Women in Clothes is a collection of voices from 642 different women describing what their clothes mean to them. Edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavitis, and Leanne Shapton, it’s the perfect comedown after eight days of dealing with the hell of New York fashion week. The voices in the book range from Miranda July and Lena Dunham to Eileen Myles and Mira Gonzalez. There are also Skype conversations, podcast transcripts, and full-color photography collections of over-the-knee socks, closets, and toothpicks.

Sheila Heti is the author of How Should a Person Be?, a New York Times notable. I first met her in Los Angeles when I attended a party at her friend's beautiful, expensive, tastefully-furnished home, wearing this t-shirt. I was convinced it would be good for my career to don it confidently, but the whole time I was terrified no one would be able to get past it. Sheila did, though, immediately greeting me with warmth. We've maintained a nice, infrequent friendship ever since. I spoke with her about her newest project, and how she thinks about clothes. 

VICE: Your last novel set out to answer the question How Should A Person Be? What is the question you set out to answer with this book? 
Sheila: I just wanted to dress better. That was my motivation in beginning this book. Thankfully Heidi and Leanne had different, more interesting motivations. The book really is a collaboration in the sense that it’s a vision that came about through the alchemy of our minds (plus the minds of our 600+ contributors)—so my vision wasn’t the guiding one for the project, but neither was Leanne’s or Heidi’s vision the single guiding one. A true collaboration makes a new person who didn’t exist before, who is the person who made that thing. I feel that when I look at this book. It’s not like “Heidi did this part, and Leanne did this chapter, and I found this contributor.” It’s much more fluid than that. I love this about collaborating but I hadn’t fully experienced it until doing this book—that a new mind is created, which creates the art.

How did the question of what women wear come about?
It came out of a personal place—my boyfriend is a very sharp dresser and I began to feel quite inadequate in relation to him, in terms of dressing and clothes. I would buy something I thought was marvelous and he’d point out the bad stitching—he just saw all these things I had never seen. Living with him, I became aware of how little thought I had given to dress, and I wanted to change this. I can’t really think about anything unless I make it a project, so my project was to interview the women I knew about what they knew about dressing and clothes. I didn’t want to be a woman in a threadbare dress beside a man in a tailored suit for the rest of my life.

We begin every project with a certain hope for how it will turn out, eventually amending our hopes or altering the projects. How did Women in Clothes compare with your original intention?
It’s smarter than my original hope. My original hope was probably more like a series of instructions that I could follow—I hoped women with great style would give me a million tips that would cause me to have great style; this is kind of stupid, in retrospect. What we ended up with is much more nuanced, and more like a novel: it’s a book with 600 characters, rather than 600 tips. 

How did you go about choosing contributors?
We wanted to have as many contributors as possible, from all over the world. We were all traveling a lot during this period, so when we traveled, we asked women on the street to fill out our survey (we had business cards made up that we gave out to strangers). We posted calls for contributors on Facebook and Twitter, and we contacted journalists in other countries and asked them to ask their contacts to fill out the survey we had posted on our website. Then we contacted specific people we were interested in having in the book—artists like Cindy Sherman and Kim Gordon, sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, “smell scientist” Leslie Vosshall, farmers, bankers… just people we wanted to have be part of the book, whose perspectives we thought would be interesting and important.

You've written novels, short story collections, non-fiction, a children's book… What did you want to achieve with this sort of anthology that you couldn't with the other mediums you've worked in?
Access to other minds—minds I didn’t have to imagine. Though I don’t really think of it as an anthology because I think the book is more aesthetically and formally cohesive than what you think of as a typical anthology. I specifically didn’t want an anthology, because I hate reading anthologies. Anyway, this project felt like the deepest I’ve been able to go into other minds. It was like swimming in this wonderful sea of consciousness—in thoughts and feelings that had previously been locked inside these distinct and separate bodies, but that came together like tributaries into the sea.

What was it like collaborating with so many women from different class and cultural backgrounds?
I found the interviews and surveys from people whose backgrounds differed from mine interested me much more than surveys from people whose backgrounds were more similar. I didn't learn tips from the woman who wore a hijab, necessarily, but it put my own habits into perspective as being so tied to my context or culture, rather than some floating Self I imagine is mine. 

How do you dress?
I’m not really into fashion. I don’t read fashion magazines. I dress very simply, and would, if I could, have a uniform of six simple shift dresses. But I do notice women on the street and am kind of mesmerized by women and appreciate it when a woman has some attitude in the way she walks or puts herself together or presents herself to the world. I love it when someone’s aesthetic or sensibility can be seen on their person, not just in what they create. I will probably never be like the women I admire on the street because I don’t like drawing attention to myself; I prefer to be the one who is noticing. 

Something Heidi Julavitis said struck me: "When I was very young, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be stylish, because to be stylish was to be poised on the precipice between reality and fiction."
That was completely fascinating to me. I had never really imagined myself as being stylish when I would fantasize about my future self. I imagined a million other things though. 

Like what?
Misery, sex. And friendships. Poverty too, I guess.

Another thing from Heidi: the idea of using clothes to wear past selves, to enter places we've been, versions of ourselves we miss and fear losing touch with. Wearing who we used to be in certain garments.
I just found a box of clothes from about ten years ago, and though these were clothes I had once loved, to have not seen them in so long and then excavated them, it was like bringing back a former self but not one I wanted on my body ever again. Those clothes made me nauseous.  

Do you see yourself in other women more, after completing this project?
Yes. And sometimes women wrote things that I wouldn't have ever thought of, which became my thoughts, and which are now my thoughts.

What's the book not about?
It’s about how women think about what they wear, not about what women wear. 

Click here to buy Women in Clothes

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Not OK. Photo via Flickr user hmmlargeart

If Jackass was the Velvet Underground of people filming their friends doing stupid things, then Bumfights was the genre's GG Allin—nihilistic, morally reprehensible, and devoid of any redeeming qualities whatsoever. I was 13 when the films came out, and I didn't have to watch them to understand the damage viral videos could cause. I lived outside of San Diego, where the videos were shot. Rufus Hannah and Donnie Brennan, the two homeless men who were paid small amounts of money and alcohol in exchange for allowing teens to film them abusing themselves, were locals. Mostly, they drank beers in front of the grocery store where I'd later work. On one occasion, shortly after Bumfights' teenage masterminds were arrested, I remember seeing a non-homeless man buying Donnie—recognizable because of the word BUMFIGHTS tattooed on his forehead—a doughnut inside Krispy Kreme.

In the 13 years since Bumfights, the proliferation of camera phones has meant that the number of people filming themselves and their friends doing stupid things has increased exponentially. Mostly these videos are boring; sometimes they're particularly stupid, like when teens set themselves on fire, but they rarely merit the kind of attention and outrage that Bumfights created. This week, though, a story involving a group of teens in Bay View, Ohio, managed to make Bumfights seem quaint.

The five boys, all between 14 and 17, convinced a 14-year-old autistic teen that he was doing the Ice Bucket Challenge. Then, instead of pouring ice water on him, they allegedly dumped some combination of pee, spit, cigarette butts, and shit. Because this is 2014, the teens uploaded video of the incident to Instagram. When the boy's mother saw the video on his cell phone, she went to police for help finding the teens responsible. Here's where things get funny again: At some point, Ohio native Drew Carey, currently host of television's The Price Is Right, found out about the video and, in the process of creating a positive PR story about himself, tweeted an offer to donate a $10,000 reward to local police for helping catch the jerks responsible. Somehow Jenny McCarthy—herself an autism expert—found out about the story and offered to double the reward. Her husband, Wahlburger co-owner Donnie Wahlberg, pledged another $10,000. The teens were then identified without help from the hypothetical $30,000, but no arrests have been made yet. Drew Carey tweeted that one of his "reps talked to family of autistic teen. They are overwhelmed by everyone's generous offers and are taking time to determine how to handle the charitable offers."

Meanwhile, a new report from 19 Action News suggests that this incident might be less horrific than it first appeared. The teens claim they had no idea that their friend was autistic, and that they only dumped spit and pee—no shit or cigarette butts. They say they’ve spent the whole summer playing pranks on each other like "bleaching of hair and shaving off an eyebrow while a teen is sleeping,” and that the autistic boy wasn’t singled out. But it's hard not to wonder whether these are just empty denials from a group of twisted teens trying to get out of trouble.

–Maybe today's teens are just getting way too relaxed with their bowel movements in general. According to Total Sorority Move, two freshman Alpha Delta Pi pledges at Mississippi State have been shitting all over campus, including on top of a cooler and in the front lawn of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house. While the image of sorority girls pooping across a Southern university is truly something special, this story seems a bit too good to be true. For one thing, most of the evidence is screenshots of the anonymous app Yik Yak. While there is a picture of a piece of shit on top of a Coleman cooler, it's really impossible to know whose poo it is or how it got there. Could this be a case of a sorority trying to smear its rivals? According to Total Sorority Move commenter donna_smith123, the truth is far more mundane: A sorority member got too drunk, was forbidden to leave a friend's room, and really had to go to the bathroom.

–"Imagine going to Walmart only to find that what you need is off the shelf. Not because it’s out of stock but because it’s been soaked with doe urine. That's right, from a female deer." That's how local news described an incident this week in Owasso, Oklahoma, where an 18-year-old and his older friend sprayed deer pee on $2,500 worth of merchandise. Police arrested the two for their weird prank, but despite the stilted severity of local news coverage, it's obvious that this was a pretty harmless joke. "It’s just kind of shameful. I mean, these kids need to grow up,” one Walmart customer said, clearly trying to hold back laughter.

–To be a teen is to fall in love way too easily. Usually it's with a person, but sometimes it's with jihad. In the case of the 19-year-old in Denver who this week pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, it was both. Shannon Conley went online and met a member of ISIS, America's newest declared enemy. She planned to join ISIS on the battlefield, or to help them as a nurse. FBI agents tried to dissuade Conley from joining the terrorist organization, but the teenage heart wants what it wants, and she was eventually arrested while trying to begin her journey to Syria at Denver International Airport. 

–This week in correlation ≠ causation news, a new study found that teenagers who use marijuana every day are 60 percent less likely to graduate high school and seven times more likely to attempt suicide. True, marijuana probably doesn't help kids stay in school, and smoking weed might negatively affect some teens' brain development. But marijuana isn't making kids quit school and kill themselves. What's mostly going on here is that marijuana is illegal, and the types of teens who regularly break the law are the same ones who drop out of school and have mental health problems. A more accurate headline, then, is that teens who quit high school are more likely to smoke marijuana. Of course, no one would really consider that news.

–This week in teens wasn't all bad news. On Wednesday, skate photographer/filmer Bill Strobeck released Joyride, his follow-up to March's Supreme video. Joyride features skateboarding's best teens sweating through lower Manhattan, including past VICE interviewee Sean Pablo. Even if skateboarding's not your thing, you should really still give it a watch; between all the blood, sweat, and shirtless boys in jeans, the whole thing feels like a cross between Fashion Week and a Morrissey wet dream.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

Carl Boenish jumping off a cliff with his wife, Jean.

Carl Boenish is the godfather of BASE jumping. He literally came up with the name, which is an acronym for Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth.

As an engineer who gave up his stable—but otherwise landlocked—life to become a full-time skydiver and filmmaker, Carl was jumping off of cliffs and mountains just as a boom of skyscraper construction erupted in Los Angeles, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

To share his predilection for freefalling with the world, Carl wore a helmet-mounted 16mm camera for the majority of his jumps, which allowed him to capture stunning and incredibly colourful footage of his death-defying feats.

Carl and his wife, Jean, who he charmed into becoming a skydiver and BASE jumper herself, ended up setting a world record for highest jump off of a mountain in Norway—where they both successfully leaped off the tallest vertical rock face in Europe: a 1,100 metre high point on top of the Troll Peaks mountain.

A day after setting that record, Carl jumped again from a different point on the Troll Peaks mountain, which had previously been determined to be too dangerous to attempt. And, after making that decision, unfortunately, he met his match. Carl died at 43 years old in Norway, and left behind Jean, as well as a treasure trove of 16mm footage.

30 years later, Marah Strauch completed a feature-length documentary on Carl and Jean called Sunshine Superman, which premiered at TIFF last week. I caught up with Marah to chat with her about her first documentary film, what it was like to work with Carl’s amazing library of footage, her experience at Werner Herzog’s rogue school, and the few times she’s gone skydiving herself.

VICE: Hey Marah! How did you discover Carl Boenish as a subject?
Marah: My dad was a pioneer rock-climber in Oregon. He did a lot of stuff with Smith Rocks, and my uncle was an aerial cinematographer and BASE jumper. He may or may not have known Carl, I don’t really know. But he actually got into an auto accident after he had been jumping for many years. When he died, he left a box of footage that he had shot. And some of the footage was Carl Boenish’s footage on old VHS tapes that had been recorded off the TV.

So there was the old Guinness World Record on VHS tape, and some other things that really got me started in terms of making the film. As soon as I discovered Carl, I was like this is so interesting. Then I tracked down Jean Boenish, and had a journey that lasted a really long time.

How long did it take to make the film?
It took like eight years to make the film. But that was Eric (my producer) and I working full time living in New York City. I was working as an editor and my background is in art—glass art, particularly. I was instructing students on how to blow glass in Brooklyn. So I had a lot to do during this time, and this is my first feature doc, or my first feature in general. It took a while to convince people to give me the kind of money I needed—so I could go to Norway and shoot helicopter shots.

Those are really striking. For your first feature, Sunshine Superman is very visually accomplished, and I think a big part of that is having Carl’s 16mm footage. It’s awesome. But I noticed you had a Kickstarter up just to transfer the footage—was it kind of a blessing and a curse to have all of this amazing stuff on that medium?
It was an absolute blessing. It was hard but it kind of was—and is—this treasure trove of material that I’m still helping Jean Boenish archive. It’s a project in its own right. I think Carl was a really exceptional filmmaker. I kind of became the keeper of his footage, in a way. I really needed to make sure that it wasn’t deteriorating further and getting it digitized properly. So there’s more than a movie here, there’s also this real push to make sure this footage is available to future generations.

Do you think if Carl saw a vision of the future where people do this kind of filmmaking with GoPros, then upload it to YouTube, he’d be excited?
I think Carl would’ve hated GoPros, and I’ll tell you why—because he was a filmmaker and he was very much into being a professional. I think we made big decisions to shoot the aerial cinematography how we thought Carl Boenish would’ve shot it, which was using the highest-quality cameras. I think he would have thought GoPros were cool for amateur cinematography, which is essentially what GoPros are kind of for. They’re kind of the equivalent of selfies. They’re not pro filmmaking.

Carl really believed in craftsmanship and making fine work. Everything he did was on the best material available to him. So even when video was starting to be popular [through VHS tapes] he wouldn’t use it because he really felt like the quality that he wanted was going to be much higher.

You workshopped the film at Herzog’s Rogue Film School—what was that like?
I kind of workshopped it. I had an early trailer that I cut together myself, and we didn’t really have any financing at that point. But it was wonderful. I’m a really big Herzog fan in my own way. I can very much geek out over meeting Herzog. I think with me, a lot of that experience was just being excited to meet Herzog. The fact that he acknowledged this movie that I had, actually acknowledged me, and acknowledged that what I was doing was interesting, was just a giant vote of confidence in general—because he’s just such a hero of mine. I think he really understood Carl Boenish, and liked him as a character. It was nice to have that enthusiasm of Herzog at that time.

I was telling him about Carl’s footage, and I went very much against his words. There was so much footage… he was like: “Oh, I edited Grizzly Man in six weeks. You should be able to kill the footage.” He kept saying, “Kill the footage.”

What does that mean?
He’s like, “Get rid of it, just decide. Make a decision.” And I’m like, “But Herzog, it’s on film that I have to like roll through with my arm, so how do I do that?” He’s like, “Oh, pick randomly.” I would have loved to take his advice, but it was a slower process for me. So I spent another four years making the film.

Did you skydive while making this film?
That is the single most-asked question, which is fine. I did, I did skydive. But I have a background in rock climbing and I grew up in Oregon rock climbing, so I don’t really have a lot of issues about heights. And actually, I thought the scariest part was going up in the airplane because they’re really mechanically not well maintained, a lot of the drop zones. But I enjoyed it very much. I haven’t been BASE jumping because it takes a lot of skill, so it’s not something you just kind of go out and do.

Besides his pseudo-prediction of GoPros, Carl kind of predicted action sports filmmaking. Did you look at any action sports films, like Art of Flight, when you were making Sunshine Superman?
I was actually looking at action sports film to find out what I wanted to do the opposite of.

What didn’t you like about action sports films, or what did you want to avoid?
It never would have been my inclination to make an action sports film because that’s just not my aesthetic or concern. I don’t like the kind of machoness that’s involved in that.

Carl and Jean.

I’m glad you brought up the macho thing, because one of the most interesting characters is Jean, Carl’s wife. Her perspective, and the way that she is obviously treated skeptically by other BASE jumpers as a mousey woman when she first enters that scene is very interesting. What was working with her like?
I’m still working with Jean and I will be working with Jean for a while. Not only will I be working with Jean, but Jean will be one of my favourite, bestest buddies. I just love her. She’s like family because I’ve been working on this project for so long. She’s somebody I love very much and I think that, like Carl, she kind of was her own person. It was this sense of not needing to conform to any preset mold of what this person that you’re going to be in the world would be. She’s very true to herself, and I think that’s a lot of what the film is about. It’s about being true to yourself, and I think she’s absolutely true to her character throughout the film. When I had producers looking at the film early on, they thought she was a very problematic character because she’s not particularly emotional at times. She doesn’t cry. People expect her to cry.

When Carl dies, you expect this big, emotional flood from her. But there isn’t one.
I could have had it. I chose not to because it was a cheap shot, and it was formulaic in a way that wouldn’t have been fair to her. And it really wouldn’t have been fair to the film because I think it’s so much more interesting that she ended up being this powerful, strong woman. If it were a man, you wouldn’t necessarily expect him to cry. So there’s this sense of her being a woman and people being like well she’s a woman, why isn’t she being more emotional?She’s a strong, professional person and she says it. They started BASE jumping; so it was her duty [to jump again, after Carl’s death].

She’s very heroic, I think. So I like her as kind of the strongest character in the film for sure.

The other fascinating “character” in the film is California in the time period that Carl was jumping—the birth of skyscrapers, for one. Plus Carl was literally changing the laws on skydiving by lobbying for the parks department to let them legally jump off of cliffs. How was working within that time period?
It was one of the things that attracted me to the film most. There’s a kind of openness of mind during that time in the 70s, and there’s a [particular] colourscape. I mean, the film is called Sunshine Superman,and there’s this real sense of light that, to me, California offers in this way that other places don’t. And it’s interesting. We also had Norway being its own thing. So you had these two seemingly different forces, but what I would say is that there was kind of an openness of mind in both places during that time period. I’m sure it was present in the whole world, but you look at New York and it’s more jaded.

But there’s something about Los Angeles and Norway that were very open to exploration and open to free thinkers, which I really think suited Carl. He was a force against oppression of the kind of limited kinds of thought that people could have. So I think California was a really good place for him during that time.

And in terms of it being a character, it’s really hard to put it into words. It’s more of a visual thing—it’s a kind of expanse. One of my favourite films is Antonioni’s Zabriskie’s Point, which is just California. It’s actually earlier like 1969, but gives a sense of Los Angeles being this very modern city. It’s that kind of modernism from 1969, which is an aesthetic that I love. I think Carl had this very modernist-geek aesthetic that could be kind of hipster now, but I think it really works well in the 16mm footage. You’re like wow, who are these people? I mean, it’s very American Apparel or something, like whoa.

Yeah, the short-shorts and the mustaches. Do you have any interpretation on why Carl jumped from that point, which was already determined to be dangerous, on the day that he died?
I think… Carl had just made this world-record jump, and he was really enthusiastic about that, and I think there was this slight sense of invincibility at that point. And I think he was tired. I think people make mistakes. I think there was—I wouldn’t say God-like sense to Carl. But he was feeling very invincible at that point and I think in that moment, he wasn’t really checking himself. So I think that when we get to that moment, of absolute dizzying heights, we may want to check ourselves and really make sure that we’re in the right space. He probably made a mistake, so that happens.

Sunshine Superman is screening this Sunday, the 14^th, at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto at 9PM.

Despite its clean image and desire to remain the most boring town in Canada, Ottawa is actually wonderfully scummy. Partly due to its reputation as a boring government town and its history of Irish immigrants, Ottawans are known to let loose and forget about their papercuts on Fridays and Saturdays. I all goes down on Elgin or any of the pubs and clubs north of Rideau, and strangely, unlike other cities where people start going out at 12, Ottawans are hammered by 10, in the club by 10:15 and tossed to the curb by 12.

Not unlike the Friday night rush of Appalachian coal workers to a local bar after a week of mining, Canadian federal bureaucrats join hockey players, "puck bunnies," supposed gangsters, underagers, and anyone brave enough to face the night swill in the area known as the Byward Market, every single weekend.

So if you want to see who deals with your taxes at the CRA get into a punch-up with a 19-year-old junior hockey player who thinks he's destined for the show—the downtown of Canada's capital city on a weekend is where dreams are made. 

That's why we asked our pal and Ottawa-based photographer Rémi Thériault to spend a week shooting pics around town. This is what he witnessed.

If you want to see more of Rémi's work, look here.

Rosemary’s Baby is the reigning champ of psychological terrors. The film finds Mia Farrow as a young mother-to-be who believes that everyone is hatching a satanic plot against her and her baby. In this documentary, director Roman Polanski, actress Mia Farrow, and producer Bob Evans battle back and forth about the inception and completion of the iconic film.

This doc has it all: Frank Sinatra dissing Mia, top-secret casting wishes, and behind-the-scenes fights.

On Sunday we made a one-act play for my friend Humberto’s company, Opening Ceremony. The idea was to do a play instead of a regular fashion show during Fashion Week, and, miraculously, we were able to do it at the New York Metropolitan Opera House. (Thank you, Peter Gelb and everyone at the Met!) Also, this week my dear friend Karen is putting out her first solo album of precious, personal love and heartache gems titled Crush Songs. They are songs made so intimately and spontaneously alone in her bedroom a few years ago that they feel more like unguarded whispers from her heart than a traditionally produced album. So on Sunday, during a ten-minute break as we were rehearsing and lighting at the Met, we made a very impromptu "music video” for Karen in the spirit of her album. It just seemed like if you have the Opera House, that song, and Elle Fanning together, you shouldn't let the opportunity go by. So we made this as a surprise gift for Karen to congratulate her on her album. She is going to see this for the first time as you do. I hope you enjoy.

—Spike Jonze

Click here to buy Crush Songs, and check back next week for an exclusive behind-the-scenes video from 100% Lost Cotton. 

The Natural History Museum's mobile tour. The new project's opening is Saturday at the Queens Museum. 

What is the point of a science museum? If you’ve visited the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan recently, you might think it was designed to collect dust: moldy, ancient dioramas of cavemen stare out of lit-up boxes that don’t appear to have been entered by museum staff since the 1970s.

But ask Brooklyn arts collective Not An Alternative, who are launching a new project on Saturday with a kickoff event at the Queens Museum, and they’ll tell you a science museum should be on the front lines of addressing issues that affect the natural world, like climate change. And, they say, what it most definitely should not be doing is taking huge donations from oil companies that are behind the climate change denial movement.

‘The Natural History Museum' became the newest member of the American Alliance of Museums this week. It’s a multi-year project that retools the traditional model of taxidermied beasts and ancient anthropological history to present an evolving view of scientific challenges that doesn’t whitewash politics. The Queens Museum launch, a month-long series of events and lectures timed to coincide with the September 21 People’s Climate March, focuses on climate change and critical views of museum ethics.

[Speaking of ethics, here’s a disclaimer: Not An Alternative runs a co-working office in Brooklyn called No Space, and I rent a desk there.]

Ethics undoubtedly come into question when you consider that oil magnate David Koch of atmosphere-clogging Koch Industries sits on the boards of both the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Smithsonian. Koch’s arts philanthropy extends beyond just science museums; this month the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled the new David H. Koch plaza while activists projected anti-Koch ‘light graffiti’ onto the museum. Koch's name is also emblazoned on the city's premier ballet venue.

But it is Koch’s prominent place within the controlling entities behind the nation’s two high-profile natural history museums that creates what many say is an unforgivable conflict of interest.

“There’s a contradiction there between the ideals of the institution and its practice,” Not An Alternative’s Beka Economopoulos told VICE in an interview. “Why would one of the biggest funders of groups that deny or misrepresent climate science and biggest contributors to climate pollution be sitting on the board of a museum whose mission is to celebrate nature?”

While the Koch brothers’ financial backing of the conservative Tea Party movement has been well documented, revelations of their massive funding of climate change-denying organizations is less so. In 2012, Greenpeace reported that the Kochs had funneled over $61 million into a variety of scientific front groups. The next year, a Drexel University study found that of the $558 million in funding provided to climate denial groups between 2003 and 2010, the biggest donors were ExxonMobil and—you guessed it—Koch Industries.

VICE reached to out Koch Industries for comment but did not receive a response. The Smithsonian and AMNH didn’t get back to us either.

"You have more of these donors from the 1 percent who are embedding themselves in our cultural institutions and yet turning around and lobbying for the sequester and budget cuts for those same institutions," Economopoulos said.

Museums and other arts institutions are constantly battling the twin demons of a lack of state funding and ethically-compromising corporate sponsorship, and the economic stress has only increased since the financial crisis. Elizabeth Merritt, director of the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums, explained that in the eyes of the public, there’s a fine line between receiving corporate gifts and taking hush money.

“If significantly wealthy individuals are the source of money museums rely on, are they relying on the interests of the public?” Merritt asked.

“If a major executive of a tobacco company offered to serve on the board of a children’s museum,” Merritt continued, “wouldn’t that be a mismatch between the mission of serving the health of children and that company’s mission?”

The fundamental aim of most science and natural history museums is to educate the public about the natural world. But critics say museums aren’t catching up to the times, refusing to address the root causes of the impending doom that is pollution-driven climate change—much less offering solutions to the problem.

The artists and activists at Not An Alternative stress that they are serious about founding a legitimate science museum. And that means working with some of the top climate change experts in the scientific community to curate programming.

One of those scientists is meteorologist and author Michael Mann, who will take part in a September 27 panel discussion on “The Propaganda of Debate” at the Queens Museum.

“We cannot allow agenda-driven oil barons like the Koch brothers to be self-appointed arbiters of what the public is taught about science,” Mann told VICE, adding that he found Koch’s funding of the AMNH’s Dinosaur Wing ironic because “David and his brother Charles are arguably doing more than any other human beings on the planet to return us to the greenhouse gas levels and extreme climate of the age of the dinosaurs.”

Mann is far from the only prominent scientist to be horrified by the museum community’s relative silence on the climate change.

In an April 2010 video, climatologist Joseph Romm walks through the Smithsonian’s David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins and ‘learns’ that human evolution was at its best during times of extreme climate shifts. He suggests that the entire exhibit was a front for denying the potential dangers of climate change—and for boosting the perception that global warming is not only harmless, but maybe even beneficial to humanity.

“The exhibit puts the credibility of the entire Museum of Natural History and science staff on the line,” Romm wrote in an accompanying article. “Either the exhibit should be completely reworked or they should give Koch’s money back so as not to taint this exhibit. Or both.”

It’s interesting that the exhibit doesn’t try to explicitly deny global warming so much as reframe it as a natural aspect of evolution that might have positive effects on the environment—a version of history with which almost any climate scientist in the world would vehemently disagree.

"It’s about what gets funded and what doesn’t get funded," Economopoulos said. "The politics isn’t in the science itself—science is raw data, as close to the truth as you can get. The funding is about how we are interpreting that knowledge to further an agenda. Our museum doesn’t try to obfuscate that fact."

This June, Museum Management and Curatorship editor Robert Janes called for museums to directly address climate change. In a videotaped speech released by Future of Museums, Janes scolded his community for “sleepwalking into the future.”

“We’ve now reached the threshold of 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere for the first time in human history… a dire wake up call for each of us to adopt clean energy technology and reduce our carbon emissions,” Janes warned, accusing science and natural history museums of focusing too much on keeping up with the latest gadgets and not enough on threats to the natural world as we know it.

“No amount of digital technology, gaming, or robotics will be of any use if the biosphere dissolves,” he said.

The Natural History Museum’s grand opening party is this Saturday, September 13 from 5-8pm at the Queens Museum.

Follow Mary Emily O’Hara on Twitter.

In honor of the premiere of my film The Sound and the Fury at Venice and Toronto, here's a test for a short film that was to be based on William Faulkner’s short story "Red Leaves." It's set during the early days of his fictional county, Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, before the characters who populate his famous books took over (the Compsons, the Sutpens, the Bundrens, and the Snopeses).

The story is strange, and a bit of a fantasy: The local Native Americans have purchased African slaves from the white settlers, but the Native Americans have no purpose for the slaves. Their civilization is functional without them. But the Native Americans—and here is the fantasy—have a ritual in which, when the chief dies, they sacrifice his dog, his horse, and his head slave. This kind of ritual sounds more Ancient Egyptian than Native American, but it's a good premise for a story.

In my test, the head slave (here played by Raymond Williams, my old friend and one of my best acting teachers) knows that he is going to be killed. He escapes and is chased through Mississippi by two trackers. The story also involves the incumbent chief—played by Little Bear—who is so large and lazy he's carried on a divan.

I loved the three parallel lines of action: the escaped slave, the trackers, and the chief, and how each perspective has its own energy and shooting style. I made this test before going to film school, and it was shot by the great Doug Chamberlain. Below, check out a snippet from an interview I did with the inimitable artist Douglas Gordon during the Venice Film Festival exactly three years ago.

***

James Franco: Recently, a couple called Praxis asked me to be a part of a project called Invisible Museum. It was their idea. It’s kind of interesting, but I had no real investment in it. They asked if I would contribute a piece to their invisible museum—basically, describe a piece of art that is invisible as if it existed for people to bid on. Conceptually it’s kind of interesting, but I should have asked why they wanted me. I mean, I know why—because they’d get a lot of publicity.

Douglas Gordon: What did you do?

James: My invisible piece was a short film based on a William Faulkner short story called “Red Leaves.” It was a film that I had actually intended to shoot before I went to film school. We wanted to make it, but it got expensive because the Natives live in this washed-up steamboat and I felt we needed a real steamboat. People wanted to turn it into a feature so I could make my money back, but I wanted to stay loyal to the short form. The project just got too expensive to feel good about making it. That was what I did for my invisible piece—I described this unmade film.

But then there was all this bullshit about it, like I was trying to scam people by selling invisible art. The petty commentators didn’t understand that it wasn’t about making money—it was just a conceptual piece, and one that wasn’t even mine! They didn’t understand anything about art and were commenting from a stance of pop-culture bullshit.

That’s my point: In my life as an actor, I have this level of commentary—blogs that comment from the most base level. That is a level that I have to break through if I want to do anything outside of acting and mainstream film. It's something that I always have to face.

Douglas: It’s a really curious thing. I grew up with this idea that everyone’s equal and working class, and if you rise above the working class than you can go on and on and on. I’m super lucky that my mom and dad supported me to go to art school. But then, when you’re at art school, you see people like David Bowie—who I think is a genius—and the reception of his paintings ain’t that good. The elevation of art is so strange.

James: I actually talked to Russell Ferguson about this a lot because I studied with him at UCLA, when I was starting to make my first videos and get away from commercial cinema. Actors, especially actors in mainstream film, are going to bear a lot of criticism. I mean, I’m not asking people to feel bad for me; I’m just saying that it’s the situation I’m in—people are skeptical of celebrity.

Douglas: Which you clearly enjoy.

James: I’ve embraced it now. I actually like this superficial criticism of the work, because in a way it becomes a beautiful reflection of our culture.

Douglas: This may be a terrible question, but what is the work and what is work?

James: I think you're talking about the work as an actor for hire, which is an interpretive kind of work, and work as a director or artist, which is a generative kind of work. I think I have found a way to happily combine both worlds. Even when I need to do the obligatory work of promoting a big-budget studio film, I have found a way to make this part of my personal practice by trying to be as honest as possible. 

My public persona has become part of my work, not that I am actually out trying to get tons of attention—believe me, I’d rather not do all the promotion required for a film, but if I have to, then I am going to make it worthwhile. And really, I don’t have to do too much. I think people are so used to the celebrity mask people wear to keep their private lives safe that when someone tries to take off the mask it is disconcerting. I am just trying to make all aspects of my life worthwhile and to turn the “work” into material that I can use for my work.

Image from Thinspiration Fanzine. Photo courtesy of Laia Abril / INSTITUTE

There are some photographs so unbearable to look at that you can’t take your eyes off them. The images in Laia Abril’s Thinspiration fanzine fit into this category. Her re-photographed pro-ana selfies show girls flaunting angular, emaciated bodies: impossibly wide thigh gaps, ribs straining through skin, jutting hipbones, and concave stomachs.

Laia’s work has focused on eating disorders since 2010. The latest chapter in her project, The Epilogue, is published this month and tells the story of an American girl called Mary Cameron “Cammy” Robinson, who died of bulimia at 26. Through interviews, photographs, and other found materials, the book reconstructs Cammy's life and the aftermath of her death, asking how the illness makes a person self-destruct and how it affects those around them.

I caught up with Laia over the phone to find out more.

VICE: Eating disorders are a big focus of your work. What drew you to this issue?
Laia Abril: It was inspired by personal experience and the fact that there’s a lack of information. If someone’s daughter has bulimia and they don’t see the signs, that girl might die of a heart attack and they’d never know she’d had an eating disorder.

Bulimia is also one of the most stigmatized eating disorders. It’s seen as shameful. My aim was to break these taboos. With photography we’re often documenting what happens in other societies—wars, poverty. I thought, Here’s another epidemic we could try to prevent.

Photo courtesy of Laia Abril / INSTITUTE

For your last publication, Thinspiration fanzine, you re-photographed selfies from pro-ana websites. Why?
Pro-ana sites started around 2000. I remember them from that time, when I was a teenager, but it’s an aspect of eating disorders the media doesn’t pay much attention to. When I started researching them, I thought I’d find images of thin models or actors but there were hundreds of what we now call selfies promoting anorexia. I was shocked.

I decided to photograph them because I wanted to talk about the use of photography. The project is about how I felt when I was looking at those images.

We often think of anorexics hating their bodies but these shots are quite exhibitionist. Did that surprise you?
Knowing lots of people with eating disorders, I struggled with the images. There are so many people who want to get better, and here are these people who want to get worse. Girls on these pro-ana sites say they want to be anorexic. But it’s part of their illness. I think they don’t see themselves as people any more. They show parts of their body—bones, bellies, clavicles—and you can see the process of how they’re losing their identities.

Thinspiration Project exhibited in Barcelona, Spain

Do you think pro-ana websites should be shut down?
The year I started researching these websites there was a news article saying that traffic on them had increased almost 500 percent in that year. In some countries, like France, they made it illegal and they shut down websites. But now the pro-ana movement isn’t just on websites but social media too. You see #proana as a hashtag on Instagram; you see pro-ana Tumblrs. It’s much harder for the authorities to pursue.

Personally, I don’t think that’s the solution. You shut down a website and in an hour you have ten new ones. I’d rather pursue fashion magazines that feature anorexic models on the cover. Thinspiration is much more dangerous when you see it in the mainstream.

Did you have the idea for The Epilogue before meeting Cammy Robinson’s family?
Yes. I knew I wanted to do something about death from eating disorders. Before approaching a family, who would be in pain, I had to be clear about how I would do this. I decided to explain the girl’s story as a puzzle, with the pieces of her life supplied by her loved ones.

I emailed hundreds of eating disorder foundations, at first in the UK, and then in the US because it’s a bigger country so there was a higher probability of finding someone. The UK and US have the highest rates of eating disorders. I found the Robinson family through their foundation, although I didn’t realize at first that it was inspired by their daughter.

Cover of The Epilogue. Photo courtesy of Josef Chladek

How did the family feel about your project?
Jan Robinson [Cammy’s mother] answered my email right away. She uses this foundation as a way of healing and she wanted something good to come out of what had happened to her family. She told me remembering Cammy is one of the biggest joys in her life so she was very open.

The rest of the family were more cautious because they didn’t know me and were worried about going through the pain again. But they’re happy with the book now. I think it’s been a cathartic experience for them.

In The Epilogue, Cammy’s therapist talks about the impact of family pressures on her illness.
An eating disorder develops from more than 50 different triggers. It’s never just one thing. It’s never somebody’s fault. If you completely changed the fashion industry, it doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be eating disorders. Also, it’s not like before when advertising was just in magazines or on TV. Now we’re bombarded with images—on our phones, everywhere. I think it’s about education—trying to get kids to understand that they aren’t just what they look like.

An image of Cammy's scales from The Epilogue. Photo courtesy of Laia Abril / INSTITUTE

In both projects you re-photographed found images. What does it mean to re-photograph? How does the new image relate to the original?
With thinspiration, because the primary images are so vernacular and simple, they don’t always reflect what the girls wanted them to. For instance, they want to show how separated their legs are but they take a picture where you can see the whole of their bedroom or the bathroom or whatever. So I focused in on what they wanted to show. I was curating their vision. Having those pictures in museums, as I have recently, is like an ironic expression of whether that is the ideal of beauty.

The Epilogue is completely different. I didn’t do anything to the found pictures. I photographed the present and the past I could reconstruct by going to her old high school but I can’t photograph her because she’s dead. So the re-photographed material is a tool for storytelling. Thinspiration was a conversation between my photography and their photography. Here it’s an archival process—I collect interviews, I collect my pictures, their pictures, documents.

The Thinspiration images are shocking. Is The Epilogue an attempt to counter that by finding a new visual language to talk about eating disorders?
You sometimes need to shock and sometimes not to shock. With Thinspiration I needed to shock because if you haven’t seen those images you can’t picture how awful they are.

But everyone knows death is tragic. With The Epilogue, I wanted to show Cammy’s suffering and the family’s grieving process. For people to engage with the story, you have to be much more delicate. It’s like photojournalism: it’s fine to show images of people getting killed when you’re denouncing that but if you want people to understand why that’s happening, you need to find a different visual approach.

Thank you, Laia.

You can see more of both projects on Laia’s website.

The Epilogue is published in September by Dewi Lewis Media with art direction  by Ramon Pez.

Follow Rachel Segal Hamilton on Twitter.

Photos by the author

Regardless of your age, class, or location, you probably have struggled to meet new people. In my experience, this fact has proven true for both platonic and romantic relationships. Luckily we live in the age of the glorious and almighty internet, where we can find individuals who are as passionate about weird shit as we are.

Take the Staten Island Pug Meetup.

The group belongs to Meetup.com, a website that serves as the largest network of local groups. With groups like UFO Roundtable and The Fun and Fabulous Girlfriends of NYC, the site offers a clique for everyone. One summer day while perusing the site, I came across the Staten Island Pug Meetup. I love Staten Island and I love pugs, I thought. Although I don’t own a pug or live in Staten Island, I decided to attend one of their meetups anyway.

Like a mom, Jodi Kronheim, the middle-aged organizer of the meetup, welcomed me to her 11th annual pug pool party. She defied Jersey Shore’s stereotype of Staten Island women with glowing, orange skin, treating everyone at the party like a relative. Some guests might as well have been relatives. Kronheim founded the group in 2004 with her husband, as a way to make friends with people who also love pugs. Ten years later, over 200 people belong to the group—including a married couple that met at a meetup. 

“The power of pug love brings people together,” Kronheim told me.

Between the pug swimming races, pug lollipops, and pug-shaped cake, the Staten Island pug pool party was an entertaining event anyone could enjoy.  Luckily for everyone who missed the event, I took these pictures.

Follow Amy Lombard on Twitter. 

Are you a lady tired of living in a man’s world? Are you a man tired of living in a world controlled by a handful of other men? Do you want to fuck capitalism, dismantle the patriarchy, and draw upon your own humanity to create a world that’s sustainable, ethical, and peaceful to live in? If you answered, “Yes” to any of these questions, you might be a Future Feminist, and the Hole might be the place for you.

Right now at The Hole gallery on the Bowery, the Future Feminists collective is unveiling their Thirteen Tenets of Future Feminism. “Tenet activation” performances are held nightly at 8 PM—they started the series on September 11 and it goes until September 27. The collective consists of five, self-identified frontier women artists: Bianca Casady and Sierra Casady of CocoRosie, Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, and performance artists Johanna Constantine and Kembra Pfahler. Featured performers include the likes of Lydia Lunch, Marina Abramović, and Laurie Anderson. 

VICE: Can you describe the Future Feminists collective?
Johanna Constantine (JC): Future Feminists, as a group right now, is consisting of the five of us. We couldn’t find anyone, in our personal lives or outside, to discuss these issues [of feminism] with, because people were saying it’s unnecessary, it’s outdated, and we didn’t feel that that was correct. The words Future Feminist were coined by Antony, and we’ve just kind of applied it to everything we’ve been working on. We’re looking at it as a new wave.

Kembra Pfahler (KP): Dark times require loud voices, and we got together to formulate a very clear message and to make an incantation for these times, to envision a utopia that has not yet been realized. [We are] allowing ourselves to admit that we have dreams that we want to have come true, rather than just pretending or giving up, the way that they gave up in the late 60s when they realized that the revolution would never happen and it was over. If anything’s over, it’s over for the patriarchy.

Recently, your collective took to the Williamsburg bridge and asked passers-by to pose for a photograph with a sign reading, “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE.” Given the current political climate, some might see that as an aggressive, contentious statement. Could you clarify its intention?
JC: Absolutely. It’s a future that we envision for everyone, meaning female systems and female processes and female spiritual principles. That’s the Female that we’re talking about. Also, looking at the past, it’s always been male hierarchies and male systems and male decisions for years and years, and it’s run us into the ground. So, we can look at the past as male and the future as female. 

Antony Hegarty (AH): [In] past incarnations of feminism there’s been a movement towards integrating equal rights for women within the world’s system. We’re not interested in equal participation within male systems. We’re interested in designing and implementing new, feminine systems in order to create a sustainable future, not only for ourselves but for biodiversity and for the future of nature.

Bianca Casady (BC): I also think a lot about this idea that things haven’t been gendered, even though things have been very male-centric, especially with religion and language, with who’s predominantly in the limelight. Basically, we’re all so used to the male image being the common denominator image that it’s also this illusion of neutrality. So when we say "a female world," or "feminize the planet," we actually are looking for restoring the balance. Women have been having to pencil themselves into the male story, and it’s a conditioning process which we’ve even stopped noticing. It’s shocking to suddenly have that shift, to propose that men have to start trying to fit into female archetypes. We’re inviting that process, which is awkward and uncomfortable and something that the planet’s not used to.

Where do you see feminism fitting into this country’s future? In the world’s future?
BC: Your question reminds me of the subject of racism, which comes up a lot. And throughout observing this concept of racism in conjunction with feminism, I started focusing more and more on the idea of racism against the female race. It’s a really touchy subject, of course, but we do have a tenet that talks about setting a global standard which is not partial to any culture. Women need to be treated at this particular standard everywhere, and we can’t make exceptions according to different cultures and different religions. We’re taking a pretty clear stance that women deserve to be treated humanely and ethically and have power over their own bodies.

AH: And equal access to every area of civic and political life.

JC: And also not to be denigrated for our natural qualities. It’s constantly being said that women are too emotional, we’re too soft, and it’s like what, why don’t you check your testosterone? Why are you angry all the time? Why are you aggressively wanting 15 percent more money than this other guy? To be higher on the list on Forbes? Why is that shit important? We’re constantly being pushed down for these natural inequalities that are actually quite valuable. They’re not to be dismissed. They should be cherished and held up as a critical solution, not a weakness.

AH: Empathy, emotionalism, intuition, connectedness to the earth through menstruation—all of these are reasons why women have been disqualified from participating in the rational political conversation. In the past, feminists have been loathe to identify their biological differences or to validate this notion that men and women are different physically or constitutionally, because they’ll only be more penalized as a result of it. Even now, some of our heroes are loathe to use words like feminist to identify themselves for fear it will diminish their access or ability to participate in culture or society. We are not afraid to embrace the differences between men and women, precisely because we want to elevate those primary, archetypal differences in the feminine form and feminine processes as our governing processes.

BC: It’s important to state that we really are anti-neutralist, and it’s because of these feminine qualities. We want to highlight those and promote them and protect them, and if we are trying to operate equally, there is the chance of a sort of diminishing or watering down of those feminine qualities. That would be a huge loss, which is why we’re taking such a particular stance that may sound extreme.

AH: Every man is a boy, was a mother’s son. And every boy has to become accountable again to their relationship with their mother—defer to feminine divine which is the giver to us all in the practical sense and the biological sense. It’s not to say that women innately, or any one individual of us, has something divine or some wisdom over any particular man. It’s just a movement with the consciousness of us as a collective—and as a species.

With regard to this sensitivity and connectedness to the Earth, do you find that technology creates a disconnect, or has it empowered you to explore these themes in new ways?
KP: It’s 2014, the future’s here. We can’t survive and we can’t exist unless we acknowledge that this future that people wrote about in the 60s, the strange, android, computer-ridden, technologically fueled future [is here]. We’re really living that now, and our level of consciousness hasn’t risen to the level of consciousness of technological improvements. Our consciousness is still very turn-of-the-century.

AH: There’s an [Iroquois law] of seven generations that’s very inspiring to all of us, to not take an action or make a development in society or technology that you can’t guarantee won’t have a positive impact on a child in seven generations time, and that’s what’s pushed aside in this race towards technology and capitalism. What we’re looking at is a system to regulate this unbridled, virulent capitalist application of new technologies.

BC: Technology doesn’t have to answer to any part of morality. So in a way, it’s about who’s controlling the technology.

AH: And where’s the regulatory body that has enough power to advocate for the best interests of our species and our planet? Because it seems to be dwindling away.

Finally, if you could distill the Future Feminist ideology down into one message for the men and women of the world, what would it be?
AH: The 13 tenets of Future Feminism, but it’s mutable. There could be more than thirteen.

BC: I keep talking about feminizing the planet. I don’t know if this is new language but it keeps coming out of my mouth.

JC: Feminatus Super Totus! 

The Performance Schedule:

Sunday, September 14: The Factress aka Lucy Sexton, Clark Render as Margaret Thatcher, Laurie Anderson

Wednesday, September 17: Narcissister, Dynasty Handbag, No Bra

Thursday, September 18: Ann Snitow speaks with the Future Feminists

Friday, September 19: Kiki Smith presents Anne Waldman, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Anne Carson

Saturday, September 20: Kembra Pfahler and The Girls of Karen Black

Sunday, September 21: Lorraine O’Grady

Wednesday, September 24: Marina Abramović

Thursday, September 25: Carolee Schneemann, Jessica Mitrani, Melanie Bonajo

Friday, September 26: Terence Koh as Miss OO

Saturday, September 27: Viva Ruiz, Julianna Huxtable, Alexyss K. Tylor

Follow Katherine Tarpinian on Twitter.

Illustration by Nicholas Gazin

VICE’s Art Editor Nicholas Gazin and I shuffled ourselves over to Lincoln Center on a muggy, sweaty 9/11 day to meet one of our heroes. The list of artists I consider to be genuinely heroic is short, but John Waters is indisputably a member of that club by virtue of being the first and the best to explode numerous sacred assumptions about taste, gender norms and authority, to say nothing of the cathartic benefits of watching a drag queen eat a dog turd.

From high art to low humor, the impact of John Waters can be detected everywhere. In its own slick and heteronormative way, mainstream Hollywood humor now takes the lessons of Waters’ films for granted, to the point where it is now difficult to find a popular comedy that isn’t richly scatological.

In recognition of the fact that Waters has so thoroughly gotten under the world’s skin over the course of a mere half century, the Lincoln Center hosted "Fifty Years Of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?" a twelve-film retrospective of his life’s work, along with a collection of films curated by Waters’ called "Movies I Didn’t Make But Wish I Did," which was exactly that. Even better: several of the films we had come to see that day were Waters’ personal prints, some of which had not been projected in twenty five years, and they came with a gentle disclaimer from the management about their neglected condition and the very real possibility that they may not play well or even at all. Fortunately, Multiple Maniacs looked and sounded like a million bucks.

A clip from a crummier version of Multiple Maniacs than the glorious print that was on display at the retrospective.

Photos by Lexi Tannenholtz

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

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

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

So instead of high-fiving everyone at the conference over how awesome hip-hop is, I took the time to ask a bunch of rap's female OGs about gender in hip-hop and the impact of the so-called "white-washing" of the culture. This week we have my very practical conversation with one of the most accomplished entertainment lawyers in the game, Lisa Davis.

During the panel discussion you said that you were, “Like a civil rights lawyer for black people with money.” What do you mean by that?
Lisa Davis: What I mean is that one of the only ways in which African American’s have been able to create wealth in this country is through the creation of intellectual property—music, writing, artwork, things of that nature. Historically, particularly in the entertainment industry, there’s been a practice of people not understanding the business side and therefore not maximizing their wealth. Whether it’s Jimi Hendrix and the way a manager who snatched all kinds of rights from him or jazz musicians who didn’t control their copyright. My feeling was this is an area where black people create wealth. If they are advised and protected, maybe they can keep it.

How does cultural appropriation play into that?
Oh well, [laughs] that’s a huge topic right now. That’s something that as a lawyer, unfortunately I can’t protect—that’s a cultural dynamic that has to do with a larger dynamic in our society. So how does it play into it? I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are an African American songwriter and you’ve written an early rock song. If you don’t control the publishing then when Pat Boone does his cover or Elvis does his cover, you don’t get any money for that. However, if you retain your copyright even though you can be angry about the cultural appropriation, at least you’re profiting from that. The reality is that Elvis’s version of something is going to sell more. Like with “Hound dog,” [Big Mama Thornton] sang it first. If she wrote that and retained the publishing at least she could have continued to profit from it.

Now, like with rock and the blues before, a lot of white artists are making hip-hop—
Iggy Azalea.

Exactly. How do you account for the loss monetary potential of young Black artists if others seem to have so much more commercial appeal?
I don’t know how you account for it. First of all with hip-hop, the biggest consumers are suburban kids who are not African American. So if there’s a woman artist that’s not African American, they’re not going to say well this isn’t our thing. They’re going to say, well this is fun or interesting too. I think it’s just about protecting folks. It’s a very challenging time for anybody to be in the music business, as you’ve heard. But protecting people along with progress so that whatever money they are making they’re able to keep.

How can you protect hip-hop artists?
Genres of music cannot be owned, unlike individual compositions, so there is no legal mechanism to protect rap artists from cultural appropriation. The best “protection” is to have a diversity of critical voices opining on the artistic merit of the music and also making sure that those who are given a platform are knowledgeable about the history of the genre they are critiquing. In terms of hip hop artists’ ability to protect their assets, that comes down to having the right team of lawyers, managers, and business managers who will take affirmative steps to safeguard their assets and maximize their earning potential. No one is immune from market forces, so there is no way to “guarantee” a certain amount of income. But creative managers can look for ways to expand their commercial opportunities and savvy lawyers and business managers will endeavor to help artists keep their money. An example, not from hip-hop, though, is the venture capital fund set up by Carmelo Anthony to invest in tech start-ups. 

As an entertainment lawyer, have you noticed a lack of opportunities for African American artists?
I think that that’s always a problem. I work in film and television and theater and I think there’s always less opportunity for people of color than there has been white artists. That has startlingly been the case. In some ways, because the demographics of the country are changing, that may change in a different, but better direction.

How so?
I think there’s a little buying power of Blacks and Latinos particularly because if you combine Blacks, Latinos, and Asians it’s about 35 to 37 percent of the population. When we talk about people under 18, it’s a majority-minority. So what appeals to that group can potentially sell, like, double platinum.

You’ve worked with artists like Public Enemy and Redman. Have they ever spoken to you about this?
Oh my goodness, yes. But a long time ago, so I don’t want to put anything out there. I think it’s more what you say, not exactly a particular artist, but when you look at Black Twitter you see how we feel about cultural appropriation. People put it right out there.

Follow Lauren on Twitter

Zak visiting his father on Rikers Island in 1991. Photo courtesy of Zak Ebrahim

On November 5th, 1990, El Sayyid Nosair walked into a Manhattan hotel and assassinated Meir Kahane, the ultranationalist rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League. Egyptian-born Nosair was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his crime—the first known terrorist killing in the US by an Islamic jihadist—but subsequently managed to co-mastermind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center from his jail cell.

Zak Ebrahim was seven years old when his father shot Rabbi Kahane dead, and nearly 10 when the bomb went off in the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring over 1,000. Visiting Nosair in prison, a young Zak believed his father’s protestations of innocence, as most of us probably would at an age where your mom’s still buying all your clothes. It wasn’t until years later—when he read the details of the 1990 police raid on his home—that he realized who his father really was, and that he had “[chosen] terrorism over me”.

Zak now tours the lecture circuit promoting tolerance, and recently released a book, The Terrorist’s Son: A Story of Choice, that chronicles his upbringing and describes how he escaped the radical ideology he'd been raised with for a life advocating peace. I caught up with him recently for a chat.

Zak Ebrahim at TED2014—The Next Chapter, Vancouver, Canada. Photo by James Duncan Davidson

VICE: Hi Zak. Please introduce yourself.
Zak Ebrahim: Sure. My name is Zak Ebrahim, and on the 5th of November, 1990, my father assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City. He was then found to have co-masterminded the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. So I’ve been trying to use the experiences growing up [surrounded by] an extremist ideology—and the experiences that helped me come out of that—to preach tolerance and acceptance of people who are different to myself.

What’s your earliest memory of growing up in Pittsburgh?
My very first memory, that I can recall, is our entire family going to Kennywood Park, which, to this day, is still an amusement park. I still have flashes of riding the carousel with my brother and father.

You’ve talked before about visiting a gun range with your father when he was becoming more radicalized. Was it a sudden, noticeable change, or something more gradual?
Until I was around five or six years old my father was a very loving and engaging man. He was very much involved in our family life. He had a great sense of humor. We spent lots of time together. We would go to the park and play baseball and soccer. It wasn’t until I was about six or seven that he started to become more radicalized in his views. He had some negative experiences in his life and began going to this mosque in Jersey City where the “Blind Sheikh” Omar-Abdel-Rahman would often give sermons. He became very involved with a group of men there who would ultimately be responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Along with your father.
Yes. He was found to have co-masterminded the bombing from his cell while he was in prison for the assassination of Meir Kahane.

Did you visit your father while he was in prison?
He maintained his innocence for many years. He was found not guilty for the murder of Meir Kahane, but guilty of assault and weapons charges. So he was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and with that came the possibility of our family possibly being together again. We visited him at Rikers Island in New York, and at Attica Penitentiary.

So he was a part of our lives after he went to jail, but we moved around so much that it eventually became financially impossible for us to visit. So, over the years, the visits became less frequent, as did the phone calls. The last time I saw him face-to-face was probably about 16 or 17 years ago.

What effect did these visits and phone calls have on you at the time?
My life was in complete turmoil. Beyond being bullied literally every day, I was always getting into some kind of physical altercation. I had to transfer schools because I was having so much trouble with bullying. After many years of having the same conversations with him, such as “How are you doing? How’s school? How are things around the house?” I just thought to myself, ‘If you actually cared how your family was doing, why did you choose this terrible path?’ I got fed up with having the exact same conversation with him every week. So that played a big role in disconnecting ourselves from him.

Zak visiting his father in the Attica Correctional Facility, 1994. In the background is the small house where the family stayed together for the weekend. Photo courtesy of Zak Ebrahim

What kind of reaction did you have from your peers after your father’s arrest?
From the very first moment that my father was arrested, it didn’t appear that we were welcome to go back to our community where we lived. We were lucky enough that a private Islamic school in Jersey City offered us scholarships because we had nowhere else to go. Obviously everyone at that school knew who we were, as they were a part of the Muslim community. 

I can understand why, but many people didn’t want to be associated with us, given we were the children of El Sayyid Nosair. So I was ostracised to a certain degree because of that. It kind of settled down until the World Trade Center bombing. At that point we had moved around a few times and kind of escaped, to a degree, from the shadow of our father; in the sense that most people didn’t know who we were by then.

And what was your life at home like during that time?
For many years after my father went to prison, members of the group of men who he was in very heavy contact with—many of whom would later be arrested for involvement in the World Trade Center bombing—would come and visit our house. They would try to be a part of our lives. They knew we had lost our father, and so I suppose they were just trying to honor whatever his legacy may be by watching over his family somewhat. So I was exposed to [the same kind of ideology] quite a bit.

How long did that continue?
Unfortunately, once my mother and father divorced, my mother remarried and my stepfather was also an incredible bigot who often tried to teach me lessons about the outside world. He kept us isolated for many years. I would go from home to school, walk back home, and that would be it. For about three and a half years I didn’t go out anywhere. I didn’t hang out with friends outside of school. I was kept very much in an ideological bubble. It wasn’t until I had some freedom to experience the world that I started to shed a lot of the lessons that I had been taught. [My father] was fond of saying that “a bad Muslim is better than a non-Muslim." The lessons I’d learned from my father about all Jews being evil also carried over with my stepfather.

Zak's TED Talk

Do you remember the moment your opinions started to change?
One of the more influential moments for me was becoming part of an initiative for young people tying to discuss topics centered on youth violence, particularly youth violence in schools. I was at a national youth convention and I was working with a group of kids from the Philadelphia area. About three days into it I realized that one of the kids I became close to was Jewish. I had never had a Jewish friend before. I was surprised, as my whole life I’d been taught that not only could we not be friends, but that we were natural enemies of one another. Immediately I realised that wasn’t true. At the same time I felt that I had done something that I’d been led to believe was impossible. So I felt a sense of pride in that. That was one of the first instances in which I challenged the ideology I was raised in.

You’ve spoken before about the impact Jon Stewart's The Daily Show had on you. What did he force you to engage with specifically?
Due to my isolation, I was always fascinated with the outside world. He made it seem like it was cool to be interested in what was going on in the world, and not just be interested in MTV. In particular, he challenged the ideas of being bigoted towards gay people. Not only that, but he has a way of breaking it down and explaining the implications of having a bigoted ideology.

Finally, why did you write your book? What message are you trying to promote?
The main reason I wrote the book was that I wanted to give people insight into what it was like for a child growing up in this sort of ideology. Moreover, I want to get across the lessons that I learned from the experiences I had that brought me out of this intolerant way of life.

But also it’s very important for me to highlight that, despite being exposed to this ideology that so many people are fearful of, I came out of it promoting tolerance and acceptance of others who are different from myself. If I can come out of that, then what does that say about the vast majority of Muslims in the world who are never exposed to this level of extremism?

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