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Meet the Bassist Who Ruptured His Scrotum on a Glitter Cannon

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[body_image width='1257' height='1257' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='joel-golby-bassist-who-ruptured-his-bollock-on-a-glitter-cannon-204-body-image-1418129242.jpg' id='9988']Here's Otto

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

How many songs could you play on the bass immediately after a glitter cannon pummeled you in the testicle so hard it ruptured? At a guess, I'd say your answer to that is going to be somewhere between "zero" and "absolutely zero," and that is the correct number. 

But that is because you are not Otto Schimmelpenninck, the bassist for Dutch symphonic metal band ​Delain, who managed seven songs after he got aggressively glittered at a show in Birmingham, England, last month. And we're not just talking playing bass on those songs: He did some​ metal grunting sounds on them as well.

Fortunately, Otto is Dutch, so has that kind of chill, "Well, I guess I ruptured my testicle on a glitter cannon but hei, what can you do?" attitude that no other country can really emulate. I spoke to him about popping his ball sack in Birmingham, plans for his body's future health, and glitter cannons in general.

VICE: Hey Otto. Where were you and what were you doing when your testicle got ruptured?
Otto SchimmelpenninckI was in Birmingham, performing at a sold out O2 Academy show with my band, Delain.

How did your testicle get ruptured?
We have a special effect that shoots streamers forward during a particular song in the set ["The Gathering"]. It is a bit like a confetti cannon, but instead of confetti it shoots out long silver tapes. As they have to shoot up to 12 meters, they're quite powerful. Due to numerous circumstances I happened to be exactly in front of one (instead of as far away as possible) when it fired. And—lucky me—it hit me from behind, exactly in my gentlemen's parts.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/0KuzdYesljE' width='560' height='315']

The testicle thing happens around ​the 3:25 mark

Did you still manage to finish the show?
I did. The pain was pretty bad at first, but not alarming, but pretty soon it got to a level where it was really, really bad. So bad, in fact, I was afraid I would lose consciousness. I'm not sure how, but I managed to finish the set and come back on stage for an encore—a total of seven songs after the injury.

What does it feel like to rupture your testicle?
It, um, hurts a lot! At the moment of "impact" the pain was not as worse as I'd imagined. It was different from being hit or kicked in that area, in that it was a very sharp pain, like I had been cut. After half a minute or so the pain started to get worse, changing into the kind of pain you have when you've received a kick in that zone. I also had the feeling that I was bleeding, as I felt something flowing. When I got the chance to feel inside my trousers that appeared to be correct. I had been bleeding internally, quite heavily, and my scrotum had swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

"Lucky me—it hit me from behind, exactly in my gentlemen's parts."

How did they treat you at the hospital?
It took a particularly long time before I received any attention. I arrived around midnight, had a "take in" with a nurse around midnight (who didn't look, but just asked some questions), then I wasn't transferred to a cubicle with a bed until 2 AM. Those hours of waiting, sitting on the metal chair in the waiting room, were the worst. Then, around 3 AM, someone had a look and had me transferred to a specialized department. After some more doctors and consultants had a look at it I was operated on in the morning, around 8:30 AM. They opened my scrotum, released half a liter of blood there and saw there that, as expected, my testicle was ruptured, so they had to remove some blood clots and stitch it up. There was also some other damage (some shattered arteries, a broken membrane) which were fixed to the best of the surgeon's ability. Finally, my scrotum was stitched up again and recovery could start.

Will your testicle be alright?
There is a fair chance it will, but there's always the option it won't. Even now, one and a half weeks later, it's very painful and swollen, although apparently that's normal. If recovery goes as planned, things should start to heal pretty soon and I should have an ultrasound scan taken at the beginning of January, to see if it has healed well. If recovery does not go as planned (i.e. it remains swollen and I remain in pain) chances are it will not be alright. I'm not sure yet what the consequences of that will be.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter


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Why It's So Hard to Talk About Male Anorexia

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[body_image width='1200' height='845' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='boys-get-anorexia-too-322-body-image-1418125705.jpg' id='9945']

Illustrations by Tom Scotcher

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

I led a toxic life as a teenager. But rather than the usual Strongbow binges, chain smoking, and shitty drugs, I was an anxious perfectionist, lacking in self-esteem and obsessed with a distorted image of my own body. 

Between the ages of 13 and 15, anorexia nervosa controlled me, and until last summer I'd never told anyone about it. Five years after my darkest period (I'm 20 now), the admission lifted an incomprehensible weight off my shoulders.

I was oblivious to the fact that I had an eating disorder at the time, but, at my worst, I abided by a meal-a-day rule. I'd hide my breakfast and skip school lunches. Any event where I had to eat out-of-step was agonizing. The amount of time I invested in planning my meals—or avoiding them—is terrifying to think about now. I wasted hours. Every day. But it was all necessary if I was to reach the impossible, stick-thin ideal I so revered. 

Even the single-meal-a-day directive made me feel guilty, though. I felt like shit when I looked in the mirror or when I stepped on the scales, and even worse when I curled up in bed, disappointed at my bulging abdomen. I'd cry, then roll over onto my back so I didn't have to look down at my body. By day, I felt dizzy, faint, jaded. This was around the time when super-skinny drainpipes were in fashion, but mine weren't skinny—they were slowly getting baggier. 

I was luckier than some, as I was surrounded by a caring family who certainly would have intervened at the outset had they known, but as a conniving 13-year-old with sprouting facial hair, surging hormones, and an early growth spurt, I was able to dupe them. Men with anorexia might not "look" anorexic because of the shape of their bodies, and I exploited this. Unlike women, men's body definition and musculature often remain intact when they have anorexia. An early girlfriend described me as "well chiseled." The ease at which I got away with it was thrilling. 

Later, when I did begin to suspect that I had some sort of mental health problem, I went into denial. There's a great deal of stigma surrounding eating disorders and it's one of the main reasons why men like myself initially don't seek the support and treatment we need. We feel ashamed. We can't bring ourselves to "own up" to such "weaknesses."

It was actually while reading about British men's cri​ppling "stiff upper lip" the other day that I started thinking: What if my own teenage problems also formed part of the male propensity for self-deception? Lawrence Brown, who previously volunteered at Samaritans and now works at BEAT, the UK's leading eating disorder charity, says, "When you look at the statistics, the suicide rates ​among men are three times what they are for women. This speaks of the issue that men face in talking about any kind of mental health issue—including eating disorders."

Of course, there's also the added association with the female body. Back at school, for example, I couldn't accept that I suffered from anorexia because I considered it a "teenage girl" problem. That was what society had led me to believe. There's obviously enormous societal pressure on women to conform to physical ideals, but the outcome is dire for anorexic men, too, because many simply don't think they can be anorexic.

I couldn't accept that I suffered from anorexia because I considered it a "teenage girl" problem. 

Sam Thomas, a former bulimia sufferer and founder of Brighton-based charity Men Get Eating Disorders Too, thinks we need to start seeing eating disorders as genderless.

"We wouldn't talk about bipolar disorder as a man's thing, or schizophrenia as a woman's thing, so it's surprising that we still talk about it [anorexia] as if it's mostly affecting women," he says. Terms like "manorexia" are incredibly unhelpful, and, as Thomas points out, often the statistics surrounding male anorexia appear as an, "Oh, men get this too, sometimes," after-thought. 

Consequently, the ​statistics​ on the number of men with eating disorders probably doesn't reflect the truth. They only cover those who are referred to health services, and exclude those—like myself—who are suffering, or have suffered, in silence. The idea that 1.6 million people in the country are currently living with eating disorders is probably a significant underestimate. 

Official figures suggest that 11 percent of eating disorder sufferers are male, but a ​more realistic "snapshot survey"​ conducted by the NHS Information Centre in 2007 found that roughly 25 percent of sufferers were men. And, worryingly, the Royal College of General Practitioners recently found that there's been a ​66 percent rise​ in hospital admissions involving men with eating disorders over the past decade. "This could be a genuine rise of men getting eating disorders," suggests Thomas. "Or it could be more men hitting the crisis point before they get the help they need." 

If I had mustered enough courage to talk to my doctor back then, I may have also had a tricky time getting diagnosed. Just take a look at the ​rec​ent research​ from Oxford and Glasgow academics which found that "men with eating disorders are under-diagnosed, under-treated and under-researched."

The lack of research is what troubles me the most. Doctors often don't have the necessary training for ​spotting signs of eating disorders among men—particularly since physical deterioration is often harder to spot in the early stages of their illnesses. Secondly, diagnostic criteria are often skewed towards the female body. For instance, irregular menstruation is one of the main signs GPs are still trained to look out for.

[body_image width='1200' height='843' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='boys-get-anorexia-too-322-body-image-1418125718.jpg' id='9946']

They say anorexia leaves a black hole in your life, which is something I can attest to. I remember very little else about other stuff I did during this period. I do recall the music I was into (the Mars Volta), what I liked at school (languages), but little else. Had I become anorexic at the age I am now, I—or a relative—may have discovered the wonderful help accessible though the Men Get Eating Disorders Too web​site. There, I could have found lots of information and personal stories, 1-2-1 live-chat sessions, and a discussion board for both sufferers and carers. 

Peer support groups are now up and running in Brighton and Hove too, which they hope to roll out further afield, and Thomas has recently been giving workshops to professionals with the aim of improving service provision. Next July, the first ever MGEDT conference takes place. 

Elsewhere, an affiliated charity, MB​EEDS, has just been set up in Scotland. The Laure​nce Trust already providing support to men in Northern Ireland. On a larger scale, earlier this year, BEAT launched its #beatthesilenc​e campaign, backed by well-known male sufferers like John Stapleton and Uri Geller. But while there's growing momentum behind such charities, most people still don't know they exist.

If you become ill as young as I did—13—you may not have the wherewithal to seek help online. You wouldn't necessarily have the vocabulary for what's happening to you, or the resources to reach out. According to a re​cent report, spanning 12 months, the most common age for hospital admission for a man with an eating disorder was 13, with the largest rise of admissions involving young people aged ten to 19. 

Clearly, we need a far more open dialogue, expanded education in schools surrounding eating disorders and mental illness across all ages, sexes and demographics. We need to foster environments where children have the knowledge and confidence to speak up when they're not feeling well. As Thomas rightly asks, "Issues surrounding self-harm are often standard in school policies now, so why not eating disorders?"

I recovered from anorexia very slowly, on my own, just before my GCSEs. After experiencing one-too-many jibes like, "Yeah, Huw doesn't eat, he's anorexic," I had a come-to moment. I inspected my rickety reflection one day, poked at my cheese straw-like wrists and realized that, however hard it was, I had to start eating. So I did. Meal by meal, I—slowly—built up my appetite.

Many aren't so lucky. Between 5 percent and 20 percent of people with anorexia will die. BE​AT believe that anorexia is the most deadly mental health condition. There are teenagers unknowingly killing themselves out there and we need to expand the conversation to include everyone.

Follow Huw Oliver on ​Twitter

Hypothermia, Broken Limbs, and Rectal Feeding: Details from the CIA Torture Report

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One prisoner at a CIA black site froze to death. Others were forced to stand on broken feet, threatened sexually with broomsticks, or subjected to "rectal feeding" for no apparent medical reason. The Senate Intelligence Committee released those details and more Tuesday in the 500-page execu​tive summary of its report on the CIA's Bush-era "enhanced interrogation" program.

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled the long-awaited, long-delayed report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA's now-discontinued "Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation" program this morning, calling it a "stain on our country and our values."

The controversial 6,700-page report describes, among other things, detainees being kept in a dark, freezing, dungeon-like prison, being kept awake for up to 180 hours at a time, and being subjected to "near-drowning" over and over. The three-year Senate investigation concluded the "brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values" were not effective in prying intelligence from detainees.

The report also found that the CIA misled the public, the White House and Congress on both the brutality of the program and its effectiveness.

"The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting," the report states. "Abu Zubaydah, for example, became 'completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.' Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving in to a 'series of near drownings.'" 

CIA interrogators threatened detainees with broomsticks and power drills and threatened to rape and kill detainees' mothers. Other detainees with broken feet and legs were subjected to stress positions for extended periods of time.

"The two detainees that each had a broken foot were also subjected to walling, stress positions, and cramped confinement, despite the note in their interrogation plans that these specific enhanced interrogation techniques were not requested because of the medical condition of the detainees," the report states. "CIA Headquarters did not react to the site's use of these CIA enhanced interrogation techniques despite the lack of approval."

The Senate report also describes a photograph of a "well worn" waterboard, at a site where the CIA said it had never previously used the practice.

The results of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," especially at the dungeon-like CIA site known as "Cobalt" in the report, led to noticeable mental health deterioration among detainees, the report found. At least one detainee at the Cobalt site died of hypothermia.

"Throughout the program, multiple CIA detainees who were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and extended isolation exhibited psychological and behavioral issues, including hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation," the report states. "Multiple psychologists identified the lack of human contact experienced by detainees as a cause of psychiatric problems."

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that President Obama supported releasing the report "so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired." However, more hawkish members of Congress, the intelligence community, and its allies said the report would inflame anger against the U.S. and its key allies and endanger American personnel abroad.

"We are concerned that this release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardize U.S. relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies," Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Jim Risch said in a statement on Monday.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed in a meeting with members of the Intelligence Committee over the weekend that the administration was concerned that the report could incite violence against Americans overseas, but said that he nevertheless supported its release. The US has been beefing up security at embassies, and administration officials have said that the Pentagon has strengthened protections for US forces in Afghanistan. 

In the lead up to the report's release, defenders of the CIA's interrogation techniques launched an aggressive media campaign—a "prebuttal," one of Washington's more obnoxious neologisms—against the findings. Former Vice President Dick Cheney called the report's findings "a bunch of hooey" in the New York Times, and former CIA lawyer John Rizzo said on FOX News that the report is "absolutely unfair and preposterous." Former CIA officials even built a website, CIAsaveslives.com, to hit back at the report's findings.

"It's a one-stop shopping place for the other side," Bill Harlow, a top CIA spokesman during the Bush administration, told Foreign Policy. "With the website ... we'll be able to put out newly declassified documents, documents that were previously released but not well read, and host a repository for op-eds and media appearances by various officials."

Feinstein called the pushback "a campaign of mistaken statements and press articles."

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Is Real Police Reform Ever Coming to New York City?

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In the days since a grand jury failed to indict Officer Danie​l Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, the outcry for police reform has attained something rare in this day and age: staying power. On the ground, massive protests continued in New York over the weekend, leaking out to cities like Berkeley and Boston, with related demonstrations cropping up as far away as Tokyo and Paris. President Obama seems to have awoken to the fact that this pressure is snowballing, ann​ouncing Monday that he and Attorney General Eric Holder were releasing new guidelines for how federal law enforcement conducts itself in America, with an emphasis on rules about racial profiling.

But New York remains the epicenter of the "Black Lives Matter" movement. On Monday, New Yorkers were offered a startling statistic from a Daily News re​port: Since the notorious hail of bullets that killed Amadou Diallo in 1999, 179 people have been killed by on-duty NYPD officers (222, if you add off-duty cops). Of that total, 27 percent were unarmed, and 86 percent were black and Latino, which, perhaps ironically, is nearly the same percentage of marij​uana arrests and stop-and​-frisks that hit minorities. Just three cops were indicted for those acts, with only one officer convicted—and he was later released. (The NYPD has been reached for comment by VICE regarding these numbers, but we have yet to hear back.)

As if on cue, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman pen​ned a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo, asking for the go-ahead to start looking into new cases of police brutality. In effect, this would let Schneiderman usurp the powers of local district attorneys, who have been criticized for being too cozy with local police departments in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

"In New York, and across the country, the promise of equal justice under law has been eroded by a series of tragedies involving the death of unarmed persons as a result of the use of force by law enforcement officers," Schneiderman wrote.

He called the situation on the ground "a current crisis in confidence" that justice is being served, a watershed moment indicating that this system we've glued together to get results has run out of batteries. The protesters I've spoken with at the Eric Garner​ rallies all agreed that a special prosecutor is a significant step in the right direction, especially since it seems to them that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's body cams initiati​ve is just political posturing. After all, Eric Garner's death was on video, and Daniel Pantaleo walked free.

"The failure to secure an indictment in the killing of Eric Garner leaves New Yorkers with an inescapable question: Do black lives matter?,'" New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. "Much remains to be done to repair the culture of policing in New York. The proposal to designate a special prosecutor to handle cases that result in the killing of unarmed civilians by the police is one important step so that we can hold police officers accountable for their actions and help restore public faith in our justice system."

Over the phone, Bob Gangi, the director of PR​OP (the Police Reform Organizing Project), which helped provide the Daily News with its statistics, told me the actions of Schneiderman and others, including Governor Cuomo's own call for reform in state government, were promising.

"We're pleased with all the movement from mainstream politicians to appoint a special prosecutor in these situations—supporting a special prosecutor has now become a political question," he said. "Schneiderman could be that person, but at the same time, a special prosecutor independent of the office may be needed. Because in the end, Schneiderman is a political agent."

Gangi said he wasn't taken back by the 179 death mark; to him, it's a natural byproduct of "broken windows" p​olicing, which, by targeting low-level infractions—in Eric Garner's case, selling untaxed cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island—naturally places a strain on relations between the NYPD and low-income minority communities. But he was surprised by the nationwide reaction, which, to him, is virtually unprecedented. (It's worth noting that at 70, Gangi has seen his share of police protests.)

"This is the most movement against excessive police abuse probably in history. In terms of people protesting and the media attention, it's historic, and very encouraging," he said. "The slogan of 'Black Lives Matter' has, unfortunately, a longstanding history; minorities have been mistreated for decades."

De Blasio reiterated that message of longevity in an interview with George Stephanopoulos over the weekend, one that has come o​ff as anti-police to the NYPD union, as well as former mayor (and " broken wind​o​ws" pioneer) Rudy Giuliani. When asked if he thought his interracial son, Dante, was actually ever at risk, de Blasio ag​ain argued this was the personal link that ties him to these tragedies.

"What parents have done for decades who have children of color, especially young men of color, is train them to be very careful when they have an encounter with a police officer. It's different for a white child. That's just the reality of this country," de Blasio sa​id. "With Dante very early on we said, 'Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do. Don't move suddenly, don't reach for your cell phone.' Because we knew, sadly, there was a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if he's a young man of color."

But rhetoric aside, de Blasio refused to wade into the legal underpinnings of the grand jury decision, maintaining a neutral position when it comes to the issue of a special prosecutor. Instead he has argued that his own reforms—which Gangi criticized as not getting to the "heart of the beast"—are the pathway to a more peaceful tomorrow. These include the aforementioned body cams, retraining of officers, a new marijuana arrest po​licy, and fewer stop-and-frisk stops.

Protesters are demanding more. Major demonstrations are planned all week in New York City. An action on Sunday sna​rled traffic on the Staten Island Expressway for exactly seven minutes—the time it took for Eric Garner to receive medical attention after Pantaleo's tragic chokehold. And it's to be assumed cities across the country and world will also be participating, leading up to the major civil rights march on December 13 in Washington DC helmed by Al Sharpton.

So yeah, about that staying power...

Follow John Surico on ​Twitter.


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The Canadian Government Is Researching "Guided Bombs"

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Via ​Canadian Forces.

A new post on the Canadian government's buy and sell website, where requests for products like body-worn cameras for police​ officers are advertised by government agencies, is calling for new research that will examine "Mod​eling and Simulation of Nominal and Degraded Guided Bomb" in the form of a request for proposal (RFP) from interested, private defense contractors.

The ambiguous posting calls for research into several facets of the effectiveness of bombs that have built-in tracking systems to accurately hone in on their targets. The Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), the agency in charge of, you guessed it, research and development for the Canadian military, said when reached for comment: "In order to ensure the integrity of the tendering process, we will not be in a position to provide you with any information in this regard until a contract is awarded, which is expected at some point in the new year."

Fair enough, but what can we glean from their posting right now? The text of what is essentially their want ad for brand-new bombs is accompanied by a glossary for intense weaponry terms like "KA - Kinetic Attack," "Pk - Probability of Kill," and "HOB - Height of Burst."

Judging from the posting, on which the DRDC is unable to comment, the agency is looking for "specialized technical support in the area of modelling and simulation (M&S) of air weapons." The implication is that the Canadian government is looking to develop a new, smarter aerial bombing system. The RFP also states that part of the research will include "simulations experimentations" to test the efficacy of this hypothetical guided bomb system.

One of the "optional tasks" posed by the DRDC to its future weapons partner is to develop "Simulation analysis of the dual mode [Guided Bomb Unit] survivability against kinetic attacks (KA)." This would imply that the DRDC is concerned about a so-called kinetic attack taking down one of its new, as-yet undeveloped, smart bombs. Military jargon is often hard to translate, and in this case "kinetic attack" could refer to just about anything.

The word kinetic has been used by DRDC in the past to ​describe non-lethal, physical weapons, like batons, but the term "kinetic attack" has also bee​n applied to cyberattacks that result in physical damage to the machines they target. The Stuxnet attack, for example, saw the US and Israel targeting Iranian nuclear computers with malware so strong that it caused physical damage to the computers it infected. The DRDC could be worried about a cyberattack causing physical damage to their fancy new smart bombs.

The DRDC is also looking to determine "simulation analysis of maximum reachable target speeds," which is important information to get when you're trying to destroy things from the sky.

Given the air war being waged against ISIS by the US and Canada, it's not surprising to see our government looking into how we can make more focused and powerful air bombs. Add to this Canada's increas​ingly notable role as an arms exporter, and you have the perfect situation for an agency like the DRDC to start developing new airborne bombs. 

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The Hypersonic Falcon bomb project, via ​DARPA.

Outside Canada, however, the race to create hypersonic missiles (that travel at five times the speed of sound) is escalating tensely between America, Russia, and China. Just a few days ago, the Chinese military tested a hypersonic weapon that could "dodge" American milit​ary defence systems. Meanwhile, Russia is ramping up their own efforts to d​evelop the new wave of airborne weaponry. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States has been hard at work developing their own hypersonic weaponry, but are running into problems controlling these powerful and unbelievably fast bombs, likening it to an intense auto race: "Imagine trying to s​teer around a pothole in the highway while traveling 3.6 miles per second."

While the efficacy of smarter bombs is always going to be a subj​ect of intense debate (civilians aren't impervious to bombs just because they're "guided"), Canada is obviously taking another step forward into the modern battlefield, where cyberattacks against physical bombs are a threat, and being more precise from the sky is one of the main tasks at hand.

​@patrickmcguire

I Went to Art Basel and All I Got Were These Lousy Photos

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For one magical week every December, the stupidest and shittiest rich people imaginable descend on Miami to get good deals on wildly expensive art pieces. They call this ​"Art Basel." I went down to Basel too, but I didn't buy anything. I just had a very nice time and took a lot of photos.

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I stayed at this island called Star Island. It is full of mansions where famous people live. Puff Daddy has a vacation home there, and Shaq used to own a house there too. It's also apparently ​haunted, but what island isn't full of ghosts these days? 

WEDNESDAY

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​I arrived on Wednesday and went straight from the airport to ​Gramps, where I did the opening DJ set before Odd Future. Gramps is the only good bar in Miami, as far as I can tell. This photo is during the portion of my set where I hold a twerking contest. 

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This is ​Serena Domin​guezstanding with the mural she painted outside Gramps. She also did a drawing for our ​Robin Willia​ms memorial blog a few months back. 

THURSDAY 

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On Thursday, I went to SCOPE with a bunch of ​Mishka people. SCOPE was the first of the satellite art fairs to pop up around Art Basel like a bunch of fun barnacles latching on to a big whale made of money. It's located on the beach—literally on the beach, as you can see.

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​Swizz Bea​tz was hanging out because he'd curated a booth of photos of boom boxes. Swizz Beatz is a very friendly but low-key man. A few years back I gave Swizz a portrait I did of him. He claims he still has it but I am not convinced. 

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Each fair tends to have one unifying trend that becomes apparent once you've explored about a third of the art. The theme of SCOPE this year was shiny circles. Shiny circles were very in. Here's one that I saw. 

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Here's another shiny circle from SCOPE. 

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This shiny circle was inside a rectangle.

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This is the best thing I saw. Dan Hort Projects was showing off a lot of original art by cartoonists, animators, and fantasy artists. It was nice to see some of the art that broke people made before it got repurposed and turned into pop art by millionaires. 

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This original Frank Frazetta painting blew my mind. According to the gallerist, Frazetta would make colorful, abstract backgrounds and then just paint the characters in. 

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This is a distorted Yi Hwan-Kwon sculpture from Gana Art in Seoul. All these statues are very realistic but are distorted so that they look like optical illusions when viewed from most angles. 

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This is a giant, hyper-realistic sculpture of Dali's head by Kuzu, a Japanese makeup and special effects guy turned fine artist. It is very convincing, except that it is four times the size of a human head. A lot of the sculptures at SCOPE had some novelty aspect to them. 

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This is a cute little miniature bodega by ​Drew Leshk​o. He made some other miniatures too. They didn't blow my mind, but who doesn't love miniatures and dollhouses? Fuck you if you don't love a good dollhouse. 

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​Prin​ce Rama were also hanging out at SCOPE. I like their music a lot. 

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When I left the SCOPE art fair, I saw this building that looked like a boat. The palm trees were all getting blown around by the wind. Even the grimiest places in Miami are sort of pretty and scary and feel prehistoric.

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I went to an event at the Soho Beach House to try to interview Russell Simmons. 

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​That didn't get to happen because Simmons was mainly only talking to women. I can't really blame him—I wouldn't want to hang out with me either. He runs a​ great chari​ty that provides art education to kids though.

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South Beach, basically. 

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Bow-tied boys.

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Miguel performed to a bunch of awful and disinterested rich folks at the charity event. I got the sense that most people at the party were incapable of feeling joy or being interested in things. 

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I left the Miguel show through the side entrance and saw the ocean looking like this. 

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I also saw this lady with this great head. 

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​I went to a hotel called Edition, where ​Freeman and Lowe were doing a live lecture followed by a fashion show, with music performed by the Black Bananas. 

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The show was an incisive, funny, and beautiful skewering of Art Basel. At no point did I stop thinking, Wow, I can't believe I get to see this for free. Also, this naked lady came out at the end. Afterward, someone said, "I'm so sick of seeing her naked. She gets naked at everything."

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People didn't stop talking during the entire performance and at one part started doing "the slow clap." I was so mad that I wanted to throw chairs and punch this guy on his cellphone in the back of his head until my fist came through the front of his face. 

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This is ​Black Ba​nanas, whose noisy set accompanied the bizarre fashion show. The lady on the left is Jen Herrema, previously of Royal Trux and RTX. She is probably the coolest person I've ever met. 

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​Leo Fitzpatrick had some great pins. Flexing hard with his no-flex zone pin. He had this amazing show which was just a hotel room with a giant puddle of puke in the middle. Check out his gallery ​Hom​e Alone if you're in New York. 

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​This is famous artist and Santos Party House co-owner ​​Spencer Sweeney, dressed in sort of casual cosplay as a character from Alien

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​These guys were just waiting in a hotel lobby and asked if I had seen any famous people. Apparently they hang out at hotels and events, hoping to meet show-biz people. 

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Black Bananas, Spencer Sweeney, Leo Fitzpatrick, and I all had a drawing party at the dive bar next door.

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I drew Spencer as a demon. Spencer drew me as a man who looks like a fat old loaf of bread. Kurt drew a lot of guitars. 

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Leo Fitzpatrick drew the red faces and named it Mt. Crushmore. I drew the black faces. 

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Here is Leo's "fuck the world" tattoo that he got before FTW was an internet abbreviation for "for the win." This tattoo is way more "fuck the world" than any other "fuck the world" tattoo I've ever seen.

FRIDAY

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​​Gavi​n Brown, who runs Gavin Brown's enterprise in Manhattan, got 2 Live Crew to perform at his party. Seeing​ 2 Live Crew perform in Miami is like seeing the Pope perform a mass in Rome. 

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Uncle Luke wasn't there, but Marquis and Fresh Kid Ice were pretty great. They were helped out by three backup dancers who did choreographed moves. I was unsure why ​this music about fuck shops and pussy popping was making me feel so happy, but when they kicked into "If You Believe in Having Sex," I was like, Oh, this is religious music but fucking is the religion of 2 Live Crew and they find it deeply spiritual.

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Miami bass isn't just strip club music when you're in Miami. Kids grow up hearing it in roller rinks and at block parties. I saw an army of elementary school kids having a step dance competition in the street to it last year. 

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When the 2 Live Crew show let out, we went to a nearby underground ice rink where these show-off figure skaters were doing insane moves for the pleasure of the Instagrammers. If it wasn't for the bougie Miami scum, this would be the greatest night spot imaginable.

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Did you know that many digital jukeboxes have dozens of Cannibal Corpse songs on them? For a dollar, you can put on a ten-minute live song that will clear the dance floor. It's pretty great if you're a miserable piece of shit like me.

SATURDAY

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On Saturday, ​Picturepl​ane and I ate some pretty good pizza and went to Art Basel, the main and original and most money-making festival. People in New York get all uppity about how good "their" pizza is, but pizza is pretty good everywhere. It's just bread and cheese and tomato sauce. 

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The first thing I saw upon entering the main art fair was a bunch of people who had been tucked into bed for art naps. It was pretty cute. 

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There wasn't as much bad text-based art or neon as there has been at past Basels, but there was still too much. 

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There were also about a zillion original Picasso drawings and paintings. That guy sure made a lot of work. 

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This was some sort of art flag hallway with video stuff. 

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I liked this panoramic safari painting. 

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There were two major themes of Basel this year. The first was square, mirrored art that people loved to take selfies in. This one is a bunch of shallow shelves built onto a mirror, with pills lined up on them.

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Here's a mirror on the floor with giant pick-up sticks on it.

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Here's another person taking a photo of herself in a mirror. Mirrored art is a meditation on how smartphones have made people increasingly self-absorbed. 

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It looks like these girls are taking a picture of paint cans, but the cans were just a photo printed on a mirror. They're taking a picture of themselves.

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The other big trend of Basel was hanging mobiles and sculptural stuff hanging from the ceiling. Lots of C​alder stuff. 

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Here's more dangling art. 

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These ladies were hanging out around the Baz Luhrman booth. I liked their energy. 

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This looked like the smuggest little bastard imaginable. 

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I saw a kid get really excited by this because it reminded him of cheese. Kids love cheese.

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Design Miami is a fair that is mostly furniture-based. It looks like a more tasteful Crate and Barrel. 

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Trash Talk and Denzel Curry played in a scary parking lot. Lee hit some guy in the head so loudly that everyone could hear it over the music. There were cinderblocks all over and the guy he hit started running into the crowd swinging a cinderblock until he was stopped by Alex and Francis from ​Wh​ite Mystery.


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This is another guy who got hurt at the Trash Talk show. What a bummer. 

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This was a scary place. 

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We went and saw ​Quintr​on and Miss Pussycat at ​Chur​chill's, an old punk bar where Marilyn Manson got his start. The opening puppet show was an amazing story about Trixie cooking a goblin cake to win a baking contest.

SUNDAY

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​I woke up Sunday and met ​​Carlos Enriqu​ez Gonzalez, an artist who makes giant sculptures and small toys depicting horrible genital monsters. This is a spread from his sketchbook.

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My art fair date for the day was Sucklor​d, from the reality shows Work of Art and Gallery Girls and maybe some others. He makes bootleg toys and then sells them for a lot more than your average bootleg toymaker. Also, his mother was the main pioneer of gay S&M paraphernalia in New York. 

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We went to the NADA art fair and met this guy, who encouraged us to check out the band he managed, Skins. Adrian Grenier says, "Go listen to Skins." ​I once live-tweeted every single episode of Entourage and when I ran out, I live-tweeted episodes that I made up. I didn't mention any of that to Adrian. 

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The overwhelming trend at NADA was fabric pieces. Here are a bunch of rugs. 

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Here's a bathrobe and some psychedelic hand towels. 

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This shirt was gigantic. Way to big for a human being to wear. It would probably fit that Dali sculpture.

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Another trend was gallery booths that had all sorts of crazy shit lying around.​ This is the Hole from New York. 

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​This is Galerie Joseph Tang from Paris. 

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I love this giant laminated sandwich bag of real food. ​It was gross and great. 

I like this series of paintings of empty magazine stands. I miss magazines. 

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This was my favorite gallery at NADA—Roberto Paradise from Puerto Rico. They had crazy shit AND fabric stuff.

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Next, we headed to Select. It's another art fair on the beach in a big tent. The theme of this one seemed to be corny sexuality.

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This nice guy Brian Whitely had all videos of clowns eating till they puked and being face-fucked with popsicles. He gave us popsicles and beer. 

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From this corner of the Select Fair it looked like everything was butts and stripes. 

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This lady from Vector Gallery would charge your cell phone by somehow plugging it into her vagina. I assumed she had one of those small pocket phone batteries inside her. 

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Our final art fair was Aqua. Aqua is a hotel where the rooms are all accessible from a central courtyard, but instead of beds the rooms all have different art inside them. There were some nice art pieces but the nontraditional setting overpowered any effect the art could have. 

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Look how pretty this is.

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This painting is by Vonn Sumner from Seattle. Nice job!

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All of these keyboards were on and it sounded pretty cool. There was a great piece in the Roberto Paradise booth a couple years back where the painting was resting on a keyboard. What's up with leaving keyboards playing infinitely as an art concept?

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The neon art trend has been dying down. This sign was on the outside of a CVS in South Beach. I loved looking at it. 

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​Sucklord looked so sad as he went into the hot tub for one final splash before having to return to the cold of New York. Goodbye Miami. See you again in not too long!

Follow Nick Gazin on ​Twitt​er.

Spending a Night with New York's Finest Rat-Hunting Club

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Photos by  ​Johnny Milano

Matt Combs, a graduate student and research assistant at Fordham, is spieling a SparkNotes-like summary of his research on Manhattan's rat population as we wait on a subway platform. He tells me that while there is no dearth of rats in Manhattan, there is a lack of concordant study regarding just how un-dearth-like the rat population is. A common narrative claims that there are as many rats as people living in New York City (8.4 million), while a more recent study estimated a population closer to 2 million based on a statistical analysis that combined catch-and-release data and information from 311 calls.

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Combs uses some of this data to determine population densities and plans his sampling accordingly, but he is ultimately interested in other findings. "Our research seeks to understand how rats inhabit this environment," he explains, "what makes them more or less successful, and how they travel through a dense urban matrix like Manhattan."

New York is of particular interest for rat studies, so much so that New York's rats have their own Wikipedia page. As Combs tells me, "the city is a novel ecosystem for wildlife, with a unique physical landscape and selection pressures driven by human development and lifestyles."

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By observing patterns of genetic connectivity between rat DNA sampled from different parts of the city, scientists at Fordham aim to develop "modeling tools to understand the effects of physical factors, such as subway tunnels and parks, as well as socially derived landscape variables, like average income and human density."

To do this, Combs and company spent much of the summer  ​collecting samples from traps he set throughout the city. But eventually, he discovered a collection method that was, among other things, more efficient.

Cue R.A.T.S., or Ryders Alley Trencherfed Society, a name coined by organizing member Richard Reynolds, the man Combs is taking me to see on Avenue B and 10th St. From there, we'll be hunting rats in Tompkins Square Park with a " trencherfed" pack of terriers kept by Reynolds and his R.A.T.S. compatriots.

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Richard Reynolds

When discussing rat numbers, Reynolds is a guy who prefers the poignant ambiguity of a simple "I don't know," with no interest in talking about "statistics whose input is predicated by morons." He's also a guy who discusses things dryly, with a comedic frankness that comes off as erudite. He knows the 311 research's conclusion might be compromised by socioeconomic factors that affect how frequently residents call 311 for assistance with house mice.

He's been approved by the American Kennel Club to judge dog shows, he's been a  Master of Foxhounds, a keeper of half a dozen successful dogs certified by the American Working Terrier Association for their earthwork, and he's worked as a senior partner at an investigative financial consulting firm—basically a private detective for white-collar crime. And on nights like tonight, he's a guy who likes to hunt rats with dogs.

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Given his background, it doesn't seem like such an eccentric pastime. He's a dog breeder who enjoys hunting. At his age, it makes more sense to take his terriers down to the city from his home in Tenafly, New Jersey, for a night hunt rather than mount a horse and spend all day chasing foxhounds chasing foxes.

Plus, rat hunting is way less   bourgeois and more badass than fox hunting, in addition to being less morally concerning for humans and our sympathetic whims. Fox hunting might be more of a well-known pastime, but it's arguably less socially acceptable because humans tend to have a higher regard for foxes than rats, even though foxes aren't supposed to be killed during a fox hunt.

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Rats, though, are fair game. This is especially true for R.A.T.S.'s diverse group of ground dogs, selectively bred for the ease with which people can get them to hunt the type of animals we usually call "vermin." Sometimes, Reynolds says, he lets his dogs—like Catcher, the Bedlington he brought with him tonight—chew on frozen rats when they're young to develop a taste for it. Otherwise he takes them out as pups, and around two years of age, they begin to display their genetic knack for the task.

The Bedlington is skilled for both ground work—tracking down and flushing rats out from their underground refuges—and the chase. Meanwhile, the other dogs with us tonight include Paco, a feisty guy best suited for chasing rats once they've been spooked by the terriers: a Westy, a Border terrier, and a Dachshund.

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Their predatory pack behavior is endearing, and the carnage is actually kind of cuteIn just a few hours, the group nabs six rats, four of which were dealt their final blows by the Westy (aptly named Hunter), a breed that comes just halfway up your shinbone. When a rat is caught, the nearby dogs take turns treating the dying mass like a pair of dirty socks before it's plucked by Combs's latex-gloved fingers from the ground, measured, sampled, and interred in a nearby trash can.

At one point, as Combs weighs two corpses and snips their tails for DNA—one of which marks the milestone 200th collected specimen—Catcher picks the rat up and drops it in front of my feet. The rat's eye is doing that thing that eyes do in horror movies, when they've fallen out of a face but are still attached to the head by some fleshy musculature that you don't want to look at long enough to name.

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As you might imagine, our crew provides something of a spectacle for passersby. And m uch like their dogs, the R.A.T.S enjoy the attention. They always describe their mission proudly, especially because there are virtually no objections. Instead, they're used to fielding questions like, "What do you do with the bodies after?" or "Will the dogs get diseases?" or "Good for you for doing this!"

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And should any of the spectators be interested in joining the fun, Reynolds tells me that  "anybody can come once if they'd like." If, however, you or your dog don't hunt well, you won't be invited back. The only thing that really gets in the way of R.A.T.S. is a lack of organization among hunters. Legally, they're not doing anything wrong; a license is usually needed to conduct other types of hunts, but cops are actually glad to help out by pointing the pack in the right direction.

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Whatever the actual population is, it's safe to say that rats are a significant menace and have thrived in dense areas where they are least wanted. This is among the reasons why the research Combs is involved in is so interesting, because it looks at how, despite residents' best efforts, rats continue to subsist and grow at incredibly rapid rates. So much so that each time some people spy one, they swear it must be the  ​biggest they've ever seen.

As the night wears on, the members of R.A.T.S. start to saunter away with their dogs toward the places both creatures comfortably call home. As we say our goodbyes, Reynolds and Bill Reyna, Paco's handler, profess their "tremendous respect" for rats like a pair of all-knowing characters from a Faulkner novel.

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R.A.T.S.'s actions here won't affect how well rats live in the city; they're not trying to eliminate the rodents, because then what would they have to hunt? Instead, on two counts—with the involvement of Combs and the groundwork standards they're setting for urban sport hunting with dogs—they're helping us better understand how both animals' genes affect modes of operation in ecologically unique systems.

VICE Premiere: Cloakroom's New Song 'Starchild Skull' Keeps the Shoegaze Spirit Alive

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As the world gets shittier and shittier, one good thing is knowing that slowcore will never die, because we'll never run out of things to be bummed out about. There's probably no better soundtrack to bemoaning the trials and tribulations of the day than Cloakroom's latest shoe-gaze-y single, "Starchild Skull." 

The track is off their new album, Further Out, which is being released on January 20 by Run for Cover Records. Fittingly, the song was recorded by Matt Talbott, the guitarist from legendary alt-rock band Hum. The song taps into the sound of slowcore greats like Codeine and Low, while simultaneously incorporating Cloakroom's own ambient, Midwestern drawl. It's like if Steve Albini secretly moonlit as a corn farmer in Des Moines. 

Preorder the new album ​here.

How-To: Eat Live Octopus

How Are YouTubers Going to Change the Publishing Industry?

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Zoella. Screen shot ​vi​a YouTube

This post originally appeared on VICE UK​

Intellectuals always worry about the decline of literary culture. Much like ​racists opine over an all-white, all-fantastic Britain that never was, they assume there was a golden age of books—a time when the massed ranks of the workforce were reading Dostoevsky and Kafka and arguing about the use of symbolism in late-period Henry James while jostling through the factory gates.

But shitty stuff has always outsold the highbrow. Around the time Herman Melville was writing his masterpiece about a whale hunt and the inscrutability of the universe, most readers were devouring crappy bodice-rippers about heroines in trouble. Only a few thousand copies of Moby Dick were ever sold during the author's lifetime.

Not a lot has changed. Recently, YouTube star Zoella's inaugural novel became the fasted-selling debut in history, shifting more than 78,000 copies in its first week. Fresh horror: it turns out the 24-year-old vlogger's book Girl Online—a 21st-century teen romance about a blogger's fling with a boy in a band—was constructed with the help of at least one ghostwriter.

"To be factually accurate, you would need to say Zoe Sugg did not write the book Girl Online on her own," ​a Penguin spokesperson told the Sunday Times. It's an admission that came as a surprise to literally nobody, but still seems to have aggravated half the internet, to the point that Zoella ​has decided to "take a few days out and off the internet."

Zoe does not arrive at the gates of the publishing world alone. In fact, she arrives with a horde of shiny, well-groomed vloggers, all ready to storm the book trade armed only with detailed subscriber base data and the ability to arrange facial muscles into adorably quirky poses.

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A page from Alfie Deyes's Pointless Book

Zoe's YouTube-ing boyfriend Alfie Deyes already has a bestseller called The Pointless Book. It's every bit as futile as the name suggests—a hearty laugh in the face of anyone still laboring under the misconception that books are one of humankind's best tools for mind expansion. It has two pages inviting you to take a finger selfie. He has two more books in the pipeline.

Their vlogging pal Tanya Burr recently signed a deal with Penguin for a book of beauty tips and life story "snippets," while Faber has acquired the rights to a diary by Louise Pentland (better known by her channel name Sprinkle of Glitter) and Headline will put out a fashion and lifestyle guide by YouTuber Fleur de Force.

I asked a friend of mine who works for the children's division of a large publisher what's going on. "The senior people of a certain age, they've learned to think a certain way when it comes to young people and social media and the internet. It's like, 'If I don't understand it, it must be something we should be doing.' So there's a hunt to come up with names from YouTube."

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Zoella and Alfie Deyes. Screen shot ​via YouTube

It does smack of desperation a little: Experienced commissioning editors throwing aside their own taste and judgement in a mad scramble for broadcasting wannabes willing to be fashioned into authors.

"There's a push to sign up the next YouTube star because, in publishing, people want the next version of what's taking off right now," says Tom Tivnan, features editor at publishing magazine The Bookseller. "None of the next batch will probably do as well as Zoella or Alfie Deyes—at least not the same kind of YouTubers. But you might see people who vlog on films or music, and you could see a publisher trying to tap into their audience. If a million people are already following what someone says, doing a book is a good bit of business. The reality is, publishers will do anything to make money."

At the risk of sounding like one of those death-of-the-novel worriers, if books are reduced to merchandise for video stars, it must surely devalue the unique joys of the printed word. A book can't just be photos and glorified transcriptions of three-minute videos. Won't teenagers work out they're only going to get that particular experience properly online?

"The YouTube market—it's a market for teenagers who don't really read," says Tivnan. "They will support people they idolize on YouTube, so they'll buy the T-shirt and they'll buy the book. But I suppose you could look at books which have gone through a manufactured process like a gateway drug to 'real books' or better books."

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Leena Normington, a publicity manager and YouTuber who vlogs under the name justkissmyfrog, agrees. "No one buys one book and never reads another author, so if famous vloggers are getting teenagers into the book shop, they're expanding the book market rather than shrinking or monopolizing it," she says.

However, Normington also concedes that there's a danger of publishers getting it wrong if they rush into the wrong partnership. "Something that works for three-minute videos isn't always book-appropriate," she explains. "A good vlogger isn't always going to be a good writer, and there's costs and time that come with trying to make something transfer into a book—ghostwriting, content curation, continually giving them remits to write within.

"If you have a celebrity with a big enough audience, you can't get it too wrong, in terms of shifting units. But there's reputation to consider—whether it's right for your imprint, if it really doesn't work as a book. It's less of a risk for the big publishers, but the mid-to-smaller guys want to build a reputation for doing a certain kind of book well."

There's a considerable irony about publishing's mad dash for the digital natives. Successful YouTubers, tweeters, and Viners are hailed for bypassing old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy media. Yet, the serious money still comes from entering traditional platforms: books, radio and television.

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Jazza John. Screen shot ​via YouTube

So what do YouTubers think about the crossover? What do they make of Zoella's success? I asked Jazza John, a thoughtful 25-year-old vlogger who's been posting since 2007 and recalls being part of a small community of "nerds who made friends on the internet by making videos for each other."

Won't there be career-minded teenagers now vlogging as a means of gaining book deals, Radio1 slots or sitcoms on BBC3?

"Inevitably," says John. "People are very aware you can become a professional YouTuber, but there are also still people pissing about with a webcam simply because it's a fun thing to do. The people who do succeed are taken on by management companies, then encouraged to collaborate with the right people and so on. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

"I'm still having a lovely time on YouTube," he adds. "The nerdy kids making videos still exist; it's just there are cool kids here now as well. It's like the nerds got to the canteen early and made it quite cozy, and then a load of cool kids came along, realized the canteen could be cool and made a lot of noise. And that's fine.

"It's great for Zoe and Alfie—they built their audiences democratically online. But there is a nostalgia among some of us who've been around for a while. Maybe we're just harking back to the days before Oreo wanted to pay people to eat their biscuits in videos."

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It seems strange that Oreo marketeers are in the same business as book editors, hunting out fresh faces for 13-year-olds to envy and admire. But, when you think about it, perhaps it's not all that strange. Perhaps it's been that way ever since capitalism worked out the spending power of youth and  ​invente​d the teenager back in the 1950s.

If I'm honest about my own reading material as a 13-year-old—mostly Match and Shoot football annuals—it's hard to argue a huge amount has changed. If kids' publishers had worked out a way of making books out of ZX Spectrum games, I might have asked for one or two at Christmas.

New stars rise and fall, the great supply-and-demand machine keeps on churning and someone, somewhere is discovering Thomas Pynchon's novels for the first time. The fall of Western civilization will have to wait.

Follow Adam Forrest on ​Twitter


Can Obama’s Justice Department Actually Curb Police Brutality?

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The failure of local jurisdictions to indict p​olice officers who killed unarmed black men in Ferguson and New York City has prompted​ nationwide protests this month and calls for justice and accountability for heavy-handed law enforcement tactics disproportionately affect minority communities. With local prosecutors declining to charge cops in both the Ferguson and New York incidents, the hopes of activists are now pinned to federal investigations by the Department of Justice. 

To much fanfare, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division announced last week that it is probing NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for possible civil rights violations in the death of Eric Garner. If Pantaleo, who administered the chokehold that killed Garner, is to be charged, the DOJ's investigation must show that he "willfully" denied Garner's constitutional protections, and that the officer used an "unreasonable" or excessive amount of force. But legal experts say the road to justice is paved with institutional obstacles. 

As former federal prosecutors  ​told the New York Times, the high burden of proof required by federal Civil Rights investigations—much​ h​igher than that required by the local prosecution that failed to indict Pantaleo—is difficult to meet. The problem, prosecutors said, is that the definitions of "willfulness" and "unreasonable" force are fuzzy. "It's crystal clear that the federally protected right that we're talking about is the right to be free of an unreasonable seizure of his person— that appears in the Bill of Rights," former federal prosecutor Mark F. Pomerantz told the TimesBut, he added, there is "no precise definition of when force is reasonable or not." 

Despite video e​vidence suggesting that Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold, the officer has claimed that he never intended to hurt him. And while the NYPD has imposed a ban on chokeholds for nearly twenty years, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, which represents NYPD officers, has ​denied that Pantaleo's takedown was indeed a chokehold. Rather, the union has claimed that Garner "was a big man who had to be brought to the ground to be placed under arrest by shorter police officers." 

With the DOJ probing Pantaleo's role in Garner's death, the officer could face criminal charges under the FBI's  ​"color of law" statute that allows the agency to investigate and charge police officers previously acquitted of state charges. But history has shown the investigation process can be long and arduous. Of the thousands of civil rights complaints filed each year, only a few dozen result in charges. Even in cases that garner national media headlines, the process remains slow: A federal investigation into George Zimmerman is still ongoing, and federal prosecutors seem ​unlikely to file charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. 

On the bright side, federal charges against law enforcement officials are on the rise, according to a 2014 report from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division: 

In FY 2012, 59 law enforcement officers, including police officers, deputy sheriffs, and State prison correctional officials, were charged with using their positions to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights, such as the right to be free from unwarranted assaults and illegal arrests and searches. The number of cases indicted by the CRM Section has grown from a low in 2003 of 63 cases (of which 27 were police cases) to 124 in 2012 (of which 44 were police cases). From 2003 to 2012, the Section essentially doubled its case load with the same staff. 

In the case of Ferguson, the DOJ could ​still pursue a civil case against the Ferguson Police Department, rather than against Wilson himself. Under the same "color of law" statute, if an entire police department shows a "pattern and practice" of civil rights violations, the Department of Justice's Special Litigation Section may seek civil remedies and a "consent decree" establishing a plan of reform for the local agency and its officers. 

According to the 2014 DOJ report, this type of federal intervention is also on the rise:

The investigations conducted by CRT's Special Litigation Section (SPL) have similarly increased in both number and scope. The Section has more active police pattern or practice investigations of law enforcement agencies than any other time in the Division's history. The Section has 27 active law enforcement pattern or practice cases: 13 open investigations, three matters in litigation, and nine matters that have been resolved by an agreement that SPL is enforcing. In two of the open investigations, SPL has issued letters of finding and is in active negotiations to secure a settlement. SPL is preparing to file litigation in at least two additional matters. 

The recent investigation into the Cleveland Police Department is one such example of "pattern and practice" probes. After nearly two years of investigation, the DOJ announced last ​week that it found that the Cleveland Police Department had shown a pattern of "unreasonable and unnecessary use of force." The City of Cleveland has agreed to work with Department of Justice on a consent decree that will enact policing reforms intended to mediate constitutional violations. That's welcome news to activists in Cleveland, ​where a police officer recently shot a twelve-year-old boy who was carrying a toy gun. 

But while federal oversight is theoretically intended help reduce the unreasonable use of force and other constitutional violations, the success of the DOJ's consent decrees is still up for debate. In 1997, when Congress first authorized the US Attorney General to sue police departments, Pittsburgh was the first department to catch a case. Five years later, in 2002, the consent decree was lifted, and signs of reform began to fade. "Over the last 20 years, there's been a big cultural change in the structure of the bureau of police, but we're still wanting in the management department," Elizabeth Pittinger, executive director of Pittsburgh's Citizen Police Review Board, told Northeast ​Ohio Media Group. "If you don't have supervision, the behavior is going to perpetuate itself." 

Similarly, while the LAPD's 13-year consent decree imposed following the infamous Rodney King beating has been heralded as a pinnacle of reform, a 2​009 study by Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government found "a troubling pattern" in which "African Americans, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, are subjects of the use of ... force out of proportion to their share of involuntary contacts with the LAPD." 

So while the DOJ investigations may be one of several approaches to implementing police department, it's clearly not a civil bullet. Other reforms, like body-worn cameras for cops and special prosecutors for police brutality cases, are also on the table. And on  Monday, in the wake of the explosion of recent protests over incidents in New York, Ferguson, Cleveland, and elsewhere, the DOJ ​​revealed new guidelines for racial profiling: 

The new policy, which is spelled out in a  ​memorandum circulated Monday, instructs that, in making routine or spontaneous law enforcement decisions, officers may not use race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity to any degree, unless listed characteristics apply to a suspect description. Under the policy, federal law enforcement officers will be prohibited from acting on the belief that possession of a listed characteristic by itself signals a higher risk of criminality.

For many in the movement, though, modest reforms will not quell concerns that police departments act with impunity in their disregard for black lives. As President Obama ​told BET in an interview Monday, "This isn't something that is going to be solved overnight...This is something that is deeply rooted in our society. It's deeply rooted in our history."

Follow Kristen Gwynne on ​Twitter.

The Film That Made Me... : 'Salò' Was the Film That Truly Shocked Me

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK​

There seems to be a theme developing in ​t​his column where people's most touching experiences with film come from a disturbance. Being rattled is a sensation that takes a while to shake off, and some films swallow you in their quicksand so much it can take some effort to slop yourself out. You can't even escape them in your dreams. I recently finished watching the quite dated campy yet compelling HBO prison drama Oz, and every other night I have a dream about having to shank Miguel Alvarez in the library with a sharpened toothbrush. It's strange.

I was 13 when I got my first email address, the now defunct hotmail.co.uk that was linked to the nexus of my young social life, MSN Messenger. I'd go on forums and websites and just start adding people and talking to them, some I'm still in (vague) contact with today. The internet was a different place back then; it was more like a flea market, with rusty but cool little trinkets for sale, the odd pack of asshole kids setting fire to a cat somewhere. 

Now, it's like a giant Waitrose where the exhausted security guards are imploring everyone to out-nice each other while snooty parents and their yelping, chocolate-covered offspring screech "otherkin' and "sex politics" at a weeping cashier.

My longing for the halcyon days of the web can't be justified without looking at its downsides, however. It exposed a young me to a very real, very visceral side of mortality. Websites like Ogrish and Rotten showing you photos of brains splattered across a parking lot, worms crawling through the mouths and noses of dead kids, dried corpses of prostitutes who'd decomposed to the point where their irises had sunken through their corneas. Some fucking grim stuff.

But it wasn't just the photos; it was the videos, the beheadings, murders, hangings, animal cruelty and, on places I daren't venture even then, rape and torture. Never before had humanity been exposed to its own cataclysmic cruelty in such an accessible way. It only takes one weird mate or a glimmer of morbid curiosity and you're watching someone's father drown in his own blood while someone slices through his trachea with a Bowie knife.

But I lost no sleep. They were troubling videos but they didn't trouble me. As I matured, as we all do, my blood lust became weaker and weaker.

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I remember seeing Salò on one of those talking head shows about The Most Disturbing Films of All Time, an incredulous Ross Noble talking about Cannibal Ferox, throwing his arms about, saying, "Reet urpsetting that!" I remember seeing the scene with the feast of human faeces out of context, every 10 seconds cutting to some mug going, "I mean, it was just wrong, wasn't it?!" 

This stayed dormant in me until one sunny afternoon, when I decided to download it. I'm sorry if you think downloading is wrong, but I was 17 and had no money and wasn't about to order a fucking Italian art film from the 1970s on Amazon.

I loved it from the opening. The classical music playing over the old-timey credits sequence, displaying the film's name, the actors' and, of course, "Pier Paolo Pasolini", the director, who was  ​murdered 20 days before the film's release in November of 1975.

Pasolini was a controversial figure, his alliance with communism perhaps being the reason behind his death. But he was nonetheless a creature of culture. Salò is loosely based on the Marquis De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and is exercised in four parts, in the manner of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, albeit with a wildly different plot. 

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It follows four fascist libertines—men of great power and influence—after they kidnap 18 young men and women, before choosing four soldiers with big dicks as their collaborators and taking everyone to a secluded mansion near the titular town. 

The men are all, in their own way, physically grotesque, respectively bloated, lizard-like, scrawny and nonce-y. Four old madams accompany the men and youngsters, recounting sordid tales from their days as prostitutes over a soft piano while the men humiliate, sodomize, rape and beat their detainees. They're made to eat pastry with broken glass in, marry each other, crawl on their hands and knees in the nude and, of course, eat shit, all while the men recite almost beautiful sentiments justifying their actions. "Nothing's worse than a breath without odor," one laments, before sodomizing a soldier who is in the process of raping a girl.

The film draws to an almost nauseating close as the libertines murder the remaining captives, taking turns to be voyeurs. Two of the big-dicked guards dance a waltz together, and then it's over.

§​

I remember the feeling I had when the credits appeared on screen. I was bemused, entertained, disgusted, upset and beguiled all at once. I read the  ​Wikipedia entry and all related entries over and over. Then I watched it again. And again. I became obsessed with it, with its sentiments, how every time that girl screamed and spat out blood and glass it still shocked me. That eerie, fuzzy 70s camera quality, the loudness of the voices in this empty palace.

Naturally, watching real people die on camera is shocking, and while it's not something I explicitly regret seeing, it also isn't something I'd encourage. But Salò's mixture of deranged philosophical discussion and incredible sadistic cruelty did something else to me. It disgusted me in a way I wasn't familiar with. It was the art with which they performed their deeds, these egregious, slimy, powerful men, espousing the poetry of the ages with their tongues covered in shit and blood.

Salò was the first film I ever saw that I deemed to be a true work of art. There was no comeuppance, no hero, no villain, no real message other than the twisted sermons given by the madams and dignitaries. Yet, it's greater than the sum of its parts. It's not gore porn or shock schlock. It's detestable and whimsical at once. Things can be funny and heartbreaking. It's a testament to nuance in the extreme, if you can believe it, and showed me how to say one thing and do another, especially in regard to my professional life.

It is a horrendously beautiful film, a cum-covered rose, a masterpiece.

Follow Joe Bish on ​Twitter.

Every Found Object on the Mexican Border Represents a Tragedy

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The Wall, Jacumba, California, 2009. All images courtesy of Richard Misrach

Images of the ​US-Mexican border are often bleak—a high fence, perhaps, some garbage, a guard or two and a vast expanse of space on either side. But the 2,000 miles of land and its multibillion-dollar barrier is not devoid of life and its ephemera. Far from it. 

​Richard Misrach, a photographer famous for his love of open space and strange light, has spent the last five years photographing all the items he encountered along the border, things left behind by migrants passing through. Backpacks, shoes, books, soccer balls, wallets—all are found in the arid dirt, with no identity to speak of. The people who dropped them are long gone and no one knows what's happened to them. 

Misrach has teamed up with Mexican composer ​Guillermo Galindo for the project—which will be ongoing until its culmination as a huge, interactive exhibition in 2016—who is building functional, fully playable instruments from the found objects. At face value a backpack or a sneaker is completely banal, but together the two artists are attempting to address the humanity behind the statistics, to make people realize that every lost shoe belonged to a lost person. 

​VICE: Hi Richard. What pulls you to the Mexican border? 
​Richard Misrach: 
Well, I've been photographing in the Napa Desert for almost 40 years now. I've always thought of them as a giant stage—everything from bomb ranges to nuclear testing happens in our American deserts. I've been aware the border issues for years but its always been such a high-profile subject that I didn't bother touching it. But in the last decade the increased militarization of the border has caught my attention. Its a real paradigm shift. I've now photographed almost 2,000 miles of the border, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and it's really indicative to me of a major shift in what's happening in the US in terms of our national sovereignty. It all plays out in the landscape. I'm not a journalist—I look at the bigger picture and how the landscape speaks to us.

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Wall, Playas de Tijuana, California, 2013

And in partnering with Guillermo Galindo, you're creating another layer of interpretation. These objects you have found are so ephemeral—a piece of rubbish, a single shoe—but are allowed to be re-born again, to regain an identity. 
Yes. If you go along the border you're going to find "human trash"—backpacks, water bottles, tennis shoes—but it's only trash in the landscape before you start opening it up. For example, I once opened a backpack that contained bright yellow boxer shorts covered in cartoon characters, Trojan condoms, a big bottle of cologne, toothpaste, toothbrush, and a surfer T-shirt and I realized, my God, this was a portrait of a young man. Another backpack I found, maybe 500 miles away, carried a small lipstick compact with a mirror and a cute little purse with around 70 pesos in it. It was a young girl. If you actually open up these pieces of trash, suddenly you get the people. It's very powerful.

So yes, I bring a visual approach to these items, but Guillermo—whose original project this was—tries to find the life of each objects that I bring back. In the last three years we've been working together, I've been bringing back things myself as he has problems at the border. Because I'm a white guy with blue eyes, I can be there and work. If Guillermo goes, it can be really unpleasant.

So you don't ever encounter trouble?
It's been interesting. I've been doing this so long that I'm used to it, but then, I'm an old white guy with a big camera and a tripod. I have a formal, non-threatening presence. People will check me out and I have to go through their sensors and things, but I'm on public land so its OK for me to be there. Once they've checked me out, they become very friendly—some even start showing me their own photos on their iPhones. Once they get comfortable with me being there they kind of look out for me and I feel quite safe because they are there waiting and watching all the time. It would be very different for a person of color.

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Micro Orchestra, 2014

Do you never find the expanse and remoteness of the landscape claustrophobic?
No, the more remote the better. It's probably some sort of existential thing. When I'm out there in the middle of the desert by myself, I feel like it's kind of primal. But I've also been photographing the walls that go through the cities and the more densely populated areas, too. The whole border stretch varies from places where the river takes over—like the Rio Grande in Texas—and more dense, urban landscapes like Nogales, Arizona, where the wall splits the city in half. It's the weirdest, most surreal thing—families and friends have been cut off from each other. There's a Nogales USA and a Nogales Mexico.

Do you feel like every item you find along the border is a tragedy?
Well, the most recent development is that we have ​52,000 unaccompanied children coming from Central America, all the way across the desert to get to the United States, only to end up incarcerated. Two weeks ago I was in the desert photographing some places where people put water and food out for migrants.

Because they can get to these remote places and die?
​
Yes. I spent three or four hours in one place and my shoes and hands became filled with cactus spines. They're brutal and really hard to get out—I actually had to throw away my shoes at one point. But these people—children—travel through the night across this terrain. I once found a pair of tennis shoes for a four-year-old and two bibles inscribed with crayon hearts—these are really, really young kids. Innocent children trekking across vast expanses of dangerous landscape. Women are raped all the time. People come here, desperate, looking for the opportunity for a new life. It's a tragedy. It's 52,000 major tragedies.

Guillermo, I'm looking at an image of an instrument utilizing found clothing that looks like an effigy. It's quite affecting.
Guillermo Galindo: Yes, that particular one is a replication of the effigies that are found on the border. It's a strange instrument.

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The Efigie 

Can it—and the other instruments you've created from the objects—actually be played?
Yes, but every instrument requires a lot of training and practice. Even I am still learning how to play them. Each of the instruments have special tunings—they are tuned only to themselves, not to Western standards.

What is the message here? A greater connection with the idea that, behind each statistic, behind each piece of "trash," is a person just like us?
Yes. We need to understand that these objects—things we use in our daily lives—belonged to someone who was suffering. These people trying to cross the border need to drink water, they need shoes. They are just like everybody else. For many, though, these tragedies are just numbers. The instruments show them the humanity of the tragedy.


The instruments require human manipulation, so they end up becoming, by default, a conduit between two people. It's a tangible connection between the person who owned the property and the person playing the instrument.
That's right. I consider these objects to be sacred. They are very special and have to be treated gently.

RM: Guillermo is reconceptualizing these objects, which have otherwise kind of lost their meaning, or become jumbled into a different meaning by the concept of tragedy. Reusing them and releasing them makes you pay attention.

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Zapatello

Richard, do you drive around and collect these things alone?
Yeah, I really have to get into the zone to do it. I get up at about 4 AM and push all the way through to the evening. My wife says I live on twigs and beetles—I don't like to spend time going to cafes and basically just live off trail mix. She is is horrified by the way I eat out there, but I get into a zone out there and have to pay attention all the time to the changing light. It works best when I go alone.


Where do you sleep?
​
For the first 35 years I would sleep in the back of my Volkswagen Camper. I've had five over 40 years, but in recent years, because of my back, I now do the motels. I need to sleep in a real bed.

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Veronia, Friendship Circle, San Diego

Finally, what has been the most affecting object you've found so far?
GG: The first time I went to Laredo, Texas, I found a child's backpack with a cartoon character on, which happened to be one of my son's favorite. It really touched me that a boy my son's age is out there with his backpack.


RM: Mine is something really different. Guillermo is making an amazing piece out of something that I recently found—an old Spanish library copy of Doctor Zhivago that was right by the border wall. Inside, I found a bus ticket for a college student. It was a leather-bound, beautiful edition of a book that—even though it's about Russia and the Cold War—carries such meaning as to what is happening on the border today. That the person carrying this book would have just lost it, in a fleeting moment, is so affecting for me. 

Follow Eleanor Morgan on ​Twitter

Did Majid Jordan Accidentally Create the Perfect James Bond Intro?

How the Hoodie Became a Racially Charged Garment

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Trayvon Martin in a hoodie. Photo released by the Martin Family

In Allison Lurie's 1981 guide to ​fashion semiotics, ​The Language of Clothes, she writes about "garments of ill-omen" that seem to bring about dismay and harm to their wearers. As psychological as it is superstitious, these garments take on a preternatural aura of evil and peril. It could be as benign as, say, a white blazer whose unsoiled surface instills the wearer with an irrational fear of dirt and stains, inducing anxiety and neurosis. It could be a sweater gifted by an ex that comes to symbolize all the strife and despair of a failed romance. "More sinister and fortunately more rare," Lurie writes, "is the garment which seems to attract disasters to you rather than itself." In the vernacular of popular dress and in the ongoing relationship between clothes and social conflict, there is perhaps no more malevolent garment than the hoodie.

For hundreds of years, the hood has been ingrained in lore and legend. It already holds a morbid connection through the crimson-clad heroine Little Red Riding Hood, who defeats the big bad wolf that had gobbled up her grandmother—the wolf is killed and gutted at the story's end. The Grim Reaper, the very personification of death, is usually depicted wrapped up in a dark, hooded cloak, as is the Ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Hoods conceal, they obscure—huddling signifies to many that you have something to hide.

The hooded sweatshirt, a ubiquitous garment worn the world over, carries both a practical and countercultural appeal. First made in the 1930s by Champion, it was designed for laborers working in colder weather but has evolved into a street style staple worn by everyone from surfers to skaters. In recent years, however, it has taken on more sinister connotations​.

[body_image width='1800' height='1196' path='images/content-images/2014/12/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/09/' filename='the-hoodie-the-deadly-consequences-of-race-and-dress-456-body-image-1418141749.jpg' id='10120']The Million Hoodies Union Square protest against Trayvon Martin's shooting. Photo by Wikimedia user David ​Shankbone

Some of the people who wear hoodies use them to keep their faces hidden while committing crimes, and for a certain segment of the public, the hoodie has become associated with hoodlums and wayward youths. In the mid 90s, the hoodie got linked to the anarchic and murderous aura of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, when a police sketch of him wearing a hoodie and sunglasses was spread all over the media. In high fashion, this meaning was appropriated and used to charge luxury products with subversive appeal—Raf Simons famously showed a ​hoodie-heavy collection inspired by terrorists mere months before 9/11.


​In 2012, the hoodie made headlines again when it got mixed up in the death of Trayvon Martin. The story, by now, is well known: Seventeen-year-old Martin was stalked, shot, and killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman who seemed to assume the kid was a criminal because he was black and wearing a hoodie. The country was predictably divided over the shootings, and the hoodie became just another symbol of disagreement—people around the nation, including the ​Miami Heat, donned hoodies in solidarity with Trayvon, while Fox News host Geraldo Rivera claimed, ​absurdly, that the item of clothing helped cause the teen's death. 

Hoodies are now tangled up in a seemingly never-ending conversation America is having about race, socioeconomic status, and violence perpetrated against black bodies. So it seems grimly appropriate that when 12-year-old ​Tamir Rice was gunned down in a public park by a Cleveland police officer because he was playing with a toy gun, he was wearing a hoodie.

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​Sign outside a pub in South London. Photo by Wikimedia user Secret​london

And so the hoodie has become a "garment of ill-omen" indeed.  To some, hoodies mean "thugs" who are up to no good. Others can put them on to protest racism and the violence it inflicts upon black men and boys in particular. You have the ​Million Hoodies Movement for Justice on one side, and on the other you have ​stores that ban them because they worry criminals will wear them. Hoodies remain a great way to stay warm and dry, but these days they mean so much more than that.

Read more stuff by Jeremy on Garmen​toZine.com.

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