Thumbnail photo via Flickr users Dave and Margie Hill

In this column, I’ve chronicled all manner of racist, pseudo-racist, racially insensitive, and vaguely pornographic videos. With just a modicum of effort, you can watch such modern classics as “DISRESPECTFUL NIGGER GETS THUMPED,” “typical nigger behavior,” and that toe-tapping ditty, “Quit your bitchn’ nigger!” by Johnny Rebel.

YouTube isn’t just a place for racists to express themselves knowingly. It’s also overflowing like a backed-up port-a-potty at EDC with candid videos of racist rants filmed without the subject’s knowledge or consent. The latest clip to burn up the charts on TRL (Total Racism Live) is of an unnamed black tour guide in San Francisco who lays out a poorly considered thesis on why Chinatown is unlivable (spoiler alert: a lot of problems are related to ginseng). The tourists watching this spectacle are said to be German. Some of them applauded her screed. German tourists cheering on a black woman saying racist things about the Chinese? It sounds like either the world's worst happy hour bar joke or the world's best episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

To this furious woman, Chinese people are loud, plentiful, smelly, and do weird things like eat frogs and walk around their neighborhood. They also enjoy dragons, which seems to be the last straw for her. Maybe she's a character from a shitty fantasy novel and a dragon killed her parents. Or maybe she was just drunk off whatever is in that bottle she's holding. I hate to speculate, but that’s all I can do since the tour guide is not named, the tour bus company is not identified, and I don’t even know if this video was shot recently. Why let that get in the way of our anger?

I wouldn’t say it’s irresponsible to post a video like that. It’s irresponsible to pay your credit card bill a month late, leave your baby locked in a hot car, or put a tarantula down your trousers. It just seems pointless at first glance. Whenever videos like this Chinatown clip are released, the same tired dance begins anew. A smug laptop monkey embeds the video and proceeds to tell his or her audience that they “can’t believe racism still exists in 2014.” This is, after all, the Blessed Age of Obama. How can anyone be so oblivious to the fact that we won? Actually, yes. I can believe it. There are racists in every country. Yes, even you, Luxembourg. Don’t think I forgot about you! Some of my best friends are probably racists secretly plotting against me while I sleep. Dave will be so disappointed to find out that we got him KFC gift certificates and a cotton gin for his birthday, they must say.

These accidental racists become mini-internet celebrities overnight. Who can forget our angry stripper friend from upstate New York seen above? Or the "crazy, rude, and racist" woman in Boston screaming "fucking Allah!" after an incomprehensible fight with a convenience store clerk? When I pulled up the New York stripper video, I had to sit through a trailer for Dumb and Dumber To before I could watch the real thing. It was a reminder that tragedy in our culture can often double as entertainment. These videos get hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views. If the comments are indicative of the overall audience for these little nuggets of heaven, the average viewer is either appalled that someone could be so racist or eager to hear someone use the word “nigger” and really mean it.

So, if you are not the kind of twisted bastard who amuses themselves with rhetorical violence, then what are you watching this stuff for? It’s probably the same reason middlebrow people watched Honey Boo Boo: to feel superior to someone appreciably less "cultured" than they are. Well, I’m not racist, am I? Shame on them! I must show all of my friends how horrible these people are immediately, and across multiple social media platforms!

I don’t begrudge anyone their Mussolini moment of masturbatory bliss, but there are so many of these videos online. What are we learning now that we've seen some poor fool call someone a "chink" yet again? That old white people sometimes say awful things in public? That certain small towns have an issue with race? Why not question the entire concept of outing racists if it’s going to happen no matter what?

That’s the very thing I asked myself when I decided to stop doing This Week in Racism back in July: What’s the point? Believe it or not, I was hoping to never write another one of these columns for the rest of my life.

Stop applauding!

OK, thanks. For those of you who have never done a weekly column about prejudice and hatred—or for those still convinced that everyone in the world is hopelessly in love with each other like in a fucking Nancy Meyers movie—it’s hard.

The news is overwhelmingly about atrocities of one form or another—and that's not even counting the Cathy comics or the box score for a Laker game—but race issues are especially distressing, since the heart of the matter is that some people don't like other people because they look different. Who wants to be reminded that this planet is full of spiteful, nasty, cruel beings with only one desire: to see you fuck off and die? Why subject oneself to bigoted, prejudiced imagery? What sane person would want to write about that? 

No one!

And yet, here I am, bringing back a column that's brought me much mental anguish, that's encouraged people to call me all sorts of names that start with the letter "n," and made me reconsider my desire to live on a such a bleak planet. I'd leave, but I can't get a WiFi reception on Jupiter.

I think we all just want to try to make sense of this nonsensical existence. That’s why we post and watch videos of hateful people saying awful things. It’s why we’re collectively fascinated by serial killers, rapists, and war criminals. We just want to figure out why. This column is my feeble attempt to solve that puzzle.

The Most Racist Tweet of the Week:

This sand nigger keeps liking my girlfriends shit

— Keenan Ordonez (@KeenanOrdonez) October 22, 2014

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Ernesto Chahoud, owner of Darsko record store, in Beirut

Below a canopy of electric wires on a narrow street in Bourj Hamoud, an Armenian neighborhood in east Beirut, a small group of pensioners sit on red plastic chairs outside a corner shop, chain-smoking and occasionally shouting at each other, in conversation rather than anger.

Mopeds and a beaten-up 1960s-era Mercedes compete with women bustling children home from school and a couple of foremen carrying a nondescript assortment of scrap metal and wood. Amid the daily humdrum the gentle melody of Grant Greene’s “Idle Moments” emerges from a nondescript shop front, sandwiched between a falafel joint and a shoe-shop selling "NIKE’s" with ticks stitched backwards.

Inside, a tall man wearing a T-shirt that's slightly too small for him fiddles with an old Sansui amp standing on a table beside vinyl copies of Heavy D’s “Gyrlz They Love Me,” Bo Hanson’s “Attic Thoughts,” and a 70s-era Turkish psychedelic funk 45. The copy of “Idle Moments” spinning on the nearby turntable is a 1964 Blue Note original. Similar copies have sold on eBay for over $950.

It would be easy to pass by Darsko without noticing it. Ostensibly a shop, it doubles as a hangout for friends, local musicians, enthusiasts willing to pay big, and connoisseurs looking for a trade. Archaic property legislation means that rent on the building has been fixed since before Lebanon’s civil war (1975-90), making monthly payments to the landlord negligible.

Over the last few months, the likes of DJ Format, Olly Teeba of the Herbaliser, and German 45-legend Florian Keller have passed by during trips to Beirut to perform with the Beirut Groove Collective (BGC), a group of DJs pursuing a strictly vinyl policy, spinning a variety of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, rare-groove, and hip-hop. On the first of November, Mr Thing—two-time World DMC Champion and the producer behind Yungun’s classic Grown Man Business LP—is set to touch down in Beirut to headline with the collective.

Ernesto Chahoud, Darsko’s owner and a founding member of the BGC, is one of Lebanon’s premier vinyl collectors, with over 10,000 dug up in flea markets, old record shops, attics, and dumpsters in Beirut and wider Lebanon since the mid-90s. In addition to his work with the BGC, Chahoud has helped bring artists—including pioneering jazz guitarists Ryo Kawasaki and American Melvin Sparks—to Lebanon.

Lebanon may not seem the ideal place for vinyl enthusiasts, but anywhere can be a crate digger's dreamland under the right circumstances.

The period stretching from the end of the French occupation until the outbreak of civil war is regarded as a golden era in the country. During this time, bolstered by the influx of Western tourists to the country in the 1940s, vinyl began to be pressed. Local labels such as Societe du Libanais du Disque acquired distribution rights from European and American labels, while others, such as Dunya Phone, sought to promoted local and regional musicians. During this period, the likes of Miles Davis, Dizzie Gillespie, and Ella Fitzgerald traveled to Lebanon, performing to sell-out crowds at the Baalbek festival, amid some of the finest Roman ruins in the world.

While the Baalbek festival is still going today, the outbreak of civil war brought a cruel end to Lebanon’s short-lived vinyl pressing era.

The space Darsko now inhabits was Chahoud’s grandfather’s shoe factory. However, in 1975, the family, who were supporters of the Lebanese communist party, moved to west Beirut as the east became increasingly dominated by right-wing Christian militias. Following the 1982 Israeli invasion, they relocated once again, to Rmeileh, a mountain village close to Sidon and, at the time, one of few remaining communist bastions in the country.

“One time in the bus on the way to school, we were sitting in traffic. Suddenly, rockets hit the car next to us,” says Chahoud. “Everything was on fire, people were running and screaming. The driver managed to U-turn and drive us home. I was maybe five years old. Soon after that my parents left Beirut.

“Life in Rmeileh in the late-80s was all right. It was full of armed, drunken men—a bit crazy. You know, like that Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch. It was the end of the war, that latent time between the end of an era and the beginning of another. Really, I just dreamed of returning to Beirut—mainly because there was no pinball in Rmeileh. Also, I wanted to hang out with girls.”

In the early 90s, Chahoud returned to east Beirut with his parents as the city and its citizens attempted to rebuild after 15 years of conflict.

“I was hanging out with a group of guys older than myself—hippie, rock 'n' roll types. They were listening to the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, etc. We would buy cassettes in these shops that would be completely sparse other than a table and chair, with thousands of cassettes lining the walls. The cassettes would only have the name of the artist and the album written on them, but not the track listings. We never knew the name of individual songs,” reflects Chahoud.

“One day I bought this set of five cassettes that included an early Fleetwood Mac tape with Peter Green, one Bob Dylan, and one Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I remember listening to them when I got home that day and thinking, Oh fuck, this is something. Around a year after that, I started buying vinyl.

“In the early-90s, people returned to their homes after the war and began renovating and selling things. Everyone was throwing away vinyl, especially with the rise of CDs. I used to go to the flea markets around Beirut every weekend. There were crates and crates and I would pay around 500-1000 Lebanese Lira (30 - 60 cents) per vinyl. My parents thought I was fucking crazy.”

While it's still possible to stumble across a gem, the majority of valuable Lebanese-pressed vinyl has now been eaten up by connoisseurs. Traders have also wizened up to the potential value of rare and even not-particularly rare-records, Chahoud’s vociferous appetite almost single-handedly serving to raise market prices.

Ernesto in King's

In King’s, a record store located a ten-minute walk from Darsko, Chahoud argues for half an hour over the availability of an old Deep Purple album. A picture of King having his cheek squeezed by Julio Iglesias is tacked to the back-wall, and a stuffed flying fish hangs above the counter. In the mid-90s, Chahoud bought a crate of vinyl from King for a paltry 40,000 Lira ($26.00). It included some rare northern soul and disco. He says King has regretted it ever since.

Today, the Deep Purple LP is not for sale. Chahoud leaves looking crestfallen, while King returns to his prior engagement: placing counterfeit porn DVDs into plastic sleeves, accompanied by carefully cut plastic cards containing seedy images explaining the DVD’s contents.

“Fuck it,” says Chahoud, leaving the shop before reminiscing about a Larry Corryell gig he attended in Beirut a few years ago.

“I ended up backstage and asked Corryell about this quasi-mythical session he allegedly recorded with Miles Davis back in the day," he recalls. "He looked at me and said in disbelief, 'How do you know about that?' Before explaining that it was true, but Davis’ family had never allowed the release. He wasn’t sure why, but added, 'I’ll tell you what—Miles had me playing like I’d never played before.'”

Talking to Chahoud, it's clear he wishes he’d been around for Beirut’s golden era, when vinyl was readily printed and some of the biggest names in jazz and soul graced the stage at Baalbek.

“It must have been amazing,” says Chahoud. “A lot of people here are not scared of ISIS. During the civil war here we did just as bad. Behead people, cut off ears and collect them, tie a man between two cars and split him in half… many crazy things. There was just no YouTube.

“I dream that Beirut could one day return to being the city it was, recognized as a thriving cultural hub not just in the Middle East, but by people all over the world.”

@martnbeirut

Russell Brand made his name as a provocateur, but recently his voice of dissent has grown louder and louder, threatening to drown out the clownish Booky Wook image he spent a decade building. Nowadays, the radical raconteur is as well known for gunning down US news reporters and setting the world straight on his news commentary show The Trews as he is for his stand-up and aborted marriage to Katy Perry.

After causing controversy by telling everyone in the UK to stop voting, he's followed up with a new book—Revolution—that lays out his manifesto for a world of less work and more play. This recent call to arms has invited widespread criticism not so much for the ideology, but the platform; like Bono, Gwyneth, and Angelina, he's another celebrity to swap Hollywood for humanitarianism, and there are plenty of people not pleased about that.

In a new episode of Shorties, we sat down with Russell for a quick chat about his vision for a better world. While it may well be the case that the incumbent political system isn't serving us, is Russell's brand of revolution really the answer? 

In early October, Paris’ Longchamp Racecourse hosted Europe’s “most prestigious horse race," the 93rd Qatar Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe (or just “the Arc” if you want to save yourself some time). The whole “most prestigious in Europe” thing is up for debate, but since Qatar signed a €5 million ($6.3 million) sponsorship deal with the venue in 2008, it’s definitely one of the snazziest, up there with the Dubai World Cup and Japan Cup elsewhere.

Nowadays, the Prix is screened in about 200 countries, viewed by a billion people and welcomes around 60,000 visitors every first week of October. This year, horse owners, gamblers, wealthy jet-setters and people who like watching big animals run around in circles flocked to Paris once again to take part.

As soon as I walked through the gates to the racecourse, it became pretty obvious that most of the visitors had no real interest in the horses. Which wasn’t really too much of a surprise. Most were there doing business, busy being seen or simply trying to fill their Sunday with something that wasn’t a Netflix binge or afternoon spent napping on the couch. It also felt a bit like a tourism expo for Qatar; there was an exhibition of Qatari outfits, a Qatari crafts workshop, and a lot more Qatari singing than I’d imagine you usually hear at the races.

Loading up with a hotdog, I wandered into a tent where an “elegance contest” called Beautiful Duos was taking place. I was looking Larry David-level normcore in jeans and trainers, so entering wasn’t really an option. A shame, as the prizes were pretty great: a Citroën DS3 car for the winning couple, a holiday in Qatar for the runners-up, and Longines watches for the second runners-up.

With all these distractions, I completely forgot about the race that was taking place only a few steps away. Mind you, it didn’t really matter: turned out I’d bet on the wrong horse—Ruler of the World—which is just further proof that you should never judge a horse by its clearly optimistic name.

What Ebola looks like up close. Photo via Flickr user NIAID

Until yesterday evening, no one in New York cared much about where a man named Craig Spencer had gone or what he had done. Now his movements seem to be all anyone can talk about.

The 33-year-old doctor tested positive for Ebola last night, a week after returning from Guinea where he was working with Doctors Without Borders to help patients with the deadly disease. After flying back to JFK on October 17 he rode the A, L, and 1 trains, visited the High Line park, went on a three-mile run, ate at an unnamed restaurant (later revealed to be the Meatball Shop), and, on Wednesday night went out bowling in Williamsburg before taking an Uber back to his apartment in Harlem. The next morning, October 23, he had a temperature—a possible symptom of Ebola—so he called the authorities and was rushed to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital by health workers in protective gear, where he remains in an isolation ward.

The public and the press were told all this at a press conference last night during which Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and New York City Health Commissioner Mary Bassett all took pains to reassure everyone that the situation was solidly under control. Spencer (who, Bassett kept reminding us, is a “medical doctor”) had been taking his temperature twice a day since returning from West Africa, and before Thursday he hadn’t exhibited any symptoms other than fatigue, which is common enough among the Ebola-free population—we’re all fatigued; you're probably fatigued right now. It's a hard, tiring life out there.

Those sorts of reassurances from health professionals are important, according to Paul Slovic, president of Decision Research, a nonprofit that studies public health and perceptions of threat. “[Ebola] is a deadly disease that's new, unfamiliar, and basically seen as uncontrollable—we don't have medicines for it, we don't have vaccines to prevent it,” he said. “All these things contribute to a certain dread of Ebola, which makes it understandable that people are anxious or nervous.”

Retracing Spencer’s steps and who he may have brushed against while strolling along the High Line is close to impossible. “You'll never figure out who all was on the subway or at the bowling alley or whatever,” said Diane Griffin, chair of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Although at the same time those kinds of very casual contacts are highly unlikely to lead to transmission.” (Try telling that to Motherboard's Jason Koebler.)

To be on the safe side, four people have been placed in quarantine: Two of his friends and his fiancée, who all may have had contact with him while he was sick, and the Uber driver who took him to Harlem on Wednesday, who wasn’t at risk, officials said. Also playing it safe was the Gutter, the bowling joint where Spencer hung out that night, which shut down on Thursday, cancelling a Goodnight Records CMJ showcase. (It’s reportedly going to be thoroughly cleaned before reopening.) Spencer’s apartment is also locked and quarantined off—his building’s superintendent isn’t letting anyone in, said Bassett at the press conference, and Spencer even left his key inside to prevent anyone from getting his hands on it.

Scene outside Craig Spencer's apartment pic.twitter.com/0wcvQgJ9d1

— Evan Engel (@evanengel) October 24, 2014

This is the part where everyone should be reminded just how hard it is to get Ebola. It’s a terrifying disease because it’s so deadly, but it’s only transmitted through the bodily fluids of someone who is actually sick. A New York Times blog post titled “Can You Get Ebola from a Bowling Ball?” answers its own question with a resounding no:

If someone left blood, vomit or feces on a bowling ball, and the next person to touch it did not even notice, and then put his fingers into his eyes, nose or mouth, it might be possible. But, the Ebola virus does not normally build up to high levels in saliva or mucus until very late in the disease—several days after the initial fever sets in—and it is unlikely that someone that ill would have just gone bowling.

What spreads in situations like this isn’t the virus, but news of the virus. If you were on social media last night you saw it unfold in real time: the announcement that Spencer was being tested for Ebola a day after going bowling in Williamsburg, the realization that there are only two places with lanes in the Brooklyn neighborhood, the revelation that the Gutter was closing while Brooklyn Bowl was staying open as usual—then, finally, the announcement that the doctor did indeed have Ebola, at which point all the headlines could change from “Suspected Ebola Patient” to “CONFIRMED EBOLA PATIENT!”

Naturally, the press has been reporting the shit out of this, though beyond the bare facts of Spencer’s activities in the last week there’s not much to say. New York magazine interviewed a friend of his who described him as “really bubbly and outgoing,” a good guy who “would tackle whatever comes his way”; Mashable drew up a little map showing all the places Spencer had been since his return to the city. There’s a palpable hunger for more nuggets of information about this story—this morning, a cluster of camera crews were stationed outside of the Gutter, either awaiting an employee’s arrival or simply snagging B-roll of the closed and shuttered storefront.

Photo by author

Despite the media frenzy, most outlets have been responsible about not descending into alarmist hysteria. The exception, of course, is the Daily Mail, which reported that “Ebola panic is swarming New York City” and that Spencer had “passed through vast swathes of city with deadly virus.” The publication’s proof of this panic was a few scattered tweets from random people. In reality, no one is stockpiling food or running through the streets screaming. The city has been preparing for an Ebola case for quite some time now, and New Yorkers have certainly been through more terrifying and bizarre things in the last decade and a half than a single sick man. That is to say: Don’t worry about us, mom. We’ll be fine.

Other than Spencer and the four people in quarantine, the only real victims of this “outbreak” have been the Gutter (which we haven’t been able to reach yet) and Goodnight Records and the bands that were supposed to play the divey bowling alley last night.

Keith Vogelsong, the label co-founder, was scrambling to find a last-minute alternative venue when we spoke to him, but didn’t sound too hopeful—it’s CMJ and the whole city is pretty much booked.

“We had over RSVPs, it was going to be a good night,” he said. “It really sucks.”

Reporting was contributed by Matt Taylor.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

All photos by Julian Lucas

As much as we enjoy it, we take porn for granted. Most of us use it often enough, but we never think about the work that goes into making a good piece of pornography—the camera angles, the lighting, the acting, and yes, even the script. But there is an art to writing a porn screenplay, as I learned when Kayden Kross and her fiancé Manuel Ferrara invited me along to shadow and observe the porn script-writing process and production start to finish.

I meet Kayden and Manuel at a hookah bar in Los Angeles, their location of choice for brainstorming. Porn is the family business, and it’s easy to see why they’ve had such continued success: They bounce off each other with a mixture of shared ideas and compromise, and their adoration for one another is evident.

Tonight they're working on an assignment for Jules Jordan Video; Manuel will be directing and starring it what was slated to be a DP film. That stands for “double penetration,” in case you didn't already know, which means a single female performer would be getting simultaneously anally and vaginally penetrated. (It doesn't sound sexy when you say it like that, I know.) A whole lot of coordination is required to execute a DP scene, and Manuel is known for having done a lot of them with a 53-year-old German porn star called Steve Holmes (who, in his own words, is best known "for being old and creepy and having a big dick"). The choreography is complicated, Kayden explains—the guy on top is responsible for working around the “anchor” on the bottom. But Manuel and Steve have a good handle on it, which is why they’ve been invited to do another, three years after their last movie together.

They began the writing process by setting “parameters,” or outlining the type of sex they have to include. In this instance, they’re tasked with plotting out four DP scenes with four different girls, which will take place over the course of two and a half or three hours. They mention that the story is not normally of consequence, nor is the dialogue. As Kayden tells me, “At the end of the day they want what makes them aroused—so if the dialogue contributes to that, great, but 70 percent fast-forward through it.”

But viewers do want some backbone of a story. “It’s important that they can jerk off with what’s around the sex, as well as just the act itself,” Manuel says.

For the DP project with Manuel and Steve, they want something lighthearted. “I’m thinking Dude, Where’s My Car meets Cinderella,” suggests Kayden. Basically, two guys wake up after a big night of DPing a really hot girl. Eager to track her down for a repeat, they head out and trial-DP a couple of other girls. Unable to pinpoint who the elusive girl is, they return home only to find she’s been at home fucking their roommate the whole time.

“A twist!” I shout, prompting Manuel to make a joke about being “the M. Night Shyamalan of porn.”

But Manuel ultimately doesn't like the; idea, so the brainstorming continues—they want a decent storyline, but need to take into account the average porn consumer's relative disinterest in the plot. Then this conversation happens:

Manuel: What about Cinderella meets Unbreakable?
Kayden: So, you and Steve are superheroes?
Manuel: Yeah but every time he does it, he breaks his penis.
Kayden: How about we do Groundhog Day meets—
Manuel: No, no.
Kayden: Let’s do The Taming of the Shrew, where there are four shrews!

They're in hysterics by this point.

“The thing is that every story has already been told," says Kayden. "There are only so many archetypes; everything kicks back to another previously told story.” She rattled off a few narratives she’d like to bring in, including a porn rendition of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Adapting a classic wouldn’t be simple, though, since you usually have just four weeks from a film's conception to its completion—spending any more time on production is simply a waste of money thanks to the economics of the porn industry.

“The moment your content hits the internet, it’s stolen,” they tell me, referencing the various free tube sites that pilfer their work. “There’s such high consumption. We’re dealing with tiny budgets largely because of this.”

Perhaps it’s because of this that Manuel’s idea of pulling it back to realism ends up winning out. “I’d like to come up with our own stuff," he says. "It’s not supposed to be this hugely complex thing where people get to the end and go, Oh, I didn’t see that coming.” And with that, they land on a simple idea: a celebratory DP to welcome Steve Holmes (who is based in Europe) back to America.

The story isn’t far from what would have been a reality for Manuel and Steve some 15 years ago.

“It makes it more lively and more realistic,” he says, going off of an earlier suggestion of Kayden’s that they make something that doesn't seem overly acted. ("Realistic" for porn actors may not be realistic to you and I, however—like the time when Steve had just finished shooting a DP scene and walked outside to find Manuel recreationally DPing his makeup artist.)

Having settled on the idea, Kayden and Manuel scribble down a few ideas for DP sequences and a scene that would serve as "the tease," a necessary element in every porn movie, where the girl instigates the arousal by stripping, flirting with the camera, playing with herself, and whatever else works. “It’s an art to build a tease in there without looking like we just slapped it on,” Manuel explains.

Just hours later, Manuel DPs Them All was written. They planned to shoot this a matter of days; pre-production was already almost done. 

“What’s backwards about porn versus Hollywood is that we already have our locations booked for three out of the four days,” Kayden says. “We have a really nice house booked, then another one with 80s furniture. We know for the most part that we can only really shoot in a studio or a house. We can’t exactly shut down Hollywood Boulevard.”

They book ahead of time in order to snag the best locations. These spots will set a production company back around $100 to $300 per hour. For the homeowner, it’s not a bad way to simultaneously pay off a mortgage and have something fun to talk about at your next dinner party.

A few days later, I meet up with them on set, where Manuel DPs Them All will come to life. The script is basically exactly what they came up with at the hookah spot, with just one scene tweaked. When Manuel isn't on screen, he's operating camera operating because a) he’s very good at it, and b) this was a gonzo film—a style that attempts to situate the viewer in the scene with the performers. In lieu of formally constructed dialogue and direction, the performers largely improvise, sort of like a Christopher Guest film only not quite as funny and with a lot of sex. 

As far as the actual DPing goes, there was a vague plan—they knew which positions they want to showcase, and in which order—but the actual fucking is an art. It's difficult when you have two penises attempting to penetrate two orifices on one girl with limited space for the attached bodies to maneuver. I press Manuel on the logistics.

“It can be very easy or very difficult, depending on who you work with,” he tells me. “Steve and I have been doing this for so many years that it’s almost natural. Usually it works better to put him underneath, and he likes to be underneath. But if you work with inexperienced guys it can be a nightmare.” Later, when am sitting with the editor (who we’ll call “Tom”), he points out the imperative of “creating the piston motion” and praises Manuel and Steve for their perfect execution.

I sit for a while with Tom, staring at an screen filled with Manuel, Steve, a bunch of girls, and a whole lot of sex. My mind is fuzzy and full of genitals, but Tom walks me through his process like he was showing me different tiles I could use to line my kitchen. “I mean, I’ve done around a thousand of these,” he says. “I’m very detached. I have to be.”

Manuel DPs Them All has now been released (on JulesJordan.com), so go ahead and buy it if you like.

Follow Shanrah Wakefield on Twitter.

Vintage Adidas jacket from Rokit

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX DE MORA
STYLING BY KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Stylist assistant: Bo Dube and Thomas Ramshaw
Make-up: Danielle Kahlani
Hair: Nicole Kahlani
Models: George Hard and Coral at FM

Vintage Adidas jacket from Rokit, skirt from Rokit

Gogo Philip necklace, All Saints top

Gogo Philip choker, Motel dress

Claire Barrow tie, shirt from Rokit

Gogo Philip earrings, vintage Adidas jacket from Rokit

All Saints top and trousers

Top from Black Heart Vintage 

Shirt from Black Heart Vintage 

Top from Black Heart Vintage, skirt from Beyond Retro, Loeffler Randall trainers

Screenshot via YouTube.
Following the brazen attack on two soldiers in Quebec on Monday, and the terrible events that unfolded at Parliament Hill Wednesday morning, the reaction at home and abroad was a mix of shock and disbelief. Many were left stunned at the idea that the sleepy, peace-loving nation of Canada would be hit by what would end up being two homegrown attacks by radicalized citizens.

Here’s the thing: for anyone following national security in this country, these attacks should not come as a surprise. In fact, as Glenn Greenwald recently outlined on the Intercept following Monday’s attack, it’s more of a surprise that it didn’t happen sooner.

Canada has been long seen as a safe haven for extremism; a mix of liberal immigration policies and a belief in an inclusive society have made it the perfect place for planning and plotting, as evidenced by the string of attacks planned or carried out in Canada. Unfortunately we also have a rocky history of giving citizenship to militants from abroad. It's well-known, Toronto-born Omar Khadr—the last western citizen to be held by the US at the Guantanamo Bay—came from a family known for their connections to Osama bin Laden and had alleged connections to al Qaeda. Add to that Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 when our soldiers and war planes actively fought in a Muslim country, and you have a climate ripe for fostering homegrown extremism.

As VICE News recently reported the two attacks this week come amidst the deployment of six Canadian CF-18 combat aircrafts destined to join the armada amassing against ISIS. It’s now clear that Canada—like France, Belgium and Australia—is not immune to these sorts of attacks, and you don’t need to look too far in the past to see how close we’ve already come to planned acts of terrorism on Canadian soil.

In April of last year, Canadian and American authorities disrupted a plot to attack Via Rail passenger trains running between Toronto and New York. In 2006, the infamous Toronto 18 were arrested after plotting a series of attacks against targets in Southern Ontario allegedly inspired by al Qaeda. Just before that in 2004, a homegrown terrorist living in his parents basement in Ottawa was arrested for allegedly creating bomb detonators for al Qaeda.

Not to mention, the Air India bombing of 1984 was the most spectacular terrorist attack in Canadian history—and the work of Canadian-based terrorists who plotted within our borders. But these incidents, in comparison to the latest from Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau, were more organised, planned out, and had more moving parts. It’s this sort of increased complexity that allows these kind of attacks to be more easily detected and stopped, as the communication networks used are more likely to be surveilled by law enforcement.

But by including Canadians in ISIS’ recent call on supporters to kill citizens of countries that have entered the anti-ISIS coalition “in any manner or way however it may be,” they have effectively changed the game on terrorism at home. And with Canada’s latest bombing campaign set to take effect, we’re now as much a combatant in Iraq as American forces.

The fact is, terrorist attacks have long been a threat in Canada. But now, with more active engagement in the Middle East, at a time when potential threats are perhaps more easily radicalized and then instantly martyred on social media, so-called "people of interest" that call Canada home now have even more reason to act out.

In a press conference following Wednesday’s attack, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson spoke to the challenges faced in stopping lone-wolf attacks saying,“These are difficult threats to detect… There is no way to know when or where these attacks will happen.” Paulson went on to say that there are currently 93 “high-risk” individuals that are under investigation as potential threats to the country. It’s both interesting and a bit worrisome to note that according to Paulson, Wednesday’s shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was not on that list. 

@katigburgers

This Saturday is the anniversary of the 1983 American invasion of Grenada, codenamed Operation Urgent Fury, which squashed a revolution on the tiny island that dared to challenge US control of the Caribbean. Margaret Thatcher, the UK prime minister at the time, felt put out because US President Ronald Reagan had kept her in the dark about his plans to land troops on the former British colony. But newly discovered documents reveal that the previous Conservative government had hatched a virtually identical invasion plan almost a decade before the Americans stormed the island in order deal with a younger version of those same revolutionaries.

Grenada was once a British sugar plantation worked by African slaves. By 1974, Grenadian strongman Eric Gairy looked set to become the country's first prime minister when the Brits eventually left. Gairy was obsessed with UFOs, compared himself to God, and relied on a personal militia called the Mongoose Gang to crush protests against his increasingly dictatorial leadership.

As mad and ruthless as Gairy was, his presence on the island represented stability for British interests. So British spies in the Caribbean were busy trying to stop opposition elements from assassinating him on Independence day, “when his public presence amongst crowds, noise and fireworks might present a favorable opportunity,” according to declassified UK government files that I found at the National Archives in London.

One intelligence report, marked “secret,” was written by an MI5 officer. Describing his work as “intelligence” might be a stretch, however, as the British spook also reported, “On the other hand, the West Indian temperament does not seem to lend itself to determined and fanatical action except sporadically.” That sounds like a weird mix of guesswork and racial stereotyping rather than legitimate insider information.

Nevertheless, the files reveal that information from this officer prompted the British military to prepare a full-scale invasion plan on the eve of Grenada's independence, “to restore law and order and constitutional government. This would involve a reversion to colonial rule,” the foreign secretary warned Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath in January 1974.

MI5 was worried about the New Jewel Movement ("Jewel" was an acronym for “Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation"). It was viewed as “an extremist organization whose main aim is the overthrow of Gairy and his government (by force if other means fail) and the setting up in its place of a people's revolutionary regime.” The files show that Britain's economic interests in the Caribbean were comparable with investments in India and oil reserves in the Middle East. They reveal that MI5 spied on Grenada's trade unions and ran informants inside the New Jewel Movement (NJM) in the months before independence, looking for plots against Gairy.

MI5 did this knowing that Gairy was no angel. Their intelligence reports refer to his Mongoose Gang as “ruthless” and described it as “an un-uniformed and undisciplined body... many of them have criminal records.”

In the end, the British invasion plan was never used, because Gairy clung to power during independence. It would be another five years before the NJM ousted Gairy in a coup, creating a progressive republic in the Caribbean that would be a thorn in the side of American free marketers with slogans like “Education: A Right, Not a Privilege.”

Chris Searle, a former speechwriter for the NJM leader, told me he was surprised to learn about the UK's contingency plans, as the movement had viewed British imperialism as in the past, unlike the threat of American aggression. But the British plans were credible. The secret intelligence reports on Grenada were compiled by the MI5 station on the neighboring island of Trinidad, which had orchestrated the overthrow of Guyana's democratically elected government in 1953 when Winston Churchill feared the country's leader, Cheddi Jagan, was too left-wing.

British concerns about the NJM overthrowing Gairy in Grenada went to the very top of the government. On January 25, 1974, the foreign secretary advised the prime minister that “the internal situation in Grenada has deteriorated seriously in the last few weeks. There have been strikes, interruptions of public services, and demonstrations which have led to violence including shooting, with resultant casualties including three deaths. Nevertheless Mr. Gairy's Government is still in control. There is a fair chance that, with the security forces at his disposal (the police and the newly recalled 'police aides' [the Mongoose Gang]), he will succeed in containing the situation at least until independence on the 7th February 1974.”

However, the foreign secretary warned the PM that drastic measures had to be contemplated. “In the worst case it is possible that the government may not succeed in retaining control so that it becomes impracticable to transfer sovereignty on the 7th of February to a cohesive and effective authority,” he wrote. This would put the UK in a difficult position, the minister explained, and an invasion to restore “colonial rule” had to be considered.

Britain's defense secretary then convened a meeting on January 30 with the military top brass to discuss a secret paper titled “Grenada: Policy on Intervention by HM [Her Majesty's] Forces.” On the scenario of “Intervention to restore law and order after a breakdown of the Gairy Government,” the briefing noted that “the Ministry of Defense has examined in general terms how such an operation might be mounted.”

The plan bears striking resemblance to the 1983 US invasion. It involved a battalion of Royal Marines or paratroopers, a squadron of helicopters, and warships with “sufficient logistic support for 28 days' operation.” Military lawyers even asked, “What would be the legal position of British forces sent into the Island? If a Marine, in the course of his duty, should kill a local inhabitant, would he be liable for trial by court-martial for the civil offense of, for example, manslaughter?”

The papers also show how British planners were concerned about deploying the Parachute Regiment in Grenada, “whose associations with Londonderry we might wish to avoid in the Grenada situation”—a reference to the paras' role in the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of peaceful protesters in Ireland. You can see why. In November 1973, Gairy's Mongoose Gang had shot activists in an episode known as Grenada's Bloody Sunday.

In fact, Whitehall had sanctioned Gairy's crackdown. The foreign secretary sent a secret memo to the prime minister in May 1973 warning, “There are signs that the role of the official Opposition in Grenada may before long be taken over by a newly formed Black Power organization.” The minister suggested, “It might be better that Mr. Gairy should have a free hand to keep such developments under control in an independent Grenada than that we ourselves should run the risk of becoming involved in the task.”

The UK Foreign Office did not respond to requests for comment.

Blackwater mercenaries are icons of the post-9/11 era. Photo via Flickr user chuck holton

Private military contractors have long been a staple of America’s war on terror. Terrified of copping to just how expensive and bloody it can be to do nation-building abroad, the guys in charge of the US military-industrial complex came up with a nifty way to avoid another Vietnam: private-sector soldiers, a.k.a. mercenaries.

By 2008, more than 150,000 contractors were deployed in Iraq alone, responsible for everything from logistics to serving as bodyguards for diplomats. These folks have a history of doing awful, awful things in war zones—since 9/11, they've been implicated in the rape of US civilians and the mass slaughter of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, among other outrages. Meanwhile, the companies pulling the strings have made billions and paid essentially no price (besides the need to occasionally rebrand) for their employees' egregious human-rights and civil-liberties violations.

But if Wednesday’s guilty verdict against four Blackwater guards is any indication, that could be changing. The men were at the center of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, when they opened fire with machine guns and grenades on a crowded Baghdad traffic circle and falsely claimed to have come under AK-47 fire from insurgents. A jury in a Washington, DC, civilian court convicted them for killing 17 innocent Iraqi civilians and wounding 14 more.

“This verdict is a resounding affirmation of the commitment of the American people to the rule of law, even in times of war,” said US Attorney Ronald C. Machen, Jr., whose office prosecuted the case. “I pray that this verdict will bring some sense of comfort to the survivors of that massacre.”

One of the defendants, Nicholas A. Slatten, was found guilty of murder and faces life in prison, while the rest will serve a minimum of 30 years for manslaughter and weapons charges, pending appeals. Besides putting this handful of thugs behind bars, the verdict could also have ripple effects on the entire private soldier industry. 

“A case like this will have genuine shock effect on individuals and organizations whio want to participate in support of US military activities,” said Geoffery Corn, a veteran army officer, lawyer, and professor at the South Texas College of Law who specializes on international jurisdiction issues. “It’s a validation that even in the most chaotic warzones, not all killing is permissable—there are limits.”

The problem is that the US still leans heavily on private military contractors to conduct its operations. The draft ended back in the Nixon era, and though America has gone to war several times since, the government has refused to institute mandatory military service, as countries like South Korea and Israel have done. The Pentagon has to rely on voluntary recruits, and that's a tricky business—especially when many in the pool of potential soldiers aren't physically fit enough to join the military.

So the government has turned to hired guns, whose bluster reflects our insatiable thirst for their services. Just weeks before the 2007 massacre, a Blackwater manager told a State Department investigator "that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq," according to a memo the official sent to officials in Washington. Defense Department contractors numbered around 66,000 as of this July, a significant reduction since the peak of the Iraq War,  but that doesn't include other government agencies like the State Department, which Blackwater was working for at the time of the Nisour tragedy. 

As Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security program at New York University, put it, the Blackwater verdict “doesn’t get to the broader issue of when we use military contractors, and what rules are in place to make sure we don’t commit human-rights abuses” in the future.

There's also reason to doubt that one court decision seven years after the fact will persuade Iraqis that America is ready to play nice.

“I’m not convinced that the verdicts aren’t some kind of play to tell the world that the United States respects human beings and they’re valuable, while in fact it’s the opposite, that humans aren’t valuable to them,” Ali Abbas Mahmoud, an Iraqi ministry of housing employee whose brother was killed and sister injured in the Nisour Square massacre, told McClatchy. “If they are valuable, why do they hire these killers? In my opinion, it’s just a kind of media show.”

Structural changes in how America does business abroad seems like the only way out of this pattern of bloodshed, even if the ruling—and the 2000 law it relied upon—offer some hope that contractors will be less cavalier.

"What would really be significant is if the US government hit the contractors where it hurt," said Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought a (successful) civil suit against the Blackwater for the Nisour debacle. "This is a bit of a black eye for Blackwater but doesn't hit them at their bottom line. It would make a big difference if the US decreased its reliance on contractors, who after all profit wildly from our going to war."

As Jeremy Scahill and others have already pointed out, the CEOs at these companies never suffer for the horrific behavior of their underlings. In Blackwater's case, that would be former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, who left the (since renamed) firm in 2010 but was in charge at the time of the incident. He had the temerity this week to decry the politics behind the verdict; he also recently suggested that the US should pay some Blackwater-style mercenaries to fight the Islamic State, and even help deal with the spread of Ebola. As it happens, just last month the Pentagon was considering dispatching noncombat contractors to Iraq in hopes that they might bolster the country's embattled army.  

"The military-industrial cohesion and symbiosis is not going to be significantly impaired by this decision," Azmy said.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Footage from a protest. Screengrab from SCMPTV

Hong Kong's Beijing-backed Chief Executive C.Y. Leung, already demonized by pro-democracy protesters in his city, made himself an even easier target a few days ago when he said, “If it’s entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you’d be talking to the half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than US$1,800 a month." In other words, "We can't have full democracy in this city because otherwise the poor will take over."

This gets to the heart of what's driving the current protest movement: The average Hongkonger's vote is a joke because they aren't free to nominate their own leaders. Instead, a 1,200-member nominating committee—dominated by Beijing and business interests—approves candidates before the general public ever gets to vote. Essentially, every candidate must first be vetted by the business elite.

While Hong Kong was still reeling from the insult, I caught up with a few locals to see what they had to say about Leung's brash statements. They didn't want to show their faces while talking to the foreign press, so I photographed them artfully instead.

VICE: How old are you, and what do you do?
Carolyn: I'm 21, and I'm an English tutor and full-time university student.

I guess that means that you make less than HK$14,000 (US$1,800) a month.
Yes.

That means you're a second-class citizen who shouldn't vote! What's that like?
That's so stupid. I feel slighted because my monetary worth does not signify my value as a citizen. There are many people who, due to a variety of circumstances, cannot make HK$14,000 every month, but that does not mean they are less of a citizen.

Is there a policy in Hong Kong that you would like to see changed?
The education system is kind of bad. People who come out of the system are not ready for university or real work because they don't have practical skills, especially after recent reforms that shortened pre-university education by one year.

VICE: How old are you, and what do you do?
Jessica: I'm 28, and I work in finance.

Does that put you over the poverty mark?
Several times over.

That's great! I guess that means you're a first-class citizen.
It's nice, I guess, but I still haven't managed to find and buy a home I want.

Do you want see the voting system be made more democratic?
Sure. It's always better to have a choice than not to.

What policies would you change with your vote?
Any policy that encourages the influx of mainland Chinese tourists and the unhealthy growth of the retail industry—of shops that Hong Kong doesn't need more of. 

VICE: How old are you, and what do you do?
Marcus: I'm 29, and I'm a freelance marketing consultant.

That sounds tricky. Does that keep you over the HK$14,000 mark every month?
My income fluctuates, and it can dip below the HK$14,000 threshold depending on my workload. With that said, I don't feel like I'm part of the “below 14k” stereotype, if that stereotype exists at all.

What's it like being among Hong Kong's poor?
In terms of income, I might be [poor]. But in terms of feeling and thinking, and how I participate in societal affairs, I don't believe in that distinction and labeling. I believe that we are created equal and while our needs for societal support are unique and different, our contributions are unique and different as well. I can't say that a tycoon is more important to Hong Kong than a janitor—we just need everyone to function together and do their part, and that egalitarian thinking applies to both what we can give and what we can ask for.

Do you want a direct vote?
Absolutely. I believe an authentic vote is my way of participating in the management of this city, as well as its direction and development. It's me saying that I am part of this city instead of a drone who happens to be in the vicinity. To me, a voice in the system signifies ownership, and endows the right and responsibility that comes with being an owner.

The launch of the 2008 Imbalu ceremony in Mbale. Photo via Flickr user buhugu.org 

This August, thousands of locals and foreigners descended upon the hills and plains of the rural Mbale District, a typically sleepy land of coffee, corn, and carrot farmers in southeastern Uganda. Temporary dwellings went up to accommodate the sudden swell of guests, and the millet beer flowed as processions of dancers and singers wound their way through the streets. There were rumors that even the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, would attend.

The draw? The public circumcision of dozens of adult men, a practice the government and local boosters now want to promote as a major tourist attraction.

Imbalu, as the ceremony is known, is a compulsory coming-of-age ritual in the Gisu culture. Some say it started over a thousand years ago as an ancient medical practice and eventually grew into a tradition. Some say it’s actually arelatively recent cultural accretion, borrowed and adapted through intermarriage with the circumcising Kalenjin people of Kenya in the early 1800s. And some say the first circumcision was meant to punish a notorious adulterer, but only made him more attractive to the ladies, prompting all the region’s other men to grit their teeth and follow suit. 

Whatever the origin, every other spring sees young men between the ages of 16 and 22 announce their intention to undergo the procedure, which takes place in the mornings in August. For several days beforehand, they’re paraded around and prepared for the experience, which will give them the right to marry and earn them (along with their families) social capital by, as regional Member of Parliament Nandala Mafabi put it, “proving their ability to endure pain and protect their family and tribe.”

On the day of the ritual, the men are done up in ceremonial garb—usually something hanging around the neck and bands around the legs—and painted with ash. Then they're marched in a sort of dance through the street and arrayed in front of the public. They cannot show fear or pain, nor can they cry, as in the course of ten to 30 seconds an expert using an inyembe knife slices off their foreskin. Afterward, they dance some more, the wound is wrapped, and they undergo several days of ritual recuperation before emerging as fully endowed Gisu men.

According to Professor Suzette Heald of the London School of Economics, who has studied Gisu culture for years and attended the Imablu ceremony back in 1968, it has always been open to outsiders. “Unlike such rituals elsewhere,” she said, “they are public—not secret and private—and generally strangers are allowed to watch.” However, back when she observed the ceremony, and as she understands it up until very recently, very few non-Gisu attended the event. “No big fuss was made of this in my day,” she said.

Local and national figures have recently latched onto the ceremony, however, believing it can both enhance Uganda’s existing tourism market and bring all manner of development to Mbale. Tourism is one of Uganda’s biggest sources of income—in the 2013-2014 fiscal year, it took in $1.4 billion, up from $1.1 billion the previous year, topping the country’s other two major revenue drivers, remittances ($800 million) and coffee ($415 million). For years, hundreds of thousands have come for the country’s natural wonders, like the falls, sport fishing, and rafting on the lower Nile, along with the gorillas, birding, and safari offerings in the nation’s nature preserves. Some people come to see the remains of the Buganda Kingdom, the colonial state, or the shrines of several 19th century Christian martyrs.

But as the conflict in South Sudan, where Ugandans carried out a great deal of low-level trade, rages on, the economy has suffered to the tune of almost $240 million. In response, the government and tourism industry have ramped up a year of aggressive marketing and growth, attempting to boost domestic and international travel and expand their offerings. Because it’s in vogue with global tourists (and because the United Nations Development Programme has offered to back government initiatives aimed at promoting community-oriented, poverty-alleviating tourism), Uganda’s taken an interest in the cultural practices of its more remote and marginal tribal cultures. And the practice they’ve latched onto first and foremost is Imbalu.

Asked why the government would stump for circumcision-based tourism, Mafabi, a key supporter of the campaign, explained that, “It is a culture which has survived for many generations. It is a uniting factor for the Gisu. Whether educated or uneducated, it brings them together, and you see that unity.” It’s not the only public circumcision festival in Africa—the Antambahoaka of Madagascar and Masaai of Kenya and Tanzania reportedly allow spectators at their circumcisions. But Mafabi and other backers maintain that the Gisu tradition is unique in the rituals surrounding it, offering little little more than bluster about becoming a more popular destination than the Masaai Mara.

Nationally, the central government has endorsed the ritual, placing it on the Ministry of Tourism’s calendar. The Ugandan Tourism Board has also prepared a promotional video on the ceremony and made Mbale the site of their late-September Tourism Week, timing it to culminate in the circumcision display (which was actually delayed so that President Museveni could attend). But according to Mafabi, “The government has not put up anything yet—it does not have an interest in putting in money.” To that end, Mafabi and other local leaders are spearheading fundraising drives to create a cultural center, event space, and museum of circumcision and cooperation, which should encourage more visits.

Once tourists come for the Imablu, Mafabi hopes they’ll stay (or return) for the region’s other offerings: Mt. Elgon, the fourth-highest peak in Africa, the Sipi falls, and the caves in the region’s hills. He believes that the local, little-known coffee is of the highest quality. He’s confident that the region (current tourist capacity: 41 hotels with 790 beds) can hold people’s interest well enough to rake in the dough and push the area into an era of exponentially increasing development. “The money,” he says, “will go into infrastructure and education and especially into hydropower because fuel right now is one of our greatest expenses.”

He holds that his constituents are on board with the plan as well, especially the Gisu. Any other form of modernization, he argues, could jeopardize their culture, but this path will put a premium on preserving it. In his mind, it’s a win-win: bring in cash for the region and income for remote peoples wthout cultural dislocation.

But all cultural tourism is tormented by ethical pitfalls, and Imablu is no different. Tourism operators have jumped onto the Imablu train, but they’ve done so with language that paints the Gisu as a Disneyfied and exotic tableau, frozen in time. "The natives of this country are very friendly," reads one ad. "This is one of those amazing experiences that can still authentically be traced on this African continent," reads another.

That’s just a general complaint about the industry, but in the case of Imbalu, the compulsory nature of the ritual might give some tourists pause. “Theoretically, it is voluntary in the sense that the ‘boy’ is free to choose his own year,” says Heald. “But many try to escape or delay—and, yes, there are parties rounding them up every two years and cutting them. … The parties are out looking in Kampala and other cities in East Africa” to force recalcitrant Gisu back to Mbale for the ritual.

“To understand this,” Heald continues, “one has to understand its supreme importance for the Gisu, both in that it unites all Gisu and that it is the sine qua non of being a man there. No uncircumcised man can live there. It is a heroic ordeal they should withstand without betraying a tremor. … Strangely perhaps, it is a great time in Bugisu [the broader region] with the country alive with dancing and celebration.”

For Western audiences, who now take a dim view of even infant circumcision anywhere in the world (think: Intact America), the idea of being compelled to undergo this kind of practice in order to live in a region is difficult to comprehend. But what borders on truly disturbing is that even those who have moved away and expressed no interest in being part of Gisu traditions, living in their homeland, or marrying a Gisu girl might be snatched up by roving bands and coerced into enduring a very public (and clearly painful) circumcision ritual. Some Ugandan media reports even suggest that the incentive of tourism dollars could increase the stringency with which this tradition is enforced by, for example, offering rewards for the return of reluctant men living outside the region.

Mafabi, for one, has faith that the squeamish and doubtful alike will appreciate the value and meaning of the ritual if they just witness it one time. In fact, he seems to believe people will return for multiple viewings. Whether or not a perceptible number of foreigners will buy into the idea that it’s worth spending time and money to watch an ethically-charged circumcision ritual remains to be seen. But for now the region is gearing up for 2016, the year of the next festival, which they hope to aggressively promote through their embassies around the world.

Photo by Tim Llewellyn

A few weeks ago, I interviewed mortician Caitlin Doughty, and she talked about how bad end-of-life care is for many (usually elderly) Americans. One of the people whose work she cited on this topic in her book was Dr. Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

It just so happens he recently published a new book on the subject called Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. The questions that he grapples with are quite challenging: How do we handle decisions about end-of-life care? Is more treatment always the answer? What is the appropriate role of family members in the process? Basically, how should we die? I reached out to Gawande to talk about those questions, because I love talking about death. Enjoy!

VICE: What are your thoughts on the case of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old with the brain tumor who moved to Oregon from California in order to take advantage of the state’s euthanasia law?
Atul Gawande: What strikes me is that the health-care system has failed her. Because the biggest reason she’s wanting to have that option to take her own life is because she fears that her suffering will become so unbearable that she will not find the time that she has left worth living. And if we in the medical profession are so obtuse and neglectful that we could not assure a young woman with a brain tumor that her needs and concerns for suffering are going to be met... then you know, I can’t blame her for saying, “I need to have my own option out of this because there ain’t nobody else who’s going to help me.” That’s the serious concern I have. 

Do you think too often many well-meaning people might see or discuss legalizing assisted suicide as a panacea for the problems with end-of-life care when we should be looking for more thorough solutions?
Well, I worry about the danger. When I hear about the idea that our aim is a good death, I think that misses a core part of the picture. I’m not sure that what I see is that people are “death-obsessed.” I think we have to be vigilant for the possibility that people see people who are old as severely frail or disabled.

Zeke Emanuel wrote that article about how he didn’t want to live past 75. The core element was the idea that “at 75 my contributions to the world will not be what I’m able to contribute now. I don’t want to kill myself at that point, but I’m no longer gonna try to fight for time after that.” 

Do you think Zeke Emanuel might not know what he'll want at 75?
Yes. In that essay, he didn’t leave room for recognizing that that change is extremely common, and that he’s very likely to make that change. He may not, but it’s very likely he will.    

In your book, you talk about a gray area between whether someone is "dying" and not. Could you give an example?
There was a woman who had had a heart attack. The heart attack cut the blood supply to her bowel, and so she had gangrene of the bowel. So she ended up having a stent put in her heart. I took her to surgery and removed a large section of her bowel. She had an open abdomen that literally wasn’t closed. She was on a ventilator, her leg had turned gangrene, and I was going to her sisters to say, “Should we amputate her leg as well?” And they said, “Is she dying?” Well, how do you answer that? On the one level, she has a potentially fatal condition, but I have no idea whether she could make it through or not, even though there’s a high likelihood she could die. And we stretched out how long this period of existence can happen. Is someone who has a Stage IV advanced cancer “dying” when that process might take three years? 

How should a doctor transition from “fixing” someone to ensuring the most comfortable end of life? 
I wrote about the colleague whose father said, "If I can watch football on television and eat chocolate ice cream, that’s good enough for me." It’s like the best living will ever, because I know now as a doctor what I’m fighting for and what I’m making sure I don’t sacrifice in this person’s life. And the irony is that you’re not really “switching modes.” It means you’re fighting for every inch of ground you can get for them as long as you don’t take away that ability. 

One thing I didn’t find in your book was a Holy Grail–type example of a place that you feel does a great overall job of end-of-life care. It doesn’t seem like you think it’s out there just yet.
No, I went looking for the Holy Grail, and I show lots of success stories and they come in so many different flavors. There’s the nursing home that has the dogs, the cats, and the birds. There’s the people in senior-living apartments where it was made possible for people to continue living in apartments no matter what and never have to end up in a nursing home at all. Or the assisted-living place where it’s attached to a school and the elderly teach in a school and the kids come out of school and they help take care of the elderly.

There’s a lot of different pathways. But the core element is the recognition that people have much more that they live for than just being healthy and safe. We can be curious about those things, and we can define them and help make them possible. And it generally isn’t about money. It’s mostly about imagination that there is a life worth living and fostering even though you might be disabled, even though you might be frail, even though your memory might be going, or you might be within weeks of the end of your life.   

If you could do one thing to fix the system, what would it be?
I’m getting to do what I would do. I think power is about what the public insists that the system do, and then others have to respond. The president can’t make it so we have a culture that actually values the priorities that people have for the end of their lives, or for when their quality of life starts to be affected.

We could pass laws that say, “Damnit, everybody needs to make this their priority and this has got to be important to people’s lives!” But it wouldn’t change anything.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Publicity still courtesy of the official Nightcrawler site

Nightcrawler, the new Hollywood thriller, is essentially Network meets Drive. It's the story of Louis (an emaciated Jake Gyllenhaal) a down-and-out young nobody who finds himself swept up in the world of the "nightcrawlers," freelance reporters for the local news. They shove their camcorders into the gory messes at crime scenes and car crashes to collect a paltry bounty from news stations in need of something salacious for the public to consume over breakfast.

It takes place in the same sodium-vapor-lit Los Angeles you may remember from Collateral, and includes some really memorable bits of atmospheric music by James Newton Howard. In other words, it has all the markings of one of those cool movies for nerd bros, like Dark City, Limitless, Memento, and yes, Donnie Darko.

But it's also been infused with two not-at-all-hidden parables: one about the local TV news being full of violence, and the other is about the terrible things that happen when there are no jobs and young people are permanently unemployed, and—more importantly—uncared for by society.

Recently I met director Dan Gilroy—who made a name for himself writing screenplays for The Fall, Real Steel, and The Bourne Legacy—while he was doing press for his film. I started the interview by asking him about TV news. To put it mildly, he's skeptical.

Photo by the author

He compares TV news to junk food that everyone consumes without thinking. "One day somebody puts the caloric intake on it, and turns out you're eating 32,000 calories every morning," he said. "I think if you could do the equivalent of the caloric intake for local television news, then you could sort of see what the actual toll is."

When Louis gets into the news footage industry, it's not that he quickly sheds his scruples; it's more that he never had any. He charges headlong into the job with all the intensity of someone on the autism spectrum, immediately hiring someone to listen to a police scanner for rich people being attacked by minorities so that he's free to master his camera technique, and look into what Gilroy calls the "caloric intake" of TV news. Here's a quote from the film that details what Louis finds:

An average half-hour of Los Angeles television news packs all its local government coverage—including budget, law enforcement, education, transportation and immigration—into 22 seconds. Local crime stories, however, not only usually led the news but filled 14 times the broadcast, averaging five minutes seven seconds. 

While doing his research, Gilroy may have landed on a horrifying study of local TV news conducted by Pew back in 2004. It may not have been as bad as Nightcrawler makes it sound, but things did look pretty troubling back then.

It might be unfair to say that TV news in 2004 was shortchanging important issues—disasters are big deals!—but there's a case to me made that TV news was making a disproportionately big deal out of local crime. And it's not clear that anything's changed.

Gilroy stood by the numbers in his film, telling me, "They might be like 5 percent off here and there, but for the most part [they're] true." Since it's a fictional film, the numbers are incidental, but interesting to consider nonetheless.

The director added that the violence contributes to what he calls a "narrative of fear." Gyllenhaal's mentor of sorts, played by Renee Russo, provides a detailed blueprint, explaining exactly who needs to bleed:

Viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs. What that means is a victim or victims, preferably well-off and/or white, injured at the hands of the poor, or a minority. […] The best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you, Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.

The film also finds a way to make today's lack of job security interesting. "One of the stories that perpetually hits me is the tens of millions of people under 30 who have no job prospects and no career prospects," he said. The economy is what forces Louis into the world of the nightcrawlers. Before that, he stole scrap metal, and despite his pluckiness and his winning attitude—which he projects by aping motivational speakers throughout the film—he can't find permanent work. 

"I think he's left behind any sort of romantic notions that there's a safety net for him, or that people will protect him," Gilroy said. "He thinks, I'm in this alone. I believe that there are many people in the world today who intuitively understand that they are in it alone, the world is not going to help them at all."  

The hopelessness of Louis's professional life bleeds into his personality: His first move after he gets established as a nightcrawler is to hire an underling, Rick (Riz Ahmed, playing the classic vaudevillian schlemiel). Louis' first instinct is to have him work as an unpaid intern. 

I had to ask if there were unpaid interns on Nightcrawler. Gilroy was adamant: "No, we didn't have one unpaid intern. We paid everybody. Absolutely. I would never have somebody working for me for free."

In tougher times, I've been unemployed, scraping by and taking any work at all. At those same times, I've watched the TV news and felt like it was part of a vast propaganda machine. Nightcrawler would have had special resonance for that younger version of me. The sense I got from talking to Gilroy was that he knew that.

"To be honest, I'm more interested in the younger generation's reaction to this film," he said. "I hope it has some relevance in the sense of, Wow, this is what I'm going through. I believe it's a touchstone experience for a lot of people."

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Images courtesy of the Sad Girls y Qué Facebook

Sad Girls y Qué are a glittery girl power gang based out of Tijuana who offer an alternative to "white feminism." Five Chicana-identifying women started this collective in October 2013 with a Tumblr-style Facebook page that has gained more than 12,000 followers through its curation of images of alternative icons like Selena, animated characters like Sailor Moon, and sex-positive imagery. They also use the platform to publish heartbreak poems and notes on depression and solitude. Through the dissemination of internet art, they seek to retaliate against the culture of machismo prevalent in Mexico and the world at large while reappropriating a girly "feminine" aesthetic. Since their inception, they have garnered fangirls from Pakistan to Mexico who identify with their chola chic propaganda and messages of feminine solidarity. 

The whole concept of the "sad girl" was inspired by the Chicana chola culture highlighted in the 1994 movie Mi Vida Loca, which takes place in the Los Angeles neighborhood Echo Park. The sad girl is often depicted in LA tattoo art as a gangster chick with tears running down her face. She's beautiful with a hard-edged pachuca style. However, this image of a crying woman is not a weak victim. She's tough and conveys a more complex range of femininity.

I spoke with recovering Catholic schoolgirl Maite Soleno, Selena-obsessed Anna Bon, hustling hair goddess Pau Lia, glittering anthropologist Ariana Bon-Hodoyán, and taxidermy aficionado Ana Laura Camarena of the Sad Girls over Google Hangouts about their backgrounds, what it means to be a Sad Girl y Que, and why they reject "white feminism." 

So how did SGYQ come together?
Anna Bon: The collective started with eight of us. Now there are five of us. It began as an online outlet for our frustrations regarding being girls in a patriarchal world. I started the Twitter and Facebook and let all my friends in on the fun. I just told them to go crazy. It was kind of by accident that we created this character of the "sad girl." At the beginning we used it to say anything we didn't feel comfortable saying on our personal profiles. It became popular instantly and we realized we weren't alone in our frustrations. SGYQ has given us the courage to stand up for ourselves and others against misogyny and racism. At first it was sort of a shield and now it's our weapon.

Why do you feel you need to defend yourself?
Growing up in a society that is so macho-oriented and Catholic, we've felt limited and oppressed by those forces. Mexico is one of the countries where cat-calling is prevalent. You can't really walk alone at night or during the day without experiencing it. I don't want to reinforce this idea that Mexico is this shitty, unsafe place, because it’s not. But there is this macho culture that is very apparent and dominant. It’s insane how much shit you go through as a girl.

Can you explain what a sad girl symbolizes to you?
It could be any girl who is fed up with society's standards and patriarchy. But it’s more specifically for Chicana girls. There’s this group of artists in LA who call themselves “sad girls” and they’re all white girls from CalArts. It’s cool that the sad girl term is a trend and a thing, but the appropriation of it is annoying and offensive. You can like other cultures and admire them and be interested in them without appropriating them in a way that devalues their origin. It’s important for us to let it be known where we got our name from because it validates a culture.

So what is the origin of the sad girl?
I got it from the movie Mi Vida Loca. A scene in the movie provides a good metaphor. One girl’s baby daddy dies, leaving behind his lowrider car, Suavecito. The girls imagine doing laundry easier, filling it up with groceries, and going to Disneyland. But the men have other ideas about putting Suavecito in a car show and splitting the prize money. The girls find out about it and say they should get the prize money. “That motherfucker left us with kids, bills, etc.” But the women are robbed by the men. It’s relatable to what we go through as second class citizens to the necessities of men.

Can you describe the aesthetic of SGYQ?
Feminized things and anything pink. Those things are usually devalued, made less important. Even women who have corporate jobs have to dress like men to gain respect. We are trying to be aggressive about it. Just because we like those things doesn't make us superficial or dumb or any less smart. 

Maite Soleno: The symbol switching can be used to negate the idea of what the media says a feminist has to look like. A feminist doesn't have to be some hairy girl. A feminist can be whomever. It doesn't rely on the fact that she likes pink or not.

Ariana Bon-Hodoyán: We’re trying to fight against this whole angry feminist stereotype. I'm not trying to blame men. 

Maite Soleno: Even bell hooks says that patriarchy is genderless. It's this massive thing that's oppressive. The media has created this stereotype that feminists hate men and they're lesbians. Actually, you can wear short skirts and be smart and a feminist. 

Sad Girls y Qué cosmic sweatshirt of Selena in Mexico

Is there ever any disagreement over what to post?
Anna Bon: When there were more of us, there were differences in how we defined feminism and objectification. We’re totally into girl power and being naked and whatever, but we also had to have a standard. Facebook doesn't even let us show naked bodies. We've gotten so many bans from Facebook.

Maite Soleno: And it's all because of nipples and vaginas. They want to equate vagina with porn and reduce it to that. I'm not saying anything shady about porn. I watch porn. I love porn. But it’s a reductive thing.

Do you have any feminist icons?
Ariana Bon-Hodoyán: The story of Malinche is very relatable to us. She was an indigenous Mexican woman who interpreted and advised the Spanish colonizer Hernan Cortés. Everyone in Mexico believes Malinche to be the ultimate national traitor because she betrayed the Aztecs. However, she was a slave who was sold by the Aztecs and simply used the Aztecs’ enemies against them. She embodies characteristics not typically associated with women in Mexican culture like intelligence, adaptability, leadership, and forward thinking. And by adapting to unexpected historical circumstances, she defied social expectations of women's role in society.

I think Sad Girls y Qué represents these same characteristics and attempts to fight traditional social restraints set by macho values in the culture we live in. In Mexican culture, la Malinche represents the antithesis of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Unlike the holy virgin, la Malinche has become equated with being a sex object or “whore” who slept with Cortés and betrayed her own people. Even if in truth she was used as an object of exchange among men who delivered her into the hands of the Spaniards.

What are your thoughts on "white feminism"?
Anna Bon: White feminism is mainstream feminism. It's controlled, superficial, carefully packaged, easily digestible, and "one size fits all." It’s non-intersectional and binary. It does not understand race, culture, and gender diversity when it comes to inequality. It’s focused on body hair, the pay gap, make-up, skirts, Joan Rivers, and “not all men.” It’s the feminism you learn when you're a teenager. A well-rounded feminist looks out for everyone, especially oppressed groups that for centuries have been demonized, dehumanized, and exoticized by Western culture.

Maite Soleno: White feminism is what bell hooks refers to as the “eat, pray, love” kind of feminism that enables a ruling section of women to appropriate all kinds of cultures to empower themselves from their already coveted position of privilege. It reinforces patriarchal notions that only the problems of the bourgeoisie are relatable and worth noting. It’s a smoke curtain. But white is not a concept to be reduced to skin color, white is the combination of privilege and ignorance that constitutes a culture that believes we live in a post-racial, post-sexualized society.

What kind of feminism would you call your type of feminism?
Ariana Bon-Hodoyán: Common sense.

What about feminine rage? 
Anna Bon: Yes, we are angry at society and everyone who has ever tried to oppress us, but we are more sad for you. We’re really sad for you because your thinking inhibits you. You are the one who is losing more from ascribing to patriarchy than we are. We’re conscious and we know what we’re up against.

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