The federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Photo via Americasroof/Wikimedia Commons

Last Tuesday, outgoing US Attorney General Eric Holder used a speech in New York City to trumpet the news that the federal prison population dropped by about 4,800 inmates in the 12-month period ending September 30. That's the first decline since 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president and Americans were being held hostage in Tehran. That it took so long is kind of stunning given that crime rates have been nosediving nationally for decades now, according to the FBI. But better late than never, right?

Holder (who also announced his resignation last week) expects the number of people inhabiting federal facilities to drop by 12,000 over the next two years. Between the Justice Department making a major push to divert nonviolent offenders away from incarceration and a new effort to ease up on egregious mandatory minimum sentences, it's starting to feel like we've reached a pivotal moment when it comes to prison reform in this country.

"This is nothing less than historic," Holder gushed at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "To put these numbers in perspective, 10,000 inmates is the rough equivalent of the combined populations of six federal prisons, each filled to capacity."

That definitely sounds like a big number, and reform advocates I spoke to were encouraged at the shift, even as they caution against getting too excited over one year's worth of data. It's worth keeping in mind that around this time last summer, we were celebrating a drop in the state prison population even as the federal numbers continued to edge upward. Now the reverse is true.

"It's a drop in the bucket when you look at the bigger picture,” Nancy La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, told me of the drop in federal prisoners. “The attorney general should be celebrating this trend, but he equated it with being able to close ten prisons, and that doesn't really square with our research. The facilities are so overcrowded that you'd have to reduce the population by 50,000 inmates just to get within capacity, and then only after that point could you reduce it to the point of actually closing prisons. So you're not going to be, like, saving any money or closing any prisons—it's still a great thing, but it's a step along the way."

Breaking down the numbers on a state-by-state basis shows that the picture is slightly more complex than "Prison Population Drops!" headlines would have you believe. According to the latest year-on-year numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics—which are different from the fiscal-year data touted by Holder—California, New York, and North Carolina both shed thousands of inmates in 2013. But part of what is going on in California was a response to a judge's ruling that state prisons were overcrowded and prisoners should be sent to local jails—a reminder that just because state or federal prison numbers are going up or down doesn't necessarily mean more or fewer people are behind bars. Kentucky, meanwhile, completely abandoned its investment in the for-profit prison racket last year.

Plenty of state prison populations continue to swell, however. Florida and Texas, for example, each added over 1,000 new inmates in 2013; Florida also put 100 more people in its private prison system, which now holds over 11,800 people. Arkansas jailed thousands more inmates, mostly because of new policies put into place in response to a repeat parole absconder being found responsible for the death of a teen. Add up all the states that boosted their totals and you get enough surplus prisoners to more than compensate for the meager federal reductions.

Experts I spoke to seemed to agree on one thing more than any other: It's almost impossible to know what causes the incarcerated population in the United States to change from year to year, and accounting methods vary between states and localities. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers released earlier this month, for instance, do not include county-level stats (those come in the annual correctional population estimate each December). Last year's total—which measured the previous year, 2012—found 2,228,400 total people in American jails and prisons. Of course, that number excludes military and immigration detention centers, as well as facilities on Indian reservations. And it's worth noting that just 216,900 of those 2.2 million were in federal prisons.

So even if the feds are easing up a bit on the whole mass incarceration thing, local governments are more than capable of going rogue. Some of the worst prisons in the country, like New York's Rikers Island—where mentally ill inmates and teens, according to a recent investigation by Manhattan's US attorney's office, are routinely abused by guards—are largely beyond federal control. We got some good news on that front this week, as well, when the city's Department of Correction announced it would no longer put 16- and 17-year-olds in solitary confinement—starting at the end of the year. (Why they have to wait that long is a whole other story.)

Desptie all this, the decrease in the federal prison population is a long overdue (and welcome) development in the eyes of activists and academics who have been pushing back against the prison-industrial complex for years. It's a testament to reforms initiated by Holder, but also the US Sentencing Commission, which—with a bit of prodding from the attorney general—has started to look more and more like a real agent of change. The chief hold-up at this point seem to be the incentives at many levels of government to keep prisons packed. For prosecutors, the temptation to keep racking up convictions and long sentences is obvious. Likewise, for states and regions that are home to giant job-creating prisons, the economic boost and resulting tax revenue can be tough for local legislators to pass up.

"It's kind of a natural law, right?" La Vigne added. "The tendency to fill those prison beds is fierce, and there's always mechanisms—usually found at the prosecutorial level—where they find ways to subvert reform."

Still, it would be a mistake to discount what could be a seminal juncture in the dystopian odyssey that is American mass incarceration.

“There are lots of people who would like to see the prison population cut in half, and are disappointed that there hasn’t been a steeper drop,” Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ public safety performance project, told me. “But when you compare where things were headed to where they are now, there’s been a significant shift.”

That the federal prison pool has finally edged downward gives reform advocates hope that we’ve turned a corner—they hope the states will follow. After all, they've shown a capacity to cut down their own numbers as recently as two years ago.

“It’s a huge deal,” Gelb said. “The federal system and the state systems are behemoths—giant battleships that do not turn on a dime. And for both the state and the federal systems to have been expecting growth of tens of thousands of inmates and to now to be flattening out represents a major shift in the way this country approaches issues of crime and punishment.”

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Several weeks ago, I wrote about the birth and subsequent charity efforts of the Fappening, Reddit’s newly-created subreddit (which later became multiple subreddits) devoted to housing celebrity nudes. The Fappening subreddits popped up when nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities were leaked on 4chan. They were controversial from the beginning, sparking questions of where privacy met “free speech,” a favorite buzzword of Redditors. These were private nude photos, on the one hand. But on the other hand, what about free speech? “Guys,” Redditors cried, “we cannot forget about free speech, whatever that means, we are not entirely sure but it usually involves naked women. This is the way our forefathers would have wanted it!”

But only days after that, Reddit took down both Fappening subreddits. Many Redditors lamented what they perceived as a loss of precious free speech, and criticized Reddit for “censorship,” both common cries any time Reddit takes down a subreddit. That’s probably because, historically, taking down a subreddit has been fairly uncommon. Reddit, which journalist Adrian Chen aptly described as a “safe space for male libertarian undergraduate computer science majors to complain about women,” has in the past made a point of letting controversial subreddits exist without interference from the top. You might remember r/jailbait, the subreddit for sexually suggestive but not technically pornographic photos of underage girls (some taken without the subjects' knowledge). Jailbait was the subject of controversy for years, but Reddit CEO Yishan Wong stood firm in his (and Reddit’s) belief in “free speech,” refusing to shut it down. You might also remember r/ creepshots, the subreddit where you could post covertly-taken photographs of women (sometimes “upskirts,” sometimes closeups of breasts), taken unbeknownst to the women. Initially, when news of these subreddits incensed the non-Redditing public, Wong held strong, repeating that Reddit would not “ban legal content even if [they] find it odious or if [they] personally condemn it.”

But Jailbait was eventually shut down in 2011, after much negative media attention and, finally, a power struggle between Jailbait moderators (a.k.a. the definition of hell). In its official rules section, Reddit now bans both child pornography and “sexually suggestive content featuring minors.” Creepshots only existed for part of 2012, a much shorter life than Jailbait had, and was shut down after Adrian Chen “doxxed” Michael Brutsch, a Creepshot moderator and frighteningly disgusting guy. (Brutsch was also responsible for the creation and moderation of dozens of other subreddits that purposely pushed the limits of taste, including “Misogyny,” “Incest,” and “Rapebait.” None of those subreddits exist anymore.)

When reached for comment, Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s Director of Communications, told me that Creepshots was not banned. Rather, “the creator and mod of that subreddit was threatened or blackmailed by someone, and subsequently asked [Reddit] to close the subreddit for him. [Reddit was] not intending to ban that subreddit and later made a statement saying [they] would not ban similar subreddits.”

Reddit has historically positioned itself as a sort of lawless Wild West where fights are won with free speech instead of guns. That may have been true in the early days, but it is mercifully growing less true by the day. Reddit’s decision to shut down the Fappening subreddits happened within a matter of days, a much quicker action than they have ever taken on previous subreddits. Systems administrator Jason Harvey explained that he shut down the Fappening subreddits for several pragmatic reasons: legal requests to take down the photos were pouring in from the DCMA (Defense Contract Management Agency), people were posting photos of underage girls more quickly than mods could delete them, and the sheer volume of traffic was essentially breaking the site. Harvey wrote that he personally found the leaked photos “deplorable,” but Reddit wanted to make it clear that this was not a change in their laissez-faire policies toward subreddits. Yishan Wong, in a post dramatically titled “Every Man is Responsible for His Own Soul,” wrote that despite the Fappening subreddits shutting down, Reddit would not be changing any of its policies:

...while current US law does not prohibit linking to stolen materials, we deplore the theft of these images and we do not condone their widespread distribution. Nevertheless, reddit’s platform is structurally based on the ability for people to distribute, promote, and highlight textual materials as well as links to images and other media. We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize. Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event.

That’s a lot of conflicting information in one paragraph, but it boils down to this: “We are banning this objectionable thing for legal reasons. We want you to still think of us as guardians of free speech. But also we want you to know that we hate the objectionable thing. But that’s not why we banned it."

Reddit is the cool babysitter. “Look, if it were up to us, we wouldn’t even have bedtimes, but you know, rules are rules.” That said, at least one Fappening-related subreddit still exists. That subreddit is FappeningDiscussion, which does not post direct links to celebrity nudes, but rather tells users where to find them. Victoria Taylor stated that “[Reddit does] not plan to ban /r/fappeningdiscussion,” but clarified that the subreddit is still subject to the same site rules that all subreddits are.

In a nutshell, Reddit does ban some objectionable content: the objectionable content that violates their site rules. But that’s not contradictory to what our legal notion of “free speech” is. All “free” speech, including that outlined in our own First Amendment, is limited in some way—which is why the notion of free speech doesn't protect your right to distribute obscene materials, to disregard a school administration's policies, or to do anything outright illegal. Free speech has never meant “do or say whatever you want at any time without consequence.”

These days, Reddit responds to objectionable subreddits more quickly than they ever did. And that’s how it should be. But the company shouldn’t feel the need to repeat ad nauseam their commitment to free speech, as Wong did in the aforementioned post. By responding to public criticism and following its own basic rules, Reddit has simply become less of a hellhole than it was two years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s a paradise. Reddit still allows the existence of crazy fringe subreddits (r/whiterights) and bafflingly disgusting ones (r/picsofdeadkids). And of course, r/fappeningdiscussion remains in existence. Reddit is still a huge message board on the internet. By its very nature, it is hell. But if there now exists one less message board titled “Rapebait,” I’d call that a good thing. I would not call it censorship, or some sort of devastating loss of free speech. I would call it the basics of human decency, and a teeny step toward progress. It’s a little silly for Reddit to pretend it’s still the anything-goes cesspool it was in its early days. There’s no shame in admitting that your site is now a little less horrible than it once was.

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Anders Breivik leaving an Oslo courthouse in a police car in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Lwp Kommunikáció

On July 22, 2011, right-wing extremist Anders Breivik detonated a bomb in downtown Oslo, killing eight people. He then drove 25 miles to Utøya island, where the ruling Labour Party’s Youth Rally was being held, and began an hour-long shooting spree that ended in the deaths of 69 more people—most of them teenagers.

Professor Lars Weisæth, an expert in psychotraumatology and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), was asked to step in and “crisis manage” the situation. Just over three years later, I spoke to him about that day and the impact it had on the thousands of affected people he cared for. 

Professor Lars Weisæth. Photo by Heike Bartel

VICE: Hi professor. So at what stage were you called in on July 22?
Professor Lars Weisæth: The same evening. I was on vacation in my summer house on the south coast of Norway, about 150 miles from Oslo. I was first called by NRK, the national television station. They know me, as I’ve been involved in all major Norwegian disasters in an advisory capacity. I’ve been trained in hostage psychology, helping police negotiate with terrorists or kidnappers, and I was chief psychiatrist of the armed forces.

Were you involved as things were unfolding?
No, I was driving back to Oslo. I heard about the shootings on the radio, and when I arrived the situation was still not clear. To give advice to the health authorities the next day—which I had to do, as that became my role—I needed a clear idea. Ten had been regarded as killed, but the bigger numbers weren’t out yet. Then I managed to talk to some of the victims during the night and the next morning, so then I got a clear picture of what had happened.

And what did you put in place?
Well, when a traumatic event occurs, I diagnose it. There are three major types of large events: a company or organizational disaster; a local community disaster, when one community only is affected by an event; or a distant type of disaster—distant from the family—which this was. If it’s a local event, you move your resources there, but it was clear that the Utøya massacre was not. The 565 youngsters on the island came from all over Norway, and during the night we learned that 69 had been killed: 12 percent.

So, an Information Support Center [ISC] was established in both places—this ISC was grasped by the World Health Organization in 1991 and included in the guidelines for how countries should respond to disasters. You need to invite family members to come to the site. You need to feed them, to house them, but most of all you need to inform them—ongoing information on what has happened, what is happening. You have to anchor families to the ISC, otherwise they will try to find out for themselves by doing desperate things. You have families all over Norway, and they do not know what the fate of their child is. More than 1,000 people met at this hotel, the ISC, during the night and the next day.

Were there any especially difficult decisions you had to make?
The main problem was that there were no exact numbers. In the government quarter, it was established that only eight people had been killed. But we didn’t know who had been there. There are 4,000 people who work in this district—70 percent of the Norwegian state apparatus concentrated within a radius of 330 yards—and 1,700 offices were destroyed. But the main problem was on the island. It was dark. Nobody knew how many had been there. We learned finally that it was 565. So, the uncertainty about the number who’d been killed was the main problem. The police only issue information that is certified. So, during that night, they only reported 10 people having been killed. But we had reason to believe it was many, many more. In my opinion, that should have been said. They had created a false hope.

Another problem was that—and today it sounds crazy—many were hospitalized with serious injuries, and not all of them could be identified. So when the police called the hospital to find out who had been admitted, the hospital refused to give out names. It’s a typical symptom of stress: people cling to rules and they become more bureaucratic.

How widespread was PTSD in the aftermath?
In the governmental quarter, about 25 percent suffered from PTS after seven months. On Utøya, it was 70 percent, although that is now down to about 25 percent after three years. Also, we did a national study of how the Norwegian population reacted. Grief was the main response. Half of the Norwegian population actually cried on the first weekend when it became clear what losses had occurred. The second most common response was anger—about 40 percent. Fear, which Breivik wanted to create, was far less frequent, although a bit more so among young people in Oslo.

Is it possible that the families suffered PTSD, even though they weren’t directly submitted to danger?
Usually the families suffer losses, so you will have grief responses. But in this case there was a particular additional and very severe stress: namely, that a large number of the parents had had telephone contact with their sons and daughters before they were killed—actually, while they were being killed. Talking was of course itself a risk, because Breivik could hear them, and the mobile phones among the dead were going off all the time, too—families trying to reach their young ones. So, in this particular terror incident, the families took part in the ordeal, more than usually is the case.

One of the thousands of memorial messages left outside Oslo Cathedral following Breivik's attacks. Photo via Wikipedia

The fact that Breivik turned up in a police uniform must have had a huge impact on later PTS symptoms.
It did. A group of these youngsters that I’ve talked to were hiding in a small cave. Breivik shot and killed one of them, the furthest out, and then continued on his path. But when a boat came, with policemen calling out, “We’re here to save you,” they didn’t believe it. It obscured conditions for “early event identification," as we say. He also called out: “I’m here to protect you because there’s been a bomb in Oslo.” And when they went up to him, he shot them. It was really very evil.

Was he insane, in your opinion?
In Norway, if you’re insane, you cannot be sentenced. In most other countries, it’s not enough to be psychotic [to escape trial]. It must also be the cause of your murdering—there must be a link between the psychosis and the crime. Actually, I think Breivik was psychotic along three dimensions: his grandiosity, his feelings of being persecuted, and the lack of affect. That is not what terrorists are usually like. To me, this is a very sick person: he smiles and kills.

But is it possible to plan something so meticulously over such a long period of time and still be deemed insane?
Very good question, and that’s the other side. Along these three dimensions, he qualified for what you would call a partial psychosis—a paranoia. These people can be extremely rational, extremely logical, very good at arguing and long-term planning. They know the difference between right and wrong, and they know when they commit an act that it is wrong. And that’s the reason, I think, that in the end the court concluded that he was sane. Probably, if we had had a different law, we could have said both that he’s partially psychotic but also that he knew what he was doing and is sane enough to be sentenced.

You know, it came out in a recent book about his mother that he gave her a dildo for her birthday when he was a teenager. I never heard that from any other family, getting involved in one’s mother’s sexual life like that. To me, that is an early sign that something is very wrong. The whole family was observed in a child psychiatric department when he was four or five years old. It was clear that something was disturbed. The childcare agency was worried that he was suffering from negligence, that he was a deprived little boy, but the mother was allowed to keep him.

Oslo immediately after the attack by Anders Breivik. Photo via Wikipedia

Is there a qualitative difference between PTS arising from this type of event—an atrocity "out of the blue"—and from other situations of extreme danger?
There is a scale: natural disasters, human error—let’s say in a traffic accident—human negligence and, finally, violence: terror, war, criminal violence. With a natural disaster, nature is dangerous but not evil, so your self-esteem—your sense of value—is not harmed. There’s no one to blame. You’re not humiliated, so that’s less psychologically harmful.

I try to tell these youngsters, "You’re an innocent victim. A murderer has tried to kill you and your friends." But, because he attacked these two social systems, it was also an attack on Norway, on our democracy. This provides a meaning, and that is crucial, because if I’m being maimed for life, at least it was not accidental, although I paid a heavy price.

What did you do in the subsequent weeks?
My main work over the next weeks was to organize psychiatric support in the government quarter. PTS causes cognitive disturbances. It reduces your ability to concentrate; it affects your memory. So, intellectual functions suffer. The main challenge was to find suitable jobs that the people could manage so they could still be productive and feel they were a part of the workforce.

What about with the Utøya survivors?
One of my main jobs was to arrange a return to the island—about 1,000 people. I recommended that everyone who had lost someone there and everyone who had survived should return. It’s beneficial if the bereaved family is invited to the site of death. It will make it less difficult to understand and accept what happened—where Breivik had stood when he fired the shots, how rapid death came. Second, the site of death gives a sense of closeness to the dead person, almost like the grave. Third, many families feel they have a duty to do this. It reduces the guilt. It’s like a service they owe the dead person: to find out what happened to them, where they died. And then you have the symbolic, ritual effect on those kids, many of whom were quite scared before they did this. It’s anti-phobic. Reality is far less frightening than all the fantasies you can have.

Bomb damage in Oslo. Photo via Wikipedia

Was there any "survivor guilt"?
That has been a pronounced psychological reaction. We’ve found that in other disasters people struggle with difficult decisions—I call them impossible decisions—about their own survival, how much they can do to help others. That’s a very painful part of the post-traumatic stress syndrome in situations like this.

Finally, how do people get over this?
By traditional, psychotherapeutic means: working through the experience, taking part in the grief over your lost friends—it’s a gradual, long-term process. These are healthy people, so it’s likely that not that many will have chronic problems. But it’s like war—you can never guarantee that all soldiers will avoid permanent psychological injury. It’s too violent for that. You must have the memory, but you shouldn’t have the re-experiences. You need to turn the flashbacks into a bad memory from earlier in your life, not something that keeps coming back to you with the quality of, “Oh, it’s happening again.”

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Andrew pictured at home with his Alternative Miss World 2014 throne. Photo by the author

If John Waters is the godfather of camp, Andrew Logan is his technicolor British counterpart. A sculptor, painter, and performance artist, Logan is also the founder of “Alternative Miss World,” a kind of club kid answer to the Miss World beauty pageant they stopped televising in the UK when everyone realized it's weird to rank women on how well they can wear a bikini. The Alternative Miss World favors creativity over conformity, and launched the careers of a bunch of iconic creative figures—from director Derek Jarman to performance artist Leigh Bowery.

Logan came up with the idea in 1972, and since then has held 12 Alternative Miss World competitions. After a five-year hiatus, the event is back and will be held at Shakespeare’s Globe, perfectly symbolizing the way in which—over the years—Logan has turned his unique brand of high camp eccentricity into a British institution. 

Andrew lives and works in his studio, the Glasshouse, a huge, glass-roofed building in Bermondsey with a rubber plant tree growing upwards through the floors. The whole building is full of his work, including that mirrored sculpture of what's probably Liza Minnelli’s head in the picture below. He recently invited me over to talk about the competition. 

VICE: Hi Andrew. How did the idea of Alternative Miss World come to you? 
Andrew Logan: It was natural, really. I’ve always loved giving parties, so it started with friends and just dressing up. Nothing is deliberate. I’d just been to Crufts dog show, so I was rather inspired by that, and you’ve got to remember that Miss World was huge in the 70s—every household in the country watched it religiously.

How has the competition evolved over time?
When it started there was no difference between the audience, the contestants, or the judges—everyone was just mucking in together. That’s still very much the ethos. People are always trying to get me to get important “VIPs” now. In the 70s, there weren’t celebrities like that, but now we’re really in the cult of celebrities. I’m not that interested. I never have been. I’m much more interested in the relationship between the people watching and the people taking part—the mix.

2009 Alternative Miss World winner Fancy Chance. Photo by Robyn Beeche

Who are your judges this year?
I’m very happy with my judges. They’re all people I’ve known. Zandra Rhodes; Molly Parkin; Anthony Eno; Daniel Lismore; Miss Fancy Chance from the last one; Rebecca Hoffberger, who runs a fantastic museum called the Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore; Rajef Set is coming from new Delhi; and Angela Flowers. She was my gallerist for a while, but I’ve known Angela since I was a errand boy at the ICA in 1967. The cabaret artist Bish is going to be doing something, and Grayson Perry’s co-hosting. He was the 1985 Alternative Miss World at the Brixton Academy, so, in a way, he’s kind of a product of the event.

As co-hosts, will there be some competition between you and Grayson?
No, no. I'm not a competitor. I’m very, kind of... I wouldn’t say constrained, but you’ve got to tread carefully—you don’t want it to be too intrusive on the main event. However, I know Grayson’s already got three outfits, and he said one of them was so neon that no one’s going to be able to look at the stage because it will be so bright. I don’t know if he’s trying to upstage the contestants.

And what about the contestants, how do you find them?
Well, they find me. Some people have done it before. My sister Janet has done every single one. Never won. She came third last time. She’s brilliant. And my brother Quentin is also in it. Then other people I wouldn’t know, people who’ve applied and know about it.

Really, you’re limited. You can’t have 500 people enter, because how on Earth are you going to get through the evening? When we had it in the grand hall at Kensington Olympia in 1981, it finished at 3AM because our people had to walk so far to come back down the catwalk—it was 250 feet long.

Even this one, if you allow each contestant three minutes and there are three sections, you're talking three hours just gone, and that’s without cabaret. So it has to be really sharp. In the very first ones, people just ran up and down, and people didn’t have day wear, swimwear, or evening wear. They only had one outfit and it didn’t make any difference.

How many contestants do you have?
We have about 17 or 18.

Divine pictured with Andrew Logan, 1978. Photo by JD Matthews 

Divine hosted one year, right?
Divine was a co-host in 1978. We met in 1977 at the Jubilee when I had a studio at Butler’s Wharf. My friend Zandra Rhodes brought him to a big summer party I was holding and he ended up being a co-host in 1978. Quite a remarkable, wonderful person—really warm.

Have you seen the Jeffrey Schwarz documentary about him?
Yes. It’s interesting, because it’s only his American side. On his English side, he was a great Anglophile. I think there should be a sequel of his English side, because that’s when he became a pop star and did all the clubs and his career changed. 

Right. How was Leigh Bowery involved?
Well, Leigh started his career in the 1985 Alternative Miss World, the same year as Grayson. I think it was the first time he’d ever appeared on stage, and there was no going back after that. This event has spawned a lot of creative things. Gosh. Well, Derek Jarman, 1975. Derek had been rather obscure before then, but after that his life moved into the public eye.

Alternative Miss World seems to foretell things. In 1975, it was very punk; there were lots of safety pins and a lot of rips—things that didn’t really happen in fashion properly until a year later.

(Left) Leigh Bowery and Jill, 1986; (Right) Grayson Perry covered in mud, 1986 (Photos by Robyn Beeche).

In terms of the costumes and presentation of the show, how does that connect with your work as a sculptor?
I see the whole thing as a big sculpture that involves hundreds of people. It is a sculpture. Some people call it performance art, but I don’t care what it’s called. I always do a theme, and this year is neon numbers. It came to me in the middle of the night; I woke up and thought, ‘Oh, numbers.' And then looking at The Globe I thought, ‘Well, what’s the antithesis of the Globe’s oak and bleached wood? Neon.’ So everyone has to come in neon. Guests as well. Get neon! It’s so cheap. You can get it everywhere. It'll be like a construction worker symposium.

Andrew pictured with Luciana Martinez, 1981. Photo by Robin Beeche

Final question. Is it true you held the first Sex Pistols gig?
Yes, in my Butlers Wharf stage. I had the Sex Pistols the first time they played. It was in my studio on February 14. You’ve got to remember that, back then, London was a very small artistic community with very few artists, and very few designers. I knew Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood very well. Malcolm knew about the Butlers Wharf, so he phoned me up one day and said, “Look, I’ve got these boys, they’re gonna be bigger than the Beatles.” I said, “Oh lovely.” He said, “I wonder if they could play?” And I said, “Fine, sure!”

So they came and played and it was very funny because it was in this huge, 2,500 square-foot old warehouse. It had a corrugated iron roof and I built this portacabin that I bought for nothing and lined it in gold and called it “the gold room." They started to play and the reverberation was unbelievable, so we all ran into this gold room. I think there were only about three people standing at the front. Very noisy.

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Alternative Miss World is being held at Shakespeare's Globe on Saturday the 18th of October.

The 12 previous Alternative Miss World contests were the subject of acclaimed feature-length documentary ‘The British Guide to Showing Off’, directed by Jes Benstock, available on DVD and as video-on-demand, exclusively on www.wearecolony.com. 

Photo via the author.
Yesterday, Damian Abraham of Fucked Up fame (and our Canadian Cannabis series) moderated a mayoral debate hosted by ArtsVote at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. As we approach the one-year anniversary of Rob Ford admitting he smoked crack, Toronto’s year of police surveillance, professional wrestlers and boxers visiting City Hall, FordFests, and sudden medical emergencies, the inclusion of Canada’s favourite screaming frontman moderating a debate seemed just about right.

That said, compared to last week’s debate where Olivia Chow was heckled to “go back to China” and a woman screamed out her homophobic support for the Fords, the ArtsVote debate was remarkably civil. Abraham began by warning the crowd that homophobia and racism would not be tolerated (it’s a shame that this warning needs to be issued, in 2014, in Toronto) and the candidates began to trip over each other to answer questions about the future of arts funding in Toronto.

Joining the regular trio of Ford, Chow, and Tory were Morgan Baskin, the “teen candidate,” who at 19 has already developed an impressive amount of political acumen, and Ari Goldkind, a defence lawyer who, in a profile published by the Toronto Star called “Meet the Longshots” was photographed after defending a pedophile client. But, as Goldkind told the paper, “People think that my job is getting somebody off. It’s not. It’s making sure we dot I’s and cross T’s.”

So with the dream team assembled, the candidates did their best to sell their connections to the art world. Some more than others. Goldkind’s performance was strong, and he was quick to take on Tory and Ford. He called Tory the “king of maybe” and challenged Doug Ford, who often mentioned the economic benefits of the arts, by saying: “You can’t legitimize the arts by saying it makes a profit.” Though as a genuine member of the arts community, he floundered. When asked about his most transformative arts experience in the city, he mentioned the one time he had dinner at O.Noir, the restaurant where all the servers are blind. Not only is that arguably not an artistic experience, he was probably meeting a client anyhow.

Nice try, Ari.

Olivia Chow is arguably the most connected candidate to artists and creative projects across the city. She namedropped The Remix Project more than once—an academy and nonprofit for youth in low-income areas to study music, photography, and business. It’s considered to be instrumental in the rise of OVO, and they just opened a new HQ in Chicago.

Olivia was also able to namedrop other, specific, successful creative projects—like the ArtSpace renovation of an old school on Shaw St. that has provided studio space for artists. But she often got bogged down with dreamy philosophy about how art can help business, and how important creativity is for a city, repeating such ethereal phrases as: “Creativity allows us to see the world in a different way.” Rather than sticking to her specific accomplishments or actionable ideas.

Hearing John Tory speak about the arts was, unsurprisingly, like listening to your Conservative uncle tell you about his favourite painting. He was nearly incapable of answering a question about his “most transformative art experience,” beginning with a ramble about how impressive one-man plays are (without specifically naming one) before ending on a general answer: Nuit Blanche. Tory also namedropped Queen St. West as the “second coolest neighbourhood in the world,” but probably hasn’t set foot on it since the 1980s.

Doug Ford’s performance, in contrast to his last debate, was surprisingly subdued. Ari Goldkind cracked that he must have had a tea before the debate, and it’s clear that he’s been coached to calm the fuck down, here and there. Given that Doug Ford doesn’t have much of an arts record, he focused on two key things: his trip to Austin with his brother to plan a “music city” initiative in Toronto, and the arts gala he and his brother organized (the division of labour is unclear), which raised a million bucks for the arts.

Doug committed to keeping that fundraiser going, which is great, but his attempt to paint himself as an arts advocate fell to pieces when he continuously referenced his goal to “bring a world class music festival” to Toronto. He cited SXSW and Austin City Limits as world class music festivals (even though he has never been to SXSW) and namedropped Michael Hollett (a vocal critic of the Fords), who founded NXNE as his “friend” who joined him on the trip to Austin.

The problem with this is that, NXNE is by all accounts a world class music festival*. Its lineup is often quite similar to the lineups you’ll find at any other marquee music festival across North America, but as any concert promoter in Toronto knows, there are various municipal blockades in place when it comes to booking off-kilter venues, or holding electronic music events.

As Olivia said: “We need to make sure we're not afraid of [EDM]."

Doug also mentioned the City Hall music office, which is a Ford initiative, and was never followed through on. He constantly referred to it, as if it’s some great success, when in reality it never opened. Unfortunately, none of the candidates called him out on that.

The most impressive debater was Morgan Baskin, who is quite clearly a serious longshot in the race, but who is already demonstrating she’s willing to go toe-to-toe with the staid candidates Toronto has been watching in debates—for what seems like an eternity now. She was the only candidate, when asked about whether or not Toronto needs a civil employee who could act as the city’s ‘Creative Director,’ who made mention of actually attending the public meeting about having such a position in the first place. And she was not afraid to mention the Ford Bros’ reluctance to vote for arts initiatives (though, to be fair, Rob voted against TIFF funding and Doug did not).



The moment Olivia elicted a collective groan from the ArtsVote debate crowd, via Twitter user graphicmatt.
Ultimately, the more conservative candidates (Doug and Tory) made the mistake of acting as if their future initiatives would suddenly make Toronto a world class arts city. Tory said that he would take the Toronto arts from “good to great,” when the reality is that the city is already full of talent. What’s needed is more funding, less roadblocks, and more affordable space for artists to live and work. That’s where the government comes in—and clearly, most candidates have no idea what’s actually happening in the city or its world-class cool neighbourhoods (thanks Vogue, for using SEO clickbait articles for evil. You’ve ruined our city).

Unfortunately, the debate ended in embarrassing fashion, as Olivia Chow declared that she was going to share some original art of her own with the crowd. She then held up a crude drawing of John Tory’s transit plan, which elicited a sea of groans in the crowd. Abraham, who was there to keep the candidates on the topic of the arts, threw his hands up in frustration. And Tory, as if to say now now, just let her prattle on, advised Abraham to just let her go.

It was a sad attempt at over-politicizing a debate on the arts, especially from a woman who, earlier in the debate, had said: “We can’t play politics with the arts.”

If this is the kind of maturity that our (ostensibly) most artistic mayoral hopeful is bringing to the table, the Toronto arts community shouldn’t be holding their breath for a windfall of municipal support anytime soon.

*The author is a member of NXNE’s advisory board.


@patrickmcguire

Anonymous activists milling around the entrance to Saint Hill Manor. Photo via Wikipedia

Saint Hill Manor isn’t your average British beauty spot. Firstly, although one part of it looks like a Norman fortress—all round barrel turrets and the kind of pointy windows you’d see in an Asterix comic strip—that extension was actually built in 1968. Secondly, its centerpiece is a large statue of a man carrying a shield decorated with a symbol you might recognize from the placards at Anonymous rallies. Thirdly, it used to be full of Scientologists.

Saint Hill is the last great bastion of Scientology in the UK. The original manor house was built in the small West Sussex town of East Grinstead in the 18th century and purchased in 1959 by L. Ron Hubbard. His decision to turn it into Scientology’s British head office made it a Mecca for followers of Hubbard’s philosophy, of which there are now said to be 10 million (this number is disputed by basically anyone who isn’t a signed up Scientologist).

“Nowadays, Saint Hill's car park is usually all but empty. You can almost see the tumbleweed blowing through,” says Jon Atack, a former Scientologist and the author of A Piece of Blue Sky, a takedown of Hubbard's belief system. “The vigorous harassment of critics has slowed down too—as I can attest!”  

Jon Atack. Photo by Lizy Atack

Atack, who has repeatedly challenged the membership figures posited by Scientology’s top brass, told me, “Scientology was never big business in the UK. The last census showed just over 2,000 UK members. The international figure is probably about 25,000.”

I grew up near East Grinstead, a town that represents Middle England at its most repressed. Constituents are represented in Westminster by Nicholas “Bunter” Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson, and the nearest chain supermarket is almost ten miles away. As a child, I was forced to play rugby at a club whose pitches were straight over the road from Saint Hill. We used to hear whisperings about the Scientologists (and Mormons) in the area, but I don’t remember them amounting to much more than the  kind of standard xenophobic chatter that traditionally greets a large influx of Americans. Before Tom Cruise and John Travolta outed themselves, nobody really cared about the group of alien worshippers.

But Saint Hill used to be the bustling international headquarters of Scientology. Atack was there between 1975 and 1977, and then again from 1982 to 1983.

“It was fairly busy then, with about 180 staff and usually about a hundred students,” he tells me. “But, despite a weekly service, there were no pretensions to religion. The weekly service was usually held to an empty room, but was a necessity to gain recognition as a religion.”

With hundreds of Scientologists (“mainly Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Israelis”, says Atack) descending on East Grinstead, the town began to entice followers of all sorts of alternative spiritualities. East Grinstead might prefer visitors to focus on attractions like its beautiful 14th century timber high street, or the local coffee shop owned by Peter Andre, but it was better known for years as the UK base of Scientology, Mormonism, Opus Dei, and Rosicrucianism.

In London, Scientologists have shown no sign of acknowledging their diminished following. In the last decade they’ve opened both a major church near St Paul’s Cathedral and the Dianetics and Scientology Life Improvement Center on Tottenham Court Road. Wedged in between the various shops selling digital radios and second-hand tripods, this is intended to be a place for silent reflection and the acquisition of knowledge.

A polite young man with gelled blond hair and a thick northern accent greets me at the door. He gives me a guided tour of the center’s three video chambers—all of them lined with copies of Hubbard’s seminal text, Dianetics, in every language from Arabic to Zulu—and offers me tea and coffee. I’m charmed. So charmed, in fact, that I settle in on a sofa to watch a documentary about the life of Lafayette Ron Hubbard.

The Dianetics and Scientology Life Improvement Center on Tottenham Court Road. Photo via Wikipedia

It’s worth noting, at this point, that I’m the only person here. Every passerby has something to say about the center, whether it’s a derogatory quip or a specific South Park quote, but nobody goes in. Perhaps that’s why my new buddy is so friendly—he spends all his days trapped inside an empty museum, the informational videos endlessly repeating themselves like some kind of nightmarish Groundhog Day. It must be nice to have someone to talk to for once.

Irene Thrupp, L Ron Hubbard’s personal secretary during his residence at Saint Hill, tells me her story from the video screen. She’s a posh old lady who was charmed by “Ron” and his acquisition of expensive desk chairs. There’s something very sad about the way that Irene venerates this man to an empty congregation.

Saint Hill is not what it was in Irene's. I’d chatted to an elderly East Grinstead resident about her reflections of the place. She remembers the annual “Medieval Fayre” and skiffle concerts held in the grounds, back when the Scientologists knew how to throw a decent party, concluding by telling me that I looked “susceptible” and warning me not to get sucked in.

But what is there to get sucked into? Sure, the man at the center is very friendly—the kind of guy who’d fix your printer for free—but there’s nothing here to actively participate in. I ask what my first step to enlightenment should be. “Err,” he puzzles, as though he's never been asked this question before. “You could try filling out this free personality test?”

Question 1: Do you make thoughtless remarks or accusations that you later regret? Yes, I do.

Question 88: If we were invading another country, would you feel sympathetic towards conscientious objectors in this country? Who’s "we"?

Question 92: Are you a slow eater? Defiantly so.

Question 98: Would you use corporal punishment on a child aged ten if it refused to obey you? Wait, what?

This is the test that the Church of Scientology uses to determine whether you can be saved by their purification schemes, or whether you’re insufficiently pro-discipline. As initiations go, it’s hardly that enticing for a faith that’s already been battered by bad publicity.

South Park's depiction of the stuff Scientologists believe in

“I think that the combination of South Park and Anonymous has turned away potential recruits from the new generation,” says Atack, musing on the statistics from the most recent UK census. “Add to that the broad availability of material on the several hundred dedicated websites, and most people will simply shake their heads and leave.”

One of those websites is “Operation Clambake,” an anti-Scientology organization so widely followed that it even has its own Wikipedia page. I spoke to its founder, Norwegian activist Andreas Heldal-Lund, to ask him why he thinks Scientology has failed in the UK.

“Scientology aims for the universe, but only has a net big enough to catch a limited number of fish,” he tells me, somewhat confusingly. “But you can achieve a lot even with a few fish if you meet the right people.”

Heldal-Lund's organization has captured the attention of what he calls “the nerdy early implementers of the internet”. And that, he believes, is where Scientology has shot itself in the foot. “They lost the big and most important battle: the internet,” he says. “For most people, the cat is out of the bag, and they're less and less likely to fall for this.”

Despite what Atack and Heldal-Lund have told me, and the dismal emptiness of the Scientology venues I’ve visited in the UK, I can't help but feel sorry for Britain's Scientologists. It might have a bizarrely corporate hierarchy for what’s ostensibly a real, proper, serious religion, but on a basic level there are impressionable people who actually believe what they’ve been told. They filled out the personality test, discovered they were pathetic mortals, and were told that the only way to rebuild themselves was through Scientology. I’d argue we should sympathize with this lot, rather than constantly berate them. It's not like their nonsense, made-up religion is any more ridiculous than all the other made-up religions.

Scientology has always been a poor fit for the UK. It’s a phenomenon better suited to wealthy, tanned Americans who’ve spent their entire lives being told they can be anything they want to be if they throw enough money around, not the Irene Thrupps of this world, or the poor northern lad giving tours of the Dianetics Center.

Saint Hill might present itself as the headquarters of Scientology in the UK, but that clearly doesn't count for much. The manicured lawns, placid ponds, and Travelodge interiors have been left to fester, completely rejected by a nation that can't even deal with moderate Protestantism any more. As for the old guard of British operations, most—including Irene Thrupp—have died, taking Scientology to the grave with them. 

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Nas's debut LP Illmatic is often called the best hip hop album ever made. Photo via Mikamote/Wikimedia Commons

When Erik Parker was an editor at VIBE working on a piece about the tenth anniversary of Nas's seminal rap album Illmatic, he knew his print project wasn't doing the music justice. The MC's vignettes about day-to-day life in the Queensbridge projects aren't your typical paeans to New York City. The songs on Illmatic are so closely tied with specific characters and traumatic memories from Nasir Jones's frenzied adolescence that a true celebration of their greatness required sharing old footage and audio with a new generation of hip-hop heads. So Parker teamed up with graffiti artist One9, and the two spent the next decade crafting Time is Illmatic. The end result premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 19 and is finally set for a nationwide release on Thursday.

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Photos courtesy of the author

It was the winter of 2013, and Dakota Joe thought he was about to die. Hail was beating a crater into the mountain’s bald face, and his Kmart jacket had stopped keeping the cold out a long time ago. His pants were soaked through to the skin—wet denim is slow to dry and wearing it on the Appalachian Trail is generally a bad idea. Every muscle in his body was tense from miles of hiking through the Georgia wilderness. There was no feeling left in his arms and legs, just a stinging cold and more than a little fear.

If it’d been summer, Joe might have taken in the panoramic view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He might have looked down on the half-dozen towns dotting the Trail, catching a glint of the sun off some aluminum siding on barns or shabby general stores. Instead he had to turn away from the summit and slide inch by inch down the icy path, each rickety step putting him on the verge of a twisted ankle or a deadly tumble.

Somehow Joe managed to make his way onto a dirt service road. There, a state trooper picked him up and brought him out of the wilderness, although not out of kindness. Dakota Joe was wanted in Florida for violating his probation. A warrant was out for his arrest.

Within a few weeks, Joe was booked and shipped off to Punta Gorda, Florida, for an eight-month bid at the Charlotte County Jail. It would be a year before he’d see the Trail again.

In early 2014, a crippling cold front had dropped temperatures in my hometown of Milwaukee to a wind-chilled 50 degrees below zero. A few friends and I decided that it was the perfect time to drive down to Georgia to hike the first 40 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

Known affectionately as the AT among trailblazers, the southern tip of the 2,181-mile long path stretching from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine, felt like anything but a winter wilderness. Although most of the trees were already stripped bare by the frost, the area’s thick rhododendron bushes and dense mist gave the forest a jungle-like feel, abetted by the occasional waterfall and stream.

We first encountered Dakota Joe on the approach trail to Springer. He scurried up to us while we were eating lunch, wearing a dopey grin and drops of sweat dripping from his bald head the sides of his bony, freshly-shaven face.

As he greeted us with a chipper Floridian drawl, the first thing I noticed was his backpack. He was carrying over 60 pounds of equipment, food, and water, all loaded together in a heap. He had just started to hike that day, too, and found out very quickly that he’d overpacked.

“When you’re on the [Appalachian Trail] you ultimately pack for what you’re afraid of. Afraid of running out of food? You’ll pack too much. Running out of power? Extra batteries,” he said.

Joe was incredibly upfront, telling us about his divorce and recent release from prison with a casual boredom usually reserved for mailmen and checkout clerks. It freaked us all out, this raggedy man sharing the details of his tumultuous personal life in the middle of a half-frozen Georgia forest no less.

We decided to let Joe hike with us after that chance meeting. Partly because we were already headed in the same direction, partly because he had a transistor radio that got regular weather updates, and partly because the fear of being stabbed to death in our sleep by a stranger was outweighed by our deep-seated Midwestern fear of being impolite.

In the 40 miles we hiked between Amicalola Falls and Lake Winfield-Scott, Joe stayed mostly silent. We knew his pack was weighing him down, putting a strain on his spine that he clearly wouldn't be able to endure for the next 2,000 miles of wilderness. Talking became a luxury reserved for infrequent smoke breaks and when we settled in for the night.

Still, we did learn choice pieces about his past, usually over a cheap dinner of pasta and salami after we’d set up camp in one of the wood shacks along the Trail. He told me about the ice storm that nearly killed him in 2013 while I was filtering water for a few of us in a trickling, forgotten mountain stream. You need to do that to ward off Giardia, a parasite that can turn any outdoor adventure into an unending nightmare of cramps, shit, and puke.

Joe, of course, drank straight from the stream.       

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing last time,” he said. “Going up there in denim like a damn idiot, no cell reception, nothing. This whole adventure is harebrained, but at least this time I know how to take care of myself.”

He certainly had a system and a plan, and then enough food, supplies, backup batteries, and fuel to last him for a few weeks until he needed to resupply. His point about packing for what you’re afraid of was true—and after nearly dying on during the ice storm at Dick’s Creek Gap, he was a little afraid of everything.

Most impressive of all was his body of work. Joe would walk and take pictures on his flip phone all day, sending updates along to a friend in Florida who would post them on a Facebook fan page titled “The Adventures of Dakota Joe.” While the page only had several hundred likes at the time, Joe was confident that the meandering soliloquies and gorgeous landscape shots he posted would soon attract more.

“People are already rooting for me out here,” he said. "I’m getting food drops after a few hundred miles or so, and it’ll mostly be from people who believe in me, and want to hear my story.”

Originally born Chad Ferguson, Joe’s initiation to a life of petty thievery and chasing highs started on his 18th birthday when he robbed a Domino’s Pizza. That and some furniture robberies in Tennessee earned him his first stint in prison, a four-month bid that did little but cement his burgeoning drug addiction.

“After jail l I got into drugs really hard," he said. "There’s not a drug I haven’t put in my system. I’ve had my heyday with crack cocaine, heroin, LSD, ecstasy, all that stuff, and I would’ve robbed my own mother for money.”

After burglarizing a church in 2008, Joe was sent to a federal prison in Florida where, on his first night, a fellow inmate was stabbed in the bathroom. The next morning Joe decided that he was running out of time to get his life in order. He vowed to get clean and never, ever go back to prison.

After eight months the state released him, and he found himself free from his most serious drug addictions and ready to get right. He settled into a little home in Fort Myers, Florida, got a full-time job and even a serious girlfriend he eventually married. Things were finally starting to settle down. Unfortunately, right after his marriage fell apart in 2012, Joe was stopped by a local cop and charged with driving on a suspended license. He was stuck with three years’ probation and the life he’d built seemed to be slipping away.

Joe decided to do something drastic in response, something he’d wanted to do since he was a little kid: hike the Appalachian Trail. No time to flesh things out, no time to save up money for the trip. He was just going to do it, planning be damned.

That hike was interrupted after he nearly froze to death at Dick’s Creek Gap and the cop that picked Joe dropped him in Charlotte County jail for violating the terms of his probation.

Stuck in prison once again, Joe tried to keep his head down. He took on extra work, acted like a model inmate, and controlled his temper. Through it all, the only thought on his mind was getting back to Georgia so that he could finish the hike he’d barely even started.

On a breezy September morning, the gates to the jail opened. A part of him thought that he should just cut his losses and settle down again. But to Joe, this felt like a final shot to make something of himself. Maybe not something extraordinary, but something. So he set out on the Trail again.

When he began to post about his plans on the Appalachian Trail hiker forums WhiteBlaze.net, Joe expected people to be skeptical of his second attempt. But the derisive response he got from his fellow online hiking junkies surprised him.

“Oh gosh not this dude again,” one hiker wrote.

“We’ll be taking quarter bets on how long it takes him to violate probation. I’ve got 72 hours or the first Friday after he’s released,” said another.

Joe was understandably pissed off, but it would come in handy over the next eight months. Before, he’d wanted to fulfill a little childhood dream and hopefully write about his experiences along the way. Now, he had what every good visionary needs: haters.

Instead of folding, he decided to double down and show those bastards who he really was. He wasn’t just going to hike the Appalachian Trail, he was going to hike there and back (or “yo-yo”) and do it all on half of a shoestring budget.

On October 13, 2013, Joe got himself a bicycle and rode it all the way from Port Charlotte, Florida, to a run-down town on the edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia armed with nothing but a few dollars, some basic gear, and a food stamp card. A few weeks later he was standing next to me on top of Springer Mountain.

“It’s Dakota Joe, don’tcha know?”

This cheesy salutation heading each Facebook post endeared me to Dakota Joe’s writing early on—that and his rabid dedication to the task. During the 2,181-mile journey, Joe compiled an impressive body of work matched by few on or off the Appalachian Trail. It’s common for hikers to document their journeys with a post every few hundred miles and a couple photos, but rarely has the Trail been so deeply documented, each rugged, muddy day of the hike so carefully described and captured for posterity. And Joe did it all on a cell phone made during the Bush administartion.

After we parted ways in northern Georgia, Joe was able to lighten his load somewhat and continue his hike with a smaller pack. It was still February, and even in the South the winters can still bring a bitter cold, with snow up past your ankles and wind that threatens to rattle the skeleton apart.

Joe trekked through the snow for weeks, almost never encountering another human being—no hikers, no Conservancy volunteers, no one. For weeks at a time it was just him and the Trail. Fifteen miles of hiking a day, a small pot of warm mush for dinner, and the odd deer for company. These were meditative times. Joe didn’t know and stopped caring whether or not another person would come along before winter’s end.

But when Joe crossed into North Carolina in early February, he met the man who would become half of the Appalachian Trail’s strangest dynamic duo.

Phil, a lanky and laconic German grad student, happened upon the itinerant ex-con in a North Carolina shelter. He recognized Joe almost immediately from the notorious posts about him on WhiteBlaze. The two immediately took a shine to each other in a way neither could really describe, although both did suggest sitting down to watch Deliverance as a defining moment in their peculiar friendship.

Phil was hiking the AT while his girlfriend worked in Washington, DC for the summer. He would eventually propose to her that Independence Day on the summit of Mount Katahdin. Together, Phil and Joe set out to cross the Smoky Mountains.

They quickly acclimated themselves to the Trail life, slowly ramping up their daily mileage. First 12-mile days sufficed, then they went up to 16, then suddenly they were hiking 20 miles a day with ease, enjoying the first signs of spring thaw and the newfound hiking companions who began to show up on weekends. Although they mostly continued to sleep in the wood shelters, the pair began to take infrequent stops at hostels in the booniest of boonie AT towns.

“Our first night in Virignia we stayed at a hostel in Damascus," Joe said. "Me and Phil both got sick from Norovirus and the guy who owned the hostel still charged us 25 bucks a night to stay. I paid $175…to vomit and diarrhea my brains out for five days straight."

Food was rarely plentiful, and tobacco (one of Joe’s few remaining habits) was even rarer. Adjusting wasn’t too hard for Joe following eight months on the prison diet, though, and the endorphin rush of every peak and every scenic outlook made it all worth it.

All the while, Dakota Joe’s Facebook presence continued to grow. Now, each of his posts would reach 10,000 or more people. On top of that, the haters on WhiteBlaze began to simmer into grumblings about his use of food stamps—petty shit that indicated everyone realized that Joe was really going for broke.

A little love from the fans certainly helped, be it in the form of an online comment or the odd care package left at some wayward post office. It didn’t change the weather or make his legs stop hurting on the bad days, but it did make it all a little more bearable. Joe understood that this is what it took to get an eyeful of America’s remaining wilderness, and it was worth it.

Joe never said this out loud, nor did Phil. When I reconnected with them in May for a ten-mile section hike—at that point child’s play for the two of them—they had long since stripped their minds of such ornate excess in order to make room for a shark-like internal propulsion system that hummed, Keep moving, keep moving forward.

Phil was pissed off that I’d shown up just as they were about to hit the home stretch. He had a girlfriend to propose to, and here I come along to do a measly ten-mile hike—not to mention give Joe an inflated sense of self by writing about him. After talking for a few minutes, Phil wandered off to cook a chicken sausage and go to bed, just as the sun was setting.

Sitting on the Killington shelter’s slanted metal sheet roof, just a few hundred feet from the top of Killington Peak in Vermont’s Green Mountains, I could see that Joe had changed since I’d seen him over 1,500 miles earlier. Maybe it was just the copse of facial hair he’d acquired, but he seemed to have to grown into a mature calm.

“This is really a job now," he said. "I’ve got a few hundred miles left, and after Phil does his proposal I’m gonna rip back down to Georgia. Phil’s pretty fast, but walking with a second person does slow you down. I’ll bet I can do 30-mile days like nothing.”

It was quite a claim to make, but I was ready to buy it. Wanting to see the view from Killington myself I started to head back up the mountain, a climb that takes you up several hundred vertical feet. It’s a tough-but-doable ascent for a novice like me.

Joe nearly sprinted the entire way. He was up there well before me, taking in a gorgeous view of Vermont for the second time that day, and I realized that he really had come into his own. This nutty guy could set a record, I kept thinking. he could actually do it.

After a quick ten-mile hike the next morning, we said our goodbyes outside of a Walmart in Rutland, Vermont, where Phil and Joe bought supplies and siphoned off some electricity to charge their phones. From there the two bounded towards the White Mountains, arguably the most beautiful and challenging part of the whole Trail. Southbound hikers cheat themselves by tackling this monstrous slice of the Northern New England first, both in eating up the most stunning spectacles at the outset and forcing themselves to do the hard stuff before they’ve even earned their trail legs.

It was no sweat for them. Their entire world was one long hike at this point. What was another 6,000-foot-tall mountain compared to what they’d just done?

Finally, with just two weeks to go before Phil’s proposal set to take place on Mount Katahdin, the pair reached the final stretch of the AT: Maine’s Hundred-Mile Wilderness.

“We were sick of the fucking trail,” Joe said. “We had to ford a river naked because we didn’t want to get our clothes wet. Plus it’s a bit of financial burden once you get to Maine, because you’re running out of money and it seems like all of the hostels in Maine exist purely just to rip you off.”

Of all things, money was high on Joe’s mind. Phil was about to go back to DC, but Joe had to turn around and do the whole damn thing over again with only a food stamp card and the good graces of his fickle fans.

But Dakota Joe is nothing if not bold. And fortune, it seems, truly does favor the bold. During a patch of strong cell phone reception in the Hundred-Mile Wilderness he got a call from an old friend named Teddy who whispered an endless stream of miracles in his ear.

I got some work out in North Dakota, Teddy told him. There’s a gold rush out here. You show up and I’ll get you a job, no questions asked. $20 an hour and a per diem to boot. Lay water pipes all day and live like a king.

Dakota Joe hadn’t heard that North Dakota had recently been experiencing an energy boom, thanks in large part to the explosion of the natural gas and oil industries in the region. He had no strong opinions on fracking, much less flaming water taps and polluted reservoirs. Even if he did, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. This was more money than he’d ever made in his life.

But what about his promises of a yo-yo? Joe had spent two years building up an online persona, and said over and over again that he wasn’t just going to do the AT one way, but both. The last thing he wanted to be was a fraud.

Somewhere in the middle of Maine a switch flipped. He was about to do what no one on Earth would’ve bet he could have a year ago. On paper, people like Dakota Joe aren’t supposed to hike Triple Crown trails. That’s for the Bill Brysons of the world, for the young and parent-supported, for crunchy baby boomers wanting to "get away from it all." It had been the stinging rejection from WhiteBlaze that had doubled his trip to yo-yo status, and with the end of the Trail nearly in sight an adult level of reasoning took over.

Dakota Joe didn’t need to do anything crazy to make his life worthwhile. He’d already done it.

In the most bizarre, roundabout way possible, the AT had done for Joe what two stints in prison had thoroughly failed to do: rehabilitate him.

At the Trail’s end there were no plumes for Dakota Joe and Phil the German. The only fireworks were far in the distance, marking a Fourth of July that neither would celebrate or even care about. For Phil there was a woman he loved, and for Joe there was only a plaque bearing the words of deceased Maine Governor Percival Proctor Baxter: “Man is born to die. His works are short-lived.”

“I was really emotional, now that I had an actual life to begin,” Joe said. “What I would do when I got back had been on my mind the whole time. I could’ve yo-yo’d the trail, achieved the dream, and come back to nothing.”

Returning home confirmed that for Joe. Most of his possessions had been sold during his time on the trail, pawned off for drugs by his old junkie friends. So Joe said a few goodbyes to those loved ones still sober enough to say goodbye back and left for North Dakota.

Dakota Joe has settled down for the moment—out of jail, out of the woods, slowly working his way up the ranks into the American middle class. Working and resting, working and resting, every day without fail, laying water pipes atop the Bakken formation in rural North Dakota.

“Everywhere you look there’s oil pumps, fire shooting out. It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in my life,” he told me.

I wanted to say something to him about the potential environmental impacts of fracking, or at least point out the painful irony of harvesting oil after spending six months in the woods. But I didn’t. Joe had managed to silence all of his WhiteBlaze haters by finishing the Trail and getting a job, so it felt weird to piss on the track in the middle of his victory lap.

For now, Joe will keep working and writing for whoever’s willing to pay attention. That may bear fruit, as he’s already got a bigger and more dedicated following than most writers I’ve known.

There are still two legs of the Triple Crown for him to see, with a combined 5,754 miles between them. There’s also the Florida Trail, a thousand-mile endurance trial of swampy misery that no one has ever yo-yo hiked. Although he’s more focused work than the lure of a trail at the moment, a glimmer of possibility remains for Florida.

Joe may yet take that long walk through his old backyard, as a truly free man for the first time in years.

Dan Schneider is a freelance journalist and law student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Follow him on Twitter.

Cris and Renato, loving each other intelligently at the Love School press conference

Cris and Renato Cardoso are two glamorous TV hosts with a “bulletproof marriage” who travel the world teaching single and married people how to “love intelligently.” In London this past Sunday, no less than 11,400 people showed up to watch them present the Love School, an "interactive love seminar."

Having seen the happy couple’s faces beaming from the side of nearly every bus in town, I was intrigued. What were Cris and Renato’s credentials? What kind of people would pay money for instructions on how they should love each other? And why did I get an uneasy feeling in my stomach when I stared at their poster for too long? The only way to answer those questions, I decided, was to go to the Love School myself.

Admittedly, the Love School is not aimed at cynical young men like me, who have an inherent mistrust of self-proclaimed experts. Instead, it's aimed at believers—believers of the promise that £46.50 (about $75) and a few hours of speeches can save a failing marriage, believers of the fact that two people can have universally applicable relationship advice, believers of love being something more than a cultural construct. Still, I couldn’t help feeling slightly creeped out as I entered the event.

The press conference held beforehand was tightly controlled. I was required to submit questions a week in advance and the press were discouraged from speaking to attendees. Instead, the organizers had hand-picked a few success stories for us to interview. 

There was one member of the press group who I'd assumed was there to ask questions like the rest of us. Instead, she spent all of her face time hurling compliments at the happy couple before clapping maniacally at everything they had to say. I didn't catch which publication she worked for. She also asked someone from the Observer if they were married or not, but I'm not really sure what to make of that.

The author speaking to one of the Love School's "success story" couples

It might seem lazy to say Cris and Renato have a bit of a cult vibe going on with their Love School, but it's accurate. Renato is a bishop in a controversial religious organization called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The UCKG preaches prosperity theology, which says that devotion to God will be rewarded with material wealth. The church's founder is a Brazilian billionaire named Edir Macedo, who, over the course of his career, has been investigated for money laundering, fraud, and embezzling church funds. In 1992, he was jailed for charlatanism, which, I admit, must look great on a resume.

Macedo has dubbed himself "the Bishop." He owns a media conglomerate and, as of last year, a bank. Can you guess who the Bishop’s daughter is? That’s right—shiny, happy love guru Cris.

The church sponsored the Love School, but its influence was played down. In the press conference, for instance, the couple said it wasn't necessary to follow the teachings of their church to benefit from their lessons. However, nearly everyone I spoke to at the event was a member of UCKG, or had at least visited the church before coming to the Love School. Towards the end of the event, shortly before we were asked to pray, Renato strongly recommended that everyone attend something called a "root seminar," a five-week course run by the church.

The importance the church places on money was also evident in the talk. Nearly every element of the three-hour sermon related to money in one way or another. Renato stressed several times that marriage is the best indicator of financial success. At one point, he said: “When you love each other, you make a good team and can make a lot of money.” He said, by buying a ticket, people had “invested” wisely in their relationship.

Just before the intermission, the link between the church and the Love School was made crystal clear. Renato directed people to an envelope in their goody bags (which were full of advertisements for UCKG events) and asked that people donate “five or ten pounds” to the UCKG Help Center.

When I spoke to a church member during the intermission, she said: “I do think it’s strange to ask for a donation, because people have already paid for a ticket.” She went on to say, “The thing with the church is that everything comes back to money.”

Some props brought out to illustrate a point about women being better if they don't have sex 

It was also in financial terms that Renato exposed his questionable attitude towards women’s rights. When stressing the importance of women remaining chaste—or, in his words, “keeping it tight”—he used a charming analogy: “A man won’t buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.” To illustrate the point, he had a large cow wheeled on stage, which remained there for the rest of the event.

Renato also spoke with authority about bitter mothers brainwashing their daughters to hate men, and about the unintended consequences of the women’s rights movement.

There was a bizarre moment when he stood on a box and did a lengthy impression of a woman demanding that she be allowed to cook for her husband, but then wanting to go to a restaurant, but then being determined to pay… or something. I struggled to follow this bit because I was distracted by the shrill female voice he put on. I thought this was a bit undignified for a churchman, but the crowd fucking loved it. He even got a round of applause.

If you’ve noticed that most of my quotes came from Renato, that’s because Cris barely spoke during the event. She didn’t even open her mouth until 30 minutes into the talk. When she did speak, her husband would often say, “In other words,” before going on to say something quite different. If this event taught me anything, it was both how to mansplain and how not to use props.

An incredibly well thought out diagram demonstrating how you're at your most attractive between the ages of 22 and 37

The pearls of wisdom that weren’t sexist or related to finance were either obvious or useless. “Looks aren’t everything” was a big one. This was illustrated with a graph showing how people reach their peak attractiveness between 22 and 37. I'm not exactly sure what kind of research went into it, but I'm pretty certain they didn't just make a graph in Excel and project it onto the wall because that would be insane.

At one point we were told: “Sometimes we love someone so much we just want to turn them into us.” Which just plainly isn’t true. 

And the text on the front of the goody bags read, “Starve your emotions and your love life will thank you for it.” Which is objectively terrible advice and also doesn’t really make any sense.

Despite all this, people seemed to have been genuinely moved by the Love School. I heard audience members describe it as “inspirational” and “educational.” Some people, including Cris, teared up during the concluding prayer. For that reason I was reluctant to judge the teachers and their pupils.

But then at the end of the event, a selection of biblical quotes was projected onto the back of the stage. One of which was: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” I'm not sure why they decided to include that particular quote, as it instantly brought to mind Cris’s billionaire father, his exploitative church, and Cris and Renato’s shameless request for donations. In any case, it was a lot harder not to make the judgements I'd just stopped myself from making. 

Follow Alex Horne on Twitter

Aleppo is Syria's largest metropolitan area and a millennia-old commercial hub. Today, however, it is a relative ghost town, threatened by regime bombing from the air and a militant offensive on the ground.

For two weeks this summer, VICE News embedded with the Islamic Front, a coalition of Islamist rebels fighting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad on one hand and Islamic State militants on the other. From their secret tunnels beneath the ancient city to their threatened frontline outposts in Aleppo's ruined medieval center, we followed the Islamic Front as it battled against overwhelming odds to retain control of the capital of the Syrian revolution.

Photo via the Conservative Party Flickr account

Yesterday, Conservative Chancellor George Osborne gave a big speech in which he outlined his party’s vision for the years ahead. Austerity was the theme, with Osborne pledging to cut £3 billion ($4.86 billion) a year from the welfare budget. It was interesting, if not particularly surprising, to note the glee with which the audience applauded Osborne when he said there would be less welfare spending.

But the chancellor’s hymn to capitalism reached its conclusion on an odd stylistic note—as his final call to arms, Osborne decided to pay homage to the rhythm, cadence, and wording of the most famous passage in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. It’s not a literal piece of plagiarism, as when Rand Paul lifted the Wikipedia entry for the film Gattaca to paint a picture of a dark future in which eugenics is practiced, but it is a very obvious nod. Actually, it's more of a headbutt than a nod. I’m paraphrasing slightly but in Trainspotting, Renton’s monologue goes something like this:

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career... Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... Choose good health... Choose fixed-interest mortgage payments. Choose a starter home... Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you've spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life...

Osborne's speech ended like this:

Choose jobs. Choose enterprise. Choose security. Choose prosperity. Choose investment. Choose fairness. Choose freedom. Choose David Cameron. Choose the Conservatives. Choose the future.

I emailed Irvine Welsh to see what he thought of the chancellor referencing his Trainspotting and got this in reply:

“He’s a fucking twat… I would rant about the prick, but have too much on re deadlines.”

He added, on Twitter: “Would rather have Fred and Rose West quote my characters on childcare than that cunt Osborne quote them on choice.”

I called the Conservative Party for a response, but didn't get a comment.

The "choose life" scene from the Trainspotting film

Osborne has seemingly become another in a long line of politicians who have misinterpreted a work of art, like Ronald Reagan did when he referred to Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as being "a message of hope." The chancellor took a monologue that parodied consumerism and capitalism and turned it into an exhortation to follow him along that road. He’s taken a piece of satire and interpreted it at face value, like his dear leader David Cameron, who in 2008 told BBC Radio 4 one of his favorite songs was the Jam’s “The Eton Rifles.”

"I was one, in the corps. It meant a lot, some of those early Jam albums we used to listen to. I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs," Cameron said. To which Paul Weller’s response was, "Which part of it didn't he get? It wasn't intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps."

But there was surely something arch and intentional about Osborne’s piece of borrowing. Everyone’s seen Trainspotting, particularly guys who, like him, were in their 20s when the film was released, even if they spent much of that period spadding around with the fisheries minister burning piles of dead cows. Renton’s monologue is brilliantly written; you can see why a speechwriter would want to borrow the rhythm of it, particularly as repetition works so well in a political context.

So is Osborne deliberately parodying the parody? Taking a piece of anti-Thatcherite writing and reclaiming it for the Thatcherites?

You can almost see him now, a Machiavellian smirk playing across his face as he digs back into his hedonistic past, taking an early literary inspiration, discarding its politics, putting it through the mincer and turning it into the final insult. It might all seem quite clever, were Osborne not likening a country he's running to a heroin addict deciding to stay on the junk.

Follow Oscar Ricket on Twitter.

Maureen O’Connor is a columnist for New York magazine, in particular their women's site the Cut, which focuses on pop culture, sexuality, and celebrity. In practice, this means that she writes about butt play and getting shipped to San Francisco to date tech guys, which she makes fascinating through a voice that's inquisitive, fun, and takes the topics of sex and love as seriously as they deserve. This week on VICE Meets, we sit down with Maureen to talk about online dating and how the internet has redefined sex and relationships for this generation.

Edmonton-based director Kyle Thomas’s first feature film, The Valley Below, is a decidedly Raymond Carver-esque multi-narrative drama set in the badlands of Alberta. The film—which premiered as part of the Toronto International Film Festival Discovery program—is the logical conclusion for Thomas, who, after graduating from Concordia, moved back home to Alberta and set about establishing a collective of like-minded independent filmmakers who frequently take turns producing, directing, and acting in each other’s films.

In this episode of the Director’s Canvas, we follow Kyle as he preps for his first major film festival: first to a meeting with his publicist where he receives his breakneck festival schedule, then to a chat with his producing partner, Sandy, where they discuss the challenges and advantages of working on micro-budget films in Alberta, and finally to a rooftop bar, where the young director contemplates his plans for the future.

The Simpsons is a cultural institution, a television series that can cause grown adults to lose all sense of sanity when they find out a character on the show might die—a cartoon character, no less. But back in the early 1990s, it was still fresh, still earning its place in the cultural lexicon. That first wave of popularity was marked by an intense public fascination with a rude, insolent, snarky, skateboarding boy named Bart.

Bart Simpson merchandise flew off shelves faster than stores could stock it, and intense demand created the black market entrepreneurs who sold what have come to be known as "Bootleg Bart" shirts. Bootleg Bart shirts put Bart and other Simpsons characters into numerous bizarre and varied situations. Shirt designs could have Bart playing for the Chicago Bulls, single-handedly defeating the Iraqi army, or smoking copious amounts of marijuana, or being suffocated by an obese woman's rear end. If you grew up watching The Simpsons in its early seasons, chances are you owned at least one of these illicit pieces of clothing. You also probably gave most of them away or they fell apart from the ravages of time and overuse.

Fortunately for classic Simpsons fans, a mysterious UK man who only goes by the name "Leo" is collecting Bootleg Bart shirts and maintaining a home for these outlandish images across numerous social media platforms. His goal is to preserve as many Bootleg Bart shirts as he possibly can, while also educating people on the numerous ethnic and racial issues that come from making Bart Simpson black. I spoke to him in the middle of yet another round of Simpsons mania.

VICE: What got you started collecting Bart shirts, and when did you decide to create your online presence?
Leo: I was seven in 1990, and like most kids around the world, I loved The Simpsons. In addition to Bart shirts, I had bootleg Roger Rabbit [clothes] that my mom used to bring back from the market. I always found them funny, with the colors all mixed up. I remember going to Western International Market and seeing the Bart Marley shirts.

In 2003 I got myself a couple of Bootleg Bart shirts for a laugh. Whenever friends or family went on holiday and asked if I wanted anything, I would always say "a Bootleg Bart shirt." I was introduced to social sites and thought it would be cool to start up my own little page sharing my shirts and other bootleg Simpsons images that I had found. I wanted to make a place online where people could go and reminisce, have a laugh, and remember a time when The Simpsons was brand new. I have to give a shout out to a Flickr group that inspired me called "Growing Up Star Wars." You should check it out.

How many Bootleg Bart shirts do you own?
A lot of the shirts on the Instagram feed are from the followers of Bootleg Bart. It's a community site where people make contributions. My collection keeps changing because I sell some, but last time I checked it was around 60. It will grow, and the dream is to do a touring exhibit, with an "educational museum" feel to it.

You've got a book coming out. What can we expect from that?
I've been working on a book for years and have teamed up with someone this year to make it happen. I wish I had more to say on it. For updates visit bootlegbart.com.

Have you spoken to anyone at 20th Century Fox or the Simpsons production office about what you're doing?
Me personally, no. I have no idea how I would get in touch. I would love to, though. How good would it be to get their blessing? I know Matt Groening collects bootlegs. I remember him showing some of his collection in a documentary years back.

Did Fox ever try to halt the sale of Bootleg Bart shirts? It seems like there were so many different versions out there that it would have been impossible to stop it all.
Yes, Fox did successfully seize sellers back then. It was mainly the counterfeits—the shirts that were trying to pass as official merchandise. They also destroyed a bunch of shirts that had Bart posing as a Nazi. 

A lot of the Bootleg Bart shirts made Bart black, and he was used as a symbol for resistance to apartheid, for rasta culture, and hip-hop music. Was this just a coincidence of history, or is there something about Bart Simpson as a character that encouraged that?
When I was seven, I didn't know what race meant. I didn't think once why the Simpsons where yellow. But yeah, Bart was funky as hell. For starters, he had a high-top fade and two hit records, one by Michael Jackson, one by Jazzy Jeff ("Do the Bartman" and "Deep Deep Trouble"). So yeah, back then he was fresh to death.

Sometimes, when I show older people photos of Bootleg Bart shirts, they get offended, particularly any Black Bart shirts. There's one in particular where Bart is a rasta and has big red lips similar to racist caricatures of the past.
Oh, for sure. There are some really offensive Bart shirts. I think the worst one I've seen is a Gulf War–related one with Bart shoving a gun down some guys neck saying, "How much is the price of oil now, raghead?" I think that's why it's important for the book and exhibit to happen—so it can paint the political landscape at the time and put things into context.

If someone saw a Black Bart shirt out of context, it could look real racist. But if you know the subject matter, then you understand it. But yeah, there are some real fucked-up ones. I get private messages all the time telling me how much of an asshole I am for posting some of the shirts.

Speaking of the Gulf War, Bart was depicted as a giant, muscled soldier with a gun a lot, which is a bit weird considering the character is a child. 
Yeah, Bart was used on all sorts of Gulf War propaganda. If The Simpsons wasn't a hit show at the time, I'm sure it would have been some other cartoon character. Maybe the Ninja Turtles?

The show has been around long enough that it's had the opportunity to be a pop culture fad more than once. When the show first premiered, Bart was arguably the most popular character, but it seems like that's Homer now. Why was Bart so initially appealing, but less so in the present?
Yeah, you're right. I love the fact that The Simpsons has grown up as I have. A lot of people bash the show now for not being like how it used to be, but the couch gags alone smash anything I've seen on TV. You don't need to watch the full episode if you don't want to, but man... watch those couch gags.

I don't know a lot about [Homer's popularity] really. I guess it might have something to do with the writing. Bart is kind of annoying these days.

Do you have a favorite Bootleg Bart shirt?
Man, I can't chose one. I've got one of Bart, Nelson Mandela, and a map of Africa backdrop with Bart saying, "The dude's my hero." Love that one. I'm a big fan of the Hawaiian shirts, with the Simpsons as luminous green geckos. And last but not least, a Bel Biv Devoe, LL Cool J, Betty Boop crossover with Bart staring at Betty Boop's ass.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.