Images courtesy of Ed Piskor

Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree is an astonishing feat of cultural archaeology, in both ambition and execution. The project somehow doesn’t seem quite real: a comic-book history of hip-hop going back to the very beginning—the late 70s—where lore is thick and documentation scarce. To tell this story in any language would be a challenge; to tell it in the language of comics feels like a magical summoning.

The very first panel takes place at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, believed to be rap’s birthplace, a community center where DJ Kool Herc first got the idea to talk in rhymes over the records he spun. From those beginnings emerged a local culture that became a global empire.

Piskor’s preparation for this historiographical undertaking is limited to his comic history of computer hacking, Whizzywig (2012), as well as the drawings he contributed to Harvey Pekar’s The Beats: A Graphic History (2009). So far, he’s published two volumes of Hip Hop Family Tree—out of the six he’s contracted for—with new pages serialized weekly at Boing Boing.

Piskor manages to make his history live by isolating key moments in the culture’s development—some of them obscure but crucial, others nearly as well-known as they should be—and extracting from these moments a few key anecdotes which are then dramatized and made humorous through illustration. He’s able to employ this methodology in telling about everything from rap’s first appearance on Soul Train to the definitive battle between Kool Moe Dee and Busy Bee to hip-hop’s acquisition of a socio-political consciousness, to the making of Wild Style (1983), to the formation of Run DMC. The characters he draws are animated and nuanced, with affectionate attention paid to period detail. The whole concept works, on every single page, and, taken in its totality, the book is allowed to become as epic in its variety and dimensions as the story it tells. 

I spoke with Piskor about the hip-hop community's response to the series, how he finds most graphic illustration to be "garbage," and how tall and wide he'd like to grow his rap Family Tree.

VICE: Can you tell me about your earliest memory of rap?
Ed Piskor: By virtue of being born in 1982, it was already in the atmosphere on a routine basis, man. So the area I’m from—the neighborhood I lived in was predominantly black—there were constantly boomboxes walking up and down the sidewalk, all that kind of stuff. I remember the very first rap song that I owned, that we had in the house on wax: It was Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” because it was on a disco compilation that my parents had. I’m from Pittsburgh. It’s not New York City, but at that stage, which would be ‘85, ‘86, ‘87, hip-hop was in a sort of golden age of sorts.

How has the hip-hop community responded to the series?
Really good, man. It’s almost like the book is officially a piece of hip-hop culture at this point, because different rappers will get in touch, and they want to make sure they’re a part of the story when it comes to their time.

What rappers have gotten in touch with you?
De La [Soul]. Biz Markie. DMC is down. Chuck D will retweet my stuff. Grandmaster Flash will retweet my stuff. There’s a bunch, man… Some of these guys will try to [denigrate] other guys, and say, “Ah, man, he didn’t do this. He didn’t do that.” So I have to have a critical ear for the stuff I’m being fed. It’s good that they’re getting in touch, but when it comes to usability of information, I’m suspicious of stuff. I feel like I have a good bullshit detector. If it sounds too wild and I can’t find one other person who says the same shit, it can’t get put in the book, man.

What are you working on today, in specific?
I’m putting together the strip for next week, and it’s gonna be a good one, man. It’s the introduction of L.L. Cool J into the mix. I hope to pencil two pages today; one of the pages is gonna be a splash page of the young L.L., because I think he deserves that.

Nonfiction comics seem to have undergone a flourishing, of sorts. Do you have any opinions about that?
I actually don't think about this too much. I hate biopics and I don't really read many nonfiction comics, to be honest. Thinking about it, the only nonfiction comics that I've really ever read were autobiographical. There's room for everything in comics, though.

Given the ambition of your own nonfiction-comics undertaking, I’m surprised you don’t have more appreciation for people who are doing similar things.
Well you know what it is: I think they all suck, so it’s like, “Let me make a good one.” That’s truthfully the spirit. So it’s like, “I’ll show you mooks how to do this shit.” It’s true, too—you can quote me on that. You have your outliers. You have your work by Joe Sacco. You have [Art] Spiegelman’s Maus. And that stuff is unassailable, untouchable. But now there’s been a graphic novel boom-and-bust kind of thing where people are getting these gigs to make stuff for big New York publishers. So there’s a lot of chaff. But just in general, in every medium, there’s a lot of garbage, and then there are the few outlying pieces of good work out there. I kind of live by this maxim, man, that the enemy of the best is the good. So if it’s passable, then that’s a failing grade to me, man. I’m just trying to digest the best diet I can, so I can make the best comics I can. That goes for film, that goes for prose books—I just have no time for something that is a C average.

It's obvious that you've used sources outside of what's indicated in the bibliographies, particularly when it comes to interviews. Why don’t you give yourself the credit you deserve by better indicating your sources?
All my friends bring that up to me, and I really just don’t give a fuck about creating an academic text or something. I’ve never gone to college; I don’t even know how to write that shit. A lot of my information is from internet interviews and stuff like that. So I don’t even know how to cite that stuff properly. I’m from a position of ignorance, man, when it comes to that part—citations and shit. And I actually don’t care to pass, in academia and stuff like that. I mean, it’s pretty cool that different college courses do use my books, but I just want to make a cool comic. That’s just a different level of work.

I feel it would take me a month or something to corral all my sources, because I didn’t start documenting them from the beginning. I’m just trying to do my thing and have fun, and that doesn’t feel fun to me. I don’t take liberties, man, and if I do, I call it out immediately. There’s that one image in the first book where the Furious Five gets their first advance, and they go out and buy dirt bikes. I just drew a couple of the characters doing weird jumps and stuff, and I call it out: “Artistic license.” ‘Cuz, you know, I have no evidence that they knew how to do dirt-bike jumps or whatever.

Around when does your interest in rap history start to terminate?
I’d say ’93, ’94, maybe. But then it goes beyond that a little bit. I’ve got six books in me right now—that’s my focus. I’m not sure how far that’s gonna take me.

How far are you interested in taking the project?
That’s an impossible thing for me to answer because as I keep writing and putting stuff together, I keep finding things that are visually interesting and need to be put in the book. So the better way I can answer that question whenever it comes up is I can tell people I’m signed up for six books, and I’ve finished two so far, and I’m well over halfway done with book three. So just by gauging the way things are moving and how much information is being put into this stuff, the end of the sixth book probably will not get beyond ‘87.

What makes you believe the origins of rap should be honored in this way?
The narrative is about community and world-building and how word of mouth works. So at the Kool Herc parties at 1520 Sedgwick, the future of hip-hop—the next people in line—were all at those parties. Hip-hop as we know it is from a very congested area in the South Bronx. By virtue of that, everyone involved in it has a relationship with each other. So that was my whole thing. It’s like, OK, we’ve got this pressure cooker right here, man—we have all this energy—and if you play the six-degrees-of-separation game, you can draw clear lines back to any of these people who were at 1520 Sedgwick. So that’s the exercise, is introducing these early characters and showing how they all interconnect.

Follow Lary Wallace on Twitter.

Dutch artist Hans Eijkelboom works through the medium of clothes. Kind of. You might know him from his previous project, 10 Euro Outifts, where he bought—and photographed himself in—32 outfits that cost less than ten euros. His new book, People of the Twenty-First Century, tackles the subject of sartorial decisions once more, only this time he turns his camera outwards. 

Over the course of ten years (1993–2013), Eijkelboom took to the streets to document tribes of the general public—the everymen and everywomen. But don't make the mistake of thinking he's interested in fashion. "No," he says when we meet up to discuss the book. "I’m interested in people and their desire to shape their identity with attributes.”

In this case, those attributes are clothes and mass trends—be it a mad flush of pink worn across men's chests, a sudden wave of red sailing jackets, or even a sea of orange trilby hats. People in (scarily) similar clothing appear in blocks of 12 in the book, and each "look" was captured in a very short timeframe.

"I worked in the same way from the beginning of the project," says Eijkelboom. "I went to a city, looked for the main street, and tried to find a mass theme, a particular piece of clothing or accessory. Then I began taking photographs. I never worked more than two hours on the same theme." 

There are many "mass themes" in the book, but seeing as the project brings us almost up to the present day, I asked Eijkelboom if he thought there was one defining trend that characterized our modern era. "Message T-shirts," he replies. "I find it interesting that more and more messages appear on clothes. It’s not about attempting to look attractive anymore—rather, it's about saying, directly, 'I'm looking for love.'" He feels the internet is to blame. "Your image in the digital world is more important than the one in the ordinary world.”

It might be objectively hilarious to look at 12 shots of men all in various shades of genital pink, but People of the Twenty-First Century is tender at its heart. Eijkelboom loves people. Normal people—people just going from A to B.

“Compassion and love are the basis of my project," he says. "I am just trying to pose the question we all ask ourselves, which is: 'Am I an independent individual, or am I simply a product of the culture in which I live?'”

Hans Eijkelboom's People of the Twenty-First Century is published by Phaidon. 

Between February 1692 and May 1693, more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, and 19 of those people were executed. Like most sites of terrible events, Salem has become a tourist trap, and in October (its busiest month, naturally), the town erupts into a sort of haunted Disney World. I traveled to Salem the week before Halloween with two friends to see what all the fuss is about, look for real witches, flirt with zombies, and take photographs of it all. 

Walking down the street in Salem on the Saturday before Haloween was nearly impossible due to the amount of people in costume. While talking on the phone with a friend back in New York, I describe Salem as “Like walking in Times Square except everyone is a drunk witch.” According to a local witch named Vlad, last Halloween night drew over 150,000 people to the small town's normally quiet streets.

We went to the "Chambers of Terror", which, according to owners Skip and Derek, is the scariest haunted house in Salem. It was very spooky, and they let me take photographs. At night we visited the Zombie Prom, a really big Halloween event held at Victoria Station, a local restaurant and bar. The prom was complete with a band, cheesy prom pictures, and even a zombie prom king and queen. The manager of the restaurant, Daryl, told us that the tourism in Salem has exploded in the last ten years, partially due to the town finally embracing its haunted heritage. Daryl said that Zombie Prom would probably draw a crowd of at least 650 people. Daryl even shared some stories and facts about his time as a security guard at the infamous Danvers State Hospital, the mental institution known for it’s inhumane experiments and tests on patients, now torn down and turned into a condo complex. 

Overall, visiting Salem during Halloween season was an awesome and spooky experience if you like commercialized versions of terrible and tragic historical events (I do). I made a ton of friends but I don't remember most of their names. Maybe I'll go back next year and try to find them.

Follow Walter Pearce on Instagram for more dry moments from exciting places. 

5Pointz, a graffiti Mecca in Queens, which is now no more. (Photo via Flickr user Sauvage Ocèane)

In 1994, ten months after winning the New York City mayor’s office for the first time, Rudy Giuliani stood in front of news cameras and announced the newest target of his “broken windows” policing strategy: graffiti.

"A cleaner city is a safer city," Giuliani said. "That's something that everyone instinctually understands. And something we have to make a big part of efforts to improve the quality of life in our city.” Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern added that "the 60s are over,” and called graffiti "a metaphor for urban decay perhaps best shown in A Clockwork Orange."

New York City back then didn't exactly have Kubrickian drugged-up clownish teenagers wandering around raping people, but it didn't resemble Friends or Seinfeld either. Times Square was still saturated with porn shops and prostitution, subways were riddled with graffiti, and Williamsburg was a good place to score blow (OK, so that might still be the case). Graffiti artists with names like Revs, Cost, and T-Kid ruled the streets, and Giuliani—and, more importantly, his NYPD Commissioner, William J. Bratton—wanted to do something about it, drawling a line between the aesthetic issue and violent crime rates.

A 25-man vandal squad was launched by Bratton’s NYPD to hunt down taggers, and in just 17 days, 21 people were arrested. Several city agencies coordinated to form an anti-graffiti task to fight the plague of aerosol, and sales of the spray-on chemical to kids under 18 were banned.

So began a decades-long battle of wits and money to erase the graffiti of the 70s and 80s from every corner of Gotham, a struggle that was recently captured in the Museum of the City of New York’s City as Canvas exhibit. After Giuliani left office, his billionaire successor Michael Bloomberg carried on the crusade. He had his own version of the Vandal Squad, called GHOST (the Graffiti Habitual Offender Suppression Team); Howard Stler described these guys as “the shock troops in Bloomberg’s latest campaign to clean up the town” in a 2005 piece for New York magazine. 

Cops have scooped up some of the city's bigger names in street art, like Cost. Photo via Flickr user carnagenyc

Given his reputation as a progressive concerned about income inequality and police excesses, few expected new mayor Bill de Blasio to treat graffiti as one of the city’s chief menaces. But the anti-graffiti movement has reared its head yet again now that its founding father Bratton—who called the City as Canvas exhibit “outrageous”—has reclaimed his old gig as police commissioner.

"Graffiti is a constant battle,” Bratton told local radio station WNYC in April. “It’s one of the issues I’m going to be focusing on. I’ve already spoken to the mayor about my sense that graffiti is growing in the city now again.” Bratton also made use of the phrase “urban decay.”

The numbers show Bratton means business: According to the  the first eight months of 2014, graffiti arrests rose 4 percent, to 1,080. Last year, 3,598 people were arrested for graffiti or graffiti-related crimes, and that was actually lower than 2009 and 2010, when the number surpassed 4,000. But the most symbolic gestures of the rejuvenated crackdown have been the NYPD’s gloating arrest of Cost (45-year-old Queens resident Adam Cole) last month, and November’s whitewashing of 5Pointz, the soon-to-be-demolished Mecca for graffiti artists in Queens.

That raises the question: Is there danger that the city’s graffiti culture will be expunged, and does it really make sense to go after this kind of low-level mischief, especially if it has value in the eyes of many residents?

“I know some writers who have not painted at all over the last year,” Jonathan Cohen, the curator of 5Pointz and a graffiti artist known as Meres One, told me. “They’re not willing to risk their freedom. Many of them just went back to doing whatever it is they were doing.”

A 5Pointz tribute to Iz the Wiz, one of NYC's signature graffiti artists back in the 70s and 80s. Photo via Flickr user Kenji Takabayashi

Opened in 1993, 5Pointz was a place where graffiti writers of all ages could spray in New York City without being subject to arrest. It brought tourism in the area, drawing national and international attention to the local street art scene. In that sense, Cohen says 5Pointz was “never a cure, but an alternative” to the city’s graffiti crime problem.

“We would say, ‘Please don’t go out and destroy the neighborhood. Do it here,’” he told me. “But turning up the heat is a dangerous thing. Trying to erase art completely from the streets is scary.”

“It feels like we’re back in the Giuliani years,” Marie Cecile Flaguel, a volunteer and organizer at 5Pointz, told me. “Since September of 2013, there has just been this zero tolerance. Like, these kids will be taught a lesson by being charged with higher offenses.”

She believes the whitewashing of 5Pointz was sanctioned by the NYPD; with the Vandal Squad patrolling day in and day out, it seems far-fetched to her that officers didn’t witness the operation (orchestrated by the owner of the buildings) take place. In her opinion, the following arrests of six 5Pointz regulars—the first (and last) time artists have been arrested there—was an indication that the cops wanted the place stamped out once and for all.

A tribute to NYC firemen at Gerardi's Farmers' Market on Staten Island. Photo via Flickr user Susan Sermoneta

Of course, it’s not the 90s anymore, and graffiti has lost much of its stigma. Most writers Flaguel knows tend to be graphic designers or set designers. “It shows that Bratton has not paid attention to anything going on in New York City since he left,” she told me.

Flaguel thinks busting graffiti artists distracts the local cops from fighting serious crime, like robberies or homicides, which have increased in Long Island City’s 114th Precinct, where 5Pointz is located, over the past year. “When we concentrate on these lower-level things, we miss the big picture issues,” she added. “It’s much easier to just bust a 17-year-old walking home in Queens late at night with a marker in his pocket.”

The problem for Bratton, like so many American security hawks, is the unintended consequences. Just as many tactics used in the wars on terror and drugs exacerbate the problems they're supposed to solve, intense enforcement of graffiti laws seems to be doing more harm than good.

“Finding a solution to a problem is a lot better than trying to kill a problem,” Cohen said. “It’s important for people to have a legal outlet for their art. Now, it’s either you paint illegally or you don’t paint at all. This spawns a lot more people doing not nice things.”

Since 5Pointz, Cohen said he’s noticed intensified bombing in Long Island City. In fact, since this latest crackdown began last fall, graffiti complaints have gone up 24 percent citywide, from 6,947 to 8,635. In neighboring Woodside, graffiti complaints have skyrocketed by 120 percent since this time last year.

Reasons for the big bump remain murky, but to Antonio “Chico” Garcia, a longtime NYC graffiti writer, graffiti is just like weed: “The more you fight it, the more there’’ll be. And you can’t win a fight you’ve already lost.”

Chico's work on the Lower East Side is harder to come by these days. Photo via Flickr user Wally Gobetz

If you’ve been down to the Lower East Side in the past 20 years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Chico’s work. He’s known for crafting optimistic murals on behalf of local businesses; his most recent, on the corner of Avenue B and Tenth Street, depicted actor Robin Williams after his death.

“Artists, both young and old cats, need a place to be heard,” Chico told me over the phone from Florida. “The kids will be very upset if they can’t do anything with their art. They’re gonna get pissed off, and they’re gonna start vandalizing. Then, you’ll just see more and more.”

To correct this, Chico proposes the city follows Montreal’s model, in which graffiti artists are commissioned to beautify empty lots in dilapidated areas. He also says that New York’s subways should (once again) be teeming with color when they zoom into the dull platforms, and that can be done by hiring local bombers.

“I hope the new mayor tries to figure something out,” Chico said. “De Blasio can call me, and I’ll explain it to him.” 

Over the past few years, the city’s cooperation with Chico has faltered; after being laid off by the New York City Department of Housing in 2008, he moved south, occasionally making trips back to the East Village to paint a curbside mural upon request. A graffiti artist since he was nine, Chico, now 51, is frustrated that his work isn't valued more by public officials, who shower money on museums and other institutions of high art.

“Fuck the city,” he told me angrily. “Take what the kids want to do on the wall, and eat it. They don’t want to work with us? Well now, you’re against us. And you can’t stop us now, because the war’s gonna go on.” Chico then broke out into a quick rendition of the classic 1970s track by McFadden and Whitehead, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”

“Because graffiti is coming right back,” he said, "with a big H. Handle it.”

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

Some spells for sale on Etsy right now—thank god it's payday

Victoria Zasikowski is an Etsy witch. Her profile bills her as a “professional astrologer and practitioner of Hoodoo Magick," while her shop—the Enchanted Land—offers a menu of spells, pendulum readings, and cartomancy. Depending on what spell she's casting, she uses candles, cauldrons, mojo bags, and customized "spellvelopes."  Once she's done, she sends pictures to every client as proof that the spell has been cast.

"You may send me a hair and nail sample in the mail if you like," reads her listing, "such items are called 'personal concerns' and are known to increase the effectiveness of any spell. Airmail to the UK tends to take around 5 days. My address will be given upon request.”

Etsy is full of peculiar items for sale—as Regretsy famously illustrated—but what’s often forgotten is that it’s also full of witches. The marketplace offers an online home for spell casters, fortune tellers, and those ladies you might see in the local alt-weekly ads peering into a glowing crystal sphere.

The average paranormal purchase involves back and forth emails to work out what’s required, a personal recommendation, and finally the casting of the spell, with a date given for when the client can expect its effects to start kicking in. Victoria gets asked about custom spellwork, but can’t always cater to the requests. Some are a little ambitious: “I got one request to make the client taller, one to change the color of their eyes... I  don’t want to lead them on. Some of the requests are just ridiculous.” (Apparently, the film The Craft has a lot to answer for.) She adds, “A number of spell casters I know have been sent pornographic pictures and requests to make clients' penises bigger.”

Etsy spells live in the "Handmade/Everything Else/Metaphysical" category of the site, and can take several formats. There’s the haunted object—most often an antique or jewelry with a "spirit" inside for good luck—and there’s downloadable magic in PDF form (as with this vampiric transformation ritual). But most common of all is the spell similar to a Catholic indulgence, or any other faith encompassing paid-for prayers: For a price, the seller will cast a spell for you.

I decided to speak to another Etsy spell caster, “witch and necromancer” Gill of Faerygill, who has practiced magic for over 30 years and trades both on Etsy and her second site, Tarot Magick. She describes the process of divining a client’s needs as akin to spirit-writing with a computer. “I get an image, something they've not told me about themselves. I'll lay down the cards, and while I'm reading them, I type out what I see. The words just sort of come to me, the closest thing I can describe it to is channeling. Sometimes I just can't type fast enough.”

More so than with face-to-face readings, the internet allows a client to relax and let their guard down. Victoria notes that “it does give you a very interesting cross-section of people’s lives," but that it comes with its own dangers. "I have to be respectful of people who come to me laying bare their souls," she warns. "There are customers who are emotionally distraught, people with a lot of trauma in their lives."

Does she ever feel like people's problems are too big for her to tackle with Etsy witchcraft alone?

"I have to refuse to do spellwork for some people, and recommend that they look for a psychiatrist," she admits. "I've had a handful of people who were obviously suicidal, and I'll never, ever do work for those people and have to refund them."

The witches of Etsy are nothing if not thorough: as with every industry built on trust, they have their own directories and review sites. Both the sellers I interviewed refuse to do revenge spells, which traditionally are bad karma. Gill says it’s impossible to put a curse on someone you don’t know, and that what you put out there comes back to you: "I’ll usually say to people that I can banish and I can protect, but I won’t do curses.” Nevertheless, hexes, curses, and "EXTREME black magick" are available online from £1.59 [$2.55] to over £400 [$640] from sellers with fewer scruples.

The range of magic available reflects consumers’ hopes and dreams, their ambitions and anxieties, in much the same way as Amazon’s self-help book chart. “They want spells for situations in life that most of us face. It’s quite practical work in some respects,” says Victoria, whose most popular spells are for reconciliations, or people looking to find their soulmate. She estimates that her customers are 95 percent female.

Similarly, Gill sells more love spells than anything else, though over the years her custom spell option has brought in some odd requests. “Once I was asked to do a reading for a client’s snake. She had this pet snake and she wanted a reading to find out why she felt bonded to it. That has to have been the weirdest reading I’ve ever done...”

Gill's spell-casting equipment

Spells for weight loss, money, and a better sex life are also popular, though more poignantly, Etsy is also full of spells catering to people looking to change their gender, and a near-countless number of fertility spells.

Etsy supports an entire economy of "intangible items": sellers buy supplies there as well as offering their services. They source occult books and even offer witchcraft correspondence courses. But other websites are not quite as liberal: the witchcraft community of Etsy migrated there after being banned from eBay. In a policy revision in 2012, eBay discontinued the sale of readings, spells, and potions due to “a large number of misclassified items and eBay policy violations."

Items banned by eBay over the years deserve their own lengthy article—the list features lock picks, Native American crafts, social media endorsements, amateur pornography, "grave-related goods," and human remains. At times the rules are logical (credit cards, firearms), at times baffling and arbitrary. What is an anti-ageing face cream, the Etsy witches argue, if not a potion with better advertising? What’s the difference between a diet spell and a book by Gillian McKeith?

“We were quite a large community, the metaphysical section of eBay, but they really didn't need us,” Victoria says. “Hundreds, maybe thousands of sellers, and most of us had our eggs all in one basket. And we were just kicked off, out of the blue.” She recalls watching the site remove her listings one by one, slowly taking away her livelihood: “Obviously we all know eBay exists as a money-making machine, but this really revealed their true colors. We all basically got fired without any notice. After that I took to bed for a week.”

Though it insists on spell casters using the legal disclaimer “FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES,” Etsy allows for pretty much any kind of spell, from “extreme telekinesis” to sending a succubus on a loved one. Many of the spells seem like little more than commodified good vibes that rely on good intent, though even within the community there are conflicts. “There are charlatans,” Victoria tells me, “there are scams. It’s not always obvious, but sellers can just copy and paste the text from other people’s shops, and the buyer might never know.” This in turn attracts criticism and trolls: “You do get the anti-witchcraft brigade,” Gill tells me. “Mainly fundamentalist Christians. It’s just like when Jehovah’s Witnesses call to the door: I’m polite to them and tell them the truth. I’m a witch. I practice magic. It can lead to some interesting conversations.”

What comes up when you search for "spellcasting" on Etsy

This is perhaps hard to fathom, given that if you believe in witchcraft, surely the one person you don't want to annoy would be a witch, but clients who refuse to pay are another occupational hazard. Victoria explains: “You hear stories about clients who haven’t paid, and the occasional seller making threats. People have said “I will curse you!” I’ve never threatened a client, though,” she adds, matter of factly. “It wouldn’t make for good feedback.”

At face value it’s hard to get one’s head around paying anything from £8 [$13] for printable instructions, up to over £1,000 [$1,600] for an “Extreme Binding Bewitchment." But then commercialized faith is nothing new: only last month eBay managed to sell the Pope’s hat for just under £70,000 [$112,000] (the money was donated to humanitarian aid in Congo). Surely its buyer believed on some level that the item was charged with contagious magic, as in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and that there was sanctity woven into its very fibers.

“I do vaguely remember that sense of mystery and awe,” Victoria tells me of her magical beginnings, “of doing something that others might not understand. You might be a little nervous about it. It has that sense of intrigue, like it's something dark or dangerous…” The internet is allowing a new generation to experiment with minimum personal risk. “For the newbie it must be like a sweetie shop. You can get advice, join forums, and still be anonymous.”

The witches of Etsy are growing in number every year, and the internet and the occult might just be a perfect match. After all, the Wiccan Rede, “An it harm none, do what ye will,” isn’t too far from Google’s “Don’t be evil.” On the internet, everything is niche by default: as Nancy, teenage sorceress of The Craft snarls, “We are the weirdos, mister.”

Follow Roisin Kiberd on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Carl Mueller

Names in this article have been changed.

On Halloween night, Andrew will celebrate the holiday the way most married fathers do: He and his wife will go trick-or-treating with their two kids, who are nine and 12; maybe afterward, they’ll head to their church to finish off the night with games and snacks.

But Andrew’s family isn’t like other families, because Andrew is a registered sex offender.

Sex offenders are the closest thing we have to real-life monsters on Halloween—and surely, few things can horrify a parent like the thought of his or her child being snatched up by a pervert while trick-or-treating. But there is no evidence that children are more likely to be abducted, assaulted, or abused on Halloween than on any other day. Crime data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System shows that there is no recorded spike in sex crimes before or after the holiday.

Even so, many states have adopted draconian measures to protect kids from stranger danger on Halloween. In Missouri, if you're on the sex-offender registry on October 31, you have to be in your house from 5 PM to 10:30 PM unless you have a really good reason; you also have to turn off your porch lights and put up a sign announcing "No candy or treats at this residence." Other states and local jurisdictions have similar restrictions that prohibit sex offenders from dressing up in costumes, decorating their homes, or driving after dark.

These regulations, which extend the reach of Megan’s Law—a nickname for a category of statutes that are designed to prevent child molesters from preying on the kids in their neighborhood—would be a great help if sex offenders were all fundamentally evil would-be rapists and killers. But most registered sex offenders are not convicted of violent crimes. The crimes that can make you a "sex offender" range from rape to sexting with a teen to—in some states—public urination.  And it should be noted that even for more serious crimes, recidivism rates for sex offenders are extremely low—only about 5 percent commit another sex crime after being released from prison. In 2008 the Department of Justice concluded that “Megan’s Law showed no demonstrable effect in reducing sexual re-offenses." So why have these Halloween restrictions at all?

"Just because you're on the registry doesn't mean the Constitution doesn't apply," said Janice Bellucci, an attorney and president of California Reform Sex Offender Laws. Earlier this month, Bellucci met with registrants and their families in the ACLU building in downtown Los Angeles, where she talked with them about their everyday nightmares. One registrant at the meeting asked about whether or not his family could have Halloween decorations on their house. "If your kid colors a pumpkin, that could be considered a violation of your parole," said Bellucci. "Look, we don't agree with this, but if you don't comply, you're going to jail."

The ACLU has decried policies that stigmatize sex offenders; the civil-liberties organization has partnered with Reform of Sex Offender Laws, Inc. (RSOL), to challenge some of these Halloween policies as well as other requirements that stigmatize sex offenders. Bellucci has successfully reversed some of these policies in counties across California by arguing that they’re unconstitutional.

That sort of activism hasn't stopped the nationwide trend toward more restrictions, however. In Illinois, a new law effectively bans sex offenders from participating in any "public holiday" events—dressing up as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, or handing out candy on Halloween. In Caseyville, a small town in Illinois, there’s been a hoopla over a registered sex offender whose house is decked out in spider webs, pumpkins, and witches’ cauldrons this year. The decorations are not his—they belong to his roommate, who is not a sex offender—but the neighbors have complained to law enforcement that the decorations “draw kids in” and it makes them “really nervous about the kids in the neighborhood.”

In some states, the cops actually drive around on the evening of Halloween to check on every sex offender's house, to ensure that registrants are complying with the restrictions. Anything from a pumpkin to a bowl of candy can warrant a re-arrest. 

California, where Andrew and his family live, has been closely monitoring sex offenders on parole to make sure they don't leave their homes or answer the door after dark since 1994; the compliance checks are nicknamed—no joke—"Operation Boo." The cops can't do drive-by check-ins on all 100,000 registered sex offenders, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website encourages adults to wear an Operation Boo “parent patrol badge” to “let everyone know you’re a part of the growing army of parents fighting back against sexual predators.”

When I spoke with Andrew about these conditions, he was surprisingly sympathetic. “Look, I have a daughter and a son—sometimes I want to see who [on the registry] is living down the street, too,” he confessed. “But I don’t want people to be afraid of me because I’m on the registry. I’m not a threat.”

Like many people listed on the registry, Andrew's crime was nonviolent and an isolated incident (he was sentenced to only three months in jail) that involved fooling around with a younger girl when he was 20 years old. His crime also occurred almost 30 years ago, and a lot has changed since then: He's been to counseling, he's gotten married, and he has a family. But when other parents discover that he's on the registry, they won't let their kids come over to play with his daughter. He's treated like a monster.

Of course, “no-candy” laws are just one small aspect of the restrictions placed on registered sex offenders—they're barred from living in certain areas and must avoid going to some parks and playgrounds. Andrew told me he was asked not to return to the YMCA where his son goes swimming once the staff there discovered him on the registry.

Back in May, the California Sex Offender Management Board admitted that the registry isn’t really doing much good and should be limited to violent offenders only. But with the pressure to keep communities safe, few lawmakers want to risk looking sympathetic toward sex offenders. Two years ago the town of Simi Valley, just north of Los Angeles, proposed a policy that would force registered sex offenders to post a sign on their doors during Halloween announcing "A registered sex offender lives here.” 

The proposal terrified Bill, a sex offender living in Simi Valley. Bill was convicted almost 30 years ago for a minor offense that didn't result in any prison time—what he describes as a “midlife crisis” that involved a young girl watching him shower. 

Bill’s wife told me that just before Halloween, “the police came to our door, in uniform, and handed us copies of the ordinance. We were afraid of what might happen to us from our neighbors, or anyone.”

Their terror comes from the horror stories of sex offenders being brutally attacked. Last year, a registered sex offender in Baltimore was beaten to death in broad daylight; a registrant in Rhode Island was similarly killed earlier this year; a few years ago, a group of teens in Florida brutally beat a registrant and killed his dog.

Before you visit any state’s sex offender registry online, you have to check a box agreeing that you won’t use this information to “harass” or otherwise inundate the offenders listed. But registrants may have reason to assume not everyone will abide by that honor system, and having to stake signs in their yards on Halloween certainly doesn’t help calm them down.

Recently, Bellucci successfully sued Simi Valley for their policy requiring sex offenders to put signs on their lawns during Halloween. But the registrants still had to follow the other restrictions placed upon them: not answering the door, not wearing costumes, and not passing out candy. Mitchell, a sex offender who was a plaintiff in that lawsuit, told me that because the ordinance doesn’t specify the distinction between what he can do and what his family can do, his family wasn't able to enjoy Halloween either; they spent the holiday last year with the lights off and doors locked. His kids are older teenagers now, so they aren’t much into trick-or-treating themselves, but he told me that the ordinance took something “neighborly” and turned it into something sinister.

“Normally we would put out a pumpkin by the door, but we were afraid that would constitute decorating for Halloween, which was also forbidden,” Bill told me. This Halloween, the family will also leave their lights out and keep the door locked.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

The Netherlands—and in particular its capital, Amsterdam—has long been thought to have some of the world's most liberal marijuana policies. But today, the country's government is clamping down on the weed industry. Police are raiding growers far more often, authorities are requiring "weed passes" to discourage marijuana tourism, and unprecedented numbers of so-called "coffee shops"—where the sale of small amounts of marijuana is tolerated—are being forced to shut down.

VICE News visited Amsterdam to see what effects the new restrictions are having. After speaking to coffee-shop owners—-one of whom has to close his shop because he's technically too close to a school—we went to a weed festival and visited the home and greenhouse of Doede de Jong, one of the country's few outspoken growers.

Tombstones piled up in Brest-Litovsk Fortress. All photos by Debra Brunner. 

Back in May, construction work for a new supermarket began in the center of Brest, a city in Belarus on the border with Poland. In a turn of events that wouldn’t seem out of place in a horror film, more than 450 Jewish gravestones have since been discovered in the foundations of the houses that have been demolished to make way for the store.

Central Brest was once home to the Warburg Colony, a housing estate that was built to accommodate Jewish orphans after the First World War. When the Nazis arrived in 1941 the Brest Jews became victims of the Holocaust—ghettoized, moved to camps, and killed.

After the war, with Brest’s Jewish community devastated, the Communists set about getting rid of the remnants of Jewish culture in the town. In 1959 they dismantled the Jewish cemetery—one of the oldest and largest in Belarus—and turned it into a sports stadium. As the dismantling process got underway, Communist Party members, along with enterprising locals, recognized the high quality of the headstones and “recycled them." As well as in the foundations of houses, these Jewish graves have since been discovered in the makeup of Brest’s road surfaces, pavements, and gardens.

Tombstones at the site of the new supermarket

In May, with diggers churning up the ground to build a new supermarket, more recycled headstones started popping up. Debra Brunner, co-director of the Together Plan, a UK-based charity supporting community empowerment in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, told me, “I can't even begin to explain what it felt like to actually stand among the graves. Picture a huge mound of freshly dug mud with Jewish headstones coming out at all angles. It was a macabre sight.”

It would be impossible to restore the headstones to the cemetery they were stolen from, as the original site is still a sports complex and the particular location of each stone is unknown. At the moment, due to a lack of space and resources, many of the headstones are lying in a pile by the 19th century Brest-Litovsk Fortress, an important Soviet Second World War monument. It is feared that opportunists will try to make money off of these rediscovered headstones by conning unsuspecting visitors to the Fortress into making “charitable donations” toward a fictitious “memorial fund." In their present condition the stones are vulnerable to the weather and to the whims of the public, as they remain freely accessible to passersby.

A digger on the site of the new supermarket

Minsk-based Artur Livshyts, who heads up the Together Plan in Belarus, said that the reaction in Brest to the morbid finds “is mostly a positive one." He said, “The Jewish community care deeply that the stones come to rest in a place dedicated as a memorial, and the wider non-Jewish community generally show concern and really do care for these stones too. Even the builders on the supermarket site stopped work to move the stones to one side and took the time to alert the Jewish community.”

Fifteen hundred headstones have been found in Brest over the past six years, with the rate of discovery escalating since work on the supermarket began. Graves are being discovered on an almost daily basis now, and often as many as five men are required to excavate a single one. According to Brunner the stones are “rough to touch but some are in really good condition considering what they have been through.”

Brunner told me about her recent trip to Belarus and how “minutes” after arriving she “received a phone call from a local man." This man told her about a farmer who, earlier that day, had been digging in a field in order to erect a new fence and had come across a gravestone lying face down in the ground. He lifted it out of the earth and wiped it down, before quickly realizing that the stone’s inscription was in Hebrew," she said.

Tombstones piled up in Brest-Litovsk Fortress

“We went to collect it in a van and moved it to a safe storage site. The members of the Brest Jewish community who came to help us unload the headstone were deeply concerned about the welfare of the stone—the delicacy and care of the unloading process showed us how much it meant to them.”

Belarusian native Regina Simonenko is the go-to woman when a new headstone is discovered. Head of the Holocaust Center in Brest, Simonenko arranges the pickup driver every time there is a new find. “Each headstone tells a story," she told me. “One headstone was found in the garden of a village house. It had been used to grind flour and a hole had been worked into it over the years. Another grave we found recently was dedicated to a woman named Golda. It was badly damaged and the dates of her life were missing, but there were clear tracings of gold in the engraving of her name.”

Simonenko and the Together Plan hope to create a memorial out of the headstones “so they won’t be used for anything else in the future," or at least to construct a protective fence to secure the graves preserved by the fortress. So far, the Together Plan has managed to pay for 400 headstones to be carefully relocated. But until more money is raised, the ultimate fate of the stones remains unclear.

Follow Kate Samuelson on Twitter.

'You Are Happy and Fulfilled' by Cameron Gray. Image courtesy of Mike Weiss Gallery

"Do you strive to open your heart to receive miracles and improve yourself? Do you feel there is a solution to every problem? Do you accept yourself even though you make mistakes? Do you feel like everything happens for a reason?" 

If your response to any of the above was to turn on some New Age bangers, crack open a crisp Kombucha, and shout a blood-curdling YES!, then artist Cameron Gray should be your guiding light.

Opening tonight at Mike Weiss Gallery in Manhattan, Gray's Gymansty is an art show that preaches "self-help advice and encouragement dispensed with a heavy dose of nihilistic pragmatism" through performance, video, and sculpture. Accompanied by art duo and longtime VICE friends Mike and Claire—who created a workout tape-cum-psychedelic freakout for the exhibition—the opening will also include a live spectacle that will bring Gray's conceived spiritual system into the real world, proselytizing to the masses in the process.

"Spiritual growth and self-help are impossible or at least more difficult in a media-saturated culture," says Gray. "The show will attempt to create feelings of disassociation and emptiness— which (for me) are the new sublime, foregrounding the zen-like transcendence and beauty of empty ideas and shallow reflections." 

In other words, there's going to be a lot of bodybuilders involved. See you tonight at 520 W 24th Street, New York. For more details, visit Mike Weiss Gallery's website.

'Gymnasty's Guide to FitnASS 1.' Image courtesy of Mike Weiss Gallery

'Gymnasty's Guide to FitnASS 2.' Image courtesy of Mike Weiss Gallery

PHOTOGRAPHER: JR JANSEN

STYLIST: SKYE KELTON

Assistant: Aaron Wynia

On-site producer: Ryan Archibald

Models: Fehn, Shelby, Tosh

Maje dress, Chosen Vintage rings

April77 jacket, American Apparel top, Diesel skirt; Malmo at Parloque jacket, I Love Ugly at Parloque pants; Antipast at Gravity Pope cardigan, American Apparel skirt

American Apparel sweater, H&M underwear

Chosen Vintage trenchcoat, trousers, accessories, and boots, American Apparel top

Topshop shoes

Maje dress, Urban Outfitters bra and underwear, The Leather Atelier necklace, Chosen vintage rings 

Urban Outfitters dress

Long Journey at Nomad jacket

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

October: the spookiest month of the year. Halloween is coming up, and to accompany that we’ve already had two massive horror releases with Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within. Each has divided critical opinion, with review scores spanning a wide range of the spectrum. This is handy for me, because it entirely backs up the point I’m about to make: Modern horror games are doing a lot right, but they also have a long way to go.

I recently spoke to Frictional Games’ Thomas Grip about the state of the genre. As the Creative Director on titles such as Penumbra: Overture, Amnesia: The Dark Descent (pictured above), and the upcoming SOMA, he’s basically horror royalty. We looked at both sides of the argument and came up with a few points for what’s good, and what’s bad, about where horror games are at right now.

Neverending Nightmares: If this is personal to you, perhaps seek help

Good: Raw Fear
Say what you want about the quality of any horror game, but most of them are damn good at scaring you—even if it’s just a monster jumping out of a door and feasting on your face. It’s a cheap trick, but it’s still going to leave your seat wet afterwards.

“In this new rise of horror games, the focus is all about very basic scares—there’s something horrible hunting you and you need to survive,” says Grip. “What I’m hoping we see more of in the future are games that focus on something more personal, that go beyond the primal lizard brain response scare… Games like Neverending Nightmares and The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter are trying to do this, and it’s also something we’re trying to do with SOMA.

“While it can be hard to go much further in terms of raw fear, there is a lot to be done in making horror more personal and thought-provoking.”

The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, a horror game that does go deeper

Bad: Failing to Explore Deeper Themes
Grip told me that many elements from Penumbra and Amnesia came about as attempts to improve upon things that annoyed the creators in past games. Part of this is the failure of the genre to explore deeper themes.

“It’s not that games are void of complex narrative, but there is so seldom a proper focus on it. There’s an array of surrounding features that muddy the water, often in an attempt to create more ‘fun’, and deeper aspects are never allowed to be explored.”

However, he admits that even Frictional Games made mistakes. In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, there were underlying themes of what made a person evil, but looking back, he wanted to make them even more apparent. Perhaps even at the expense of spooky monsters chasing you. It’s something they hope to be looking at in future efforts.

Slender: oh God, oh God, oh God, and so forth

Good: Making the Most of Minimal Features
Remember when Slender came out, and people seemed to really like it? Now it seems like every other game is about a lonesome soul searching for trivial objects while a mysterious force chases them. While that lack of originality is a problem, the core idea highlights something good.

“Slender came about and showed a larger audience that a game could be terrifying with a bare minimum of features. A lot has been made in that space, where you just focus on the raw basics and build an experience around that. Developers are much more aware that a good horror game is all about the feeling they generate, and less about having a fun core gameplay loop—which has been a pitfall for many years.”

Resident Evil 6: a very modern case of cut-scene overkill 

Bad: Cutscenes
If you happen to follow Grip on Twitter, you’ll probably have seen some of the various game-design discussions he prompts. In most games, there’s nothing wrong with a good cut scene to introduce you to characters or to show you events that aren’t possible in the gameplay. But for horror, he has different ideas.

“For horror games, cut scenes can be devastating. Like when you introduce a monster in them, I hate that. They’re a crutch for when you want the game to play out in a certain way and you come to rely on them.

“For instance, in Amnesia we have a section where the player needs to hide as a monster enters the room. This is the kind of thing you’d normally see in a cutscene, but now you are actually in charge of how it all unfolds. Our goal is for the player to be constantly in control.”

PT: winner of Most Pooped-In Pants, 2014

Good: Being the Scariest Horror Medium
I’ve always thought that a book or even a movie could never be as scary as a game, and that comes as an extension of the point about being in control. If you’re watching a movie, you can hide behind a pillow as the character walks around the corner that they clearly shouldn’t be walking around. In a game, it’s you who is looking through that dumb character’s eyes, and making the same moves you’d be screaming at them not to make otherwise. Grip agrees with me.

“For that pure sense of primal terror, there is nothing that can beat a game. However, right now the personal horror of The Exorcist or the disturbing atmosphere of Hard Candy is not really present in games. I definitely think games can probe much further. The question is just how far.”

Fatal Frame V: Does nobody ever say, “It’s behind you,” in Japan?

Bad: Very Little Innovation
I mentioned before how many games in the horror genre simply tend to borrow off one another. Every few years we seem to be left in a state where we’re waiting for a game to come around and revolutionize things, at least for a short time.

“There has been very little innovation in terms of interesting systems and themes. If you look at the golden age of console horror games in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there’s a lot of really interesting approaches going on. The dual worlds of Silent Hill, Fatal Frame’s camera, Forbidden Siren’s sight-jacking, and so on. I feel there was a very strong desire in those games to go beyond the more primal, and into more deeper horror.

“Unless you are after some very cheap scares, crafting good horror is not something that can be done by adjusting a few knobs. The build-up, narrative, and scenarios you place the player in are really what makes a game scary or not.”

The past few years has seen a great rise in excellent narrative experiences with the likes of To the Moon and Gone Home. The horror genre can’t be that far behind. We’ve got the scares down. Now we can build on that to make horror games better than ever before.

SOMA is scheduled for release in 2015. Frictional Games are online here.

Follow Matt Porter on Twitter

Popcorn Venus. All images courtesy of the artist

Juno Calypso once spent three days on her mum’s dining room table, standing in a cake, surrounded by sweetly rotting prawns and pineapples on sticks. The artist, art director and film-maker uses her alter ego, Joyce, to create intriguing, unsettling scenes of suburban frustration, female isolation and the hopeless fight against time, often surrounded by food, masks, and saturated soft furnishings.

Of course, the silent pastel fury of suburbia has inspired artists ever since cities started to creep out of their urban womb in the 1930s. From Philip Larkin to David Lynch we’ve long been fascinated by the strange modern hinterland of twitching curtains, empty streets, tarmac-paved silence and hidden domestic mystery. But in Calypso’s pictures the viewer is invited into a world on the border of suburbia, science fiction and S&M. We go behind the curtain and we’re not sure we like what we find.

I spoke to the 25-year-old London-based artist to find out what the hell is going on.

VICE: Pork, prawns, pineapple: Why do you use food in your work so much?
Juno Calypso: I’ve always been attracted to the texture of food in photos. I suppose it all began with Popcorn Venus – the photo where I’m popping out of a cake. I started to think about how we photograph women in the same way we photograph food, as these very glossy, artificial things pumped full of preservatives. We’ll do anything to stop both decaying.

In Popcorn Venus there’s a very prominent sliced sausage in the foreground—was that intentionally phallic?
In the 70s they served a lot of platters and they always had these big sausages—the kind of things you find in Turkish supermarkets. I love how obscene, huge and pink they are. They’re seen as disgusting and fake.

Joyce’s expression is so at odds with what she’s doing. She’s jumping out of a cake and yet there’s no joy in her face.
There are all these ideas about how you’re supposed to look into the camera to be sexy; make your eyes droopy, your mouth pouty. But if you exaggerate that just a bit, you look ridiculous, tired and pissed off.

She looks almost sedated, disorientated—like she doesn’t quite realize what’s happening.
She looks tired because I was tired. I felt like I was trapped in that cake. All that food was laid out for three days and nothing changed, nothing went moldy. Even the prawns. Eventually it just started to smell sweet—like the sweet smell of death.

In Reconstituted Meat Slices the tin of meat is both horribly flesh-like and yet completely artificial. Did you intend for it to be the same color as your skin?
I wanted to exaggerate that color. I found the tin of meat in a supermarket and it looked like something straight out of the 50s. It stank. A lot of people think she’s dead in that photo, and the food looks dead too—artificial, canned, processed. She’s the embodiment of all that. I wore a lot of fake tan that day.

Reconstituted Meat Slices

That image, that pose, is echoed in a new photo where you’re wearing a silicon mask. But this time you’re staring right at the camera. What changed?
I feel like she’s getting more powerless. I want to be submissive and tired. The eyes are red like she’s been crying. I found the mask on eBay—it’s a Japanese silicon sauna mask. You feel completely disgusting, trapped behind this hot, sticky piece of plastic. It’s supposed to make you look younger, preserve you, stop age and time.

It reminds me of Twelve Reasons You’re Tired all the Time, where you’re wearing a weird pink plastic mask in what looks like a front room.
That mask is called the Linda Evans Rejuvenique Facial Toning System. On the inside are all these gold metal pins and when you turn it on it electrocutes your face. These things are all on the border between beauty, torture and science fiction. I thought it was historic, but it actually came out in 2000 and they’re still being produced now.

Twelve Reasons You’re Tired all the Time

These products aren’t just about making you look young—they’re also trying to hold back death, aren’t they?
Oh, they’re all incredibly morbid. They’re designed to make you mourn your lost youth but also be scared of the future. So you’re never really just living inside your body, you’re always thinking about either the past or the future. They’re selling you these products through terror and sadness.

It’s like we—well, men—are trying to confront their own fear of death by stopping women age.
The scary old woman is a universally horrific image—from The Exorcist to Snow White—because she is the opposite of sexually attractive. There’s so much decay under women’s bodies but we have to hide it, keep it under wraps. A few months ago I went to The Anti-Ageing Show—a convention at Olympia—and it was the scariest thing I’ve ever been to. They gave you a discount on treatments if you had them there, so when you walked in there were all these women lying on beds, having treatments. It looked like a morgue. It was like walking into an embalming centre, with dead bodies everywhere.

Artificial Sweetener

Oh God. When you look back at an image like Artificial Sweetener, where you’re three years younger, how do you feel about the woman in that picture?
I can’t tell if I look young or old. I just look grotesque. But I love inhabiting the grotesque. I’d love to learn prosthetics—at the moment I’m just using fake teeth, eyelashes and make-up, but I’d love to give myself huge lips, something that’s not quite believable.

The Eternal Beauty image where you’re standing behind the door—where is that?
I shot it in my friend’s studio. They’re actually film stills. I thought it would be fun to film, rather than taking loads of pictures. It’s meant to be this imaginary beauty clinic—you’re not quite sure what they’re doing to women but you know it’s sinister. There’s no narrative or script; the pictures are just there for people to imagine around.

I put cling film around my hair. It was sweaty and itchy. Like when you’re in a salon and having your hair bleached, but instead of trying to make myself beautiful, I’m enduring all the discomfort to make a picture.

I started it at night time. I drank loads of coffee and worked through the night, until the sun came up. That’s the sun coming through in the background.

It feels like the decline of Joyce. She’s gone from jumping out of a cake to being laid out on the floor like an autopsy.
Yes, it’s like she’s been incubated.

Cyril Connolly called suburbs “incubators of apathy and delirium". 
Suburbs are creepy. And yet they’re supposed to be this dream of the perfect life, perfect home, husband and sofa. I grew up in London, I’ve never lived in suburbia, but they seem like a doll’s house. The house that I shot Artificial Sweetener in was my ex-boyfriend’s parents’ house. His mum had decorated the whole thing, sewed the curtains, picked the wallpaper. She made it all match.

There’s also a sexual frustration bubbling under a lot of the images. In Modern Hallucination you’re lying on a bed, on your back, like you’ve just had a wank.
I love the twin beds in that image. Twin beds: that’s just sexual frustration in bed form. Is it for children? Or just a couple who don’t have sex any more? So she’s lying there, completely frustrated and defeated.

Has your process changed much since you started the Joyce series?
I’m now very aware of the process. There’s less showing off. I started this project while I was still at uni and I wanted to make people laugh, make myself look ridiculous. But now, working by myself, there’s no big cake. I’m just making work for myself. 

Follow Nell Frizzell on Twitter

In an editorial for Bloomberg Businessweek posted this morning, Time Cook, the CEO of Apple came out as gay. The 53-year-old has never denied his sexuality, but he has kept his privacy closely guarded. Apparently, though, he had a revelation. Cook wrote, “I believe deeply in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who said: 'Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?' I often challenge myself with that question, and I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important.”

For a long time, Cook’s sexuality has been an open secret. Out magazine called him the most powerful gay man in America last year, and no one protested or filed suit. But still, the declaration is making headlines across the globe, and Daniel D’Addario at Time even said it’s the most meaningful coming-out yet. That’s because Cook is not merely “admitting” to being gay, he’s owning it. “I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me,” the CEO wrote.

It’s true that Cook's coming out is important, but not for the reason that D’Addario suggests. For one, it’s much harder to come out in the business world than say, in Hollywood. A New York Times article by Claire Cain Miller from May asked why, exactly, there weren’t many out CEOs. “The business world is one of the slowest sectors of society to adopt new norms of acceptance—despite the fact that it keeps out some talented people, the lifeblood of companies,” Miller wrote. Ultimately, she concluded that breaking through the pink-ceiling was considered dangerous because having a gay executive could potentially irk investors or customers.

The problem is compounded when it comes to the tech industry, which is notoriously misogynistic. Evidence abounds that it’s run by overgrown college bros. In the spring of 2013, a woman tweeted about sexist remarks she overheard at an open-source conference and was subsequently besieged with—of course—death and rape threats. In May, the CEO of Snapchat had some of his old emails leaked, like one telling his fellow bros: “pat yourself a pat on the back or have some girl put your large kappa sigma dick down her throat.”

Tim Cook isn’t only the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world—he’s also on the board of directors of the National Football League. By coming out, he’s become the ultimate gay bro. So while people are shrugging their shoulders about yet another dude coming out (you can practically hear the collective sigh of clueless straight dudes across the globe going: We get it already), they should realize that Cook claiming his sexuality as an asset is a big fucking deal. By not publicly acknowledging it, he was giving credence to the idea that there are certain immutable aspects of people's personalities that can’t or shouldn’t be recognized in the tech world. Numbers and data are pretty democratic, so it’s bizarre that tech isn’t a place with a level playing field already. By coming out, Cook’s helping the industry reach its meritocratic ideal—that the best programmer or the best engineer or the best businessperson should rise to the top.

Follow Allie on Twitter

Photos by Matt Sharkey

Everybody loves the 80s, right? It was arguably the goofiest decade in history in terms of music, fashion, and film, and for Dalila Acuña, it was the defining time in her life. (You may or may not recognize Acuña as one of the two girls sharing a schnitzel in my recent Skinema column.)

The classic, screwball comedies of that era are her fondest childhood memories, the actors of that time her first crushes. Twenty-four years later she still obsesses over the high hair and carefree days of her youth—so much so that she often makes her husband dress up as her various teenage dream lovers. She even moved to Winona Ryder’s hometown in the hope that Johnny Depp will again seek her warm embrace but find Dalila waiting there instead. 

Lately the artist has been trying to harness her fixation with the 80s in a healthy (albeit drunk) manner, by sewing odes to her favorite scenes from 80s movies into pillows and bags. The local buzz in San Francisco for her pop-culture-themed blankets and pillow cases has earned her a show at the Book & Job Gallery opening today, October 30. We caught up with Johnny Depp’s stalker to talk about her upcoming show, Cry Baby, as well as the dangers of sewing while drunk.

VICE: Why such a fascination with the 80s?
Dalila Acuña: It’s kind of a mix of 80s and early 90s, but I grabbed on to it because my parents made us go without TV for a big chunk of our childhood. We had a TV, but we didn’t have cable. We got two channels—like in National Lampoon’s European Vacation: “Cheese or snow.” My dad would bring home VHS movies and pizza on Fridays. They were such super hippies that the fact that we got pizza and some kind of caffeine-free soda was huge. So we’d watch these shitty B-rated movies that my dad picked out for us over and over and over again because we didn’t have TV. So it’s not a fascination with the era itself so much as it is a weird nostalgia I have for being a kid, and not giving a shit, and laying on a crappy brown carpet in our living room with the awful wood paneling, and my little brother and I watching Strange Brew, Space Balls, Young Frankenstein, and all those kinds of comedies over and over again.

Why do you think no one makes good screwball comedies anymore? It seems like any attempt at a laugh-a-minute comedy is always one of those shitty spoofs like Scary Movie, where they can’t even come up with their own silly plotlines.
I think it’s because everyone is so serious and too cool for a crappy comedy. Maybe there’s just too much media and people don’t find the same stuff funny anymore because they’re exposed to too much? Everybody always tries to make their comedies into a crappy love story in one way or another these days, and there’s always this weird sex element. In the 80s, the sex was kind of minimal, aside from some random flashing of tits.

How did you get into sewing? Did you start with the aim of sewing 80s pop culture icons?
My first sewing experience was in English class in high school, and we had to create a book cover for The Scarlett Letter. I sewed an A on the front of mine, and it took me forever. It sucks because I really liked that English teacher, but he ended up having sex with some high schooler in 1997. He got busted at a senior party sleeping with a student, and he had a wife and kid. But he was the best teacher. And totally not attractive at all.

More recently I was trying to embroider but didn’t know how, so it was a process of teaching myself. My mom embroidered. She was supposed to show me how to do it, but she never did. So I kind of taught myself. I actually had two boyfriends in high school who knew how to use sewing machines, and I would beg them to teach me how to use them, but they never did. Then, when I was 23, a bunch of my girlfriends got together and bought me a sewing machine for my birthday, and I had to figure out how to use it on my own. All these years later, I kind of know how to use it, but not really; I don’t know all the special functions. But it all started with me making family pieces, and then it turned into making joke pieces for friends—like making the Ghostface Killah and Elvis blankets for your sons. It spiraled from there.

But no grandmother to show you the trade?
No, and that’s another person that wouldn’t help me. I’m really frustrated because just recently I was going through all my grandmother’s linens, and she had all these pieces with embroidered flowers on them. It turns out that it was shit she had made. She stopped embroidering a long time ago, and here I am trying to figure it out and I have all these people around me who know how to do it.

Ha! Damn! Was she killed in a fiery car wreck and you can’t get the information from her now?
No, she’s still alive, she just doesn’t want to teach me. She’s like, “That was back in the day. You had to sew everything for yourself if you wanted it to look nice. Now you can order anything you want online—with free shipping! Why would I bother?” So she doesn’t derive joy from embroidery. It was just out of necessity, a product of the era. Whereas, I really love sewing.

You don’t seem to love it at the moment. You seem extremely stressed out over this art show tomorrow night.
I do it all the time for fun when there are no time constraints. Now I’m under the pressure of a deadline, and it’s stressful. Don’t people say, “Don’t do what you love as a career or it’s going to ruin it for you..."? When I agreed to do the show, I only had three Space Balls pillows done. Now with one day left, I have 24 pillowcases in various sizes, and I’m not done yet. Some of the pillows are really big—like 17” x 17”—and then I have some smaller ones that are 11” x 14”. And they’re all functional. One of them is a cross-stitched piece that I did of my face inside a TV, and then I sewed all my 80s crushes from when I was 13. So that took a really long time. I was super obsessed with Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing and Johnny Depp from Cry-Baby. So I sewed all of their faces in hearts and all my loves will be around the outside of the TV.

Who are your other childhood crushes?
It’s those two, Ferris Bueller, and the one that I haven’t finished is Lloyd Dobbler from Say Anything.

Who was your favorite?
Johnny Depp in Cry-Baby, hands down. I think every girl had a crush on Johnny Depp. But Cry-Baby was such a shitty, glorious movie. He was all decked out in his 50s gear. Plus, all those shitty songs in that movie, and his little tear drop on his eye.

Which of your childhood crushes would you still bang in 2014?
Still Johnny Depp for sure. He still looks good.

How about Patrick Swayze?
Now that he’s dead? I don’t know. Necrophilia really isn’t my thing.

Do you get aroused while sewing your crushes?
A little. Johnny Depp is pretty hot, even in cross stitch. I’d still hang out with a sewn version of Johnny Depp.

Any masturbation during the sewing of Johnny Depp?
No, I was too focused. But I thought about it later on. And I had my husband dress as a greaser like in Cry-Baby that night, with a leather jacket, a pompadour, and nothing else. One thing I would like to point out is that we recently moved to Petaluma, California, because Winona Ryder is from Petaluma. And she dated Johnny Depp, so I’m just getting closer and closer to him. I’ve been moving from place to place where he’s lived and hoping that he’ll show up. He’s not even from here, just his old ex-girlfriend is, but who knows? Maybe he’ll seek her out and I’ll be here instead. I’m just hoping some day he returns…

I’m told your prefer to sew when you’re highly intoxicated. How hard is it to sew a straight line when drunk?
Yes, it is my preferred method of sewing. You can’t really do it sober. But sewing a straight line drunk is very difficult. That’s when you go for a zig-zag stitch. I’ve fucked up quite a few times while drinking, and if you look on the back of the pillow, you’ll see that the sewing machine that I’ve had forever has been dying on me. It skips a stitch every now and again. I feel like it’s my special, personal touch. Also, when sewing drunk, there will be blood. I poke myself often and always have bloody fingers.

Is this really about recapturing your youth, or is it about easing into old age? Because sewing is such a grandma thing to do.
It’s definitely about nostalgia. I’m trying to remember what it was like to be younger, when you didn’t have a care in the world except to think about what it was going to be like when Johnny Depp made out with you. But the truth is I’ve basically been 50 years old my entire life. I’d much rather sit by myself and drink wine and sew and read a book and eat prunes than do anything people my age might be doing. I’m basically a hermit, and I don’t like to exercise or move a lot.

Follow Dalila on Instagram or check out her art show tomorrow, October 30, at San Francisco’s Book & Job Gallery.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko.

Horror filmmakers have provided us with enough fuel for a lifetime of nightmares full of crazy killers, dissected mutants, alien births, and rotten flesh as it’s torn apart. If this is the kind of thing that comes from the depths of their imaginations, what the hell scares these people?

Because it's Halloween, I spoke with a bunch of horror icons and asked them, “What is the greatest horror you have ever experienced in your real life?”

Illustrations by Nick Gazin

WES CRAVEN
Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Hills Have Eyes
A year and a half ago, my wife and I stayed in a hundreds-of-years-old inn in northern Scotland. When we arrived, they told us that the place was haunted. I, by and large, have never experienced anything supernatural and tend not to believe in anything until I see it for myself. The innkeeper took us through this great gallery that lead to the lobby which connected to a giant dining room. He stopped and pointed out a giant mirror that recently had to be moved from the restaurant because guests were noticing people in the reflection, but when they turned around the people weren’t really there. I thought, OK, sure and laughed to myself.

In our room was a giant fireplace with a gaping opening, all black from years of soot. It was right at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t working and I didn’t think much of it. But that night I had a dream that I was looking at the fireplace and it was medieval sized—so big you could walk into it. From out of that darkness came a ghostly woman with a long gown who looked around and then looked directly at me. Her arms came out and she just rushed towards me. I woke up in a scream, gasping, and just completely out of breath.

JOHN CARPENTER
Halloween, The Thing, They Live
Many frightening things have happened to me in my life, mostly when I was young. I think I was scared of most everything back then. Recently I was visiting my father in Kentucky when I suffered a retinal detachment in my right eye. I asked the examining ophthalmologist if I could travel back to LA and my eye doctor. He told me my retina could detach during the flight and that I needed surgery immediately. Until my surgery two days later, I was terrified of going blind. My eyesight is my career, my life. Until recently retinal detachment meant blindness. I thought I was fucked. The surgery was successful, although not without complications. The fear subsided. Today I can see.

FRANK HENENLOTTER
Basket Case, Frankenhooker, Brain Damage 
Annie, the Broadway musical. Talk about horrifying. Ilze Balodis, one of my best friends and an actor in Basket Case, worked at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The school always got preview tickets to various Broadway shows so, in 1977, we went to the Alvin Theatre to watch Annie three days before it officially opened. I was horrified immediately. Insufferable Broadway brats straining to act "cute and adorable" as the orphans, Dorothy Loudon outdoing the brats as Miss Hannigan, and that god-awful song "Tomorrow" seemingly sung every 45 seconds. I told everyone I knew that the show wouldn't last a week. Instead, it became a huge hit. It spawned a movie directed by John Huston—John Huston?!!!!—and a remake is scheduled for release this December. The horror continues.

CLIVE BARKER
Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Candyman 
Honestly, when I was in my coma. To be plunged into an absolute darkness and wake up with a breathing tube down my throat and be in that absolute nightmare place, surrounded by people I didn’t know. It was terrifying. The absolute worst experience of my life, no question. And I’m talking about horror now, as opposed to grief. You know, the losing of my parents, the losing of certain people in my life who were very precious to me. In terms of emotional horrors, that’s far worse than a coma. But, if we’re speaking of horror in the most conventional sense, it would have to be the coma.

HEATHER LANGENKAMP
Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven's New Nightmare
One weekend I found myself staying by myself at my dad's little farm out in the boonies of Oklahoma. I thought at the time that I'd enjoy the quiet peace that I usually find out in the country. That I would have no problem staying by myself in a little cabin on the prairie. But as darkness fell, every sound magnified into a Freddy fingernail screech and every bug and raccoon seemed to come out of the night to scare the living daylights out of me. Even the wind conspired against me to send spooky voices my way. I realized that all the horror movies I've watched were replaying themselves in my imagination as I just tried to enjoy that solitude. I spent that night totally freaked out and stayed awake all night, TV blaring, hoping to scare away all the demons.

TONY TODD
Candyman, Night of the Living Dead, Wishmaster 
Nothing is more horrific than seeing a merchant of peace be assassinated. Suddenly all around me, the city was ablaze and people were rioting over Dr. King’s assassination. I was in the seventh grade and was raised by a single woman, my aunt, who refused to let me go out in the street and protest. I wanted have my voice to be heard. I am a child of the 60s, so I lived through the assassination of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. King. It seemed like everyone who promised to lead us to a better place was assassinated. What is more horrific than seeing the unexplainable happen to a great man of peace and not be able to change it?

LINNEA QUIGLEY
Return of the Living Dead, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Silent Night Deadly Night
When I was 14 or 15 years old I went on a family vacation to Acapulco. After checking into our rental house, my mother stayed behind while my father and I headed to the store. Thankfully he forgot his wallet and we turned back only to find two huge men standing in the yard about to enter the house. Before we could do anything a man holding machete grabbed me and in a fit of rage I kicked the living hell out of him and he let us go free. Thinking back, I think it was a hint to my future as I did it in a bikini.

TOM SAVINI
Dawn of the Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn, Friday the 13th
The scariest thing I have ever experienced was while I was a combat photographer in Vietnam. Your whole body shakes and rattles and your mind is focused on only one thing... is there a person going to walk out of those woods in front of me? 'Cause if he does he is going to want to kill me. Where do you in normal life ever experience THAT? You don't. It's a really really scary thing to have to think about. Especially after there has been an attack and you know they are out there and it's dark... real dark... until the clouds move and the moon lights up your position. Think about that kind of fear. In a movie theater you identify with a character and go on the journey of say Father Merrin in The Exorcist and it is scaring the shit out of you but deep down you know you are safe sitting in the theater. Imagine deep down knowing that you are not safe. You are scared of being shot or getting blown to pieces... and there is no deep down safety that you are somewhere else. That is the scariest thing.

R.A. MIHAILOFF
Leatherface, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III 
I am the guy you don’t want to meet in a dark alley for real. But honestly, I can’t think of anything profoundly horrific that has happened to me in my life. The only thing that scares me is death. I am absolutely terrified of dying. Mostly because I am an atheist and believe when you die, the lights go out. That’s it. It’s the end of The Sopranos. I’m loving this life and having so much fun. I never want it to end. The thought of losing all of this terrifies me. I love being big. I love being strong. I love being a man. I love being in the movies.

ANGUS SCRIMM
Phantasm, Mindwarp, John Dies at the End 
There has been a dearth of ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties in my life. I have never even stepped foot inside of a haunted house. Nothing genre-related has ever really scared me. I don’t really have nightmares except with everyday occurrences, like someone close to me falling ill. I look forward to my dreams. In them I am I often traveling and on my way home and can’t wait to get there to see my loved ones. Everyone I have ever loved is in my dreams. The closest I have ever gotten to a nightmare is a reoccurring dream I have had of an all brown city that is impoverished and deserted. In it, I walk around wondering how it all happened. I feel alone and am only able to see an occasional figure in the distance.

MICHAEL BERRYMAN
The Hills Have Eyes, Weird Science, Teenage Exorcist 
Quick backstory: I was a Boy Scout a long time ago, worked with the sheriff’s department in college as a volunteer diver, and I used have an advanced first aid certificate from the Red Cross. I just like to help.

I was on my motorcycle in the mid 70s. To the set the scene, I was into the super-bikes. I had a beautiful Norton Commando 750. It was a great, powerful bike. I was riding the coast back from San Luis Obispo and, at this point, I was in Santa Barbara. I noticed there was a traffic accident up ahead and a beat-up old Volkswagen van was on its side. I parked my bike and realized that three people had been ejected from the van.

I immediately knew what to do. I stopped traffic and asked someone to get out of their car and instructed them on how to hold the man’s head because he was having difficulty breathing. It sounded like he had a punctured lung. I said, “If you notice anything strange, just call out my name and I'll tell you what to do. The ambulance is on its way.” I moved onto the next victim who was a man who was semi-conscious and next to him was a big cooking pot, the old-school kind that’s dark blue with the white spots on it. It was full of spaghetti!

In the other lane of traffic, there was what looked like a pile of blankets, but there was a woman inside who had a terrible head injury. A big chunk of her skull was gone. The poor gal was in a lot of pain. As I was applying pressure to her wound, I looked up and saw a BMW with a guy in a business suit weaving through the traffic because he was important and needed to get somewhere. As he pulled up, he did not know there a person in the pile of blankets. Right as he was about to drive over her, I jumped in front of his car and he honked at me to get out of the way. He could care less about the accident. I said, “Please stop! Come help us!” He honked again and stuck his head out of his car and said, “Get the F out of the way!” and then drove forward and tapped my legs ever so slightly with his bumper. I jumped on the on the hood of his BMW and grabbed his windshield wipers and started pounding on his windshield until I broke it with my fist. At least then he stopped the car.

At that time, a police officer arrives. The guy in the BMW screamed, “Arrest this man. He broke my windshield!” And I say, “This guy wants to drive over an injured person.” Mr. Business Guy, Mr. Important, gets out of his car and is ready to do business with me, but the cop grabbed the guy by the tie and his belt and twisted him around and put his boot you know where and gave it a tight little squeeze and handcuffed him. The guy finally shut up. I tended to the victim until the medics arrived. Later I went to the diner across the way to fill out a report and a cop hands $20 to the waitress and says, “This gentlemen right here— whatever he wants, it’s on us.” I said, “OK, well I’m gonna stay and have dessert. I like pie.”

Follow Jennifer Juniper Stratford  on Twitter.

Photo by Michael Sharkey

A couple years ago, I read David Gordon’s story "Man-Boob Summer" in the Paris Review. Though I don’t like the word boob, much less man-boob, I started reading it anyway because it was the first story in that issue, and fell for it when the narrator describes an intense and bizarre sympathy for a stranger who at a community pool lowers herself into a Jacuzzi with him. Gordon writes:

I saw how her thighs were scored with the plastic pattern of her chair. The marks looked like welts, like someone had whipped her, and even though I knew it was only from sitting and reading Us magazine, I instantly felt something sorrowful and wounded about her, like there was always smoke in her eyes, smoke only she could smell, or else she was allergic to something that was there around us but that I was too crude to sense.

As the story progresses and the narrator becomes involved with a teenaged lifeguard, what seems to be a male fantasy come true is jarred by a horror-inducing confession before it shifts back into a familiar sense of reality. As with Gordon’s other stories and novels this shifting between the inside and outside the characters’ heads is deftly—and at times profoundly—handled. Sometimes, the splashes of terror one experiences as a reader are almost palpable, like you’ve dipped your hand into water you thought was room temperature but is actually ice cold. Yet the stories are also funny and moving and even tender. Gordon writes about love, sex, isolation, disconnection, loss, intrigue, writing itself, and as he puts it, what is “compelling and mysterious to him personally.”

In the title story of David Gordon’s new collection White Tiger on Snow Mountain, a protagonist who fears he is impotent gets exotic alternative treatments for his problem and becomes involved with two masochistic women online. Though the story very much involves sex, it’s the least sexy thing Gordon has written, and probably the most disturbing. What at first seems like a humorous dalliance in the online world of S&M becomes a sad and harrowing mystery. 

I spoke with Gordon over email about how it’s hard not to read online sex stories, being sickly as a child, and why he imagines his readers as people he will never meet, but happen to find his books and feel like they were left just for them.

VICE: I notice that throughout your collection, the stories are colored with elements of fantasy and horror. What is the relationship between these two, as you see it? And why did you chose to become a writer who somewhat straddles the line between literary fiction and genre, with the former keeping the upper hand?
David Gordon: The relationship between fantasy and horror? Well I suppose as genres they are distinct, with Narnia at one end and Stephen King at the other, but they merge around the supernatural. In fact, all of these genres melt together for me because the influence is so fundamental, which is to say from early childhood. These were among the first real books I read: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, crime.

I never thought I was straddling genres really, I just tried to write fiction and that was what I came up with. If it is “literary,” then that has to do I think with the primary impulse behind writing. You said the end of [my story] "I Think of Demons" freaked you out, and I was really pleased because affecting the reader that way feels like an achievement and it was very hard to pull off. But if you hadn't been scared, it wouldn't mean the story failed. Another friend told me he had to stop reading because he was laughing too much and that felt great too, but again—the work doesn't depend on that. If you are a standup comic and no one laughs—you failed. If you write Horror with a capital H, the point is to give people goosebumps. And so on. And these things are incredibly hard to do, if you try them. But for me something else is primary, so the choices I am making when writing may not be the one that leads to a laugh or chill or whatever. I'm trying to learn all I can from those books, but use it to express something else that is more compelling and mysterious to me personally, and that for lack of another word, I might as well call literature.

Speaking of what you “might as well call literature”—one of your stories is entitled, “Literature I Gave You Everything and Now What Am I?” Well I’m curious about what exactly “literature” is to you.
Well in that story I started out joking, though perhaps in a bitter way, with a character I imagined as the ultimate sour, struggling writer who combined all the most grouchy aspects of my otherwise very nice writer friends.

That said, I do think I had a sense of a "vocation" of sorts. I felt that I absolutely had to be a writer at an absurdly young age, like first or second grade, and just dedicated myself to that. Not to mention showing no interest or aptitude for anything else. Then a couple decades go by and you think, what have I gotten myself into? Does it make sense to do this with your life? In my case the answer was—Why not? What else would I do?

I feel an intense connection to the books and writers I love and even like their actual presence there on the shelf.

I am not a religious person at all in the usual sense. It seems to be completely contrary to my nature, but I do think that it is helpful to think of yourself as part of something bigger than you. So maybe I am trying to see writing as a small contribution to something bigger. The reader, I imagine, is the person I will never meet who just finds my book somewhere and feels like it was left just for them.

So literature then is maybe the answer to a type of spiritual loneliness and longing? That connects all of us. That sustains literature. That literature both answers but also perpetuates maybe...
Yes I think you are right. You put it better than me.

Speaking of which—loneliness and longing seems to me to be part of what drives WTOSM. How did the title story—which starts with the sentence, "Last fall I became impotent"—come about?
Actually the story evolved very slowly. In real life I’ve gone to acupuncturists for many years, for everything from running injuries to allergies, and I always wanted to write about it. Also the whole world of online sex talk, sex ads, sex chatter, whatever...it is this new part of the culture that is there to be written about, the same way telephone conversations start appearing in books. The odd thing is that it is literally a "text" event, people writing to each other, so on that level it seemed very compelling to me, as powerful language to work with on the page. Why I felt these things belonged in a story... I don't know.

The story was like this box that these items just seemed to go in together. Some of the narrative choices were almost arbitrary to begin with: I didn't want to spend my time writing about a guy wacking off at a computer so I thought maybe he’s too shut down for that even. But then I didn't want to write like an "issue" story about a medical problem, so I made his self-proclaimed diagnosis really dubious. We’re never quite sure what’s wrong with him. I just asked myself, Who is this guy? What's his problem really? And I do think it is a kind of despair that he is in. He is feeling for one solution after another—maybe it is sex, maybe it is smoking, and so on. It's a winter of despair that we live through with him. I liked that his sex life, while intense, becomes verbal and non-physical, a phantasm, while the healing that occurs is non-verbal and totally non-sexual, but based on human touch.

That is the thing about these sex chats or texts. Even when it is creepy or nearly illiterate, it is hard not to read it, which makes it inherently interesting to me as a writer. I have to respect it somehow. The same with curse words. At their best they are literally "curses," like magic spells, which connects to the root of poetry and language. Like maybe the first word was some caveman burning himself on the first fire and going, "Fuck!"

I see this interest in reconnecting what is disconnected in your stories. What is your first memory of feeling disconnected? Mine is probably allergies. As a child I had terrible allergies that caused me to feel imprisoned in my body, that dulled and irritated my senses, made me not want to be seen. I got shots. I identified with the kid in your story “Vampire of Queens” who is “allergic to the world.”
Really? As you might know I was a pretty sickly kid and suffered from allergies too.

Yeah. I’m sort of leading the witness here...
I exaggerate the scene in the vampire story but I really did once fend off a grade school bully by threatening to cough on him. This kind of chronic stuff—bronchitis, red swollen eyes, and so forth—separated me from the world, literally, since I was inside, reading books, and never played sports and so forth, which added to my shyness and sense of being alien. It also made me feel disconnected from my body because it made my physical self a kind of untrustworthy enemy. I felt like it was hard to think or even experience things when I couldn't breathe properly or my skin was covered in rashes and so forth. I used to wake up with my eyes sealed shut and think I was blind. No doubt that also helped make me awkward and anxious. I also have to think it helped make me a writer—I was the classic skinny, pale, bookish nerdy dweeb, spacing out at recess while the ball bounced off my head.

Any advice for the disconnected?
I do think that, ideally, writing can be a way of creating a kind of live emotional experience which is transmittable, sharable with other people, who then read the words and have a personal and unique experience of their own, one at a time. This to me is amazing and one of the things that fiction still does so well. 

I am just a guy with a book to sell, but if you want my actual real advice? Help someone else. Think about someone or something else besides oneself. This is the only way to connect with others and be free from ourselves that I have seen work. I haven't come across any others. But then I am probably a more desperate character than most.

David Gordon is a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, and a superstar in Japan. In addition to winning him the VCU Cabell First Novelist award, Gordon’s first novel, The Serialist, garnered three Japanese literary awards, was a finalist for the Edgar Award for First Novel, and was made into a movie. He also cuts his own hair.

Follow April Ayers Lawson on Twitter.