Italy isn't exactly a gay-friendly country. Same-sex marriages are taboo, and there's an entire galaxy of homophobic groups running around the nation, from conservative Catholics to secular far-right extremists, all committed to the idea that having sex with someone who has the same version of genitals as you is somehow evil.

One of these groups is the Standing Sentinels, who have been attracting attention by organizing silent vigils in public spaces to encourage citizens to be watchful of what they refer to, with typical apocalyptic right-wing bombast, as the destruction of mankind and civilization. Their main objective is to defend the “natural family based on the union of men and women,” to carry on the battle against gay marriage and the Scalfarotto bill, which increases the penalties for some homophobic and transphobic crimes.

On Sunday, October 5, the Sentinels gathered in many squares around the country to hold one of their usual vigils. LGBT associations and left-wing movements were obviously not too happy about that, so they also showed up to demonstrate against the Sentinels. Some violent confrontations resulted in Trento (where two Sentinels were hospitalized), Turin, Naples, and Bologna, where demonstrators clashed with the neo-Fascist party Forza Nuova. In Venice, two men kissed in front of the Sentinels and, according to a local newspaper, "could now be accused of a 'unauthorized demonstration.’”

In Bergamo, a city in northern Italy, a young man showed up and stood in front of the Sentinels wearing an Illinois Nazi outfit from The Blues Brothers and an armband with the symbol used by Chaplin in The Great Dictator while holding a copy of Mein Kampf and a cardboard sign that read, “Illinois Nazis stand with the Sentinels.”

Standing Sentinels in Milan. Photo by Zoe Casati

That man was Giampietro Belotti, a 29-year-old student at the University of Brescia. His satirical one-man protest was not welcomed by the Sentinels and the police, who took him to the police station. Ironically, Belotti could now be charged with "apology for fascism" (a crime under Italian law).

I called Belotti to talk about his close encounter with the Sentinels and the cops. 

VICE: Where did the idea of dressing up as an Illinois Nazi come from?
Giampietro Belotti: I’ve taken part in historical reenactments in the past and I have always been fond of fancy dress parties and absurd costumes. I haven't been able to digest this whole Standing Sentinels issue—I see it as pulling the wool over people's eyes. So, I thought I'd combine the two. 

How did the Sentinels react when you got there?
They stood still, frozen. When the organizers of the event saw me, they ran to the special General Investigations and Special Operations Division [DIGOS, roughly equivalent to the FBI] agents to seek help. One minute later, I was going through my wallet for my ID card.

What happened at that point?
A small assembly of people formed around me—a few were applauding, others were taking pictures with their phones. When the cops asked me for my documents, some people intervened to say that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Two people pulled out their IDs when they realized that the cops were going to take me to the police station.

And then?
Let’s just say I wasn’t eager to be taken away. The DIGOS cops were actually quite well-mannered, though—within the limits imposed by their job, of course. Only one of them grabbed my arm and started tugging at me. I said, “Would you mind keeping your hands off?” At that point he stopped because he realized that he wasn’t standing in front of a rioter. The people who were there to defend me started to raise their tone, so I preferred to follow the cops.  

What did you talk about with the DIGOS agents during the ride?
That was a scene that bordered on the absurd. The cops totally got the references to the Illinois Nazis and Chaplin's The Great Dictator. In the car we started talking about The Blues Brothers. I was quite puzzled by the whole situation.

So you basically discussed cinema while riding in a cop car?
Honestly, I never thought something like that could happen. The astonishing thing is that the cops were getting all my references, while many journalists haven’t. Some publications ran headlines like “Fake Hitler” or “Dressed as an SS.”

What happened when you reached the police station?
They filed my report, took my fingerprints and my mug shot. I am dressed as an Illinois Nazi in my mugshot. At first, they wanted to confiscate my cardboard and the Mein Kampf book I was carrying with me. Then a third cop arrived who pointed out that confiscating a book that can be found in any bookstore made no sense.

Moreover, besides the outfit and the book, I also had a lot of pink paper triangles in my pocket—the ones they used to identify homosexual prisoners in concentration camps. I wanted to distribute them to the homophobes standing in that square, but unfortunately I didn’t have time.

Do you really risk being charged with defending fascism?
Well, the cops told me that they had to lay the report of what had happened, confiscate the cardboard, and notify the judge. The only possible crime I could have committed is apology of fascism, which is quite a paradox.

I'll say.
My file was on the magistrate’s desk today and now I have to find myself a lawyer. They gave me a public defender yesterday as I don’t have my own. However, many people have tried to find me a lawyer that could defend me for free.

It's ridiculous. I showed up in that square with the intention of making a statement, but if I was ever asked to leave—something like, “Excuse me, could you kindly get the fuck out of here?”—I would have left. I truly didn’t expect what happened to me.

Follow Leonardo Bianchi on Twitter. 

Mohamed Farah. Photo by Patrick McGuire.

Earlier this week, Mohamed Farah, a community organizer from Toronto’s Dixon neighbourhood in North Etobicoke, contacted VICE Canada and offered us a tell-all interview. If his name isn’t familiar to you, Farah was the man who tried to broker the sale of the Rob Ford crack video to the Toronto Star and Gawker. He later appeared on CBC’s the fifth estate and again on City News in November 2013.

Our conversation with Farah led to an explosive allegation about a second video, which features an unnamed judge smoking crack on camera. Farah claims that he and his source, who filmed both videos, were more scared to break the news of the judge video than they were the Rob Ford video, because Rob Ford was, "known to be partying."

If Farah is to be believed, he claims the same judge also offered the owner of the Rob Ford crack video help to broker a deal for the mayor’s infamous video, in exchange for keeping the judge out of the scandal.

VICE Canada reached out to the Toronto Police about allegations they seized a video of a crack-smoking judge during the Project Traveller raids. We’ve yet to recieve comment.

On top of that, Farah claims to be the man who Rob Ford was talking about when he was videotaped intoxicated while threatening “first-degree murder” on an unknown individual—a clip the Toronto Star released last November.

We also discussed the Dixon neighbourhood at length, and Farah’s own issues with the way it has been portrayed in the media. Farah has been well known in that neighbourhood as a force of peace and positivity, being at the helm of various community organizations that have, among other things, been fighting to establish a community centre for more than a decade.

What follows is our conversation with Mohamed Farah that has been edited for length and clarity.

So why don’t we start at the beginning. What was it like trying to bring the crack tape to the media? And how did you feel the first time you watched it?
People in the community knew beforehand about some of the activities he’d been involved in. So I wasn’t really shocked that there was a video out there. However, when I saw the video for the first time, it really was shocking to me. Just seeing it with your own eyes, seeing how he was behaving, what he was saying, that kind of stuff.

[Rob Ford was] a city councillor in the area before he was mayor of the city. During his time as a city councillor, he didn’t have any initiatives or policies or anything for the community to build a recreation centre or more after-school programs… And then after he became mayor, it’s been the same kind of narrative… to fight crime, war on drugs... But he’s always been involved in these kinds of [illicit] activities as well.

[The] kids that videotaped him, that were with him at that time, grew up under his regime. He tells people, ‘Oh, if you need a job, come to me and I’ll give you a job. I’ll give you a reference… If you need to get a house, give me a call and I’ll come help you get a house.’ Basically ‘Give me a call if there’s anything you need,’ right? But it doesn’t actually fix anything on the top level.

He depended on people on a one-on-one basis to keep calling him up... And there were people he depends on to go to for certain things. But it’s always been the status quo to keep people poor, not having any access to resources, and if you want anything, basically come to me and I’ll help you out. Why should I go to him for a job interview or to get a job when I could have a rec centre or get access to computers and all that kind of stuff I need? So that was kind of the buildup to the situation.

There was a bill that was passed in 2010 by the Conservative Government and this bill basically had the initiative to go after organized crime. However, the crime rate in Canada had been going down for a lot of years, we all know that. But somehow, I guess the police had to find a way to fill those missing links. So we saw activity, we saw a system where people were being locked away for petty crime, and they come back to the community as informants or we call them “CIs”—confidential informants. And these guys actually go over to the police to find evidence or organize other schemes…

So we just decided, if you get involved in a situation, you have a choice to be a victim of a bigger scandal or just come out and tell your story and let it blow over.

So when the Gawker article came out, when the Star article came out, what was the feeling like in your community?
[The Star] kind of outed us. They [printed] where we lived, what we looked like… So when the story broke in the community there was a witch-hunt—like, who’s behind this, who are the people who are involved in the situation?

Who was behind the witch-hunt? People in the community or people from outside the community?
Everybody had a reason to get mad. You had people in the community who… didn’t want that stigma from the media. So those people were mad. Then you had people who were loyal to [Rob Ford]—like I said, he had a dependency system where he’d get people employed in certain areas. And those people were on the frontline, Ford Nation. Some of them actually got ahold of me, and asked me questions about what was going on.

When you say “get ahold of you,” what do you mean?
Basically they knew who I was because a week before the story broke, Robyn Doolittle was hanging out in my neighbourhood. We went to a basketball game.

She probably stands out in Dixon.
She stands out. And so we’re at the game, she’s a reporter, and then a week later the story breaks and I’m with the same person. So they’re like, ‘We saw that girl with you. She’s a reporter, she was in the neighbourhood.’ I kind of denied it.

Did you go underground because of that?
I couldn’t go underground because if you did that…

Then they’d really know.
Yeah, yeah. Then you can’t tell anybody.

So when these guys were coming up to you, what were they saying?
[They were] trying to solve the issue. I guess some of them felt like if they did Rob Ford a favour, he would pay them back in favours. Some felt like, you know what, this is for my benefit, let’s just find a way to solve a problem.

So why was Robyn Doolittle at the basketball game the week before?
I invited her to the neighbourhood. I said, ‘Listen, why don’t you come by and see some of the guys and the [community outreach] program that we do. Take a look, this is what we are trying to do.’ Because I wanted her to understand the whole scope of the situation.

And let’s talk about that program a bit because an organization you work with, Inner City Union, is hosting a mayoral debate tomorrow night. You’re going to be on the panel representing Rexdale. Before we keep going into this scandal, what is your day-to-day role in the community?
The basketball program that we do is for youth in the neighbourhood. And the program actually expanded to the rest of the GTA. One of the coaches, one of the organizers went to Africa to participate in the FIBA tournament, which is a big tournament globally. They went to the finals because they represented a Somali city. They finished second place.

This Toronto team?
This Toronto team.

Amazing.
Yeah and that wasn’t put in the news, it wasn’t talked about. They made headlines in Africa and Europe... but nobody covered it here in Toronto.

I went back to the community in 2012. I’d been traveling, I’d been living in other places. So when I came back, a friend of mine approached me and said, ‘This situation’s getting hectic in the community. A lot of these kids are dying. Why don’t you come in and try to do a couple of programs with us?’ So I helped out.

We also did a partnership with the City of Toronto, the Police, TD—we did a program for little kids that were 13 to 15 years old. Unfortunately, that money disappeared. It was organized by the City of Toronto and the police were involved too. There’s people in the community who are gatekeepers. We have people in trustee positions, we have people in city parks, and they exploit the community in terms of resources…. They want to keep people in this economic condition. They want to keep people poor [in North Etobicoke, Ward 2, Rexdale].

So the articles come out, Project Traveller raids start, you were arrested. Take us through that process.
Before the raids happened, we kind of knew it was coming because we saw some of the signs. One of the signs is you get pulled over, you know you have a suspended license, but they let you go. If your tail light is broken, no one stops you. If there’s a lessened police presence in the area for a week or a couple of days, it’s the calm before the storm.

Why is that a sign?
Because they’re holding an investigation and they don’t want anybody coming in and they don’t want any interference. They want things to be cool before.

And they want to catch everyone at once.
Yeah. They want to catch everybody, all people at the same time.

[During the first raid] I got arrested early that morning, I got taken to a station and put in a cell for maybe 13 hours.

What were you charged with?
I was charged with weapon possession, I believe, proceeds to crime, and storing ammunition.

Have you ever owned a gun before?
No.

Did you see the gun that they accused you of possessing?
I saw a glimpse of it, yeah.

Were you surprised?
I was shocked, yeah. It looked like a big gun. It was something I hadn’t seen with my own eyes.

What kind of gun was it?
It looked like a 45-calibre Smith & Wesson.

And you’d seen guns in the community before obviously?
I hadn’t seen guns with my own eyes, no… I’ve never seen guns in my community.

You’ve known them to exist in your community though?
Definitely, yeah.

So how do you think a gun came into your apartment?
Most likely somebody that I knew left it there, but I’m not going to speculate.

Who was with you when you were arrested?
[My mom was] in the apartment as well. So me and her were in the apartment when they raided.

And she wasn’t cuffed, was she?
She was cuffed. She was cuffed and arrested.

Was she alright in the end?
Yeah, she was good. She’s a strong woman, she’s been through worse so she cool, she cool.

How long did it take you to get those charges dropped?
It took about a year to get them dropped. But the main thing was that when I was inside, I noticed that a lot of the people that were arrested were people I hadn’t seen before. Like I’d seen guys from the States, guys there from different parts of the city, and we’re all trying to figure out what’s going on.

If you ask, ‘OK, where are you from? How did you get involved in this?’ There was a pattern I noticed and the pattern was that they all had communication with individuals that were being [watched]. So if they called up that person, anything from that person or directed at that person, there was something to that whole raid.

By the way, there’s no such thing as a gang [called] the Dixon Bloods in my area.

You’re saying that’s an invention?
There’s no such thing as Dixon Bloods. Even the name doesn’t make any sense. When you say that you’re a gang, you rep a gang. You have gang signs, you have a territory, you have colours that you wear... That’s not in this neighbourhood... I’ve never seen a gang in our neighbourhood. I made sure my whole life that there would be no gang in my neighbourhood and we kept it that way.

There were active criminals in your community, though.
Listen man, if criminals mean a kid that is smoking weed or selling weed and gets caught doing petty crime, then perhaps. But if you’re talking about what they claim in terms of organized crime, conspiracy, with the smuggling of drugs, all that stuff, then no, it doesn’t exist in our neighbourhood.

And the guys who sold or wanted to sell the tape, made the tape, what was their affiliation?
It wasn’t ‘guys,’ it was probably one individual that I spoke to that I dealt with. It was a personal conversation between me and him, a personal thing between me and him. His friends, people that I knew, no one was happy with that, the way he went down.

I explained to him what was going on. I kind of told him, ‘Listen, if you have these kinds of interactions with these people, this is what you have to watch out for.’ And I guess, through conversations, he got scared. And he came to me and said, ‘Listen, I’ve got to talk to you about something.’ When he told me about the actual tape and [when] he told me the story behind the tape, I said, ‘Listen, you have two choices: you can either suppress it and leave the city or you can just come out and get a lawyer and try to bring this out.’ So we chose to bring it out, unfortunately it didn’t work out for him.

What was his relationship with Ford like before that, and how did he come into contact with him in order to film it? Was Ford just at the place where he did his drugs and your source happened to be around?
That’s the question I’m trying to figure out myself, like how did he get caught up with these guys? My assumption is that Ford had people that he was friends with that he used to go hang out with… But it’s so strange to me... I don’t know how all those people come together. I can’t tell you that either.

What kind of other high-profile figures were mixed up with this guy, if any?
[The] mayor, a judge…

You’re saying there’s a second video with a judge.
There’s a second video with a judge, yeah.

Is that the second video that’s been referenced by Bill Blair?
I believe that’s the second video that’s been referenced, yeah.

And how did you come to know that?
Because there were only two videos to begin with. There were two videos that were talked about: one was Rob Ford, one was the judge.

So you’ve personally seen the Rob Ford video.
That’s right.

Have you seen the judge video?
No.

Why haven’t you seen it?
I do not want to see it. I could have seen it if I wanted to. I didn’t want to see it.

Because you don’t want to know who the person is?
[My source and I] kept it on a need-to-know basis, because if I’m in a position where I’ve got to testify that I’ve seen the video, I’m not going to lie to anybody. So I said to him, ‘If I were you, I would sell the Rob Ford [video]… But don’t sell [the judge video], don’t get involved in that.’ He listened. But I’ve never seen it.

And you believe him entirely that the second video exists?
Yeah, I definitely do.

Because he wasn’t lying about anything else?
No, absolutely not.

And did he say anything about what was going on in that particular video?
No, he didn’t say anything about the video… He told me a story of how when he talked to the judge—it’s a female judge I believe—I guess she must have somehow found out that there was a tape of Rob Ford and a tape of them as well. I don’t know how they found out.

Before the news came out?
Before the story broke. The judge was trying to tell him, ‘Listen, don’t get me involved in this. If you want to sell the Rob Ford tape, I’ll sell it for you or help you sell the tape if you leave me out of it. And she tried to go find a buyer, but she couldn’t. The judge said, ‘Listen, I couldn’t find a buyer, but just keep your bargain. Leave me out of it.’ Something like that.

I don’t even know if the judge is [one of the people who] initiated the Project Traveler warrants. [But] I need to know because it matters to my community, it matters to the people who got caught up in the situation.

Did he seem more nervous about having the Rob Ford video or the judge video?
I think everybody was more worried about the judge video more than the Rob Ford video… nobody cares about Rob Ford. People knew about Rob Ford’s craziness before the story even broke out. No one cared about Rob Ford because he was known to be partying. 

Why is it scary?
I mean because it’s a powerful person, someone who could have leverage.

So you’ve known about the judge video since May 2013?
Right.

It’s October 2014. What have you done since you found out about the judge video to try and get that information out?
To try to get it out? The only thing I ever did was, I mentioned the story once on the fifth estate and then after that, I never talked about it again.

You told the CBC and they cut it out?
For the fifth estate, yeah. They edited it out.

Why do you think that is?
I made a mistake on the title of the judge... I got them mixed up.

And the judge had previously purchased and smoked crack in that area?
I don’t know if the judge bought crack, but they had been on video smoking crack.

Why do you think this allegation hasn’t come out yet?
I think the implication is huge. [The Toronto Police] have had a rough year in terms of the Sammy [Yatim] shooting, [fallout from] the G20 protests, this would… be bad for the city.

It would. So going back to your neighbourhood, how long have you been trying to get things to a better place?
Well, I’ll give you guys some of the backstory to [all this]. 2003 was an election year. That was when I originally wanted to talk about having a rec centre for our community. I spoke to a guy at the Sun, his name is Mike Strobel, he’s a journalist. He did a piece about our [community] organization at that time. In that article, I specifically mention the need for these young people. [Those young people] are the same group of guys that are right now caught up in Project Traveler—they were like 12 or 13 at that time.

And you were saying that if these kids don’t get something productive to do, they’re going to be in trouble.
Exactly. They’re going to be in trouble.

And then after that piece was done, John Tory called me up and said, ‘I’ll help you guys get what you need. Help me, volunteer for my campaign.’ And I did, I volunteered for John Tory’s campaign in 2003 against David Miller. When the campaign was over, he lost, so I haven’t really seen him since. That same year, I kind of left that whole organization and started traveling.

In 2005, [I linked up with K’Naan]. He’s from [Dixon] as well. He did his first music video and we were friends. So I said, ‘Listen, that same issue that I had, why don’t you [meet] these kids to talk about the issues?’ So in the video, he’s talking about struggling and the exact same kids that were on the video were in Project Traveller. Like all the same characters that are on the news every day are in the same video.

So for the last 11 years you’ve been trying to call attention to the problem in Dixon?
Yeah, exactly.

What other parts of this story do you want to get out there?
The media part. The media part for me was very difficult and I’ll tell you why. As soon as the story broke, even though people knew the situation we were in, they pushed the envelope... For example, they aired out the person who shot the video. When I talked to Robyn Doolittle, she said, ‘There’s no way on Earth the Toronto Star would ever leak a source or give a source up. We’ll go to court, we’ll go on stand, we’ll do this and that.’ And they threw him under the bus, whoever that person was.

Without naming him, how would you describe the character who shot the video?
He didn’t have a criminal record before he got arrested, so that’s enough to describe him.

People can do criminal stuff but not have a criminal record.
I’m not saying he didn’t do criminal stuff, but I’m saying he must have been someone who was very careful, the way he carries himself... More business-oriented I would say. He’s a nice guy, he’s very approachable, very cool, very quiet, that kind of guy.

He wanted to change his life by the sound of it.
Yeah. He knew that he couldn’t maintain what he was doing and support a family.

So you have a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth with how Robyn Doolittle dealt with the story?
I don’t know if it was her or people pushing her, but the way the story was done, how everything came out, it’s not right. I felt like they thought they could get away with it. It’s going to blow over pretty fast, things are going to happen and he’s going to resign. It’s going to be old news. But he’s been on the media ever since, and his story keeps getting longer and longer.

The Star had to apologize for overusing the term “Somali” in their reporting.
It’s beyond racism. [They] mentioned the word ‘Somali’ and ‘crack’ about the same amount of times... Number two, we’re Canadian. I went home that same night and I watched CNN and they [said] ‘Somali Cartel’ with the [Rob Ford story]. And that’s on CNN, the most trusted news, or whatever they call themselves.

[The media] calls [Rob Ford] a racist and they say this guy’s a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, this and that. But they have these stereotypes that they push and they suppress their own information of certain realities. And they paint pictures in certain ways. I think that has to be addressed.

Are you upset with how you were characterized?
Not really. I think [Robyn] tried to make me look like a nice guy, which is good. I’m happy for that, but I’d rather be the dick, than for my community to come off as the bad people. It’s the other way around for me. Don’t make me look good, but then shit on my whole community, my friends, my family.

It makes Dixon seem like a very scary place.
It does, man, it does. And it’s far, far from it. I don’t know if you been there… You’re going to be shocked. You’re going to be like, ‘This isn’t the place I saw on the news.’ Because it’s far from it. It’s a really nice neighbourhood.

Is your community still missing a community centre?
We never had a community centre, ever. [Rob Ford is] a fiscally conservative guy so he doesn’t believe in building that kind of stuff in the neighbourhood. Apparently it’s a waste of money, or a hug-a-thug program, and all that kind of stuff.

For the 11 and 12 year-olds living in Dixon now, what kind of impression has all of this left?
That’s the question we have right now. [Since Project Traveller], people were angry mainly for two reasons: the effect it’s going to have in terms of the community’s [reputation] and what these kids see right now; and B.) The kids that are caught up in the whole justice and religious aspect of it might get radicalized now…

This is not a fair world, I don’t want to be part of a world where a judge or the mayor is smoking crack from my brother or cousin. Then they end up joining a radical group somewhere and go into that kind of stuff. That was the biggest fear in the neighbourhood.

Or kids are upset because, ‘They cuffed my mom.’
I mean, yeah, or, ‘They body-slammed my grandma,’ right? Actually, after the raid happened, they came back with a thing called Project Clean Slate. So basically they come in and broke the doors down, slammed people’s families and everything else. The next day it’s like, if you want a job being a police officer now… If you want to be a cop, here’s the application, we’re hiring.

Your kids want to hang out next Friday, let’s go to a Blue Jays game, right? Let’s do a little BBQ, let’s have a BBQ. How are you going to take me to a game when you just broke my house down? Fix my door first.

It’s nonsense, but I think there were some good cops in that situation who really knew what was going on and did a lot of work building relationships with people. One or two officers I would say made people feel that change was going to happen. But we’ll see how that goes.

Are you hopeful?
The change is already happening… There’s a young girl, Munira Abukar she’s doing it. She was actually born and raised in Ward 2. At 12, she was a tutor. She knew what was going on. At 18, she became part of the Toronto Community Housing Board. She was fighting Rob Ford as part of that board. She graduated from Ryerson, she’s going to law school, she’s running for city council—she’s the real deal. I never knew [someone like her] would come out of that situation. It’s like a flower from a concrete; you don’t see it happen, but she actually came from that. So the future of the area is very secure in terms of people stepping up and making a difference, and hopefully it continues.

Are there any other things that you feel we haven’t touched on?
The video where [Rob Ford] goes crazy. When the story broke, [Rob Ford] sent out people to go find the guys, so I guess someone must have given him my number to call. But he didn’t call my number, [one of his associates] tried to call me… when someone got ahold of me, it was to have a meeting with Ford, [one of his associates, and some] other people. I turned it down. I’m not going to meet on their turf.

[I said,] if they want to talk… let’s do it in a place that I’m comfortable with. They didn't want to do that.

Can you say who the middleman is?
I can’t say who the middleman is. But that person came back to me a few weeks later and he’s like, ‘Yo, this dude [Rob Ford] is pissed. He wants to fight you.’ And I’m like, ‘He wants to what?’ He wants to fight me. Like why would he want to fight me? If he’s got issues that he wants to address, we can sit down like grown men and address the issues and try to resolve it. I’m not trying to get into a fistfight and get arrested again for hitting the mayor.’

So you think he’s talking to you in the video?
I’m pretty sure he’s talking about me in the video. He’s pretty pissed off.

What did you think when you saw that?
When I saw it—I came out of jail, bro—I had to laugh, man. But on the other hand… I took [it] very seriously—that’s a reason why I wanted to come out on the fifth estate... I had to go out there and show my face. I could have done it behind a veil, but I wanted to just let [the Fords] know if I talk about you in private, I’ll talk about you in public as well.

If you did meet with Rob Ford, what do you think the meeting would have been about?
I honestly don’t know. I think he’d probably try to buy me out maybe. Maybe try to intimidate me, I don’t really know. I can’t really call it. But it was kind of to suppress the video and he did a good job at suppressing it. I mean it really got suppressed afterwards.

Well no one’s seen the crack video.
No one’s seen it, exactly, yeah.

Does it still exist within your community?
There’s a million stories out there, so I really can’t call it.

Follow Patrick and Ben on Twitter.

Brave Soul from TK Maxx jacket, Primark T-shirt and jeans, Timberland shoes

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX DE MORA
PRODUCTION: TABITHA MARTIN AND KYLIE GRIFFITHS
Words: Jamie Clifton

MIACHI, SOUTH LONDON (above)

I guess most people would think I had a tough upbringing, but I never saw it that way. I didn’t realize I was in a position of disadvantage until I was in school. Then, I started to realize that I was in a different situation than others. I cultivated this bad attitude.

One day, when I was 11, me and my brother were walking down the street and a man got shot in his face. My mom detected a change in us after that. We got involved in a lot of stupid situations. We had always been brought up to know wrong from right, but I got involved with carrying weapons, drugs, robbing people, robbing shops. I identified it as wrong, but I didn’t feel remorse or guilt.

When Prime Minister David Cameron came in, my mom’s disability money got cut, so she couldn’t work. Her care package was cut, as well. I had this twisted logic that the money I was earning was going towards my family. I was eventually charged with armed robbery. I couldn’t go back to doing those things. I’m studying TV and film, and a lot of it involves theory work, talking about ethics in news and TV production. How can I criticize someone on TV for moral things when I’ve done something like I have to a fellow human being? My mentality now? I just wouldn’t be able to do it.

Thrasher T-shirt, Stromberg beanie

LEE, SOUTHEND

I grew up in Southend in Essex, England, skateboarding, graffitiing—just getting in trouble, really. There was nothing else to do other than fight. You know, “We’re from Southend, they’re from wherever"—completely pointless bullshit. I finally got charged with assault and the use of an offensive weapon. I had a longtime relationship with my girlfriend for around five years. 

She would go out on girls’ nights out and deliberately get guys to chat her up and drop her home. Nothing ever happened. But one day I came back and caught her in the house with one of my mates. I just lost my temper, kicked the door through, and got hold of him. I bashed him up. After that I was so ashamed.

My dad’s a police officer. I rang him up as I drove off and said, “Dad, I’ve really fucked up. I need some advice and help.” So he said the best thing you can do is go and hand yourself in. Two days later I got released on bail and I was told that I can’t go anywhere near them. I carried on with my normal life for the next couple of weeks.

But she came over, started bashing on my door, shouting through my letterbox. When I ignored her, she would tell the police that she had seen me down her street, or that I had called her. That basically got me three strikes, and they put me inside. As you get older, it eventually gets out of your system, as you find more important things in life to keep you focused.

North Face hat, Ralph Lauren top, Primark jeans, Nike shoes

JACK, ESSEX

My mom worked her ass off for us, and did everything in her power to teach us the correct way of living. My dad died when I was nine, which obviously upset me, but being that young I never really know if I understood or not. I always used to hang out with my big brother when my mom was at work, ironically in the police force. When I was starting high school, I was already hanging with the older kids. That was when I started doing minor crime.

I got into dealing a bit of hash here and there—smoking it, too. I got sucked into that whole rudeboy scene. I isolated myself in my tracksuit with my so-called friends around me. I never felt remorse then, it was almost like the worse behaved and more violent we were, the more kudos we’d have among the messed-up minds that we thought were judging us.

Now, I feel a lot of remorse, but it's still my life and I can’t say I would change it. I was on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, when I first got locked up, and I didn’t get the message. I just knew that when I got out, I was out, and happy. All I really wanted to do was make money. The second time I went in, I was close to home with loved ones on the outside. I even drove past my house on a prison transfer! That was the game changer. I knew from that sentence I was done. No more. I walked out that gate and I said to myself I’m never going back. I got home, gave my old friend my phone, which was a pretty busy line at the time, and that was it, no crime since.

I work hard. I have a beautiful girlfriend. I rent my flat, I pay my bills, I have a car. I work all over the planet. Life’s crazy now, but in a good way. I owe it all to my mom and my big sister—they’re the ones who stuck by me. Me and them have always been polar opposites, and they were disgusted by those things I did, but they’re still here chilling with me. That must have been hard for them.

Stone Island top

JORDAN, SOUTH LONDON

Growing up as a young man in public housing, you just get into drug dealing, robbing, or fighting. I was more on the fighting side of things. I think it came from my school having trouble with two other schools nearby. I used to have to walk back on my own to where I live along a route that passed the two other schools. I had to learn to fight, and from there, I started to enjoy it. But it was mainly fighting, more than other crimes, and later on it had to do with soccer violence.

I support Millwall, and a lot of the time when you go to soccer games, even if you don’t fight with other fans, you end up fighting with the police. The police are basically legalized hooligans. They come up to you, smash you over the head, spray gas at you. They’re worse than the fans most of the time. I’ve had a lot of convictions. But what I got sent to prison for was affray, which is like taking part in a riot, and two ABHs (Actual Bodily Harm), which were for fighting in pubs or on the street.

One time, some Jamaican guy came up to me and tried to rob me in Tooting, saying I was a white boy and so on. He pissed me off, and I smashed him up. I ended up getting arrested for it. Now I think, 'Don’t go out of your house thinking bad things are gonna happen. There are a lot of opportunities out there for good things to happen; don’t be one of these people that drag themselves down.' Because that’s what I did. I did it the hard way, but I learned quite early. I got sent to jail at 20—it helped me. I came out thinking, 'This ain’t the life for me,' and I changed from then on.

As an uneasy ceasefire continues to hold in Eastern Ukraine, VICE News returns to Donetsk to follow some of the characters involved in setting up the self-proclaimed state of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).

In early April 2014, pro-Russia rebels seized the regional administration building and other key institutions in Donetsk, expelling Ukrainian officials and raising their own flag. The rebellion here—and other incidents elsewhere—quickly escalated into a bloody civil war that has left over 2,000 people dead and displaced more than a million.

Filmed over six weeks, this documentary follows the chaotic birth of the DPR as it tries to forge a path to independence and closer ties to Russia.

Photo via Flickr user Chris Beckett

For months now, civil servants at the UK's Office of National Statistics (ONS) have been wrestling with Britain’s sex workers. Thanks to their efforts, the first "official" figures were released last week showing how much Britons spend on drugs and prostitution. Which turns out to be quite a lot.

The ONS reckon we spend about £11 billion ($17.8 billion) per year on drugs ($10.8 billion) and prostitution ($7 billion). As the Telegraph pointed out, it’s similar to the total amount Britons spent on wine and beer in 2013—or, as an Iranian news source gleefully noted, similar to the size of the UK agriculture industry.

Why are we suddenly measuring this? In a word, the EU. If you’re a European Union member state, one of the things you have to do is report your gross national income—roughly speaking, how much money your economy makes in a year. That figure gets used as part of the calculation that says how much you have to pay into the EU to fund it. The richer a country you are, the more money you pay in.

Measuring the total amount of money flowing through Britain isn’t easy, and over the years the EU has tried to standardize how countries work it out. One of the big problems has been measuring black markets, which isn’t reported to the tax man for reasons that should be pretty bloody obvious. So as of 2014, member states are expected to estimate the size of two key parts of the black market—illegal drugs and what is called "prostitution activity."

In short, the European Union is sticking its nose into Britain’s sex workers, and potentially changing the amount the UK has to pay in EU funding as a result.

But hang on a minute. If the black market isn’t recorded, how on earth do you measure this stuff in the first place? That challenge was handed down to the ONS, which published an initial report on the effort back in May. The short answer: There’s not much data to go on, what there is looks pretty weak, and trying to come up with a good estimate is extremely tricky.

Taking drugs first, you could look at seizures by the police, as some researchers have done. The problem with that, as the ONS point out, is that drug seizures are sporadic and the government explicitly tells people, “The number of drug seizures made and quantity of drugs seized should not be taken as measures of drug prevalence in England and Wales.” A better approach is to take the number of users reported in various studies, but then you’re dealing with self-reported figures, and people aren’t always honest or accurate in surveys.

Of course even if you know how many people take drugs, you still need to figure out how many, how much they’re paying, and what proportion of drugs are manufactured in the UK. To do this, you have to make a whole bunch of assumptions, some of which are pretty dodgy.

For example, the ONS says, “We assume that the purity-adjusted amount of drugs consumed by the average user remains constant over time. This assumption is probably false, but we have no data to challenge it.” On cannabis, “We assume that half of cannabis sold in the UK is imported and half home-grown. This is an arbitrary assumption.” 

It’s the same for sex work. The ONS used research by Eaves, a charity that focuses on victims of sex trafficking. Eaves estimates that there were 7,000 off-street sex workers in London in 2004. To get a figure for the whole country they just scaled the figures up, assuming the number of prostitutes per person is the same whether you’re in Camden or Cornwall. Then to get figures for 2014, they assumed “that the number of prostitutes has the same pattern through time as the 16+ male population. This is a weak assumption based on the market for prostitutes' services. It is necessary because we have no time series data for the number of prostitutes."

That still doesn’t tell you how much income they’re generating. To get that, researchers looked at the PunterNet escort directory to figure out an average price—assumed to be the same across the whole country – and then made a whole bunch of assumptions based on studies in the Netherlands about how many clients sex workers see in a typical week, and how many weeks are worked over the course of an average year. That’s assumed to have remained the same since 2004. Under the "justification" column for these assumptions, the ONS put down “no information available.”

It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? It’s not that the ONS is bad at this—the officials doing the best they can in the circumstances—but the questions are almost impossible to deal with without a big, national, large-scale effort. That raises an important question: If these figures are largely guesswork and bullshit to begin with, how does it help anyone to include them in the EU’s statistics?

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

Nikki Allen Poe and Chris Goldstein at one of their signature "Smoke Down" protests. Photo by Kimmie Christie

Last Wednesday, activists and reporters gathered at Philadelphia’s City Hall to watch as marijuana got decriminalized. Before laying his John Hancock on the final line of the bill, thus making it official, Mayor Michael Nutter stood at the podium to break down the logic behind the move.

“It is our hope that by decriminalizing marijuana in the city of Philadelphia, we can begin to eliminate a great impediment to many who are otherwise law-abiding citizens trying to lead productive lives,” he said.

Legalization advocates could barely contain their delight at the drastic change in tune from just two months ago, when Nutter railed against the prospect of decriminalization. But what—or who, for that matter—brought him around? 

Nutter gave props to city Councilman Jim Kenney, thanking him for passing “one of the most significant pieces of public policy and legislation“ for the city of Philadelphia. Kenney absorbed the compliment with a cold, nearly imperceptible nod, and then glanced over to the two guys sitting next to me among members of the press.

The crowd at City Hall knew them well. Nikki Allen Poe and Chris Goldstein have made their names as local pro-marijuana agitators. Both are currently on probation for leading hundreds of potheads in a blazing protest on Independence Mall, the grand enclosure surrounding the famed Liberty Bell. What the press scrum didn’t know, or at least didn’t acknowledge, is that these two radicals sparked the political process that made marijuana decriminalization in Philly happen. We were there because of them. As Nutter and Kenney, the elected men in suits, basked in camera flashes, Poe and Goldstein clasped each other’s hands in celebration.

“Fuckin’ A, man,” Poe said to Goldstein, before yelling, “Thank you, Mr. Mayor!” in Nutter’s direction. After a moment, Poe turned to me and whispered, “It’s surreal to pitch all this shit and then hear it coming out of a politician’s mouth.”

Poe and Goldstein are an odd pair. Anyone sizing them up would recognize the suited and booted Goldstein as the straight man and Poe—rocking a baseball hat with juvenile tattoos peeking out of the sleeves of his T-shirt—as the wild card. The stereotypes hold true: Goldstein is a co-chair of the Philly chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and Poe is a comedian and spoof city council candidate who hosts a conspiracy-theory-laden podcast called the Panic Hour.

The two met and bonded over numerous joints in 2011 while camping out on the pavement surrounding City Hall during Occupy Philadelphia. After the movement died down and reforming marijuana laws became a hot-button issue in 2012 (the year Washington and Colorado legalized recreation weed use), Poe and Goldstein focused their efforts on their favorite illegal plant. On October 2 of that year, Goldstein and another activist smoked a joint on Independence Mall to mark the 75th anniversary of the first federal marijuana arrest. That action planted the seed for his next big project.

“I got home that day and Poe was like, ‘Man, we need to do it bigger,’” Goldstein told me.  

Thus Smoke Down Prohibition was born. For the inaugural event in December 2012, Poe and Goldstein gathered about a hundred people to light up simultaneously at 4:20 AM on Independence Mall. The crowd grew for the second iteration a month later, and again for the third. The fourth protest, on April 20, 2013, the international pot holiday, saw nearly 600 Smoke Down participants burning together just a stone’s throw from where the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. That confab drew more attention than previous Smoke Downs, but Poe and Goldstein were undaunted.

“We knew we were breaking the law,” Goldstein said. “We didn’t expect park rangers to hassle us too much. We always stayed for an hour and then left. We always cleaned up after ourselves, and we always did it in the free speech zone.”

But their good manners went unnoticed, and the authorities saw their momentum as a threat. At the following Smoke Down on May 18, while Goldstein was away visiting family, Poe led a crowd to Independence Mall to discover a massive police presence. Hundreds of Philly cops and park rangers placed temporary barricades around the protest area adorned with signs reminding the crowd that illegal drug possession is a crime. Poe, accompanied by libertarian activist Adam Kokesh, proceeded with the protest anyway. The police promptly descended upon the crowd and began detaining protestors. Poe and Kokesh were both arrested and charged with marijuana possession. Independence Mall is part of Independence National Historical Park, which is federal land, so Poe was charged with the federal crime of marijuana possession. He spent five days in prison before being released and tried.

Goldstein returned and decided to press on with the protests, but the presence of the authorities only grew more intense.

“I never knew park rangers had riot gear until Smoke Down Prohibition,” he told me.

This time, park rangers and Philly cops were joined by officers from the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Protective Services, Transit Police, and even US Fish and Wildlife Officers. They arrested Goldstein on federal possession charges.

Poe wound up with a year of probation and Goldstein with two, and both were fined. While going slightly easier on Poe due to the five days he’d already spent in jail, prosecutors came down hard on Goldstein, demanding that he pay a $3,000 fine within 30 days or else be subject to prison time. Both men paid up and remain on federal probation to this day.

Goldstein, Poe, and other activists on the day of Poe's sentencing.

In the wake of their spats with law enforcement, the duo began to eye up more legitimate routes to marijuana legalization. Rather than challenging the dystopian monolith of federal law, they targeted local marijuana regulations. Goldstein attempted to convince Philly police that they should alter their marijuana enforcement protocol in light of the vast racial disparity in the city’s marijuana arrests—83 percent of those charged in 2013 were black, mirroring a nationwide trend. Poe ran for an open City Council seat on a platform comprised of decriminalizing marijuana, dismantling the notorious Philadelphia Parking Authority, and renaming a street after former 76ers star Allen Iverson.

Neither effort had much impact. Poe and Goldstein were two guys with a great idea for Philadelphia, but no sure way to get it through. They had to find someone in city government to take on the cause, but who would listen to two federal criminals with a penchant for public pot-smoking?

Thanks to a combination of luck, smooth talking, and a referral from local organizer Anne Gemmell, Poe and Goldstein landed a meeting with Councilman Kenney, a champion of LGBT rights and likely 2015 mayoral candidate. Goldstein presented the politician with the facts: Those arrested for small amounts of weed are usually people of color, the police burn roughly 17,000 work-hours a year on marijuana crimes, and the local court system wastes $7 million annually on processing these arrests. Moreover, decriminalization could be the first step to mending the frayed relationship between black residents and city police.

Kenney found the arguments compelling enough to pursue a change in the law. With Poe and Goldstein’s collaboration, he and his staff drafted a bill that would sufficiently alleviate the arrest rate—reducing penalties to a $25 ticket for possession of up to 30 grams of pot. (That’s an ounce and two grams, for those of you who don’t buy in bulk.) Kenney quickly gathered strong backing in the City Council. He also began prodding Mayor Nutter for support. In July, Kenney wrote an open letter to the mayor urging him to sign the decriminalization bill. Nutter responded through the press, saying, “It is an insult to the African-American community that all of this discussion and debate is revolving around whether or not black guys can smoke as much... weed as white guys.” Nutter would soon come to regret this baffling oversimplification of the racial disparity in marijuana arrests. He flipped his stance completely in September, indicating that he and Kenney had reached an agreement.

“We want to ensure that the punishment for using or possessing small amounts of marijuana is commensurate with the severity of the crime, while giving police officers the tools they need to protect the health and well-being of all Philadelphians,” Nutter told reporters with Kenney at his side. Ever since, his views on the issue reflect the councilman's, whose stance, in turn, has been shaped by Poe and Goldstein.

So what made Nutter blink? Goldstein theorizes that the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri, this summer shined a light on questionable police practices and race issues all over the country, leading Nutter and Philly’s police commissioner to look at their city's racial disparities more closely. Kenney believes Nutter just didn’t want to continue the slugfest: “I guess he just figured that he would cut bait as opposed to trying to fight this.”

Philly Democratic political consultant Larry Ceisler thinks it was just pragmatism. “[Nutter] still has a year and a half left on his term and he still has another budget to do," he told me. "There are a lot of bigger challenges in the city of Philadelphia than decriminalization of marijuana right now. My guess is that the mayor looked at the bigger picture.” (Nutter's office did not respond to my requests for comment.)

Prior to signing the bill into law, Nutter amended it to include a $100 fine or nine hours of community service for anyone caught smoking weed in public. Besides that, and the familiar compromise of funding an educational campaign to keep people off drugs, Nutter left the bill largely intact. Despite opposition from the highest authority in the city, and against almost all odds, Poe and Goldstein have brought marijuana decriminalization to Philadelphia.

Considering the path of their uphill battle, one wonders if Poe and Goldstein just happened to be in the right place and time, touting marijuana reform just as the city (and country, for that matter) readied itself for what seems like inevitable change. But then I asked Kenney if he ever considered pursuing decriminalization before his meeting with the activists. “I didn’t think much of it at all, really," he replied. I asked if he was aware of the activists’ criminal backgrounds. He laughed. “I looked at their federal charges as their way of protesting what they believe was an unjust law. I wouldn’t exactly call either of them criminals.”

Of course, for the time being, at least, both Nikki Allen Poe and Chris Goldstein remain criminals in the eyes of the federal government. In Philadelphia, however, they are also local heroes. Two days after the signing of the marijuana decriminalization bill, Poe posted the following on his Facebook page:

“I just got a round of applause and a free haircut at the barbershop in my neighborhood because of the weed decriminalization bill. I was also told that I am an honorary African American, although that's not exactly how they put it.”

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One of the few known photos of Thomas Pynchon

Last weekend, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, debuted at the New York Film Festival to fiendishly good reviews. But it was the news that the author would be making a cameo that got the world talking. To Pynchon fans, the prospect of the man himself on screen, photographed, is either the most exciting day since May 8 (a.k.a. Pynchon in Public Day) or a concept as terrifying as being locked in a room and forced to read Hemingway for a week straight.

It all started 51 years ago, in 1963, when George Plimpton in the New York Times published the line: "Pynchon is in his early twenties; he writes in Mexico City—a recluse." It is doubtful if Plimpton, who helped create the Paris Review, knew at the time that he was accidentally kicking off the largest and longest game of Where’s Waldo? ever conceived. Nevertheless, the label has stuck.

Thomas Pynchon is a reclusive author; Thomas Pynchon gives no shit about your interview request; Thomas Pynchon is a cranky old lady by the name of Wanda Tinasky who writes letters to local newspapers for kicks. 

Despite his reputation, the facts of his life are simple and readily available. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. was born in yadda yadda to yadda yadda and yadda yadda and attended yadda yadda before joining the yadda. He married yadda yadda, his literary yadda. He is yadda years old and lives in yadda yadda. He is a reclusive author.

It's generally assumed that because Pynchon does not get photographed by paparazzi falling out of a cab at 4 AM he is therefore an enigma. This is far from the truth. He's not hiding in the woods or refusing to publish new work à la J. D. Salinger; he just doesn't like talking to reporters. While there are only four known photos of Pynchon (and there's no proof that they are even photos of him), he's been rendered as a cartoon in The Simpsons three times in the last decades, which is hardly the action of a paranoid luddite. Rather, he's a vibrant prankster with his finger on the world’s pulse. He knows how to manipulate us. He’s willing to make fun of himself, but refuses to do the same for Homer, whom he describes in one episode's script notes as his role model.  

Simpsons executive producer Matt Selman recently tweeted Pynchon's line notes for his first appearance.

As an April Fool's joke this year, The Paris Review published a fake interview with Pynchon in which he name-dropped Nicolas Cage and Face/Off. Even if a gag, the reference somehow made sense, and it wouldn't be far off to suggest Pynchon would say something similar himself. If there’s one man on the planet capable of portraying Slothrop from Gravity’s Rainbow in all his mania and slow dissolution it’d be him. Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s latest novel, is filled with a kaleidoscopic set of pop culture references, from Hideo Kajima to TOR. He may not be appearing on literary panels and making speeches, but he certainly hasn't shut himself off from the world.

There are dozens of impressive investigative articles and books about Pynchon, published across half a century, that read partly like a John Grisham novel and partly like stalker notes. But these ultimately say more about the pursuer than the pursued. As Andrew Gordon wrote in his essay "Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir," “I don’t know what I can tell you about Thomas Pynchon, but I can tell you something about myself.”

In March of 1977, Jules Siegel published an article in Playboy that attempted to fill in some of the gaps in the life of America’s most curious living author. The piece was titled, "Who Is This Thomas Pynchon… and Why Did He Take Off with My Wife?" In it, Siegel indulged himself and his readers with some creepy and intrusive descriptions about Pynchon’s lovemaking. 

Thanks to that article, we know precisely how Pynchon fucks.

It’s not common to be privy to the precise dimensions of your friend's cock, and it would certainly be a bit odd to write about it. But, according to Siegel, his ex-wife Chrissie described Pynchon as—if you really must know— “a wonderful lover" who was “sensitive and quick” but embarrassed by feminine “boldness” between the sheets.

Those details say more about Siegel—and myself for including them—than Pynchon, just as any detail plucked entirely at random does.

Some more odd facts: Pynchon loves travel and has lived in New York City, Ithaca, Seattle, Mexico, Houston, and Los Angeles. He blames his teeth for social exclusion and enjoys (or enjoyed, I don't know) a breathtakingly good strain of weed named Panama Red. His house was worth just over $1.6 million in 2013. He wrote the vast bulk of Gravity’s Rainbow wasted in some capacity. He’s an avid fan of pigs, and signs off his letters with cute drawings of them. He once kept a piñata pig named Claude at his house in LA. He based a gruesome section of his debut novel V around a Jewish princess having a rhinoplasty because the author was once dumped for being a Catholic. 

Pynchon inscribing a copy of Gravity's Rainbow for his friends Phyllis and Fred Gebauer. Image via UCLA Extension Writers' Program

While these aren't the sort of details that would emerge in a respectable Q&A session, it isn’t a moral fault of Siegel—or anyone else—to mention them; they are, after all, the sort of juicy gossip every human being trades on. But they do risk giving you a false impression of the author. He's no more the sum of his publicly known quirks than you or I. 

Mind you, at least Pynchon himself has remained—unlike David Foster Wallace’s literary legacy, which has been consistently polluted by his perceived personality—unsullied. 

The author's lack of center is what gets us talking. We read his novels for clues and look through obscure fan forums for theories, because the stories we create for ourselves always surpass those of reality. Oz was only great before Toto drew back the curtain, after all.

What I worry about is that his film debut represents the start of something, a great world tour or at least a public unveiling. If he doesn’t cohere to what we imagine in our minds—and how could he?—we’re going to feel disappointed. Someone might recognize him on the street as he wolfs down a foot-long sub and shoot questions about politics toward him, and he’ll speak with his mouth full and ranch dressing is going to go absolutely everywhere—onto his shoes, his sports jacket—and it’ll make its way onto YouTube and everyone will laugh and my heart will break. Then he’ll be on reality TV jerking off a pig.

Currently, Pynchon lives in New York. Manhattan alone has an estimated 8,000 CCTV cameras, so it’s quite likely that the American government has a manila folder somewhere in Area 41 containing thousands of photos of him picking his nose. My hope is that they are never released. While it’s not unimaginative to assume that Pynchon gets up to the same kind of stuff as other brilliant men of 77—hanging out with his wife, listening to the Beach Boys, checking his prostate—it’s far more interesting to fill those gaps in yourself.

Follow David Whelan on Twitter.

The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa began in Guinea in December 2013. From there, it quickly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Cases also appeared in Senegal and Nigeria, and there was another outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, Liberia is at the center of the epidemic, with more than 3,000 cases of infection. About half of them have been fatal. 

As President Barack Obama announced that he would be sending American military personnel to West Africa to help combat the epidemic, VICE News traveled to Monrovia to spend time with those on the front lines of the outbreak.

Above, Games auteur Hidetaka Suehiro, a.k.a. Swery. All illustrations by Stephen Maurice Graham

It’s easy to view video games as one gigantic cash-money maker, with mega-proportioned teams of energy drink-fuelled tech-heads coding umpteen hours a day to deliver the triple-A hits that top sales charts. You know: Call of Duty, FIFA, Battlefield, Halo, Destiny, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto. The franchises that destroy all before them—or, in the case of Destiny, hope to.

Scratch at the surface of this perception, though, and just like any other medium where a select group swallows up the most significant audience percentage, freaks emerge from the depths: singular visionaries, crafting inimitable experiences. We’ll call them "auteurs" for the sake of convenience, but of course these games directors have teams around them, willing members of a digital cult.



The trailer for 'Splatoon'

It’s true that one can look to certain companies as only ever following their most impassioned paths—Nintendo makes Nintendo games and Nintendo games alone, and even at a stage where the Wii U isn’t exactly selling like hot cakes, its designers are maintaining faith in their established methods. Hence forthcoming games like Splatoon, a co-operative shooter where the intention is not to kill but to claim territory with paint guns (I’ve played it, four on four, and it’s great), and Mario Maker, where they invite the player to design their own Mario stages and, presumably, share them online. Both are very Nintendo: family friendly, but appealing to the curious of any age.

Smaller studios have stood out in the past, too, and will continue to do so: Insomniac Games, based in California, has the colorful Xbox One exclusive Sunset Overdrive out on October 31st, which follows their sterling work on the Ratchet & Clank and Resistance games. (After a ten-minute hands-on with Sunset Overdrive at this year’s EGX, I’m pumped to see more of its gooey silliness.) But when games come out that resonate with the personality of just one person, a sole captain whose calls have carried through their crew and into the final product, resembling nothing else at retail, that’s when gaming truly turns from a mass-produced, mass-consumed pastime into something rather more niche.

The launch trailer for 'D4'

“Niche” being entirely the most appropriate adjective for Swery, aka Swery65, real name Hidetaka Suehiro. A writer and director for a handful of unremarkable PlayStation 2 titles, such as the Metal Gear Solid–inspired Spy Fiction, Swery made his mark on gaming’s global consciousness with 2010’s bizarre detective-mystery-cum-survival-horror game Deadly Premonition—a release that divided critics to the extent of IGN awarding it a 2/10 while Destructoid considered it to be perfect. But enough of the past, as Swery is back, with Dark Dreams Don’t Die, a.k.a. D4.

An Xbox One exclusive that slipped out a few weeks ago, D4 is just as befuddling as Deadly Premonition is celebrated/castigated, featuring bizarre characters and surreal situations aplenty. The player is David Young, a private investigator looking into the murder of his wife who, because this is a video game, can travel through time when the game allows him to—i.e., when he encounters an object that magically activates this power. Visually, it’s not a showcase for its platform’s capabilities, but its cel-shaded style is at least a progression from the PS2-like textures of Deadly Premonition. Delivered episodically, D4 isn’t the complete package yet, with three episodes available now, and Swery not exactly forthcoming on how many more will follow.

That’s assuming they do, at all. Sales of D4 have been atrocious. Its director has stated that the series will continue “if the fans like what they see”—but so far it seems like very few potential players even know of its existence, with week one sales somewhere in the region of 10,000 according to this Neogaf thread. Fans of the game, and Swery in general, are encouraging others to share their own support for D4, with the hashtag #saveD4 already well in use on Twitter. Sales for Deadly Premonition were never completely clear, but its director said in 2013 that it was “no economic success." Makes you wonder why Microsoft took the punt that they did on him with D4, given the Xbox One is proving a flop in Swery’s homeland.

Hideo Kojima

D4 nevertheless represents an auteur’s first leap of faith into the new console market, exclusively—unlike Hideo Kojima’s cross-generation approach with both 2014’s Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (more on that here) and next year’s MGSV "proper," The Phantom Pain. He will go completely new-gen with the help of Hollywood, though, as Silent Hills—the next entry in the Silent Hill survival horror series, with a release date still very much TBD—pairs the Japanese director, designer, writer and producer with Guillermo del Toro. Perhaps you’ve already seen its playable teaser, P.T.—some 30 million people have, whether watching or participating, and most of them have shit themselves while doing so.

It’s with Metal Gear Solid that Kojima has made his name—and it’s the series that he’ll be remembered for long after he’s retired. The blueprint for all stealth-action games since, the original Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation, released in 1998, is a six-million-selling classic that holds up remarkably well today, providing the naturally archaic aesthetics don’t upset you. On the downside, it was an introduction to Kojima’s bloated cut-scenes, which reached a nadir with Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns Of The Patriots (2008), featuring one unplayable sequence that runs for 71 minutes. That’s 71 minutes of video, in a game. Wanna see it for yourself? Be my guest: Here’s the whole eight and a half hours of MGSIV cut scenes:

Oh Christ, Kojima, just get to the bloody point

There are plenty more highly individualistic designers readying their next products. David Braben has Elite: Dangerous out in the wild for (updated) beta testing as I type, and holy space-age pirate Jesus it looks incredible, while Goichi Suda, aka Suda 51, has his Grasshopper Manufacture team beavering away on the bloody Let It Die, a free-to-play PlayStation 4 exclusive due sometime in 2015. Always divisive, Suda’s track record just about features more quirky highs than derivative lows, with Killer7 and No More Heroes winners—critically, at least. Yet, the word so far on Let It Die isn’t particularly positive, Bloody Disgusting’s Adam Dodd writing, “Copious amounts of gore and violence can be fun, but they’re not enough to carry a game.”

At least the public knows Suda is up to something, and even if Let It Die bombs, you can guarantee he’ll have something sticky, saucy, and sublimely his up a sleeve. The same can’t be said for God of War creator David Jaffe, who’s been quiet since the 2012 version of Twisted Metal for the PS3, or Ken Levine, the BioShock director who closed his Irrational Games studio in February 2014 and hasn’t announced any new project since, beyond confirming he’ll be pursuing “smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavors." Not knowing what these guys are up to is fine though, as what kills the fans is when a favored talent reveals an exciting new project only for it to sit in limbo for years.

Fumito Ueda

What we’re asking: Fumito Ueda, please, where the hell is The Last Guardian? Apart from a gig as animator on 1997’s WARP-developed Enemy Zero, Ueda (and his Team Ico crew, part of Sony’s SCE Japan Studio) has brought just two games to completion, both as director and designer: 2001’s Ico and 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus. I don’t need to detail the brilliance of these games, surely, which is why, in turn, expectation for The Last Guardian remains massive even though the last footage anyone saw of it was ages ago. All anyone from Sony will offer on it is that more will follow “when we are ready." Said Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida in August 2014: “We have a time frame in our mind, and the team is making great progress, but still not to the point that we can say, here you go.”

What was a PS3 game expected in 2011 has since become, presumably, a PS4-only affair with a release date of strictly TBC. Yoshida has revealed that The Last Guardian has been “completely re-engineered," after the tech of the PS3 presented Team Ico with insurmountable obstacles. In late 2013, Edge interviewed Ueda himself, who apologized for the game’s delay, adding: “In the case of The Last Guardian, my creative work was mostly finished a long time ago, but the details of when, where, and how it will be completed are beyond my control.” Ueda is technically a freelancer these days, albeit one contracted to see out his responsibilities on The Last Guardian.

It’s impossible to say when his job will be finished. Shadow of the Colossus took three years to develop whereas, so far, its successor has been in the works since 2007. It might be that it never comes out, which would be tragic, frankly, given the standards set by its predecessors. If Swery can find a way to follow Deadly Premonition with further kooky creations, surely the gaming gods will see fit to bless us with what looked, in its 2009 trailer, to be another beautifully unique expression of immersive interactivity.

Or perhaps The Last Guardian’s costs are simply too great, and its commercial chances too slim, for Sony to go for gold—despite assurances that it will, one day, come out. After all, when you’ve got an average CoD game like 2013’s Ghosts setting sales standards for "next-gen" consoles, why take the risk on something like The Last Guardian failing at retail?

The future for gaming’s auteurs might therefore lie completely outside of the mainstream, in stylised F2P slashers and download-only episodic experiences. This is a business, first and foremost—cash-money needs making, and guns traditionally sell better than small boys forging friendships with gigantic beasts in mystical lands.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Sam Howzit

In the Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.

Fred Van Lente speaks with the rapid buoyancy of an enthusiast, and he can't help but go off on a series of tangents before navigating to whatever his point is. A popular culture maven, he attended film school but was frustrated by the inefficiency of the creative process. Now a writer for Marvel, Valiant, and other comics publishers, he tells me he became a professional comics writer “when [he] was fired from [his] day job at the United Nations.”

As serialization has spread to other popular media—most notably television—the vocabulary of comic books has begun to permeate mainstream culture as well. Van Lente, who is intimately familiar with the fascinating and bizarre construct that is mainstream comics storytelling, sat down with me to explain some of the terms that make this complex world easier to break down and understand.

Fred Van Lente. Courtesy of Fred Van Lente

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Brackets denote paraphrasing. Everything else is in Fred Van Lente's words.

Done-in-one: n. A single-issue story.

Anthology: n. A collection of stories by a variety of creative teams.

Miniseries: n. A comics title with a definitive endpoint, usually three to six issues.

Maxiseries: n. The same as a mini-series, only eight to 12 issues. Usage: Used heavily in the 1980s. The most famous maxiseries of all time is Watchmen, which originally ran as 12 serialized issues.

Title: n. Synonym for "series,"  e.g., Amazing Spider-Man, Detective Comics.

Line: n. An imprint connecting a particular set of titles under a specific form of branding, e.g., Marvel Adventures [presents stories for] younger readers.

Universe: n. A set of titles connected by the characters all operating in the same world.

Crossover: n. A storyline that goes across multiple titles. Usually, these days, a crossover has its own title (an “event book”) as well. The first comic book crossover was 1940's Marvel Mystery Comics #8. The two most popular features, Human Torch and Submariner, fought each other. From that moment on, [crossovers] became standard operating procedure.

Classical crossover: n. Two books [intersecting]

Event: n. [A crossover] that’s happening to the entire universe, the entire line, simultaneously. Almost all the titles participate in that.

Event Book: n. A miniseries or maxiseries [containing the central story of an event].

Tie-in: n. The individual issue or issues of an [ongoing] title that link into a specific event (unique to events as opposed to crossovers).

Red Skies Event: n. A disparaging term meaning [a book is linked to] a tie-in just to trick somebody into buying it. Etymology: A reference to Crisis on Infinite Earths, when all the skies in the DC titles [became] red.

Continuity: n. The idea that each story is a building block of a larger fictional universe.

Reboot: n. When take a pre-existing franchise [or fictional universe] and you wipe everything that happened clean and you start from scratch [usually with the same characters]. Most reboots are also a relaunch. e.g., Casino Royale [is a reboot of the James Bond franchise.]

Soft Reboot (or In-Continuity Reboot): n. When you change some [details] but not others. It’s usually contained to certain characters within an ongoing continuity, e.g., Spider-Man: One More Day, where Mephisto, using his demonic powers, managed to undo Mary Jane and Peter’s marriage so that nobody had memory of it.

Full Reboot: n. Rebooting the entire line.

Relaunch: n. When you take an existing franchise—you do not break from continuity—and you start it over with a new #1, usually just an excuse to get new eyes on the series.

Retcon: n. Short for “retroactive continuity." A "fix" or "patch" to continuity that smooths over something that happened that either the writer doesn’t like, or wasn’t interesting, or doesn’t support the current story.

Death (of a character): n. A kick in the ass to continuity. It’s peaks and valleys. You kill somebody off, you’re getting a lot of eyes on that. Then when you bring them back, you’re getting a lot of eyes on that. The only unkillable character is the one with extremely good sales.

First Appearance: n. [The comic in which a character is] first seen, e.g., in Batman’s first appearance, called "The Case of the Criminal Syndicate,” it was never explained who he was.

Origin Story: n. [The story in which we see] where a character came from. (Note: Many origins are also first appearances. In Spider-Man’s first appearance, [Amazing Fantasy #15], you meet Peter Parker, he gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and Uncle Ben gets shot.)

Pacing: n. The rate at which storytellers dole out "beats," or distinct movements of story progression. [Early] comics were about 64 pages long and had four to eight stories per issue. In the mid 60s, [Marvel] pioneered stretching out stories across multiple issues when their heavy hitters, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, wanted to flex their storytelling muscles in titles like Fantastic Four and Dr. Strange. Now story pacing is set by the current economics of the market, which is four to six issues followed by a collected edition.

Decompression: n. Dragging the story out way longer than it really [deserves], partly to sell more comics, partly to lessen the burden of the creative team.

Idle: n. The curse word of comics. Idle means no one’s working, meaning a penciller doesn’t have script, an inker doesn’t have pencils, a colorist doesn’t have inks, a letterer doesn’t have pencils. It almost always results in a domino effect.

Six-Month Week: n. It takes a penciller six weeks to finish [each] issue. You start 12 weeks in advance. What that means is that, in four to five issues, that artist will have to be replaced.

THE TAKEAWAY

As popular culture continues to recycle and regurgitate itself, knowing the difference between a reboot and a soft relaunch might come in handy. These narrative terms are also fun to apply in the real world: Compare your friend’s first appearances to their origin stories. Or relaunch your life by quitting your job, moving to a new apartment, and legally changing your name. And idle is a handy way to describe any workflow problem that throws a whole system off, resulting in a waste of time or a late, cold pizza.

FURTHER READING

To learn more about the process of making comics, read Make Comics Like the Pros by Fred Van Lente and Greg Pak. To learn more about the history of comics, read The Comic Book History of Comics by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey.

Follow Nat Towsen on Twitter.

Stephen King’s recent book, 11/22/63, is about a high school teacher who travels through a time portal in the pantry of a greasy spoon diner to the late 50s in order to kill Lee Harvey Oswald and prevent JFK’s assassination. King's use of time travel in 11/22/63 is more than just a plot device. The way that the novel's English teacher protagonist (a job that King had before he wrote his first book, Carrie), travels back from the 2000s to 1958 is a metaphor for King’s ability to revisit the same genres and time periods without ever getting stale.

I wanted the rights to the book, but J.J. Abrams has them and is adapting the novel into an online miniseries. I love J.J. Abrams as much as the next person (though I bet there are some pretty ardent Lost fans that I’ll never match in fervor) but come on. That guy gets to do everything. I’ve been accused of being ubiquitous, of occupying too much cultural ground, of being a pop culture hog, like a guest at a wedding who sticks his dirty fingers in every cake and pie.

Maybe that’s all true. But Abrams has had a few TV series. He took on Star Trek, and is now doing my personal favorite, Star Wars. He co-authored a meta-novel called S., which involves a master narrative that serves as the basis for a meta-narrative told though handwritten margin notes between a grad student and an undergraduate student. Yes, he has the track record and know-how, so I understand how he got the rights to 11/22/63, but still, why do I get so much flack for doing it all? I ain’t the only one.

My favorite King material deals with his home state of Maine, the 1950s, madness, or all these things at once—books like It, Different Seasons (which contains the stories “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” “Apt Pupil,” and “The Body,” which were all adapted into movies), Carrie, The Shining, and 11/22/63. These books do what horror and science fiction do best: They talk about who we are as humans, how we deal with each other, and our psychology, through the horror genre, in order to get at something even more true. Stories like “The Body” and “Apt Pupil” don’t even have any fantastical elements, but the death and violence at their at their centers bring out the darker subtexts of their coming-of-age plots.

It uses a mad clown in order to get at the deep social forces among people living in in close proximity to each other. Carrie and The Shining are brilliant manifestations of bullying and alcoholism with the added complexity of the supernatural. The beauty of such allegories is that they are supported by their own rules—the fantasy worlds work whether you read into them or not. They don’t depend on the allegorical level.

11/22/63 does everything King is good at and more. His time travel premise allows him to go back to one of his best eras for subject matter: the 1950s. Of course he doesn’t need his characters to time travel in order to write about the 50s. He could just set his story in the past, as he has done many times before, but the time travel aspect allows us to go on the ride with King the writer as he set-designs the past. In stories like “The Body” and It, King does the same period scene-setting, but he isn’t able to call attention to it in a meta way like he does in 11/22/63. In the books that simply take place in the past, King can give us a plethora of details: the duck’s ass haircuts, the slang, the old cars like Sunbeams and Chryslers, the dated racism—but he can’t underline them with the characters’ reactions as he does with his time traveler in 11/22/63.

When the school teacher goes back to 1958, he can marvel at the ease that everyone uses the terms “Jewed” and “Gypped”; he can savor the taste of milk, lobster, and beef compared to their adulterated equivalents in the 2000s; he can be surprised at the lack of all the online amenities that he’s used to and marvel at his own dependence on the electronic universe.

King is one of our greatest storytellers, and, by incorporating time travel into 11/22/63, he is able to go back to one of his many creative wells and again find something original. I’m sure J.J. Abrams, as the torchbearer for the Trekkies and now the Lucas legacy, will be the perfect shepherd for King at his best.

As a straight woman in the online dating world, I have discovered that men can be creepy. I’m sure there’s a men’s rights activist out there right now clutching his fedora and angrily shouting, “Not all men, m’lady!” So I am going to address that right now: Yeah, duh. No shit. In fact, I’ve actually dated some of the men who haven’t approached me online in a moronic manner. Only later did I find out how moronic they were.

My inbox is flooded daily with strangers asking me questions like, “Can I suck a cucumber out of your butt?” and “Biggest dick you’ve sucked?” Every message reads like something a right-wing political cartoonist would have Bill Clinton say in the late 90s. I started to chronicle these messages on my Instagram account, because laughing about it helped me deal with the pain, which is the only way to solve any of my problems. That’s basically why I became a stand-up comedian.

Before I knew it, I gained a small following. People were interested in my grotesque dating life, but then I started getting messages from angry men saying the messages were my fault—I must have somehow been leading them on, tricking them into sending me such messages. Sorry, but my dating profiles are genuine—except for the part where I say I worship Satan.

Guys, I’m actually on your side. Kind of. I want you to have successful dating lives. Kind of. I think the real issue here is that you are being misguided, probably by horrible pick-up artist message boards and your horny friends. Instead of asking other men how to approach women online, how about you get some advice from an actual woman?

If All You Want Is a Hook-Up, Make That Clear (But Not in a Porny Way) 

This goes for Tinder, especially. Tinder has confused the crap out of people. Is it a hook-up app, or is it something more? What’s the end game? Not enough people do this, but I think you really should say what you’re looking for. Just some sex? OK, that’s fine. A relationship? That’s fine, too. At this point, I wouldn’t be offended if, after having some conversation, a man revealed to me that all he wants is to have sex. I would most likely decline, but I wouldn’t think he’s a bad person. There’s a difference between talking to someone and them eventually saying, “I’m going to be honest with you, I only want a casual hook-up” versus being greeted with “Let me fuk that asshole.” Come on, at least spell fuck right.

And whatever weird porn fantasy you’re trying to live out, stop.

Also, stop telling us you can make us come. You probably can’t.

Oh and for the love of god, stop telling us that normally you’re shy or that usually you are not so forward. Not only do we know this is bullshit, but it does not make us feel good to be the exception to your usually, and normally.

The way I read this: Normally, I don the facade of a decent human being who doesn’t approach women in such a vile manner. However, one look at your profile and I thought, “She looks desperate enough to engage in intercourse with me right now.” In this guy’s defense, one of my pictures is of me crying while eating a burrito.

Don’t Call Us “Cutie,” “Sexy,” or “Babe”

Calling a woman you don’t know “sexy” or “cutie” is not as flattering as you might think. You become the catcalling construction worker of the internet. Then there’s “babe.” Babe bothers me on many levels. First off, it’s the name of a pig from a popular children’s film. That pig, while he was alive, made more money than I will ever make in my lifetime. It’s also very close to sounding like "baby," which is the title of a Justin Bieber song. Justin Bieber is currently someone who makes more money than I will ever make in my lifetime. More importantly, an early definition of babe is literally, “an inexperienced or naive person.” This, if you didn’t know, is demeaning. So, even if I somehow manage to make more money than swine, or a fictional pig named Babe, this word would still make me cringe.

The only exception is if I’m dating Ted Logan from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He can call me whatever he wants.

Don't Tell a Horrible Joke

Yes, humor is attractive. However, copy-and-pasting a joke from some men’s humor website is not you showcasing how funny you are. On multiple occasions I have gotten this couch gag, which unfortunately has nothing to do with The Simpsons:

This joke is funny because not only does he not want to use a condom during sex with a stranger (which greatly heightens his risk of getting and spreading sexually transmitted infections), but he also wants to keep his sperm inside the woman he is having unprotected sex with so she could very likely get pregnant. It’s a classic bit, actually. The real issue here is, Chaplin did it better.

Then there’s this dead baby joke. Fortunately, I have only received this once:

This guy is not only a pedophile, but a cannibal to boot! That’s like finding a lawyer who went to med school.

Stop Sending This Message

This is a popular one guys are mass-sending. I have a strong feeling that whichever PUA site started this one was definitely trolling. Saying you’re not a creep almost instantly makes you a creep, especially if you later use the words “squirt” and “uncalibrated.”

Don’t Be an Asshole If We Don’t Respond

Sometimes on Tinder, it’s a match and that's as far as it goes. I have endless matches who I’ve never spoken to and have never spoken to me. Some matches will send me a message, and get angry if I don’t respond. For a few, it only took them a couple of hours to yell profanities at me. Don’t take it personally, and don’t make yourself look worse by flipping out on a total stranger.

Don’t Send Dick Pics

Tinder thought it would be a good idea to have a Snapchat-esque feature called “Moments.” The concept is that you take a picture and that picture goes out to all the people that you matched with. Those people see the picture, and swipe left if they don’t like it, right if they do. Most "Moments" are selfies, or pictures of dogs, or meals, or erect penises.

Like Snapchat, there is also the option to write messages on your pictures or draw something. Thanks to Tinder, I have seen more than one dick overflowing with heart-shaped sperm.

Straight men: You need to stop thinking that your penis is attractive. Do you know how many lunch breaks you’ve ruined? Just face the facts. The sight of your veiny, erect penis does nothing for us. We will never see your penis and get wet. That’s why foreplay exists.

If you do want to send a horny pic, show us other parts of your body. I can see myself enjoying visuals of a nice man-butt, or a hairy chest. Better yet, a picture of you fully clothed, buying me whiskey.

Don’t Try to Make Us Sing a Journey Song

This is self-explanatory.

Don’t Ask Too Many Questions or Make Your Message Too Long

All this does is make the potential responder feel like they just got a homework assignment. When the questions are too specific or personal, it also comes off as odd. Do you want to go on a date or steal my credit card information? Starting with a simple “hello” might be boring, but going paragraphs further than that is just as boring—especially if you’re just talking about your day. It’s reminiscent of having to hear my mom talk about the pillows she bought on sale. I don’t want anyone I could potentially have sex with to remind me of my mom.

Now you know some of the things you shouldn’t do. What should you do? Be nice, genuine, avoid graphic sex talk, and save the dick pics for at least the fourth date. Also, never forget that online dating will always be dismal. At the end of the day nothing will change this crushing fact. Perhaps with this guide, it will help relieve just a little bit of the misery.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

These guys can't do anything right lately. Photo via Flickr user Spencer H. Johnson

Ever since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in January, the Democrat has made it his mission to repaint the public image of the New York City Police Department. But the outrage that plagued former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration hasn’t exactly been confined to the dustbin of history. In July, the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man stopped for selling “loosies”—individual, untaxed cigarettes—served as a horrific reminder that the NYPD is still comprised at least in part of sadistic jerks. That episode was made all the worse by de Blasio's follow-up advice that if the cops come around, your best bet for survival is to just chill out and let them arrest you.

The notorious stop-and-frisk program is slowly winding down, but the boys in blue can’t seem to let go of old-school brutality. This despite heightened media scrutiny since unarmed teenager Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, over the summer. (Massive protests are expected there this weekend.)

Just last week, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters hat he had it out for bad cops—“the brutal, the corrupt, the racist, the incompetent”—and even showed his department a video of cops beating the shit out of people as a warning. But if these past few days have served as any indication, Bratton—whose "broken wndows" policing mantra holds that we should go afer low-level, quality-of-life offenses like subway panhandling—has his work cut out for him.

Tuesday

Late one August night in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Kahreem Tribble, 16, was apprehended by the police for having 17 baggies of weed on him. He was arrested, and later pleaded guilty to the violations. But on October 7, a video surfaced in which Tribble is seen getting punched and then pistol-whipped by two cops during the arrest. A third officer can be spotted idling nearby, watching his colleagues treat Tribble to a broken jaw. The trio are now under investigation, and, according to DNAInfo, Commissioner Bratton is “angered and embarrassed by it.” 

That video came on the heels of the Garner family announcing that they will be suing the city and the eight police officers involved in his death for $75 million. It's worth noting that chokehold complaints against the NYPD are the highest they’ve been in a decade.

Wednesday

In early June, Marcel Hamer, 17, was walking home from school in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood when a plainclothes cop approached the black teen and accused him of smoking marijuana. “It’s just a cigarette, mister!” Hamer can be heard pleading in the video, which was released to the Brooklyn Paper. He then got thrown on the floor and punched in the head for no good reason. The family is suing the NYPD for causing brain damage.

Also on Wednesday, the New York TImes reported that plainclothes officers have arrested some 60 people in the Port Authority Bus Terminal’s second floor bathroom for "public lewdness." Apparently, the undercovers like to wait at the urinals, on the lookout for masturbators. The accused, who are being represented by the Legal Aid Society, claim they were just pissing and they've been victimized by overzealous cops.

Thursday

Lamard Joye, 35, was in Coney Island celebrating his birthday last month when cops stopped him to conduct a search. Soon after, as the video above shows, an unidentified police officer took a wad of cash from Joye’s back pocket—$1,300, he claims—and then pepper-sprayed him when he asked questions. The Brooklyn DA’s office is investigating the matter, reported the Daily News on Thursday, but Joye still hasn't seen a cent of his money.

Later in the day, it came out that a local cable news team’s camera was broken by police because they dared to film on a public sidewalk. Seriously. And this was layered aggression, too: The NY-1 reporters were interviewing African-American students who had reportedly been told to get out of posh Park Slope by cops immediately after leaving their own school.

Capping off what has been a PR shitshow of a week, the Brooklyn DA’s office vowed Thursday to look into all these “troubling” videos. The US Justice Department is also considering a request by six members of Congress to look into the NYPD’s broken windows doctrine, which critics say has the effect—intended or not—of criminalizing being black or brown in New York.

There's still plenty of time left for Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton to steer things in the right direction. But they've got a hell of a long way to go.

John Surico is a Queens-based freelance journalist. His reporting can be found in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter.

Photos by the author

Cairo is quiet on Friday mornings, but 21 miles to the west, in Birqash, the camel marketplace is buzzing from the break of dawn. 

When I visited recently, I could hear sticks as they whipped through the air and cracked on strained, burdened flesh. The beasts nearly trampled passersby as they attempted to escape beatings. It looked chaotic but the camel drivers knew what they were doing. Bidders—mostly butchers, some collectors, a few illegal racers who operate in Sinai—entered in droves. The way in wasn't pretty. It smelled putrid. Camel corpses were strewn in small piles. They had survived the 40-day journey from Somalia and Sudan only to expire here.

"If a camel is sick," one camel seller said, "it's easier to kill it before it makes the others sick as well." Nearby, a dead animal festered, its neck cleanly, deeply slit.

Sellers normally control the camels by tying their legs together in sets of three or four. Hitting one forces the group to trot ahead, but sometimes the camels try to run away and the drivers stop them by surrounding them with sugar cane batons raised in the air. The camels that don't do as they're told get hit harder.

"Dance! Dance!" one boy shouted as he and two others struck a camel. It bayed in pain as the preteens laughed, twisting left, then right, and eventually spinning as it was driven against a wall. Having one leg tied up didn't make it any easier. The father of one of the boys said they hit it so the bidders could see the camel from every angle. "But really only the teeth matter," he said. "Check the teeth, and you'll know if the camel is healthy."

A single hole-in-the-wall eatery in the marketplace served mashed fava beans and ta'amiya (falafel), staples of the Egyptian diet. A few men sat in the shade and sipped cups of tea as they traded stories from the camel route. Visitors yelled out bids: Adults go for around 11,000 Egyptian pounds (a little more than $1,500); juveniles are worth half that. White camels go for much more because they are prized for their fairer fur. Whenever a winning bid was secured, the camel was untethered and driven to a separate area where marks were spray-painted on the side of its hump.

Symbols were already carved into rumps to indicate ownership. The camel market seemed to have its own written language, a private code understood by the camel sellers and a man in a booth who recorded all transactions in a single tattered ledger. Butchers had eight days to clear their debt. Everyone else needed to lay down stacks of hard cash immediately. The market operates on trust, and millions of Egyptian pounds can change hands before noon on a busy Friday. 

When it was time to be loaded onto the overcrowded bed of a pickup truck, the camels fought back. They screamed and yelled and kicked as their tails were pulled, their heads were smacked, their balls were jabbed, and their hides were pushed. Some camels shit on the men handling them. Others just shed tears and cried out to the herd.

In his book Camel Meat and Meat Products, Isam T. Kadim points out that “there are few specialized dromedary camel slaughtering plants in the world because of the limited production and the low per capita consumption of camel meat.” There are few regulations on the slaughter of camels, which leaves space for the kind of animal abuse that can be witnessed in Birqash.

Harsh as it may be, the camel market of Birqash plays an important role. Though camel is more commonly consumed in Somaliland and Ethiopia, some Egyptians eat it as well—it's the cheapest red meat in Egypt, and for a country where many live in poverty, the protein trucked in from Birqash is much-needed sustenance. Two years ago, when there were concerns about contracting foot and mouth disease from eating cow, many Cairenes switched to eating camel. The cheaper meat has traditionally been seen as healthier option than beef, and some say camels yield other benefits as well. When I was living in the West Bank, a Bedouin man once offered me a glass of camel milk. "It's like Viagra," he said. "Drink this and you'll last all night." 

Back in Cairo, I stopped in a butcher shop to ask about the price of camel meat. The butcher laughed and said only the poor eat camel; the rest eat beef, if they can afford it. Butchers in Cairo never sell both for fear of being accused of mixing the meats and overcharging customers. To locate a kilo of camel, I had to head to Imbaba, a poorer neighborhood west of the Nile.

Forty Egyptian pounds (about $5.50) bought me a kilo, or 2.2 pounds. Food prices have been rising for years, but wages haven't increased with them, so many households have trouble feeding themselves. The butcher in Imbaba told me business had been on the decline.

I took the sack of raw meat to a restaurant and asked them to cook it for me. They made kebabs out of the camel meat, and grilled the skewers with a variety of fresh vegetables, all seasoned perfectly. It was lovely—rich, with plenty of fat to lend it flavor. It tasted like beef but slightly gamey, not unlike buffalo or even ostrich.

The treatment of camels in Birqash is certainly cruel and offensive, but likely no worse than what goes on anywhere else in the world. Factory farming is a an arguably worse practice, because it harms the animals while damaging the environment. It can be harrowing to see animals getting beaten and abused, but it's not as if the pigs and chickens that wind up on Western tables live happy lives and die in their sleep. 

In Imbaba, I asked the waiters if they would ever eat camel. "I have before," one said, "but I wouldn't again." Why not? "It's for poor people. I'd rather eat chicken or turkey or beef."