All photos courtesy of the author

Muay Thai kickboxing is one of the hardest contact sports in the world. I know from firsthand experience; for nearly a decade I was a nak muay (kickboxer) in Bangkok. My wife worked for the UK's Department for International Development and we got posted to Thailand in October 2003. Rather than spend all day converting my Bhat into Singha at the Queen Vic, a pub in the British Embassy, I booked into Rompo Gym, a professional stable in the heart of Bangkok’s slaughterhouse district. 

I’d been a nak muay since I was 19, studying “Dutch style” in the gyms of rainy Manchester and London's East End. But in the heart of Bangkok’s professional, organized scene, I had to unlearn what had been learned in the West. I also had to shed the beer fat and man up. Over the course of eight years, ten months, three weeks, and five days, I was to learn much about the “art of eight limbs” and life as an undercard fighter—Muay Thai's equivalent of a support act.

Rompo Gym was a filthy rat hole that backed onto a series of the city’s shanty dwellings. It was love at first sight and I love it still. Fighters from all over the world came to Rompo Gym because they could get title fights at big venues and live out their dreams. But it was also known as “the mafia gym” in Muay Thai circles.

The first lesson I learned was that the toughest, trickiest opponents to contend with were outside the ring. “Mr. Pek” was our promoter back then. With 114 fights to his name, he'd been a superstar champ in the 1970s and was now a fight promoter in charge of setting up and paying for everything involved in a Muay Thai boxing match. Mr. Pek was top of the food chain, and he shat on and hustled from everybody.

One Rompo alumnus, a farang (Western) fighter, was left up country in Buriram (“the city of happiness”) by Mr. Pek after he KO’d a Thai who was known for flogging his opponents with knees. Mr. Pek was incandescent with rage. A gambler of aristocratic proportions, he'd bet his purse on the Thai to win by KO. He was out of pocket after making a dumb money bet against his own fighter. What’s more, our man didn’t even get his winnings—Mr. Pek left him stranded in the boondocks and he had to make his own way back to Bangkok, dejected, disillusioned, a winner who ended up broke.

Gambling is so entrenched in the sport that a 2013 review of Muay Thai becoming an Olympic event included a comment to the effect that while the sport had become popular worldwide, its lack of proper systems for doping control and the conflict of interests deeply embedded in the industry meant that it was unlikely anyone would win a gold anytime soon.

Similarly, as a newcomer to the professional game, you soon discover that the Bangkok fight scene itself is a smoke-filled world of fat bellies and oily hustlers with Fu Manchu moustaches – and that you're just a non-durable commodity in a big, organized, peripherally criminal enterprise. This is a business. If nobody is fighting, no one makes money.

Cue the second lesson I learned: Not all matches will be even. Life-threatening mismatches were a frequent occurrence. Many foreign pugs, me included, were paired with opponents often 20 pounds heavier. This is a classic trick. The promoter would offer you a big bout at Lumpinee Boxing Stadium (Wimbledon for kickboxers), but the catch was that you had to drop ten or 20 pounds in two weeks and fight in a new weight division. After a fortnight of fasting like a monk and wasting in the sauna like a jockey, you meet your opponent who weighs what you did two weeks ago. Few guys, including me, escaped this set-up with a classic Rocky-style victory.

Thais, on the other hand, often claim they don’t care about how much their opponents weigh. For them, it’s not about winning or losing; it’s about displaying proper technique, having heart, and showing “a true fighter’s spirit” Poetic, yes, but bullshit. A fair fight is as rare as hen’s teeth. Matches get fixed, fighters get doped, officials get bribed and venues get bombed.

Are Thais better at “the noble art” than Westerners? By and large, yes. They have faster legs and clinch (upright wrestling with knees and elbows, a hallmark of Muay Thai kickboxing). But Westerners tend to have better hands and head movement (generally a no-no in Muay Thai because it opens you to getting kneed in the head). But times are changing. More and more foreign fighters—from England, Ireland, France, Russia, Israel, and Iran—are making serious inroads, much to the chagrin of the Thais. 

Yet Western kickboxers gape in awe at the fight record of the average Thai boxer, which often runs into the hundreds. They soon find out why Thais have had so many bouts. Young kids, both male and female, are sold off to gyms as indentured fighters to work off family debts incurred from high-interest loans or gambling. They make no money and have no choice about fighting. This exploitative arrangement does not lack cruelty. I witnessed one child, no more than 13 years old, whipped with a plastic skipping rope for refusing to obey the orders of his guardian-promoter.

Here’s the relatively absolute fact of the fight game: Promoters—in my experience, at least—tend to be liars and cheats who don’t give two hoots about the young bucks on the card unless they're big-time champions. I was once matched in an “easy fight” with “an over the hill fighter” by an unscrupulous Australian promoter (who claimed to be an ex–Special Forces sniper). Fifteen minutes before the ring entrance, I was told that my opponent was “Jaradorn the Rocket,” a former world champ with a vicious right round kick. I lost by technical knock-out 123 seconds into the first round. But my corner man, Tomas Nowak—then world heavyweight champion—put the frighteners on the promoter, marched him to the ATM, and we got paid that night, a rarity in Bangkok.

While use of strong-arm tactics with upstart promoters were a constant necessity at Rompo Gym, gamesmanship was essential for victory within the ring. Tall orders aside, it’s best to beat a Thai by KO. Why? Because if it goes to the three Thai judges at ringside, they will rule against you or call it a draw. Should you be lucky enough to win a world championship, there is a catch: You might have to pay for the belt. In one instance, the cost of the belt (25,000 Baht, or $770) was in excess of the prize money (23,000 Baht, or $710). But it’s not all heartless—foreign fighters who win belts at least get a chance to pose for a picture wearing it, but only before it's swiftly snatched away by a lowly official from the sanctioning body.

Believe it or not, the training is harder than the fighting. You have to run ten kilometers five times a week and box five to six times a week at the gym. You train all the time and only take one to two days rest, max. Any more than that and you get chewed out by your trainers. The injuries suck—among them, golf ball–sized bruises on your shins, mild concussions, and zig-zag scars in the middle of your forehead from sok glaps (reverse elbows). I've lost three back teeth, dislocated a jaw, had a knee injury that kept me awake for almost a year, endured two nasty bouts of plantar fasciitis and a painful dose of red eye from practicing clinch.

Was it worth it? I do look back at my time down Rompo gym with fond affection, and I don't think I'll ever have as much fun again. Muay Thai kickboxing, just like professional boxing in the West, is a mug’s game. No one cares about the fighters, there’s not much money in it, and you might walk through life carrying a permanent injury. But it’s not about the money; it’s about the glory. And when it’s time to go, we get to take that with us—that, and the thrill of the occasional win.

The 2008 arrest of Antonio Iovine, a Camorra boss who reportedly ran the Casalesi family’s hugely profitable waste-disposal business. Illustration by Jacob Everett

In the American imagination, being involved in organized crime means living in beautiful mansions, having beautiful cars, and being surrounded by beautiful women. Nothing could be further from the truth. The life of a mafioso is horrendous, bleak, and almost monastic. What people don’t realize is that being a mafioso, even a boss, means living like a rat in a sewer. They are forced to hide the riches they have earned, risking their own lives and those of their relatives. They become fugitives, dwelling in tiny underground bunkers just a few square feet in size, and rarely see daylight or their loved ones. They understand, from the moment they go down that road, that it ends in two possible ways: Either they’ll be in prison, or their enemies will murder them.

I’m speaking specifically of today’s mafiosi, the current generation of powerful, rich, and influential Italian criminals. They live in pursuit of only two objectives: power and money. That doesn’t mean, however, that they immediately get whatever they want.

When you join the Mafia, you begin with a low starting salary. Your title would be picciotto d’onore (“boy of honor”) if you were in the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, or guaglione (“boy”) if you were in the Neapolitan Camorra—whatever you were called, you wouldn’t be making all that much, though you’d probably earn more than you could at a legal job in those parts of Southern Italy. You might bring in $2,500 to $4,000 a month to start. Then, as you took on more responsibility (and if you managed to survive), your salary would increase to around $6,500 to $13,000 a month. If you worked your way up to become one of the boss’s right-hand men, you could get a monthly stipend of $32,000 to $38,000. If you were a vicecapo, second-in-command to the boss, you’d receive about $130,000 a month. And bosses—well, it’s impossible to even guess how much they can take in.

In general, criminal organizations have a lot of members, but most of them don’t actually earn that much money, even though their jobs may be very dangerous. But zone bosses (those who control a “piazza,” or a fixed territory) and capos can earn truly significant sums. Members of La Santa, a secret society that’s made up of the highest-ranking members of the ’Ndrangheta, make a reported $130,000 a month. The monthly salaries of zone bosses in Scampia (the fulcrum of Neapolitan drug trafficking) range from $65,000 to $130,000. And along with the money come various benefits like cars, properties, and shares of their legitimate companies.

Then each clan offers its own form of insurance. If you have a disabled child, your base salary rises. If (or when) you are killed, your family receives money for your funeral and a “death allowance.” When a member of a powerful clan is killed, the family can decide to receive a lump sum of $130,000 to $260,000 or a monthly stipend, which is paid to the dead man’s widow, mother, or girlfriend (provided she is the mother of his children). There are also prison allowances.

I will never forget a scene I witnessed a few years ago in a courtroom in Naples. They were sentencing a Camorra family, and I went, as I often do, to watch the trial. When they read the sentence, I saw one of the defendants, only 24 or 25 years old, cover his face with his hands as he heard that he’d received eight years in prison. He was in the cage, the cell from which detainees participate in the trial. One of my police bodyguards, after seeing how young he was, tried to comfort him: “If you behave, your sentence will be reduced—you’ll see,” he said. “Plus, this is only the first level. The sentence could still change.” (In Italy there are three levels of court, and the first two allow for appeals.)

The guy raised his head and responded: “And now? Who’s going to tell my wife that they only gave me eight years?” It turned out that he was upset because, according to the rules of his organization, if he had gotten a sentence of ten years his family would have received almost $4,000 a month, but since he got only eight their allowance would be, at most, half that.

Growing up in the Camorra’s territory, I have always understood that even murder doesn’t pay particularly well. Executions are special assignments, separate from the daily business of organized crime, that earn killers a bonus—usually about $3,200 to $4,000—as well as other perks. After a hit, the killer is immediately moved to someplace more secure, outside the area where he normally works. One time, years ago, a hit man murdered a young woman in Naples for $2,600: She was tortured, killed, and burned, and he was sent to Slovakia, where the authorities couldn’t find him.

In many ways, joining a criminal organization is a lot like getting a job at a law firm or another large institution: You start out making barely enough to live, but you know that you’re paying your dues. The tasks, at the beginning, are routine and sometimes humiliating, but your assignments will become more prestigious as you become wealthier and more important. The $2,500 a month that a picciotto earns today could become millions of dollars if he becomes a boss—a process that, with luck, might take only a few years. There’s a certain logic as well to becoming a Mafia hit man—killing someone will almost certainly further your career ambitions, because you can’t become a Mafia boss if you don’t have both military talent and economic vision. If you are simply a soldier or only a white-collar professional, you can never be a boss.

Occasionally, a clan might run out of money, possibly because it has been under pressure from the media and the police. To deal with this, they raise capital by extorting more money from businesses. At Christmas, for example, a clan might force stores to double the price of panettone (a typical Italian Christmas cake) in order to pay the end-of-the-year bonuses for their incarcerated members. In some extreme cases, when the clan is really in a pinch, it may authorize robberies. It’s very rare, however, for the Italian Mafia to commit robbery—like prostitution, that crime is considered “dirty,” i.e., not honorable. (On the other hand, the Mafia has no problem receiving a percentage of any profits from such activities when they take place in their territories.)

The number one thing criminal organizations like the Mafia offer their members is security. If you do well, you’re rewarded. If you make a mistake, you die or go to prison for a long time. But even then, someone will take care of your family, and someone will pay for your lawyers. That sort of deal is fairly rare in this day and age—how many workers are guaranteed to get money if they’re injured on the job? How many people labor honestly for decades in the same job without getting a decent raise? This is the true power, and appeal, of the Mafia.

Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler

Roberto Saviano is an Italian writer and journalist. He is the author of Gomorrah and Zero Zero Zero. For the past eight years, he has lived under police protection because of death threats against him made by the Camorra. The film Gomorrah, based on the book, won the Gran Prix at Cannes in 2008 while the TV series, which premiered in 2014, has been distributed in 50 countries. Follow him on Twitter.

Brooklyn-based photographer Jennifer Loeber has developed a series of projects in the last several years around themes of youth, sexuality, and alternative lifestyles. In her new body of work, titled GYRLE, she photographs the experience of a subject named Lorelei over the course of her transition to becoming a woman. Loeber recently spoke with me about the childhood summer camp where she first met Lorelei, relating personally to her subject through observing her “second puberty”, and the surprising reaction of drunken college students to six-four trans woman during spring break in Florida.

VICE: How do you know Lorelei?
Jennifer Loeber: I originally met Lorelei when we were teenagers at a non-traditional summer camp I chronicled in my series Cruel Story of Youth. It was a sort of teenage utopia self-governed by the campers and freed of the usual constraints of a conventional camp experience. At that time, she was still identifying as male and named Robert.

I didn't find out about her transition until she added me on Facebook. We had reconnected when Cruel Story of Youth was being exhibited and written about. Given our shared history, I felt comfortable enough to later ask if she'd pose for my ongoing nude series, Zeig Mal. Shooting that single image led directly to this series.

Was she easy to convince to participate in the extended project, or did it take some cajoling?
The thought that kept circling was that it was the first time seeing each other after many, many years. I wondered if it might be a terribly awkward or flat-out bad idea on my part. But our collaboration was actually easygoing and more rewarding than I had even hoped, mostly due to the unbelievable willingness of Lorelei to share her experience so intimately.

How long have you been working with her?
We started shooting in the early fall of 2012, while she was living in Northampton, Massachusetts. I’ve since been back several times. I also traveled to Florida, where she lived with her mother briefly.

What are you looking to ultimately show or communicate through these images about either Lorelei or the transgender experience?
It's important to have the chance to look deeply and candidly at someone living through transition. Politeness dictates that we collectively don't want to stare or intrude with personal questions, and the more timid may simply want to process at their own speed. I would hope my work offers such pragmatic options, in addition to being personal expressions.

Some of the images are very intimate. Do they show an intimacy between the two of you that relies on a personal connection and trust developed over time, or are they reflecting Lorelei’s open and honest nature?
That summer camp had a huge impact, and gave us both a palpable sense of belonging and unparalleled freedoms at an impressionable age. When you meet someone as a kid during such an intense experience, you're forever tied to one another in some metaphysical way.

Despite not having been in each other's lives for over a decade, we fell almost immediately in step. She admitted that she has had a long-standing crush on me from our teenage years, which I honestly wasn't aware of then. I was a bit shocked! We're just friends and I am happily married, but it was sweet to discover someone still liked me with bad hair and braces.

What's fascinating is that history now adds a layer of sexual tension between the two of us that transcends the boundaries of female and male. I'm interested in the fluidity of gender and sexuality. Hopefully, human beings will someday feel comfortable enough to process and accept behavioral evolution. It's all a gray area, despite religious and political ideologies that insist on unambiguous standards.

A number of the images are moderately explicit. Are there moments that you don’t photograph? Are there photographs that you take but don’t show?
Lorelei has allowed me total access to her life and the people in it, provided they're also comfortable with my photographing. So far, nothing has been cut due to explicitness, though I doubt that would ever be criteria for editing an image. This body of work aims to show as much of her life and journey as possible. Nudity and sexuality are essential.

Out of all the photographs taken, how do you select which ones to include as part of the project? Under what criteria do you judge images as strong enough?
Editing my own work is the most challenging part of being a photographer. You fall in or out of love with images, sometimes for the wrong reasons. I’m lucky to have had some outstanding photographers give feedback on this series, including Todd Hido and Alec Soth.

Do you involve Lorelei in the selection of images that you publish publicly?
No, but I don't keep anything from her. If she felt uncomfortable about an image and asked me not to present it publicly, I'd honor that request.

What are some of the insights that your experiences out in the world with Lorelei—at the beach, at the hospital and other public spaces—have given you into the life of a former male navigating her new femininity?
I didn't expect to see my own experiences of becoming a woman mirrored so closely in Lorelei, but each time I photographed her, I witnessed moments I vividly remembered as a teenage girl. Her "second puberty" through the use of hormones is eerily identical to mine, in terms of dealing with a changing body and mindset and the chaos that ensues.

It's been revealing to see someone go through that teenage turmoil, not only as a fully formed adult, but also having previously lived with all the privilege of being male. It's an uneasy shift to voluntarily make.

What have you observed about public preconceptions about her?
Unfortunately, people still sometimes stare, whisper and misuse pronouns with her, but I've mostly been pleasantly surprised by positive reactions. When I photographed her in Florida, it happened to coincide with spring break. I had no idea how hordes of drunken college students would react to a six-four trans woman, but other than a few double takes, no one seemed to care in the slightest. The US has a long way to go in accepting transgender people—and protecting their rights and safety—but there are glimmers of hope within younger generations. 

Is the project finished? Have you started to exhibit the work yet?
It's an ongoing project. Lorelei leads an unconventional life full of surprises and adventures, so I can't yet say when this body of work will be finished.

Noel in his Bill Clinton tribute room. Photo via the author.
In 2001, Toronto native Noel Biderman launched what is now one of the biggest online dating sites in the world for people seeking affairs—AshleyMadison.com. Named for the two most popular girls’ names in the US at the time, Biderman’s brainchild became a multi-million-dollar operation with its targeted service that matched people already in relationships with likeminded hookup candidates.

Almost 15 years later, Biderman—AKA the “King of Infidelity”—is releasing a new book named First Bump as a result of years collecting the user data of his over 27 million clients and working with universities like Columbia, Duke, and NYU to conduct research. The premise? Most men start cheating on their wives during or immediately following pregnancy.

I met Biderman at his Midtown Toronto office to find out why he’s putting out a book about such a spurious topic that is sure to piss people off and to dig into how his personal life relates to his business. Guess what? He claims he’s never cheated on his wife.

VICE: You come from a law background and what you do now seems a bit different. How did you end up founding AshleyMadison.com?
Noel Biderman: My story begins strangely enough on an airplane. I was reading a [business] magazine that was talking about the dot-com bubble bursting. This was 2001. The journalist, she was saying the dot-com bubble has burst, but the world has already been changed. We will never watch pornography the same way. We’ll never listen to music the same way. And then [the journalist] said we’ll never date the same way—you’re not confined to waiting for your mom or your friends to introduce you to someone or college or university being the place. You can actually reach out across the country, across the globe and find exactly what you’re looking for.

What she said about online dating was maybe the most fascinating, which was she herself wouldn’t use an online-dating service—at least not yet, given that 30+ percent of the people on there were actually posing. They weren’t single, they were already in relationships. And so that was the so-called lightbulb moment.

If I wasn’t a sports attorney—like any other reader who might have read the article—I might have flipped the page. I spent an extraordinary amount of time dealing with domestic situations including unfaithfulness where players would call me and say something like, ‘My wife wants to come visit me in this city.’ And I’d be like, ‘What’s the problem?’ ‘Well my wife from the city is not going to like it.’ You know you can’t marry two women just because you have different residences. It was that bad.

So in a sense, I was already involved with professional infidelity long before I built AshleyMadison.

So in your book you talk about how there is a scale of monogamy to polyamory and how it’s more of a sexual preference or sexuality. What do you think it will take for society to accept that as a sexuality?
I think you have to look at where the origins of monogamy came from. There’s really two that you could point to. One is that Judeo-Christian notion that’s 2,000 years old. So to move away from that, it could take a counterbalance of time. It will take years for them to build that new condo across the way [points out office window], but a piece of TNT could blow it up overnight. Even if something took 2,000 years, in 20 years we might be able to move away from it.

But at the same time it came from a secondary place. At some point in time, most people started owning things, and we wanted to be able to give our property to our progeny. And absent DNA testing, we had to create rules about that. We didn’t want women to be unfaithful so we could no longer identify our progeny, that’s actually a deep drive in the societal narrative.

I have two children—nobody would dare challenge me that I can love them both equally. But if I said to someone that I have two wives and I can love them both equally, they would question that ability. For romantic love, we don’t believe that we have the capacity to love more than one.

So what it’s going to take, I think, is brilliant social science work. If couples in these polyamorous situations are more successful than those in monogamous situations… I mean I’m the first to say defining success by not failing is a terrible way to define success, right. But if we look at divorce rates, couples in open marriages are wildly more successful than monogamous couples.

That is surely a piece of evidence we should all want to study deeper. And then it’s going to take that generational change. It’s taken a long time for us to be more accepting of same-sex relationships. So my guess, if you’re asking me as an expert on infidelity, we’re talking about 40-80 years before half of society is more fluid with sexuality than where it is today.

So as society moves more toward accepting different types of queer identities, where do you think polyamory fits into that?
I think it’s the last bastion because it affects the most people. It affects just about everybody on some level. And we seem to have these notions in traditional media [that] we can change everything about society: how we educate, live, eat, equality, rights… But somehow morality has to stay static. It seems like sexuality is that last bastion and infidelity is the very last of it. People will have to be comfortable with every other type of appetite and behaviour pattern first before that regular person can actually say we can date, we can love, we can have children, but having a sexual relationship with someone is not any different from shaking hands with them.

Are you married?
Yes, you got me, 12 wonderful years.

What does your wife think of your business?
Here’s my belief in it. Part one is I go to my partner at the time and say, ‘Listen, I have this idea and this is what I want to do.’ I think you can have a couple of reactions to that—‘You’re crazy,’ which she said. You can say, ‘Absolutely not, I don’t trust you, I don’t believe in you, I don’t like that,’ which I think people probably expect her to do. Or she could look at the landscape, look at me and say, ‘This is what you want to do? I believe in you. Then do it.’ So in a sense if anything, it solidified my faith in our choices in one another. Since the day I started this business, she has been with me and has been my biggest cheerleader, my biggest defender.

And I assured her: ‘Listen, you’ll always be able to judge me for the man that I am. This is a business opportunity. I am looking at this professionally. I think I can do really well by it.’

So are you in a monogamous relationship?
I am so far, to the best of my knowledge.

When your kids grow up, will you explain to them what you do?
I will. I think, one: we don’t give our kids enough credit. They figure things out so why not have the conversation? Two: honesty is always the best policy especially when it comes to your kids. And three: I’m really confident that they will judge me for the husband they see me being, for the dad that I am, and that the business is secondary to our personal lives. I have a young daughter. Do I worry about one day her coming into my office and crying to me that her boyfriend cheated on her and I’m partly to blame because I threw AshleyMadison into that conversation? Yeah, but I also know the reality, which is with or without AshleyMadison, that could’ve easily happened.

I’m married and have been for two years. What advice do you have for someone like me who’s in the beginning of their marriage?
When I look back on my own courting and formalizing of [my] relationship, part of it is that we never discussed monogamy in any kind of way. We didn’t sit down and say we’re monogamous now. By the way, how do we define monogamy? What am I allowed to do? Can I watch pornography? Are you OK with that, are you not? Are strip clubs another thing? Can I touch other people? Like clearly having an affair in a hotel room is out of bounds, but are there any boundaries? I don’t think most couples do that. And it’s probably a healthy conversation to have because you might be surprised by the boundaries both positive and negative.

I think the second thing is we don’t really get a good roadmap of what it’s going to look like. And so what I tried to do with First Bump in particular is this is the roadmap I’m seeing. There’s no culture or place on Earth you can point to where people don’t have affairs. In fact, there’s places on Earth where it’s prohibited by death and women still do it. And so that shows you how deep of a biological drive it is.

And so I would want to know what that roadmap looks like. I would want to know where the potholes exist. Everything we know at this time in history about unfaithfulness is anecdotal. It’s a retrospective. It’s inaccurate. We know politicians seem to do it and get caught with their pants down and athletes seem to do it, but is it your neighbours? One of the myths we also broke down was that it’s women too.

The title of your book is about cheating when a woman is pregnant, but it seems like there’s a lot more to it than just that. Why did you pick that as the main thing?
We said what is the single most interesting find or maybe most impactful finding of all the things we’ve seen? And surely not that coffee drinkers are more unfaithful on average than tea drinkers. What was certainly fundamentally important to me was when do affairs start in marriages?

We’ve all heard of the seven-year itch. We have this notion that seven years into a relationship we might start hitting a rocky patch. Well it turns out that’s terrible mythology, that that happens really three to four years into a relationship for a whole host of reasons. Again, sociologists will explain that cohabitation breeds indifference. But the biggest factor ends up being that all of the sudden, especially when a first child or pregnancy is on the scene, your sex life goes from 100 mph to zero. Like literally, there becomes a period of abstinence. Women feel less attractive so there’s an emotional side to not wanting to be sexually active for some, not all. There’s a healing period of time, and then there’s a demands period of time. Having a newborn is tough. It doesn’t lead to a lot of intimacy.

So it turns out that most men start thinking about being unfaithful right amongst that change in life…This is when we’re seeing them log into our service in millions—we’re talking about in droves—looking to explore their first-ever affair. They’re saying, ‘I never thought I would do this before, but oh my god, it’s been nine months. She seems to love the child more than me.’

They’re just ill-prepared for it. And so I’m not blaming, I’m not finger-pointing… I just think that if I was in that life stage again, I would surely as a married man want to know that. 


@allison_elkin

A still from one of Dr. Vikram Yadav's (a.k.a.. "The King of Blackheads") many extraction videos on YouTube

The devil makes work for idle thumbs. And fingernails, specially made wands, scalpels, scissors, or whatever appliance you deem fit for extricating excess gunk from your body.

We all do it. Whether it's a swift squeeze of the blackheads on the side of your nose, a wiry hair that's managed to loop back into itself in your bikini line, or a ready-to-burst whitehead, our bodies are endlessly purge-able. Now, though, such self-maintenance doesn't just happen in the comfort of our own bathroom mirrors. Instead, there are millions of us uploading these moments to YouTube for curious viewers to watch. One video, titled "Best Pimple Pop Ever," has more than 22 million views. That's a lot of pus junkies. 

And it's not just a stomping ground for amateurs (though entire families screaming while mom forces decades-old sebum out of dad's back are a site to behold). There's also a community of medical professionals turning the camera on their extractions. Dr. Vikram Yadav, whom any extraction connoisseur will already be on a first-name basis with, is a main offender. The dermatologist—affectionately known as "the King of Blackheads"—boasts 168 million views on his videos, which largely consist of extreme close-usp of blackhead extractions from the noses of old Indian men. His most popular, "Black & White Heads on Nose Part 3," has 18 million views. The man is a celebrity. 

Not all of these new YouTube celebs are pus lords like Dr. Yadav, though. There's also Nick Chitty, a kindly-looking, mustachioed audiologist based in Wiltshire, England. He inserts cameras into the ears of his patients, along with a "trusty Jobson-Horne"—otherwise known as an ear curette—to hack away at the plugs of wax attached to their aural canals. You might be retching reading this, but his 3.5 million views suggest many find earwax removal pretty fucking sexy. One and a half million of those are for his magnum opus, "Ear wax removal Unbelievable what comes out," where he used the tiny metal instrument to unwed an unholy lump of amber bedded in an old man's ear. Chitty isn't just doing it for himself any more, either—his army of fans demand regular updates. 

"I have to upload videos regularly—otherwise I get angry messages from people saying they want more," he says. "They tell me I'm not uploading fast enough."

If that sounds like the kind of behavior you'd expect from someone watching a live webcam show, their pants around their ankles, that's because it kind of is. "Sometimes the video requests get sexual," Chitty says solemnly. Some viewers' obsessions breach reasonable borders, though. He tells me about one who copied him and got the tip of a cotton bud stuck in her ear. What did she do? Drove two hours to get him to remove it, of course. 

Cotton buds: the things most of us use to sort our ears out. Image via Wikimedia Commons

We all love picking at ourselves. Our bodies are—despite our clever, complex brains that make us brilliant and capable—just bags of assorted viscera. Underneath our skin (or even on the skin itself), we are all disgusting. And you can bet the most prudish—the people who will be reading this saying, "This is absolutely foul"—are the ones who spend hours hunched over, drawing out stubborn ingrown pubic hairs as if their lives depended on it. We're monkeys. We love to groom. But why the hell do such huge swaths of the population love watching other people push junk out of their bodies? 

Writer Sali Hughes, who has just released Pretty Honest, a straight-talking book of relatable beauty situations, hasn't watched any of the videos but understands why people would. "Squeezing spots and blackheads is massively satisfying as both a participant and, if you're anything like me, a spectator. I'm not at all surprised people watch spot squeezing on YouTube, because decent extractions just don't happen often enough in real life to keep a junkie high—though I can recommend splinter extraction for a similar buzz," she says. "Extractions also appeal to the neat freaks and the fixers among us. It's purging bacteria, releasing tension, easing discomfort, then sweeping the whole gross business away like it never happened."

Hughes's point about the extraction lovers among us being junkies is spot on. If you're a picker or squeezer, your need to purge your body of what's within it can veer into obsession. It takes you over. Dr Frederick Toates, a professor of biological psychology at the Open University, wrote the actual book on obsessive-compulsive disorder. "It's a puzzle as to how someone happens upon [skin picking, ear-wax removal, whatever] in the first place," he says, "but once it's started, the evidence suggests this kind of aggressive action against the self triggers endorphins, and these act as rewards or reinforcers."

As for that sexualized element that Chitty spoke about—well, Toates says these acts are "tension-reducing in the way orgasm can be."

Watching worms of pus squiggle from widened pores, picking at an ingrown hair, or finding a secret stash of earwax down your ear canal provides not only a hormone rush but a feeling of self-affirmation. "It draws on the basic need that we all have to exert some control, to have some efficacy in the world," Toates says. "If we can't exert it on the outside world in a way that's acceptable and rewarding, then we compensate for it by doing weird things like self-mutilation, or even just twiddling our hair."

Someone going nuts on an ingrown hair. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Although squeezing ourselves, and watching other people being squeezed, can be almost orgasmic, there's often guilt associated with it too. Fans of videos like "Huge Cyst Extraction" (a mere 32 million of us) probably won't boast about their viewing preferences. Commenters type things like "EEEEWWWW," or "Why did I still click play >.<," but you get the feeling it's like a closeted bro googling "twink suck," then commenting "no homo" underneath the resulting video because he feels guilty for both seeking it out and getting off on it. This isn't the stuff you stumble upon by accident.

The guilt, the compulsion to watch, and the excitement of watching are all factors of both zit squeezing and watching zit squeezing. Research into gambling—another compulsive behavior, albeit one that's monetized a bit more effectively than pus farming—shows that the physical act of, say, pulling a plastic lever on a fruit machine, or rolling a die, draws gamblers into what's known as a compulsion loop.

As well as being fooled into thinking their piddling actions can have tangible outcomes, e.g., pulling a lever = money, the expectancy of an eventual outcome—heightened by its unpredictability—gives both gamblers and fans of zit popping a surge of dopamine. The outcome rarely fully satisfies them in the desired way, but gives them just enough pleasure to keep them going. It's the "high" that Hughes was talking about, which results in an evening lost to squeezing empty pores all over your face in the vain hope one tiny bump will produce a satisfactory squirt of white blood cells.

The compulsion-loop theory has been applied to internet users too. Judith Donath, an MIT media scholar, told Scientific American: "These rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, much like the frisson a gambler receives when a new card hits the table. Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist."

Think of the last time you went on an 800-picture stalk through an acquaintance's photos, or a 20-minute swipe-through of Tinder. The thrill isn't in seeing what their hair looked like circa 2009, or their skin shedding tattoos with each 100 taps. It's because, with every click/tap/swipe, there's a new outcome.

The ongoing effects of this are damaging, though, and not just because of the embarrassment that comes with someone stumbling across your web history, or, in the case of zit squeezing, someone noticing the painful, semi-circular indents around a pimple that produced nothing but a pathetic, clear droplet. They're damaging because nothing's actually changing.

"These habits are all ways of getting feedback from an action when you've got no real reason to get out of bed in the morning," says Toates. Ouch. "These videos and these habits are feeding stress-triggered addictions, and they are going to be strengthened by not having any sort of meaningful activity in your life." OK, I get it, I need to take a long, hard look at myself. 

So, in essence, all these videos do—however much you (or I) love them—is square your uselessness. As exciting and high-giving as they are in the short term, they might also be the most compulsive viewing of all. Plus, they're just gross, right?

Follow Sophie Wilkinson on Twitter.

Photos by Diego Trujillo Pisanty

Between Edward Snowden, the Fappening, and the recent Snapchat leaks, it seems clear that it's surprisingly difficult to keep information out of determined hands in the information age. Computers are still an easily undermined medium on which to transmit secrets, so in response, artist Diego Trujillo Pisanty has taken an old-school approach to keeping confidential documents safe. On a grant from the Mexican Fund for Culture and Arts, Diego built a printer which prints self-destructing documents. The paper exiting the printer catches fire via a chemical reaction almost immediately, reminiscent of every 70s-era spy movie ever made. The project, called This Tape Will Self Destruct, was debuted outside of Mexico City in late September. I interviewed the device’s creator over Skype at his home in Newcastle, England to learn more.

VICE: So, how does your device work?
Diego Trujillo Pisanty: Well, the document gets printed by a normal thermal printer on receipt paper. Then there’s a series of mechanisms that apply two chemicals, mainly. One of them is a potassium salt, and the other is glycerol, or glycerin—it’s the same thing. When those two come together at the end of the process, they catch fire. The control mechanism is an Arduino connected to a Raspberry Pi computer and the Raspberry Pi controls the thermal printer and tells the Arduino when to activate specific mechanisms.

How long did it take you to build this?
Uhh, about a year.

A year?
Yeah. It was funded by the Mexican government as a program to support young artists and to give them money for a year, and then after that they have to present a finished piece, so it was scheduled to take a year.

Did you have to pitch the idea or was it an open grant?
No, it’s actually quite competitive and you have to pitch the whole idea. I had to tell them I was going to be burning things in my house with their money. I had to present the political context of the piece, and originally it was going to be a different chemical reaction, but that turned out to be a bit too unstable, and I had to go for something simpler.

Has anything gone wrong?
I had to run it at the exhibition opening; that was part of this program. We did about six demonstrations in about two hours, and on one of the runs the papers didn’t catch fire, so sometimes it fails. Occasionally you need to readjust the mechanism, some things go out of sync, and it’ll start printing gibberish like any normal printer. But with a bit of patience you could get it to run forever, but I think it would be dangerous to run it continuously.

So it’s reloadable.
Oh, yeah. So actually between prints I always reload it to make sure the next print will come out OK. You can change the paper, add more chemicals, and the spray can is actually just a glue to glue the potassium salt in place, so I double check all that, just like you’d make sure you had ink in your inkjet printer. So, the spy equivalent of that.

Could a person at home build one of these?
I only had to get one part manufactured. Everything else I laser cut. I have a laser cutter at work so that was handy. And the electronics are easy, so yes, you could manufacture one at home. But the actually difficult part was engineering plastics that don’t corrode, because one of the chemicals is slightly aggressive to plastic. If you’ve got the money you could make one at home. I did.

So what inspired the piece?
Well, I’ve been quite interested in the whole NSA scandal, and before that the Wikileaks thing I was quite curious about, because it just shows that we haven’t understood digital material and its ability to be copied and distributed. I had those things in mind and I read a news article saying that, you know, the Russians were really worried about digital material leaking out so they were going to replace their computers with typewriters. And that, to me, is like we’re going back to the 1960s. Like, having spy offices with typewriters. About four months later was when the Guardian newspaper released a video where they’re destroying their hard drives and putting angle grinders through their computer equipment. And I thought that this wasn’t that different, the notions of secrecy haven’t changed that much in the last 40 years. It seems that governments still have top secret programs that civilians find out about. So I was thinking this was a way to revalidate that and bring that commentary across, and self-destructing documents are very iconic of that era.

Reminds me of Inspector Gadget always rushing to get rid of his self-destructing missives.
In Cold War fiction it’s always—actually in the first James Bond movie, they don’t show it, but it’s mentioned, like, “We’ll send you your mission through a self-destructing document.” It’s a standard thing, so I thought that to build the machine for real would be a good way to revalidate the idea that we’re still living in an era where the notions of secrecy are the same as they were for James Bond or Mission: Impossible. Or even things as horrible as MacGyver have references to it too, and I did end up watching a lot of bad television from the 70s. Really, that was the hard part of the project.

What sorts of images were you printing and destroying?
The images and quotes are from a variety of sources. The ones extracted from Cold War media include things like I was saying, from the early 007 movies, the Mission: Impossible series, MacGyver, and some other films of the time. The other portion of the images comes from real leaked secret documents obtained mainly from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Intercept.

There’s something really depressing about destroying communications instead of preserving them.
Well, actually, I think that’s what the project is trying to get at. I agree with you: Communication, especially when it comes to politics, should be preserved. Taxpayers in democracies need to reevaluate why things are kept hidden from us, or why they’re being destroyed. With the Guardian hard drives in particular, you’re essentially destroying evidence for things that could eventually become declassified and historically important. So, that’s what I’m actually trying to get at. Yeah, it’s quite spectacular to see a bit of fire, but deeper down it’s a concern that we are essentially still in a Cold War state of mind: that things need to be kept secret from the population because they can’t be trusted with it.

Your style of art is pretty unique. I was looking over your 300 Year Time Bomb and the Generated Man—how would you describe what you’re trying to do now?
Yeah, that’s a good question, always a hard one to answer. I think that like most people in my generation, we grew up in a time when science was the best thing around, we were taught that science was everything. So part of my artwork deals with science as a conceptual space, and not so much as a space for knowledge, but more thinking about the human element of science and technology and their development. At the same time I think I’m very poetic about it so I try to find interesting stuff with the media itself that I produce. I’ll try to represent my ideas with the best materials, I use a diversity of formats, but I was originally trained as a photographer, and I still do a lot of photography, around other things. It’s very hard for me to say that this is my style. I’m interested in technology in a conceptual space. That’s probably the best way of generalizing all of my work. And in technical terms it’s just very diverse, there’s programming, electronics, object manufacturing, and photography.

Do you have any plans for your next project?
Yeah, there’s a couple of ideas but they’re not really matured yet. Right now I’m still recovering from this one.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

Levi's jacket, T-shirt from Flashback; American Apparel shirt and socks

PHOTOGRAPHY: Yaniv Edry @ AMP Agency
CREATIVE DIRECTION: Vita Doll, Yaniv Edry
Styling: Noa Nozik
Hair: Yaniv Zada

Adidas shirt, American Apparel jeans

Love for a Second sweatshirt

Adidas sweatpants, American Apparel T-shirt, Topshop jacket; Levi's overalls, American Apparel top and socks

Shirt from Beyond Retro, American Apparel shorts; shirt from Flashback, American Apparel jeans; Adidas sweatpants, American Apparel T-shirt, Topshop jacket; American Apparel T-shirt and jeans

Topman jacket, APC jeans; T-shirt from Flashback, American Apparel jeans

Vans T-shirt

Adidas T-shirt, H&M hoody; American Apparel T-shirt

Topman jacket

Adidas T-shirt, H&M hoody; Love for a Second sweatshirt; American Apparel T-shirt; Vans jeans; T-shirt from Flashback, Forever 21 trousers

Whatever works, I guess. Photo via Flickr user Pro Juventute

“Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television,” Gore Vidal once famously advised. While some may argue that the democratizing force of the internet has diminished the power of television, it hasn't diminished the power of screens: Thanks to webcams and smartphones, we can all appear on our own personal TVs, and we can even have sex through them. 

No one has absorbed this lesson more than teens, who just can’t seem to stop sending nude photos to each other. This Wednesday, on her NPR show Fresh Air, national treasure Terry Gross spoke to Hanna Rosin about the phenomenon, which Rosin addresses in a new Atlantic article, “Why Kids Sext.” The interview touches on some important points, like the fact that minors sending naked pictures to other minors is something that is both completely commonplace and sometimes a felony (as teenagers in Detroit may soon learn). It's a conversation between adults who don’t want to judge young people but at the same time don’t completely understand them.

After all, there’s no way for someone who hasn’t been a teen for 30 years to truly understand what today’s adolescents are doing. At one point, Rosin tells Terry that girls say sexts are like, “the guys are collecting baseball cards or Pokémon cards,” adding that, because so much porn is available to teens, sexts are more “like a prank.” Do teens really treat their sexuality so casually? I don’t want to question Rosin’s sources, but I have a slight feeling they may have been grunge-speaking her. And where did she even find a teenager who remembers people collecting Pokémon cards? 

­-Teens aren’t just not passing up chances to have sex. They’re making new opportunities, sometimes in radical and wildly inappropriate ways. It’s not every day that the tabloidists at the New York Daily News start an article with “Whoa!,” so when they do, you’d better pay attention. In Florida, where so many crazy things happen that making jokes about it is now gauche, a 19-year-old boy was charged with indecent exposure and criminal mischief after having sex with a stuffed horse inside a Walmart. Security cameras caught the teen grabbing the animal from a clearance bin, taking his penis out of his pants, and “[proceeding] to hump the stuffed horse utilizing short fast movements.”

After finishing on the horse’s chest, he put the toy back on a shelf. According to his arrest statement, the boy hadn’t actually considered that someone else might pick it up afterward. This statement, combined with his handwriting and the fact that he had sex with a stuffed horse inside a Walmart, makes me wonder if maybe the boy is operating below standard mental capacity. Initially I had just assumed that this was a weird Brony thing, but the Smoking Gun has now released a photo of the “victim,” which appears to be a fairly ordinary stuffed brown horse. ­Whoa!

-Of course, Vidal’s mantra about never turning passing up an opportunity to have sex is absolutely terrible advice. There are plenty of situations in which you should refrain from intercourse—chief among them being if you’re an adult with a minor, and even more so if you’re an authority figure. (Vidal, we should note, might disagree with us about that whole sex-with-kids-is-bad thing.)

As we previously noted, two female teachers in Louisiana were arrested for having “simultaneous sex” with a male student late last month. Now the Daily Mail is reporting that it was the boy’s boasts which ultimately led to the triad's demise. The boy says he regrets that his sharing of the secret may have ended his teachers’ careers. Possibly he also regrets that he is no longer having threesomes with his teachers. According to his grandfather, “He is really down about it right now. All boys that age want to brag about what they are doing. He didn't expect it would come to this.” 

-It seems like we go through this every month, but there’s something we need to make absolutely clear: Teens, please don’t try to join the Islamic State. It won’t go well. Reports have now been trickling out of disillusioned IS recruits who want to return to their old lives. The latest and highest profile news of this sort is that at least one of those teenage Austrian girls who ran away to Syria to be with IS wants to go back home. The girl, who is widely believed to be pregnant, fears the consequences of jumping ship, which could include both punishment from IS and arrest in Austria. All of which is more proof that, no matter how appealing joining a marauding religious terror gang may sound now, you’ll grow sick of it pretty quick. The caliphate probably isn’t going to happen, you might die, and it just won’t be all that much fun. 

-Not all of this week’s big teen stories involved sex or terrorism. On Monday, TIME released its list of the 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014.This year's batch includes Nobel Prize winner Malala, the Obama girls, Kardashian reboots Kendall/Kylie Jenner, and a bunch of interchangeable basic cable stars. The only real question that the article raises is: When did kids start having such weird names? Thirteen to 19 years ago, apparently. Kiernan, Nash, Flynn, Lorde, Troye, and Tavi? White parents are crazy.

-In Seattle, four guys approached a 16-year-old student while he waited for the bus, punched him in the face, stole his cell phone, and then texted his mother, “I’m gay you know that.” According to local news station KATU, the boy, who received a cut on his face and “was planning to see a dentist following the attack,” recognized one of his attackers as a former schoolmate and fellow teen. Whether the attack was because of the victim’s perceived sexual orientation or if the text was simply an impressively idiotic attempt to add insult to injury remains unclear. 

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

When the term no man's land rose to prominence during World War I, it was used to denote that ambiguous space between armies that was both unattended and well guarded, because both sides were afraid to move. The opposing armies would bolster their positions with heavier artillery, barbed wire, mortars, and such things. Tensions increased until it became a situation where death or surrender were the only options, leaving no room for diplomacy.

With his short film Sort (a.k.a. No Man’s Land), animator David Adler takes on that ambiguous space with a fresh perspective, attempting to artistically illustrate the trials of war and life. If it all sounds a bit heady or pretentious, just watch the opening scene and let it tear up your brain. The hyper-stylized sequence harnesses the same energy found in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, with red-hot bullets tearing through soldiers and explosions blowing them apart.

Two surviving Danish soldiers serving the Germans fall into a bunker, kill some soldiers, and hunker down. Despite having just met, the two men are forced to work together in order to survive. Out of that necessity, a bond is slowly formed. One is a captain. His face has been disfigured by war—you can literally see the death on his face. The other, a corporal, is clean—handsome even—and appears to be the paragon of good. Death threats veiled as orders are shouted at them by the surviving German.

The look and animation of the short will probably shock more than the content, due to its jarring and interesting use of motion capture footage. Shot with a handheld camera and later turned into a 3D animation, the film has a distinct look that, at points, gives the impression of stop-motion or a video game.

The film unfolds quickly, and layers gradually reveal themselves. Why are friendships formed and the status quo challenged, even while staring certain death in the face? How do societal expectations and guilt transform people? These notions are subtle at first, but then it smacks you right in the face. While not always the most nuanced film, Sort makes up for its bluntness with sheer grit and technological achievement.

All in all, the film is a remarkable achievement, even more so because it's Adler’s student film. After premiering at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival six weeks ago, the film has now found its way online for you to see for yourself.

To watch with subtitles, click the CC button on the Vimeo player.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

The Burns Archive

Stanley Burns, a New York ophthalmologist and historian, has the world’s largest collection of early medical and historical photography, with well over a million photographs in his possession. It’s probably the biggest collection you didn’t know existed. But with the first season of the Cinemax/HBO series The Knick his photographs are being brought to life. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and staring Clive Owen, the show (whose season finale airs tonight) focuses on the fictionalized Knickerbocker hospital in 1900 New York City, right at the dawn of modern medicine. Using his vast collection and his expert knowledge of the field (he’s published 44 books and over 1,100 articles on early medical photography), Burns provided much of the information that inspired the show’s plotlines and ensured its historical accuracy.

Dr. Burns and Clive Owen on the set of 'The Knick.' Photo by Mary Cybulski/Cinemax.

Walking through the Burns Archive, the townhouse on East 38th Street in Manhattan that houses the collection as well as Burns’s ophthalmology practice, is like exploring the Library of Congress if it were maintained by a mad scientist. Framed photographs cover almost every inch of wall space, countless books line the shelves, staircases, and sometimes floors in neat stacks, and many of the rooms look like they have been perfectly preserved for a hundred years. 

“Look,” he said as he led me into a room on the third floor decorated with pristine antique furniture, “It’s like you stepped into The Knick.”

VICE: Why did you start amassing your collection?
Stanley Burns: Well I was always a historian, always interested in history. And I’ve been a historian for over 50 years. In the mid 70s a friend introduced me to a medical daguerreotype, and when I checked on the history, the written history didn’t match the visual history. And so I realized I had to collect photography because the evidence in photography with an original photograph is irrefutable—irrefutable truth. Especially in medical photography when you have a surgical picture, there’ll be a caption saying he’s doing such and such an operation, but it won’t describe his shoes, his shirt, what’s on the floor, the type of buckets, what they’re throwing in the buckets, anything like that. A photograph gives a wide expanse of information you don’t get from a written record. They say a photograph is worth 1,000 words. But in every inch of a photograph there’s 1,000 words.

1845 Daguerreotype from upcoming book 'Stiffs, Skulls & Skeletons'

How do you keep track of all the photographs?
I have my own system, in my head. The idea is that I know where everything is and I can put my hands on it. The other thing you should know is I don’t need any sleep. Four hours a day is all I need, unless I have a great topic, and then I need very little. And so I always had two jobs, I had an eight-hour doctor job, and I had an eight-hour writing job.

And there’s still fours hours leftover.
And that’s what I’d use to think about what I’m going to write about the next day. I have trouble going to sleep at times like that because it’s all in my head and I just want to get it out.

An arm to arm blood transfusion

How did you manage to buy up so many photographs?
I was interested in the fact that it was available. People have described my collecting as if it were 1902 and I decided to take all my money and buy every Picasso I could buy. Within three years it had been recognized by Time as the most important emerging historical collection. Once I realized I could buy everything, that’s what I did, because it was not appreciated at the time. It was cost-feasible. I’ve written 44 books and as each book gets written, I can no longer buy the photographs that were written about. They’re too expensive all of a sudden. And I do not collect art, music, or sports.

Why is that?
Because everyone else has that. Everyone collects those things, usually as an investment or something to show people if you’re at a museum. My history of photography is the history of photography as used by people and professionals.

African-American college students, circa 1895

So it’s like a people’s history of photography.
Yes! In other words, how we used it in combat, how we used it in news, how we used it to record ourselves.  I haven’t mentioned that to anyone else. But that’s my history of photography: Photography as defined by how people use it. Like how did African-Americans use it? My collection of African-American photography is that of the middle and upper class in the 19th century, which you don’t hear about. Because when people wrote about the history of blacks, they wanted either the hero or the oppressed. That’s how we got around to [The Knick character] Algernon. They came to my house, and there it was. 

A leading black Surgeon demonstrates pathology to other doctors, Paris, circa 1905

Once you see that, you have your show. You know it’s true. You see, without that photograph, I could tell you that happened, but you wouldn’t believe me. They look admiringly at this black doctor, a bunch of white doctors. That’s why I collected photography, and now I’m thrilled because I get to see these photographs come to life on the screen.

Your interest in medical photography, did that come from being a doctor, or your appreciation of photography?
Well it was really from medicine. It was being able to tell the story of medicine, because in the 20th century, physicians made a promise to us that they kept, and that promise was a long, healthy life. See in 1900, the life expectancy was 47 years. People expected to die young, they lived with death; it was very common. They didn’t expect to have an operation and survive it. And as far as I’m concerned, the detrimental part of it is that we’ve removed death from life so you don’t even expect a 96-year-old guy to die. You want to do a heart transplant on him.

Bellevue hospital ambulance with attendants, circa 1895

What do you think the value is of having death more in our consciousness?
So that your expectation of what your life is about is different—I mean that’s really the most important thing. What the doctors did with all these great discoveries is remove death. For instance I live in a townhouse, and one of the rooms in the house, I always explain, is called the parlor. Well, in 1910, they removed the term “parlor” from Ladies Home Journal. They wouldn’t accept a picture of a house that said “parlor.” The parlor had to be called the living room—which was the exact opposite of the parlor, which was the death room—in order to get away from the idea of death. And then the parlor became the funeral parlor. See, most funerals were done at home, in the parlor—the main room of the house. When the show is set, death was an active part of life. You did not expect to live long, and you couldn’t even expect to die quickly if you were going to die.

Hospital ward, New York City hospital, circa 1905

What is it about this time in the history of medicine that you respond to?
I respond to it because it was the first time that people could go to a doctor and know they were going to be helped and healed. Before the 1890’s, good luck. Think about President Garfield! Let’s talk about that. He’s shot in 1881. He gets shot here, the bullet lodges in his spine near the muscle. How did he die? The doctors stuck unclean hands in him looking for the bullet and spread his wound open. He had a big gash that just festered. He died a horrible, painful death. It was the philosophy of the time that you should take the bullet out, but they should have left him alone. That was 1881, he was President of the United States, and the best doctors came to dig their hands in him. Ten years later, he would have had a chance to live.

Brain surgery, circa 1920

So what changed during the time period The Knick is set in?
What we’re seeing in the show is all the great inventions that were occurring. You’re going to see the difference between antiseptic surgery and aseptic surgery, you’re going to see the fact that some people could carry a disease, carry it and kill you, but not be affected by it. This was a concept people did not understand before this time. This was the greatest period in the history of medicine, and [William Stewart] Halsted who [Owen’s character] Thackery is modeled after, laid down the principles of modern surgery, which are still followed today.

William Halsted at the opening of the new Johns Hopkins operating theater, 1904

Were you pretty hands-on with the specifics of the show?
Yes! Clive took private lessons, but all the other nurses and doctors came here and I taught them how to operate. And when we were done, they felt that probably it was the most valuable thing they would ever get from the show, because in any emergency they would know how to suture, how to tie. The nice part is, the actors were better than medical students. They were so serious about learning how to handle the clamps and things like that. And all of these principles still apply today. Every doctor does it the same way, and they don’t even really use fancier instruments.

Dr. Burns and Clive Owen on the set of 'The Knick.' Photo by Mary Cybulski/Cinemax.

What was your involvement on set?
I was on set three to five days a week. I’ll give you an example. It’s interesting because the first day I caused a small uproar. We were going to have our first operation, you saw that already in the first episode, and I walked in there and they put 100 doctors or so in the audience, and I said, “This is wrong, we can’t shoot this.” I said to Steven [Soderbergh], “If Martin Scorsese invited you to watch him film, would he put you in the top row? No, he would be next to you in the bottom row.” They had put all the good-looking doctors that were up front, and the older ones in the back, but really it was the older doctors that were always closest to the surgeons. So they stopped the action and changed it. Because otherwise people are going to call in and say, “Hey, that’s not right.” And believe me, it was right, we worked very, very hard to make it accurate.

Surgical scene, Dr. William Rodman operating, Philadelphia 1902

Is there something you wanted the show to communicate to the public?
My whole goal in my life is to popularize the history of medicine and to show the great strides that medicine has made, and to get more public awareness about what it was like, because we have no memory of pain. If women had memory of pain, they wouldn’t have another child. We always like to forget our bad stuff. You asked how I got my pictures. People wanted to get rid of the pictures of bad treatments, bad results, bad patients. Once you realize you’re doing it wrong, how many pictures do you want around? That’s the way medicine is, and that’s the way the world is. So with The Knick, I tried to show some of the greatest things that happened in that time and at the same time show some of the things that went wrong. The main thing is, doctors and people in general 100 years ago were just as smart, just as inventive, just as innovative [as we are today], but they labored under inferior knowledge and technology. So they did what they thought they could do to help and heal. We look back at it and it’s wrong, it’s erroneous, and I guarantee 100 years from now they’ll look back and say the same thing about us. I have no doubt. But that’s something I wanted the show to communicate.

I think it’s safe to say that they couldn’t have done it without you.
It seems that way. Steven always says that. They could’ve done it, it just would not have been as spectacular as it is.

Giancarlo T. Roma is a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. Follow him on Twitter.

A picket at Cortonwood Colliery. Photo by John Sturrock/Reportdigital.co.uk

This year is the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike—the longest strike in UK history. The strike saw the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) pitted against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which wanted to close pits, destroying thousands of jobs. Over the course of a year, miners picketed their work places, held rallies, and fought against cops—many of them going without wages. Eventually they conceded defeat, returning to work, marching behind brass bands playing mournful songs.

Supporters of the government saw the miners as the most militant part of a union movement that was holding the country ransom, striking whenever they felt like it and refusing to let the elected government make decisions. To others, the miners were simply ordinary people refusing to get pushed around by an ideological government bent on destroying the power of the working class. In the end, the miners were left reeling from the backlash of their defeat, which ensured the destruction of their communities as they knew them.

It is easy to look back and see history as something inevitable, and to forget the real people who lived the experiences behind the hard facts. It’s for precisely that reason that Owen Gower has directed a new documentary, Still the Enemy Within. His film gives a voice to the people who fought on the front lines and has been showered with praise. I spoke to him about the strikers’ first hand experiences, the legacy of the strike, and how history is made. 

Still the Enemy Within trailer

VICE: You would have been only one when the 1984 miners strike was going on. What does it mean to you?
Owen Gower: I was born the year of the miners strike and I actually was on the picket lines, but as a baby. My parents were both teachers but they were huge supporters of the strike; they knew it was a struggle that was going to define society. I grew up in the post strike years and witnessed the after effects—the decimation of industry. I was always aware of it but I came to the idea of the film much later. 

The documentary is narrated entirely by the miners. Why did you choose not to bring in an outside voice?
The story has always been painted as Margaret Thatcher versus Arthur Scargill [the leader of the NUM]. The people who were actually involved—the miners and the supporters—were almost airbrushed out of history. Thatcher, the government, and the police have had their side of the story told for 30 years and I didn’t feel the need to give them another platform. We didn’t want to make a polemic or a multifaceted argument. What we wanted was to tell the human story of the people who were on the front line.

I recently read an article by Lisa Jardine where she talks about how historical facts never really give us a real sense of the past because they omit every story’s key component—human emotion. Your documentary breathes life into cold historical fact. Is it always necessary to have a combination of fact and feeling to create an accurate account?
First of all I don’t believe that a documentary is ever really objective, and actually history is always from different points of view. One miner, Steve, said that the reason he wanted to tell the story is because history is a living thing. All these events are lived by people. They’re not just abstract politics. It can be easy to look back and see historical events as things that are inevitable. We wanted to get across that sense of the events as they unfolded; to put the audience in the center of it all instead of being given a dry historical lesson.

Miners flee from charging police. Photo by John Sturrock/Reportdigital.co.uk

What were some of those lived experiences that you encountered?
It was a roller coaster for everyone involved. On the one hand there was this huge sense of euphoria from the empowering feeling of uniting to fight for a common cause, from the support they received and from the freedom it gave people. Gender roles were completely restructured, as women were out on the picket lines amongst the men, and found themselves being treated as equals.

Yet at the same time they were constantly facing a huge onslaught from everything that was being thrown at them—the media, the police, the increasingly apparent divisions within the unions, and eventually from pure hardship and poverty. It was very paradoxical—for many of them it was the best year of their life, but at the same time there were huge blows to bear.

Many weren’t even receiving benefits, and struggling to survive meant there were massive strains on relationships, marriages broke down, and families were torn apart. In the documentary you can see the discrepancy in the archive footage between the same miners at the beginning of the strike, fresh faced and full of energy, and then their gaunt and drawn appearances by the end.

Can you tell us about the title, Still the Enemy Within?
Margaret Thatcher herself called the miners “the enemy within,” and 30 years later they still have that label. The argument that they were not crazy militants waging war on the government has still not been won—it's still the dominant narrative of the strike. The other side of it is that they are still proud to wear that label, and they still believe in fighting for a better world today. It’s about saying that the miners strike is not just a piece of history, it’s still ongoing.

Miners clash with police at Bliston Glen. Photo by John Sturrock/Reportdigital.co.uk

But ultimately, what the miners wanted was a long term energy strategy, planning over decades. It was also about defending an industry, jobs, and communities rather than buying in cheap imports from places like Apartheid South Africa or Poland where people were paid very low wages and worked in poor conditions.

Looking at the energy market today I think it’s clear that it doesn’t make sense. The government was willing to pay whatever price in order to defeat the strongest trade union in the country, and as a result the rest of the unions with them. The fact that 40 percent of UK energy is still generated by coal tells us the battle was never really about coal.

But didn’t the government have an obligation to the taxpayer not to pay to keep people in jobs in an industry that was making a loss?
There’s a very simple answer to that. What happened is that it cost more to lay off every coal miner than it did to keep the industry going. Firstly in unemployment benefits, and then if people aren’t earning wages, people aren’t paying taxes. It massively weakened the manufacturing base of the country that then has a huge impact on taxpayers themselves. And what we saw as an eventual result was a complete deregulation in finance. It’s not a coincidence that the big bang, when they deregulated all the banks—which then sowed the seeds for what became the 2008 crash—happened in 1986. What they saw as replacing industry was banking and finance. That is not good for any taxpayer.

How, in your opinion, are the struggles in the 1980s being echoed in the current political situation today?
Thatcher’s project was to roll back everything that came out of the 1945 consensus—public services, nationalized industries, and so on. The miners knew that if they lost, it would be more than their communities that would be destroyed. There would be a weakening of unions as well as privatizations across the board, and that is what we’re seeing today. They’ve just sold off Royal Mail, they sold the shares in EuroStar just this week. Wages and pensions are being cut, and the gap between the rich and poor is deepening.

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Manfred Kirchheimer’s 1981 masterpiece Stations of the Elevated begins its first theatrical run in the United States this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematék, over 30 years after it debuted at the New York Film Festival to little fanfare. Out of the 31 films that were featured in the 1981 festival, it was notable for being the only one not reviewed by the New York Times. Given the film’s rich beauty and meticulous composition, it's reasonable to assume that this initial dismissal and belated critical embrace has much to do with shifting attitudes toward the subject of graffiti writing. The painted trains that were popularly despised as emblem’s of the city’s decay and chaos in the late 1970s and early 1980s are now viewed with a certain nostalgia and respect, along with the gritty landscape that has since vanished. Set to a jazz soundtrack featuring Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin, Stations of the Elevated flies through through the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, the billboards of Times Square, and even an upstate prison, raising difficult questions about life in the city and the nature of urban art. Who owns the streets, and who has the right to vandalize them?

I met with Manny, who is now eighty-three years old, at the School of Visual Arts, where he has been happily teaching an array of filmmaking courses since 1975 and continues to teach today, to talk about the making of Stations of the Elevated and its long road to a theatrical release. Born in Germany in 1931, Kirchheimer’s parents brought the family to Washington Heights in 1936 to escape Hitler. He learned the craft at the very first documentary program in the United States at City College under the instruction of Dadaist filmmaker Han Richter in the 1950s. Kirchheimer then worked as an editor on industrials and television programs in New York before making his early films Colossus on the River (1963), about the docking of an ocean liner, and Claw (1968), about the rise of glass and steel skyscrapers and the destruction of older buildings in their wake. These films are largely wordless and possess a timeless quality that feels fresh today, owing to his expressive visual style and use of classical and jazz music. Somehow, it was not a surprise when Kirchheimer revealed that he regarded himself as a kind of cinematic time traveler, consciously working to produce images likely be more resonant in the future than at the time of their creation.

VICE: When did you first encounter the painted trains in Stations of the Elevated? I have this vision of you seeing them on an elevated platform on your way to work.
Manny Kirchheimer: No, it’s not like that. Because when they roll in on the way to work, they’re in your face. They’re as close as you are to me, you know? So you see a little patch, you don’t really pay attention. And I think most of the people just felt it was an assault on them. It’s bad enough having to go to work in the morning, but they have to go in these smutty, smudgy, abusive cars. I didn’t think about it one way or the other, it didn’t bother me big time, but I was hearing what people were saying. My father-in-law said that the kids who were doing it ought to be strung from lampposts. That was a fairly common attitude.

I was part of a food co-op at the time and I would go to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx—where the wholesale markets were—via the Cross Bronx Expressway. The Cross Bronx Expressway has three or four elevated lines crossing it, and by 5:30 PM in the summer, the sun is out brilliantly, and it would illuminate these screens of color. It was very pretty, and that’s when I became interested and thought to myself, this could be a film. So I applied for a grant and gave myself two hours to write the proposal. I used big words like “quintessential,” and at the time we were using tokens to get on the subway, so I talked about the trains coming from “the token ends of the Earth.” It was all bullshit. I didn’t really have respect for the process of applying for a grant, because I had unsuccessfully applied to the American Film Institute for a grant 21 times before this. And of course, this was the one that was accepted, after spending so much time being a goody-goody.

I didn’t do much research. The things that I found out, which are in the film now, are things that happened mostly while I was shooting. The fact that there was a gun, that there were eyes looking at you, that there was fire, that there were whores, that there were angry faces and clenched fists. And messages like “HATE” and “SLAVE” and “SHADOW." There was so much fire on these trains. I was finding a lot of fire, and “The Bronx is burning!” you know?

What was your sense of the inspiration behind these paintings?
I figured this is a scream from the ghetto and these kids are bursting out and expressing themselves out of the experience of their lives. Years later, when I was making Spraymasters (2008), I told that to Zephyr—Andy Witten, wonderful guy, a graffiti guy from the old day, he was the white kid and he was sort of the archivist. When I interviewed him, he did not agree with what I had concluded as an outsider who knew nothing and was trying to make a sociological thing out of it. He felt that you’d have to ask each individual writer why he was doing what he was doing. That some people were just influenced by comic books or by things they saw on television or by each other, and not necessarily by the signifiers I was finding. I was finding a lot of low-class kind of imagery and a lot of anger, which I connected to their surroundings. Why else would somebody want to call himself HATE? But Zephyr discounted that, he thought it was simplistic. I made Stations of the Elevated long before I knew him based on ideas like that. I think that’s what a lot of philosophy is about anyhow. I think that a lot of philosophy may not be true, but the process produces great work. I’m not saying mine is great work, but it’s the process that counts, not necessarily the premise.

Something I admire about Stations of the Elevated is the way people and images in the city are constantly regarding and judging each other. Somehow, every person and object feels engaged and opinionated. In particular, you feature a group of kids hanging out at an elevated train station and commenting on the art that goes by.
And the billboard faces—who are of course, contemptuous of what’s happening. They’re intimidating. They’re looking. Well, that’s what I thought. And then, sometimes they’re meretricious, like the woman who seems to be making eye contact with another billboard, who is hardly clothed.

Right. You’ve said elsewhere that you had this idea that there was legal vandalism as well as illegal vandalism, the advertisements versus the graffiti. You’re posing a question about who has the authority to vandalize our cities.
Right. Billboards and all that stuff is legal vandalism. So the question of property being abused, property being destroyed, if you put it in a different context, it’s “Who owns the streets?” In that sense, these people have a perfect right to express themselves. The billboards are expressing on behalf of some mogul in Texas or wherever, who is selling you cancer. But I don’t think these kids understood any of that. I think that they were compelled, obviously, by competition and peer pressure, but also the idea that they were seeing everything promoted instead of themselves. They were such small fry, and they put themselves up, as they say. I didn’t know any of the graffiti writers when I made this film. Before I knew anything, I called these images on the trains live souls, after Gogol’s Dead Souls. Because that’s how it seemed to me—very lively stuff, traveling on the trains and making these circuits, saying, “Look at me! Look at me!”

Why do you think there’s a renewed interest in Stations of the Elevated today, over 30 years after it first appeared?
Everybody now knows that that graffiti happened 30 years ago. But it doesn’t seem old fashioned, you know what I mean? It seems current. I tried to exclude current things so that the film would seem modern many years later. I saw myself as a visitor from the future, trying to understand what was there. Like a time capsule. I thought: Here are clues, which are bound together by these trains, but they’re all over the place, like the shadows I captured on the walls. They were being made unconsciously and without notice every day of the week by the sun on the walls of those stations. Which made me think about Hiroshima. You know about Hiroshima, where the shadows stayed on the wall after the blast? And what’s interesting is that in a sense, it’s coming true. It’s 33 years later and suddenly there’s a revival and people are seeing this world of 1977.

Like I say, the film was not successful in 1981, but now the Times calls it “achingly gorgeous.” Now they’re talking about there being beauty in this film, but in those days, those nostalgic days, everybody wanted to clean up the subways! And they’ve succeeded—tthey cleaned up the subways—but it’s also more bland. That’s always the trade-off.

Stations of the Elevated plays October 17 through the 23rd at BAM Rose Cinemas. Get more info here. 

Follow Matthew Caron on Twitter. 

Photos by Matthew Leifheit

NYU’s Bobst Library is an empty cavern where fluorescent lights hang down like stalactites and lone students wing through the stacks like bats. My ears are straining to catch some sign of life when I hear the squawk of a recalcitrant brake as the librarian wheels a metal book cart my way. If my soul could salivate, I’d go wet inside. Saints’ relics, the shirt off Justin Bieber’s back, lost tapes showing what really happened that day in Dallas—I couldn’t give two shits about those curios. I’m about to hold David Wojnarowicz’s final secret: the Magic Box. 

Through his art, Wojnarowicz gave voice to the unspeakable, be it the banal brutality of the suburbs, the roaring horror of AIDS, or the beauty of two faggots fucking on an abandoned pier in downtown Manhattan—all subjects he came by honestly. His father was violently abusive, alcoholic, and eventually killed himself; his mother was often absent and rarely parental. By the time he was a teenager, Wojnarowicz was hustling among the junkies and pimps in pre-Disney Times Square. Yet like an alchemist, he somehow distilled shit into gold, turning a painful childhood into powerful, layered artwork that was at once raw and intensely structured. His paintings, essays, and installations graced everything from the 1985 Whitney Biennial to ACT UP protest signs. If playwright Larry Kramer was the conscience of 1980s queer America, Wojnarowicz was the id—full of rage and lust, love and fear.

And he understood that that rage could be his weapon. In his essay “Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch-Tall Politician,” Wojnarowicz wrote that “to speak about the once unspeakable can make the INVISIBLE familiar if repeated often enough in clear and loud tones.” This was his central project, his central problem: how to make legible the queer outline of his life, which America would have rather seen destroyed, or, failing that, kept silent. Wojnarowicz believed that this articulation had the power to “shake the boundaries of the illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION,” his dismissive term for the false sense of shared experience that was at the heart of every two-and-a-half-child, three-car-garage, prefab, Norman Rockwell–style American dream. It was all part of the “pre-invented world”—the shit we are handed at birth, like language and capitalism—which was built to serve the needs of those in power and which Wojnarowicz rejected vocally and often.

The irony, of course, was that for all his articulate anger and eloquent lust, Wojnarowicz had fuck-all ability to talk about himself. Cynthia Carr’s biography of him, Fire in the Belly, recounts reams of journal pages filled with admissions he never made. He seemed to speak the hidden desires of every fag in America save one—himself.

According to the finding aid, 58 objects compose the Magic Box. Fifty-nine if you include the box itself—plain pine, with a logo for “Indian River Citrus” bursting across the top like juice from a ripe orange. Wojnarowicz would have been 59 this year. As I slide the top off, I find myself wondering whether this is a sign. Spend too much time around magic, and you start to see it everywhere.

Among the things inside the box are a cowboy action figure, a quartz crystal the size of a small fist, two globes, a rat’s nest of beaded necklaces, a miniature handmade mask with the lips sewn shut, a toy Santa, a dime-store bag of plastic insects, and a variety of prayer cards and photos of gurus. If you’ve spent time staring at Wojnarowicz’s work, you might feel a prickle of déjà vu: There’s a frog like in Water, a crucifix that could have come straight from Why the Church Can’t/Won’t Be Separated from the State. It looks like a young boy tried to re-create Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre using only what he had in his pockets.

The prayer cards surrounded the bed of Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz’s mentor and soul brother, when he died of AIDS in 1987. Carr suspects the orange crate belonged to Hujar too. If anyone knew of the Magic Box, she says, Hujar did. Certainly neither Wojnarowicz’s collaborators nor his boyfriend Tom Rauffenbart knew of its existence. It was under Wojnarowicz’s bed when he died—in 1992, also of AIDS—with the words magic box written on a wide strip of masking tape in his block letters. Among Wojnarowicz’s papers, Carr found only one reference to the box, in an undated list from a 1988 journal: “Put Magic Box in installation.” But Wojnarowicz didn’t create any installations in 1988. For at least four years, until his death, Wojnarowicz kept the Magic Box as his own private, portable world.

Why?

That’s the question I keep returning to. Why keep the box at all, and why keep it a secret? I believe the answers are intimately related.

Wojnarowicz understood the power of resonance, the way all things emit meaning like photons streaming from the sun, and how proximity affects understanding. In “Do Not Doubt…” he said of his work, “Photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.” English couldn’t be trusted for this kind of delicate operation, because language exists as part of the pre-invented world. Wojnarowicz wanted to express the dreams and nightmares that English would not allow by creating his own private language—and every language needs a dictionary.

We will never conclusively know what the box meant to him, but I see it as Wojnarowicz’s dictionary, his image bank, his refuge and release. Inside its 8-by-17-by-12.625-inch walls, Wojnarowicz kept a private universe, the one that inspired all his art. In a letter to his friend Philip Zimmerman, which Carr recounted in her biography, Wojnarowicz wrote, “I feel kind of satisfied in mapping down my interior world with each thing I make. I’m realizing that there is something elementally important in bringing what is deep inside to light… It can ease the pressure of being alien in the visible structure that we had no hands in creating.”

His final secret? Feeling like an alien, Wojnarowicz created a home planet, which he populated with stones and bones and feathers, toys from the innocent childhood he never had, and remembrances of the things he loved, because at the core of all his anger was a desire for a better world, where beauty reigned and no boy ever turned tricks in Times Square, for food or money or just to be held.