For many, the name Cheever evokes images of rich Yankees in the old suburbs of upstate New York. It’s true that much of his work takes place there, but this milieu was not his natural habitat and the denizens that populate his stories were not of his blood.

John Cheever was a self-made man. Just as he created his fiction, he created his life’s circumstances in order to write about them. Salinger may hold the scepter when it comes to novellas about the privileged in New York, but—leaving Salinger’s great writing aside—I think this is due to youth being at the heart of his work. Salinger’s stories are part of the coming of age within an American liberal education, while Cheever’s subjects don’t fit as well into school curriculums. But Cheever is a master in his own way, with the short story as his domain. In honor of all the essays that have been written by ninth graders about Holden Caulfield, here’s a little book report about Cheever’s best story, “The Swimmer.”

One of the masterful things about “The Swimmer” is its structure. It is set up to simultaneously explore a man’s place in an elite East Coast community and the loss of his mind. The story kicks off quickly. We get a sense of the world we’re in and the people who populate it within the first paragraph. We are swiftly introduced to our main character, Neddy Merrill, in a way that is purposefully misleading. It appears that Neddy is just having an afternoon swim at his neighbor’s pool and his life is all in order. It isn’t until the reader gets to the end of the story that it’s revealed that Neddy hasn’t lived in his home for some time and has been delusional from the start. It quickly becomes clear that the reality of the opening section is very unlikely.  

Neddy’s cockamamy plan to traverse all the swimming pools between his neighbor’s house and his own is presented in close third person so that such a strange endeavor comes off as whimsical with a bit of creative rigor. The narrator offers up the idea as an almost artistic response to a stifling situation.

"His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestions of escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the country. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure."

Here the insane idea of conquering the domesticated world of his rarefied community by swimming through a string of pools as if he were an explorer on par with Magellan is not presented objectively; its full absurdity is obfuscated by some misguided quest and filtered through Neddy’s perspective in the close third person so that the idea sounds inspired and unique.

In fact, it is an incredibly novel idea, which is one of the reasons I love the story so much. But the creative originality is Cheever’s and not Neddy’s. Such an idea in Neddy’s life is madness, but such an idea in a short story is brilliant. Cheever uses the plan to show the way man’s primal engagement with the wild Earth has been suppressed by our domestication. For Neddy, the crazy plan also represents his slipping grip on reality. The idea just comes to Neddy, but Cheever doesn’t divulge any of the reasoning behind it. In the end, trauma is the impetuous for Neddy’s delusions. But because Cheever wants this revelation to trickle in over the course of the story, he slips Neddy’s crazy plan in nonchalantly at the beginning.

The pool idea also allows for a gradual development of Neddy’s insanity and an incremental exploration of Neddy’s environment. If we think Neddy’s self-imposed journey is odd in the beginning, it is revealed that his situation is even more off kilter as each pool discloses more of his backstory and how out of synch he is with reality. We also get portraits of the people that populate his world. Each pool is matched with a description of its owners. These descriptions are filtered though Neddy’s perspective, so we get a sense of who he thinks they are, which is then contrasted with how they actually are when he interacts with them. He feels that he is socially superior to some. He thinks that he is the one with the upper hand in an old affair, when actually he is an uninvited guest and groveling former lover.

In the end, his own house is revealed to be empty, and his grasp on reality is completely loosened. The pools are like stepping stones that progressively reveal the extent of the deterioration of his mental state and culminate in the discovery that he doesn’t even live in the community anymore. When this is revealed it negates the probability of the scene in the beginning. But its final pages, the opening scene doesn’t matter. It has served its purpose as an engine to start the character’s journey. It is the booster rocket that propels the story rocket through Earth’s atmosphere and then falls away as Cheever takes us to the moon.

More by James Franco from VICE: 

Are You a Nerd?

Brand-Funded Films and the Trailer for La Passione

American Psycho: Ten Years Later/Twenty Years Later

My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict

Paul Salveson likes stuff, that we're sure of. Past that, his work confounds us in the best way possible. Is that a cinderblock made out of bread? I honestly don't know, but I love it. His new book is Between the Shell, which just won MACK’s First Book Award and is due out this Fall. The book is a collection of mind-bending assemblages he’s been constructing from household objects over the course of the last seven years. "It’s got a lot of older images and most of them haven’t really seen the light of day. So, it’s this nice culmination of work I was doing and continue to do," he told us.

As well as these weird and wonderful amalgamations, Paul's work has taken a turn towards more conceptually weighted subject matter, creating scultpures out of wheat and other materials (so it was bread!). He recently received his MFA from the University of Southern California, and did his thesis on toothbrush design, of all things. Paul says he's always been interested in "how crazy and baroque they are and how there’s a new crazier toothbrush with different colors and moving parts and plastic bits and stuff like that." Paul says he’ll be moving to Philadelphia at the end of the summer, so keep an eye out.

More photo stuff from VICE:

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Prayers, Pilgrims, and Parties

Kristie Muller's Peculiar Still Lifes and Body Part Portraits

Members of the Kunduz Central Club and their director with Mohammad Anwar in the center.

In a large, renovated warehouse in Afghanistan's Kunduz City, 24 young athletes are training like madmen. They are dressed in mostly dirty, mismatched gees and colored belts that signify their will to improvise, rather than the achievement of a certain skill level. Here they only use the equipment that is available—a giant mat and their own bodies.

They take turns carrying each other on their shoulders and successively jumping over and crawling under each other. As many as four athletes line up and bend at the waist, while  one of their brothers launches himself like a flying squirrel over their backs. It’s both impressive and exhausting to watch.

It’s also encouraging to see this many young men of military age not pointing guns at each other. Instead, they are cooperating in training for the one thing that all Afghans—whether they're Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara or Pashtun—can all agree on: kurash. The sport is so popular in Afghanistan, even the Taliban like it.

According to the sport’s Asian Confederation, it originated in what is now modern Uzbekistan at about 1500 BC. Kurash could be considered a mixed martial art in the sense that it combines elements of both upright wrestling and judo. Since opponents cannot grapple below the waist or wrestle on the ground, kurash moves at a very fast pace. The goal is to put your opponent on the mat. When a competitor’s knee touches the floor, the action is stopped and they begin again from a standing position.

Kurash is so popularly that even amateur matches can draw thousands of spectators (male only, women are not allowed). Often men will bet on the outcomes. In Kunduz, it was local money, not international money, that paid to transform this building into a gymnasium.

Mohammad Anwar is the Director of the Kunduz Central Club which boasts 2,000 members and runs recreation centers like this across Kunduz.

“It keeps them from doing bad things,” says Anwar. “They come here and they make their bodies healthy. It helps keep them away from drugs and other trouble.”

For those who do it, it’s also a chance to briefly escape from the dangers and everyday problems of living in a nation that has been at war for decades.

Akram Uddin (in blue jacket) is the pride of Kunduz and a Kurash champion in Asia.

A 29-year-old tree-trunk of a man named Akram Uddin started training at this club 13 years ago when he was just 16. He got so good that by the time he was 22, he was invited to compete in a tournament in Macau. Akram Uddin lost.

“But when I saw how hard all of the other athletes trained, how good they were and what it looked like when their flags were raised up when they got their medals, I said to myself, I will do that for Afghanistan.”

And so he did. Akram Uddin came home and trained hard enough to compete in 20 different countries throughout Asia and Europe. He eventually went on to become a top champion in the Asia Confederation.

Participants work out by propelling their bodies over the backs of as many as four other people.

Kurash was reportedly being considered as a sport for the 2020 Olympic Games to be held in either Istanbul, Tokyo, or Madrid, but it did not make the shortlist announced this month. It lost out to stuff like sport climbing. Still Akram Uddin would’ve been 36 by then, way past his prime for an athlete in combat sport. Although he insists he would’ve been ready, he will have to settle for making Afghanistan proud on a smaller stage.

For now, the other members practice their moves, gracefully shifting their weight, using the laws of energy, gravity, and motion to throw each other in hard slaps against the mat.

Akram Uddin referees a few practice matches between heavy, medium, and lightweight fighters. Each shows an intensity and skill level that could rival mixed martial arts clubs anywhere in the world.

The warrior spirit, is not in short supply in Afghanistan, after all. Fortunately, when young men fight each other here—no one ends up dead.

All text and photos by Kevin Sites.

Pro-choice activists in Dublin. Photo via

Names and identities in this article have been changed.

"This is what it's coming to," said Katie. "These stickers are popping up on lampposts all over town." The Dublin streetlamp she's pointing at, along with many others around the city, has been branded with a large, pink dot beneath the words, "A SAFE ABORTION WITH PILLS." It's part of an ad campaign for a website selling miscarriage-inducing drugs, a good deal of which are being snapped up by young Irish women for whom abortion remains a stigma that can't be addressed openly.

"Vulnerable girls and women are ordering shite like this online and hiding away to ride it out and hope for the best. It's hideous," Katie told me, repulsed. Ten years ago, she—like tens of thousands of Irish women have in the past decade—made a secret trip to the UK to terminate her pregnancy. But today, abortion in Ireland is still illegal and divisive. Politicians may have voted overwhelmingly to introduce limited abortion last week, pushing the bill onto the next stage, but even if it were passed, it would only allow women who were deemed to be sufficiently "suicidal" to stop unwanted pregnancies in their tracks.

Ireland's quietest export—women who travel to the UK seeking an abortion—is often referred to in the country's ferocious abortion debate. But the less publicized practice of self-administering—when Irish women order their own "abortion pills" online—is actually much more common.

“No one talks about women who self-administer,” says Amy. Four years ago, she carried out an abortion on herself using a pill bought from the internet. “We talk about our 5,000 women a year who travel, but no one talks about the really dark underbelly of self-administering, and there are far more of us. We’re swept under the carpet.”

Anti-abortion posters in Dublin. Photo courtesy of @redlemonader

“This kind of abortion is a lot more common than people think,” said Cathy Doherty from the Abortion Rights Campaign. “Before I’d heard of it, I never really thought you’d still have the 'back-alley abortion’ in Ireland these days—women sitting alone in their houses, still desperate enough to try it.”

The Irish Eighth Amendment of 1983 introduced a constitutional ban on abortion, including administering abortions on yourself or assisting anyone else in doing so. Last year, the Irish Medicines Board seized and destroyed 487 abortifacients (pills that induce abortion) that had made their way into the Republic. Some websites require women to order their package to an address in Northern Ireland before sneaking it over the border into the south.

Source and take one of these pills and you've incontrovertibly broken the law. But, for many Irish women, the threat of legal repercussions and health risks still outweigh the financial and emotional costs of seeking aid in the UK. Pro-choice groups in Ireland estimate that, between last-minute flights, accommodation, and paying for the procedure itself, an Irish woman would need upwards of €1,000 (about $1,300) in the bank to afford a legal abortion, not to mention the potential costs of taking time off of work.

And if you can’t afford to make a trip to the UK, chances are you can’t afford to support a newborn baby. In certain cases, a self-administered abortion seems the only way out.

“I was terrified that I was pregnant—terrified," says Amy. "If I had gone ahead with that pregnancy, I would be in an absolute poverty trap. I was entitled to nothing. No social support, no social welfare, no rent allowance, no job seeker's benefit, no maternity support... I would have had nothing to feed myself and raise that child with. So, those were my choices: spend money that I don’t have—that I couldn’t get from anywhere—or do this. So I did it.

“I was scared during it, because it was a lot more painful than I expected it to be. It doesn’t last for very long, but it’s quite a strange experience. Kind of about halfway through I was like, ‘OK, this is too sore, I’m going to stop this now and go and have the surgical procedure,’ even though, you know, you can’t possibly stop it.”

Pro-life activists in Dublin. Photo via

If women are able to acquire the correct pills, misoprostol and mifepristone, it's likely that, while painful, the self-administering will be safe. But if things go wrong—if the website they ordered from sends them dodgy pills, for example—and they end up in the hospital, women are forced to find a way to convince medical staff that they suffered a natural miscarriage, or risk facing prosecution.

A few of the websites claiming to offer the abortion pills are bogus; sometimes the pills never arrive, sometimes they’re fake. Despite the fact they're pinned to lampposts, the website advertised on the stickers in Dublin seems to be the most trustworthy. It’s part of a dedicated campaign, working in 13 different languages to send abortion medication to women in countries all over the world where safe terminations are inaccessible. It also provides phoney prescriptions for Misoprostol, a consultation with a doctor, and a thorough amount of advice and access to research. It has a recommended donation of €90 ($117.00), but women who can't afford that can donate what they're able to.

“Self-administering is a lot safer than other methods women might use to make themselves miscarry," Mara told me. "I would credit that website with saving lives all over the world.”

“Women in Ireland, just like all other women in the world, need abortions,” said a spokesperson from the website. “The legal status has no impact on their need to access abortions. Those women are you and me, our sisters, friends, and mothers. Making abortion illegal doesn't reduce abortion rates at all, it only makes abortions unsafe—pushes [them] underground.”

“The Department of Health will tell you that the number of women seeking abortion is going down, but our numbers are going through the roof,” adds Mara Clarke, Director of the Abortion Support Network, an organization that uses donations to help Irish women get safe abortions. “We deal with the desperate women, because you would need to be desperate to call up a stranger and ask for money. We hear, ‘I sold the car,’ ‘I cut off the landline,’ ‘I returned the Christmas presents,’ just to try to get an abortion.”

An abortion rights rally in Dublin after the death of Savita Halappanavar. Photo via

The abortion pill stickers are popping up around the Irish capital at the same time as graphic anti-abortion posters and billboards. Abortions happen legally in Ireland in extremely limited circumstances. The fact that you may soon be able to get one if you can prove you're suicidal isn't likely to help very many—especially given that you would have to prove it to a panel of six doctors, which just seems cruel to the point of being dystopic.

“It’s shit,” said Mara Clarke about the proposed change to the abortion law. “It is a testament to how horrific the situation is for women that this legislation is being called a victory. We have mothers calling us, telling us that their 18-year-old daughter drank a bottle of floor cleaner after she was raped at her own birthday party. We hear about women taking whole packets of birth control and washing it down with vodka.

“A woman who is suicidal who can travel [to the UK for an abortion] isn’t going to face a panel of six people,” says Cathy from the Abortion Rights Campaign. “The only women who’ll have to do that are the really, really desperate women.”

The new legislation is restrictive, but pro-life groups want to keep it that way, claiming that if abortion law in Ireland becomes any more similar to Britain's approach, the “floodgates would open,” angering many who have ethical objections to the practice.

“We have the floodgates open!” says Amy. “We have 5,000 women traveling a year, and God knows how many self-administering. The floodgates are open, we just don’t talk about it. We are not a country free of abortion. Regardless of what you think about abortion as an ethical thing, women will always have abortions. Always. Always—regardless of how unsafe it is.”

Follow Ellen on Twitter: @ellenmcoyne

More on abortion in Ireland:

The Holy War On Irish Wombs

The Fight to Save Northern Ireland's Only Non-NHS Abortion Clinic

Did Savita Halappanavar Really Have to Die, Ireland?
 

The VICE Podcast Show is a weekly unedited discussion in which we go inside the minds of some of the most interesting, creative, and bizarre people we've come across. This week, host Reihan Salam talks with the ACLU's principal technologist, Chris Soghoian, about online security and his run-in with the FBI. A few years ago, federal agents busted through Chris's front door, ransacked his house, and confiscated his computers. Why would this happen to a mild-mannered techie guy with no history of criminal activity? Because Chris had made an ingenious website that showed users how to create and print their own counterfeit plane ticket, and how to circumvent the TSA's no-fly list. He did it as a demonstration to show the TSA how badly needed to revamp their security measures. The charges were eventually dropped, and now Chris has a cool job at the ACLU.

Previously on the podcast we spoke with the Nation's Jeremy Scahill about the film Dirty Wars and national security.

More about online security:

A Chat with Some Immoral Hackers Who Don't Care About Your Feelings

Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?

The Syrian Electronic Army Talks About Hacking the 'Guardian' and Their Obama Bomb Hoax

Flooding in Toronto. Photos by Justin Friesen.

On Monday July 8^th a record rainfall of over 100mm hit Toronto. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the average amount of rain expected for the entire month of July. Flooding hit the city hard as 300,000 residents went without power and many people ended up with basements that now double as swimming pools. All of this came on the heels of a significantly larger flood in Calgary that forced many residents to evacuate their homes and caused billions of dollars worth of damage.

In Toronto, expensive cars were lost, our mayor hid in his idling SUV to stay cool, and GO Train commuters needed to be rescued by a raft. While much of the city waited for their power to return, conversations about climate change, specifically if the storm apocalypse we were all experiencing was caused by it, was a popular topic of discussion. While climate scientists have been telling us that hurricanes are going to get stronger and more frequent, Canada's larger cities have been complacent at best—given that extreme weather has always been something that doesn't happen to Canada's big cities. But is that changing?

If climate change is the culprit of our recent influx of extreme weather, does that mean we should just accept that floods and large, extended blackouts are going to be part of our lives from now on? Hopefully not, right? Especially if you’re one of those people who are now learning that most insurance doesn't cover flood damage—unless you were “lucky” enough to have sewage water destroy your basement.

Instead of merely speculating on what terrifying fate Canada might be facing, I sat down with Franz Hartmann, the executive director of Toronto Environmental Alliance. He holds a PhD in environmental politics, so he knows what he’s talking about. We met to discuss climate change and its effects on our cities. Unfortunately, I ended up leaving the conversation even more terrified than before.

VICE: Climate change is being blamed for extreme weather—primarily hurricanes—and a lot of climate scientists have been warning that they'll become more common and more extreme. With the flooding in Calgary and the record rainfall in Toronto, would you say we are feeling the effects of climate change now?
Franz Hartmann:Yes. As weather people say, it's very difficult to say that a particular event is caused by climate change, but if you look at weather patterns over the last ten years what we see in Canada especially, and here in Toronto in particular, is a dramatic increase in severe weather events in comparison to previous years. What happened on Monday is unprecedented in Toronto's history—we got more rainfall in twenty-four hours than has ever been recorded. It is very difficult not to conclude that this is an example of climate change's effect, and for whatever reason they conclude this is not an effect of climate change we know for a fact that this is what it will look like in the future.

You have been quoted as saying that the crumbling Gardiner Expressway in Toronto will seem like a pothole in comparison to the full effects of climate change—what type of weather changes does climate change have in store for us?
There was a report that was presented to a committee of city of Toronto councillors back in January. It was developed by a consulting firm, and essentially they came up with a new model that specifically looked at what Toronto's weather and climate will be like by 2040.

They compared what the model predicted to what happened between 2000 and 2009, and the two things that really struck me when I read this report is one, severe rain events and downpours. Between 2000 and 2009 a severe event, on average, resulted in 66mm of rain. They predicted that by 2040 that a severe event would lead to 160mm of rain and Monday's event was 124mm. So, what we saw on Monday is three quarters as bad as it will on a regular basis by 2040. That's very frightening because our infrastructure was undermined by [Monday’s flooding].

The other key prediction was that the number of hot days would dramatically increase. For example, between 2000 and 2009 the average number of days where the temperature, with humidex, was 40 degrees Celsius or more was ten. They’re saying that the number will go up to forty days per year. So imagine almost a month and a half of a summer that will be spent with temperatures of 40 degrees or more.

And if our power is being knocked out by floods, we won't have air conditioning to relieve that.
Exactly. Imagine a major flood happening where we get 160mm of rain in twenty-four hours and then imagine that happens right after two to four days of really hot weather—and the electricity system just goes down. It will create utter chaos in the city, one of the only reasons the city survived the flood that happened on Monday is because we had power, we had power for pumps, we had power for emergency vehicles, and for communications and so forth. If you have a city-wide power outage, that all of a sudden changes everything. That's when you have to start being concerned about deaths.

What can cities do to better prepare for scenarios like this?
Well, the city of Toronto actually published a study back in 2008 called “Ahead of the Storm” that outlines the steps the city should take immediately, and over the long term, to get ready for climate change. That includes not just preparing or adapting the city for it, but also mitigation, things that can help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions today so that whenever climate change does hit us it's not as severe. This report was developed, some of the things were implemented, and staff were assigned to make things happen. Then in the last couple years, because of budget cutbacks, the number of staff that are working on this has been reduced. The amount of money that's been invested in helping us prepare for climate change has been reduced. So we're actually slowing down exactly when we should be speeding up on actions to prepare Toronto for climate change.

Mayor Ford said that he felt the city’s response to the emergency situation on Monday was satisfactory, and called for a complete review of how the city handles situations of this nature. What do you think the review will find?
I hope it finds that city staff and public sector workers did the best they could under very difficult circumstances. The cutbacks that have taken place in the last few years in Toronto—not just at the municipal, but provincial and federal levels as well—have severely strained the ability of public servants to do what they need to do. I think there's another piece of the puzzle, and I was a bit disappointed that the Mayor did not mention this in his press conference. It's not just about emergency services being able to respond to these events, it's about what all levels of government can do to help prepare the city, and not just Toronto but cities across the country, so that when these severe weather events happen (be it floods like in Calgary and Toronto or power outages because of high temperatures) that we have the infrastructure in place to withstand those bad storms.

That discussion is not taking place, in fact that sort of discussion has been wholly missing in the last couple of years at city hall. We need to prepare our cities ahead of time as well as make sure our emergency services are in shape. To put it differently, we do have to be able to respond. But we also have to start thinking about preventative measures.

Sure sounds like it. Thanks, Franz.
 

Follow Ian on Twitter: @iancborsuk

Previously:

I Woke Up and Calgary Was Flooded

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was founded five decades ago years ago as a Marxist people’s army fighting against capitalist imperialism and Colombia’s often-brutal government. And they’ve been fighting a protracted bloody war ever since. In recent years, FARC has devolved into a guerrilla force that threatens the very people it originally sought to protect. Why? Because in order to secure their dwindling territory and lucrative coca fields, FARC has buried thousands of land mines in civilian areas. Since 1990, there have been over 10,000 land mine victims in Colombia, the second-most in the world behind Afghanistan.

FARC and the government have been negotiating peace for the past six months, and FARC’s potential demobilization could yield a transformative moment in Colombian history. But the scars of 50 years of conflict, and 50 years of land mines, can’t be so easily erased. We traveled to Colombia to speak with land mine victims and to see first hand how around 7,000 FARC guerilla have held off over 300,000 Colombian soldiers for so many years.

Part two of Colombia's Hidden Killers will premiere tomorrow on VICE.com.

You should also watch Venezuelan Body Count, in which Ryan Duffy travels to Venezuela to investigate the country's crime epidemic.

Dear Guinness World Record Museum,

I recently visited your Los Angeles location. As was the case with the Hollywood Wax Museum last month, I was not impressed by what I saw. 

It's not just that your museum was generally shitty, boring, and broken-down. There was a much larger problem than that. 

As I walked around the museum, I saw several "world records" on display that I knew were incorrect. For instance, the above claims that Titanic holds the record for highest box office gross, and that Lance Armstrong has the most Tour De France titles. 

So when I got home, I did some fact-checking. The amount of false information you have on display is truly staggering. 

Now, I don't intend for this to be a definitive list of all of the errors in your museum. Obviously I didn't have time to check all of the facts. But here are some things you claim are true that are not:

- You claim Michael Jackson's Bad is the 2nd biggest selling album of all time. It is actually the 10th biggest selling. 

- You claim Hilary Duff is the highest paid child TV actor. It is actually Angus T. Jones.

- You claim the longest mustache ever was 10 feet 2 inches long. According to the Guinness Book of Records (your book) it is actually 14 feet long. 

- You claim that Dustin Hoffman holds the record for most Best Actor Oscars, with two. Daniel Day Lewis has three.

- You claim that Jurassic Park has the biggest marketing budget of any movie ever. Wrong. Avatar does. 

- You claim that George Burns is the oldest man to win an Academy Award, at 79. Christopher Plummer won one when he was 82.

- You claim the Turkish lira is the least valuable currency in the world. This hasn't been the case since 2005.

-  You claim that at age 81, George Cukor is the oldest person to have ever directed a film. Spanish director Manoel de Oliveira is 104 and still working. 

*DEEP BREATH*

-You claim the Statue of Liberty is the world's tallest statue. It is actually the world's 37th tallest. 

- You claim the Golden Gate Bridge is the longest bridge in the world. The longest is actually the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge in China. Golden Gate isn't even in the top 40. 

- You claim Hearst Castle is the most expensive home ever built. It is actually Antilia in Mumbai. 

-You claim the John Hancock building is the tallest apartment building in the world. The tallest is actually Princess Tower in Dubai. John Hancock isn't even in the top 40. 

- You claim Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery is the world's largest cemetery. It is actually Wadi al-Salam in Iraq.

- You claim the largest wine cellar in the world is at a winery called KWV in South Africa. It's actually at Milestii Mici in Moldova. 

- You claim the world's largest soccer stadium is Maracana Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It's actually North Korea's Rungnado May Day Stadium. 

- You claim the fastest jet ever is Lockheed's SR-71. It is actually NASA’s X-43.

- You claim the world's largest concrete dam is Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. It is actually the Three Gorges Dam in China. 

- You claim that the oldest man in the world is Shigechiyo Izumi. Shortly after his death, it was discovered that Shigechiyo had been lying about his age, and was actually only 105 at the time of his death, an age many people have reached.

- You claim the world record for juggling clubs is seven. It is nine.

- You claim the loudest snore ever recorded was 90 decibels. A British woman named Jenny Chapman recorded a snore of 111 decibels in 2009. 

- You claim the heaviest woman is Flora May Jackson. Carol Yager, who weighed 1,200 pounds at her heaviest, is the actual record holder. 

- You claim that Belgium and Luxembourg have the highest intake of calories per person per day. Shockingly, this record is actually held by the people of the USA. 

- You claim that something called Baz's Super Brew is the world's strongest beer, at 23 percent abv. This record was beaten when I was 15 and my friends and I would mix vodka with beer. Officially, it has also been beaten by a beer called Armageddon, which has 65 percent abv.

- You claim the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold went for $157,000. One has since been sold for $500,000.

- You claim the record for domino stacking is 1,002. Some dude in Belarus recently stacked 1,036.

Obviously, I might be wrong with some of my claims here. If that's the case, I apologize profusely. I'm only one dude with a laptop, whereas you are a MUSEUM DEVOTED TO WORLD RECORDS.  

Now, it's not like it would be expensive for you to change this stuff. Almost all of the information in your museum is presented on printouts stuck to walls. Like this sign—which is held together with fucking tape—that says Cats is about to become the longest running show in Broadway history.

This sign hasn't been accurate since 2006. How much could it possibly cost to get a new one of these printed? Admission to your museum is $16.99 for adults. There's no way you don't have the money. You've had 16 years to do it. Get your shit together, guys. 

A lot of your information is displayed on these super high-tech touchscreens, too. Which, presumably, would be free to update. So why is it still all completely wrong? The West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, hasn't been the "largest shopping centre" (sic) in the world since 2004. 

Some records I can understand why you wouldn't be in a hurry to change. This carpet, for instance, that has the long jump world record written on it. I'm sure custom-made carpets ain't cheap.

However, 29' 4½" has never been the world record for long jump. The actual world record is 29' 4¼"—a quarter-inch less. How are you guys so bad at this stuff? This thing must have been so expensive. You couldn't have double-checked your numbers before sending the order in?

It seems that you're aware of your problem, and some time in the early 2000s you started making up ridiculously niche records that have no chance of ever being beaten. Like "most latex feet made for a single film."

I'm no expert in trade laws, but I feel like this scam you're running must be illegal, right? Like, false advertising or something? You can't call yourself a "World Record Museum," then display things that aren't world records. It'd be like if someone bought tickets for Legoland, only to find out that it's actually a Holocaust museum upon arrival. 

Perhaps you could convert your museum into a living history exhibit? Like Colonial Williamsburg, but demonstrating what life was like inside a shitty, late-90s LA tourist trap? Or just burn the place to the ground and claim the insurance money? IDK.

Also, your water fountain was broken. 

Yours, 

Jamie Taete

@JLCT

Previously: An Open Letter to the Worst Wax Museum in America

I saw The Act of Killing in a small theater, with about 20 other people. For some, the documentary was just too intense. More than a handful of viewers had to walk out during the screening. For those who stayed, I could see how emotionally taxing it was on their faces as they filed out of the theater in complete silence. I don't think I've ever seen a film as exhausting and affecting as the The Act of Killing. It was like going to a funeral and wedding at the same time.

So, what is this documentary about? On paper, it's concerned with the genocide of Chinese people in Indonesia between 1965 and '66. But what elevates the film is the fact that director Joshua Oppenheimer chronicles these killings through reenactments gleefully performed by the men who actually committed the murders and rapes and tortures so many years ago. What unfolds is a film that is frightening, hilarious, and, at its best moments, otherworldly. I can honestly say it's the most haunting and emotive documentary I've ever seen. It's no wonder why Werner Herzog and Errol Morris signed on to be executive producers. To get more insight on this film, we spoke with them about the making of the film and how important it could be for the future of documentary cinema. Enjoy!

—Wilbert L. Cooper

By Maurizio Cattelan & Pierpaolo Ferrari
Art Director: Micol Talso

Styled by Sarah Grittini; Hair and Makeup: Lorenzo Zavatta; Producer: Matteo Ferrari
Special thanks to Dakis Joannou and Enrico Cerchione

A selection of images from the forthcoming issue of Toilet Paper, Maurizio and Pierpaolo’s insane biannual publication, which they tell us will be out in the States “around September.” If what you’ve seen here isn’t enough to wipe the shit from your mind’s asshole, you should head to Paris, where enlarged images from Toilet Paper are now plastered to the windows of the Palais de Tokyo’s façade.

Click through to the next page for more pieces of Toilet Paper.

More from Maurizio Cattelan & Pierpaolo Ferrar: A Few Pieces of Toilet Paper

More photo stuff from VICE:  

Interfearance

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Exogenesis

Cry-Baby #1: Adventure Oasis Water Park

(screencap via KSHB/story via Reddit)

The incident: A woman went to a water park in a bikini. 

The appropriate response: Nothing/surreptitiously staring if you find the person attractive.

The actual response: The woman was ejected from the park.

Last Tuesday, Madelyn Sheaffer (pictured above, in her bikini) was at the Adventure Oasis Water Park in Independence, Missouri with a group of five other people.

Madelyn got into the pool with her niece and nephew. She was approached by two employees who told her she would need to put shorts on, as her bikini bottoms were too small. 

Madelyn, understandably perplexed, asked if she could speak to a supervisor. 

In the news report about about this, you never fully see Madelyn's bikini bottoms. But judging by what you can see in the above screencap, they seem to be fairly standard. I guess there's a chance they're crotchless, or have a photo of genitalia screenprinted on them or something. But I doubt that's the case. 

Madelyn was taken to an office to speak to a supervisor, who also told her that she'd need to cover up, or would be ejected from the pool. 

Cry-Baby #2: An unnamed beach supervisor

via Reddit

The incident: A guy saw two naked toddlers on the beach.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: He called the cops. 

Last week, writer Jeff Edelstein was at the beach in Spring Lake, New Jersey with his wife and two children.

As they were getting ready to go home, Jeff took off his children's bathing suits and hosed them down to get the sand off. His children are aged two and four. 

While he was doing this, he was approached by a beach supervisor who told him, "You can't do that here. Spring Lake is not that kind of place."

Jeff ignored him, and carried on hosing down his kids. A few moments later, he heard the man say, "I've got two naked people on the boardwalk" into his phone. 

Moments later, a cop showed up. According to Jeff, the beach supervisor pointed in his direction and shouted, "that's them!"

To his credit, once the cop discovered it was two toddlers who were nude, he didn't taze or arrest anyone (which, once again, is unusual for this column) and merely let Jeff and his wife off with a verbal warning. 

Which one of these dress code enforcers is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this little poll right here:

Previously: Some guy who (allegedly) tried to bite off another guy's penis Vs. will.i.am

Winner: will.i.am!!!

@JLCT

There has been no butter for two weeks. A taxi driver thought there might be butter in the supermarket in Miramar. I think so too: I once saw a man in that market buy 20 cases of Coca-Cola in loose 12-ounce bottles. Otherwise there is no butter to be found anywhere in Havana. I am not going to Miramar just to find butter. I am content to believe I could, whereas I´d be most unhappy if I went and discovered they didn´t have any.

Last week there were no tomatoes. We looked for them everywhere, to make spaghetti sauce. Just when we resigned ourselves to no tomatoes ever again, the markets were suddenly full of them. Things like this happen all the time. Yesterday our building elevator, broken since the rains in May, was repaired. We rushed out for the joy of returning later and making out with our dates in the elevator. Or with each other, if we didn´t find dates.

There is now a shortage of pharmaceuticals. That is the embargo. I have an infection. First the national pharmacies ran out of Diproma for pain. Then Cipro disappeared. In the full-price international pharmacy in Miramar a tall, 40ish Jewish American princess held up the line for 40 minutes with the kind of obnoxious, trivial complaint visiting Cuban Americans love to inflict on people working here in stores, smugly aware that they are inconveniencing many of their former countrymen by exploiting the bureaucratic fastidiousness and imperturbable slow pace of the people serving them. The proud little smile this witch offered the 12 people waiting behind her reminded me for all the world of my erstwhile editor at Perseus Books, a malignant twat named Lara Heimert, who was full of absurdly unmerited self-confidence and had the brains of a luncheon menu. I gave the woman in the pharmacy the finger, which happened to be the infected one. I´ve just given Lara Heimert the same finger, so I suppose this infection is good for something.

The orthopedist at the university hospital wanted me to take Cipro for five days before he lanced the blistered fingertip, which everyone on the Malecon is curious about now, as it began as a tiny white discoloration and quickly blossomed into a major problem. Also, since it was soaked in iodine, the bandage looks like a little orange microphone for Karaoke Barbie. But after two days I couldn´t stand it. We went to see Ricardo´s mother´s cousin who works in a hospital lab across the road from Carlos III shopping center. She walked us through a maze of hospital corridors and waiting areas, some of them open to the sky, to a doctor who told her to poke it open with a sterile needle and squeeze the pus out, which Ricardo´s mother´s cousin proceeded to do, while a lab worker on maternity leave came by to show off her new baby. I wanted to scream from pain but didn´t. I looked at the baby and saw a future of scrapes and bruises. Life is short and full of pain and always beautiful, besides.

My Santeria doctor thinks he can cure anything. He is useless for anything besides back problems, where he does possess a certain genius. Even then, he insists on explaining “the Eastern philosophy” he studies, at such tedious length that what are basically chiropractic sessions are 10 percent treatment and 90 percent explanation of how the blood flows around the brain when the chakras or whatever are in tune with the moon. I get a brand new pain from nodding like a moron for 40 minutes out of 60. All the same, I call him to give me acupressure with a lit taper, which distracts me from my finger.

At the original hospital a different orthopedist, young and handsome, studies the result of my treatment at the second hospital. He decides to scalpel away the blister, scrape out the infection, and douse the wound with iodine. First he injects a local that numbs my other fingers and leaves the afflicted one with full sensation. So that little operation was a trip. Now the finger is almost normal but I can´t get it wet. The surgical glove they gave me to wear in the shower doesn´t fit over the bandage. We wanted to go to Camaguey and swim in the coral reef. Now we can´t do it until August, if I come back in August. You must never plan, is the lesson here. Last year all the raving beauties on the Malecon were from Isla de la Juventad, but this month they are all from Camaguey. We thought it would be nice to meet some who hadn´t moved to Havana and become complete whores yet. It has to wait.

Some notes on The Act of Killing: I didn´t bring the press book. But IFC picked it up on the festival circuit, so it should be playing at IFC Center right now, or soon, or maybe it just did. Although I´ve come to feel that film reviewing is as idiotic as art reviewing—most people no longer watch movies in theaters, so reviewing them doesn´t even count as a consumer service—I will risk saying this is the only recent movie besides Melancholia and Amour that I made a point to see in an actual theater, though not for exactly the same reasons. I had heard that The Act of Killing shows something new and urgent about the banality of evil in our time, and that turned out not to be an exaggeration. So it is better to see it sooner than later. Why put off having any residual illusions shattered? While this documentary is well shot, it is nothing special cinematically—as a mental experience, however, it is priceless.

Parenthetically, a recent spate of “smart for the stupid” magazine prose efforts have attacked Hannah Arendt´s Eichmann in Jerusalem in connection with Margarethe von Trotta´s current biography film starring Barbara Sukowa as Arendt. These articles have been written by people who cannot distinguish an idea from an opinion, and believe their opinions qualify as ideas; they also appear to think that by “banality” Hannah Arendt meant “boring.” Eichmann´s banality was fascinating, as Arendt made entirely clear, for his extreme typicality, Eichmann being a standard-issue product of a highly organized bureaucratic society that happened also to be devoted to evil ends, the means to which were technically indistinguishable from the working apparatus of any other “advanced” society. For example, though this fact emerged long after Arendt´s report, the numbers tattooed on Jews in the death camps corresponded to numbers on computer punch-cards provided to the Reich by the German branch of IBM, used the way such cards would´ve been used to compile data of any sort in another country. But these particular cards were used to track down every Jew in Europe and their numbers were replicated on the skin when an individual Jew had been processed for extermination.

That Eichmann imagined himself an intellectual, even a scholar of Judaism, exactly reflects “the absence of thought” which Arendt speculated, in The Life of the Mind, enables people to do evil. This hypothesis has also lately been attacked, as if it had been put forward as a certainty. Arendt´s entire report on the Eichmann trial has in fact been disparaged by what I suppose are called cinema pundits writing on the von Trotta film, on the grounds that Arendt only attended a few days of the trial and otherwise relied on transcripts as her source material. I can´t think of any criticism more unconsciously reflective of the twisted spirit of the day, in which the world of appearances is taken for reality, when all philosophy since Plato proceeds from the opposite understanding. It is not entirely beside the point what Eichmann looked and sounded like, but Arendt experienced this in the courtroom and in fact his eccentricities as well as his ordinariness were part of the banality she perceived, and what he actually said is far more telling than what his hair looked like when he said it. What´s fetishized by the new hue and cry about Eichmann in Jerusalem is the idea that anyone sensitive to their own vivid impressions, whether equipped with Arendt´s formidable powers of reasoning and deduction or two hairs short of a pinhead, can arrive at the truth about anything by recording what it feels like to them. This was the masturbatory raison d´etre of 60s New Journalism, and it has never entirely gone away. It´s obvious to me, anyway, that Arendt´s latest slew of detractors are the least formidable she has ever had, incapable of separating her ideas from what they wrongly presume about her personality and character because of the fact that she had an affair with Martin Heidegger. This dovetails neatly with the undying, hysterical resentment over Arendt´s observations about the Jewish Councils´role in the death camp deportations, and with the mentality of right-wing Zionism in general.  

As Arendt´s cinephile critics have never read Heidegger, they also assume that everything he wrote is darkly and inextricably connected to his disgraceful collusion with the Nazis at the beginning of the Third Reich. If things were that simple, folks in Tuscarora might live in Utopia, but the rest of us would have no art, no literature, and no nuanced inner lives, since a great deal of life´s interest derives from its unceasing plethora of contradictions.

I promise you will learn absolutely nothing important or even accurate about Hannah Arendt´s thought by reading reviews of the von Trotta film, though the most conspicuous ones to date may incline you towards my point of view, i.e., that most film reviewers deserve to be film reviewers because anything more ambitious than sticking a thumb in the air is beyond their competence.

This brings us to The Act of Killing and why it´s worth seeing: metaphorically speaking, it´s a film about an Eichmann trial that never happened, and how an Eichmann might portray himself if things had turned out differently, and there had been a Thousand Year Reich instead of a 12-year Gotterdammerung. It doesn´t matter at all that this film is a disjointed mess; its disjointedness is that of a harrowing dream with interchangeably horrific parts, rather than the spawn of a delusional script conference. Its philosophical focus is steady, even if its narrative threads are full of disorienting tangles.

It showcases three unlikely-looking, middle-aged-going-on-elderly mass murderers in Northern Indonesia who played exuberant, hands-on parts in the genocide that followed the overthrow of Abdul Sukharno in 1965 (the coup depicted in the pre-Jew-baiting-Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt vehicle, The Year of Living Dangerously), in which over a million supposed communists and ethnic Chinese were slaughtered in an amok-seeming, meticulously orchestrated frenzy, in part by General Suharto´s army but also by local gangsters acting on Suharto´s behalf, using lists of “subversives” and their locations provided by the CIA.

The Suharto coup was very much an American business-sponsored atrocity—vintage Kissinger & Co.—and as far as so-called free-market capitalism is concerned, it was enough of a success story that none of the people responsible for it have ever been held accountable. In fact, one of the major crimes against humanity in the 20^th century is still celebrated in Indonesia as a patriotic triumph. The Act of Killing´s central triad, who were movie ticket scalpers and besotted fans of American cinema before becoming mass murderers (partly motivated, according to them, by anger over a Marxist-imposed quota on Hollywood films), needed little encouragement from this movie´s directors to reenact their murders on film, sometimes casting themselves as their own victims, restaging episodes of savage mayhem in the styles of their favorite film genres—the cowboy Western, the gangster flick, and, yes, the Technicolor musical.

The bizarre result is a brilliant study in impunity with implications that are hardly local. The American public´s serene acceptance of a war against everybody, arbitrary violations of international law, torture, robot aircraft bombings in neutral countries, illegal detention of suspects, and, particularly, the flatulent, exculpatory rhetoric of Obama to soften its criminality into something gooily well-intentioned and accidental, is only a touch less obviously grotesque, thanks to America´s superior brainwashing, than the spectacle of Indonesian talk show hostesses gushing admiration for this film´s protagonists and the sadistic methods they invented to dispatch “the enemy.” It´s when a fat cross-dressing member of the gang wistfully recalls telling his 12-year-old rape victim, whom he strangled afterwards, “This is going to be hell for you, but heaven for me” that I realized The Act of Killing may be too much for the very people who most need to see it—and that it really needs Steven Spielberg´s imprimatur (fat chance) instead of executive producers Erroll Morris´s and Werner Herzog´s, which will likely consign it to the realm of cult oddities.

TRAVEL

BLOOD SACRIFICE IN SUMBA

WHERE SHAMANS AND WARRIORS WORSHIP HOLY SEA WORMS

By Milene Larsson, Photos by James Morgan

A Pasola warrior about to throw his spear at a fighter from a rival clan. The spears may be blunt these days, but they do occasionally kill fighters and spectators.

Sumba is an island the size of Jamaica in the Indonesian archipelago that has been cut off from the rest of the world for so long that its ancient animistic traditions survive to this day. It is the setting for ritual battles called Pasola which take place every year in February and March. The Pasola is a fight between rival clans who hurl spears at each other on horseback in order to “fertilise” the soil with spilled human blood.

To get to Sumba from Bali, we hopped on a small propeller plane for a one-hour flight. Most of the passengers were Sumbanese commuters, but there were also brawny leathery surfers on the hunt for uncrowded waves, and Western and Indonesian businessmen, probably land speculators. Land on Sumba is in demand because the island, rich in culture and blessed with perfect beaches, is tipped to become a hot tourist destination.

As we descended over rice paddies lined with palm trees and rolling hills dotted with wild horses, we passed clusters of thatched bamboo huts with muddy courtyards where pigs, chickens and dogs roamed. In contrast, the modern, half-built Tambolaka airport feels out of place. For now, Sumba is still far too wild to attract casual holidaymakers. The clans on the island still practise head- hunting, sorcery and ritual blood sacrifice according to their arcane Marapu religion, and the official Indonesian law often gives way to adat – local clan law and traditions.

We had come to film the lead-up to the Pasola battle in Wanukaka, a village in West Sumba where members of the Praibakul clan, from teenage boys to elderly men, had been prepping their spears and horses for this year’s fight against the neighbouring Waihura clan. The battle was set to take place a couple of days later, although that could change depending on how the ratus – the local shamans – would read the moon.

Before driving into Wanukaka, we stopped by some ramshackle roadside stalls to stock up on gifts of psychoactive betel nuts called pinang and Gudang Garam clove cigarettes for the ratus and Pasola warriors. We had arranged to stay with Rudy, a descendant of Wanukaka’s royal Mamodo family. His house on the outskirts of the village was surrounded by palm forest hills and rice fields where farmers pushed heavy wooden ploughs behind their buffalo; it looked like a prettier version of the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. Rudy hadn’t arrived yet, so his sister, Monica, served us sugary tea on their front porch which was lined with pig jaws. “Animal jaws and skulls are signs
of richness. It shows the family have many animals and can afford to eat meat,” she explained.

Pajura ratu Bapak Kameme Bili having a cigarette before this year’s boxing match, which takes place before the Pasola.

On the side porch, Rudy’s cousin Dedi, a fierce young Pasola warrior, was polishing his spears, a cigarette dangling from his lips. We asked him about his preparations. “We don’t prepare. We just go there and fight because we have to, for the harvest,” he said. “If you get hit by a spear and you start bleeding, it means the harvest will be good.” Dedi has fought in the Pasola since he was 14, and showed us the scars all over his body. “The pain when the spear hits you is incredible, especially if you get hit in the head.” He offered to take us to a bare-knuckle boxing match that night called the Pajura which traditionally takes place before the Pasola. We gladly accepted, before he warned us that spectators often get punched, and that some boxers wrap rocks, horns or broken glass around their fists. A senior family member added that until recently the Pasola had been much bloodier. “It was only 40 years ago that the government forbade the use of metal-tipped spears and parangs [long-bladed machete-style knives, carried by every Sumbanese man] during the Pasola. Now fighters use blunt spears,” he said.

After a dinner of fried Pot Noodles and dog meat, Dedi and his friends, cheery having drunk the crate of beer we’d given them, decided it was time to go to the Pajura in Tetena. Riding on the back of a drunk Pasola warrior’s motorbike, through jungle roads and without a helmet, to go to a bare-knuckle moonlight boxing match might sound alarming, but the ride under the stars was pretty awesome. We must have driven for 45 minutes, past endless palm trees and surrounded by bats, when the road came to an abrupt end by a field of shoulder-height vegetation. Dedi and his friends kept driving at full speed through the high grass until we reached a small path that led to what must have been hundreds of steps leading down to a beach. We were early. A few people were sitting on the sand, profusely smoking Gudang Garams to repel the swarming mosquitoes.

Dedi led us to a tent where some men had gathered around a ratu who was sitting cross-legged and wrapped in impressive ikat, preparing his betel nuts in a wooden mortar. He was the Pajura ratu – for one night only, the world’s coolest-looking boxing referee. He explained the rules of the fight via a long-winded legend in a local dialect. The tale involved a man who was lost at sea whose wife had married another man, which resulted in clan battles and ended with the exchange of holy nyale, a sea worm that appears once a year, determining the day of the Pasola. Even so, we were none the wiser about any technicalities. By now, hundreds, if not thousands, of people had gathered on the beach, and more were descending the crowded steps.

A ratu trying to catch holy nyale sea worms that only come to shore once a year, heralding the day of the Pasola. The nyale’s colour is believed to predict the quality of the forthcoming harvest.

Suddenly, the entire crowd formed an impromptu circle around a fight that had kicked off. Then random fights broke out all over the place. The only graspable rule was that if a guy from the Praibakul clan spotted someone from the Waihura clan, they would fight. Dedi reassured us that the ratu had “tree bark” to treat injuries.

When our cameraman was punched in the stomach, and shit- faced local politicians started picking fights with people, hands on their parangs, we felt it was time to move, and spent a good two hours queueing to climb the narrow steps.

Rudy works as a law adviser for the Sumba Foundation, a nonprofit charity that has established malaria clinics and schools on the island and supplies clean water to villages. The morning after the fight, one of his colleagues, a Danish doctor called Claus Bogh, who has spent the best part of a decade on the island, had tea with us on the porch.

“In Sumba, blood represents everything from food to war and life,” he said. “At the Pasola, if there’s not blood on the ground, the ratus will not stop the game. They have to make sure that next year’s rice harvest will be good. For that, there has to be blood.”

He told us to be careful. “A spectator was killed a few years ago. A spear hit him right in the eye and he died within ten minutes.” He warned us that every Pasola ends in mayhem, usually with a lot of stone throwing. He also confirmed the rumours we’d heard about headhunting clans.

Sumba’s most famous ratu, Dangu Duka, chewing betel nuts before the Pasola.

“A couple of years ago, a clan kidnapped a girl because she refused to marry one of their men. When her clan found out, they came for her and chopped off the heads of her kidnappers and sent them to the kidnappers’ clan. In 1982, I think, there was a major falling out between two clans and 200 people were killed, all of them had their heads chopped off.”

We later found out that the day before we left the island, seven people had been decapitated in a land brawl a few kilometres from where we had stayed.

After we’d spoken to Claus, Rudy took us to meet Sumba’s most famous ratu, Dangu Duka, half of whose face has mysteri- ously turned black. “The gods from the heavens and the gods from the underworld tell us when the Pasola needs to take place by sending the nyale. We pray at sunrise and sunset to the gods, and measure the moon cycles to predict when the nyale will come,” the ratu explained. As well as setting the date of the Pasola, the nyale predict the quality of the harvest, depending on their colour and shape. “The soil needs blood,” he said. “If someone is killed in the Pasola, it’s treated as a local issue, it has nothing to do with Indonesian law.”

All the while, he was crushing his pitangs and chewing them with chalk powder and a green plant that he kept in a small straw bag. We tried some. The pitangs tasted like coffee beans soaked in chlorine. Following his example, we spat out the copious amounts of red saliva that the nut produced, and enjoyed a feeling of relaxed euphoria.

In the evening, we made our way to the holy village of Ububewi, where three ratus were about to begin the Pasola ritual. Dedi and his friends gave us a ride but stopped in the middle of a jungle dust road, saying we had to walk the rest because noisy motorbikes would disturb the sacred ceremony. When we reached the top of the hill, the ratus were chilling out on a porch chewing pitangs. We had just missed the first ritual, a sacrifice of chickens to read the future of the Pasola in their entrails. As the moonlight grew stronger, and once the ratus were done wrapping themselves in intricately patterned ikat, amulets and feathers, they picked up baskets of pitangs and flasks of coconut oil, and installed themselves on the ancient stone mega-lith platform overlooking the jungle and moonlit valley. They sang shamanic hymns, calling the nyale by humming at the moon. Without ceasing their incantations, they walked down the hill to the beach where the sea worms would hopefully make an appearance.

A spear split this Pasola fighter’s nose. The guy who threw it rode a victory lap, cheered on by the crowd. The Sumbanese depend on the rice harvest and believe blood must be spilt on the soil to fertilise it.

We followed them, trying hard to avoid the deep cracks that were hardly visible in the dark. As we proceeded, more villagers joined us. We finally reached the beach in the early hours of the morning, watching the sunrise while the ratus walked into the sea to catch the nyale they’d been calling for since midnight. After 20 minutes, they strolled back to the beach with their catch. Hundreds of people swarmed to hear the predictions for the coming harvest. This year’s sea worms were green and brown. Green meant that the rice field will be infested with moss, and brown warned of problems with insects. Not great news. At about 7AM, Pasola fighters came riding in on their decorated horses. When the blaz- ing sun was up, the first Pasola began. More and more people arrived, eagerly pressing themselves into the crowds to get closer to the flying spears. After about an hour and a half, the Pasola warriors, now warmed up, rode off to the main Pasola field on the other side of the village.

Thousands of people had gathered, all trying to get to the front. Some climbed trees for a better view. The fighters, tire- lessly hurling spears at each other, seemed to take little notice of the heat and appeared completely fearless. They believe that dying in the Pasola is honourable, and that you return to your ancestors. Whenever someone was hit, the warrior who’d thrown the spear threw his hands up in the air victoriously, while his clan peers cheered.

Several hours later, our tans were approaching the stage of second-degree burns. By 3PM, feeling like the battle would never end, our cameraman, desperate for shade, stole a family’s flowery umbrella to take a nap under it. Just as he’d settled into a comfy position, members of one clan, frustrated with the lack of blood spilled in the Pasola, started throwing stones at the fighters and the crowd. At that, the armed Indonesian police, who until then had kept a low profile, started firing their machine guns in the air, inducing panic and scattering the crowd, including the warriors on horseback.

As Claus had promised, the Pasola ended in chaos. Dedi, who had fought impressively for a long time, rode a final vic- tory lap, his eyes gleaming with pride. He then rode up the hill to his house, where we joined him and his family for the Pasola feast. As we snoozed on Dedi’s porch, between being served rice, dog stew, nyale goreng and pitangs, it dawned on me that rather than the bloodthirst I had initially expected, the Pasola has more to do with restoring peace, venting ag- gression and resolving disputes between the clans. Once you overcome the fear of being trampled or speared, the chaos is really liberating.

Do you like travelling? What a coincidence, we do too:

Machetes and Motorbikes at Mali's Sangue-Mo Fishing Festival

Meet the Malaysian Neo-Nazis Fighting for a Pure Malay Race

Yemen's Deposed President Has Built a Museum Dedicated to Himself

When Colombians get together, they roll deep. So when we went to Bogotá to sample former Mario Batali-pupil Daniel Castaño's classical Italian fare at his restaurant, Emilia Romagna, we brought a big-ass bus to cart around the crew. And true to form, we filled the bus with a rowdy bunch of sous chefs, friends, and other restaurateurs.

After sampling Bogota’s eclectic range of culinary styles—including Memphis barbecue, Spanish tapas, and of course, Colombian grilled meats—Daniel and his buddies were pouring an anise-flavored sugar cane liquor called aguardiente (a national specialty) down each other’s throats on our way back to his Brooklyn-inspired restaurant, Gordo, where he whipped up some late-night grub.

A screenshot of Boundless Informant: the NSA's tool to organize and analyze their global surveillance data. via WikiCommons.

I expected Canada to be upset and disturbed by the revelations made by history’s most famous whistleblowing fugitive, Edward Snowden. And, of course, many Canadians are. However, when it comes to the conversation that’s being held on the world stage, between our government and America’s, things seem pretty chill.

I know they’re supposed to be our big brother and all, but when the American ambassador to Canada says the NSA isn’t spying on Canadians—why should we believe him? We know that PRISM collects communications between Americans and non-Americans when their system classifies a conversation as suspicious. So if I email a guy in Chicago, about taking “a Southwest flight to San Diego, where Iran into one of the Chemical Brothers” [this NSA-baiting phrase was generated by MOTHERBOARD’s Hello NSA site] as a Canadian, shouldn’t I have cause to be concerned?

A big part of why Canada doesn’t want to take a swing at Obama’s government—which has invoked the espionage act more times than all of the other presidents combined, largely to prosecute whistleblowers—is that Canada is in the mass surveillance game too. Not only are we in the game, we’re playing it in bed beside the NSA, the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, and whoever else wants to join in on the action.

The United States, along with Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and England have formed a global surveillance super-group called the “Five Eyes,” which you may already be familiar with if you follow spy game politics. It’s not clear if Canada fancies itself as a Baby Spice or a Scary Spice when the Five Eyes go out and do the group thing for Halloween, but what is obvious is that this troupe has agreed to share the information they’ve harvested from their own spying machines with each other—to create a global surveillance net. Five Eyes began as an intelligence partnership between the United States and England in 1948, a bond that had a much less ominous name: the “UKUSA” agreement.

According to Snowden’s documents, the UK is taking the “lead role” within the Five Eyes posse, as they have the “biggest internet access” for spying. One of Snowden’s files even included a quote from Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Chief of the NSA, who wrote: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? … Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.” If you’re not up on your British surveillance institutions Menwith is an “eavesdropping site” located in Northern England.

The Government Communications Headquarters in Gloucestershire, England. The UK's answer to the NSA. via WikiCommons.

As an aside, I find the fun times language of “summer project,” to indicate a very comfortable level at which these organizations cooperate with each other. Developing an all-seeing eye over every communication that transpires in the world seems to be a casual gig that they chip away at summer by summer. Meanwhile, Snowden is stuck in Russia waiting to be granted asylum in Venezuela…

But let’s not get distracted by the plight of Edward Snowden—no matter how insane, troubling, and Hollywood-esque it may be. What he did was incredible, his fate is still uncertain, but he didn’t reveal the truth about the American government’s surveillance industry simply so that we could speculate on whether or not he will escape punishment.

So, what is Canada’s role in the Five Eyes? Thus far, the Canadian government has continually “brushed off questions” about its own spying capabilities. We know that our Defence Minister (no not the old, cool one who believes in aliens) cosigned a surveillance program in 2011 that would monitor global internet and phone traffic—but of course, he says, it doesn’t target Canadians.

The Guardian has also revealed that Canada’s own spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSEC), may very well have helped England spy on Londoners during the G20 protests and riots. Could this have been a “thanks bro” for any surveillance that the other Four Eyes helped Canada with during Toronto’s G20 protests? Are the Five Eyes helping out the Canadian government look into the Montreal protesters right now? What about Idle No More? Or the activists who are against Enbridge’s Line 9? One would imagine that our government isn’t just helping out England because we care about the commonwealth.

Beyond Canada’s possible efforts to squash social dissent through surveillance, both domestically and to assist our global partners, Canadians must be concerned about whether or not they are personally being spied on. The typical defense of surveillance programs like PRISM is that they are developed to target the bad guys; but by design, they gather such vast amounts of data (the Brits’ own agency, GCHQ, say they take in 600 million “telephone events” a day) that most of their information is simply not going to help foil a big terrorist attack. All of that excess data is categorized as incidental or inadvertent interceptions.

The CSEC, Canada’s surveillance agency, says that such interceptions are destroyed upon discovery. But according to “top secret documents” seen by The Guardian, America’s Foreign Intelligence Security Court (a court that aims to operate entirely in secrecy) has authorized the NSA to “make use of information ‘inadvertently’ collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.” So has the CESC also been given some kind of secret power to use the inadvertent interceptions they get without really telling anyone they’re using it? If the Five Eyes also trade secrets with each other on how to get around judicial loopholes, then that would certainly be a possibility.

As Conor Friedersorf posited for The Atlantic, “intelligence agencies have an incentive to make themselves complicit in foreign governments spying on their own citizens.” That’s because they can help each other get around their own country’s pesky surveillance laws. If the information is coming from another country, they can help clean it up and trade it with each other to make it legally useful. While the NSA denies this as a possibility stating “Any allegation that NSA relies on its foreign partners to circumvent U.S. law is absolutely false," it’s kinda hard to believe anything they say at this point.

Canadians are supposed to be reassured by the American ambassador saying that America isn’t spying on Canadians, but we know that Canada was helping England spy on its own people, and America’s own Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress when he said the NSA was not spying on Americans. It seems that these questionable statements, or outright lies, are designed to protect the greater good: The Five Eyes. Given that Microsoft has now been outed for cooperating with the NSA, it’s clear there is a governmental and corporate alliance devoted to keeping this surveillance machine intact.

So if the Canadian government isn’t going to get mad for you, or discuss their own surveillance programs, then perhaps they are creating the ideal situation for a Canadian whistleblower to emerge. Given the omniscience of this surveillance network, however, the Five Eyes have certainly created an anti-resistance, anti-dissent climate that likely will scare activists and leakers from speaking out. The curtain has been pulled back on the existence of a massive spy machine, but unless someone is able to pull its power cord, it seems like this is the world we’re stuck with.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire
 

Previously:

Canadians Should Be Concerned About the NSA and PRISM

A Photoshop mock-up of what an indigo child might look like. Images via and via

Sankar led me to a small stool that faced a black box about the size of a shoebox. The box was fitted with a tiny lens that poked out toward my face and a bundle of wires that coiled back into his computer. "You don't have to be so nervous," he assured me. Sticking out of another side of the black box was a wire leading to a hand-shaped pad covered in sensors. Sankar gave me an instruction: "When I say, put your hand on the pad."

I'd come to Sankar's studio to have my aura photographed. Which isn't something I'd usually do, but I was looking into the phenomenon of "indigo children"—kids supposedly born into the next stage of human consciousness, possessing unusual and occasionally supernatural abilities. I'd heard that, when photographed by aura specialists such as Sankar, the full-body indigo halo that surrounds these kids—invisible, of course, to the naked eye—makes itself known. So naturally I wanted to see whether I was one of the blessed souls inhabiting this enlightened plane of being.

Photo taken and aura registered, Sankar—a friendly man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a studio full of crystals—beckoned me over to his computer to show me the result: a low-quality photograph of my face surrounded by a red cloud that looked like it had been inserted with the spray can tool on Microsoft Paint.       

The author's aura photograph.

"You're a very active person, aren't you?" he asked. I guess I'm active—I mean, I work a lot more than I sleep and I always fall asleep on the sofa, so I'm never technically in bed... “A person’s aura is divided into different sections," Sankar continued. "Each part gives us a reading of a different part of that person’s life. Your aura is intense red.”

“All of it?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Is that normal?”

“There isn’t a normal.”

After chatting to Sankar about his trade for a little while, I brought up the reason I was there and asked him if he knew much about indigo children. He told me that he'd heard a bit about them within the spiritual community and had met indigo adults before, but never an indigo child. Before I left, he said something that seemed kind of odd, like I'd fallen into a Stephen King script that never made it past development: "This is the time the indigo children are being born, isn’t it?”

I started off referring to indigo children as a "movement," but was quickly chastised by the indigos I met ("It's not a movement; a movement is something you can join, it's not like we're spreading an ideology."). So let's call it a phenomenon—like the X-Men if they never went to stay at that big school with the bald guy.

The indigo children phenomenon started some time in the 70s—the term coined by self-proclaimed psychic and synaesthete Nancy Ann Tappe, who published a book about the concept called Understanding Your Life Through Color after noticing, through the mid-60s, that a large amount of children were being born with "indigo" auras.

Nancy Ann Tappe. Image via

However, as with most spiritual phenomena, there are no concise classifications of what that indigo aura really means, no accepted dogma you can research or prophets you can look to. People just interpret it how they like. But most people seem to interpret it as the idea that indigo children represent the next stage in human evolution and possess traits from the mundane—that they're more creative and empathetic than their peers—to the sublime: that they can read minds.

There are, however, a few generally agreed characteristics of indigo children, outlined on a reliable-sounding website called Spiritual Growth Prophecies: "They are born feeling and knowing they are special and should be revered;" "These children are confident and have a higher sense of self-worth;" "An indigo knows they belong here as they are and expect you to realize it as well;" and "The fulfillment of their personal needs is important to them, and they will let you know."    

To me, they just sound like the sort of selfish and self-entitled dickhead children you move cars to get away from on the subway, but reading through further characteristics I suppose that arrogance is justified: "Creative, with an artistic flair for music, jewelery making, poetry, etc;" "Intuitive or psychic, possibly with a history of seeing angels or deceased people;" "Possess a deep desire to help the world in a big way" and "Looks for real, deep, and lasting friendships."    

The opposing school of thought, maintained by academics like David Cohen and Robert Todd Carroll, is that parents label their children as indigo instead of seeking proper diagnosis for the out-of-the-ordinary behavior they're displaying. In Carroll's book, The Skeptic's Dictionary, he notes that, "One thesis of The Indigo Children [a guidebook for parents who believe their children to be indigo] seems to be that many children diagnosed as having ADD or ADHD represent 'a new kind of evolution of humanity'," adding, "One can understand why many parents would not want their child to be labeled as ADD or ADHD. The label implies imperfection."

So instead of addressing the fact that their kids have ADD or ADHD, parents can call them "indigo children" and tell all their friends at the nursery that their child is "gifted" rather than suffering from a disorder. Dr. Ovais Badat, an ADHD specialist, told me, "If a child with many of the symptoms of ADHD is not treated in childhood, it could—as we know from research—lead to significant problems academically, socially, and emotionally. In adulthood, we see untreated children become disadvantaged, with higher rates of mental illness, accidents, lost jobs, and crime.”

A clip from the movie Indigo, a film about indigo children.

So while the child might be addressed as "gifted," the adverse effects of not properly addressing the disorder that's giving them that gift could be highly detrimental in later life.

While I began looking into indigo children, after trawling through all the relevant forums, I quickly noticed that any age is welcome in the indigo realm. The label isn't just for spiritual stage moms who are keen to lumber their kids with supernatural powers, but an explanation for any adult who's ever felt slightly uncomfortable in their own skin. If you've never really felt like you fit in—or if you have a child whose behavior strikes you as a little peculiar—there are some handy, empirically rigorous internet quizzes that will tell you whether your child is indigo or not.              

Here are a few example questions:

– Has your child acted like royalty since they were born?
– Does your child refuse to do certain things he or she is told?
– Is waiting in lines torture for your child?

None of these, of course, are applicable to normal children—most kids fucking love waiting in lines—so the quizzes are pretty foolproof (despite the fact my aura wasn't indigo, the results of the quiz told me I am, in fact, an indigo human—something I knew all along and was just waiting to have confirmed).      

But, for whatever reason, people are always going on about not trusting what you read on extremely rudimentary quiz websites. So in an effort to decipher whether "indigo people" exist, I thought it best to seek out some myself and ask them some questions.

After posting on a number of Facebook groups, a man with "indigo" in his name added me and posted a message on my wall: "ur an indigo?" he said. It turned out he runs the UK Indigos Facebook group and, though he seemed a little nervous—he made me promise I wouldn't use his photo and assured me that he wasn't a drug user—he sent a short letter I'd written around to some online indigo groups. I got two replies: one answering some of my questions, and another offering to meet.

A short documentary about indigo children.

First up: the questionnaire respondent. My ADHD/ADD questions were skirted over and my question about indigo people possessing powers answered vaguely—that the powers are all psychic and unexaminable; Reiki healing, that kind of thing. When I asked whether indigos have been around for a long time or just for the last few decades, I was told: "My understanding is that the first-generation indigos started manifesting in human form in the early to mid-60s. I was born in the late 60s. My role was to help ease the shock and dis(ease) of later indigos who began being born in great numbers in the 80s through today... [sigh] I do my best."    

The thing is, although there were apparently indigo children born "in great numbers" just a couple of decades ago, I couldn't track down any current kids with the gift of an indigo aura. I read about them, heard about groups of parents angrily telling teachers that they don't know how to teach their indigo children properly—I trawled spirituality forums and questioned any indigos I got in touch with. Even Dr. Badat told me he’d come across the phenomenon in his line of work. But, as far I can tell, the indigo community is made up solely of middle-aged people for whom the phenomenon is almost a form of therapy.      

One of those people is Caroline, whom I met with recently. She was friendly and talkative, opening up quickly and talking for about 45 minutes without me asking many questions. She's had a tough life—abusive partners, depression combated with antidepressants, suicidal thoughts—the full spectrum of unhappiness.

"I always felt different from everybody else. I never felt like I fit in," she told me. That's until she started reading about indigos online and discovered that all of her feelings could be explained by the fact that she too was perhaps an indigo. "I went on a blind date with someone who owns a big company in Canary Wharf. We were talking for about 15 minutes and it turned out he’s very spiritual. He said to me, ‘You know you’re indigo, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

I asked Caroline for her thoughts on the ADHD/ADD question, to which she replied, "I don't really know a lot about ADHD. It's a weird thing that all the indigos I know all love animals, all love nature, all are very spiritual. Are ADHD people like that? When I was a kid at school, there were probably kids there who had ADHD, played up and wrecked the class's learning conditions. And they weren’t spiritual or into animals in any way.”

Akiane, a ten-year-old supposed indigo child.

She describes herself as holistic, but understands that sometimes medication is important. She also seemed more enlightened than I would have expected, more rational than you’d think for someone talking to you about auras.

But, after a while of chatting, Caroline said something that I took to be revealing. While talking about her ups and downs and how finding out that she was an indigo had helped her to deal with her issues, she said, "You get people who come in [to indigo groups] and say, ‘I feel really low today, I actually feel suicidal.’ If I was to say that to a normal person, they won’t understand, they’d just think ‘Why? What's happened? Why do you feel like that?’ But you can’t explain it. The other indigos understand so we can support each other.”

Perhaps managing your emotions by ticking them off against an online checklist helps people justify why they didn't fit in at school, why they haven't been able to hold down a job or why they've found it hard to settle into new environments. And if auras and a slightly misplaced idea that they represent the next stage of human evolution helps people deal with those issues, then what's the harm in allowing them to do so?

However, as with most Big Topics—war, famine, runway fashion shows—the whole thing gets far more uncomfortable when you add children into the equation. As Dr. Badat told me, ignoring that a kid might be ADHD—be it through labeling children as indigo or not—isn't likely to do them much good in later life. And the most troubling problem is that it's a disorder that is relatively easy to treat. 

By way of example, he told me, “I would invite any skeptic to argue with my many ex-offender [ADHD] patients who are totally transformed by treatment, even to their own surprise. They are getting into work, even college. They're becoming assets to their community and families and totally steering away from crime, all down, in some cases, to a modest and cheap medicine and some basic coaching and education about ADHD.”

It's easy to empathize with parents who don't want to accept that their child has a disorder. And, especially in the case of ADHD—unlike children with physical disorders—symptoms are invisible, making it far easier for parents to pass behavior off as misunderstood or "gifted" rather than tied to any specific medical condition.

But by relying on the intangible, spiritual option and not properly dealing with the ADHD symptoms when they present themselves, these parents run the risk of watching their child become less "gifted" as they grow older, ending up instead as an adult struggling to find their place in the spiritual world that's been pushed onto them and still lacking an explanation as to why they feel like they don't belong anywhere else.

Follow James on Twitter: @duckytennent 

More stuff about spirituality:

Making Friends at Stonehenge at the End of the World

The Spiritual World Reacts to the Higgs Boson Discovery

I Tried to Have a Spiritual Experience in the Desert

Photos from inside the Fox by Mish Way.

I like to think of Vancouver as a teenage girl: always trying to improve herself with glittery, eye-catching accessories while desperately trying to remain authentic as to not be scrutinized too harshly by her peers. Ever since the 2010 Olympics, Vancouver has grown on top of itself. I don’t need to regale you with complaints about the high rise condominium towers which seem to constantly shoot up across our skyline, or the fact that most art and music venues have changed hands over and over causing turmoil through certain (and very vocal) communities. I, personally, don’t really have a problem with it. This is just what happens with a young, desirable city. It grows. Capitalism. I get it.

I live in Mount Pleasant. This neighborhood was once a seedy back street just south of the drug-addled downtown east side, but it is now marketed as “a trendy neighborhood.” Even my own Air BNB profile is littered with this ridiculous lingo, in hopes that I will be able to rent my one bedroom apartment for twice the price when I’m out on the road. Over the past six years, I have watched Mount Pleasant’s grimy laundry mats, diners and video stores be replaced by Donnelly Group bars, boutique coffee shops, and Urban Outfitters-inspired clothing stores. Mount Pleasant now looks like its name, except for one sore thumb that seemed untouchable: Fox Cinema.

Fox Cinema is Vancouver’s last porn theatre. Resting between the painfully high-end Lark boutique and a tailor-made suit store, the Fox Cinema was always a mystery. Everyone knew they played shitty old porn flicks and that the activity that went down there was seedy. But recently, Fox announced it would be closing its doors so they could renovate and become the replacement for The Waldorf Hotel—a multi-complex of music, art and bar activity—that was forced to shut down earlier this year.

The old Waldorf crew—Ernesto Gomez, Thomas Anselmi, and Danny Fazio—have partnered up with David Duprey and Rachel Zottenburg from The Rickshaw, Rumpus Room, and The Narrow, to scrub the semen off the walls and turn the Fox into something more suited for the made-over neighborhood.

I had never been in the Fox in its past iteration as a dirty movie theatre, but I was curious to see what was happening inside before it got made over. In 2009, neighbours complained about illegal prostitution and drugs going on inside the theatre so, Constable Mark Jarvie went undercover and, surprise, found some hookers. So, yes, the Fox was acting as a social club for anonymous blowjobs and a dark, semi-quiet place to shoot dope. The city was super pissed. The Fox’s owner, Xiaohua “Lisa” Huang, insisted that she only saw people freaking each other “once in a while” at her former porn theatre. Not a big deal, right?

Anyway, I decided to go to the Fox on a Friday evening with my friend Nick. Walking the four blocks down from my own apartment, I babbled to him about which porn might be playing, naively expecting one of the big budget actress I had spent time with at this year’s AVN Awards to be lighting up the screen. When we entered the theatre, an old, salty man stuffed behind a booth sat between a mess of small television sets.

“$7.50 a piece,” he said barely looking up at Nick or I. As we paid the man, I tried to ask him questions about the closure. He looked at me as though I was crazy, remained tight-lipped, and waved us off.

When we walked into the dank, dark theatre it was quiet except for the slapping noises of skin on skin coming from the screen. A young woman was being double teamed by two men. The fuzzy camera work bounced with her butt as she uttered little yelps. Straight porn. To the right of the entrance was a row of men standing in the dark, looking forward. Nick and I slipped into a row and I put a plastic bag on the seat before planting myself down. Nick passed me a swig of whiskey.

“You’re sitting on a bag?” He asked.

“Duh.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I wore shitty pants for a reason.”

The theatre was practically empty, except for a few men littered through out the rows of seats. The film was weirdly quiet and you could hear any movement one made. I imagined the obvious sound of dick stroking would not be masked by the porn movie. Dated porn is boring, and walking in halfway through makes it even worse.

Within a mere 30 seconds, I felt a breath behind me. I turned my head around and saw a man drop himself in the seat directly behind mine. I knew he had moved to sit by me. That sickening stomach flip of rape fear—that I have had since understanding that I could in fact be raped—jelly beaned inside my stomach. I exhaled with annoyance. Nick noticed the man too, and made no objections when I whispered to him that we should get up and move seats. Sure enough, the man followed us. When we moved again, he did too. I focused up on the screen and on the mediated sex that was happening in front of me. Slap. Slap. Slap. Moan. I could feel the man breathing heavily right into my neck. Finally, the rage inside me thickened to a breaking point and I got up, grabbed my plastic bag and walked out. Nick followed.

At the front, I demanded my money back from the man at the front. He shook his head and pointed down at a lamented piece of paper typed out in Times New Roman that said, “NO REFUNDS”.

“Fuck it,” I said to Nick and we walked out. The whole thing lasted an unsuccessful 15 minutes.

“I feel dumb for not saying anything to that guy,” Nick said as we walked down the street, “total pussy move.”

“No,” I reassured him. “That place was fucked.”

And it was fucked.

It had little to do with gender. Nick got some lecherous looks from a bunch of different men—sitting along the back wall—who were staring him up and down from the minute we entered. In that space, anyone and everyone was a victim or a predator, or both, but it was really up to the individual. Fight or fuck. It’s going to happen anyways, so why not have a contained, safe haven where willing participants can frequent?

I dissect pornography often and I think about the social implications of sex even more. I’m fascinated by our North American approach to sexuality. The muddled contradictions that rest in the assumed morality about sexual pleasure and the duty of reproduction. The existence of rape culture. The disconnect between our desires, our bodies and our sexual partners.

Disappointed with my lack of investigation at the Fox, I began talking to a friend of mine who was working on the demolition crew revamping the building. His eyes lit up with the screen of his iPhone as he showed me photo after photo of all the writing on the walls designating blowjob zones and fuck-corners. Little notes and dates scrawled everywhere in Sharpie. He showed me the brown splatters of blood that were on the walls at the edge of every row of seats. Dope squirt. Pass out.

Written on the wall of the men’s bathroom was: “The Fox is shutting down by June 30th. Let’s all get naked and fuck!”. He showed me the seats with a black light detecting the decades of semen laminated onto the wood. He said the floor was littered with used condoms, thousands of them, and little crunchy thongs scattered like desolate animal bones. A part of me was shocked by the utter filth of the place, while another felt like this was totally banal.

The Fox was a secret club. The cheapest fuck-and-suck-free-for-all the city had. For a mere $7.50, those who wanted it could participate in anonymous sex with whoever they wanted for as long as they wanted and no one would say a word. It was a safe space for seedy sex, and by entering its doors I was participating.

In some ways, I knew going to the Fox was going to end up like this. It would be like visiting a gun range, standing in front of one of the shooting targets, and being angry that I ended up with a bullet in my stomach. While a part of me hates the fact that I just meant every word of the last sentence I wrote (I do not condone “asking for it” rhetoric) I do understand the unfortunate reality of the world we live in.

R.I.P. Fox Cinema.

Follow Mish on Twitter: @myszkaway

Previously:

I Kinda Like Vancouver's Poodle in the Sky

The 2012 presidential campaign was a series of gruesome sideshows that lasted two years and made everyone unhappy. Americans thought the campaign had gone on too long and wanted it to end… in 2011, even before any Republican primaries had been held. Horse race–style stories documenting the minutiae of day-to-day campaigning and polls and microscandals out filled cable news and every political corner of the internet and were obsolete by the time The Daily Show got around to making fun of them. None of it mattered. Mitt Romney was the frontrunner in early 2011 and he won the nomination only to lose fairly badly to Barack Obama—an outcome you could have predicted without reading or watching any of the thousands of news items that accompanied the campaign.

Then it was over, and we were treated to some months of relative peace and quiet. Congress was busy finding new ways to not do anything. The 2014 midterms were coming up if you were really an election junkie. There was some speculation about who was going to run for president—definitely Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, and Chris Christie; probably Joe Biden, Jeb Bush, and Bobby Jindal—and no doubt there was a bunch of behind-the-scenes fundraising and conversations between political professionals going on, but it was out of the public eye, because c’mon, who would start campaigning for real more than three years before an election?

Hillary Clinton, for one. There are already pro-Hillary Super PACs roaming the Earth, including Ready for Hillary, which recently hired some of Obama’s best organizers, even though Hillary hasn’t even officially declared her candidacy. But maybe Ready for Hillary is just her supporters' response to anti-Clinton efforts already underway—American Crossroads, the Super PAC founded by Republican strategist and bad person Karl Rove, has already cut an anti-Hillary ad that criticizes her for lying about whether the 2012 attack on the Libyan embassy in Benghazi was an act of terrorism:

Hillary is getting beat up on because she’s the presumptive frontrunner for the Democrats (the Republican field is going to be more wide open), but she’s not the only target out there. America Rising, the Super PAC that runs StopHillary2016.org, also operates a Tumblr that takes shots at every Democrat who might run in 2016, including Biden and Colorado governor John Hickenlooper.

Democrats are also in full pre-campaign campaign mode. They just created Correct the Record, a “dedicated research and rapid response communications project to prevent Republicans from denigrating potential Democratic candidates with baseless attacks.” I can’t wait for the microscopic arguments over the truthiness of campaign ads that will spill over from blogs to Facebook and Twitter and probably result in some hi-larious memes like  2012's “binders full of women.” It’s gonna be a fun three years, y’all.

Electioneering season has been getting longer and longer since 1840, which is considered to be the dawn of the modern campaign (back then, the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” was a brilliant piece of advertising strategy). In 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president ten months before the general election, but by 2008 candidates were declaring their intentions almost two years in advance. State primaries have been getting scheduled earlier and earlier in the year, a trend you can see evolve from 1976 to 2012 (though in recent years both major parties have cracked down on states moving up their primary dates), and intra-party debates have been creeping up the calendar too—the first presidential debate for the 2000 election cycle was held on October 22, 1999, just a few months before the first GOP primary, but by the 2012 cycle the first debate had been moved back three months, to May. The first informal straw poll for 2012 I could find evidence of was in August of 2010, a mere two years before the general election. There have already been at least two for the 2016 race, one at CPAC and one at the Roanoke Conference, a less publicized GOP gathering in Washington state.

A political cartoon from 1840, when things were simpler.

In 2011 the New York Times’ election blog published a defense of long campaigns. “Nationwide courting rituals should be long enough to let great politicians flourish and bond with the nation,” wrote historian Gil Troy. He argued that these campaigns let voters get to know the candidates and how they respond to pressure: “Like automotive crash tests, nasty campaigns determine a potential president’s strength and durability.”

Except the voters—who these campaigns are supposedly for—fucking hate these things. “Too negative, too long, dull,” was how the Pew Research Center summarized the public’s opinion of the 2012 campaign.

Long campaigns don’t just irritate voters, they introduce more money into elections and, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out last go-round, they can result in ideological differences being erased in the name of electorate-ready talking points. If you’ve never seen a presidential primary in action you might think that they’d give voters a chance to pick between a variety of positions, each represented by a candidate. The reality of 2012 was much uglier than that—the Republican candidates competed to be more Christian, more anti-tax, and less believing in climate change to try to capture the support of the right wing of the right wing of the GOP. On top of everything else, the length of campaigns wears candidates down. “Is this a marathon or what?” Senator Howard Baker once said while running for president. “I’ve been campaigning for president for 53 weeks… That’s time enough, isn’t it?” He said that in 1980. Today, campaigning for that long would get you just about to the first primary.

Why do campaigns have to be like this? In parliamentary democracies, where elections generally occur when governments call them and don’t have dates fixed years in advance, the whole process happens much quicker—campaigns are over in weeks or months, not years. But we’re not going to switch over to a British model of government, and passing laws that tell candidates when they can give speeches or spend money will likely be impossible thanks to the First Amendment. If candidates can get an early edge by organizing or fundraising—or putting out negative ads—they’ll take it. If a voter sees an anti-Hillary ad in 2013, he might think, Oh no not this shit again, we just had an election! But he also might start thinking, Hillary Clinton something something Benghazi, hmmmm… sounds bad! 

Then there are the people who actually seem to enjoy campaigns—either because they make a living from working on them, or just because they’re exciting. Congress moves slowly or not at all, most of what the executive branch does happens in secret, and the Supreme Court, though powerful, doesn’t respond to political cues in the ordinary sense. A campaign constantly generates news, there are winners and losers at the end of it, and there’s no end to the speculating you can do. If you get into the spirit of the horse race and just let the sickness take over your body, watching the slow-motion nightmare of modern campaigns can be sort of fun.

I remember coming home on the last election night, glancing at Twitter, at finding this tweet from conservative Daily Caller writer Matt K. Lewis:

Who do you like for 2016 (as of right this minute)? Rubio, Ryan, Jindal, Christie, Pence, Martinez, Haley, Santo, Huck, Haley, Paul...?

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) November 7, 2012

Yup. For some, the 2016 campaign started at midnight, November 7, 2012—1,462 days before election night. Just 1,216 days to go.

@HCheadle

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