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The VICE Reader: Talking Video Games and Ghosts with John Darnielle

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We recently ran an excerpt from Wolf In White Van, a novel exposing Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle not only as a lyrical genius, but as one hell of a novelist. Since then, the book has blown up, climbing onto the New York Times Bestsellers List and receiving a nomination for this year’s National Book Award, all of which is so intensely refreshing to see. Behind all that hubbub, for once, is actually one of the most compelling books of the year, a complex and constantly unwinding story of a disfigured man who operates a text-based role-playing game by mail. By turns mysterious, heart-rending, cryptic, hilarious, OCD-laced, and basically by transitive property capable of all other traits comprising any of those cult games that may have for some time overrun your life, it’s easy to see how Wolf In White Van could inspire total obsession. 

Recently, Darnielle was kind enough to correspond with me via email to answer some questions about the book, his history with gaming, haunted feelings, and much more.

Photo via Wikicommons

VICE: Correct me if I'm wrong, but after reading the book it seems pretty obvious to me that you were or are a gamer. I don't think I've read a book that nailed the obsessive hoarder pleasure of role-playing quite like this. Is there a game that most haunts you, or one that's closest to your heart?
John Darnielle:
I played video games from early on and can probably break down my Ages of Video Game life like this:

I. Pinball enthusiast skeptical about and fearful of the new machines (Asteroids, Space Invaders) in the arcade

II. Reality-accepting pinball enthusiast spending half his arcade time at the video games (Centipede, Qix, Missile Command)

III. Guy whose friends had an NES but who, himself, didn't. This means I didn't get into first-generation cartridge stuff until they cut the price on the NES because they were making room for the SNES, which I've still never played. This era for me is defined by Ninja Gaiden III, which is a masterpiece.

IV. Guy who bought a Nintendo 64: The hype around this machine was huge, and we couldn't really afford it but we got it anyway. For ages there were only four games you could get in the US to play on this system and one of them was fucking Goldeneye. A lot of people loved fucking Goldeneye, but I could not give a shit about that so I played Mario 64 until I'd gotten every star twice and found Yoshi on top of the castle and then a friend at work loaned me Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, which was huge, because it was such an immersive world with such clear good/evil boundaries, which are something I like: not always, I also like—you know—other configurations, but I respond pretty viscerally to evil villains who seek to punish the innocent sheerly for the sake of magnifying their own evil. I hadn't, prior to this game, even with Mario 64, felt that total-narrative-immersion thing that became the norm in video games for quite a while. The first time I arrived at the Temple of Time, the quiet in there, the echo of the footsteps... it's still pretty vivid.

This is all prologue though. The game that haunts me most dates back to era II and was called Dazzler, and involved feeding bananas to a gorilla trapped at the center of the screen, and there are vultures chasing you because they hate the gorilla maybe? And you have to drop snakes behind you to distract the vultures, and the hero's name was Oh, and I am submitting this link as proof of these claims because I totally get that they're pretty extraordinary claims. Dazzler is kind of representative of what was great about that "quick, invent a game" era of coin-operated games: some guy probably wrote the plot because that was his job—to think up a game. "Feed the gorilla while evading vultures" was his idea on a given day at work. There are a lot of games from that era where the plot feels like something that came to somebody in a dream, and they're really quietly inspirational to me. 

Photo via Flickr user abbyladybug

The narrator in the novel is the creator of many games himself. One in particular, Trace Italian, incidentally ends up connecting fantasy to reality with damaging results. For him, the whole game generated from his obsession with the phrase "Trace Italian." I wonder if the world of the novel at first revealed itself to you in a way like this, from some strange kernel?
You are absolutely right on about me and the glow that certain words and phrases, mainly phrases, have for me. It's the joy of giving things titles—when I was a young music obsessive, I sort of had this hierarchy of coolness in my mind. Albums whose titles did not come from one of the songs were almost always way cooler than albums that took their titles from the names of one of the songs. Albums whose titles came from within one of the songs but not from one of the song's titles, that was pretty cool, because it pointed you specifically at that one song without being super-obvious about it—it was like a clue on how to read the album. Self-titled albums that weren't debuts, this was a weird grammar that I later learned within the record business is basically an admission of defeat and/or a marketing strategy. 

In the case of the book, I wrote the last chapter first, right? And then the thing happens at the end of it, and I was like, that's the sort of short story you write when you're 12: some stuff happens and the narrator dies. I kept hammering away at a forward-moving book with a bunch of narrators saying interesting stuff sometimes, but the story was kind of going nowhere... but then one day while working, I thought how that last chapter story is probably actually an OK story if you work backward to it somehow. And so that led me down a rabbit-hole of thinking about backward masking, which used to be this super-cool arcane knowledge area back before you could just dial up the supposed backward-masking things online, and I ended up reading about this Larry Norman song—Larry Norman being more or less the founder of Christian rock, a really interesting figure—that, when you play it backward, is supposed to say "Wolf in White Van."

And so, like... that's the sort of phrase that, as a writer of any kind, I think you have to hear it and feel wonder. It's just so evocative and open. Why no article: "the" white van, "a" white van? What's going on, that some person thinks that's what he hears? The person who thinks that's what he hears, how does that bizarre image function for him? Why is it evil, if it's evil? At any rate it sounds kind of dangerous and ominous, right? So I assigned it to the book as the title, and got the idea of tracing backward, and this phrase—I feel like the idea of a phrase being obscure enough to really be open to whatever you want to bring to it, that's where phrases come alive for me. When there's not enough information in something so you have to supply it yourself.

Do you listen to music when you write?
I listen to music sometimes when I write, but I'm always having to stop, because I read everything I write out loud. That's the test of whether it works or not, for me: how it sounds out loud. But when I'm just sitting down for the morning, or when it's a little loud out in the house beyond my office room, I'll listen either to classical music (I listened to a lot of Scriabin while writing Wolf) or metal: usually death metal, usually older stuff. In part "usually older" because if I'm listening to something I'm not super-familiar with, it'll probably distract me. Music is great both for feeding the mood of the writing but also for staying out of the way while providing a sort of conscious-mind minor distraction for me. So, like, I know the first two Mercyful Fate albums backward and forward, so I listened to those a lot. And the Warfare Noise comp of Brazilian thrash. And this band called Moss, a fair bit of slow doomy stuff really lets me write while being slow enough to not distract me. If things get real active and up-tempo, it's too much and I have to choose between either the music or the writing.

And finally I listened to a lot of ambient, which is so useful, because you can sort of assign a mood to it—even the cheery stuff—if you say: "This is ambient music for funerals" in your mind, you can get a pretty funereal vibe from it. This podcast called Ultima Thule is kind of my first-look listening when I sit down to write. It's pretty perfect.

Photo via Flickr user sketchbookkid

I got the feeling at times that the narrator was the voice of a ghost, someone who was beyond reality, but left inside it because of a wrong he'd done, accidentally or not. Do you believe in ghosts? Something beyond death?
I have to get all cute and 90s-college with this: I do "believe" in "ghosts." That is, I think ghostliness is a thing and there are ghosts in everybody's lives and the idea of ghosts is something that's going to inform how I or anybody else relates to the world whether we think of them as existing outside our consciousness or not. Like, objectively, do I believe that the spirits of the dead exist outside of the consciousness of the living? No. But that's not the same as nonexistence. I think of ghosts as something you have, like a cold. And, like a cold, you're probably always going to have it again. 

You're right that Sean is pretty ghostly, especially because he's been reborn: the Sean people knew (the only one people knew; hardly anybody knows the rebuilt Sean) is a ghost haunting the lives of the people who knew him. But because he survived, he gets to see what that's like—to have been a person who now haunts others. 

I would prefer to believe in a world beyond this one—I always liked the teaching that this world is not illusory but sort of play-acting while the spiritual world is the actual, absolute reality—I used to read a lot of Vaisnava texts about this stuff. But honestly, no. At the same time, there's so much that's illusory that we buy into just for the sake of getting along daily that I like to sort of hold ideas of other worlds as possibilities in my mind, in that internal yes-and-no space, which is also where fiction lives. For instance: I read about a murder, and it's gruesome as fuck, and it's so vivid and I knew the killed character well enough that it feels very real, and is real in this space in my head, but nowhere else.

That's what ghosts are like for me: real, but probably only for me.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Your Password Is Not Secure, and It's Not Your Fault

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Image via Flickr user Christian Ditaputratama

When it comes to passwords, we're all tolerating a broken system. The problems range from the irritating—it's strange needing to remember some obscure code you created years ago in order to access some trivial thing like your Greyhound Road Rewards account—to the horrifying—no matter how much security goes into creating passwords and concealing their secrets, in too many cases, the fucking things don't even work

I set out to find the cure for this plague. I started by creating what seemed to me like a clever system for generating randomness in a way I could remember. I'm not going to write about it in detail because I'm still using it, but suffice it to say it involves using the name of the service to generate a code that only makes sense to me.

Then, with an open mind, I explained my system to security expert Nik Cubrilovic in case it needed tweaking. After all, there must be a system for creating good passwords that security experts agree on. And surely a layman like myself can implement such a system, right?

When I told him the confusing cipher I'd been using to generate passwords that can only be cracked inside my amazing brain, he very kindly shot down my system as confusing, stupid, and not very secure. I would soon find out that there are debates raging about the right way to do this, but the best solutions can't really be implemented yet, and a functioning, universal system might never exist. 

Authorized selfie of Nik Cubrilovic, courtesy of Nik Cubrilovic

The conversation picks up just after I explained my top-secret password system:

VICE: What do you think of my password system?
Nik Cubrilovic: Just to clarify, if somebody saw one of your passwords, would they be able to work out the rest of them? I’ve heard similar schemes where you take X letter of the service name, and then from your favorite bands, a line of their song lyrics, and you use that as the beginning or as the seat of the password.
 
Oh, I would never use dictionary words.
That’s bad advice because four words combined together—and there’s math on this—is probably stronger than anything that a person could generate.
 
But words can't be better than the randomness I'm generating, right?
Here’s the thing: The human brain is horrible at generating randomness. If you ask someone to pick a random number between one and 100, and you ask them to do it 1,000 times, it wouldn’t be random at all. It gets even worse with passwords. When you put someone on the spot and ask them to come up with a password, it usually ends up being really bad. We know this. There’s data to back this up.
 
What kind of data?
Password databases leak, they get cracked, and then people sit down and analyze password choices. The most famous one is rockyou.com, 40 million passwords leaked, and 87 percent of them were cracked using nothing more than an English dictionary and doing variations such as switching an O with a 0, adding a question mark at the end, or an exclamation mark at the end, and adding the numbers 12345 at the end. So that was all cracked within a matter of hours.
 
I have to admit my system is kind of like that. How are dictionary words better?
So here’s the thing: Using four English words, like "big hay straw stack," is actually a strong password. I know this might seem anathema to everything you’ve been told and heard your entire internet life, but The Oxford Dictionary has however many words in it—200,000? (Note: It's actually 252,200) So 200,000 to the power of four, with all the different permutations, is a lot stronger than a single word with 12345 at the end, exclamation marks, question marks at the end of it, and anything else that people come up with.
 
That seems like it would create passwords you can actually remember.
You need to have a password you can remember. The best scheme for a memorable password, is to take four random words out of an English Dictionary or a Spanish dictionary—whichever you choose—and then just use that as your password. 
 
I thought there was supposed to be one capital letter, plus a mix of letters and numerals, and it needed to have certain punctuation marks, but not other punctuation marks because certain passwords don’t allow certain punctuation marks...
We’ve been obscenely cornered into this. If you think of the history of it, it’s kind of crazy how we’ve ended up here. Just having eight characters wasn’t enough, then having a capital letter wasn’t enough. Then adding a number wasn’t enough, and adding a symbol... and every step of that just makes the passwords harder and harder to remember.
 
You’re kinda blowing my mind. There are some services that will say, “No, put something else in. You can’t use dictionary words!"
That’s not good. I actually started a website called badpasswords.org and it highlights websites that practice poor password recommendations or poor password policies, and that’s one of the things they shouldn’t be doing. You should even include this comic in any post that you do about passwords because I think it conveys the idea of using words in a password.
 
At this point he showed me this XKCD Comic:
 
 
OK. Can you sum up the message of the comic?
[These restrictions] make passwords more difficult to generate, and it makes them more predictable. So if you look at the first frame of that comic, it says, “common substitutions.” So, because so many passwords have leaked now, and we have so much data on how humans come up with passwords, the computer programs that do those substitutions have become very, very good at what they do. Frighteningly good.
 
The entropy—the range of possibilities—is 44 bits as opposed to 28. To sort of visualize that, every “bit” is doubling the amount of time it takes. So the difference between 28 bits and 29 bits is very significant. If a 28-bit character password takes a day to crack, a 29-bit would take two days to crack. If you keep doubling that, you compound it to 44, you end up in a scenario where it’s literally going to take decades and centuries for someone to crack a password that’s just four words, and it’s easier to remember.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're saying password systems fly in the face of all logic.
[They're] asking people to generate a password they’re never going to remember, and it’s actually easier for a computer to crack, [when they could have] a password that’s easy to remember and difficult for a computer to crack. Assuming that they’re random, because it has to test 200,000 words to the power of four. 
 
So we should never have been using our own passwords—we just should have been given four words?
Everything we’re doing right now is wrong. The other thing that’s wrong is forcing people to change their passwords every X period of time. That’s wrong as well because all that ends up happening when you force people to change their passwords, and to generate new passwords, is they just end up writing them down or picking something that’s simpler. Or they lock themselves out. So, pretty much everything that we do, or that’s commonly accepted today as far as passwords and security is wrong. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s steadily changing.
 
But I hadn't heard of this. How are you not shouting in the streets about this, trying to convert people to the XKCD Method?
A lot of services haven’t adapted to this yet and will actually reject the four word passwords. Apple is one of the services that does reject the four word passwords.
 
Right. The systems are the problem. How should new password creation systems work?
These services shouldn’t be checking based on rules, they should be checking based on how random the password is, and they’re not doing that at the moment. What they’re doing is a very simple check of: is it at least eight characters long? Does it have an uppercase? Does it have a lowercase? Does it have a number? Does it have a punctuation mark? And that’s not the way that passwords should be checked for randomness. They should be evaluated mathematically. Not based on some silly rules.
 
Calling it the XKCD Method might help it along.
You’re right. It does need better branding. 
 
**
 
After I talked to Nik, I got in touch with XKCD creator Randall Munroe who made the comic strip, and is more or less the poet laureate of the nerdier parts of the internet. I figured he would confirm my assumption that adopting the system he recommended would solve everything. As you might have guessed, it's more complicated than that.
 
"Almost nothing I've written has started so many arguments," he explained. "Everyone on the internet is an amateur security analyst."
 
He pointed me toward Diceware, saying "It offers a specific wordlist and procedure, whereas my comic is the argument for the general practice." Diceware is a system that satisfies some very intense demands for randomness in generating dictionary words for the kinds of passwords he's recommending. Unfortunately diceware involves rolling actual dice—physical, six-sided dice—to create strings of truly random numbers that correspond to truly random words. "Do not use a computer program or electronic dice generator," the site warns.
 
I had high hopes when I got a hold of Munroe, but the idea that you would have to pull out your Dungeon Master's tools to generate passwords sort of made my heart sink. No one is going to do this. "The other thought I have," Monroe went on, "is a general suspicion that the whole password concept might be a lost cause, which I'm guessing isn't what you want to hear."
 
During our conversation, Cubrilovic brought up another part of the password problem that might be the solution to this mess: The "second factor." He explained second factors as "everything from finger scanner, eye scanner, smart card, security token, text message, they’re all second factor solutions that work after your password. That’s definitely the way things are headed."
 
This sounds about right. If the whole password concept is a "lost cause," like Munroe said, then let's shut it all down. I'm very optimistic about this second factor. This phase in our data security will remain perfect forever, and I am sure that this iteration of online security will never turn into a bunch of needless, petty frustration.
 
Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Among the Wood Elves and Stormtroopers at Europe's Biggest Fantasy Festival

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If you're planning to spend the weekend in the Dutch countryside with a load of Disney princesses, orcs, and witches, my advice is to make sure you go prepared. After three hours of sleep, a nine-hour bus ride, several hours photographing cosplayers, and a couple more hours walking through a forest, I finally found the hut that I'd be sleeping in for the night.

I had no idea where I was, my phone was half-dead and the only gas station I'd passed didn’t sell beer. I was at Elfia—Europe’s biggest fantasy festival—and I hadn't thought anything through.

Elfia, which this year took place in some historic castle gardens near the village of Arcen, is a mixture of open-air convention, Renaissance fair, concert, and cosplay contest, spread over an entire weekend and supposedly attended by around 25,000 guests.

I’ve been to the cosplay village at Gamecom and visited a number of roleplay conventions; I'd consider myself a pretty open-minded, nerdy sort of person. But crossing the drawbridge onto the castle grounds for the first time, I felt like I was stepping into a completely alien world. An orc walked past, followed by three excited senior citizens snapping photos. 

“There are a lot of older people here today who actually just wanted to take in the castle and the gardens,” explained Maike Schober, a spokesperson for the event. She wasn't in costume.

I wish I'd had a couple of extra cameras and a few more arms so I could document everything going on around me. One thing I did manage to capture was a group of giggling girls hanging out on one of the many bridges surrounding the castle, all of them taking turns holding a dog in a black-and-turquoise Victorian dress. Several princesses were posing for pictures; I couldn't work out whether they were based on anime characters or roleplay royalty, which made me realize how embarrassingly out of the cosplay loop I'd become. 

At one point, an older lady in steampunk gear gave me a look when I lit up a cigarette in the rose garden. I'd half-hoped I'd strike up a friendship with a load of elves, that we'd all get high together in the idyllic, medieval grounds of the castle. Unfortunately, as I quickly discovered, drugs aren't popular with any mystical beings—not orcs, not wizards, and certainly not elves.

By the afternoon I'd worked my way through the castle and its gardens, soon finding myself in the large open space where the real festivities were taking place. 

Food, robes, slightly tipsy Sailor Moon characters—it was all there. A wood elf, a Stormtrooper, and the Mad Hatter were taking selfies. Entire families in costume pushed strollers through the muddy grounds. A steampunk pistol vendor warned “young warriors” not to touch the weapons on display, while a troupe of wannabe D'Artagnans flailed around in a nearby sword-fighting workshop.

I kept on walking, bumping into Captain Jack Sparrow before sitting and watching a woman in a fairy costume stroke a white pony to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. A bunch of people were staring at her breathlessly; I'm not sure what I stumbled in on. 

Passing a hair-braiding stand and a group of Ghostbusters locked in discussion, I realized I was lost and took some sluggish steps to what I assumed was the exit. Just as I spotted the gate in the distance, storm clouds began to gather.

Hooped skirts billowed, leaves whipped through the gardens, and a group of furries suddenly materialized. I decided it was time to leave, and with that two members of the Knights Templar—each about 50 years old—pointed me vaguely toward my hut. 

Jersey Club Has Gone International, but It's Still Most at Home in Newark

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Jersey Club Has Gone International, but It's Still Most at Home in Newark

The Sports Media Is Still Racist Against Black Athletes

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The Sports Media Is Still Racist Against Black Athletes

VICE News: Fight for the Forest

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Deep in the tranquil Forest of Sivens in the south of France, militant eco-activists and French riot police are fighting a violent battle in woodlands being cut down to make way for a dam, which would mean the end for 41 acres of trees.

The activists are armed with Molotov cocktails and gas canisters; the police are trying to protect workers as they clear the forest. The local council says that the dam will irrigate cornfields in the area, but the activists—and many locals—are against the destruction.

VICE News followed the fight for the forest alongside a group of activists that have previously been hostile to media outlets.

The Rise and Fall of Britain's Most Famous Racist Politician

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(Collage by Marta Parszeniew)

All political careers end in failure, the saying goes. But some end in more failure than others. Lost his seat in the legislature. Declared bankrupt. Replaced as party leader. Expelled from the party. But Nick Griffin’s 2014 has formed a terse headstone to what had been a brilliant career. He had been leader of the British National Party for 15 years—the longest run at the top by any major UK politician since the 19th century. His expulsion on Tuesday drew the veil over an era in British far-right politics where it both tipped towards respectability and lurched from calamity to disaster like a drunk clown at a six-year-old’s party. Rest in peace, Nick. This was your life in politics.

Born: March 1, 1959
HE HAD A VERY NORMAL CHILDHOOD
Griffin spent much of his youth “counting black people walking down the streets of London." Just like most of us, his grandfather once asked him to choose a book from his personal collection of fascist literature. Like many of us, his parents met while heckling Communists at a Young Conservatives meeting. Like everyone’s dad, Nick’s dad has claimed that, “in many ways the BNP are too moderate for me." Nick’s wife later claimed that his parents’ great sin was believing that the sun shone directly the ass of their boy.

But all the same, Griffin’s boyhood seems a cold, distant place from the outside. His dad’s electronics business in Barnet, London failed, so Griffin senior taught himself accounting, while they lived in “genteel poverty," becoming habituated to sugar sandwiches for dinner. The family moved up out of the city. His dad ended up as a Conservative local official. Nick ended up as one of two boys at an all-girls private school, after winning a scholarship. His nickname at the school, St Felix’s, was apparently “Nick The Prick."

Up to Cambridge: 1977
PRIVATE SCHOOL, OXBRIDGE: HE WAS EXACTLY THE SORT OF ESTABLISHMENT INSIDER HE RAILED AGAINST
Griffin did well at school and hence ended up at Downing College, Cambridge, studying law. As others dreamed loftily of investment banking roles in Hong Kong, of working their way diligently to the middle of the civil service, there, on the fringes of their awareness, Nick was joining the National Front (NF) youth brigade. This led his to get beaten up by Communists after a rally in South London. So, he got into boxing, got good at it, and ended up representing the university, winning two bouts and losing one. Academically, he was mediocre.

(Photo by Tom Johnson)

The White Noise Music Club: 1979
HE WAS INTO THE RACIST BAND SKREWDRIVER LONG BEFORE PLAN B HAD THE T-SHIRTS
In 1979, he started putting on racially supremacist gigs in his dad’s backyard—founding the White Noise Music Club. Later, he worked with the whitest white power band of them all, Skrewdriver.

1980: Italian fascist Roberto Fiore flees Italy for the UK and befriends Nick
HE QUICKLY BACAME A BIG DEAL IN THE NF AND HELPED FOREIGNERS MOVE TO THE UK
By 1980, he was a leader in NF’s National Directorate, and editor of the NF’s youth paper—Bulldog—and ran twice in UK parliamentary elections, garnering about one percent of the vote.

It was around this time that he set up something called EasyLondon—which still exists—in collaboration with his friend, notorious Italian fascist Roberto Fiore, who was hiding out in Britain in the 1980s, waiting for the heat to die down on a warrant in connection with a bombing in Bologna. It involved subletting apartments to foreigners so that they could steal houses, then helping them get jobs so they could steal other jobs. The profits from Fiore and Griffin’s co-ventures were apparently channelled back to a range of fascist groups, which is probably still a nobler endgame than most London landlords. 

Various far-right factions in Dover last week (Photo by Alex Cornish)

1983: Leaves NF to form NF Political Soldier
HE EXPERIMENTED WITH FORMATS
In 1983, the writing was on the wall for the National Front, much as it is for the BNP now. Splitting into a range of meaningless splinters of angry bald men, Griffin dragged himself and some colleagues off to form a new group called NF Political Soldier. Then, in 1989, he, Fiore and Patrick Harrington put together a new faction: the internationalist, anti-capitalist, third-wayist International Third Position. They were a hodgepodge tribe who believed in the environment. Yay. Wealth redistribution. Yay. And racism. Boo. But Griffin soon tired of his new pals, leaving in 1990, and exited politics for three years.

1985: Marries Jackie
HE HAD A VERY NORMAL DOMESTIC LIFE
Nick once invited biographer Dominic Carman to his house in Wales a few years back. Carman described the fiesta of kitsch within as containing “scenes from Arthurian legend." The meal was sausage and mash. The wife was plump, and “unremarkable, apart from being married to the BNP leader." Indeed, Carman recalls her as seeming a bit sad at being described that way, and confessed that she’d always assumed Nick would grow out of his NF ways. This English Eva Braun was a district nurse, who’d been visiting her sister at Cambridge when she had the outrageous good fortune to meet the future ex-BNP leader.

Jackie Griffin couldn’t have been more wrong about her man giving up his old ways, but domestically at least, theirs has always reportedly been a happy marriage. They have four kids, all now in their twenties—Rhiannon, Elin, Richard and Jennifer. All of them speak Welsh.

1991: First bankruptcy
HE WAS BANKRUPTED NOT ONCE, BUT TWICE
When he was declared bankrupt earlier this year due to a legal dispute with his law firm, landing him with £120,000 (just under $193,000) in fees, Griffin tried to spin it off as no big thing. First off, he assured everyone that, unlike Westminster member sof parliament (MPs), members of European Parliament (MEPs) are legally allowed to continue their work after bankruptcy. Besides, he added, he would be better able to advise constituents dealing with debt issues. “I am now turning the experience to the benefit of hard-up constituents by producing a booklet on dealing with debt,” he said.

His constituents wondered why he didn’t have that one nailed down already, because in 1991 Griffin gone through his first bankruptcy, owing £65,000 ($104,000) after being obliterated by the property crash of that year. For someone at the aggressively anti-capitalist end of the far-right, always putting the “socialist” into National Socialist, Griffin had somehow contrived to do very nicely out of property speculation during the late 1980s. He’d bought houses, then flipped them into more houses in France, until an accident where he lost his eye cleaned him out.

It has been speculated that he lost his eye on survivalist maneuvers, training for a coming race war, but Griffin insists he was burning trash when an unexploded shotgun cartridge went off inside a bin. Either way, he was unable to finish the renovations he needed, as the market crashed and interest rates skyrocketed, the banks foreclosed, and his parents had to sell their own home to help him ward off total calamity.

1995: Joins BNP
HE SAW AN OPPORTUNITY
Griffin joined the British National Party in 1995, at the personal behest of its then-leader, John Tyndall. He’d spotted his moment, and by the end of 1993, the BNP seemed to suddenly have real traction. Griffin soon set himself apart, launching the party’s in-house magazine, and agitating as a modernizer. If it was knuckle-dragging under Griffin, the BNP under the late Tyndall was positively cro-magnon. There had been a tight focus on Jew-hating, and initially a focus on compulsory, rather than voluntary, repatriation of foreign-types. Griffin started the party’s long march towards relative—relative—social acceptability.

(Photo by Henry Langston)

1999: Rise to power
HIS RISE WAS AS SHORT AS HIS REIGN WAS LONG
By 1999, he was ready to make his move, standing in leadership elections against Tyndall, who secured only 30 percent of the vote. Once in power, he set about implementing his agenda—coming up with the new logo, embracing the media, and finagling support from the many jagged far-right splinter parties of the time, most notably the National Democrats.

2001: Oldham lights his fire
HE IS A MARTYR
Following some nasty race riots, the BNP managed to score third place results in two Oldham (greater Manchester) constituencies in the general election. It was Griffin’s first real tester as leader, and he came through strong, standing himself in Oldham West, and receiving 6,500 votes. There were no addresses from the platform at the count of either, after election authorities banned them. Griffin and his fellow candidate for Oldham East then wore white gags in protest against being barred from making inflammatory speeches in a powder keg.

2006: Acquitted on hatespeech charges
AS A MAN WHO THOUGHT HITLER “HAD MAYBE GONE A BIT FAR,” IT IS UNSURPRISING HE HAS HAD A FEW HATESPEECH TRIALS IN HIS TIME
After a 2004 BBC documentary, The Secret Agent, went undercover inside his outfit, Griffin and Mark Collett were brought up on charges of inciting racial hatred for certain comments they’d made about Islam. He was also accused of calling murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence a drug dealer and bully who stole younger students' dinner money. They were acquitted in 2006. In 1998, Griffin had already been convicted of “publishing or distributing racially inflammatory written material” in an issue of The Rune, his anti-Semitic fanzine.

Richard Barnbrooke, The BNP's first London Assembly Member (Photo by Henry Langston)

June 4, 2009: Euro Elections
HE HAD A FEW GOOD YEARS
2009 was Griffin’s breakthrough. It had been telegraphed in the BNP’s growing number of local council seats for a while—they were already the second largest party in the London borough of Barking & Dagenham. And in 2008 they won a seat on the London Assembly. People were starting to take Nick seriously. But the 2009 European Elections saw Griffin’s personal triumph—he became an MEP with six percent of the national vote. The kids at school had been wrong. He was a winner after all. He got pelted with eggs at his celebratory press conference outside the Houses of Parliament, but public office was lending the BNP enough credibility that the party’s London Assembly Member, Richard Barnbrooke, was able to invite Griffin to an event at Buckingham Palace. Of course, the Palace revoked the invitation, saying Nick had used it to promote his party.

October 22, 2009: BNP on Question Time
THAT WAS CONTROVERSIAL, WASN’T IT?
Since he was at the height of his popularity, the BBC decided that it was duty-bound to invite Griffin to shoot the shit with David Dimbleby and some panellists in London. It was so controversial that the Wikipedia article on this one chat runs to 6,000 words. Outside the studio, people protested. Inside, the focus was on asking Nick why his views are so abhorrent. In the end, Nick Griffin complained more than anyone, saying that he had performed so badly because everyone in London hates him, as it is too multicultural.

The EDL hoovered up support for far-right causes (Photo by Henry Langston)

June 27, 2009 onwards
THE DEMISE OF THE BNP
As time went on, the BNP ended up being kicked around. The party was the butt of  many jokes, and was forced to leave its premises in the Gloucestershire countryside after residents objected and they were subject to increasingly ominous threats of bankruptcy. After a poor showing in the 2010 general election, the party lost many of its council seats in the 2011 local elections, and Griffin narrowly survived a leadership challenge.

The far-right’s attempt to look respectable so that they could win elections was coming undone. Meanwhile, a tanning salon owner with a fake name started a Facebook group that became a social movement—the English Defense League, or EDL. Soon the vanguard of the BNP’s remaining support base began to bleed away onto their mean streets, preferring to drunkenly fight each other than to contest elections. To cap it all, Tommy Robinson later declared all that fascism to be a load of bullshit anyway. Typical.

Collage made with elements of image by Ricardo Stuckert/ABr

June 2013: Holiday in a warzone, because IDK
HE WENT ON HOLIDAY TO SYRIA IN 2013
Everybody loves a bargain. Especially when they’re about to be declared bankrupt for the second time. But Nick’s trip to Syria last year was a pure headscratcher. He started out in Lebanon, tweeting out things like: “Puzzle 4 journalists: Why am I in Beirut right now?” No one knew. He posted pictures of “typical Beirut corner shop fruit bar," and out of focus shots of downtown public squares. Soon enough, though, he was in Damascus and photographing himself chilling with Syrian Prime Minister Wael Nader Al-Halqi.

This capped a long tradition of opportunist associations with scumbags. In the 1980s, Griffin went to Libya at the behest of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to see if they could make common cause. He praised the Ayatollah Khomeini back in the days when he was far more of an anti-Semite than an Islamobphobe, and made common cause with Nation Of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan for his black-separatist views. Of course, he also made nice with David Duke, the ex-Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Later on in 2013, Griffin went on another jaunt, to Azerbaijan, in time to see their corrupt regime teeter its way to another rigged election. “The system here is far more transparent than back home,” he noted with his trademark sagacity.

July 2014: Loses MEP seat
September 2014: Kicked out
HIS DOWNFALL WAS VERY SWIFT, IN THE END
In July, Griffin lost his MEP seat as the party returned to the wilderness. He stood down as chairman to stave off a vote of no confidence and was given the title of "honorary president" as a parting gift. In his expulsion hearing, the ex-leader was accused of harassing staff, making physical threats, and bringing the party into disrepute, "deliberately trying to cause a crisis" and disobeying instructions. “Nick did not adjust well to being given the honorary title of President,” the new leader, Adam Walker, said after his expulsion this past week. “And it soon became obvious that he was unable to work as an equal member of the team, and alarmingly his behavior became more erratic and disruptive.”

(Photo by Alex Cornish)

October 2014 to the future: a new dawn?
HE ALLIED WITH OTHER FASCISTS

Is Nick’s career dead, or is this in fact just the start of a new chapter? Griffin has said that he will start a new movement and told VICE News that this "will be be seen as the preeminent national movement in Britain” in the “not-too-distant future." And it’s possible that VICE was in the delivery room of this new movement as it was born. Last weekend, our reporter was in Dover as Griffin addressed a protest, railing against the immigrants and comparing them to “Norman bastard” William the Conqueror.

He said he was happy to stand with members of far-right splinter groups that he would have spurned as BNP leader. The man who had led the way in creating a far-right party with an air of respectability was happily standing with a guy with a Wolfsangel flag and activists from the National Front—where it had started all those years ago. Could it be that there, in that Dover parking lot, a new chapter in the career of Nick Griffin started? Or was he just desperately reaching out to anyone still impressed enough by him to want to pose for a picture?

@gavhaynes

Cry-Baby of the Week

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

Cry-Baby #1: Lucinda Taylor

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: Some small children were tormenting a dog.

The appropriate response: Yelling at them. Maybe moving the dog to a different room, depending on the severity of the torment.

The actual response: The owner of the dog pulled a gun on the kids. 

Late last week, grandmother Lucinda Taylor was hanging out with her seven-year-old granddaughter and a little boy from across the street, who was also seven, at her house in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

According to a criminal complaint filed earlier this week, the two children began "pestering" Lucinda's six-month-old German shepherd puppy. Reports on the incident don't specify what the children were doing to the dog, but Lucinda is said to have told the kids to "quit harassing" it.

According to police, Lucinda then took out a .38 Special revolver, pointed it at the children's heads and chests and asked, "How does it feel to be scared?"

The boy then went across the street to his mother's house and told her what had happened. The mother called the police, and Lucinda was arrested on child abuse charges. She is currently out on a $15,000 bond.

Lucinda allegedly told police that the children were laughing after the incident. The boy's mother denies this, insisting that her child was frightened. Either way, probably best just not to point guns at anyone.

Cry-Baby #2: Devils Lake High School

Screencaps via Google Maps and Inforum

The incident: Girls wore tight pants to school.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: Their school compared the female students to prostitutes, and banned yoga pants, leggings, and tight jeans. 

Last week, staff at Devils Lake High School in Devils Lake, North Dakota, announced to students that they would no longer be allowed to wear yoga pants, leggings, jeggings, or other tight pants to school. 

According to a report on Valley News Live, the school banned the garments out of concerns that they might be distracting to male students and teachers.

The news station also reported that the assistant principal of the school made female students at the school watch clips from the movie Pretty Woman, and compared what they were wearing to what Julia Roberts (who plays a prostitute) wears. 

Another teacher at the school is reported to have taken a less subtle approach, and told students they looked like "prostitutes walking the streets" without any kind of visual aid.

One student, senior Taylor Gilbertson, said she felt the school could focus their attentions on more important issues. "Especially when there's bullying and all that stuff that they're not taking seriously," she said. "They should be focusing more on that than yoga pants."

After receiving a bunch of media attention over the banning, Devils Lake School District superintendent Scott Privratsky stuck by the new dress code, but admitted that maybe the Pretty Woman clips were perhaps a bit much. "It could have been approached differently, in hindsight," he told Inforum, Tuesday.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here, if you could:

Previously: Some people who shot out the windows of a McDonalds because of ketchup vs. a guy who slashed a little girl's bike tires because she ran over his foot

Winner: The ketchup people!!!

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on Twitter.


Why Is Banksy the Only Person Allowed to Vandalize Britain's Walls?

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The recent Banksy piece in Clacton-on-Sea. Photo via banksy.co.uk

Graffiti’s not what it used to be. Starting life as one of the four pillars of hip-hop, it’s travelled from Harlem’s train carriages to the UK's House of Commons, raising all sorts of questions about authenticity and what constitutes art—the same questions you’ll have seen answered by columnists and intellectualized by art critics every time graffiti’s in the news.

Of course, the main catalyst for graffiti making the news—certainly in the UK, at least—is when famed street artist Banksy decides he needs to alert the world to something, like Palestine or consumerism.

This week, a new Banksy piece focusing on immigration appeared in Clacton-on-Sea, a town in Tendring, Essex, where the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party is set to win a local election in a landslide. The artwork—which depicts a load of pigeons telling a colorful bird to “go back to Africa”—was swiftly removed amid complaints of racism from people who somehow didn't realize the stencil was an explicit statement against racism.

None of this is particularly remarkable; certain people are easily offended and local governments regularly scrub graffiti off walls. What was kind of surprising was the statement Tendring District Cuncil released when they realized they’d just obliterated something that could have potentially made them a lot of money: "We would obviously welcome an appropriate Banksy original on any of our seafronts and would be delighted if he returned in the future."

This reasoning didn’t make much sense to me; I was always raised to believe that graffiti was illegal. I called the police to check my parents hadn’t been lying to me, and they stressed that graffiti is a council matter rather than one for the force. However, environmental law states that graffiti “is an act of criminal damage under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, and those found guilty can be punished with a maximum fine of £5,000 [about $8,000]."

When was it decided that Banksy was exempt from this law? Is there a loophole that permits graffiti artists to vandalize public property if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have spent over $1 million on their work? What do the relevant local authorities have to say for themselves?

I spoke to Nigel Brown, Tendring council’s communication manager, in an attempt to get some answers. Initially he couldn’t make up his mind as to whether the piece had been removed for being offensive or being illegal. Then he said it wasn’t illegal because Banksy had their permission, and that anything that “enhanced the area” would be allowed.

When I asked why this wasn’t made clearer to people, he said, “Well, it’s hardly going to be public knowledge that we say that, because then you’re going to get all sorts of nutters doing all sorts of things.” When pressed on why Banksy specifically was welcome to return, he replied, “We are a seaside resort reliant on tourism, and it would bring a lot of tourism if we had a Banksy original.”

So there’s your answer: Banksy is allowed because money. This is not a huge surprise. Councils like money. But how do other graffiti artists feel about this Banksy-specific technicality? Surely it must be frustrating to spend half your life running away from cops, cans clattering around in your backpack, all because you're not famous enough to be above the law?

A piece sprayed in tribute to the late graffiti artist Robbo

Blaze has been writing since 1982. He’s painted trains in New York and has worked with Ben Eine and the late Robbo in London. He said, “The kid that’s done a tag gets his house raided and his life fucked up, but if it’s Banksy it’s non-vandalism—money on a wall, so to speak.”

“It seems to be that things change as soon as money gets involved,” said David from Shoreditch’s Graffiti Life Gallery. “It’s very much one rule for him and another rule for everyone else. When street artists do it, it’s vandalism. When Banksy does it, it’s an art piece. There’s a disconnect there.”

For Justin Williams, an academic who focuses on hip-hop and jazz culture at the UK's University of Bristol, the issue is more complex. “This whole thing may indicate we are having to go to a US-style form of philanthropy, which we aren't used to in the UK,” he said. “Essentially, the council is looking for a private donation from Banksy through the value of his street art. This is problematic, but it’s also a little sad that the council partly restricts such freedom of expression while desperately needing support from it to fund future artists.”

You do have to feel slightly sorry for Banksy in all this. Having a Tory-led council welcome your art must be a bit like, say, the Conservative prime minister professing his love for your band, or the Chancellor of the Exchequer plagiarizing your attack on capitalist values while announcing another round of public spending cuts.

A New York subway car covered in graffiti. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

In the early days of graffiti, attempts to clamp down on the art form often just galvanized the artists; when city officials railed against them, it reminded the graffiti writers they had the power to provoke. And when New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority repainted all of its trains in 1973, it meant that, for a brief period, artists had blank canvasses to work with, which led to famous pieces that covered entire trains.

With foresight, the authorities back then would have realized that embracing graffiti was the best way to neuter it. Banksy has been firmly embraced—his work is essentially sanctioned by the UK government—meaning his purpose is left a little unclear.

“A lot of my friends who are making work in the streets are putting themselves at great risk to create this artwork, whereas there’s zero risk for Banksy," said David. "Once you’ve removed the risk element, what is it?”

In a way, Banksy is a victim of his own success. In 1974, Norman Mailer wrote that graffiti was a way for people to advertise themselves. Cornbread, one of graffiti’s first legends, spread his tag around Philadelphia to get the attention of a girl, proving Mailer’s point. Essentially, all Banksy has done is advertise himself to such an extent that his brand has become more important than the art he's producing.

“We all strive for fame,” said Blaze. “If you’ve seen my tag a hundred times, next time you see it in the middle of a field in Cardiff you’ll think, ‘Fuck me, there’s that geezer,’ and I’ve got in your head. Banksy now is almost the oblivion because he’s just in your face all day long. I don’t agree with everything he’s done, but I take my hat off to him.”

A Banksy rat in central London. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

“Even my grandma knows who Banksy is," said David. "His work isn’t really to my personal taste, and a lot of graffiti artists are very negative about him, but if you consider the aim of a graffiti artist to be getting as many people to know you as possible, who has been more successful? No one.”

These opinions are apparent on the streets. Banksy's pieces are often written over by other artists, despite local efforts to preserve them. Paul Dizzi Saunders, director of the London West Bank Gallery, told me, “There’s a lot of resentment against him and where graffiti has gone as a result of him, but I think a lot of that just comes down to jealousy.”

Mind you, it’s not like the graffiti community’s thoughts on Banksy really affect how they go about their own business. “The people who are still out there hitting it in the streets don’t care what Banksy is doing, and they don’t care about public perception,” said David. “None of that is even on their radar.”

Follow Alex Horne on Twitter

OG Internet Trolls Are Upset Their Hobby's Been Ruined

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Illustrations by Cei Willis 

Internet trolls have a pretty terrible reputation. Mind you, that’s probably because they’re known for doing pretty terrible things. Run a search for the last month or so and you’ll see what I mean: The parents of missing child Madeleine McCann have been subjected to a torrent of online abuse, a man who threatened to “violently rape” a young mother on a soccer forum was fined nearly $2,500, and the late Robin Williams's daughter, Zelda, was driven off social media in August after people sent her photoshopped images of her father with bruises around his neck. 

The word troll has become shorthand for more or less every nasty scumbag on the internet, and there’s no denying that’s exactly what many of these people are. But this accepted meaning is actually a relatively new definition of the word—an easy, evocative, catch-all term to slap into headlines about any sadistic weirdo who does something cruel via their internet connection. Just five years ago, "trolling" meant something very different. 

There are plenty from this old guard still lurking around the online undergrowth who consider antagonizing and upsetting people in clever ways over the internet to be an art form—a calling, even. They see trolling as a form of political protest, something that can benefit society, and are frustrated that it’s been debased by idiots who send racist abuse to celebrities and athletes from anonymous Twitter accounts. These OG trolls say they belong to a longstanding internet subculture that works to push the boundaries of free speech, mock anyone who takes themselves too seriously, and expose hypocrisy.

One person who holds this particular point of view is Zack, who I previously interviewed for my book The Dark Net. He’s a 30-year-old self-described troll from Sussex who laments the state of modern trolling.

“Threatening to rape someone on Twitter isn’t trolling,” he explained. “That’s just threatening to rape someone. On Twitter.”

Zack—and others like him—claim to “troll in the public interest," using an array of tactics they’ve refined over many years of pissing people off online. His favorite technique, he explained, is to intentionally make basic grammatical or spelling mistakes, wait for someone to insult his writing, and then lock them into an argument about politics. He showed me one recent example that he’d saved on his laptop, where he’d posted what appeared to be an innocuous, poorly written comment on a popular right-wing website that that right wingers would change their political views if they read more. An incensed user responded, and Zack immediately hit him with a barrage of arguments and insults that his target couldn’t muster any kind of response to.

Zack is a member of several trolling groups, all of which he describes as being a kind of cyber neighborhood watch—they seek out extremist, misogynistic, or generally unpleasant communities, and bother the hell out of them. One group he belongs to, for example, is “Blue Pill," which was set up to target “Red Pill," a men’s rights subreddit that bills itself as a place where users can discuss “sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men."  Blue Pill exaggerates, satirizes, and mocks Red Pill. 

Trolling as it's generally known it is a creepy hobby carried out by lonely people filling the well in their soul with the tears of strangers. But in instances like this, it’s hard to argue that it’s not a little funny. Riling up users of an internet forum is never going to change the world, but it’s nice to know there are people out there giving up their free time to aggravate those who deserve it. 

Zack's work harkens back to the roots of trolling, which is a pastime almost as old as the internet itself. The introduction of the World Wide Web and America Online in the early 90s saw a dramatic rise in the overall number of netizens, many of whom flocked to a raucous and uncensored collection of messageboards, which were collectively known as “Alt” (short for alternative). In 1992, experienced users in the alt.folklore.urban  groupstarted “trolling for newbies," posting something that would coax the new users into making themselves look foolish while simultaneously letting the initiated know exactly what they were doing.

So the word doesn’t actually refer to some greasy emotional terrorist firing out abuse from his suburban hovel, but rather the slightly less sinister technique of trolling a baited line to see what bites. Zack’s spelling errors were his baited line, and in the 90s it was his way to constantly—and perhaps somewhat pointlessly—push at the boundaries of offensiveness.

At the time, most trolls—like the majority of internet users back then—identified as libertarians or anarchists who thought censorship was archaic in the new digital world. Trolls often pressed offensive images and views into the service of this ideology. On one occasion they repeatedly posted an innocent-looking link to Oprah Winfrey’s “Soul Stories” chat board, accompanied by captions like “I’ve been feeling down, here’s a link to a poem I’ve written." The link directed whoever clicked on it to hardcore porn.

Zack also used to Goatse strangers (where you post an innocuous-looking link that directs to an image of a naked man spreading his butt cheeks apart), and tells me it was highly enjoyable. “It’s fun to offend someone who is so ready to be offended,” he said. “It’s circular—they’re too ready to be offended, you offend them, and it proves you’re right.”

Possibly the most notorious trolling group of the early 2000s—and one of the first to veer away from exclusively pointless piss-taking (though still keeping one foot firmly planted in that field)—was the “Gay Nigger Association of America” (GNAA). The founders were a group of mysterious, highly skilled programmers who created and disseminated extremely offensive material with the aim of upsetting bloggers, celebrities, popular websites, and anyone else they decided they wanted to bother—all under the banner of “sowing disruption on the internet."

The group claims to be anti-racist and has launched various attacks to highlight examples of racism in the media. During Hurricane Sandy, for example, they spread a fake rumor about African-Americans looting people’s homes and stealing pets, an attempt to demonstrate how shoddy mainstream reporting on African-Americans can be. It worked: The story, presumably evading any kind of fact-checking process, was reported by several mainstream media outlets.

A later group, LulzSec, went into their attacks with a similar mentality, hacking Fox.com’s website in 2011 and leaking swathes of information after a presenter on Fox News referred to the rapper Common as “vile” on air. Over the next few months they claimed responsibility for a number of other attacks until the group’s leader, Sabu, cooperated with the FBI and revealed the true identities of other members of the group, effectively hanging it out to dry. Some might argue that LulzSec were more “hacktivists” than trolls, but their agenda seemed to be much the same as Zack’s and the GNAA’s.

There are others who troll in pursuit of a political vision, though don’t necessarily go about it in the most sympathetic way. According to Old Holborn, dubbed one of “Britain’s vilest trolls” by The Daily Mail (something he seems to wear as a badge of honor), pissing people off is a good way to keep society alert. 

He tweets and blogs constantly, his face hidden behind a Guy Fawkes mask. But without that, he’s not nearly as intimidating; when I met him for coffee he turned out to be a well-dressed, fast-talking middle-aged man from Essex, England, who has done well for himself in recruitment and computer programming. He’s most infamous for his attacks on the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, so is understandably viewed as a bit of a prick by anyone aware of who he is.

“You could call me a gobshite,” he tells me. “Always have been. I’m very antiauthoritarian.”

He describes himself as a minarchist, someone who believes in the smallest possible government. “We just need someone there to protect private property; everything else, we can work out ourselves," he said, summing up his worldview as, “The government should just leave us alone.”

Trolling is his way of causing trouble for the system. “I want to be the itch—the grain of sand in the machine,” he explained.

In 2010 he ran for Parliament, wearing his mask and frustrating the Electoral Commission by changing his name to Old Holborn. Around the same time, he marched into a police station in Manchester wearing the mask and carrying a suitcase full of money to pay bail for a pub owner who’d refused to enforce the 2007 smoking ban.

It’s hard to see what defacing the memorial page of a south London rapper—another notch on his digital belt—has to do with minarchy, or really anything other than cruelty. But he said he fears a silent and obedient society, arguing that a world where everyone is offended will lead to self-censorship. He sees it as his role to prod and probe the boundaries of offensiveness, giving the rest of us a bit more room to breathe.

"TROLL HAS BECOME A BLANKET TERM FOR ANY HATEFUL DICKHEAD WITH A HARD DRIVE"

Perhaps Old Holborn does sometimes set out with a genuine political purpose; it’s true that worrying too much about offending other people could eventually be calamitous in a free society. However, I also believe his trolling has something to do with the infamy he enjoys, as well as the strong chance that he just enjoys bullying people. There’s no way to defend the targeting of Hillsborough victims, regardless of the conceptual spin you put on it.

I suppose the problems with trolling are a) that some trolls seem to miss the line between satire and offensiveness, and b) the word has become a blanket term for any hateful dickhead with a hard drive. For every takedown of a misogynist, there’s a Peter Nunn, who was jailed this week for threatening to sexually assault politician Stella Creasy. And for every attack on a legitimate target, there’s some waste of bandwidth that leaves indefensible comments on someone’s Facebook page.      

The solution for those “trolling in the public interest” would surely be to just forego the term itself and start working under another collective moniker—“agitators," perhaps, or basically anything that doesn't represent what the word troll has come to signify. A name that could clearly distinguish between those targeting people or organizations that deserve to be attacked and the vindictive sociopaths attacking innocent web users for their own amusement.

Then again, it’s not always that clear-cut. Old Holborn falls into the second category as much as he sets out to occupy the first, and those who do intend to "troll in the public interest" are just as likely to end up descending back into campaigns that lack any clear sense of purpose. During one of Zack’s far-right trolling episodes, for instance, someone uploaded a naked photo of him that they’d found online. It didn’t faze him. He hit back immediately.

“You shouldn’t deny yourself,” he wrote. “If looking at the pics makes you want to touch your penis then just do it… if you want I can probably find you some more pictures of my penis—or maybe you’d like some of my ass, also? Or if you want we could talk about why regressive ideologies are a bad idea in general and why people who adopt them are likely to have a much harder time in understanding the world than someone who’s accepting of progress and social development?”

He continued along this theme for a while, peppering insults against the far-right posters in among quotes from Shakespeare and Cervantes. For Zack, this was a clear win. His critic was silenced by the deluge, which occupied the comments section of the website for several hours. 

“He was so incapable of a coherent response that he resorted to digging into my posting history for things he thought might shame me, but I’m not easily shamed,” said Zack. “More importantly, I could demonstrate how foolish it is to try to dismiss an argument because I’ve posted naked pictures before.”

But what was the point? I ask him. I thought you were trying to expose far-right groups?

“Yes, and by posting the naked photos, that caused it to be picked up outside the group and draw attention across the site. So the group I was trolling got a much larger audience than they would have, had it remained a bland argument. This is what trolling’s all about—creating an interesting scene to unfold, thus getting more people to think about the issue being raised.”

Do you think you succeeded in doing that? I ask.

There’s a short pause. “I dunno, but it was fun. So it doesn’t really matter if it was otherwise fruitless.”

Jamie Bartlett is the author of The Dark Net

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #99

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Hello VICE readers,

My name is Nick Gazin and I am VICE's art edtor. A long, long time ago I used to review comic books and zines in this column and list them from best to worst. The last time I did this was in January.

A lot of things have happened since then. I have gone from being VICE's freelance non-official comics expert to the part-time, completely official art editor. We have also increased the amount of comics on the VICE site, and plan to add even more. So you are welcome for that. 

Also, Anya Davidson, who does our Friday comic, Band for Life, was nominated for an Ignatz award. She didn't win it, but Fishbone became giant fans of hers and invited her to hang out with them backstage at a show. There is no award as good as having Fishbone want to be your friend. 

I spent my summer doing art for the second Run the Jewels record and merch campaign. Get it from Mass Appeal Records if you want. 

Here are my reviews for this week. 

Nicholas

#1
Megahex
Simon Hansellman
Fantagraphics

Megahex is a hardcover collection of mostly older work by Simon Hanselmann, who does the Megg, Mogg and Owl comic that appears weekly on this very site. Megahex collects stories of three roommates: a witch named Megg, her cat/boyfriend Mogg, and their nebbish pal Owl who is a big talking owl guy. They also have a group of friends who come around. Together they get drunk, high, abuse each other, have adventures, fights, and get hurt while trying to stave off depression. This book is inevitably going to be number one on a lot of "best of the year" lists. 

Every page is beautiful. Every joke is funny. Every character is a complete asshole. The book itself is a nice chunky hardcover with some good heft and a cover design that is made to resemble a DVD box set of a TV show. Every element of the book is drawn by Simon except the barcode and it is a very special object.

I did a little interview with Simon about Megahex and here it is.

VICE: Are any of the characters directly based on people you know?
Simon Hanselmann: Yeah, kind of. Amalgams of people. Some nice, some horrible. It's been amusing to read reviews that say how horrid and repellent all the characters are and how nobody would ever want to associate with them. It's been a revelation. I am a horrible person and nobody should associate with me.
 
 
Megg, Mogg, and Owl are at least sort of based on characters from some English cartoon show that you didn't create at all. How did you decide to remake them in your own image?
It was a total fucking accident. Like Flubber. Interesting history side-note for scholars: The first MMO strips were conceived and drawn almost within weeks of arriving in the UK for a two-year stay. I was living in Richmond Upon Thames where Meg & Mog illustrator Jan Pienkowski lived for a time. I think he had his civil partnership there. I was unaware of this fact at the time. Shit was DESTINY. (Don't get me started on my Seth Cohen / Eric Reynolds theories. Everything is linked and I have followed through the snow the markers laid by the universe.)
                                                              
Is Booger supposed to be made of boogers?
No, Booger is made of Marzipan (and 10% polyester).
 
You're an Australian living in Australia. Do you see the characters all having Australian accents? Is the comic set in Australia?
No. They're not Australian. I see them as living in a generic made-up Western-ish country. That said, I'm pretty into them being potentially French. I'd want money for it though.
 
In many ways Owl is the hardest character to totally understand. He is this bullied nerd when he's with his friends but somehow he gets laid a lot and has a secret rage and willingness to fight strangers. Do you see Owl as the most complex character? 
Owl's just a drunken wallflower. Booze is his spinach and it allows him to seduce women and have some semblance—some minor fucking shred—of self-confidence (sometimes). He's malleable and adaptable though. I'm looking forward to doing the Megg's Coven book and exploring him on his own away from the group. Will he succeed or fail? Find out in like two years or something.
 
In one comic Megg freaks out because she thinks Mogg got her pregnant, but the other characters seem to believe this is impossible. Why is it impossible for Megg to get pregnant?
Megg treats her body like shit. Her womb is highly inhospitable. Cockroaches couldn't live in there and they can survive radiation and explosions. (I think. I dropped out after year 10) Also: Mogg is a cat. Also: Mogg is almost exclusively into rimming.
                                               
 
What's your process like for making an individual comic from the initial idea to finishing the art?
I have my ideas pile and my idea wall. Also my bag-based travel idea book. I take some ideas and mash them together. Often Grant (roommate) will be around and make terrible suggestions that are invariably about Werewolf Jones's felt hats and pooping.
 
Then you: Make a point form list of the basic beats. Flesh it out. Nail it. Thumbnail it. Rule up grids accordingly. Ink grids. Pencil in lettering and bubbles. Pencil the art. Ink it all. Begin laborious body-ruining watercolor session. Dream about maybe learning to use Photoshop. Remember that "watercolor" is your "thing." Remember that computers suck and people who use computers don't have beautiful physical artwork to sell at premium prices to "art collectors" upon reaching a certain profile and level of critical "buzz."
 
Get Megahex here
 
                                 
#2
The Wrenchies
Farel Dalrymple
First Second

I've known Farel and watched his work progress for over ten years now. I own a copy of his first published work, which is a 3D Christian comic called Behold 3D. This book is the best thing he's done yet.

The story is an intentionally confusing and circular yarn about some kids who find an amulet and some zombies and a dystopic future with kid gangs who are on some quest. There are a few parts where I kinda didn't follow what was happening and then they bring some characters from another dimension who are reading the adventures of the characters in comics and stuff. It's very "meta" and layered and there are multiple levels of reality.

The art is really organic. Everything is beautiful with delicate inklines with great watercolor coloring underneath. Farel draws beautiful fantasy settings and clubhouses and stuff as well as outfits and weapons. He's like a more hipstery Mike Mignola. I am really sorry for saying that if you just squinched up your face. I didn't like writing it but I couldn't figure out how to say it better.

The themes of the book seem to be about people living in states of suspended adolescence, and there's a party scene that I feel like I recognized out of my own life even though this one was all children under 15 and talking animals and then zombies attacked. 

Get it here

#3
QCHQ
Jordan Speer
Space Face Books

I woke up very drunk and read this comic on the toilet while still in a dreamstate, which made this already intense experience even more real and emotionally involving. 

Where the hell did Jordan Speer come from? This guy is doing something that is mind bending and completely new to me. It's hard to accurately describe what he's doing because I do not totally comprehend. 

Jordan Speer is making still images that sort of look like they might be sculpted from clay or possibly made with an airbrush, but I am fairly certain that it's done with CGI. The only text is from a series of company-wide newsletters telling of the resurrection of an evil demonic deity named Pentadrox who is turning the planet or city or wherever the comic takes place into a horrible nightmare of constant blood sacrifices.

Each page is the most beautiful and horrifying thing you ever saw. Imagine if Stanley Kubrick were young right now and making comics and operating ten years ahead of everyone else. 

Get it here

#4
Buddy Buys A Dump

Peter Bagge
Fantagraphics

I insist that owning every individual issue of Peter Bagge's Hate is essential to any comic collection. This volume collects the stories from the Hate Annuals, which were made after Hate's 30-issue run came to a close. Buddy and Lisa become older and have a baby. Buddy buys a dump, like the title says, and then has to wear an eyepatch, which he decides to combine with a captain's hat and an occasional corncob pipe. Buddy's brother is blabbing about the horrible fate of their dead friend Stinky. Life goes on for Buddy and Lisa in their sorta odd but sweet and domestic existence. 

You probably can't do better than this as far as comic literature goes. I think Hate might be one of the most intelligent and meaningful comics ever made. 

Buy it here

#5
Benson's Cuckoos
Anouk Ricard
Drawn & Quarterly

Anouk Ricard is the best person on Drawn & Quarterly by about a million miles. She or he draws these cute little animals and people and animal people. Anouk has some great other books about a girl and her frog friend. This book is slightly more adult than those. Only slightly though. 

This is a story about a blue duck who goes to work at a company that makes cuckoo clocks. All of the other employees are crazy assholes and the boss is the craziest of them all. He also acts like every terrible boss you ever had. Eventually the blue duck guy starts discovering a crazy conspiracy and also falling in love with a dog lady at his job. In many ways it seems to follow the plot of a movie but it's really different than other things I've seen. The timing of Anouk Ricard's work sets it apart from everyone else. Also I'm never able to tell what the intended readership age range is supposed to be. Anyway, get to know Anouk Ricard's work. 

Buy Benson's Cuckoos here

#6
Me Nut Nut Nut #2
Jason Murphy
Space Face Books

This comic isn't easy to follow or make sense of but it's still entirely enjoyable due to the fun art and goofy figures. There are two people and a spider. The spider seems to bite the guy a lot and make a spider web wig for the lady. I can't really explain it better than that.

Get it here.

#7
Lil' Buddies Magazines
Edie Fake

Edie Fake makes these little zines of photos of anthropomorphic signs and mascots that belong to random businesses. Many are bizarre and funny. The best are some paintings of clothes in a laundromat that look like they want to nail each other. Volume one is random good things. Volume two is just dental signs. 

Get them here

#8
Escapo 
Paul Pope
Z2 Comics

Escapo is a graphic novel by Paul Pope about an ugly escape artist who is a very popular performer in a traveling circus. He has a big crush on a pretty dancing girl but she loves another circus guy named the Acrobat King, who looks like Paul Pope. 

Paul Pope's beautiful, inky, seemingly loose but super well-informed drawings have been great for so long that even though he's still relatively young there are multiple generations of illustrators whose styles were primarily informed by studying Pauls's stuff. THB, Paul Pope's comic about teenage girls on Mars, is probably his best stuff. All his other comics look great but the stories are usually hit or miss. Paul will often get so wrapped up in clever inventions and concepts that he gets too far away from the story. I think Escapo works better than some of his other comics because the plot is pretty simple. 

Escapo was originally released sometime over ten years ago in black and white with a different cover and fewer pages. I had a signed and numbered copy but somebody must have taken it. This new version is bigger and in color. There are a lot of great things about this book and there are some less great things. Most of the additions to the work seem odd or misguided to me. 

The cover, which is supposed to resemble torn up wheat-pasted promo posters, looks like camouflage. The original cover really jumped out at you and this new one doesn't. There's also some very digital coloring thrown on top of the art for some reason. I don't think this book needed color, but the color it's given is too nuanced. They should have just used flat colors. Paul Pope's drawings don't require complicated coloring to make sense or look good. His linework is the star of the show. The Beatles had such great songs that they didn't need a Keith Moon on drums. Ringo was the perfect drummer for the Beatles because he drummed in a way that served the songs best. Paul Pope's art is most benefited by limited coloring. 

There's also some cool sketches and notes from Paul and then some sort of needless Escapo fan art too. 

Paul Pope is great. Escapo is pretty good. Maybe try to get an older printing of this though. You can buy the new printing here

#9
Moonhead And The Music Machine
Andrew Rae
Nobrow Press

This book tells the story of a nerd with a moon-shaped head that floats above his body. Everyone hates him until he plays some crazy song at the school talent show on a Devo-style guitar with a keyboard glued to it and the help of a boy in a ghost costume. Soon popular kids are nice to him and he is rude to the nerdy lady who actually likes him. Then some other shit happens and it ends predictably with a plot borrowed from several 80s rom coms but with one or two alt comic style curveballs added. It's fun to read but afterward the story seems kind of simple, stupid, and even false.

Get it here

#10
Musashi
Sean Michael Wilson and Michiru Morikawa
Shambhala

This is some real dog shit looking manga. The linework is ugly and there's an over-reliance on some hideous zip-a-tone textures that it doesn't look like the artist was comfortable using. I would like to direct the makers of this comic to a great book called Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga. It is one of the best and funniest mangas around. 

Get Musashi here

Anyway that's it for my 99th comic column. See you at my 100th. 

Your Favorite Beer Could Be Threatened By California's Drought

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Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

When you crack open an ice-cold beer, chances are you’re not thinking about climate change. But Tony Yanow is. Yanow is the co-owner and co-founder of Golden Road Brewery in Los Angeles, and like the 400 other craft breweries in California, he’s starting to feel the sting of the drought.

Beer is about 10 percent grains, hops, and assorted flavorings. The other 90 percent is water. And when you’re brewing beer in California, where river basins are quickly drying up, that’s a serious problem.

The drought is three years old at this point, but even though lawns are being left to die and fountains are shutting off, breweries are still producing lagers, IPAs, and stouts. (Beer is, after all, the third most-consumed beverage in the world, so there's plenty of demand.) But according to Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewer’s Association, the drought has begun to tangibly affect breweries in major ways: It's forced some to use lower-quality water in their brews or invest in expensive water-purification technologies, for instance, and it's caused beer production costs to creep up thanks to the rising cost of water.

At Golden Road Brewery, the question of what to do about the water has become a daily debate. The brewery will churn out over 31,000 barrels of beer this year (one barrel is about 31 gallons). For every gallon of beer, they’ll use about four gallons of water—and that’s a conservative ratios for a craft brewery. If you do the math, that’s roughly 4 million gallons of water each year and that figure doesn’t account for the amount of beer that’s spilled or the amount of water required for cleaning the massive fermentation tanks. 

Golden Road gets their water from the Los Angeles municipal supply, which is then treated and filtered until it's clean and suitable for brewing. But because of water scarcity, Los Angeles gets its water from a few different sources—local groundwater, imported groundwater, and water from the Colorado River Aqueduct—meaning that the resulting beer doesn't always taste the same. To a layman, it's nearly impossible to tell, but those subtle differences in mineral quality or water softness have a noticeable effect on the flavor. “Sometimes we’ll sit around and ask, ‘Why does this beer taste different?’ Many times, it’s the water,” said Yanow.

So there’s a big incentive for breweries to invest in technologies that will either improve the quality of water they're getting or secure access to another stable source of water. One option is reverse osmos

Reverse osmosis—RO, in brew-slang—is a purification method that strips water of all its minerals, salts, and other contaminants. It’s a complex process of heating, cooling, and evaporating the water, but it eventually simplifies water into what is essentially a “blank slate,” rendering it perfect for brewing.

“Then you can add back all the things you want—harden it, soften it, you can get it exactly right, and make subtle changes to the water so that it’s going to be the same every time,” Yanow explained. That’s why lots of bigger craft breweries—like Stone Brewing Company in San Diego, for example—use RO to stabilize their water sources and guarantee clean, crisp water in their brews.

But there’s a catch: You lose about 20 percent of the water in the process. That loss is hard to swallow when, as in California right now, water is neither bountiful nor cheap.

“Water is expensive here—it’s really a precious commodity—so from a business standpoint it doesn’t make a ton of sense to do that," said Yanow. "And from an environmental stance, it doesn’t make sense either."

But it does make sense from a quality standpoint, which brewers recognize is the most important thing. Yanow shrugged, noting that RO might be the best option—especially given that there aren't very many alternatives.

“If the water is increasing in price and it’s scarce, we don’t have the capability to start welling our own water,” he said. 

For some breweries in drought-stricken Northern California, however, wells may be the best option to ensure that their source of water doesn't run dry altogether. Bear Republic, a craft brewery in Sonoma County, shelled out almost half a million dollars last year to drill wells to safeguard their local groundwater. It’s an expensive process, and it's not without its own problems: Well water's mineral content makes it less preferable than water from the Russian River, from which Sonoma County breweries currently get their supply of H2O.

“It would be like brewing with Alka-Seltzer," said Jeremy Marshall, head brewer at Lagunitas Brewing Company, in an interview with NPR back in February. But Lagunitas, which is located in the southern part of Sonoma County, has since been forced to blend portions of groundwater into their brews, and some breweries in Northern California anticipate that they may soon have to switch over to using groundwater entirely.

To prevent that from happening, Leon Sharyon, CFO of Lagunitas, said that they've begun a water treatment project that will curb their water use by 40 percent. It involves "an EcoVolt anaerobic digester to treat our high strength waste on-site and a combination of an aerobic digester, UF membrane filter, and RO filter to further polish all liquid waste to the point where we can reuse it on site for different cleaning and non-product processes." It's an ambitious project, no doubt, but with any luck, it'll safeguard them from possible restrictions on water use in the future.

Photo via Flickr user Michael Fajardo

In Southern California, breweries haven't been faced with mandatory water restrictions yet, but the prices of water are steadily rising. When those price hikes appear on a home water bill they might seem benign, but at a brewery that’s using gallons of water each day, it can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Elsewhere in the country, water is much cheaper. The cost alone is an incentive to close shop in California and move your brewery closer to a reliable water source (Lagunitas, notably, opened a second brewhouse in Chicago this year, next to freeflowing Lake Michigan). Breweries could import water into the state, but the cost outweighs the savings.

The final alternative? To not treat water at all—which would cost significantly less, at the expense of the beer’s quality.

“If your product is 90 percent water, you have to start with clean water,” said Victor Novak, Head Brewer at Golden Road. “Just like if you use poor malt or poor yeast or old hops, you’re never going to get to where you want to be.”

But climate change also threatens the supply of barley and hops. Most barley in the US grows in areas unaffected by the drought, but growers of hops—which, domestically, comes primarily from the Pacific Northwest—are struggling to meet the demand. That’s partly because of volatile water sources, but also because of the massive expansion of the craft brewing industry, which has caused what some have deemed a hops shortage.

Given the dryness, you’d think craft breweries would be on hold. But instead, they’re expanding rapidly. Environmental concerns aside, the craft beer economy is booming. While overall beer sales were down 1.9 percent last year, craft beer sales were up 17.2 percent according to stats from the Brewers Association. In California alone, craft breweries sold $4.7 billion worth of beer in 2012 and the industry supports over 240,000 jobs—the highest concentration of brew-related jobs in the nation—which brings in $11 billion in wages for Californians. Beer is a behemoth industry, and craft beer is having a moment.

Unlike beer's big wigs—Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, Heineken—craft breweries tend to be smaller and independently owned. Their beers are brewed with more traditional ingredients and more robust flavors, a nod to old-style beer-making techniques. Many craft breweries are small-scale beer producers, which is part of their charm. But brewing less also makes it difficult for them to justify investing in the more expensive water-saving technologies—what McCormick describes as "complex devices like automatic shutoffs on valves, or packaging lines that can be retrofitted to use less water"—given that the return on investment is longer.

Photo via Flickr user Alan Turkus

None of this would be an issue if California weren't in a drought—but it doesn't seem like that will be resolved any time soon. The US Drought Monitor now classifies more than 90 percent of California as affected by “severe drought.” This year California is expected to lose over $2 billion in lost crop revenue, livestock, and jobs as a result. Parts of the Sierra Nevada foothills, in central California, no longer have running water at all, forcing residents to rely on bottled water for everything from drinking to flushing the toilet. So much groundwater has been pumped that some parts of California's mountain ranges have actually started to move upward.

And it’s not just California: Dry patches stretch across the West, and nearly 20 percent of the continental US now qualifies as being in “severe drought.” Major water sources—like the Colorado River, which snakes through seven US states and forms the major watershed of the Southwest—have begun to dry up due to a lack of rainfall. The Colorado River Basin has lost 53 million acre feet of freshwater in the past decade.

As California crawls toward its fourth year of extreme drought, the water-related challenges could push some California craft breweries to close and others to increase their prices. Still, Yanow is clear that the craft brewing industry is here to stay—even if the drought is, too.

“Look, we live in a desert,” Yanow said. “There’s not going to be any rain in the next year, because there wasn’t that much rainfall in the first place. But with climate change and the fact that we’re in the desert, it’s gonna be worse and worse and worse.”

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

'Thug Kitchen' Is the Latest Iteration of Digital Blackface

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"The Thugs." Image via Twitter

Earlier this week, a hard-hitting investigation by Epicurious revealed that the food blog (and upcoming cookbook) Thug Kitchen—a brand that got popular by writing recipes in a tone reminiscent of African American Vernacular English—is run by two WASPy white people from California, Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway, whom Epicurious refers to as “masterminds.”

For the uninitiated, Thug Kitchen’s recipes are sold with phrases like “Don’t fuck around with some sorry-ass ten-dollar takeout,” and “This holiday season bake a batch of these spiced sons of bitches.” The tone has led many people to deride the "Thugs," as Davis and Holloway wish to be called, as “deceptive” and “a lot like the latest iteration of nouveau blackface.” Others criticized the title of Thug Kitchen for its use of the word thug, something that has been deemed a code word—that is, a “polite way to say ‘nigger’ in mixed company.”

The backlash to the revelation that Thug Kitchen is written by white people has inspired a backlash of its own. Detractors of Davis and Holloway’s critics point out that automatically associating the word thug with black men is itself racist. But there’s no denying that the word has historically been used as a weapon to condemn people of color.

As many have pointed out, last year, when 26-year-old Stanford grad and Compton native Richard Sherman played the game of a lifetime and served an integral role in sending the Seattle Seahawks into the Super Bowl, he gave an impassioned post-game speech in which he called out his opponents' perceived slights against him. He didn't even curse, but he was immediately labeled a thug, presumably because his skin color and dreadlocks fit the description of what people typically associate with that word.

More recently, I wrote about how the New York Post smeared storied New York City police officer, former drug dealer, and current community advocate Corey Pegues, describing him as a “thug cop” on the cover of their paper after he appeared on the Combat Jack Show and shared the story of how he transitioned from a victim of the trap to becoming an executive in the world’s largest police force.

One thing is clear: For the upwardly mobile white Angelinos behind Thug Kitchen, the word thug is ironic and funny, a bit of culturally exploratory fun. But for men like Sherman and Pegues, it's a putdown meant to demonize and dehumanize.

You don’t have to look very hard to find white and non-black people profiting off of what could traditionally be deemed black culture. Urban Outfitters sells a book called Understand Rap, written by William Buckholz, a white freelance writer from Seattle, who “demystifies” rap by explaining “confusing rap lyrics” so that “you and your grandma can understand.” 

More infamously, the coder frat bros behind Rap Genius received a $15 million infusion in their company from angel investor Andreessen Horowitz. But they stole a large bounty of their lyrics from an original hip-hop lyrics website and profit from the works of primarily African American artists. Meanwhile, their private internal chatroom was a mess of cultural insensitivity and crude racial jokes.

Whether or not Holloway and Davis would have received a book deal if they were black is up for debate, but what isn’t is the way the word thug has been used to insult black men and women in the United States.

With that in mind, one would like to assume that the people behind a company that sells a $20 T-shirt emblazoned with the expression “Know Your Roots"—with its link to the history of slavery and black genealogy (not to mention the seminal book and TV series Roots)—might be cognizant of the blatant racial coding present in their marketing. Either they knowingly benefitted from a form of digital blackface, or they are racially tone-deaf. Neither explanation should absolve Holloway and Davis from criticism and outright commercial rejection.

After initially agreeing to speak with me for this story, the "Thugs” declined to comment for this piece.

Perhaps the best way to respond to a company whose recent promotional video (embedded above) contains the phrase “I don’t play that shit anymore” is to look Holloway and Davis in the face and tell them that we’re going to do the same.
 

@jordanisjoso

Occupy Central, the Godfather of Kung Fu, and the Soul of Hong Kong

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Occupy Central, the Godfather of Kung Fu, and the Soul of Hong Kong

Director Urlich Seidl Talks About Making Movies That Aren't Quite Documentaries

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Photos by Piotr Sokul

If you have a soft spot for dark documentaries and the quirky side of human-interest stories, chances are you already stumbled upon Ulrich Seidl’s oeuvre. In his home country of Austria, people have been skeptical about his art and — as is often the case with the country's native artists—only started to accept him once he became famous overseas. Now, with his non-documentary Paradise trilogy still resonating with most of the art-house crowd, Seidl has become sort of a star at home, too.

The director of Dog Days and Animal Love, Seidl is known for films that are straightforward but at the same time poetic—he laughs because the world is ridiculous at times and, most importantly, he has honest compassion for the people around him. In his latest movie, In the Basement, Seidl portrays Austrians who are self-confident, articulate, and proud of their inner abysses. The film is a semi-documentary about people who have, in one form or another, a very special sort of basement—they work in an underground shooting range, or they have an S&M studio where they get hung up by their balls, or they love to collect vintage Nazi merchandise and can’t do so aboveground.

John Waters—who called Seidl’s Paradise: Love and Paradise: Faith among his top three movies of 2012—once said, “Fassbinder died, so God gave us Ulrich Seidl.” There really is nothing to add to that. Except maybe that Seidl has the best mad professor–type office in the world and giggles like a child when you point at the red Grim Reaper statue on his desk.

VICE: People often accuse you of cynicism and irony, at least in your work. Is that really how you see the world?
Ulrich Seidl: Well, luckily this doesn’t happen too often anymore. That kind of sentiment only comes from people who don’t really know my work and haven’t evolved personally. When I started out, I was antagonized for quite a while—probably until Animal Love. Everything changed with Dog Days, of course. Now, such accusations only happen sporadically.

I watched In the Basement at a press screening and people were laughing really hard, until they were almost choking, because your takes always run a little bit too long and it makes people uncomfortable.
Yeah, I like that. I like it when people laugh—the interesting thing about people watching my movies has always been that the audience never laughs or cries altogether. I’m not fishing for emotions and I’m not catering to reflexes such as, And now laugh! Instead, one person might laugh while another might be annoyed, because he or she doesn’t think it’s funny at all. I think life is absurd and ridiculous at times, so why wouldn’t we laugh? But if people just go for making fun of the people on the screen, that's their problem

This is the most distinct difference between your films and that's what people call social pornography. You don’t let us look away once it becomes unfunny.
I’m definitely not a peeping Tom. People might think they recognize a certain milieu that they can point their fingers at, but actually, I’m really spending time with my protagonists, getting to know them, building trust, a relationship. I portray my protagonists just as they are. I’m not judging them. This is why they never have any problem with me after the film’s been released.

It must take a lot of trust for a couple to let you film the woman hang those weights on her husband’s balls. Can you describe the process of getting to know your protagonists?
I just have a good sense for that. I treat people the way I want to be treated. It’s one of my talents to give people the impression that I really care about them—which is true, for that matter. You can almost always tell if a certain relationship will make for good movie material or not. But of course, there’s a lot of luck involved, too. Take Mr. Ochs, for example. We only met him by chance, by word on the street.

Mr. Ochs is the guy with the Nazi paraphernalia in his basement. With his story, I had the impression that you were using elements of classic fictional storytelling.
Yes, that’s right. After all, everything’s set up. Nothing is captured by surprise in my movies. Everything is manufactured and even when we use handheld cameras, every scene is choreographed. There’s always feature filmmaking [techniques] involved—that’s my take on cinema. I always draw my material from reality, but in the end, it’s never just documentary filmmaking. There are some completely made-up stories in In the Basement too.

Which scenes are fictional in In the Basement?
Well, take a guess!

I found the story about the woman who treats dolls like real babies hard to believe, because it was missing more background information than the others. Maybe I’m wrong though.
No, you’re right, that one’s completely staged. Many journalists are especially surprised here, but the story still works.

To me, this story shows that you have a really humane view of your characters: At first glance, the woman is totally scary, but then we look closer and she seems really happy.
On the other hand it tells us something about the isolation of man, too. It’s a story like many stories out there. It’s the same as with the pets in Animal Love, which are fulfilling the same kind of need for their owners—back then, I was already dealing with this theme of sublimation, this people not getting what they need in terms of satisfaction or power play.

When Austrians think of basements these days, we think of Josef Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch—the dungeon torturer and his victim. You decided not to go there.
That case was not really my interest when I wanted to make the movie. The idea of this project goes way back. Initially, I was fascinated by the fact that most homes have extensive cellars and people love to go to the basements in their spare time while leaving their living rooms mostly untouched. Down there, they have all the freedom to be whatever they want to be. I’d say that’s pretty universal, too. But I don’t want to judge. I’d rather show real desire and real sorrow.

This notion of not judging your protagonists is something we see with Mr. Ochs, who isn't portrayed as a monster even though he collects Nazi gear.
That is what interests me. Movies are not a means of convicting people. Besides, Mr. Ochs is not a neo-Nazi. He doesn’t commit any crimes. I find the normality behind his life and the lives of the people around him fascinating. And one more thing: Mr. Ochs is a very nice guy. That’s just the way it is. And that’s what makes it even harder. It would be a piece of cake if we could just scream, “You dirty pig!” at him.

What’s your take on Austrian film in general? What do you think about the current state of filmmaking in your country?
Austrian film has evolved into something exceptional over the last two decades. It wasn’t always like this. When I studied film, nobody was exactly waiting for movies from Austria. Now, other European countries like Poland, Denmark, and Spain envy us. We show things how they really are.

I heard that you are a huge admirer of silent film star Erich von Stroheim. What connects the two of you?
Even though it was a totally different world, I’m still fascinated by his films. He had similar themes as me—desire, death, and private life. Even his perfectionism is probably not too different from mine—even though his may have been more radical. I guess Stroheim also created this gimmick for himself, with his uniform and his military behavior.

Is there something similar with your public persona? Like an Ulrich Seidl gimmick you’re cultivating?
You need to ask others about that. But I think you’d probably find a few such elements if you wanted to make a movie about me.

Follow Markus Lust on Twitter


You Missed Out If You Weren’t at Matty Matheson’s ‘Keep It Canada’ Party Last Night

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You Missed Out If You Weren’t at Matty Matheson’s ‘Keep It Canada’ Party Last Night

Band for Life - Part 33

The Plantation Is Still Here: Inside M. Lamar’s 'Negrogothic, A Manifesto'

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Discipline 2. All images and videos courtesy of the artist

“The plantation is still here. The slave ship is still here. It’s just now in prisons. My work makes these connections.” That's how the artist, musician, and performer M. Lamar explains his provocative exhibition Negrogothic, a Manifesto: The Aesthetics of M. Lamar, which is currently on view at Participant Inc. in New York.

Filled with imagery of whips, sadomasochism, cotton plants, and a penis guillotine, Negrogothic, which runs until October 12, portrays Lamar’s multi-layered examination of the continued social, political, and sexual resonances of these historical traumas. While perhaps best known in pop culture as actress Laverne Cox’s twin brother who also played the role of Orange Is The New Black’s "Sophia" before her transition, Lamar is a highly trained countertenor. Through his music, he has commented on the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, slave ships, and lynching. It comes down to a chilling and beautiful distillation of influences as varied as opera, spirituals, blues, and black metal.

Maintaining his interest in using music as a medium to investigate contemporary representations of blackness, black masculinity, and interracial desire, Negrogothic presents two surreal black-and-white videos: Badass Nigga, the Charlie Looker of Psalm Zero Remix and Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche, Part 2, the Overseer, which features Lamar as a ghostly black figure placing whips into the asses of bent-over white men while singing ac operativ love song to an overseer. With large stunning stills printed on canvas from each video lining the gallery walls, the exhibition also includes several unsettling props, haunting remnants from the filming of the videos. In addition, Lamar will perform a new requiem entitled “Tree of Blood,” a narrative piece combining his songs on lynching, on October 5.

Touching on topics ranging from his disdain for Beyoncé to the hyper-eroticization of the black body in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and copious quoting of iconic black feminist theorist bell hooks, who Lamar calls “his North Star,” my conversation with Lamar was illuminating and exhilarating due to his utter fearlessness in discussing issues surrounding race and sexuality that are often repressed. 

As we sat in the back room of Participant Inc., Lamar told me he titled the show, his first solo exhibition, after a term he created to describe his own work.

“I started using the term Negrogothic because I was reading about the Gothic novel in which there’s this blending of romance and horror. That seemed to be this thing that I had been doing in my work for a long time. And a more obvious thing: I’m a goth kid. I’m very invested in goth, metal, and punk subcultures and taking them with me.”

While he's long been a fan of goth music and played in bands before his solo career, Lamar was also drawn to opera, particularly black sopranos such as Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, and Marian Anderson. “What they did with their voices was almost like science fiction to me,” recalled Lamar. “They were in this very European form, but you could tell they came out of the gospel tradition.”

The defining moment in Lamar’s conception of his own ability to articulate a radical social critique through an operatic style came after hearing Diamanda Galás’s album Plague Mass. He was introduced to Galás's work through his college roommate at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Lamar said, “That was the moment for me when everything came together—my rage since I was a kid and the urgency to say something about injustice in an operatic form.”

With songs such as “Swinging Low” and “In the Belly of the Ship,” which reference the horrors of lynching and the Middle Passage, Lamar’s music uncovers the hidden histories still prevalent in American culture, a devastating and significant theme that remains at the forefront of Negrogothic. Pointing to Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved appears in the Badass Nigga video, as an inspiration for his own mining of America’s painful past, Lamar observed, “I’ve always read a lot about history and have been troubled by the absences of black people’s contributions, which is a certain kind of violence. I’ve always been interested in creating these narratives in the way that Toni Morrison writes in the margins of what wasn’t written into history—all these forgotten things.”

Lamar is also concerned with exposing the political aspects of desire, particularly interracial desire. Pointing to examples from the millions of porn hits for the search “big black cock” to basketball announcers describing the players as “black studs” to a naked Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained, Lamar said, “I always like to say white men have an obsession with black bodies and black penises. I think how the black penis operates in the white imagination is a fiction. It’s this constructed thing with a mythic place. I think that’s the other side of the coin to black men being shot down in the street. This kind of thing in the imagination of white [police] officers or white people in general. And black people have internalized this fiction of the oversexualized black men.”Through reoccurring scenes of sadomasochism and subjugation in his videos and archival prints on canvas, often using the whip as a symbol for a black penis, Lamar shows how sexual practice echoes these stereotypes, histories, and constructions of interracial desire. He identifies as a "practicing homosexual"—rejecting the largely “bourgeois and white” aspects of the term gay—and is in a happy long-term relationship with a white man.

“I’ve been out in the sexual realm and I have been in scenarios where people are living out various things that haven’t been spoken," Lamar said. "As a first step–—and we are still unfortunately in a first step about talking about all this stuff—at least if you have it out there, we can maybe get to a different place with it. Some people try to make desire apolitical. You can’t control who you love but you can analyze why.”

Central to Negrogothic and perhaps the most complex yet illustrative example of the artist's detailed examination of the American psyche is his video Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche, Part 2, the Overseer. The second section  of a hopefully full-length film, the video has its genesis in Lamar’s interest in combining the ideas of Michel Foucault’s panopticon with Frantz Fanon’s understanding of internalized racism and the white gaze. However, the film took a more concrete turn once Lamar learned about the tragic story of Willie Francis, a black teenager who was executed twice in 1946 and 1947.

“The first attempt to execute Willie Francis was unsuccessful because the police officer was drunk setting up the electric chair, which was passed around different Southern cities," Lamar said. "If that had worked, we probably wouldn’t know his name. It was a question of cruel and unusual punishment. It went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, 'Go ahead and try again.' The NAACP started talking to him and it came out he had a sexual relationship with the man he was accused of killing, a 53-year old white dude who owned a pharmacy. That was the concrete story that led to the show becoming more developed.”

Fascinated by this story, Lamar attempted to research the possibilities of the history of homosexuality on plantations. Finding little to no information on the subject, Lamar decided to create a fictional realm of historical desire in his video.

“My work is invested in fiction," he told me. "I kind of hate documentary work in a way. I’m interested in it as a genre, but there’s something about the notion of reality that I think is very limiting. For me, it’s very much about the imagination and the imaginary realm.”

Through these imagined dynamics of desire and sexuality, Lamar clearly references Robert Mapplethorpe’s censored and controversial BDSM-filled X-Portfolio photographs, particularly his memorable Self-Portrait With Whip, which depicts Mapplethorpe with a whip in his ass. Lamar's is admittedly obsessed with commenting on Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic photographs as well as his eroticized images of black men in The Black Book. “[Mapplethorpe’s] use of the whip echoes him as a person who is deeply invested in white supremacist notions of blackness," Lamar said. "There has been no evidence from reading his biography or looking at his work that he had a very humane relationship to black people or black men, specifically. It was all about shock factor.”

While other artists such as Glenn Ligon have previously addressed Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, Lamar takes this critique one step further by refusing to reuse and reproduce Mapplethorpe’s problematic imagery.

“I never wanted to give viewers a black body they expect,” said Lamar. “Even in my life, while I’m very male-identified, I’ve never done masculinity in a traditional way. But in terms of the work, I wanted the figures in these films and in the images to not really be attainable or tangible–almost like a ghostly figure. If you watch 12 Years A Slave or Django Unchained, there are all these black naked bodies and there’s this pornographic moment the viewer gets to have. I didn’t want to give viewers that kind of thing.”

Another unexpected yet thought-provoking moment in Surveillance Punishment is the sudden appearance of Jamie Foxx during his 2004 Oscar acceptance speech, during which he thanked his grandmother for keeping him in line as a child, saying “And then when I would act the fool, she would beat me.”

“Here you have this moment of grand success for this black man and you immediately go to him being beaten down," Lamar said. "Like there’s inherently something wrong with black children that they have to be beat down and put in their place in order to succeed.”

An almost shocking moment of reality in the surreal and atmospheric video, the inclusion of Foxx’s speech further cements Lamar’s thesis of the inescapable connections between past traumas and the handing down of these historical legacies. Lamar's grandfather grew up in a sharecropping situation and was beaten endlessly, which in turn led him to become violently abusive to Lamar’s mother and grandmother.

“There’s all this post-traumatic stress disorder that’s not talked about in black life,” said Lamar. “I would say we’re all contending with that. I think there needs to be public spaces and real public discourse about PTSD and the lasting wounds.”

Lamar added, “I’d like to think there’s a sense of great loss and mourning. We can’t even mourn enough for the lost bodies, the lost spirits, the lost souls. One of the things bell hooks talks about is the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Kennedy—these figures that represented the possibilities of freedom. The levels of devastation and loss are almost inexplicable. I think about the particular loss of possibility with those figures, the continued losses and the losses before that—all those who died in pursuit of freedom. And in my Negrogothness, that will always be a huge part of my work.”

Negrogothic, A Manifesto: The Aesthetics of M. Lamar will be on view at Participant Inc. through October 12, 2014. 

Emily Colucci is a New York–based writer and the co-founder of Filthy Dreams, a blog that analyzes culture through a queer lens. Follow her on Twitter.

I Took A Whiff Of New York's Most Endangered Scent

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I Took A Whiff Of New York's Most Endangered Scent

This Week in Teens: Two Teachers Got Arrested for Having 'Simultaneous Sex' with a Teenage Boy

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These English teachers are in trouble. Photo via Kenner Police Department

Persuading teenagers to read for pleasure can be a real struggle. Books are admittedly less viscerally exciting than movies or television or sexting, and they require way more effort. In the age of immediacy, the temptation to look away from the page and check Snapchat is nearly insurmountable. The ability to sit and read a book is almost like a muscle: Use it or it will atrophy. That's why it's important to get teens into reading while they're young.

Part of the problem is clearly the subject matter of the tomes we foist upon teens. Reading lists in high school are typically made of pretty antiquated stuff, both out of deference to the hoary old canon and to a fear of offending parents. The result is that without an exceptional teacher, teens can get the idea that Shakespeare is a guy who uses old-fashioned words to tell stories that rely on way too many coincidences and Huck Finn is just a kid's book that's casually racist. Contemporary fiction is usually presented in the form of parent-approved young adult novels like Twilight or Hunger Games. Rarely do kids get the idea that literature can be rebellious or matter to their own lives.

What's needed, then, is a massive revamping of high school reading lists. The curriculum should be shaped by the kind of books that a cool older sibling might be into. Exposed at an early enough age, mainstream teenagers could totally get into authors like Teju Cole, Joan Didion, Raymond Carver, or Zadie Smith. We try to impart to kids that books are important when we should try to show them that books are fun. As long as there's enough sex and drugs to hold their interest, America's teens could go from being functional illiterates to pretentious quasi-intellectuals who quote Bret Easton Ellis and Hunter S. Thompson at every chance they get. (Hey, it's a start, and hopefully that's a phase they'll grow out of.)

Without a new reading list, English teachers should be encouraged to engage as much as possible with their students and relate to them—of course, they should stop way, way, short of having sex with the children placed in their charge.

But that's exactly what Shelley Dufresne, 32, and Rachel Respess, 24, two instructors at Destrehan High School, did with a 16-year-old boy in Destrehan, Louisiana. The teachers were arrested after having videotaped threesomes. Predictably, the tabloid media has picked up on this fracas with glee. (The student, incidentally, says the sex was consensual and apparently bragged about it to classmates. To complicate matters, the boy was just days away from the age of consent at the time of the incident.)

Because the teachers are women and the student is a boy, the story has ignited calls of reverse sexism in the internet's creepiest recesses. As one Reddit commenter put it, "i can't imagine the fury we'd here if it was male teachers, and the police chief called it 'poor judgment.' the feminists would be having a field day." Which, while poorly worded, is sort of a valid point—commenters saying things like "Best.Teachers.Ever" are treating this too lightly. Then again, the women are being charged with a felony, so it's not like this isn't being taken seriously.

Bottom line: Teachers should never, ever have sex with their students. It's actually not that hard to avoid!

Here’s the rest of this week in teens:

Teenagers are getting hurt playing football. Photo via Flickr user larrysphatpage

–Team sports have traditionally been seen as a good way to make friends, build camaraderie, and learn discipline, but it really is starting to feel like high school football needs to get toned down a bit. People can argue about the ethics of being an NFL fan all they want, but at least professional football is made up of adults who (in an ideal world, anyway) weighed out the long-term risk of head injuries against the short-term benefits of being rich and famous. As minors, high school students can't be responsible for making those life-altering choices, but they still face the same dangers. This past week alone, three students were killed playing America's favorite sport, most recently a Long Island student who died after colliding with a player from the other team. "It was a big hit," his coach told Newsday.

–One writer who's great for teens is Gabriel García Márquez. In his seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the character Rebeca famously has a compulsion to eat dirt and paint, sometimes to the point of vomiting. As a former paper eater (I didn't really swallow that much), I think I understand chewing on things as a nervous habit. Still, I can't help being totally grossed out by this photo of a nearly nine-pound hairball removed from the stomach of a girl in Kyrgyzstan. "Her stomach was so badly swollen from hair and bits of wool from the carpet that it literally just oozed out soon as the wall of the stomach was cut,” the hospital’s senior professor of surgery said. Without the operation, according to doctors, the girl would have died.

–One of the unfortunate aspects of the internet is that teenage missteps are now saved forever for anyone to find, usually in the form of Facebook photos or Tumblr entries. (Seriously: The next time you meet an intimidatingly cool person, spend ten minutes googling them, and you'll almost definitely feel better about yourself.) For most people, this is never going to be a big issue, because no one cares about them enough to dig up their past. For teenage celebrities, though, it's going to be rough. Heir to the Fresh Prince throne Jaden Smith has spent the last year or so tweeting profoundly adolescent things like:

This week he out-teened himself. First, he offered up his best tweet yet:

Then he released his new song, "Blue Ocean." Taking its cue from Drake's "Marvin's Room," Paris Hilton's "Drunk Text," and a million Odd Future demo tapes, the song tells the story of his relationship with a girl he met at Coachella. She has a coke dealer and a boyfriend in a Misfits shirt, but that can't stop her and Jaden from connecting. There's some awkward rhyming, talk about magnets, sirens, and lots of people yelling "Jaden!" in the background, but words can't do it justice. Just listen.

–Does the man make the name, or does the name make the man? While it might seem ridiculous to suggest that our first names shape who we become, the fact is, a 13-year-old named Blade just impaled himself while riding on the back of a four-wheeler. The accident happened at Ohio Mudfest, and Blade, not realizing that the injury was serious, pulled the stick out of his own stomach. He was then taken to a hospital, where doctors were forced to "remove and reconstruct more than six inches of his bowels, colon, and intestines." According to his mom, "He has to learn how to basically swallow all over again, and he's going to have to go on a special diet. They said that would probably be a lifelong thing." There's just no way that this would ever happen to a kid named Eugene—at the very worst, he'd move to Oregon. 

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

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