hand on his, and I hadn’t seen him choose her. Later I would learn he’d told the older woman that only I was here for the girls, and so she’d sent another one to drink with him, to run up his tab with booze.

The woman I’d chosen was sitting close to me. She smelled like nicotine and lipstick, and she was speaking Spanish into my ear. She rested her hand on my thigh and sipped from a drink she’d ordered as soon as she sat down. The woman next to Christof was speaking more softly, smiling, Christof shaking his head and smiling back. He looked close to nodding off, and I remembered his girlfriend in Denver, a woman who owned a clothing shop that catered to the rich. Was he staying at this table because of her? Or was he hoping our killer would stumble in? Or was he morally opposed to what I was doing? Or was he just too drunk?

“Fuck and suck?” The woman squeezed my leg. I looked at her directly for the first time, saw that her front tooth was chipped and she was much older than I was—35 or 40.

“Fuck and suck, sí?”

“Sí.”

We stood, and I followed her through the cigarette smoke of the other women I didn’t look at. We stepped outside through an open doorway, ahead of us a long row of motel rooms, a red or white bulb glowing over half the doors. The tiles under my feet were loose, and off to the right was a rectangular hole in the ground, weeds sprouting up out of it like hair. At the end of the diving board someone had set a cane chair upside down, its four legs poking up at the stars, and on the other side were more rooms, their windows dark. A few of them were cracked or shattered.

She stopped and unlocked a door, and I followed her inside.

Christof had switched to Coke and wasn’t as drunk now. On the cab ride back he was talking about our killer, how he may have been there earlier or would be there later or maybe Los Sordomudos had the wrong place. I nodded. The driver’s face was lit from beneath by a battery-powered lamp on the seat beside him. There was a day of whisker growth along his chin and throat, a white stubble, and on the radio was a top-40 song from the States that made me think of polyester shirts and barrooms and waking up hungover beside a naked woman I did not know.

I’d learned nothing from doing what I’d just done. It felt no different from any other loveless act. There was the momentary sweetness of release, then a hollow emptiness, the body taking the soul to a place where there were only echoes. Everything that happened there I could have imagined. Not to have done so instead had diminished me somehow.

This driver was taking it faster than the first one, and we were bouncing in and out of the ruts in the road, the light of his headlamps jerking ahead of us. Off to my right lay a field of brush and mesquite under the moonlight, my shoulder pressing hard against the door.

Soon we were once again passing the homes of the poor. A new song was on the radio now, Christof quiet and pensive. I thought again of the young men my age in the bed of that pickup, and I pictured two or three of them lying dead under the moon, their blood leaking into the dust.

Over the one-story shacks and through the strangler fig branches came the white and yellow lights of the Golden Zone. Then we were in it, a wash of neon and palms, and off to our right was the moonlit expanse of Puerto Viejo bay. I began to feel afraid—the woman I’d just been with, the killer we were looking for, the deaf-mutes we’d publicly bribed with kindness to get information, Christof getting recklessly drunk—all of this began to feel like some cosmic debt I was going to have to pay, and soon.

I rolled down my window to the smells of dead fish and wet sand. Lined along the beaches were wooden fishing boats, many of them on plank frames with an axle and two bicycle wheels so the fishermen could pull them into the water without help.

Soon we were in the darker streets of Centro Histórico, the driver pulling up to the pink and white entrance of our hotel. Christof gave him what looked like many pesos, and the driver thanked him three times. Then Christof and I were passing through the lobby, among its massive potted palms and tiled columns. This time I ignored the one with the commemorative bullet holes, and I followed Christof down the long tiled corridor to our room. But something was different, a square of light where there shouldn’t be, and it was coming from the left, the door to our room wide open, a sliver of wood from the casing lying across the threshold.

Christof stopped and stood still and held up his hand. Now was the time for a gun. Now was the time for a knife or a baseball bat or a tire iron. My tongue was thick in my mouth, and then I was stepping into the room behind him.

What little we’d brought to Mexico with us was scattered across the floor—shirts, shorts, underwear, a novel I’d been reading. Both mattresses had been upended, and one lay sideways across its frame, the sheet torn off. Christof moved quickly toward the bathroom, pushed open the door, and stepped in.

“We’re alone.”

I was staring at the pesos I’d left beside my notebook on the small desk. Christof had told me not to carry too much cash with me at one time, so I’d left it behind. I could hear him step out of the bathroom behind me. I pointed to my money. “Why didn’t they take that?”

Christof’s linen suit was wrinkled, and his eyes had a dark cast to them I’d never quite seen before. He lifted up what he was holding at his side. It was our killer’s mug shot, the one I’d gotten from the US Marshals in Denver.

“This was on the toilet seat.”

He didn’t have to tell me what that meant. A warning was a warning. My legs became cold water, and I pulled the cane chair from under the desk and sat down. But I was looking at our open door, its casing splintered, and what would keep him from stepping inside with his weapon of choice and spraying us dead?

I swung the door shut and wedged the chair snug beneath the porcelain knob. Christof was gathering up clothes with cool efficiency. “Someone’s told him about us. We’ll have to leave in the morning.”

Who? I wondered, but of course, why wouldn’t a professional killer, someone always looking over his shoulder, have people he paid to look too? I stood there feeling young and stupid.

I squatted and began to pick up my scattered clothes and stuffed them into my backpack. I set the novel on the table beside my bed.

There was little sleep that night. We closed and bolted the shutters against the sea air, and now the air in the room had grown thick and close. Christof snored on his mattress a few feet away, and I could smell the tequila he’d drunk earlier, our sweat, the thin cotton of our sheets. Why wouldn’t our killer decide just to get rid of us? We were in Mexico, beyond the protection of the law enforcers who’d sent us. My heart had become an electronic thumping behind my eyes, and while I had never done anything like this before, the black dread opening up in my chest and gut was nothing new.

I was the son of a single mother who, when we were kids, moved us from one rented house or apartment to another, one year three times, always for cheaper rent. I was the constant new boy who got beaten up in the schoolyard or the street simply because I was new. Then, at 14, I snapped and began to fight back with my fists and feet till that was all I ever seemed to do anymore. Then I was a grown man, writing daily, trying to become other people with words, an act of sustained empathy that had made it difficult for me to view people as good or bad. I could see only the gray, that dark tangle of human desire and motivation and hurt and action and apathy that make a life. And now I pictured that prostitute, who was probably the age of my own mother, the dim yellow bulb hanging over her head, how she’d said something to me in Spanish and pointed to a wooden bench against the wall, a place for me to leave my clothes, but underneath it was a pair of white baby’s shoes. And after, she looked at me like she would never think of me even for one moment ever again.

Lying half naked in the boxed heat of that room at the Hotel Belmar, waiting for our killer and his submachine gun, my only weapon my fists, I kept asking myself why I’d come to Mexico. I knew it wasn’t for the money—it was for this: to be tossed into the dark heart of danger and then to emerge stronger, bigger, and more fully myself.

But I already knew what it was to walk onto an asphalt lot crowded with running, shouting boys, many of whom would turn on me because I was new and did not belong there with them. I knew the violence that would follow, and while it was only insults and a slap or a punch and some kicks to the ribs and back, I knew the quiet afterward, the fear of more of the same. Years later, after knocking out the front teeth of a local thug, I knew the carload of young men who would cruise slowly by the gas station where I worked, the promise of revenge in their stubbled faces. And now this, the possibility of being not beaten up but shot to death. Strange how similar it all felt, how greater danger did not bring greater learning with it.

Deep in the night, sleep came against my better judgment and against my will. Then Christof was rousing me awake. He was already dressed, then so was I, and it was a long walk down that sunlit corridor, the hotel’s windows open to the sea, the naked sense we were easy targets now.

On the shuttle ride out of the city, Christof and I were the only passengers. The windows were open and the driver was smoking a cigarette, its smoke blowing back into our faces, the scent of the flowers snaking along the stucco walls we passed, the dust rising up alongside us. Christof was back in his linen suit, and he sat quiet and hungover beside me, his eyes seemingly on the meeting with the federal agents, who would not be pleased.

But I didn’t care about that. There was the drafty, light-skinned feeling that we were narrowly escaping something catastrophic. We drove deeper into the country, and I stared out at the shacks made from half-built concrete-block walls and billboards and sheets of tin. There was the rusted-out Datsun, the morning sun glinting off its cracked side mirror, and as we passed I turned in my seat to look for the two young boys who just yesterday had been squatting and playing in the dirt. There was only the Datsun and the shack, the frayed corner of a tarp hanging over the Coca-Cola sign that served as a wall. I turned back around in my seat. Christof asked me what I’d been looking at.

“Nothing.”

But I thought of the boys in five or ten years armed in the back of a speeding pickup, their hair blowing back from their faces as they drove into lethal danger, not as an adventure or an experience but as a way of life that would be nasty, brutish, and short. I had told myself I’d come here for a job, but I began to feel like a thief, like a white bird of prey.

Up ahead was the small airport, the narrow control tower, a plane rising off the tarmac into the air. Soon we would be on one just like it, and I vowed I would not be coming back here, not like this, a tourist of other people’s misery, a consumer of it.

When the driver pulled the shuttle van to the curb, I leaned forward and handed him all my pesos. He held it as if it might explode, his eyes careful and still. I told Christof to tell him to keep it.

“That’s a month’s pay. You may insult him with that.”

“Tell him I mean no disrespect. Just, tell him that.”

As I stepped out of the van and hauled my backpack onto my shoulder, the concrete sidewalk felt too bright and open and exposed. I hurried inside the terminal to wait for my boss and my translator, the glass door closing behind me, a desire rising within me to get back to the empty page, but this time with more faith that I might be able to find something true there without having lived it myself. I turned and began walking toward a line of men and women, some American, others Mexican or European, but I was looking for the face that had been left on the toilet of our hotel back in Old Mazatlán, a face I hoped never to see again, a face not so different from my own.

You Can Finally Send Secret Messages Inside Pictures of Kim Kardashian

0
0
You Can Finally Send Secret Messages Inside Pictures of Kim Kardashian

How to Have a Non-Monogomous Relationship

0
0

All photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Non-monogamy can get complicated. You can be polyamorous, a swinger, friends-with-benefits, in an open relationship, practicing “the new monogamy," in a group marriage, a triad, intentional community, or tribe. Your relationships can be sexual, emotional, kinky, or some combination of each. You can be already partnered and dating around, married but happily having sex with a few friends, or single but aware that conventional monogamy isn’t for you. It’s a lot! Here is a handy A-to-Z guide on the topic to uncomplicate things a little, so you and the rest of the tribe can get to business.

Abundance
If you want to boil down non-monogamy to its simplest premise, it is this: There is enough. There is enough space in your bed for three people. There is enough love in your partner’s heart that their love for another person isn’t going to take away from their love for you. There is enough lust in your loins to have sex with someone and then go home and have sex with someone else and then, if you want, to leave your house again for sex because it’s Wednesday night, baby, and you’re alive. This is called an Abundance Mentality, and is the opposite of a Scarcity Mentality, the kind of thinking that presumes finding out your girlfriend finds someone else sexually attractive means she somehow finds you less sexually attractive.

Honorable Mentions: Adultery, Acronyms, Agreements

Banal
While open relationships tend to conjure up images of 40-partner love tribes and wild orgies at swinger’s clubs (more on those later), the reality is often a lot more mundane. Open relationships involve most of the same work required in regular relationships, except, as you might expect, more frequently. At their cores, most open relationships feature the same needs (love, some sense of security, sex) that drive conventional relationships. Sorry folks, it’s just not that exciting (except when it is, but more on that later).

Honorable Mentions: BDSM, Bisexuality, Binaries, Boundaries, Big Love

Compersion
A warm, gooey feeling elicited by a partner’s emotional or sexual interest in someone else. Occasionally called the “opposite of jealousy,” compersion is sort of like having a crush by proxy. Whether or not you share your partner’s attraction to this other person is irrelevant; their happiness makes you happy.

Honorable Mentions: Contraception, Conflict, Cheating, Cuckoldry, Coming Out

Dialogue
As discussed up there in B, non-monogamy involves even more communication than your average relationship, which is to say, it involves the same amount, just more instances. Also, there aren’t a great deal of models to follow, which means you and your partners have to decide amongst yourselves what works best, and navigating relatively uncharted romantic territory requires some Big Talks. Dialogue is kind of a misnomer, duh, because you could be talking to any number of people, over and over and over. Non-monogamy equals more conversations about your emotions (and other people’s) than you could ever have imagined. Truly.

Honorable Mentions: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Dates, Divorce rates, Dan Savage

Evolution and Other Arguments
There are those who would argue that non-monogamy was humankind’s earlier, more natural state—that bonobo-inspired communities who interchangeably banged each other and raised each other’s kids wandered the Earth happily scavenging and conducting multi-partner relationships until the rise of land ownership, patriarchy, capitalism, and all those other Known Bads brought about monogamy. Despite occasionally falling prey to oversimplification, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex At Dawn makes this case convincingly (though not uncontroversially), with lots of important bonobo sex info as a bonus.

Honorable Mentions: Extra-marital affairs, Emotional Libertarianism, Exclusivity, Europeans

Fluid-Bonded
A sci-fi sounding term meaning that the partners involved do not use condoms or other barriers during sex.

Honorable Mentions: Flirting, Full Disclosure, Feminism, Fetish, Friends With Benefits, Free Love

Google Calendar
It’s not uncommon for multi-partner relationships to have one big ol’ group calendar, so everyone knows when the others are free or out on dates with another person or at a work thing, avoiding pronouns while talking about their partner or pretending to be busy so they can steal some alone time in a house where five adults live. All I'm saying is that time management is vital if you’re planning to get actively non-monogamous.

Honorable Mentions: Gender Neutral Pronouns, Group Marriage

Hierarchies
Some non-monogamous relationships use a hierarchical structure to delineate what each partnership means to everyone else. A “primary partner” is usually a more stereotypical relationship, with the two partners living together or planning to be together in the long term. A person can have a whole host of secondary partners. The obvious argument against these terms is that it’s kind of rude to literally rank people based on how close you are to them, but it’s really just the poly equivalent of declaring someone your BFF, with no disrespect meant to your other friends.

Honorable Mentions: Hundred Mile Rule, Hedonism, Hegemony, Hippies

Invasive Questions About Your Sex Life
Disclose your non-monogamous status and you are up for a lot of them. A fun thing to remember is that you do not have to answer, and that you are completely within your rights to be like, “So, you’ve been married for seven years—how, and how frequently, do you guys do it? Do you ever get worried they’re not into it anymore? Tell me about your most intimate experiences and do it casually at this loud bar.”

Honorable Mentions: Infidelity, Intentional Community

Jealousy
The most common argument against non-monogamy is “I couldn’t do it… I’d get jealous.” People in non-monogamous relationships get jealous, too! It’s perfectly natural to feel jealous when your partner announces they’re attracted to/going on a date with/trying to sleep with someone else, especially in a society that treats coveting thy neighbor’s wife as the worst thing you can do to someone you love. However, after a bit of thinking (and a few of the aforementioned emotions conversations), jealousy often reveals itself to be a host of other feelings—chief among them, personal insecurity.

Kink
Not everyone who’s non-monogamous is also kinky, but there is undeniably a crossover between these crowds. This is probably because kinks are so individual and can be incredibly niche. It’s not always easy to find one person you love having dinner with who also wants to be your human toilet after the meal is done. BDSM and fetish relationships can also be non-sexual, so a person could theoretically remain emotionally and sexually faithful to their partner while also having a Daddy they visit on weekends for age-play.

Honorable Mentions: Kids, Key Parties

Longterm Couples
I’m speaking exclusively from my own experience (as a white, cis twenty-something lady living in a large urban center), but I know very few long-long-term couples who do not have some kind of ~*arrangement*~ regarding sexual fidelity, even it’s just a “once in a blue moon separate encounters” or “a very rare threesome together” kind of thing. The idea of romantic longevity as something made more possible via occasional sexual or emotional infidelity has been called “The New Monogamy.

Honorable Mentions: Love, Lust, LGBTQ, Long Distance

Millennials
A generation born at the height of America’s divorce rate (which peaked in the 80s and has actually gone down during our lifetime), millennials seem to be as suspicious about conventional monogamy as they are about traditional work hours, mainstream politics, and prejudice against male top knots. Whether or not today’s young adults consider themselves non-monogamous, they are certainly getting married later and “dating around” or hooking up for longer, making them more likely to experiment with different types of partnership.

Honorable Mentions: Mormons, Metamours, Misunderstood, Marriage, “Monogamish”

Nerds
We’ve been over this. Some of the earliest adopters of non-monogamy are hard nerds and there’s no way around it. As with the kink community, not all non-monogamous people are nerds, but they are certainly a demographic with a higher-than-average number of Doctor Who tattoos.

Honorable Mentions: New Relationship Energy, Norms

Orgies
These aren’t just a thing from stories about the 70s—orgies happen in real life in a variety of locations and styles. From clichéd aging swinger “key parties” to pile on at sex clubs to at home play parties for groups of friends, group sex is alive and well in 2014.

Honorable Mentions: Open Relationships, Orgasms, One Penis Policy, Oxytocin

Polyier Than Thou
I don’t know if the term above is actually a thing, but there are definite pockets of the non-monogamous community that look down on monogamy as a repressed road to celibacy and unhappiness. While monogamy is not for everyone, neither is non-monogamy, and setting yourself up as some kind of hyper-enlightened being just for doing your own thing sucks.

Honorable Mentions: Ponytails, Primary partners, Play parties, Polycules

Queer
The queer community was onto ethical non-monogamy (and non-monogamy in general) way before the straights got involved. The most chilled out people I know are gay dudes with long-term partners who still have sex with whoever else they want to.

Honorable Mentions: Queen-size bed, Quad

Rules
Rules, like hierarchies, are kind of a touchy subject in the world of non-monogamy. While some object to placing any limits at all on their partner(s) behavior, others insist rules are crucial for managing the plethora of potential conflicts that can arise when only two people are dating, let alone four or five, each with their own other relationships as well. In my experience, rules evolve over time, but having agreements in place as a starting point for conversations about what does and doesn’t work for you is important.

Honorable Mentions: Real Talk, Robert Heinlein

Swinging
Swinging is a purely sexual form of non-monogamy, and like kink relationships, poly (or anything else) can exist in about a million forms. “Soft swinging,” for instance, involves couples who fool around with other people together, but don’t have penetrative sex with anyone other than their partner. Swingers are also responsible for the term “Adult Buffet,” a private party where everyone involved is free to have sex with everyone else in attendance, and for this perfect and hilarious term, I’m willing to ignore the whole shag carpeting thing.

Honorable Mentions: Status Quo, Sex Clubs, Solo Poly, Safe Sex

The Ethical Slut
Dossie Eaton and Janet Hardy’s book about responsible non-monogamy can be a little tough to read. Basically, it is rife with the kind of language you’d expect from a late-90s text about alternative sexualities written by two people who describe themselves in the introduction as “lovers, dear friends, co-authors and co-conspirators.” However, if you can get over the moonstone/Earth mother vocab, the book is a great introduction to non-monogamy and a very practical primer on communication and honesty within any kind of relationship.

Honorable Mentions: Tinder, Triad, Tribe, Tilda Swinton

Unicorns
A kind of gross term interchangeable with the acronym HBB (Hot Bi Babe) (I told you it was gross), and referring to the stereotypical white, cis, heteronormative non-monogamist’s dream: a sexy bi babe willing to exclusively date and/or live with a couple, more or less becoming their threesome sex slave. They’re called “unicorns” because this is a very common type of relationship for couples dipping their toes (etc) into non-monogamy to seek, whereas actual bi women willing to put up with it are few and far between.

Honorable Mentions: Unspoken Arrangements, UTIs

Vocabulary
As you may have gathered, the vocabulary of non-monogamy is vast. In addition to more widely used words like “poly” or “friends with benefits,” there’s also people’s individual monikers for their feelings and relationships (“wibbles” for moments of jealousy, “throuple” for a three-person grouping that considers themselves equal partners, “spice” as the plural of spouse, and so on).

Honorable Mentions: “Vee” Relationships, Veto Power

World Wide Web (of ROMANCE)
OkCupid and Tinder seem to be the preferred tools for meeting non-monogamous people right now, and the internet has been a driving force in amping up mainstream awareness of the myriad forms of alternative relationships out there. If you’re looking to meet some non-monogamous people and don’t know where to start, OkC and Tinder are a great place to start, but prepare for a lot of messages like: “non-monogamous? chill. guess ur rlly slutty. cum ovr, we touch dixxx?”

eXes
If you date a lot of people at once, and are dating most of them from within the relatively small non-monogamous community in your city/town, you are going to have a bunch of exes and there’s not much you can do about it. Try not to be a jerk.

Yes (Consent)
As with sexual consent for anyone in any situation, “yes” is not really the best you can do. An enthusiastic and excited “YES PLEASE” from all participants really is required for a happy non-monogamous relationship. We’ve all got those friends who are “doing the open thing” and it’s very clear that just one of them is, and the other one is kind of sad about it but won’t say, and you just have to watch the break up happen in slow motion. If you want to date someone and it’s clear that they think your other partner is just a phase you will one day get over before settling down with them, back away slowly. That scenario will not end well.

Honorable Mentions: Yonis, YOLO, “You guys are so wild. I honestly could never do that.” 

Zeitgeist
Interested in non-monogamy? Great news. So are magazines and newspapers right now (and for the past decade at least). Mainstream media coverage of non-monogamy tends to be confined to trend pieces in the lifestyle section, but the Thinkpiece Express seems to be picking up speed. Slate, for instance, has published over 17 pieces on polyamory in the past two years. And now there’s this. Welcome to the pile, VICE!

Follow Monica Heisey on Twitter.

Comics: Fashion Cat in 'Hotel'

A Recent Cop-Related Fatality Has Revealed the Flaws in Quebec's Police Review System

0
0



A demonstration in Quebec, protesting the death of Guy Blouin. Photo via JuliaBPage on Twitter.

A 48-year-old man named Guy Blouin was killed last week on September 3 after a collision with a Quebec City police cruiser. His death has highlighted the need for a transparent and independent investigation process into police-related deaths.

Witnesses say that the police car backed up and deliberately hit the cyclist at high speed, then the officers arrested the wounded man, put his bike in their trunk, and fled from the scene. Ann Mathieu, a spokesperson for Sûreté du Québec (SQ), Quebec’s provincial police, could not corroborate that account of the incident, while adding that their internal investigation might reveal another side of the story.

While there has not been an official police account of the story, the witnesses’ version of the incident sparked protests around the Saint-Roch Church square, underlining existing tensions between the police and the community. It’s also reopened a discussion about the growing disconnect between cops and the public, and how to handle police officers who kill or injure the very people they have vowed to serve and protect.

Why are police still policing police?

The Minister of Public Safety, Lise Thériault, asked the SQ to lead the investigation into the death of Guy Blouin. Blouin’s death was confirmed on Thursday, Sept 4, two days after it was announced that another investigation—also led by SQ—would not result in any criminal charges being laid against the Montreal police officer involved in the shooting of Alain Magloire, who was killed on Feb 3.

Magloire was the fourth man with mental health problems to be shot to death by Service de police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) officers since 2011.

Over the past 15 years, there have been on average 30 people a year who died or were seriously injured in police operations in Quebec. Police-led investigations have resulted in accusations against police officers in less than one percent of cases.

A bill creating an independent bureau of investigations was adopted last year, but the new unit will not be operational before 2015. Until then, inquiries will remain under the responsibility of either the SPVM, the Service de police de la Ville de Québec (SPVQ), or the SQ. Ignoring widespread criticism, the government has refused to establish an independent review process.

“We’ve seen all sorts of evidence that these [police-led] investigations are not trustworthy,” Sébastien Harvey from the Québec City section of Ligue des droits et libertés told VICE. “We’re disappointed that the government did not accelerate the implementation of the bureau.” Though his group has criticized the proposed bureau—which is inspired by the Ontario Special Investigation Unit—Harvey says even such an imperfect alternative would be better than the existing process.

Independent investigation  or public relations operation?

As for the tragic case of cyclist Guy Blouin, SQ spokesperson Ann Mathieu questioned civilian accounts of the incident and insisted that the investigation might reveal “other elements.”

Because the crime scene had been altered, SQ investigators had to construct a forensic recreation of the events. They brought in a helicopter, a crash-test dummy (dressed in the victim’s own clothes), the police cruiser, and Blouin’s bicycle.

The same day, SPVQ officials told the media that the officers involved had gone on medical leave, and a story came out stating that both policemen had “flawless disciplinary records.”

“It’s like there is an attempt to frame things in a certain way,” former French police officer and police and judicial affairs analyst Stéphane Berthomet said. The expert noted that the only information SQ officials made public at the beginning of the investigation were facts that tended to exonerate the officers.

Neither SQ nor SPVQ representatives made any public comments after that.

In an email to VICE, SPVQ communications director François Moisan said that the identity of the officers involved have not been made public. When asked how a journalist was able to discover their “flawless” service records, Moisan said the journalist must have had access to it through their own “contacts.”

The SQ public affairs spokesperson, Richard Gagné, said he could not give out any more information before the investigation is completed and Clément Falardeau, public relations officer at the Ministry of Public Safety, refused to comment on the independent SQ investigation.

“The ministry is hiding behind the independence of the police corps,” Berthomet said. “It’s an easy excuse to stay out of it.”

In his 2013 book, Enquête sur la Police, Berthomet documented several cases of independent inquiries that were manipulated to exonerate the officers involved.

“This is not Ferguson”

Blouin’s death sparked protests around the Saint-Roch Church Square, where vigils were held last Thursday and Friday. Some residents expressed grief for Blouin's death, while others displayed anger and hostility towards the police, holding sings that read: “The police are stealing lives”—an ironic reference to ongoing protests by police unions and other municipal employees against cutbacks in their pension plans, where police officers can be seen wearing stickers reading: “We haven't stolen anything.”

In a late-night demonstration held on Sept 5, a small group of protesters marched from the church square to a local police station before blocking traffic with a sit-in on Charest Boulevard, where nine people were eventually arrested and charged with unrest under a municipal bylaw.

The previous day, the Quebec Police Brotherhood president, Bernard Lerhe, had stated that civil society groups and opinion leaders would only exacerbate tensions by protesting police impunity.

Quebec City mayor, Régis Labeaume, asked the public to trust the SQ investigation and accused anti-police activists of trying to “recuperate” Blouin’s death. In his blunt populist style, he also declared: "We’re not in Ferguson here."

Indeed, Blouin’s tragic death has nothing in common with the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The same cannot be said, however, of the killing of Freddy Villanueva, an unarmed 18-year-old who was shot to death by SPVM officer Jean-Loup Lapointe on Aug 9, 2008 in Montréal Nord.

The investigation into this tragic event—also conducted by SQ—led to no charges against Officer Lapointe. After his medical leave, Lapointe went back to active service and eventually joined the Montreal SWAT team.

The coroner’s public inquiry ordered in December 2008 stated in its report—released in December 2013—that flaws in current police investigation processes had hindered the coroner’s work in finding out the truth about the causes and circumstances surrounding the death of Fredy Villanueva.

The lack of accountability when it comes to police killings has been a problem for decades in Canada.

Rachel Sauvé, organizer with the Coalition Justice for Levi—which recently won a Supreme Court case against the Ontario Provincial Police—said that the only way to end police impunity is to shift away from, and recognize: "A systemic pro-police bias embedded in and across our justice system which makes it impossible for that system itself to hold these bodies to account."

Here’s How Winnipeg’s Mayoral Candidates Feel about Aboriginal Issues

0
0

Winnipeg has the highest indigenous urban population in Canada, and ranks highest among rates for violent crime. Image via.

Following the discovery of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine’s body in the Red River near the Alexander Docks in downtown Winnipeg on Aug. 17, the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women was once again thrust into the national spotlight. And as VICE reported, on August 21 thousands took to the streets of Winnipeg as part of a vigil march to honour the memory of the murdered girl.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has infamously dismissed the international attention that has been drawn to the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada by saying there weren’t any sociological issues behind the wave of deaths and disappearances.

“We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon,” Harper told reporters in Whitehorse, Yukon on Aug. 21. “We should view it as a crime.”

Reaction to Harper’s comments, and his continued refusal to call a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women, sparked a reaction across the country. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau called Harper out, saying the Prime Minister is “on the wrong side of history.” Still, others believe that an inquiry alone will do nothing to solve the systemic problems behind the issue.

“When I think about what is the actual root of what’s going on, I think it’s the oversight of Canadians to help their own,” Michael Champagne, an indigenous youth leader in Winnipeg, told VICE at Fontaine’s vigil.

On the political front in Winnipeg, (a city which boasts the highest aboriginal urban population in Canada, yet also ranks highest in the country among rates for violent crime), Fontaine’s murder brought more attention to indigenous issues in mayoral campaigns than the city has ever seen.

“Since this campaign got serious, nearly every week we’ve seen candidates talking about indigenous issues,” Mary Agnes Welch wrote in the Winnipeg Free Press Sept. 10. With Winnipeggers going to the polls Oct. 22, VICE decided to contact the four front running mayoral candidates to see what they would do to tackle the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Winnipeg.

Judy Wasylycia-Leis

Wasylycia-Leis is the current poll leader in a mayoral race that is still far from decided. The former NDP MLA and MP has long been an advocate for an inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

“It’s an issue that has been pursued actively over past ten years,” Wasylycia-Leis told VICE Wednesday morning. “But little action has been forthcoming, from all levels of government.”

While Wasylycia-Leis supports the call for a national inquiry, it is an issue that she intends to tackle on a local level if elected mayor in October.

“The mayor of this city needs to be upfront and centre walking with our sisters,” she told VICE. “Public involvement demonstrates to the population that this is a critical issue that we need to take on as a community. We may have limited [municipal] powers, but we need to stand with our sisters as a priority.”

Wasylycia-Leis also spoke to the need for an improved teen-runaway strategy in the city, and calls for the city’s police to take a leadership role in organizing a unified, national police voice in calling and enforcing the results of an inquiry.

“I’ve been to far too many vigils over the past decade,” said Wasylycia-Leis. “Tina Fontaine’s murder, for me and so many others in this country—it was the last straw.”

Gord Steeves

Former city councilor Gord Steeves was regarded early on as the frontrunner to beat. But his campaign has been suffering on a number of fronts. Brian Bowman’s campaign (more on that later) has been more effective at reaching younger middle-to-right voters, and at offering progressive ideas for the future of Winnipeg, where Steeves seems to be targeting the base of voters that outgoing Mayor Sam Katz has historically relied upon.

But the revelation of a racist Facebook post from Steeves’ wife Lorrie in which she ranted about “drunk native guys” on welfare threw an uncomfortable spotlight on Steeves’s campaign. As Agnes Welch of the Free Press again pointed out, Lorrie Steeves’s post, “Exposed the deep lack of empathy and misinformation that still stymies reconciliation. [And] many in Winnipeg share her views.”

While Steeves has tried to explain away his wife’s racist comments, his own policy proposals for a “safer downtown” Winnipeg seem to be drawn from the same misinformed well, focusing on “reducing crime” and further criminalizing already marginalized populations by “ban[ning] boulevard begging.” As Robert-Falcon Ouellette pointed out to VICE, these “safety proposals” are designed to satisfy the fears of a population that is already safe downtown: suburban, largely white Winnipeggers who only venture downtown for Jets games, concert events, or to shop.

Steeves’s media contact declined VICE’s request for comment on missing and murdered aboriginal women, or to clarify how he would propose to make downtown Winnipeg safer for aboriginal women as well as suburban families. This has been on par with his responses to media in general when asked about indigenous issues.

Brian Bowman       

Brian Bowman, who represents a solid right-centre alternative to Gord Steeves, is a young lawyer who has been involved in community development. Bowman, who self-identifies as Métis, is quick to highlight his work on the board at Ka Ni Kanichik: an indigenous, community-based organization.

“There are some people [in Winnipeg] who see a growing indigenous population as a negative,” Bowman told VICE on Wednesday. “That’s ridiculous. We need to do better as a community to allow everyone, regardless of ethnicity, race, or economic background, to reach their full potential.”

With regard to missing and murdered aboriginal women, Bowman told VICE: “We have to recognize that this is not just a criminal matter. This is a sociological issue. We need to provide supports for law enforcement to protect our most vulnerable in our community. We need to look at where the supports within the community are that can allow a place of sanctuary and support for those affected by violence and other crimes.”

“A disproportionate number of those people are aboriginal women and girls,” he said. “Statistically, they are more vulnerable. We need to work with the federal and provincial governments, and community groups like Ka Ni Kanichik to address the problem in a meaningful way.”

However, Bowman says that while he is “open” to the idea of national inquiry into the issue, “I don’t think that it would be adequate to address it. What I’m focused on as a potential mayor at what can the city do.”

Robert-Falcon Ouellette

Early in his mayoral campaign, Ouellette, an administrator of Aboriginal Focus Programs at the University of Manitoba who self-identifies to both Cree and Métis backgrounds, brought attention to the deep-seated racism in Winnipeg when he spoke out against racist attacks he was receiving on Facebook and via email. Since then, he’s remained outspoken about the need to reconcile what he calls a “divided city.”

“When you’re talking about the problem of murdered and missing aboriginal women, you’re talking about a sociological problem,” Ouellette told VICE on Tuesday. Ouellette was quick to note that while downtown Winnipeg may be “dangerous” to people who are vulnerable, putting more people—be they more cops, cadets, or drones (as Steeves has suggested)—won’t make the community safer.

“The people who are already doing that job are doing it well,” Ouellette said. “The problems are far deeper than just having people walk around [to patrol].”

Ouellette spoke to issues around Child & Family Services and the lack of trust many in the indigenous community feel towards an organization that he says is systemically flawed. But, as a city administrator, Ouellette’s priority would be to grow downtown into a community, in much the same manner as Bowman proposed—by increasing density and economic opportunity, while supporting organizations that provide supports for vulnerable peoples.

As for a national inquiry into missing and murdered women?

“If they were to do one, they would actually need someone in place who would be willing to challenge both sides of the debate, both the indigenous and the western, or Canadian, leadership,” Ouellette told VICE. “[But] study without action is essentially doing nothing. The problem with the Canadian system is a lot of times, politicians feel an inability to actually go out there and make change, or propose different ways of doing things. Because [of] entrenched interests within systems, it’s very hard to go about changing it.”

All three of the mayoral candidates VICE spoke to, as well as other fringe contenders, have recently promised to unveil further policy proposals with regard to indigenous issues in the coming weeks. Winnipeg’s municipal election will be held Oct. 22.

@badguybirnie


The Zozobra Festival Is a Neo-Pagan Ode to Spanish Colonialism

0
0

Zozobra, or "Old Man Gloom," is set afire at the climax of this decades-old Sante Fe traditionAll photos by Lyle Shanahan

Last week, at a park in New Mexico’s capital city of Santa Fe, tens of thousands of people gathered to watch the annual burning of what may be the world’s largest marionette. The creature is known as Zozobra, or “Old Man Gloom.”

Felix Martinez, a native New Mexican, has been coming to Zozobra since he was three years old. Standing amidst the crowd with a half-gallon of orange juice and Vodka while sporting a virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt, he screams out, “Que Viva La fiesta!” The 40,000-plus crowd made up of wasted teenagers, hippies, artists, cholos, 20-somethings, tourists and half-terrified children respond in turn with a thundering “Que Viva!“

At around 9 pm the park lights shut off, and the steady chant of “Burn him! Burn him!” rises from the crowd. Fifteen minutes into the performance, the fire dancer emerges. Torch in hand, she moves methodically up and down the stairway towards Zozobra, taunting the distressed marionette whose arms flail in fruitless protest, his puppet lips miming in syncopation to the detached moans projected over the loudspeaker. (There is actually a man present who gets paid to moan in agony.)

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” said Arizona native Mary Martinez, marveling at how quickly the seemingly innocuous gathering of picnicking families, mariachi music, and dancing transformed into something vaguely nefarious. “The people, the puppet…I don’t know quite what the fuck is going on.” 

Many New Mexico residents have been coming to Zozobra since they were children.

At around 9:30 the ritual reaches its climax as the fire dancer puts torch to muslin, the moaning puppet bursts into flame, and the crowd celebrates a city’s renewal by fire. 

“It is an annual cleanse,” says Sam Mauldin, Brooklyn-based rapper, New Mexico native, and son of the famous World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin. “[Every year] our city gets together and slays a monster.”

The burning of Zozobra—a Spanish word roughly translated as gloom or anguish—began in 1924. Raymond Sandoval, event chairman and designer of the creature’s face, told VICE, “Zozobra is the battle between unrestrained and restrained fire. Glooms, whether they be scribbled on scraps of paper, nine boxes of legal documents or a t-shirt, are the representation of man inflicting pain upon man.” Zozobra’s insides are stuffed each year with tax paper, bills, parking tickets and the other unpleasant physical documents of daily life.

Since its beginning 90 years ago, this creepily awesome event—sponsored by the local Kiwanis Club—has become a quintessentially Santa Fe tradition. Describing the importance of Zozobra to New Mexico, Felix Martinez told us, “You got the Hispanic thing, the Native American thing, the Mexican thing and the Anglo thing. But we all got the Zozobra thing.“

Hunger Games-esque scene as the Fiesta Queen addresses the crowd

Zozobra was started by Santa Fe artist Will Shuster, who was inspired by a Yaqui Indian ritual in which they would burn an effigy of Judas. Since then the neo-pagan ritual has—somewhat anachronistically—come to mark the beginning of “Fiestas De Santa Fe,” the oldest civic celebration in North America, which commemorates Don Diego de Vargas’ “peaceful” reoccupation of New Mexico following the famous Pueblo Revolt.

Musing over the Spanish royal court, including the fiesta queen and volunteer conquistadors that have just finished performing on stage below the towering puppet, a young man named Joseph took in the scene.

“It's great. You got dudes dressed like Spanish knights, people selling Navajo tacos, some spaced out hippies and uncomfortable tourists…It’s Santa Fe!”

Two locals are pumped and ready to go.

The event itself—an indigenous-inspired art installation that commemorates Spanish colonial culture—make Zozobra a surprisingly honest mirror into the city.

Speaking to the unique mix of Hispanic, Native American, Latin American and Anglo culture that defines the region, Sandoval said,

“Zozobra is something that we will all have and own a piece of that no one else has. We describe the sounds, the smells, the food, the fireworks and the moans. We tell a story of where we’re from.” 

But there is another, equally important side of the celebration—one defined by blackout drunkenness, fist fights, gang-standoffs, negligent parents and bewildered kids. Each is indispensible to overall drama.

Fom classic cholo swag to this white linen wizard look, contrasting style is one of the most notable and enjoyable parts of Zozobra.

“This is not a find yourself, burning man type thing.” Joseph said. “This is organized chaos.”

In past years, the celebration of Zozobra has gotten out of hand. In 1971, the mayor of Santa Fe was forced to declare a state of emergency as celebrations descended into mayhem. In 1976, widespread havoc led Mayor Bruce King to call in the National Guard. And in 1997 a gang-related shooting left one dead on the Plaza of Santa Fe. 

“The party used to move from the field to the Plaza downtown” said Celeste, a Santa Fe woman who started going to Zozobra in the late 70s. “It was great! But sometimes things would get crazy.” 

After the fatal shooting in 1997, Zozobra was moved from Friday to Thursday and the bars and plaza in downtown Santa Fe were closed to the public.

This guy is having a good time.

This year Zozobra was moved back to its original Friday timeslot, and the police presence has increased accordingly. Officers from the nearby Albuquerque Police Department (APD) were brought in to help secure the area. The presence of APD—among the most lethal police forces in the county, one with a penchant for killing unarmed homeless men, the mentally ill, and any shade south of pale—did not sit well with some locals.

“They worry about us killing each other,” said Steve Sandoval, a former Iraq veteran and native New Mexican. “APD has been killing us for decades. They should not be here. It is an insult.”

And while the more authoritarian air has diminished the event for some diehards over the years, others speak to the lasting importance of Zozobra.

Santa Fe Fiesta Queen Carmelita Roybal being escorted from backstage into the crowd by her Conquistadors

“Zozo was pretty scary, and after the lights went off he was horrifying,” Mauldin told us of his first appearance at Zozobra. “When he was gone and reduced to a pile of ash, I felt like the whole town had slayed a monster. It was beautiful. The ashes raining down on the crowd were surreal.”

And each year as Old Man Gloom’s fiery remains fall from their supports, and the lights at Fort Marcy turn back on, you can sense a tangible release from the crowd.

As Ray Sandoval put it, “For many of us Zozobra is our New Year’s, where instead of making resolutions we stuff our glooms—and in a sense our failures of the past year—into the mighty beast to be consumed by fire, allowing us to begin our year anew.”

Video retrospective by Luke Fitch

Follow Sam Gilbert on Twitter.

Rory Mulligan: Sam I Am

0
0

This morning I received a message from photographer Rory Mulligan, sent to friends and colleagues to mark the event of his 30th birthday. The note explained that as he entered a new decade of his life, he felt a small slice of an ongoing project was ready to be shared. When I clicked the link to his website, I found this series of bizarre and somewhat subtly horrific images, titled Sam I Am. This seemed odd, because birthday imagery is usually stuff like cakes and balloons, not devils and blood graffiti. I was immediately entranced by the beauty of these monochrome images, but also shocked by sudden interjections of violence, and unusual insertions of the male nude. In my mind, the pictures began to coalesce into a language of darkly mysterious symbols and gestures. I called Rory to find out more, and he gave me this statement:

"This group of photographs is part of an ongoing project exploring the physical geography and mythical history of the lower Hudson River Valley of New York. My approach to photography has always walked a line between reality and fiction, using the raw material of what I find and scenarios I orchestrate to create a nebulous visual world. This area is teeming with history—from the fiction of Washington Irving and John Cheever to the real life horror of the Son of Sam murders, to more contemporary incidents like the train derailment at Spuyten Duyvil (“Spouting Devil”) and a macabre scene this April in which the cadavers of 25 cats were found in plastic bags hanging in a park in Yonkers. For me, these incidents and the landscape are all strongly connected. I am in the process of creating a body of work dealing with the way photography can utilize the history and fiction of a particular landscape to reveal connections between past and present."
 
"All of the aforementioned incidents are not just connected by this particular area, but by another issue I have been exploring in my work for several years now. Most of my photographic output up to this point has dealt with my own issues pertaining to other men and masculinity—namely my sense of dislocation stemming from my discomfort with the rampant machismo that both the real and art-historical worlds are dominated by. I see this project as continuing that train of thought in a more severe and direct, yet abstract manner. These violent and traumatic acts are all committed or narrated by men. The strong connection between men and violence is complicated, but undeniable. I am deeply committed to this project and envision myself working on it for years to come."  
 

Rory Mulligan is a Hastings-on-Hudson, NY-based photographer. He is a graduate for Fordham University and the Yale School of Art.  

Matthew Leifheit is photo editor of VICE. Follow him on Twitter

Check out the Son of Sam killer's middle school yearbook photos in this month's True Crime issue of VICE magazine.

An Engineering Student Turned Meth Cook in Lebanon

0
0

Image via Wikimedia

In the post–Walter White world of methamphetamine trafficking, the stereotype of the average meth cook has broken down, but even so, Apo, a name he used to protect his identity, did not fit the mold. He met me in an East Beirut bar in a nicely pressed pink Ralph Lauren shirt. He was well groomed, slightly shy, and had an air of sweetness that didn’t match up with the image of Mickey Rourke in Spun. The “Walter White of Lebanon” had agreed to talk to me now that some time had passed since prison. 

Apo was raised 20 minutes outside Beirut. He described himself as “not a perfect student, but good. The best in his family, at least.”  Like so many other Lebanese youth, he continued his education after high school, and began a mechanical engineering degree at a major Lebanese university. 

In 2005, two years into his mechanical-engineering degree, Apo’s trajectory changed dramatically. It started with the emergence of the underground party circuit in Beirut. Trance and house broke onto the Lebanese music scene, and as in so many other countries, drugs followed—mostly ecstasy, cocaine, and speed. The scene was centered around smaller nightclubs—“BO18,” an old converted bomb bunker, and “the Basement,” now defunct—as well as larger venues like Forum de Beyrouth and Biel, an event space on the waterfront. Both Apo and a friend of his who asked to be called Sami described it as their favorite moment growing up in Lebanon, a time of naïve youthfulness. They agreed, “Lebanon was banging.”   

Apo and his friends spent weekend after weekend chasing girls and raving. But they were curious about the chemicals they were experimenting with. They scoured the web to find out about various combinations of chemicals that made up the pills they were taking, but their interest homed in on a drug that was possible for them to produce. “It was like heaven, ignoring the side effects,” Apo noted when describing his initial impression of meth. “You’re productive, not sleepy, friendly,” he added. A set of insecurities every young adult can relate to. 

They started cooking for their friends. It was a cheap alternative to the pricier drugs on the market, and it wasn’t a crowded field. There had been rumors of an Armenian cook who had escaped to Yerevan years before, but apart from that meth was a new phenomenon for Lebanon. Apo told me it took him seven months to master the hang of cooking. They sourced Sudafed from local gym clubs, which sold it as an appetite suppressant. The precursor chemicals, which are hard to source in America, were purchased from the same companies supplying their university laboratories. He and his friends set up makeshift labs wherever they could, but usually in the basement of their parents’ apartment buildings.

One day, Apo and his crew started a cook in one of their parents' apartments. Half way through the process, everything lit on fire.  It was out of control, and fire spread quickly to the balcony. One of his friends grabbed the fire extinguisher to put it out, but the extinguishing chemicals mixed with the meth fumes, blanketing the entire apartment in thick, white dust. Seconds later, Apo’s friend’s mom walked through the door, astonished. They told her it was a university experiment gone wrong. She bought it. 

“It was boys being boys,” Apo told me. “In the beginning it was just, go with the flow.”

Once the gang perfected its cooking method, they gave out product to their closest friends, and partied harder than ever. In a country where youth unemployment is expected, Apo had found his purpose. “It’s an art; you’re painting something.” 

His art quickly turned to business. Within seven months, Apo and his crew saw a potential market when friends of friends came knocking. One batch every two weeks turned into two every week. They were happy to be making money, but they were also making addicts, themselves included. “A year of good fun and then paranoia kicks in, a lack of sleep, and you get thin. When you want to sleep, you can’t sleep,” Apo explained. This, in combination with the influx of money, created an atmosphere of distrust among the original friends, who were now no more than greedy partners. What had started as “meth among friends” had become a drug operation that spread beyond Apo’s largely Armenian crew and inadvertently infiltrated the Lebanese party scene. Meth was on the rise in Beirut. 

The crew had managed to stay beneath the police radar, but Lebanon is a small country. Unbeknownst to them, one of their customers was also an informant for the police. The informant had kept quiet as long as he was getting his supply. But the partners’ paranoia, driven by a lack of sleep, left them with the feeling the operation was spinning out of control. They started to say no to people. Around the same time, Apo began to understand the depth of his own addiction. He wanted out and headed to a hospital to get clean. Meanwhile, Apo’s partner had cut off the informant, who then headed to the police.

Four days after Apo’s release from the hospital, the cops came knocking. They knew everything. He was tried and convicted, and sent to Rumieh, the largest prison in Lebanon, where he served four years. For a boy brought up within the traditional Lebanese family structure, prison was an adjustment. It took him six months to find his feet. He used Xanax to control his anxiety, but he was determined. “If people throw you in a desert, you just have to survive,” he told me.

Apo was released from prison, still this side of 30. He returned to school, where he is now finishing his bachelor’s degree. He said the police are letting him live a free life and don’t check up on him anymore. He’s not proud of what he’s done, but “it's definitely a story to tell your kids when they grow up.” He has a new group of friends, but in regard to his old partners, he said, “I still respect them. Shit happens.”

Follow Atticus Hoffman on Twitter.

In Turkey, UK Fighters Empower Syrian Refugees Through Boxing

0
0
In Turkey, UK Fighters Empower Syrian Refugees Through Boxing

Brewing Beer in the Middle East Is a Tough Business

0
0

All photos by Elizabeth Whitman

The same faded red and white logo is deployed outside nearly every liquor store in Jordan. It brandishes the name of a Dutch company that has brewed here since 1958 and come to dominate—some say monopolize—the beer industry. But a newcomer recently stepped into this Amstel-ruled market, aiming to radically reshape the industry by introducing craft beer.

Beer drinkers have rejoiced, extolling the mere concept of a craft brew interrupting the country’s monotonous beer landscape. Yet the future of Jordan’s first microbrewery, Carakale, is far from assured, even though it has wildly exceeded expectations. As alcohol taxes rise along with water, gas, and electricity costs, mounting concerns weigh on Carakale’s young founder, Yazan Karadsheh.

Karadsheh is affable but earnest. His eyes carry traces of the weariness and satisfaction of his work, where his shifts last anywhere from 16 to 27 hours. “I’m not starting a microbrewery,” he told me adamantly. “I’m starting a craft industry.”

Self-described as in love with beer, Karadsheh got his start in Boulder, Colorado. He had earned a degree in electrical engineering and gone to work for Halliburton, but it was “hell on earth,” so he quit, landing an unpaid gig in a homebrew supply store in Boulder instead. He eventually enrolled in the Master Brewer’s program at UC Davis and gained more firsthand experience at a brewpub and then a microbrewery in Colorado.

It was the latter, Karadsheh said, that gave him the confidence to start a brewery in his home country, Jordan.

Building Carakale

Alcohol is sold in select establishments in Jordan, where drinking still carries a mild stigma. The population is 97 percent Muslim, and though plenty of locals do drink, society as a whole remains conservative. Only Christians can start alcohol-related businesses in the country.

Naturally, those norms and restrictions have held back the development of a robust local beer, wine, or alcohol culture. With locally produced beers limited to Amstel and two Jordanian companies, "a lot of people are hungry for a different beer," Karadsheh said.

Upon his moving back to Jordan in 2009, however, the government told Karadsheh he could not open a brewery. So he brewed in his parents' backyard and gave the beer to their friends, who urged him to go commercial. But without a license, he couldn't.

In the black hole that is Jordanian government bureaucracy, the key to accomplishing anything is wasta. The term, meaning "intermediary," refers to personal or family connections that work like a magic wand. Drop just the right names, and licenses can be granted or job offers extended. It wasn't until a family friend helped him obtain a license after a year and a half back in Jordan that Karadsheh finally began working on the brewery. "Having people in the right places helps to push things forward for you," Karadsheh admitted frankly. "But that's not how it should be."

The brewing license was merely the first headache of many. Every government institution had its requirements, from the Health Ministry to the fire department and municipal governments. In between paperwork, he worked on designing a full-sized brewery and, with a friend, perfectinga logo based on a tuft-eared, endangered wildcat—the indigenous caracal.

Paperwork wasn't the only painful part of becoming legal. “I’ve been told to go stand in the corner because this is haram [sinful],” Karadsheh recalled from his visits to government ministries. Other times, people he had employed in constructing the brewery would walk away mid-project. Gradually, Karadsheh painstakingly assembled a trustworthy team of about ten people. “We’re super tight,” he told me.

The Brewery

In a district about half an hour west of Amman, clacks and whirs fill the air as a conveyor belt crowded with brown glass bottles runs through a clear chamber. The bottles are filled with beer and capped before proceeding to the pasteurization house. They emerge on the other side and are fed through a labeler, which whips each bottle with pale yellow stickers—a picture of precision.

Tubes and hoses snake throughout the 4000-square-foot hangar, leading from spigots to small canisters and towering metal vats. In one corner, metal steps lead to a massive lautering tun, where a sweet and sticky liquid known as wort is strained from a mash of milled malt that has been steeped like tea in hot water. (Carakale gives local farmers the leftover mash as livestock feed.)

Visitors can watch this entire production through the interior glass panels of a tasting bar on the brewery’s second floor. But a door to the outside leads somewhere else entirely: a wide deck, where views fall over dry but sweeping hills punctuated by occasional patches of green. Sparse scrub and rows of short dark green trees pepper the slopes of a valley that descends to the Dead Sea.

Carakale currently brews about 40,000 bottles per month. It won't profit until it adds another 10,000 or so, but production has increased steadily. In January, it was putting out 12,000 bottles a month of its blond ale, which Karadsheh considers an appropriate introduction to the world of craft beer, with some "toast notes, sweet notes, and a slight bitterness." Since then, a stout and a special-edition whiskey ale, which Karadsheh intended to brew only once a year (though popular demand may change that), have rounded out Carakale's craft list. Planned for next season are English pale ale and an IPA.

Across from the bottling machine, a dugout contains miniature versions of all the other equipment throughout the brewery: vats and containers from when Karadsheh brewed at home. Now, the prototypes are used for R&D, but they also remind visitors and employees alike of Carakale's humble beginnings.

Going Global

"Right now, I'm thinking about how to make this flourish, and so export is my next tactic," Karadsheh told me. When Carakale first entered the market, in November 2013, the government taxed alcohol at more than $11 per gallon. The amount has nearly doubled since then, to about $20 a gallon, according to Karadsheh. Energy and water prices are also climbing. All of those increases are absorbed in the cost of the beer, and as a result, the beer market is shrinking.

"It’s extremely tough to be a start-up in our country right now,” Karadsheh explained. Despite his goal of creating a craft industry in Jordan, he's keen for the microbrewery to turn a profit. His father "spent a lot of money making his kid's dream materialize," Karadsheh told me. "I'm very lucky." But he's also itching for his brewery to become sustainable. "It's kind of like a toddler crawling on the ground. I feel like, 'That's enough.' It's supposed to be up on its feet by now."

"I can wait until the country wakes up and starts inhaling beer to a point where it's healthy for the market and [the microbrewery] to grow,” he said. “Or we can just export and get to that point next week, or in a couple of weeks." For now, he's targeting buyers from the UAE to China to "fast-forward" Carakale's progress.

For the Love of Beer

Making a killer brew requires rigorous training in key areas. "You want to be a cook, a scientist, and an artist," Karadsheh said. "And you have to be an engineer." Over the years, working in beer-supply stores and microbreweries, brewing in the kitchen, and earning engineering and brewing degrees were "perfect for what I need to do here.” Even before Carakale, his skill had proved itself, when the Upslope Dunkelweizen based on a recipe he developed won a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2009.

But something else, more fleeting than awards or even the product itself, also draws him to beer making.

"Brewing is the only time when I don't care what's happening politically," Karadsheh said. "I'm in the zone. Even on bad days, it's crazy, it's stressful, but somehow it's relaxing at the same time."

"People do yoga to meditate." The line sounds like a quip, but he’s oddly serious. "I brew beer.”

Follow Elizabeth Whitman on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images