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

Cry-Baby #1: Michael Harvey and Barbara Moore

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A McDonald's worker didn't put ketchup in a customer's order.

The appropriate response: Going back and asking for ketchup.

The actual response: Two people allegedly shot at the drive-thru window with a BB gun. 

A little after midnight on Tuesday, 40-year-old Michael Harvey and his 29-year-old friend, Barbara Moore, paid a visit to a McDonald's in Anderson, California. According to a report on KRCR, they ordered food from the drive-thru window. Allegedly, the person who prepared their order made the mistake of not including ketchup in the bag. News reports on the incident don't give specifics on what happened next, but the couple reportedly became "disgruntled" enough for restaurant staff to call the cops. 

When police arrived, they discovered that the drive-thru window had been shot twice, causing holes in the glass. Two cars in the restaurant's parking lot were also reportedly shot at. 

Police found the pair at 1:40 AM in the parking lot of a nearby Walmart after recognizing a car matching the description given by workers at the McDonald's. Because where else would you be hanging out at 1:40 AM on a Tuesday after shooting out the windows of a McDonald's?

According to police, Michael was discovered to be on probation and had a felony warrant out for his arrest. Meanwhile, Barbara was found to also be out on probation, and in possession of a counterfeit $100 bill. They were both taken into custody for their outstanding warrants. 

A search of their vehicle turned up three "gas-charged, semi-automatic" BB guns, as well as McDonald's wrappers and a receipt from around the time the window was shot out. I would imagine that makes the police's job pretty easy, evidence-wise. 

Cry-Baby #2: Michael Rapaglia

Screencaps via WMUR9

The incident: A little girl ran over a man's foot on her bike.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: He allegedly slashed her tires.

Earlier this week, an unnamed ten-year-old girl was riding her bike outside her home in Franklin, New Hampshire. 

As the girl rode past her neighbor, 39-year-old Michael Rapaglia, she allegedly ran over his foot. After she did this, witnesses say that Michael told her if she ran over his foot again, he would slash her tires.

The girl's relatives told WMUR9 that she often joked with Michael, so she thought that he'd made the threat in jest. Because she thought he was kidding, the relatives said, she ran over his foot a second time.

When she did this, Michael reportedly followed through on his threat, pulling out a folding knife and stabbing the girl's tire.

According to a neighbor who witnessed the incident, the girl's mother then came out and told Michael he had to buy the girl a new tire. He refused, and police were called.

Michael is currently out on bail, but is not allowed to return to his apartment or go within 300 feet of the girl.

Sgt. Daniel Poirier of the Franklin Police Department told WMUR9 that "We see a lot of different things as police officers, but this one is at the top of the list," without specifying how he orders his list of "different things." 

"That a grown man would actually slash a juvenile's tire, it's kind of unbelievable," he added.

WMUR9 also reported that the Franklin PD is going to buy the girl a new bike, which is probably the nicest thing the police have ever done in this column.

Which of these folks is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll right here:

Previously: A guy who allegedly shot a dog because he was tired of hearing barking vs. a woman who tried to trick a guy into raping someone who outbid her on a house

Winner: The woman who tried to get her enemy raped!!!

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on Twitter

I recently started thinking about Richard Ramirez, the person, as opposed to Richard Ramirez, the notorious serial killer. Not because I sympathized with the Night Stalker, or wanted to in any way humanize what he had done, but because there was something in his extreme behavior that was fascinating. Often, as an actor, I’ve looked inside to see how far I could go with psychotic behavior.  

A performer is asked to sympathize with the part he plays, suspending judgment about the character while he is playing it. That is how actors as accomplished and humane as Sir Ian McKellen, Tom Cruise, or Kenneth Branagh can play Nazis, Macbeth, or Iago, and why Hopkins could play Hannibal Lecter or Denzel Washington could play the corrupt cop in Training Day. If Ralph Fiennes signaled the audience to tell them what he really felt about his Nazi officer in Schindler’s List, he would have undermined his portrayal and diminished the impact of the movie.

It was from my place as an actor that I began thinking about Ramirez. His drive to murder came from a variety of places. First, from childhood experiences, especially witnessing his Vietnam veteran cousin kill his wife. Later, Ramirez’s drug use and interest in satanic religious practices pushed him over the edge into violence. Like most serial killers, his motives seem sexuality- and power-based. He wanted to dominate his victims—that domination turned him on. 

After breaking into a home, killing the men in the house, and tying up the women, Ramirez would usually rape his victims, often several times. His murders also had a practical purpose, since he would rob his victims. In fact, he started out as a burglar, and that is why his method of attack was to break into homes and murder people in their beds. Although he always hoped for young women, he frequently happened upon elderly couples. 

Ramirez would listen to AC/DC’s album Highway to Hell on repeat while driving around the Los Angeles area looking for victims. He believed that he was the devil’s favored son, although he had stopped participating in organized Satanism at that point. Ramirez’s murders were pleasing to the devil and, in return, Ramirez wouldn’t be caught or killed. 

It’s a big leap, but I can relate a little to Ramirez’s feelings. I would never try to condone what he did, or would ever be interested in a project that tried to sympathize with him, but I wanted to examine my own feelings to see how they matched up with Ramirez's. I didn’t try to humanize him as much as I tried to demonize myself. I've also felt feelings of repression, the need for power—especially sexual power. I’ve felt hurt and shunned and wanted to lash out in return.

Ramirez was shaped by his culture, his sense of style, and his ideas about his role as a killer. These are things that were given definition by thriller films and by relationships depicted in sitcoms and pop culture. All of these things help weave the fabric of what the norm is. Bands like AC/DC can react against this norm in the realm of music, and Ramirez could react against it in the real world.

That is the big difference. AC/DC was playing bad boys for entertainment’s sake, but Ramirez brought it into the real world with real consequences for people’s lives. In a way, murder came to define him. Who was he as a person other than a murderer? He became a monster in the public consciousness and in his own mind.

These poems are an attempt to fuse Ramirez’s life with lessons from my youth, when TV shows taught me what love and the good life looked like, and then I felt disappointment when my own love life didn’t conform to these models. The feelings of a rejected or shy or insecure young man can be intense. They can provoke frightening emotions that feel as intense as murder.

I am trying to aestheticize extreme emotion—not to celebrate a killer like Ramirez in any way, but to break from the normal forms of representation that are part of the problem in the first place, like movies, books, songs, and TV shows.

1. Black Death

When I put on the mask of Ramirez
I can drive through these poems
Like a Satanic killer cruising down
The 1980s Los Angeles Freeways

At night, in a stolen car, high on speed,
Highway to Hell on the stereo.
My baseball cap: On. My high tops,
Size twelve: On. My trench coat, black: On.

I once was a robber, now I’m a robber
Of souls. Think about it, and nightmare:
You wake; I’m over you, your wife:
Next to you, a gun in your face, you’re dead.

You see, I’ve snuck into your house,
It was so isolated, on your quiet street,
No one noticed as I crossed the street,
Stealthy as the Angel of Death, my coattails

Spread like black wings—you see,
There was a marking on your door,
But instead of lamb's blood, an invisible
Sign, that only I could read, it said: victims.

I’ve killed you. I spend hours with your wife.

2. California Legend

There is nothing cool about murder,
Except when it’s in a poem,
Or a movie, then it’s something else,
It’s not killing people, it’s killing ideas.

Richard Ramirez is dead, he died
On death row, a year ago,
He was a California legend,
“The Nightstalker,” who haunted

The LA landscape with the specter
Of his threat: the tall intruder
Who would spend hours with victims,
Won by the lottery of his instincts,

Sometimes young, sometimes old,
As old as eighty, my grandmother’s age,
Raped and killed, not for their bodies,
Wrinkled and valueless, but for the power

Over them he wielded, in the dark, the two,
Alone. And then caught, and given a face,
And the famous picture in the courtroom,
Pentagram on his palm, devil in his eyes.

A fool beyond the pale, and now a legend.

3. Like a Virus

There are those crazies—Ramirez
Himself, with his AC/DC fetish—
Who will use culture to shape
The demeanor of their evil.

Don’t use these poems faces,
Use these poems like equations
In Math, and interpretations
In English to decipher a way out.

Think about the darkness a min,
In order to see through the façade
Of imprisoning light. We’re all
Trapped in houses and things,

Lined up and ready to interface,
Like a programed set of computers,
And then here comes the killer, down
The freeways, and into our towns,

Like a virus, ready to corrupt order
And put everyone on the defensive
Because someone has taken fate
Into his own hands, and shook, shook,

Shook! Fuck that guy who shot Lennon.

4. Satan Out of His Shell

The capture of Ramirez was comic
And just. He had returned to LA
On a bus after a bad visit to his bro
In Arizona or New Mexico, all the cops

Were waiting, because he had been
Identified, but they were all watching
The outbound busses, so Richard
Just walked through the downtown

Greyhound station behind the backs
Of half the police force and into a bodega
To buy some cigarettes, when,
An old Spanish lady called out: “El Diablo!”

One the front page of the papers in the rack:
His face. He ran. First across the freeway,
His old vein of death, and through the heat,
To, by God and by right, a Latin neighborhood,

Where first he tried to steal a car, and then
Another, and then was hit over the head
With a steel rod. He puttered out on his last
Bit of energy, depleted by the sun and loss

Of blood, hissing at the ladies as he passed.

A scene from "Exhibit B" (via)

Priscilla Adade-Helledy is a young black woman living in London. She graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) two years ago and now deals with the myriad trials faced by every young actress: people asking you to work for free. But there's less work thanks to arts funding cuts and having to decide whether it’s really worth paying $400 for head shots when your roommate actually has a pretty decent camera.

Another problem Priscilla confronts is the lack of good roles for black actors—and black actresses in particular—in British film, theater and TV.  So, a few months ago, she was excited to get a call about a gallery-based installation show at the Barbican that explored the legacy of European colonialism and was specifically looking for performers of color. She got the part, undertook the three-day rehearsal process, and prepared for opening night.

But the show never opened.

Protesters outside the opening night of "Exhibit B" (Photo courtesy of Zita Holbourne)

Just as the performance was beginning on Tuesday night, a crowd of around 150 anti-racism protesters gathered outside the entrance to The Vaults in Waterloo. They beat drums, shouted slogans, and did all the usual stuff protesters do. Then the atmosphere changed; the protesters reportedly forced their way through the security barriers, blockading the performers in and the audience out. The Barbican representatives freaked out and promptly cancelled the entire week of performances, saying they “could not guarantee the safety of performers, audiences and staff." Priscilla and her fellow performers were confused, scared and distressed; the protesters were jubilant; and the section of keyboard crusaders who usually concern themselves with this sort of thing totally lost their shit.

This storm had been brewing for a while. From the moment the piece, "Exhibit B," had been announced, a section of the black activist community had denounced it as a racist work of colonial exploitation. A blogger named Sara Myers started a change.org petition calling on the Barbican to withdraw the piece, stating that, “We, as black African people, do not need to be reminded or re-brainwashed into thinking we are less than. To camouflage this assault behind the mask of a ‘respectable’ institution such as the Barbican is tantamount to mental terrorism.” To date, this petition has gathered just under 23,000 signatures.

So where does the outrage stem from? What does a piece of Barbican-curated performance art have to do to become an act of “mental terrorism?"

The problem people had is that "Exhibit B" takes some of its aesthetic cues from the 19th Century “Human Zoos," in which African natives were paraded around Europe and the US in ethnographic displays, not unlike those weird vignettes at the Natural History Museum. Obviously, the entire concept of this type of “show” is totally grotesque, raising massive issues around visions of “the other” and the colonial gaze.

And it is exactly those issues that the artist, Brett Bailey, claims he’s attempting to address in the piece. Bailey is a white South African who grew up under Apartheid and has gone on an obvious personal journey exploring conflicting narratives of race, privilege and history. He is described by the South African critic Ashraf Jamal as “…our greatest theatre director, hauntologist, mesmerizer."

When we met a day after the furor of opening night, Bailey explained that "Exhibit B" consists of 13 tableaux-vivants, each featuring one or two performers standing absolutely still, whose only instructions are to never break eye contact with the audience. The “colonial gaze” is returned and subverted. The tableaus themselves reflect various horrors perpetrated in the name of racial differentiation, both colonial and contemporary. For instance, two of the “modern” stages deal with immigration and asylum, and are titled “Found Objects." Referring to a living, breathing person in front of you as “object” is intentionally jarring, and each tableau is accompanied by an explanation of its historical context and a list of its components. Crucially, the last item on each list is “spectators." The audience are explicitly framed within the work, forcing them to confront their own complicity.

A scene from "Exhibit B" (via)

While Bailey insists that the core question of "Exhibit B" is “how do you bring dignity to this person from whom dignity has been stripped," much has been made of whether he, as a white man, has the right to address these questions. Writing in the Guardian, Kehinde Andrews accuses the show of “fawning over the naked and prostrate black body” (two of the performers are topless) and of reproducing “the idea that black people are passive agents to be used as conduits for white people to speak to each other."

And here lies the real problem in most of the discussions of this piece. Thus far, "Exhibit B" has been shown in 12 cities, meaning around 170 black performers have made a conscious, informed decision to participate in the work. For all the vitriol directed against Brett Bailey by the boycott campaign as an “insidious white liberal," he isn't really the point of interest in this discussion. The point of interest is Priscilla.

Over an extensive interview, Priscilla told me she’s furious that "Exhibit B" has been shut down, and was emphatic that participating in the piece was a profoundly moving, empowering experience for her. “I felt real investment in this work, and ownership over my role,” she said. “Sometimes you come across a piece and just go, ‘That’s it! That’s exactly what I want to say.’ We all really saw this as a journey, as a way of changing things. But also, for me, I learned a lot about my own identity—like, I was born in Brussels and I never even knew the last Human Zoo was in Brussels, in 1958.”

I asked her about her reaction to finding out the piece had been shut down. “The first thing was I tried to find words, but I came out in tears. In all my experiences of racism I’ve never actually had someone say to me, ‘You can’t do your art.’ We were being totally unvoiced by the people who said they were anti-racists. It was really… umm… depressing.”

Protesters outside the opening night of "Exhibit B" (Photo courtesy of Zita Holbourne)

Later, I did telephone interviews with Sara Myers—who started the online petition against the piece±and Zita Holbourne, co-Chair of Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts, one of the key organizations backing the boycott. I told them about the unedifying situation of a young black woman saying she felt denied a voice by other, older black women, and asked them what they would say to Priscilla. Sara Myer’s response was telling: “Nothing.”

“A young black woman has just told you she feels you’ve denied her voice, and your response is really ‘Nothing’?"

“Well, I’d say now she knows how our ancestors felt.”

“But she’s saying she feels you denied her voice.”

“I didn’t deny anyone’s voice. I didn't shut the show down. The Barbican did that—the Barbican silenced her, not Sara Myers. We just banged drums and protested.”

Confusingly, before she’d told me this, Myers had announced her campaign’s victory on Facebook with the line: “We did it. And our ancestors are proud.”

Many of the other performers echo Priscilla’s sentiments. Anne Mora stated, “I invited a friend—a black African and a scholar in African studies—to the show. I knew he could deconstruct this piece every which way, and I wanted his opinion. Afterwards, he said, ‘Everything I am trying to do in my work was presented in this exhibition.’ I have never felt prouder.”

A scene from "Exhibit B" (via)

So what happens now that the show has been cancelled? One thing’s for sure: 14 actors won’t get to perform a piece they believed in at the Barbican.

But the rest of us will only ever be able to wonder what all the fuss was about. The first question I asked both Sara Myers and Zita Holbourne was which performance of "Exhibit B" they had seen to make them so passionate about it. They both replied that they had never actually seen the piece and had based their judgements on pictures and videos. This isn’t the politics of representation—it’s the politics of representation of representation.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe "Exhibit B" is an awful, racist horror. The problem now is none of us will ever know, because we’ll never get to see it.

And there’s the rub. While everyone involved in the boycott absolutely insists that they weren’t censoring Brett Bailey or his art, denying freedom of expression is an act of double violence. You do violence to those who want to speak, but also to those who want to hear. You may have loved to see this piece and decided for yourself whether or not it was worthwhile. But now you can’t because some people decided you weren’t grown up enough to make up your own mind. And that sucks.

At the time of writing, the No. 2,678 bestseller on amazon.co.uk is Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. This is massively irritating, as it’s a good 6,000 places above my own book, but it is an important historical document that should be read. Outrageous, yes, but very important. 

All too often fundamental principles express themselves as clichés. But when it comes to freedom of expression—both to see and to hear—one must ultimately echo Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s summation of the French philosopher Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Rotherham Interchange

The names of grooming victims and the security guard have been changed for their protection.

In the center of Rotherham, England, is the Interchange, a modern glass concourse that serves as a nexus for the buses, taxis, and trains that crisscross the town. Rotherham’s sex gangs used the Interchange to recruit victims and transport them to waiting clients. According to the Alexis Jay report, which said 1,400 young girls were abused over a period of 16 years, within the well-lit and sterile corridors of the Interchange, school children “ran a gauntlet” of “drug dealers, addicts, and people involved in a range of criminal activity.”

“The C block is where the buses to the villages go. Very, very few people use that part of the Interchange," said victim Emma Jackson,  It’s always very quiet.” The deserted terminal provided the perfect hunting ground for predatory sex gangs.

Emma claims that in 2003 she was sexually assaulted on C block, gang-raped, and then sold for sex. Eventually, she broke down, told her family, and gave a statement to the police. She gave them a collection of semen-stained, bloody clothes that she had been too ashamed to even wash. However, this important evidence was lost somewhere on the way from Emma’s home to the police station. Eventually, the police gave Emma £140 ($230) for her ruined clothes. A second allegation of rape led nowhere as the Crown Prosecution Service decided that there wasn't enough evidence to proceed with the case.

All of this was unknown to James Cole, who was 19 years old at the time and had just started working at the Interchange as a security officer. The police didn’t bother to ask if he had seen anything suspicious the night Emma was first raped, or to tell him to be on the lookout in the future.

But by 2005, Cole was well aware that there was something disturbing taking place around the town center—in the bus station, marketplace, and surrounding deserted alleyways. He said that “Asian lads were taking advantage—using—young teenage girls for sex. The girls were being passed around but it seemed almost as though it was a collective agreement that this is what would happen.” Added Cole, “I got the impression that they enjoyed terrorizing [the girls]. Lots of verbal abuse, name-calling—'slag,' 'bitch'—demands for oral sex, spitting at them. Girls would come to us and say they were being followed.”

James Cole

There is a permanent sadness in Cole's eyes, which often fill with tears as he describes his experiences. “The impact on me has been massive,” he says. He pauses and takes a deep breath, hangs his head, and his voice drops to a hesitant whisper. “It’s destroyed me in a sense. Seeing the assaults, the abuse, and the cavalier manner in which these men got away with this. It’s tarnished and almost burnt a hole in my soul. They were just allowed to act like hyenas in the chicken hut.” Cole says that throughout 2005, large groups of drug dealers and grooming gangs fought it out on the platforms. He reported incidents to the police and the South Yorkshire Transport Executive but, he says, “Whatever I reported went into a black hole.” His bosses asked him to draft a child protection policy for the Interchange, which he did, but it gathered dust in a drawer.

In February 2006, a serious assault on Lauren, a 16-year-old girl, sickened Cole. He filed a witness statement to the police that claimed that an Asian man had tried to force Lauren to give oral sex to one of the gang and she had refused. He recalled, “She spat in his face and he ordered the gang to assault her in retaliation.”

Lauren was beaten senseless. According to the report, she was cornered between a marble screen and revolving door by four Asian men and a white man. She had no escape. As one punched her in the face, another was kicking her in the body. When the first two had finished, the white male “went in and punched her in the face and threw her to the floor.” Another man dragged Lauren off the floor and sent her crashing down again, rendering her unconscious. He then stamped on her face. Another man then entered the fray and continued to kick and punch the motionless young girl.

Cole said, “I thought they were going to kill her. We had it all on CCTV and it was very, very clear. I begged her to speak to the police,” who arrived at the scene 45 minutes later. Lauren’s attackers were all known to the cops and security staff, yet no prosecutions followed.

Cole explained, “I don’t know if it was because she was intimidated, or scared or just blasé. I tried to explain to her that males don’t have the authority to do this kind of shit.” But it seems that in Rotherham, they did. The victim didn't speak to the police. Cole says that months after the incident occurred, police returned the recording to the CCTV operator who accidentally dropped it and stood on it, destroying important evidence of the gang’s activities.

In August 2010, the Interchange suspended Cole after he made a complaint about the conduct of police at the Interchange. His employers offered him an out-of-court settlement, which he decided to accept and move on without seeking legal actual against them.

A few months later, in November 2010, Cole was reading his local paper, the Doncaster Star, over lunch. There it was: Five men had been convicted of child sex exploitation in Rotherham. Cole was shocked. Two of the men named, Umar Razaq and Adil Hussain, had been involved in the incident with Lauren years earlier. Cole said, “I felt physically ill. I went to the toilet and I shit myself.” When he got home he googled the story. As soon as the images came up, he realized that the men were part of the same gang responsible for the sexual violence in the town center and selling Emma into sexual slavery.

Appalled that it had taken so long for anyone to be punished, but with his convictions about what was happening reinforced, Cole began a personal campaign to highlight the links between child sexual exploitation and the gang culture embedded at Rotherham Interchange. Cole is deeply affected by his experiences, wracked with guilt that he should have done more. But he tried his best—documents show that Cole contacted every agency that had a statutory responsibility for safeguarding children and young people in Rotherham at the time, and others. A long trail of correspondence shows Cole’s concerns were ignored by the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into Child Sex Exploitation, the Labour Party, and Children’s Services, the Safeguarding Board, and South Yorkshire Police.

In 2010, Cole emailed the Strategic Director for Children’s Services at Rotherham Council, Joyce Thacker, and Paul Lakin, who replaced Shaun Wright in Children’s Services. (Lakin is now leader of Rotherham Council.) Thacker took Cole’s concerns to Rotherham’s Local Children’s Safeguarding Board (LCSB). Its manager, Ailsa Barr, dismissed the claims as “exaggerated.” Confidential documents show that Lakin agreed with Cole and suggested that a town center child protection policy was required, just as Cole had requested in 2005. But he and Thacker allowed the complaint to be delegated to Streetpride—an agency responsible for dealing with garbage and litter.

In 2011, Cole found himself unable to sleep knowing what had happened. He approached the Coalition for Removal of Pimping (CROP), a Home Office–funded charity that supports the families of victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) across the UK. CROP provided support services to parents in Rotherham, and had built up a comprehensive picture of exploitation within the town. A CROP worker recorded Cole’s evidence and told him that the information would "contribute to national policy." The charity told him that they intended to take the matter up with Rotherham services but Cole never received any feedback.

Shaun Wright, former South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner

In 2012, Wright was running as a Labour Party candidate for local Police and Crime Commissioner, despite having resigned over serious weaknesses in Children’s Services just two years earlier. (Wright is now infamous for how long he took to resign following the Alexis Jay report.) In August 2012, Cole—a loyal and passionate member of the Labour Party—raised concerns that Wright was an unsuitable candidate for the role because of his tarnished record in tackling CSE. The letter he wrote, which was copied to Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, warned that Wright’s conduct “was bringing the Labour Party into disrepute.” Labour’s regional office brushed him off. Labour has since claimed that the party couldn’t have known about Wright’s failings when Miliband endorsed him.

In the bitter 2012 Rotherham election, Cole supported the Respect Party candidate, prominent British Muslim Yvonne Ridley, who pushed grooming to the top of the political agenda. The Labour candidate, Sarah Champion, won and Cole was suspended from the party for supporting Ridley. He later wrote to a number of Labour politicians, including the member of Parliament for the nearby Don Valley, Caroline Flint, to say that he was glad to have been expelled, saying, “I can't and won't be complicit in anything illegal or immoral.”

Cole then wrote to Champion to tell her that she needed to get her hands dirty and speak out. Cole told Champion, “I was warning about people in that gang in 2005—[Rotherham Council] ignored these concerns.” Champion assured him that she believed that “we have a strong system in place."

Less than a year ago, Cole was compelled to write again to Joyce Thacker and the LCSB again asking what action was being taken to stop the drug use, sexual acts, and other activities that continued to take place around the Interchange. Nothing was done once again—until the Jay Report was published.

A few days ago, Cole was surprised to receive a call from Paul Lakin to invite him to a meeting in the council offices. Cole says skeptically, “It’s almost as though I’m important now.” When the scandal broke, Cole took no satisfaction in knowing that he had been right to kick up a fuss and not let it go. Wright and Thacker have both since resigned, but Cole is disgusted that it has taken this long for anything to happen. He says, “Now we know to what extent Rotherham has become some kind of ghettoized brothel. I can’t believe it. It's absolutely insane. Why is it no one believed me?”

MATTE magazine is a photography journal I started in 2010 as a way to shed light on good work by emerging photographers. Each issue features the work of one artist, and I shoot a portrait of him or her for the issue's cover. As photo editor of VICE, I'm excited to share my discoveries with a wider audience. 

Hobbes Ginseberg is a 20-year-old Los Angeles-based photographer who doesn't want to make a big deal about their gender but prefers the pronouns she or they. They moved to Seattle after completing high school, and a year and a half after that followed their dreams to Hollywood. We met when I was in LA visiting artists on official VICE business last month, and I was immediately struck by Hobbes's alert, inquisitive presence. After having known each other for no more than five minutes, we decided we should work together on an issue of MATTE magazine to be released at the New York Art Book Fair this week at MoMA PS1, and went to the roof of the hotel, where I made the above cover portrait. I only had four frames left on my roll of film, but somehow each picture turned out to be interesting. Hobbes is someone who uses their self-image as their art, so this wasn't actually that surprising. A mix of politically engaged self-portraiture in photography in the tradition of Catherine Opie, Cobain-scented soft grunge internet phenomena, and something indescribably glamourous and completely their own, Hobbes's Selfies made me want to find out more about them.

VICE: How did you start taking pictures?
Hobbes Ginsberg: I used to do a lot of street photography. Taking pictures started for me on a trip to New York in the summer of 2010 and I had this "professional” point-and-shoot camera that I borrowed from a friend. I started taking photos of all the people I saw on the street who interested me visually. I had a vague idea of what street photography was at that point from deviantART, and on that trip I saw an exhibition by Henri Cartier-Bresson and some other old guy I dont remember. It took off from there. I did a lot of street work in Nicaragua.

When did you start taking pictures of yourself?
About two years ago I stopped shooting outside for a long time, and felt a need to turn inward so I just took a ton of selfies. It was easier for me to try new things that way. I borrowed some lights from the yearbook team at my school, and thats how I first got into studio work.

What kind of role does taking pictures of yourself play in your life?
In terms of my oeuvre, most people care the most about my selfies, and its what cemented my current aesthetic. It also the work I make that is the most cathartic for me. I get into these moods where I feel really shitty, and the way to fix it is to take photos.

There seems to be some element of performing for the camera—does the need to make new selfies ever effect choices you make about how you present yourself? 
I like this question. It made me think about something I hadn't before. Theres a definite connection between the performance of the photos and how I present myself IRL. I play things up in photos because its a safe space to experiment, to do crazier makeup or outfits and to take the styles and vibes I'm interested in to the next level. But I also like to think of them as a documentation. Whenever I get a new hairstyle or a new piece of clothing I'm really into, that will prompt a selfie. I think the need to be constantly changing up my look is related to the photographic process but not an effect of it. My girlfriend says its the other way around, though, so who really knows. They are undoubtedly intertwined.

You're very active on Tumblr—how do you feel about releasing these pictures of yourself to such a wide audience?
Having my photos seen and shared is just as important to me as the process of making them. I post everything to my Tumblr, for better or worse. I love the attention though—I want my work to be seen by as many people as possible. I feel like this method has also made my work more polititcal. In a lot of ways its a part of this new collection of work by young women and minorities who are using this space to define and empower themselves. I like being a part of that movement. 

How do you define your gender? It seems, like that is one of the subjects at play in the work. 
I identify as queer and use she/they pronouns. I wrote a whole thing about that on my blog.

Dealing with gender identity is definitely a part of my work, in the same way that it is inherently a part of myself. The selfies are about documentation and about depression, and about beauty and positivity and all of the personal issues people deal with. I create them for myself, and gender comes along with that organically, but I am not trying to “say” anything about it. I like that my work can be important for visibility and for the success of queer artists but its important for me that the work is seen through a broader lens than just “gender.”

Do you see this as a lifelong project?
I hope I do it for a long time. I really love portraits of older women, and I really admire long-term dedication, but to be honest I can’t even fathom what lifelong would mean to me at this point.

Hobbes Ginsberg is a Los Angeles-based dreamer. See new work on Hobbes's blog.

Puchase physical copies of issue 26 of MATTE magazine featuring pictures by Hobbes Ginsberg on mattemagazine.org, or at Printed Matter's New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 this weekend.

Michael White in the early 1970s. All photos courtesy of Michael White unless otherwise stated

How do you begin to tell the story of a man who’s spent his life telling the stories of others? I'm sitting on the floor of impresario Michael White’s home in London's fashionable Westbourne Grove, sifting through an endless collection of photo albums and trying to work out the answer. 

“I have 20,000 photographs of people. I only like to take pictures of people, not places,” says Michael, casually ignoring the fact that the “people” he’s talking about happen to be some of the most iconic figures from the past four decades of popular culture.

Bruce Anderson, Margaret Thatcher, Dennis Thatcher, Naomi Watts

Here’s a picture of a young Bob Geldof holding a pair of Easter eggs; there’s a photo of Jack Nicholson flexing his muscles by a pool; a few pages down, Naomi Watts, conservative columnist Bruce Anderson, and Margaret Thatcher are leafing through books next to a Christmas tree. On his mantelpiece there’s a tiny framed picture of Kate Moss with Michael’s son in her lap, taken on vacation sometime in the 1990s.

“Michael White is the most famous person you’ve never heard of,” says actress Greta Scacchi in The Last Impresario, an upcoming documentary about his life. You might not have heard of him, but there’s no doubt you’ll be familiar with his work.

Michael White, Susan Sarandon, Boy George

Having basically discovered men like John Cleese—as well as introducing women like Yoko Ono and Pina Bausch to Britain—he’s had a hand in shaping the sensibilities of both your generation and your parents’. Meanwhile, his productions Oh! Calcutta, The Rocky Horror Show and Polyester liberated the concept of camp and elevated it to a mainstream aesthetic.

As profiled in The Last Impresario, Michael White is, despite his impressive social life, remarkably shy and not particularly interested in talking about himself. The Michael I’ve come to know over the past month, is a heavily asthmatic 78-year-old man I wish I’d met ten years ago—before all the parties I’d love to have been invited to took a toll on his health.

Michael White at the Electric Cinema in August 2014. Photo by Jake Lewis

I first met Michael in August at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, there to interview him about the UK release of The Last Impresario. Indeed, I hadn’t heard of him before reading the promo email, and chances are I wouldn’t have because I’m prone to deleting PR emails before I’ve even opened them. But the mention of The Rocky Horror Show grabbed my attention; I saw a (possibly not amazing) production of the show in Athens when I was 16, and its shamelessness scandalized me in all the right ways.

So along I went to the documentary’s press preview, realizing during the screening that basically everything I like had been made possible by Michael White.

Jack Nicholson

The film begins at the opening of the 2010 Cannes festival, where director Gracie Otto noticed that “everyone gravitated towards an elegant old man holding court at the center of this huge party.”

The next 90 minutes or so are a narration of his life and an analysis of his character, based largely on a series of interviews with some pretty influential people—John Waters, Yoko Ono, Kate Moss, music producer Lou Adler, John Cleese, actor Wallace Shawn, and the Icelandic artist Erró—to name a few.

I guess that was Otto’s way of telling Michael’s story—for a directorial debut, her list of characters is pretty fucking impressive.

Anna Wintour, John Galliano

Then again, maybe it was White's character that had inclined all these personalities to talk. I wanted to see for myself how the magnetism described in the film comes across in person. So we found ourselves sitting on a red leather couch at the back of a theater, trying to have a conversation. His ability to talk has been severely impaired since an almost fatal stroke in 2005, and I have a heavy foreign accent, so communication shouldn’t have been easy. Yet, by the end of the day, I was in some kind of love.

But Michael, who’s been married twice, doesn’t believe in monogamy. He says, “It’s human nature to desire ‘the new’.” In the film, he’s described by both friends and ex-lovers as a playboy—though more funny than suave. A guy who embraces women and is able to spot that special something in someone. According to Vogue EIC Anna Wintour, he was the first person to talk to her about Kate Moss.

Kate Moss, Michael White and his youngest son, Ben

“I’m the best person to invite to a party,” he tells me. “Because I will always come with a pretty girl.”

And yet you’ve stayed friends with all your ex-girlfriends, I respond. How did you manage to keep all these women devoted to you for so long?

Jerry Hall, Helmut Newton

He says this is a question he can’t answer but I think I can: He’s fun. He came to our first meeting wearing a blue embroidered jacket, tartan pants, and tennis shoes, and told me I “dress well.” I asked about the parties he hosted and attended in his heyday, and he told me the best one was the opening of Studio 54, despite the fact he couldn’t remember anything about it.

Bob Geldof

He suggested I check out his photographs from the night instead, so I gave him my number and three days later he got in touch. I wasn’t really expecting the call, but I should have been; Michael is a genuine social creature—one of those people whose existence seems to be reliant on human interaction.

Since then, every time I’ve met him he’s listened carefully and taken the time to talk to me about all the places he’s seen. He uses very few words, but those he manages to utter say a lot.

Meg Matthews, Noel Gallagher, Lisa Moorish

Michael was born in Glasgow in 1936 to a relatively affluent family, but was sent to boarding school in Switzerland at the age of seven. There, he learned how to speak French—and later German and Italian—simply because none of the other boys spoke English. He studied at the Sorbonne and his first theater job was as an assistant to the legendary impresario Peter Daubeney.

“Peter was working on the World Theatre Season festival at the time, which brought foreign plays to London. I saw Comédie-Française, the Berliner Ensemble… it made me want to keep on watching.”

Naomi Campbell

Recalling those early days, he’s delightfully unapologetic about misbehaving. “My first play was The Connection in 1961,” he says. “It’s by Jack Gelber and it’s about a group of drug-addicted jazz musicians waiting for their dealer. Theater then was censored by Lord Chamberlain, and in The Connection the actors pretended to inject themselves with heroin.”

Michael White, Andrew Lloyd Webber

A series of similarly controversial projects followed, including Son of Oblomov with comedian Spike Milligan; the Cambridge Circus revue with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, David Hatch, Bill Oddie, Chris Stuart-Clark, and Jo Kendall; and Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta!, which featured the greatest amount of nudity audiences of the time had seen, possibly even in their private lives.

The crowds kept on coming for the next 20 years or so, both to the theater and subsequently the screens. There was The Rocky Horror Show and its film adaptation; A Chorus Line; Annie; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; My Dinner with Andre; Polyester; The Comic Strip Presents; Widow’s Peak; even 1990 comedy Nuns on the Run.

Roman Polanski, Anjelica Huston

Does he have a favorite? “I love all my productions, even those that didn’t do well. I don’t like to focus on the bad stuff.”

That doesn’t mean the disappointments have been few. On the contrary; in addition to a succession of flops—like the New York staging of Barry Humphries’ Housewife Superstar—Michael famously lost the rights of The Rocky Horror Show to Lou Adler and was later forced to sell a vast amount of his personal archive to survive bankruptcy. Still, the party carried on for a while, until it all caught up with him in a series of strokes.

Hunter S. Thompson

In The Last Impresario, Kate Moss maintains that Michael “probably goes out more than me these days,” but my impression is that, in the past few years at least, he’s gradually retired from public life. And it’s obvious he’s not OK with it. He usually cuts our meetings short saying he’s tired, but calls a few days later to arrange another.

Jack Nicholson, Dodi Fayed

The walls of his one-bedroom home are covered with posters of his work, and every other surface is consumed by photographs of his friends and family. He didn’t go to Cannes this summer, which had been a lifelong habit of his, but will be spending this winter enjoying his second ex-wife Louise’s garden in California.

Michael White in London, 1983

Back in April, Michael was presented with the Olivier Award for Lifetime Achievement, but remains “very unprejudiced. People of my generation tend to look down on new work, or say young people don’t take risks, but I don’t think anything was better before or now. I think there will always be good people doing good things.”

I trust him on that. If there’s anyone to convince you that cynicism is for losers, it’s Michael White.

The Last Impresario is out now in UK theaters and On Demand.

Follow Elektra on Twitter

Half-Life's Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance. 

“Half-Life 3 confirmed!” is one of those memes some internet people never get tired of: the joke is, you see, that Half-Life 3, perhaps the most anticipated video game of all time, is never going to come out. Mind you, Valve deserve japes like that. The famed game developer insisted on making one of the most beloved first-person shooters ever before announcing that they would come out with shorter follow-up episodes. But we only got two, and the last installment ended on a cliffhanger so unfair that George RR Martin would put down his pen in embarrassment if he saw it.

Unlike Game of Thrones fans, though, Half-Life fans have been waiting seven years for closure, and it isn’t on the horizon yet. You earned our devotion, Valve, and now you have to deal with the repercussions.

Some want a crusade. However, on the calmer end of the scale, you had the 2010 Portal 2 ARG—a kind of whodunnit code-breaking exercise solved by very smart Valve fans—which somehow turned into a disappointment because it wasn't about Half-Life 2: Episode 3. (That's what the dreamed-of next installment of the franchise is called. Sorry, it's confusing.) 

Then you had the Surgeon Simulator 2013 furor, and tons of fake news, phoney ARGs and April Fools pranks fueling all these searches for information. As Tyler Malka, founder of the NeoGAF forum, said in a Guardian feature about this very subject, “Half-Life 3's more internet meme than product.” And just like any meme, it's basically run its course.

So why do we still care? It's not like it's GTA or Zelda, right? Agreed. It’s a lot more important than both of those.

Zero Punctuation reviews Half-Life

“Nothing on PC has quite managed to repeat the fine melody with which Half-Life was orchestrated,” Edge enthused about the seminal original in its Half-Life 2 review from 2004. Of the sequel, it said, “This is possibly the most exquisitely crafted action game of all time. Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter. But in action, storytelling, technical achievement, atmosphere, and intensity it has far outdone its peers. Valve just hit the top note no other PC game developer could reach.”

It got one of the magazine's rarely-awarded 10 out of 10s. Case closed.

Sure, we may get a Zelda or two per generation, and GTA sequels seem to be becoming more frequent, but Half-Life came out in 1998 and the sequel dropped in 2004. The second and last (expansion) episode for Half-Life 2 dropped in October 2007. We’d be forgiven for thinking the worst, that the franchise is grinding to an end.

Half-Life 3 will probably be the most talked about game of all time if it ever arrives. If you have to ask why, you probably didn't play the first two.

The first game in the series gave us an unlikely hero in Gordon Freeman (an MIT graduate scientist who's handy with a crowbar and not big on words), let all the action play out in real time—i.e., no cut scenes—in order to better immerse players, and provided a huge variety of enemies and environments. Half-Life altered expectations of what a game could be dramatically, and everyone naturally rushed to catch up. They failed. Even when notables like Doom 3, Far Cry and F.E.A.R. appeared almost six years later, rival developers had left it far too long, because Valve had been busy.

Half Life 2’s protracted development—with its secrecy and sudden delay due to a highly publicized code leak before release—felt like an eternity. But the results were unfathomably brilliant. The game set the standard for polished single-player first-person shooter gameplay both at the time and, arguably, for the next decade. Its level design, variety of play styles, and subtle storytelling is yet to be surpassed, with the closest effort being Valve’s own Portal 2 or perhaps Halo (which is undeniably as influential, if not as clever).

Gordon Freeman. Illustrations by Billy Mather

Most prominent in this indelible sequel is the irresistible hook of an interwoven, textural world that—not content with referencing its predecessor constantly—also seems to branch into Valve’s other games. The tantalizing link between the Portal and Half-Life universes centers around the mysterious Borealis, a ship possibly containing “local portal technology” that’s gone missing in Portal 2 and appeared in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The rivalry between Aperture Science and Black Mesa also made an appearance in the last episode.

This kind of mythology crossover shit is just what us geeks lap up. We may be jumping the gun, though.

“Yeah, it’s nice to imply this science arms race between Black Mesa and Aperture,” said Portal 2 writer Jay Pinkerton to Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “Tonally they’re very different. I think it works better. A wink-nudge link, rather than tearing down the wall and seeing how these two universes collide.”

But the world was full of incredible detail before Portal was even conceived. The fascist Combine cops of Half-Life 2 were (maybe?) bullying humans who were getting a better deal from their new alien overlords than the broken populace around you. Remember having to pick up that can? The young couple cuddled up on the sofa wanting the war to be over? That first glimpse of the towering, gleaming Citadel, which was almost always central in your vision for a reason: It was your goal line. The return of the crowbar and its accompanying musical cue stirred nostalgia. Freeman’s ally Alyx Vance is almost definitely the first real, strong, interesting, female person of color in video games.

CGR Undertow Revisits Half-Life 2

If you saw significance in something anywhere in the game, it was put there deliberately, maybe as a guide, a clue, or just to satisfy our love of discovery. This richness of thought, of detail, created an all-too real dystopian world that helps make Half-Life 2 not just memorable, but a vital strand in the DNA of gaming. I expect this strand to run strongly through anything that carries the Half-Life name in the future. No pressure.

There are three reasons for the delay and secrecy surrounding Half-Life 3. One, Valve may simple be taking its time to craft the greatest product they can; two, it might be hiding its progress to discourage code stealing; and three—and pleasenononopleaseno—it might just not want to make it right now.

Nothing would surprise me at this point. The game might suddenly appearing on Steam – Valve’s iTunes-style interface that serves as a store and community for gamers—for pre-order two weeks ahead of release. But in the meantime, we’re still here waiting. And while we're waiting, we’re playing all sorts of really great first-person games. BioShock (2007) and its sequels, including 2013's lauded BioShock Infinite, have taken the reins as far as storytelling in a first-person perspective goes, adding RPG-like upgrades for your character and the intrigue of moral choices.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) brought multiplayer FPS-ing to mainstream audiences in the biggest way possible, breaking all sorts of entertainment sales records. Far Cry 3 moved the FPS into open world territory. Valve’s own Left 4 Dead freshened up multiplayer FPS with a focus on cooperation. There are plenty of options for an FPS fan, and indeed fans of adventure and action-orientated gaming in general: the Tomb Raider reboot, Dishonored, Skyrim. And upcoming: No Man’s Sky, Alien: Isolation, The Evil Within, Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture; and let’s stop there. What can a new Half-Life offer that these can't?

Well, if it wasn’t obvious already, there’s Valve’s seal of quality. Company co-founder Gabe Newell’s last words on the subject, on the first Seven Day Cooldown podcast, were something like this: “If we talk about things too far in advance we end up changing our minds when developing things... the twists and turns we’re going through will drive people more crazy than just being silent about it.” Translation: “Give us time to sort through our crazy ideas, and we’ll deliver the best thing we possibly can. Be patient. Christ, you’re all awful.”

A trailer for Half-Life 2

These things, they take time. And if you don’t believe Valve fail at things, they beg to disagree with you.

Perhaps it’s worth considering, amid endless Call of Duty and Battlefield sequels, if we really have room for any more FPS games? Is it time for Valve to redefine their Half-Life series? Having perfected the FPP (first person puzzler, no?) with Portal, and co-op online FPS-ing with Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2, they’ve got all the skill sets and ideas covered in other games. They’ve shifted their focus to multiplayer titles of late, as Newell told the Washington Post this year: “[We] could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequels, but we collectively said, ‘Let’s try to make multiplayer games, even though there’s never been a commercially successful multiplayer game.'”

I admit, it is a little galling that in this seven-year gap Valve has been able to make Left 4 Dead and its sequel, plus numerous updates; continually fine-tune Team Fortress 2; and craft the amazing Portal 2. Oh, and don't forget the ridiculously successful multiplayer online battle RPG game DOTA 2. With all this creativity flowing in all these directions, logically there’s probably less being poured into whatever Half-Life 3 is. I don’t see this as being bad, really. We got those amazing games to keep us company. And, let’s be honest here: They’re busy.

Valve’s current large-scale project is the recently announced Steam Machines—a series of open, Linux-driven, living room PC/consoles in a box—and their Steam OS. Rumors of Left 4 Dead 3 abound. Oh, and there’s the development of Source 2, the game engine that will no doubt power Half-Life 3. In fact, it may well have been stealth-rolled out into DOTA 2, though Valve has made no confirmation of this.

Gabe himself hinted at the possibility that the official launch of Source 2 may come with a particular game for some 4chan board members who visited him for his birthday: “We've been working on Valve’s new engine stuff for a while, we’re probably just waiting for a game to roll it out with.”

Dammit, he knows what he’s doing.

Look, it’s not fair when Valve employees take the piss out of us for wanting this all so damn badly. We've been told Ricochet 2 is being worked on and that G-Man is in fact Gordon Freeman from the future and Alyx Vance's great-grandfather. From actual Valve people. Funny, guys. But the joke’s on you. Your laughter at our expense only feeds hope—you wouldn’t tease us cruelly without planning to deliver a payoff, no matter how long it takes.

What form this takes is all speculation, because that’s all we have, bar some leaked concept art circa 2008. Allegedly more up-to-date concept art exists, as confirmed back in May by Counter-Strike magician Minh Lee, even if he seems a little wary of saying so. Half-Life 3 confirmed!

Basically, Valve has plenty to keep it occupied right now. But so do we. Almost all of us who are waiting are really busy. We have day jobs. We have relationships. Kids. Lives of our own. Hell, we have other games to play. We’re better off letting Valve take its time, and perhaps focus on selling its brand-new hardware, waiting until that's selling steadily before they announce the game. Probably exclusively for Steam OS and Steam Machines. Then they’ve really got us.

Those scheming bastards.

Follow Brad Barrett on Twitter.

Stella bar in downtown Cairo. Photo by Aaron T. Rose.

For much of the 90s, drinking Egyptian alcohol was akin to dancing with death. So potent was the dose of formaldehyde in the local Stella beer that US airmen stationed in Cairo during the Gulf War were warned off sampling the native brew for fear of chronic drowsiness. Before Al Ahram Brewery—which still produces Stella in Giza and is now owned by Heineken—was privatized in 1997 many alcohol-guzzling Egyptians were equally wary of the state booze monopoly’s unappealing offerings. Some took to moonshine made out of fermented bread to sate their thirsts, while foreign reporters—ever mindful of the need for liquid motivation—sought solace in their monthly duty-free allowances.

For those who remember the alcohol scene’s heyday, modern Cairo’s cast of degenerate characters must seem very drab. “My mother-in-law used to have crème-de-menthe after lunch and not even think it was alcoholic,” said Joyce Foda, a sprightly 81-year-old American lady, whose husband administered Stella beer for 25 years after it was nationalized. Bishoy Habib, who works at the century-old Orfanides liquor store in the downtown district, chuckled as he recalled his youthful misadventures. “God, we were stupid," he said. "My cousin couldn’t see for two days after we drank ethanol.”

And it wasn't just those in Cairo's booze industry who overindulged. Many judges used to throw themselves into downtown’s dives with such abandon that their clerks soon grew tired of combing the city to summon them back to the High Court and they hit upon a happy compromise: an in-house bar, which fast became one of the best-stocked in the city.

Fast-forward to the present day, and it can be exceptionally hard to gauge alcohol’s place in Egyptian society.

Date-tinged Arak liquor has long boasted a devoted following in swathes of the countryside, and the 8 percent-strong Meister Max beer has seen its market share surge since 2010, while the old Nile-side Grand Hyatt hotel, a doyenne of the post-WWII social scene, saw its occupancy rates collapse when its new Saudi owners banned drinking. One of Al Ahram’s biggest breweries, tucked away in the conservative and mostly rural Sharqia governorate, is said to do a roaring local trade.

Despite all that, 79 percent of Egyptian Muslims insist alcohol consumption is immoral, according to a 2013 Pew poll, and the formal alcohol market has always largely been the preserve of the Coptic Christian minority and metropolitan elites.

“It was a matter of class,” admitted Mrs. Foda. And to an extent, it still is.

Most recently, an upscale restaurant on Cairo’s leafy Zamalek island turned away a young woman wearing a hijab, the headdress worn by a large majority of Egyptian women, because the bouncer worried it would make the alcohol-drinking patrons uncomfortable.

ln recent years some signs indicated that Egypt’s drinking class was expanding beyond its traditional demographic. Liquor sales across the Middle East surged 72 percent between 2001 and 2011, nearly two and a half times the global average, according to London-based International Wine and Spirit Research (IWSR). That advance came to a screaming halt in 2012 thanks to revolutionary flux and Mohammed Morsi’s yearlong Muslim Brotherhood rule, which were unkind to the industry. The Morsi administration’s attempt to raise tax on beer by 200 percent went nowhere because the opposition was so vocal, but alcohol purveyors sensed a strong shift in public discourse and acted accordingly.

Several downtown Cairo liquor stores felt personally threatened and draped curtains over their windows to obscure their stock, while some alcohol distributors, mindful perhaps of attacks on bars by religious conservatives in the south, scratched off their vans’ company logos, and began delivering at odd hours.

“We felt insecure in every way. Not only about the bar,” said Marileez Suter Doss, whose family owns the storied colonial-era Windsor Hotel, where the deliveryman has opted to stick with his unmarked vehicle.

The raft of anticipated anti-alcohol measures never fully materialized, but the promise of future restrictions was enough to scramble the market. Drinkers panic-bought in early 2013, and continued their spree into Ramadan, when alcohol sales usually plummet by up to 70 percent (though no one told the ostensibly Muslim Uzbeks, who threw a riotous embassy party in last year’s holy month, which culminated in vodka bottles sailing over the wall onto the street).

With the outbreak of serious violence after Morsi’s bloody toppling, tourism collapsed and sales of many spirits bottomed out. Scotch, the biggest spirit import in Egypt, saw a 24 percent decline. Tequila, the lifeblood of many Russian and Eastern European beachgoers, was particularly hard hit, according to IWSR estimates that were sent to VICE via email.

Businesses are still hurting, and possible tax hikes on alcohol to plug Egypt’s strained public finances might mean more pain. But as Youssef, the owner of a liquor shop in the Nile Delta city of Tanta, pointed out by way of an impromptu history lesson, Egyptians have been here before. “Gamal Abdel Nasser threw out the Europeans, who were the only ones who knew how to make good alcohol. [Anwar] Sadat brought back the Islamists, and they just wanted to destroy us,” he said.

Roughly 90 percent of Egypt’s 88 million inhabitants are Muslim, and the country’s politicians have managed this delicate dance with drink since well before Morsi checked into the presidential palace. Cairo’s sizeable foreign communities once operated a near monopoly on alcohol production, but Nasser’s rash of extreme nationalist policies in the 1950s and 60s drove most of them—and their alcohol-making expertise—into exile. The Greek Clubs in Cairo and Alexandria, where non-Greeks pay an entry fee, are among the few mementos of their existence.

Anwar Sadat charted a different but still negative direction for the alcohol industry. Where Nasser had presided over an anti-Western secular state, his successor welcomed back American and European investment, but worked to appease the surging Muslim Brotherhood by bowing to some of its demands. In came the ban on alcohol advertising, which endures to this day, and out went the issuing of any new bar licenses—except for upscale restaurants and hotels, a rule that also still stands.

It’s probably too soon to tell what Cairo’s new rulers will mean for Egyptian alcohol’s long-term prospects. The fortunes of the industry have long served as something of a barometer of the state’s openness, and here, the signals have been mixed so far.

Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, doesn’t drink, and the continued absence of foreign tourists, on whom some of the tolerance to alcohol seems to rest, has led to fears of a possible future crackdown. On the other hand, in January all bars stayed open on Eid, the prophet Mohammed’s birthday, for the first time in recent memory, and a Zamalek liquor store, Uno Ambrogiano, has re-opened several decades after its owner fell afoul of Nasser’s police chief and died in prison.

Those in the potential line of fire have, however, had plenty of time to ponder possible responses. “If they come for my beer, I’ll come at them with my gun. A man’s alcohol stock is his kingdom,” said Youssef in Tanta.

Follow Peter Schwartzstein on Twitter.

Photo by Jill Goodwin

John Lurie is a man of many talents. He starred in and composed the scores for Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, and appeared in a number of other films, like Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. He also wrote the theme to Late Night with Conan O’Brien and starred in the show Fishing with John, where he went on bizarre voyages with people like Tom Waits, Dennis Hopper, and Willem Dafoe. His band, the Lounge Lizards, which formed with his brother Evan in the late 70s, fused the sensibilities of jazz and no wave. But these days, Lurie devotes himself entirely to his paintings, which somehow manage to be both colorful and dark, playful and sober, funny and reflective.

Lurie’s eclectic artistic output is deeply rooted in a lack of patience for bullshit—and bullshit is a hot commodity in every scene he's worked, from Hollywood to the record industry to the art world. Throughout it all, Lurie has maintained unwavering integrity and a strong sense of self, even in the face of advanced Lyme disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2004.

Lurie’s first solo exhibition in five years just opened at Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York, and this Saturday, there’s a tribute concert to him featuring John Zorn and Flea (among many others). I recently talked to him over email to get his thoughts on painting, music, assholes, and Twitter.

The Red Crocodile Head

VICE:  I really like the work in your new show. Which of these new paintings was the most challenging?
John Lurie: I spend most of my time outside of New York and come back here from time to time to take care of stuff. When I’m here, I paint. I worked on Still Life with Disappearing Snake in four different trips to New York. The first problem I had was painting the table. You would think something like painting a table would not be so difficult. But it was such a disaster that, in frustration, I wrote, “What kind of an idiot cannot paint on a table?” directly on the table.

Sometimes when I get really frustrated with a painting and lash out at it, the results can be great. In this case, the writing was a mistake. Getting rid of it took quite a bit of work—to obscure the writing without making a blob that made no sense. Then there was the problem of the snake. Its red color was several different paints that I had mixed together and, on subsequent trips to New York, the paint had dried and I couldn’t match it again.

That poor painting leaned against the wall for about eight months, with my other problem paintings until, in a flurry of activity, I fixed all of them.

Toward the end she would sit on the porch and see things that weren't there. Actually, maybe they are there. 

Do you listen to music while you paint?  
I think I have only listened to music once while painting. The loss of music because of my advanced Lyme is a very painful thing. For a while, because my nervous system was such a mess, music became more like fingernails on a chalkboard than music. That is better now, but playing music is a difficult subject.

Do you approach painting with a similar type of creative energy you used to approach acting or music, or is it just its own beast?
Yes, the best music and the best paintings —the essence of them—is like something that passed through me. My job was to have enough technique and facility to not wreck it. At some point about five or six years ago, painting became what music once had been to be.

That's great. But how do you tolerate art world people?
Is there any evidence that I have ever tolerated people from the art world?

Still life with disappearing snake 

Your work has a surreal, subconscious quality to it. Are you ever tempted to get political?
I do, from time to time on Twitter, and then usually delete it an hour later. But not in the paintings. When something I find really outrageous is happening and people seem to think it is normal, then I speak out. But the responses are so irritating that I usually delete it.

I am not really political because being political never seems to help anything. It just leads to different sides arguing for the sake of proving their side is right, even when they don’t even mean what they are saying. I am for common sense. I am for decency and equality. I am against people being oppressed by assholism. Does that make me political?

Plenty of contemporary painters seem to be weary of titles, but yours add an extra layer of humor and absurdity to the work. Do you put a lot of thought into them or do they just sort of end up there?
Sometimes they flow out. A few have had eight different titles and my poor assistant has to keep track of the last one.

The painting called:

We want the funk
And some other stuff
We want some other stuff
Just normal stuff

Had two previous titles. One was, If all the passengers on a flying plane jump in the air, does the plane weigh any less? The other one was, Are you liking the purple? too flashy? Either of them could have worked.

We want the funk

You're very active on Twitter. What draws you to it specifically? When does Twitter piss you off?
The general consciousness of humanity can be disheartening. Twitter has a way of making that very apparent. Though it can be great. At the opening the other night, there were several people that I only knew from Twitter. They felt like old friends.

Lurie’s exhibition, There Are Things You Don’t Know About, is on view now at Cavin-Morris Gallery until October 25. And there are still tickets left to Strange and Beautiful: the Music of John Lurie at Town Hall in New York on Saturday.

Image by Marta Parszeniew

It’s hard to keep track of the UK's recent scandals. Cases skip by week after week—Fernbridge, Fairbanks, Yewtree—the peaceful names at odds with the collections of human misery and suffering they aim to catalog. Rotherham is the latest, an industrial Yorkshire town once famous for its iron, now notorious for the sexual abuse of at least 1,400 children by gangs of men over the past 16 years.

Professor Alexis Jay led the investigation that exposed the scale of what had taken place in Rotherham. “It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered," she writes. "They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.”

In many ways, the first line of her report is the most disturbing: “No one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years.” Jay’s "conservative estimate" was 1,400. But that was little more than a guess, for one large-ish town in one part of Yorkshire. And as she notes: “This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day."

Sections of the press leapt on the Asian identity of many of the perpetrators in Rotherham, picking up on Jay’s assertion that some local case workers were concerned about raising the ethnicity of offenders for fear of being accused of racism. Of course, that fed into wider tabloid concerns about "Asian grooming gangs." Only a few days ago, the Daily Mail complained that authorities weren’t doing enough to combat this all-pervasive Asian menace: “Educational video warning of Asian grooming gangs was made for schools seven years ago but was hardly used amid fears of appearing racist,” they spluttered.

Of course, even a cursory glimpse at the last 20 years shows this problem clearly isn't limited to one community. This isn’t the first child abuse scandal, and Asian communities aren’t the only ones to have been put under the spotlight. Each major incident has put scrutiny on a new group: the Catholic Church, Muslims, the BBC, Westminster, the NHS, social services… the list goes on and on. So who exactly are the abusers? Are there any groups at all that we can single out?

The national Child Exploitation and Online Protection service (CEOP), tried to figure this out in a report released in 2011. It hoped to bring together data from agencies across the country to create a national picture of how much child abuse was happening, who carried it out, and so on. That effort pretty much failed: “Data relating to child sexual exploitation is often partial and incomplete… or simply unrecorded.”

They couldn’t say anything meaningful about ethnicity because, in many cases, it wasn’t even recorded. Many agencies had no data on child abuse at all. Few of them proactively looked for cases of abuse, and as a result didn’t find them. Out of almost 150 Local Safeguarding Children Boards—groups across the country that coordinate relevant local agencies in child protection—only 13 even replied to CEOP’s request for information.

In other words, we know next to nothing about child abuse in the UK. We don’t know how often it happens. We don’t know who the victims are. We don’t know who the perpetrators are. We have only the sketchiest ideas about the risk factors. We are in a state of profound ignorance. 

Much of this is basic incompetence, but some of it is more sinister. The Telegraph reported that Rotherham Council officers launched a "raid" on a local youth service to destroy evidence. A Home Office official investigating the matter as far back as 2002 told Panorama that her office had been raided and a filing cabinet emptied of data.

We can’t measure the abuse directly, but we can look at some of the things we do know and try to extrapolate from them. The NSPCC have led efforts to do this, and the message of their most recent report is pretty bleak: “Child abuse is more prevalent, and more devastating, than many of us are prepared to recognize.” Eight rapes or attempted rapes are recorded against children under 13 in a typical day, and those are just the cases that get reported—the tip of the iceberg.

The NSPCC estimate that 520,000 children were mistreated by a parent or guardian in 2011; 260,000 children were mistreated by an adult outside the home; nearly a quarter of a million were in need due to abuse and neglect. Around 30,000 sexual or cruelty/neglect offenses against children were recorded by the police. Much of this is guesswork, though. Young children being abused aren’t likely to come forward, and nor are their parents. Even when people know about abuse by others, it often goes unreported.

Then there’s the nature of the abusers. When Jimmy Savile’s actions came to light, people were shocked at the scale of it all. Plenty still buy into the idea that sexual abuse is often a one-off offense perpetrated by people who lose control. The thing is, we know from the research of people like Dr David Lisak that this isn’t the case, as I’ve written before:

The average rapist is not a stranger in a ski mask, hiding in the bushes. The average rapist is acquainted with the victim. He is motivated more by power, anger and a desire to control than by sexual impulse. His attacks—and he is likely to be a serial offender—are often premeditated. He uses sophisticated strategies and psychological manipulation to identify, groom and isolate victims. He is likely to have committed other violent crimes, such as the abuse of children or partners. […] On the campuses Lisak has studied, "the vast majority of rapes are committed by serial, violent predators."

That lines up pretty closely with what little the CEOP were able to find in its report. “Many offenders appeared to derive satisfaction from exerting control over victims through coercive and manipulative behavior, not only to commit sexual offenses, but also as an end in itself. In this respect, the offender psychology appears to bear a resemblance to perpetrators of domestic abuse. Further debriefing of offenders is needed to gain a better understanding of this."

What this suggests when you piece it all together is pretty terrifying.

Over the last couple of decades, Britain has launched investigation after investigation into cases of child abuse. We're investigating sex abuse in the church, we're investigating sex abuse in Muslim communities, we're investigating it in the entertainment industry, in social services, in homes for the young, in homes for the old, in hospitals, in the entertainment and music industries, in the charity sector, in aviation, in schools, in parliament and in countless other walks of life.

Every time these cases come to light, people try to pin the blame on one group. It’s convenient, because it stops us from having to face a much more horrific truth—that there was nothing that special or unusual about Rotherham, and that child abuse is happening everywhere, all the time.

An Englishman’s home is his castle, and many of those castles are ruled by tyrants. Not harassed parents losing control, but brutal bullies and torturers who inflict pain on children again and again and again over the course of many years, acting with complete impunity. Most will never be caught, and, worst of all, the damage they cause will never be undone.

Follow Martin Robins on Twitter.

Previously: Most of What You Read About the 'iWatch' Was Utterly Wrong

My gallery, Boo-Hooray, is staging an exhibition and putting out a book on some of the strangest amateur publications ever made. Throughout the 20th century, some of the nerdiest denizens in human history self-published and self-distributed zines about science fiction, horror and themselves. They were printed on mimeographs in tiny editions ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred. They were rarely for sale, and only available for trade in exchange for letters. The graphics are unbelievable, and the texts are often deeply bizarre. Most people have never seen any of them, so when legendary rockwriter/guitar-slinger Lenny Kaye made his collection of fanzines available, an exhibit and a book was the obvious next step. The archive of over 3000 zines spanning 1941-1970 now belongs to the University of Miami. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff lately, and what it means these days. 

The maze-like pop/counter/subculture narratives of the second half of the 20th century are as open-ended as life itself—just as chaotic, and as messy. Science fiction fandom is a path in the maze. Clues are contained within, hinting how the 21st century became what it is, even if we certainly don’t know what that it is, or what turns took us where. And we also have the concern that some wrong turns brought us to existential dead-ends now facing us in our everyday lives.

Long story short: subcultural weirdos flocked together through the magic of sending materials through the mail, through cheap means of duplication, and through the maniacal quest for the most picturesque parts of the inner landscape as midwifed by what sometimes is called fantastic literature—horror, science fiction, fantasy, and its ilk.

Nowadays, with the internet as the mirror which flatters, and reality acting as the mirror which flatters not, identity has to be based on individuality. The function of the macro-tribe is null and void in the big city, and the accentuating of hyper-individualism is what brings success in life. Whether you are talking sex-having, raise-getting, or self-perception-ego-boosting, it doesn’t really matter—the presenting of yourself as a member of a micro-tribe, with its secret handshakes and insider knowledge, is the only way to get ahead. If you are the corporate super-nerd for a tech start-up, or an up-and-coming banker dudebro, you need to represent secret, hidden lore that makes you special, and your perspective special. Otherwise, you are of limited use.

Ego-boost (or egoboo as trufans called it) is the fuel of the fannish motor in the science fiction subculture of knowledge hidden from the mainstream. When you live life as an outsider, ego-gratifying reinforcements from your own micro-tribe become the very oxygen, the very water of your existence. If other people think you are a total doofus for devoting your life to an imaginary landscape, then it feels even more important that your fellow travelers within that landscape regularly give you props. Echoed nowadays everywhere on the internet, natch: Thumbs up, thumbs down. Lkes and dislikes. Do’s and don’ts. Blog comments, blog-toading,  andtrolling. Dumbing it up. Dumbing it down. Sometimes it all looks like one big arena of fandom. The racist looks at racist websites, the dog-lover reads dog blogs, the dudebro instagrams dudebro visuals, and the most advanced science-fiction people have their own internet. All catering to the hyper-fragmented cultural landscape of our eternal now.

Fanzines quite rapidly become about fandom itself, and egoboo probably fueled that. Fandom became a parallel world, where Big Name Fans and new arrivals duked it out in social collisions that sometimes mimicked exactly the kind of high school nastiness from which fandom promised escape. But fandom was also a lifeline for the outcasts and the marginal, where communication was hectic, passionate, thoughtful and infused with pretty much every technique that people like Belgian philosopher Raoul Vaneigem would write about years later as ways of blocking how the spectacle pushes us into an alienated life. And naturally this is where the parallels start to become very clear between the mechanics of 20th century subcultures, and the consumption of ideas, ideology, and identity on the goddamn internet.

Truly fannish fandom stood in counterpoint to Sercon, which stood for Serious and Constructive back in the days of yore. These were heady times when a brighter future was in the cards for all of us, and where the science fiction writers were the bards channeling how technology was to set us free, and where dystopian sci-fi was a mere shady twinkle among the darkest few of the wide-eyed and blue-eyed trufans. The earliest science fiction zines were usually Sercon, spreading belief that a collective future of scientific advancements would bring about peace, prosperity, and human fellowship. The nerds no longer would get sand kicked in their eyes by the bullies. Maybe there were even parallel universes where the nerds were their bosses!

Notwithstanding these narratives of topsy-turvy-dom between then and now, almost one hundred years later, it doesn’t feel far-fetched to think of these idealistic dreams of the promises of technology as being intimately tied to the brutal horror of the nastiest of all mechanical wars. That so much of the subcultures and popular cultural movements of the 1920s and early 1930s were driven by the purest form of white middle class escapism from what World War I had been and had meant—this was simply intolerable to ponder.

In the wake of World War II, science fiction and science-fiction fandom continued to offer escapism and solace. But the world inhabited at this point was one where hell could be identified as made by man, orchestrated by a totalitarian political regime, and where hellfire had been dropped not once but twice—and by us, the good guys—on them, the bad guys. As the shadow of the Cold War loomed large, the means of cultural escape accrued terminology and patterns that were as contradictive as life and history itself. Science fiction fragmented into myriad sub-genres, as the form conquered the mass media of film, television, print, and radio. 

This was mirrored by science fiction fandom. As it fragmented, it also became more insular and discrete from the outside world it took issue with. In a way, science fiction fandom preempted the ipod zombies that irritate us as we walk down the street or stand in a line. As said zombies are isolated in a world of Instagram-viewing or Kings of Leon-listening or video-game-playing, walking from their glass box to their bank cubicle in 2014, they are existing outside of everyday life and its hostilities. The Mirror Which Flatters is now portable.

This is similar to the manner in which the science fiction fan of yore existed in a bubble of imaginative realities where the scope of the human experience was so much more rarified than life itself. Participating in the creative cult of science-fiction fandom was a choice that could lead to an entire life spent outside of the mundane mainstream world of common existence. Cult-like behavior indeed, as this is a core essential of living one’s life in a hyper-stratified narrative of being right when everyone else is wrong: a reigning pattern of this digital world we live in now.

Asger Jorn, whom I quote with the same mathematical recurrence that Grandpa Simpson quotes Thoreau, has explained in detail how the avant garde thought of any generation becomes norm for the ones that come after and how new communicative ideas come to be taken for granted by successive generations. So fandom was—and is—about communication, and communication is a wonderful thing. It sits in a cemented juxtaposition against information, which as many have pointed out is one-directional and hence of a piece with the spectacle. And when everyday people communicate their passions, that leads to what I think we all want: a more passionate life.

Science fiction fans were passionate. And they are passionate! It takes a fuckload of effort to dress up exactly as Guardians of the Galaxy characters at San Diego Comicon, and it requires tremendous energy to figure out how to operate a stencil duplicator, write your zine, print it, and distribute it. It takes a lot of focus to construct a passionate life, and the beauty of these zines is the beauty of trufaans making something they felt passionate about, and which led to their full lives. Self-starter culture will always be meaningful, and being a self-starter has never been easier than it is right now. Ironically, though, it has never been more difficult to communicate above the medial din of spectacular technology. That means the lessons we can learn from how subcultures conducted direct communication back in the day is not only immensely useful, but also a way for the sons and daughters of the middle class to infuse our existence with meaning as an actuality and not just a consumption pattern.

Isn’t it weird that nerds became cool, that outsiders became insiders, and that even the ultimate dudebro or bro-ho consumes and affixes cultural signifiers nowadays that half a generation ago were the hallmarks of their enemies, the nerds? The people who are leaders in the digital landscape use lingo, communication techniques, organizational structure, and pop culture frames of reference that are taken directly from fandom subcultures. And what next? Luis Bunuel, in his exemplary autobiography, talks about how the only plausible religious belief system he feels himself capable of grasping at is the notion that once every 20 years or so, on a Sunday, he’ll get to crawl out of the grave and read all the newspapers, thereby finding out what happens next. I feel that yearning sometimes as well.

The subcultural self-selection processes of identity, thought and opinion are legion nowadays. Tech is losing its potency as an internet product alone, without opinion, curated content, or for that matter, guidance. I feel pretty hopeful that the myriad of fandoms that swarm around all of us everyday in 2014 can, through this frenzied activity and communication, unite all these fragmented micro-tribes into the sole macro-tribe we all belong to.

The technology of isolation does not and shall not necessitate the spectacle of participation.

Johan Kugelberg runs the project space/archiving company Boo-Hooray. They are staging an exhibition of Lenny Kaye’s Science-Fiction Fanzines from September 25 through September 28 at PS1 for the Art Book Fair. Follow Johan on Twitter.

American Apparel boxers; Diesel boxers; American Apparel swimming trunks

PHOTOGRAPHY: JONNIE CRAIG
STYLIST: SARA BROLIN
Producers: Caisa Ederyd and Hugo Anderholm
Photographer's assistant: Helmuth Bobroy
Fashion Editor: Kylie Griffiths
Hand Prints: Hammer Lab
Models: Erik F and Lisa B at Stockholmsgruppen, Movits Lenninger, Rasmus Kalen and Henry Vesterlund at Nisch Management, Beeta Holmgren, Astrid Wesstrom and Artis the dog

Zara shawl

NN.07/No Nationality trousers

Ralph Lauren shirt, Levi's jeans

Wood Wood T-shirt, Levi's jeans, American Apparel boxers

Carhartt sweater; NN.07/No Nationality sweater

Hilfiger Denim sweater; Levi's jeans

Wood Wood shirt, Beyond Retro trousers

Beyond Retro trousers, Wood Wood T-shirt; American Apparel bodysuit; Beyond Retro jeans

Morley sweater, Dockers shorts, H&M shoes; Vans sweater, Edwin jeans, Vans shoes

Tommy Hilfiger sweater, Calvin Klein jeans, Converse shoes; NN. 07/No Nationality trousers

It's a chaotic time for teens. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

It was 4:20 and the teens felt great, man, but they also had impaired cognitive abilities. It was the post-9/11 era, the effects of which were being felt in increasingly tragic and bizarre ways. It was the season of light beer, the season of darkness, the season of hope. Teens were on Cloud 9, teens were going to Heaven, and the two things may have been related because Cloud 9 was a synthetic drug sending Michigan’s youth to the hospital. History was changing, literally. In Colorado, AP US history students protested a conservative school board’s plan to emphasize “topics that promote citizenship, patriotism, and respect for authority.” It was a time a lot like the past; there was a new Bill & Ted’s movie planned and another sequel to Dumb and Dumber, featuring original stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

Does technology shape the culture, or does the culture shape technology? The answer to most questions is, "It’s complicated.” Yik Yak didn’t help us write this column and it was unclear if teenagers, “less concerned about privacy and data security than others,” would take to newly-launched anti-Facebook social network Ello. Internet consumption was still high, though, as was consumption of the “rave drug Molly.” That’s why a father shared a photo of his daughter on life support, following her attendance at a Denver rave. “This could be your child. Mine was responsible and did well in school. These raves are death peddlers.” Snapchat remained a popular way for teenagers to run afoul of the law. A Wyoming high school student took a selfie whilst giving a boy oral sex and now persons who shared the image could be charged for having child pornography. Two girls were kidnapped at knifepoint after sneaking out of a slumber party. Depending on how you look at things, cell phones either helped them to safety or allowed thousands of people to listen to their harrowing post-escape 911 call.

Sometimes it can be difficult to remain in control, to not feel like you’re just speeding through life. In Ohio, a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old were sentenced to 18 and 24 months, respectively, for a drag racing accident that left a 14-year-old girl dead. In Washington, a teenager called the police to break up his own party, which had apparently gotten out of hand with drugs, underage drinking, and fistfights. Of the troublesome partygoers, a police spokesperson said, "It was not their first rodeo." A 15-year-old from North Carolina with “no rodeo background” won a truck at a Tennessee rodeo. A white man in Florida who, annoyed by loud music, shot up an SUV filled with black teenagers—resulting in the death of 17-year-old Jordan Davis—was convicted of second-degree murder. A 21-year-old Brooklyn woman who asked three teenage girls to stop swearing on the G train was shoved to the ground and kicked until a bystander intervened. The 14- and 15 year-olds were arrested by the MTA police, and the woman, who suffered a concussion and two knee bruises, “has resumed riding the subway.”

All these things, and a thousand like them, have come to pass this week for teens so far in the year 2014. Are teens better off? Well, young people have basically begun to stop smoking cigarettes, which must a good thing. Subsequently, however, they started vaping. Scientists are still uncertain as to just how dangerous e-cigs are, but no one will argue with the fact that they’re fundamentally less badass than traditional cigarettes. The point is: Whenever one quintessentially teen thing disappears, another inevitably emerges. Rest easy knowing that somewhere, police are breaking up a lingerie party filled with middle-aged men and 16-year-old girls. Somewhere, an 18-year-old who’s been designing album covers for Gucci Mane has accidentally photoshopped Young Thug’s head onto Wiz Kalifa’s body. Somewhere, in the United States of America in the year 2014, teens are living brilliant and angst-ridden lives, as full of good and bad ideas as ever.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.