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Britain's Food Industry Is an Unhealthy, Unsustainable Mess

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Photo via.

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

It's Christmastime and the food industry's saccharine ads have graced our screens, presenting to us a vivid image of choice, sustainability, and homespun happiness. But how wholesome is our food, really?

Stephen Devlin is an environmental economist at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and his report—the aptly titled "Urgent Recall"—released today, paints the UK's food system as an unsustainable mess, one that's ravaging the environment, perpetuating disease, and exacerbating poverty and inequality.

Advocates of the UK's food system will point to the sheer volume of products available as evidence that choice exists and that consumers can vote through spending. But most of these products are owned by the ten or so behemoths (Pepsico, Kraft, Nestle etc.) that dominate the supermarket shelves. The "choice" between different brands is what these multinationals are heralding here—the choice between Doritos and Cheetos, Robinsons and Rubicon—but real alternatives just don't exist.

"We're fed the story of empowered consumers shaping the markets for the better, that through their purchasing power, product selection, and preference for environmentally friendly goods they can shape the world," says Devlin. "The reality is it's just not that convenient, especially when it comes to food. If anything they're probably the disempowered half of the producer-consumer relationship."

This is partly due to the fact that, shamefully, hunger in the UK has now reached an epidemic level, with the annual number of people given emergency parcels from food banks last year just shy of a million. It was 128,000 just three years ago. Just over one in five of those receiving an emergency food parcel said low income was responsible.

"People are struggling to afford food, but that's a reason to change the system, not perpetuate it," says Devlin. "The whole point of the system was to make food cheap and it did that pretty well for quite a long time, with food prices falling pretty consistently in the decades after the war. But if your objective is to eradicate hunger, constantly trying to reduce the price of food won't work. We've basically proven that with the food system we have."

The UK spends a smaller proportion of its income on food than any other EU country, bar Luxembourg. This is an aggregate though; even if food here is cheap, on average there is still a large demographic in society who can't afford it. The increasing reliance on food banks is testament to that. The problem worsens when you factor in the disproportionate food price inflation that the UK has experienced over the last eight years.

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Photo by Alex Sturrock

But the issue isn't really expensive food, the issue is poverty. The obsession with rock-bottom prices has failed to eradicate hunger in the UK, or the rest of the world. If anything it's contributing to the problem by proliferating dangerous practices—the use of fertilizers, fossil fuels, battery farming, wage poverty—and jeopardizing the environment.

"Growing food is probably the most profound way in which humans deliberately alter the environment, so getting it wrong is a pretty serious risk," says Devlin. "Climate change and the food system are totally intertwined. It's almost a unanimous opinion amongst commentators and analysts that the way we produce food is hugely detrimental to the environment."

The modern agricultural methods utilized are unprecedented in the natural history of the world; the widespread use of fertilizers and pesticides, the sheer stress soil goes through in churning out such phenomenal yields, and the huge carbon emissions built up across the supply chain are all contributing to climate change.

The risks posed to the environment are probably the most severe, but that's far from the only problem. "If it was just a case of doing the environmental stuff right then maybe we could just tinker with the system around the edges. But that's not all it is. It's just failing on so many other levels as well," says Devlin. "Diet related illnesses are ruining us at the moment—obesity, heart disease, diabetes, various cancers—so much of it is about how we eat and that's determined by the food system. The health impact is completely unsustainable."

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Photo Wikicommons

As is the way food is produced. So much of what we eat will travel an intercontinental web of laboratories, farms, factories, and supermarkets before hitting our plates. Sophistication is the buzzword often used to celebrate this complex agricultural supply chain and such a feat is hailed as an achievement. But the potential risks of genetically modified crops, increased exposure to fraud and disease, excessive carbon footprints, and wages for producers suppressed by a chain of middlemen don't get factored in too much.

The "sophisticated" system thrives on consumer ignorance, with many people having a warped perception of how food is produced. Labels rarely offer more detail than the standard traffic lights and percentages on the packets, let alone factory conditions and wider environmental impact. The Food Standards Agency recently published its findings on the dangerous levels of the campylobacter bacteria in supermarket chickens, but that wasn't before its former chief and current Tesco director Tim Smith lobbied hard against its release.

As the physical distance between food production and the consumer grows so too does the psychological distance. More than one in three 16- to 23-year-olds didn't know bacon came from pigs, according to a survey conducted by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) charity a few years back. An extreme example, but with food hygiene, safety, and integrity at the forefront of the average consumer's mind, ignorance is probably bliss.

"Everyone was horrified at the horse-meat scandal of course, but really what's most surprising is that something like this, or worse, didn't happen sooner," says Devlin. "Of course there's always the possibility that it did and we just don't know about it. People are terrified about the safety of their food, but it's actually as though we've designed our food system in order to maximize the risks."

The problems are obvious and the consequences dire, but with the UK's production and distribution system so firmly established, making changes will require more than a shift in consumer demand. Resistance to change is strengthened by the highly concentrated agricultural land ownership (0.25 percent of the population own all 17 million hectares), heavy government subsidies that still leave 10 percent of farms unprofitable, and convoluted supply chains.

"We can categorically classify it as unsustainable. I'm a big believer in the idea that the power lies with communities, at the grassroots," says Devlin. "That's ultimately where most of the change comes from in order for it to be sustainable and democratic. The problem is the current system puts up a lot of boundaries to that kind of community action, so we'll probably need state intervention to deconstruct or reform this. We need change from above and below."

NEF's report cites plenty of European agricultural models that have focused on renewable energy and localism; simply scaling these up may not be the answer, but they present possibilities worth exploring. At the top of the food chain there's been little imagination or appetite for a more sustainable system, or to think beyond the mantra of low prices. But the UK still remains one of the wealthiest nations and producing high quality, sustainably sourced food as well as the eradication of hunger is achievable. For once it doesn't have to be about choice.

Follow Chris Godfrey on Twitter

The Battle for New York: Cash, Corporations, and Soccer

In Defense of Fur

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All photos by Sonja Sharp

When Ashley Perez first started at New York's No Relation Vintage in the mid-2000s, the racks of rabbit, fox, and Persian lamb were among the least-coveted items in the shop. But just as fast-fashion staples like Forever 21, Zara, and H&M have flooded with modacrylic mink this season, the 24-year-old has been inundated with millennials looking to lose their furginity.

"The younger kids are all about the glamour of it," Ashley said as she reviewed the store's current stock of rabbit, mink, coyote, and raccoon dog with the educated pleasure of a connoisseur. "Fur is sort of a powerful statement. It gives an illusion, rather than a puffer or a goose down."

Logically, the opposite should be true: it takes almost as many birds to make a down coat as foxes to make a fur one, and most down fowl are raised in factory farms and plucked live several times before being slaughtered for foie gras—if you were born after 1980, you know that fur is murder, and murder fell out of fashion in New York around the same time as mink stoles.

Yet in 2014, fur is surging. Trend-watchers will point to the pelts on the runway, just as animal rights activists will peg it to the rising quality of so-called "cruelty-free" synthetic alternatives. The rise in those alternatives, they believe, has made people crave the real thing. "We're seeing a lot of fur out there because there's a lot of faux fur out there," Humane Society spokesman and fur opponent PJ Smith told me.

But today fur is less a fashion statement than a complex geopolitical reality, one few enthusiasts or opponents fully comprehend.

Most first-time fur buyers don't know that more fur-bearing animals are trapped here in New York than in any other state in the US, or that most of the minks farmed in Wisconsin will end up in Hong Kong. That the war in Ukraine and new anti-corruption laws in China have more to do with the price fluctuations in silver fox than whatever struts down the catwalk. That one day soon, the industry that begat New York City will have all but disappeared from it.

The global fur market is "extraordinarily changed," even from five years ago, explained Mark Oaten, CEO of the International Fur Federation.

China's emerging elite now consume more than 16 percent of the world's pelts, putting the Chinese neck-in-neck with Americans and just behind the Russians, who at about 20 percent of the market still buy far more fur than any other country.

"It's because of China's massive economic growth; they're huge consumers of fur products," Smith agreed. "The Chinese government has recently cracked down on gifts and corruption and that seems to be where a lot of the fur was going."

(Oaten acknowledged a slowdown in Chinese sales over the past several months, but said it has as much to do with the economy as with the new gift policy there. Sales have also slowed in Russia, due to consumer anxiety over the conflict in Ukraine and fluctuations in the ruble.)

Fortunately for the furriers, new shearing techniques have allowed them to tap luxury markets in previously unfathomable corners of the globe, including the mega-wealthy Persian Gulf, despite the year-round high temperatures.

"Now you've got enormous use of color in fur, you've got trim, which has become incredibly fashionable, and you've also got lighter fur," all of which has made the material more palatable to younger wearers, Oaten said. "Some of your friends are wearing trim and they don't really think of it as fur."

All of which is to say, when money wants something, the market responds. USDA data shows a 25 percent spike in domestic mink production over the past four years, from about 2.8 million in 2010 to 3.54 million in 2014, with a nearly 15 percent surge in the past year alone. Indeed, with the high visibility of faux fur in fast fashion and the rise of trim and other accessories that don't look like animals, Oaten said he expects a banner year in the States, and while no official entity tracks the secondhand market, sellers say fur practically runs off the rack in New York.

"They don't really last very long in the store," Perez said. "You have people come in, try it on, and in that instant they purchase their fur coat."

While wearing fur in Beijing or Dubai makes you fancy, wearing it as a young woman in New York can still make you look like an iconoclast. It's kind of like smoking menthol cigarettes or failing to shave your underarms: awesome if you're into it and discomfiting if you're not.

Full disclosure: I love fur. I'm a vegetarian who loves fur so much I once traded my California state disabled person's parking placard for a mid-century fox stole with glass eyes and its original claws.

Like most consumers in wintry climes, I also love leather boots and down puffer jackets, and while these, too, are made from dead animals, I've never once been stopped by a stranger in the subway who wanted to know whether my North Face parka was real goose. (It is.)

That's fur's Faustian bargain: if you want to wear it, you've gotta own what it is. So what is it, exactly?

A fur coat is made out of a dozen or more cute little animals—most commonly mink—often raised in small cages and then killed and skinned, their pelts tanned and auctioned off in a lot and then cut into little itty bitty strips and painstakingly hand-stitched by a highly-skilled craftsman in Hong Kong or Turkey or South Korea. A faux fur coat, by contrast, is made largely of petroleum byproduct—modacrylic is the mink of the faux fur industry—that's mixed in a giant vat and extruded into long fibers called tow that are then mechanically "tufted" into a polyester backing, which allows a faux fur coat to be cut and sewn much the same way a t-shirt or a hoodie is cut and sewn and in much the same manufacturing environment, most often in mainland China.

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Gus Xanthoudakis, 79, one of the last men standing in New York's storied fur district

The pro- and anti-fur factions each cite studies claiming to prove that their product is better for the environment, that it has a smaller carbon footprint and a longer lifetime. Anti-fur activists rightly point out that there are far fewer regulations placed on the treatment of animals raised solely for their pelts than on those whose flesh is eaten before their skin is worn; furriers counter that American and European pelts are prized precisely because the animals are treated so well, that the high standard of care at most Western fur farms leads to such a superior product that economic pressure alone will force producers in emerging markets to follow suit.

None of which changes the fact that while more of us than ever want to wear it—as fringe lining the hoods of our down-filled parkas and pom-poms bobbing on top of our knit wool hats—few of us want to acknowledge that most of what we wear through the winter is made from animals, and that all of it is made by other humans.

For a generation, the argument over fur has hinged on notions of cruelty, but in a global garment industry driven by Rana Plaza-style sweatshops, most faux fur merely trades one kind of cruelty for another. All but the highest quality is cut and sewn by semi-skilled laborers in the same kind of factories where $7 T-shirts are stitched for fast fashion brands whose labor practices often raise eyebrows.. Whether a mink is raised in a cage would seem infinitely less important than whether a garment worker is forced to raise her family in squalor, yet as consumers we've been taught to care intensely for one and not at all for the other.

Unlike modacrylic and other faux furs, which have been mechanized since their inception, animal fur is an artisan industry whose products are still made by hand. Ironically, those who have suffered most from the backlash against fur are farmers, trappers, and craftsman who, if they worked in any other sector, would be celebrated as artisanal holdouts in an automated world.

"It's a crisis for us, because we're losing that skill," Oaten explained. "So many other industries have adapted with high tech solutions, but it's still a real skill to put the fur together, and we haven't got the people to do it."

Perhaps no one knows this better than Gus Xanthoudakis, 79, one of the last men standing in New York's storied fur district. When he started working there in 1956, the manufacturing sector filled seven streets and three avenues in Midtown Manhattan. Now it barely exists outside history books.

"Eighty percent of the world's production was here in New York," Gus explained while he made repairs to a vintage mink coat in his 29th Street workshop on a recent fall afternoon. "All the buildings were fur buildings. Now they're kicking us out. They don't want us."

For years, Gus has sought out students to learn the craft he perfected as a young immigrant from Crete. But as much as they might want to wear it, young people would rather not reckon with the reality of where their clothes come from.

"I don't think they pay attention that much to exactly what they're wearing. It doesn't register," he said with a shrug. "If you put on a down coat, you would not think of fur, even though you're wearing feathers inside. But when you're wearing fur, you know it's fur."

Follow Sonja Sharp on Twitter.

NOISEY CANADA'S TOP 10 PROJECTS OF 2014

A Recent Poll Confirms: Canada Has a Huge Rape Problem

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Minister for the Status of Women, Kellie Leitch, who launched Ottawa's anti-sex assault program. Photo via the Government of Canada.

According to a new national poll that should surprise no one and anger everyone, women are frequently the target of sexual assault and rarely feel comfortable reporting the attacks to police.

The Forum Research poll, released this week, confirms what women's groups have been saying for years—sexual assault is really common.The poll interviewed 1,658 Canadians and is considered accurate to within three percent, 19 times out of 20.

Of the women who spoke with Forum, 17 percent said they had been sexually assaulted or raped in their lifetime, while 12 percent chose not to answer. The results stayed virtually the same across age groups, geographic region, and income level. The remaining 70 percent clearly said they had not been assaulted or raped.

Of those who reported being attacked, 15 percent said it was at the hands of a family member, and a quarter said it was an acquaintance or a date.

Just over one tenth of those who had been attacked reported it to police.

The poll shows that the problem also exists for men, but with much less frequency. Still, five percent of men said they were sexually assaulted or raped, while 11 percent preferred not to answer. One in ten said that the abuse came from a "person in authority."

Just seven percent of those men went to the police after the attack.

It's not surprising that these charges rarely come forward. According to government statistics, police lay charges in just 42 percent of sexual assault cases—eight points lower than the average for other violent crimes. That number goes up slightly if the assault involves a weapon, and improves to nearly 70 percent for aggravated sexual assault, the most serious of the possible charges.

One in five basic sexual assault cases are "cleared otherwise," which includes cases where "the complainant requests that charges not be laid against the accused, the accused has died, the accused has diplomatic immunity, the accused is referred to a diversionary program, police discretion, or for a reason beyond the control of the police."

Even those sexual assault cases that do progress from being reported to laying charges only result in a guilty verdict about half the time.

The survey also asked about sexual harassment. One quarter of the women polled reported being sexually harassed, while 16 percent chose not to answer. Ten percent of men say they, too, have faced sexual harassment.

The poll caps off a year when sexual violence became a major topic of discussion in Canada. The conversation gained prominence due to the allegations against Jian Ghomeshi, the revelation that Parliament is a hotbed of harassment against women, and the campaigns to encourage women to share their stories, as they did on the Twitter hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported.

There have been calls for the federal government to do more to end violence against women. The NDP has called for a national action plan to address the issue, and for an inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women. Indigenous women make up a disproportionate number of victims of violent sexual assaults and murders.

The government, for its part, has launched a plan to try and reduce violent against First Nations women, but has rejected calls for a national inquiry, and has launched a campaign to fund local sexual assault centres.

Conservative MP Rob Anders, notorious for being the worst, suggested that rape be reintroduced as a federal crime (it was replaced with 'sexual assault' and 'aggravated sexual assault' in 1983). He introduced legislation to beef up penalties for sexual assault that involves penetration. Critics of Anders's bill point out that, prior to 1983, women's allegations were often undermined because it can be so difficult to prove penetration.

At least he's trying.

But if 2014 taught us anything, it's that the issues around sexual violence aren't going away. While the rate of sexual assaults has been declining since a huge spike in the 1990s, it's still more common than it was in the early 1980s.

And given that Forum found that the prevalence of sexual assault amongst 18- to 30 year-old women was slightly higher than the average, there's still a long way to go.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

​It’s Christmas in Six Days and I Just Got Robbed

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Photo via.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

My house just got robbed, six days before Christmas. They smashed the glass door at the back of the house and took all the presents from under the tree. They took other stuff too—laptops, family heirlooms, just generally my favorite and most treasured possessions—but it's the presents from under the tree that really stings. They literally stole Christmas. Like: the exact polar opposite of Santa. Thanks a lot.

Getting burgled in December is a jarring experience. This is the second time in five years it's happened to me, so I don't know if that makes me an expert in the field, or one of the biggest chumps in the Greater London area. It forces you to confront the idea that although Christmas is meant to be a giving and joyous occasion, there are still some supreme dickheads out there. You can't really sit and watch the Queen's speech when you've got no TV. And it's hard to enjoy your turkey when you know that man is inherently evil.

Walking into my house in the immediate aftermath, it took a while for the reality of the situation to hit. On first look, the living room didn't look too bad—I have a messy housemate, so he could have feasibly just had a mad one and hidden the PS3 as a joke. It was only when I saw the garden instead of the back door that I realized we'd been robbed. And robbed hard, too: someone had taken a huge tool and smashed a hole—at least six feet high and three feet wide—into the room where I drink coffee every morning. As I stared into its gaping maw, my brain went into overdrive trying to list every belonging I felt important and wondering whether or not it was still there.

Try and imagine every single possession you hold in any way dear. Now imagine writing them all down on an insurance claim form. Merry Christmas.

Burglary, on the whole, is an opportunistic crime, and it showed in my thief's handwork. I don't want to go in and tell these burglars how to do their jobs—they had a pretty good go of gutting my home and, in some way, life—but it's clear this wasn't a meticulously planned thing. They only wanted stuff that had immediate value, and had torn the house apart trying find it. The police told me I wasn't allowed to touch anything until forensics arrived, so I just sort of squatted in the hallway, far enough from the wreckage that I wouldn't be tempted to sift through it, trying to get my head around what had just happened.

Here's the most obvious take away from all this: Getting robbed in December properly messes up your Christmas, and in more than just a 'my personal belongings are gone' kind of way. December is a month where people are meant to be out being sociable—$11 mugs of mulled cider! Secret Santa! Ice skating! Shit like that!—and I'm in a headspace where I just do not want to leave what's left of my house to go and be hollowly merry. Nights out enjoying Christmas festivities have been quickly swapped for cleaning sessions, figuring out how to work without a laptop, and reeling out the same "thanks, at least I've got my health" speech to well-wishers on the phone.

Speaking with my neighbors after the incident—I had to go door-to-door to remind them that they should definitely start locking their doors and windows—it became clear lot of burglaries in my area of East London have been fueled by a search for so called " Asian gold." Post-recession, burglars are hitting residential homes in search of quick-to-sell, high profit hereditary jewelry. An increase in gold prices has only compounded the problem—in October last year, almost 25 percent of burglaries in the Havering area saw large quantities of gold jewelry stolen. As I looked at torn up shoeboxes and the gold-colored Casio wristwatch that had been tossed across my room in a huff, I liked to imagine the disappointment my burglars found when going through my crap. Take that, burglars. I'm poor.

I got a bit obsessed with the Asian Gold theory—and FYI, if the police are monitoring my post-robbery search history, please note I have been doing these searches for purely journalistic reasons, and that I am not casing out my neighbors to try and grab some of sort of semblance of Christmas back—but I kept digging for other motives. Most of my electronics were gone, so maybe my robber was looking for presents.

In the hallway, the police told me that this time of year brings about a flurry in burglaries as people resort to crime to get them through the holiday period. Some want to sell what they steal for a quick buck to cash-in for present binge. Others are looking for the gift their kid so desperately wants, but they just can't afford. Most depressing of all, some people just need a way to heat their homes as the nights get cold. The emergency glazer fixing my window and the forensics assistant remarked that they had bumped into each other on more than one occasion, as homes and schools alike in my local area are getting knocked off for iPads, phones, laptops, and anything else people can download an app to. People are making friends over a shared love of the fact that my neighbors and I keep getting robbed.

The stats will show that burglary rates in London are down to their lowest in 40 years, but while those numbers provide some good radio show fodder for politicians and comfort for someone able to afford to buy a house in the capital, when you're having your third "Fuck, they nicked that too?" moment of the day, it's hard to find solace in a 12 percent decrease in burglaries since last year. Ideally? Ideally we'd be down 100 percent on last year. That, and I would still be able to carry on with the career mode I had going on FIFA.

It could be a lot worse—after all, as I'm more than happy to tell my extended family on the phone, I do still have my health. In a weird way, being stripped of most of my worldly possessions has given me a greater appreciation of the Christmas spirit. The outpouring of sentiment from family members and friends I've haven't talked to in months has helped me rein in (most of) my whiny millennial hyperbole. Christmas is still going to be a sorrel-fueled blur of Danny Dyer-flavored Eastenders and family dysfunction, and that's something no burglar can steal from me. I'm not glad that someone saw fit to steal my belongings, but if I play around with a few pieces in my head, I guess I can believe that they did it from a place of desperation, and that my PlayStation is going to be unwrapped on Christmas Day by a ten-year-old who's a lot worse off than I am. Christmas is for giving I guess. Who knew I could be so generous?

Follow Carl Anka on Twitter.

DC Politicians Want to Start a War With Congress Over Legal Weed

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Despite interference from busy bodies in Congress, politicians and activists in Washington, DC are planning to move forward with the city's recent initiative to legalize recreational marijuana, setting up what will likely be a long round of legal wrangling and challenges between the city and Capitol Hill.

DC Council chairman Phil Mendelson told the Washington Post this week that he plans on sending the legalization initiative, which passed this November with nearly 70 percent of the vote, to Congress in early January, as required with any law passed in the city.

The move could provoke a showdown with House Republicans who, led by Maryland Congressman Andy Harris, successfully included provisions blocking the legalization law in the $1.1 trillion spending bill that Congress passed last weekend. Members of the DC Council and their allies on Capitol Hill believe that the language of that provision could be murky enough to allow the city to go through with legalization anyway. In the final bill, DC is only barred from using funds to "enact" its marijuana reform laws—not "enact and carry out" as Harris's rider originally read.

It's a tiny technicality, but according to DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's non-voting member in Congress, Democratic budget negotiators intentionally muddied the language to give city officials a chance to work around the measure. The argument here is that by presenting the law to Congress, the DC Council would simply be carrying out the voter-approved marijuana measure, not enacting it.

The catch is that the city can't spend any money to move forward with the measure, because doing so would give Republicans an opening to claim the city is violating the ban on spending. And they're not above such petty grievances: House Republicans successfully blocked DC's 1998 medical marijuana initiative for a decade because the city's election department couldn't spend $1.64 to tally the ballot results.

Harris thinks DC should check itself, lest it wreck itself. "The intent of Congress is clear — and has strong bipartisan support," he told the Post. But while he may have notched a win this month, it's not clear if Republican leaders have the political will to get into an ugly legal battle over DC autonomy in the next Congress. That fight could illustrate the divide between drug policy hawks and more libertarian-leaning conservatives in the GOP, and risks putting the party on the wrong side of public opinion going into the 2016 election.

Regardless of how Congress deals with DC weed, though, a high-profile clash over the marijuana issue may soon be unavoidable. On Thursday, state attorneys general in Nebraska and Oklahoma filed a lawsuit with the US Supreme Court against Colorado for its legalization of marijuana. Meanwhile, the same omnibus spending bill that blocked DC's legalization efforts also forbids the Justice Department and DEA from prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries and patients that are following state regulations.

After a grueling election season, said his group is "holiday mode right now," but Legalization activists say they plan to keep up the pressure on Congress when then new session begins next year. Organizers are planning a vigil in January "to demand Congress provide District of Columbia residents the same democratic rights enjoyed by Americans of the 50 states."

"We're going to do a 420-hour DC democracy vigil somewhere near the Capitol," said Nikolas Schiller, communications director for DC Cannabis Campaign. "That works out to about 17 and a half days."

If the initiative manages to make it through the 30-day congressional review period, activists say they also plan on organizing a seed exchange and giveaway. Unlike states that have legalized recreational marijuana, DC's law legalizes possession for personal use, but not weed sales. The DC Council was working on a plan to tax and regulate legal marijuana, but that legislation will likely be barred by the congressional provisions.

"One thing that's going to happen is people are going to want to learn how to grow cannabis," said Schiller. "So we hope we can facilitate the empowerment of DC residents to grow their own."

Follow CJ on Twitter


The FBI and Obama Are Calling Out North Korea for the Sony Hack

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Since November 24, a group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace has been embarrassing Sony. These hackers started off by flashing a cheesy/ominous skull on all employees' computer screens, then they released some of Sony's films online, then came the leaks of salaries and private messages.

Airing an email in which a Hollywood exec calls Angelina Jolie a "minimally talented spoiled brat" might have hurt one person's feelings, but it's not exactly terrorism. Still, that didn't stop people from—insanely—comparing it to 9/11. By the time the Guardians of Peace made their first actual IRL threat, people completely lost their shit. Sony acquiesced to the hackers' demands and decided to eat what amounts to a $75 million investment—though some of the promotional cash will presumably be recouped with online sales. (The hackers were pretty pleased with this.)

On Friday, the FBI released a statement about its investigation into the attacks and confirmed a persistent rumor that North Korea is behind them, rather than some anti-capitalist pranksters or an 11-year-old named Dade " Zero Cool" Murphy. (Analysts came to this conclusion because the malware used in the Sony Hacks is similar to ones North Korea has used in the past.)

"We are deeply concerned about the destructive nature of this attack on a private sector entity and the ordinary citizens who worked there," the FBI statement reads. "Further, North Korea's attack on SPE reaffirms that cyber threats pose one of the gravest national security dangers to the United States. Though the FBI has seen a wide variety and increasing number of cyber intrusions, the destructive nature of this attack, coupled with its coercive nature, sets it apart. North Korea's actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a US business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves."

The White House said it was planning a "proportional response," but didn't specify what that meant—like, does the US go after the North Korean film industry now? No idea.*

*Update: President Obama was asked about the situation at his end-of-the-year press conference early Friday afternoon. He vowed to respond to North Korea's hack and chided Sony for backing down.

"We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States," Obama told reporters at the White House. "Because if somebody is able to intimdate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what will happen if these start seeing a documentary they don't like or news reports they dont like."

The president said Sony "made a mistake" in canceling the theatrical release of The Interview, and that he wished they had spoken to him before making the move.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter
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The UK's Nigel Farage Defended the Use of the Word 'Chinky'

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[body_image width='637' height='351' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='nigel-farage-is-rehabilitating-racism-549-body-image-1418992427.jpg' id='12779']Sometimes the stars align and you just get a perfect YouTube screenshot

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Back when The Simpsons was good, there was a "Treehouse of Horror" episode where an advertising mascot called Lard Lad goes on a big one and starts tearing up the town of Springfield. Near the end, Lisa teams up with Paul Anka to sing a song called "Just Don't Look," and everyone stops looking and Lard Lad collapses and dies.

My point is: Nigel Farage is Lard Lad, isn't he? And every time he opens his salamander mouth, or every time the UK Independence Party makes another column inch land-grab, they win. UKIP thrives on attention like a toddler at a birthday party, so I'm loathe to give it to them.

But here's the thing: Nigel Farage defended one of his former party member's use of the word "Chinky" today—and fucking hell Nigel Farage, you ale-on-your-head, Gogglebox fuck party, asinine shit-show: fuck off. Because when you go on LBC Radio and say things like, "If you and your mates were going out for a Chinese, what do you say you're going for?" even if one on-the-fence Middle Englander who's still secretly uncomfortable about black soccer players being allowed to play for England nods along in agreement with you, then what you've done there is you've rehabilitated racism. You've created a soundbite for the kind of dad who thinks samosas are too fiery to use in his next bar argument about immigration. You've opened the door and said, "It's alright, lads, this pub has a snug in it. Real fireplace. Let's all sit around and whitely shout about how we should be able to say the N-word, shall we?"

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Former UKIP candidate Kerry Smith

For the purpose of full transparency, let's review the incident in question in full: Kerry Smith, former UKIP candidate for South Basildon and East Thurrock, stepped down earlier this week after it emerged he'd made homophobic and racist remarks, as well as making jokes about poor people. Then, on his bi-weekly phone-in slot today, racism apologist Farage took to LBC Radio to defend Smith's use of the word "Chinky," claiming he was just a "rough diamond" from a council estate who "talks and speaks" like a lot of Britons.

There's so much wrong with this line of argument that I think I'm going to have to break it down point-by-point:

1. Just because other people think and say appallingly short-sighted and out-of-date terms from the kind of sitcom the BBC would have pulled in the 70s for being too racist, that doesn't excuse their use, especially from a parliamentary candidate who's supposed to be shooting for some position of vague power.

2. This isn't, as Farage went on to argue, the "London elite" and their snobbishness getting the Good Old Working Class Man down by policing how they speak. Because, actually, it's more offensive to assume that every salt-of-the-earth working class guy is secretly a seething, bubbling pot of race hate instead of just a normal person in a slightly different economic bracket to you.

3. Millions of people in the UK live in or have lived in council estates, so using "council estate" as an excuse is as bad as using it as a slur. If, like Kerry, you're staring down the barrel of turning 40 and you still don't know that "Chinky" is an unacceptable term, then that's your own problem and not anybody else's.

4. This is the kind of lesson about name-calling and right and wrong that I literally learned at the age of five.

But that's getting bogged down in the frankly absurd story of a man genuinely trying to explain away his use of the word "Chinky" to help him sleep at night, and is instead ignoring the wider concern, which is this: Nigel Farage is, whatever way you spin it, a charismatic man.

Stick with me. Jeremy Clarkson is technically a charismatic man, too. So is Piers Morgan. Charisma doesn't excuse any of them from being terrible, but it does mean people like them. Charisma does not necessarily equate to charm, but it's an undeniable magnetism, an ethereal and hard to define pull.

And that's Farage's secret weapon: With every Gogglebox appearance, with every Question Time pantomime, with every picture of him drinking a pint or surviving a plane crash, he becomes more of a caricature, a Nosferatu-like monster creeping around on tiptoes, amusing but still lethal. It's the same way Boris Johnson is essentially a bear who got confused and ended up in a suit, but is still, deep down, as Tory as you like: sneaking an agenda through with a cuddly cartoon exterior.

Day by day, minute by minute, inch by inch, MP by MP, UKIP are making a noise, and the noise is making an impact. Nigel Farage is very good at making people look at him, and he knows that making people mad enough to talk about him is as good a way of getting talked about as any.

Imagine a world where Ed Miliband absolutely owned the hell out of awkwardly eating a bacon sandwich. He's on Saturday Kitchen making one. He's had a bottle of ketchup printed with his face on it. He's ripping his shirt off during PMQs and offering David Cameron outside for an eat-off. That's what Farage is doing. He's seen an opportunity to hit two markets at once by just straddling any negative spin: He's winning over the growingly disgruntled swathe of voters who might dip UKIP's way, and he's getting the left mad enough to keep writing about him. I realize I have fallen for it . I know and it makes me mad.

§

What Farage did today is tacitly give permission to the people who might say it to start saying "Chinky" again. Nige says it's alright, boys, so let's get the spring rolls in. But it's not alright, and neither are UKIP. Although it often feels like they're something invented by The Thick of It to liven things up after a ratings slump, they're real and they're dangerous.

Earlier this week I spoke to an international relations expert who's been researching years of immigration debate reporting, and his most basic finding was this: the debate is narrowing because immigrants are increasingly being seen as economic units who bring money into the country (or, if you're against immigration, crime and disease), rather than actual human beings. With the debate narrowing, UKIP are taking their chance with both hands, repurposing immigration as the real problem with the UK, when it's actually far from it. Farage is painting Europeans to be the monster when he's one himself.

Farage has cheated death three times. He survived testicular cancer as a young man and a plane crash as an older one. Also, he had a car crash once. He may be un-killable. But the best way to kill this resurgence—to kill the word "Chinky," the yellow trousers, the interminable pints—is to talk around the one-note UKIP debate. It isn't to look away, or to bristle on a surface level, or make jokes about his thumb-that-learned-to-scream face. It's to go: Actually, Nigel Farage, when I go for a Chinese meal with my mates I just tend to call it "some food." Stop giving people an excuse to be as racist as you.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter

The VICE Report: The KKK and American Veterans - Part 3 - Part 3

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VICE Reports recently traveled to Mississippi, where the Ku Klux Klan is growing thanks to its new strategy of targeting veterans just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In part three, host Rocco Castoro talks with Daryl Johnson, who's been monitoring this rise in extremism. "We're currently in one of the hottest periods of extremist activity that I've seen in my twenty-year career," he says. According to him, today's white supremacist groups make past activity "look like a kindergarten picnic."

Canadian Law Isn't BDSM-Friendly

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Miztress Tia. Photo by Hilary Beaumont.

Last week, to the joy of British media, activists staged a public face-sitting event to mock the UK's new porn censorship laws. Face-sitting, female ejaculation, spanking, aggressive whipping, and penetration by any object "associated with violence" are no longer allowed in online pornography, leading critics and consumers of filth to conclude the new law targets female pleasure and BDSM.

It turns out Canada isn't so tolerant of BDSM either. While our laws don't single out any specific sex acts for eradication, they're not exactly friendly to violent porn, pro-dommes or consensual flogging either.

Our Criminal Code deems porn obscene if crime, horror, cruelty, or violence is a dominant characteristic. Canadian customs agents have the right to seize smut they deem distasteful. If you pay to get spanked, technically you're paying for sex, and the new Bill C-36, which targets sex work, has that on lockdown. And as for everyday BDSM, Canadians can't legally consent to serious bodily harm.

Miztress Tia's clients want her to spank them until they cry, and the professional dominatrix obliges. "They're asking me, so as far as I'm concerned, if you're asking me to do something, it's consensual," she said. "I ask, 'Well, what do you know about this? Do you know the risks?'"

Every aspect of the pain she inflicts is carefully planned in advance. "This is all consensual. It's talked about, it's discussed. What will you agree to? How hard can I hit you? If I break skin, is that OK?"

She uses a traffic light system of safe words: green means go, red means stop, and yellow is a caution—"OK, I enjoy the spanking, but that last one was a little too much."

But no matter how carefully planned, it's not legally possible to consent to the infliction of bodily harm "unless the accused is acting in the course of a generally approved social purpose when inflicting the harm," the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in 1995.

BDSM doesn't count, the court decided. Even if consent to bodily harm—flogging with a belt, in this case—was given, this "could not detract from the inherently degrading and dehumanizing nature of the conduct."

"Although the law must recognize individual freedom and autonomy, when the activity in question involves pursuing sexual gratification by deliberately inflicting pain upon another that gives rise to bodily harm, then the personal interest of the individuals involved must yield to the more compelling societal interests which are challenged by such behaviour," the court found.

This somewhat antiquated interpretation of consent leaves Miztress Tia in a legal bind, and Canada's new law governing sex work further ties her hands. She decided to suspend her business recently as a result of Bill C-36, which criminalizes her clients for soliciting a spanking.

"Am I considered a sex worker if I'm not penetrated by a penis?" she mused.

Tia is also toying with the idea of appearing in domme porn with other women, but she would need to be careful there, too. According to our law, "any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex, or of sex and any one or more of the following subjects, namely, crime, horror, cruelty and violence, shall be deemed to be obscene."

Possession of obscene porn "involving violence or cruelty intermingled with sexual activity" is not protected by free speech and the owner could be slapped with a massive fine, as in this 1992 case. Customs agents can also confiscate BDSM porn at the border.

That said, kinksters shouldn't worry too much about fines or jail time for watching BDSM porn or consensually whipping their partners. Yes, there are enforceable laws on the books against violent porn and BDSM sex, but law professor Karen Busby, who has researched this area of law, says the courts haven't prosecuted these cases since before the internet came into existence.

"Theoretically, police could prosecute for BDSM activity if it caused bodily harm, like candling or burning or cutting or whipping," she said. "In theory they could prosecute, but they haven't. In theory they could prosecute for BDSM imagery, but they're not. And Canada Customs is still on the books, and they could seize materials, but they don't."

There are a few exceptions. Erotically asphyxiating your partner is illegal and highly likely to be prosecuted, Busby notes. Not only could it result in death, but it's also difficult, if not impossible, to establish ongoing consent while preventing oxygen from reaching your partner's brain.

"You've got to have a way of withdrawing consent," she explains. "You've got to have clear, ongoing consent, and of course if you've got something as sophisticated as a traffic light signal then you're fine. The simple way of saying it is, you've got to be able to say no."

And to answer Miztress Tia's question of whether whipping constitutes sex work—yes, it does. The courts have previously prosecuted BDSM in the sex trade, Busby says. "If I was a betting woman, I would say they would do it again in the future."

The way Canadian law applies to BDSM is almost as ridiculous as the UK's new porn laws and should be adjusted, pro-domme Tia believes. "It goes back to what happens in the bedroom is none of the government's damn business," she says.

Follow Hilary on Twitter.

The VICE Reader: 'Becoming Richard Pryor' Is a Nuanced Biography of a Comedy Icon Who Once Lit Himself on Fire

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[body_image width='1000' height='665' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='interview-with-scott-saul-author-of-the-new-biography-becoming-richard-pryor-124-body-image-1419007164.jpg' id='12883']

Pryor in a crucifixion pose for his first album's cover shoot. Image courtesy of Henry Diltz and Harper Collins

Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor comes just a little over a year after another fine biography on the iconic comedian, Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him (Algonquin, 2013). But the world can always use another book on Pryor—he was one of the most important stand-ups of all time, and his influence on both his time and ours is unmatched—and in any case Saul's may be the best, most complete look at the comic's life.

On top of interviews with his half-sisters, companion Patricia Heitman, and friends like director Henry Jaglom—who hadn't opened up to other interviewers in the past—Saul had "hundreds of hours of conversations" with people Pryor had less salient relationships with, such as neighbors from his hometown in the red-light district of Peoria, Illinois. (Famously, he grew up in a brothel.) The biography also comes with a complementary, interactive website that includes a curated archive of Saul's research if readers want to take an even deeper dive into the material.

While there will inevitably be several more Pryor biographies published in the future, few will be as nuanced as Becoming Richard Pryor. I talked by email with Saul about what makes his biography special, debunking popular myths about the comedian's life, and what Pryor would say if he were alive to see what's become of Bill Cosby.

[body_image width='1000' height='1212' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='interview-with-scott-saul-author-of-the-new-biography-becoming-richard-pryor-124-body-image-1419007154.jpg' id='12882']Pryor onstage at Caesar's Palace in August 1968. Image courtesy of the author

VICE: What makes your book different from the earlier biographies of Pryor? Scott Saul: Pryor lived much of his life in the shadows of history, whether that was because, as a child, he was growing up in a red-light district or, as an adult, hunkering down in underground circles. Given that Pryor is such a huge figure in American comedy and American culture more generally, it was amazing to me how little had been done previously in terms of researching his life's major figures and episodes.

Take the example of his grandmother Marie, the woman he called "Mama." We knew her through the eyes of her grandson, but no one had tried to reconstruct how this poor black girl, a teenage bride abused by her husband, evolved into a formidable woman who defended herself and her grandson with straight razors and guns and changed the temperature of every room she entered. (I found my answer by poring through five different newspapers from Decatur, Illinois, her hometown.)

Or, take Pryor's exile in Berkeley in the early 1970s. We knew what Pryor had testified in his memoir—that he'd experimented there with his act like never before—but we didn't know what these experiments looked or sounded like, or how they related to the swirl of Black Power and the counterculture that he found in the city. (I got those answers in the eight hours of unreleased recordings that his Berkeley roommate let me listen to—and in underground newspapers like The Berkeley Barb.)

Or even take the writing of Blazing Saddles. Other biographers name-checked Pryor as a screenwriter, but no one had looked at the first draft of the screenplay for traces of how he'd concretely shaped it. In all of this, my goal was to show how Pryor was traveling through history and, eventually, changing history through the force of his imagination.

In addition to my archival research, I also engaged in hundreds of hours of conversations with people who'd known Pryor in some fashion—whether they'd shared a crib with him in Peoria, Illinois, had written a movie with him, or had tried to build a life with him. They were fascinating to talk to, spilling over with stories about their time with the ever-memorable Richard. A lot of these folks—like his half-sisters, or his Greenwich Village buddy Henry Jaglom, or his companion Patricia Heitman—hadn't talked at length with any previous biographer.

Why do you think they opened up to you in particular?
I think that partly I just got lucky. Since Pryor himself was no longer alive when I started the project, they were more inclined to feel free to speak their truth. But I think that they also sensed that I was approaching Pryor with an appreciation for the complexity and power of his story—that I wasn't approaching it sensationally.

You've pointedly titled your biography Becoming Richard Pryor , and cut it off at the point where you believe Pryor has evolved into the comedian of his best work. Can you talk about when this was exactly, and why you chose that point for your cut-off?
The book is called Becoming Richard Pryor because a lot of the beauty of Pryor's story is that he was in love with becoming—in love with experimenting as a comedian and an actor and, even, as a person in his daily life and in his relationships. So my focus is on that drama of development: How did a skinny black kid, abused from all sides and with few career paths open to him, become the fearless performer who revolutionized American comedy? The quick answer is that he did it through great struggle: His life was full of blockages and breakthroughs.

To my mind, the final great breakthrough is Pryor's Live in Concert, which came out of a stand-up tour that coincided with the death of his grandmother. That moment in 1978 is both the clinching moment of my tale— Live in Concert is the pinnacle of his achievement as a comedian who told the story of his life onstage—and the beginning of a new, and far more sobering, story. His grandmother was the central figure in his life. After she died in 1978, he spun into a depression that led him to become addicted to freebase and, eventually, to set himself on fire. And after the fire, he was a different artist: still deft and capable of hilarious moves in his comedy, but more guarded and risk-averse. I handle his life after 1978 in an epilogue, but the fascinating (and less understood) part of Pryor's life is, I think, what happened up to that point.

[body_image width='503' height='364' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='interview-with-scott-saul-author-of-the-new-biography-becoming-richard-pryor-124-body-image-1419007849.png' id='12885']

Marie Carter Bryant, Richard Pryor's grandmother, with her son, Dickie, in 1945. Image courtesy of Barbara McGee

You've put together a very sophisticated web site, impressively exhaustive and elaborate, to accompany the book's publication. It stands as a monument of research in its own right. Can you talk about what went into the creation of this site and what your ambitions for it were?
In order to tell the first part of Pryor's story, the story of a childhood spent in the red-light district of Peoria, I needed to be able to set Pryor and his family in a larger context. I had a lot of questions buzzing in my head: What was Peoria's vice district like? What kinds of schools did Richard go to? What sort of clubs did he perform in? And what kinds of audiences did he find there?

But there was no solid historical study of Peoria, so basically I had to do a great deal of that research myself. By the end of that process, I'd amassed what was to me a remarkable cache of materials: personal documents like Pryor's school records and his family's photo albums; the legal records of his parents (including their divorce papers); and a lot of more wide-ranging stuff that dealt with the history of segregation and desegregation in the city, and the fate of its red-light district.

My solution was to build a website that would be a curated archive of my research. So I assembled a team with a great number of diverse talents: in web design, coding, writing, even filmmaking (we made a short film about Pryor's childhood).

Since you debunk other popular perceptions about Pryor's life, I want to ask if you believe his time spent in Berkeley in the 70s really was the complete pivot we believe it to be?
I think Pryor's time in Berkeley did open up his style as a performer in a crucial way. It was in Berkeley that he first experimented with being unfunny, whether that meant being tonally perplexing or politically scathing. It was in Berkeley that his work really took on a new fearlessness: He didn't seem to care whether his audience followed him on his wayward path or not. So although the creative emanations of his Berkeley period (with the big exception of the transcendent "Wino and Junkie" sketch) did not ever see the light of day during his prime, Berkeley did leave a huge impression on him.

Much of his best stuff, post-Berkeley, has something of Berkeley in it. It pushes at the boundary of what comedy can be, sometimes because of the razor-sharpness of its politics, sometimes because it's blending together emotions that don't go together easily.

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Pryor and Lonette McKee during the production of "Which Way Is Up?" Image courtesy of Marcia Reed

You say that Pryor's "self-understanding shifted" when he began performing characters. Can you talk about when that was and how that shift in self-understanding came about?
It was around 1972-73 that Pryor started thinking of himself as someone who loved throwing himself into character. He said that "being a character" was what made him "come alive"; he loved the feeling of "being in your conscious and subconscious at the same time." By 1972, he'd been experimenting with character-centered comedy for about four years, but starting at that point he comes to embrace the idea that he'll lose himself in character. And in losing himself in the flow of character, he gains enormously in power as an artist. The best of his acting—whether in stand-up or in his Hollywood films—comes out of his commitment to the integrity of that process.

We don't think of Pryor as much of a physical comedian, but you're very careful to give him his due as someone in total control of his facial gestures.
It's gratifying to me that you noticed that. To me, Pryor was a true virtuoso as a performer. It wasn't just that he was supremely inventive as a comic (though that's true), but that he was able to execute his ideas indelibly because of his gifts as a performer. He had great chops. His body was his most expressive medium—and had been since his earliest days as a performer, when his models were highly physical comedians like Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis. He layered on top of that physical grace all sorts of other gifts—gifts for storytelling, for political satire, for throwing himself into a character —but to me, his gifts as a physical comedian sit at the foundation of what he was able to achieve.

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Pryor in character. Image courtesy of Henry Diltz.

Pryor famously kept a single set of books, so to speak—his life and his work are nearly perfectly consonant. What do you think Pryor would have to say about Bill Cosby's double-entry bookkeeping having recently gone awry?
Pryor appreciated the finesse of Cosby as a storyteller onstage, but he was also allergic to sanctimony and excellent at sniffing out hypocrisy in American life. So Cosby's hypocrisy—how he browbeat working-class black people for their lack of morals while also drugging black women himself—would have rankled him, not least because he was cudgeling people with whom Pryor identified.

Pryor's strategy onstage was the opposite of Cosby's: Rather than posing as a model of authority (rock-solid fathers like Cliff Huxtable), Pryor was the perennial underdog, always on the verge of cracking up under pressures he couldn't handle. Rather than covering up his flaws, he dramatized them. Cosby's disgrace suggests that Pryor not only had the more profound artistic strategy—he may also have had a more sustainable way of living in the world.

Find out more about Becoming Richard Pryor and order a copy of the biography here.

Follow Lary Wallace on Twitter.

Wondering...: The Best Films That Appeared at Festivals in 2014

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The film awards season—that inflated,over-congratulatory period—is upon us, during which Oscar bait movies, of which there appear to be an inordinate number this year, are shoved down our throats until tears are driven from our eyes and the cockles of our hearts are forcibly warmed. I've already watched a number of these cinematic emoticons ( Birdman, Interstellar, The Theory of Everything), and I will likely see a few more, especially The Imitation Game, if only to assess how not gay enough it is. It's hard to believe that, once upon a time, off-the-wall, psychosexual masterpieces like A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, and Cries and Whispers were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Now you have overwrought period pieces like Unbroken, Selma, and Big Eyes to "look forward" to.

Not that great movies haven't come out in 2014—here is a list, in no particular order, of films I saw at festivals this year (some of which haven't yet been commercially released) which deserve your attention, even if not all of them were 100 percent successful.

  1. Foxcatcher. (Director: Bennett Miller.) From the director of Capote, here's another film about a real-life self-loathing homosexual who had a bizarre and self-destructive crush on a young, straight-identified, repressed (and self-loathing) homosexual, except this time around the murderer roles are reversed. The famous homosexual is John du Pont (Steve Carell), heir to the chemical fortune. His man-crush is Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum), a Olympic gold medal–winning wrestler whom he takes under his sickly white chicken wing as a protégé and potential cum-dump. The film is admirably direct and unflinching in its portrayal of homosexual panic and repression, although one could hardly call it the gay feel-good movie of the year. As du Pont, Carell is monumentally unctuous and creepy—the scene in which he offers the clueless Schultz cocaine in a helicopter is genuinely skin-crawling—and his prosthetic nose, like Nicole Kidman's before him, almost assures him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. But Tatum, as the stunned beau hunk sex victim, is equally impressive.
  2. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/AabCFCREVbQ' width='640' height='360']
  3. Girlhood. (Director: Celine Sciamma.) Tomboy director Sciamma returns with a cool, minimalist movie about four black girls struggling against patriarchy and poverty in the low-rent outskirts of Paris. In opposition to the usually chaotic and overwrought representation of ghetto life, the film creates a spare, sterile, almost expressionistic cityscape that you might expect more from a zombie film. One electrifying scene, however, has the four girl gang members dress up in stolen clothes and lip synch to Rhianna's "Diamonds," a viral YouTube moment if there ever was one. The girl who escapes and binds her breasts as a kind of symbolic protest against female objectification makes the feminist and proto-queer agenda of the film heart-achingly real.
  4. Whiplash. (Director: Damien Chazelle). This movie, about an aspiring jazz drummer's relationship to his brutal teacher, made a big splash at Sundance. I thought its message was crypto-fascist, and it felt like it was directed by a computer, but I suppose that's why people like it.
  5. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/vsFY0wHpR5o' width='640' height='360']
  6. Pride. (Director: Matthew Warchus.) This is the film upon which my jury and I bestowed the Queer Palm at Cannes this year. Based on the true story of a rag-tag group of queer activists who travel to Wales to support the National Union of Mineworkers during the crippling strike of 1984, it reminds us of a time when gay political consciousness was inseparable from leftist, egalitarian, and socialist values in opposition to the status quo—something that the contemporary gay assimilationist movement seems to have largely forgotten. Warchus, who has taken over the directorship of the Old Vic Theatre in London from Kevin Spacey, deftly sidesteps many of the clichéd characters and scenarios to create an uplifting film that you don't mind being lifted up by.
  7. Winter Sleep. (Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan.) Winner of the 2014 Palme D'Or, the top prize at Cannes, this three hour–plus opus about the everyday struggles of a secular Turkish former actor turned hotel owner and landlord is what I call a "Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man" movie, the prototype being Bertolucci's 1981 film of that name. Set in a bleak, remote small town in Central Anatolia, it concerns the midlife crisis of a slightly pompous and self-centered (if well-intentioned) man who is living with, but emotionally distant from, his frustrated young wife and his cynical, world-weary sister. Comprised mostly of his philosophical discussions with the proto-feminist yet defeated female characters and his ethical dilemmas in dealings with the pesky underclasses, it nonetheless revolves entirely around the crisis of a bourgeois, middle-aged white man, which makes it a slightly odd choice by the Jane Campion–led Cannes jury. Cultural differences aside, it makes me long for the feminist verve and sexual subversiveness of 70s Bertolucci.
  8. Two Days, One Night. (Directors: The Dardenne Brothers.) Also in competition at Cannes, I'm not sure why this great film received such a mixed reception on the Croisette. Dardennes fatigue might be one explanation, as the style of the Belgian brothers has become so refined that perhaps viewers find it too familiar and effortless. Or perhaps the expectation was that their casting for the first time of an A-list actor, Marion Cotillard, in the lead role would make for more "commercial" entertainment. Instead, Cotillard blends in completely with the social-realist, kitchen-sink ethos and aesthetics of the filmmakers. It's refreshing to see a film so resolutely fixated on the plight of a working-class female character. Like Winter Sleep, the film is about the dialectic between moral and ethical choices, but here the point of identification is with the exploited female worker, the camera doggedly following her and her emotional turmoil as she attempts to save her job at a solar panel factory. Thoroughly feminist, it's about survival in the face of corrupt managerial austerity and lingering institutional misogyny. A refreshing change from all the glossy real estate porn that female characters have been reduced to in contemporary Hollywood.
  9. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/Cs2dYAlbINY' width='640' height='360']
  10. Timbuktu. (Director: Abderrahmane Sissako.) Winner of the Ecunimical Jury Prize at Cannes, Timbuktu is an examination of the occupation of Mali by militant Islamic rebels, neatly capturing the irony of modern Jihadis using Western gadgets to make viral videos designed to throw neglected societies back to the Stone Age. The football-game-without-a-football, like Antonioni's tennis-game-without-a-tennis-ball in Blow-Up before it, symbolically sums up the absurdity and tragedy of revolutions stuck in reverse.
  11. Leviathan. (Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev.) One of my favorite films at TIFF, and the winner of the best screenplay at Cannes, Leviathan brilliantly captures all the absurdities and hypocrisies of post-Soviet Russia: the petty bureaucracy, the thuggish leadership (the film's amoral Mayor gives Toronto's own Rob Ford a run for his money), the bizarre marriage of convenience between the Orthodox church and leftover Communist-era hierarchies. The basic plot—about a homeowner refusing to give up his prime waterfront property and home to the city for the construction of a church—is filled out by scenes of vodka, guns, and adulterous sex, an impending sense of doom and dread waiting around every corner. As in House of Sand and Fog, the house is not merely a location, but a metaphor for the dissolution of identity and purpose; the central Leviathan metaphor suggests a society hopelessly swallowed up by the eternal return of its own corrupt history.
  12. Return to Ithaca. (Director: Laurent Cantet.) A kind of Boys in the Band for straight, white, middle-aged Cubans, I personally found this talky, single-location film riveting, but maybe that's because my husband is a Cubano who, like the characters in the film, suffered through all of the trials and tribulations of the "Special Period." What sadly emerges is a portrait of a disillusioned country with no direction and an unknown future.
  13. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/iOVDmHmisQw' width='640' height='360']
  14. Pasolini. (Director: Abel Ferrara.) Legendary Italian Marxist homosexual director, poet, and philosopher Pier Paolo Pasolini is a muscular subject for any filmmaker to confront, and Ferrara only succeeds in conveying those not inconsiderable aspects of Pasolini's life that intersect with his own: an Italian sense of moral density and Catholic atheism filtered through impulses of cinematic sexploitation and experimentalism. Although the film's broody design and Willem Dafoe's stylish performance in the title role capture the cool, cerebral chic of Pasolini's persona, the film in its entirety doesn't quite convey the kind of homosexual complexity embodied by the subject, characterized by Oedipal overdrive, macho masochism, camp spiritualism, and the godhead of working-class rent boys. (Although the casting of Pasolini's real-life muse Ninetto Davoli definitely helps.) By steering clear of the political conspiracy theories surrounding Pasolini's murder, Ferrara misses the opportunity to place Pasolini more adamantly in a long tradition of martyred, radical, homosexual geniuses.
  15. Tales of the Grim Reaper. (Director: Nick Broomfield.) From the director of Kurt and Courtney and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, this harrowing documentary explores the horrific true story of a black serial killer in South Central LA who was able to murder scores of crack whores over a period of decades owing to the indifference of police and a society that regards disenfranchised black communities, and its women in particular, as utterly disposable. Broomfield proves himself once again to be a fearless documentarian, bravely circumnavigating pit bulls and gangbangers alike to explore his subject, and enlisting a formidable and fearlessly funny, former crack addict female prostitute as his guide and proxy to tell this disturbing story.
  16. Hungry Hearts. (Director: Saverio Costanzo.) Or, We're Having a Rosemary's Baby! What seems to start out as a romantic comedy about a young couple expecting a child quickly turns into a vegan horror flick replete with fisheye lens shots of a demented young mother-at-the-top-of-the-stairs who starves her own baby by denying it meat. The tonal shifts are too sudden and broad, and do we really need two psychopathic mothers in one film? The hapless father and sole voice of reason in the film, played by actor-of-the-moment Adam Driver, is annoyingly wishy-washy.
  17. 99 Homes. (Director: Ramin Bahrani.) Another Hollywood it-boy, Andrew Garfield, fares much better in this indie drama about a single father evicted from his home who makes a Faustian bargain with the real estate baron who has evicted him (a suitably scary Michael Shannon) by accepting a job evicting other victims of the US foreclosure crisis. As with Two Days, One Night, it's almost disorienting to watch a movie made from the point of view of working-class people living paycheck to paycheck, and like the Dardennes, Bahrani deftly handles the moral quandaries and ethical challenges facing desperate people screwed over by austerity measures and corporate and governmental malfeasance.
  18. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/aA_ZHAs4M9k' width='640' height='360']
  19. The Look of Silence. (Director: Jonathan Oppenheimer.) An emotionally devastating follow-up to Oppenheimer's controversial documentary The Act of Killing, based on the same subject—the mass killing of Communists by Indonesian death squads in the 50s and 60s. This film may not have the conceptual and theatrical audacity of its predecessor, but its close identification with the victims of the genocide and their families makes it a logical and necessary cathartic sequel. The framing device of the brother of one of the victims using an opthalmologic device to check the eyesight of the killers—who still rule the same communities from which they culled the Communists—in order to provide them with glasses, is an apt and chilling metaphor for memory, perception, and distorted historical vision. His own eyes, as he listens to their casual, even proud, confessions of murder and torture, are unforgettable.
  20. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. (Director: Roy Andersson.) The Swedish director returns with the third installment of his trilogy about the zombie-like complacency and absurdity of the austere and frozen Nordic middle class. Comprised of a series of carefully composed and highly art-directed tableaux vivants, the film builds to a surprisingly savage critique of colonialism. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for good reason.
  21. The Revenge of the Green Dragons. (Directors: Andrew Lau and Andrew Loo.) A huge disappointment from the director of Infernal Affairs and fellow Hong Kong director Andrew Loo. The New York City setting fails to invigorate the Hong Kong action movie genre, and in fact seems to signal its complete exhaustion, coming across instead as a weak imitation of Scorsese, its executive producer. The scenarios and characters are all-too-familiar cliches; the casting and performances are uninspired. The teeth-pulling and finger amputations seem oddly stale and pedestrian when compared to, say, the perversely imaginative tortures and slayings in Takashi Miike's Japanese gangland movies. For a more entertaining film with the same story and setting, try Michael Cimino's slightly underrated Year of the Dragon.
  22. [vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/104221333?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=B30000' width='640' height='360']
  23. Dearest. (Director: Peter Ho-sun Chan.) Another film about about working-class characters, this time revolving around the rampant phenomenon of child abduction in China. Based on a true story, the film is overlong and somewhat melodramatic, but a twist halfway through, which shifts the focus of the narrative to the wife of the abductor, makes the scenario more morally complex and complicates the concept of nature over nurture in parenting.
  24. The Riot Club. (Director: Lone Scherfig.) An adaptation of Laura Wade's stage play, Posh about a secret society of privileged prats at Oxford University, the film comes across as a creepy cross between Brideshead Revisited and a reverse Straw Dogs. The elitist, conservative young tossers, based on a real-life society called the Bullingdon Club, of which UK Prime Minister David Cameron was a member, descend on a quaint English pub run by a working-class Scotsman and wreak havoc on his property and person. Had this film been released in Scotland before the referendum, the country would have surely voted for independence.
  25. The New Girlfriend. (Director: Francois Ozon.) Based on a Ruth Rendell mystery (of all things), the French gay auteur returns with a stylish, Hitchcock-and-De Palma-inspired, psychosexual cross-dressing yarn infused with a generous dollop of Almodovarian melodrama. Although it still reads as slightly heteronormative, especially coming from a gay director, there are enough gender twists and turns to keep it interesting.
  26. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/KaTTr5-JmuU' width='640' height='360']
  27. The Duke of Burgundy. (Director: Peter Strickland.) Here's a lesbian fetish epic from British filmmaker Strickland, whose first "proper" job in the film industry was as a production assistant on my 1999 neo-Nazi porn film, Skin Flick! A lavishly photographed, subtly subversive, avant-garde work about the perils of perversion, the film archly exposes the banality and conventionality of sadomasochism without sacrificing feminist-charged sexual empowerment. It's Fifty Shades of Grey for intellectual lesbians and their admirers.
  28. Mommy. (Director: Xavier Dolan.) At 24, the Quebec gay wunderkind, who tied for third prize with Godard this year at Cannes, proves definitively with Mommy that he's an international filmmaking force to be reckoned with. A turbulent, formally brilliant melodrama about the relationship between a mother, her ADD-inflicted son, and her repressed best friend and neighbor, the movie also packs an emotional wallop. This is Canada's 2014 entry for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
  29. Party Girl. (Directors: Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq, Claire Burger, and Samuel Theis.) A great, simple narrative film shot in hand-held, cinema verite style about an aging nightclub hostess who decides to get married and settle down, with disastrous results. This won the Golden Camera for Best First Feature at Cannes.
  30. [youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/ysdz5A-fszY' width='640' height='360']
  31. A Girl at My Door. (Director: July Jung.) This strong first feature by Korean director Jung follows the exploits of a young lesbian alcoholic policewoman who takes over as the head of a police substation in a remote seaside town only to have a past scandal come back to haunt her. Moody, morose, and strangely compelling.
  32. Misunderstood (a.k.a. Incompresa). (Director: Asia Argento.) After her first two features as a director: Scarlet Diva, an underrated sex comedy, and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, her adaptation of the late J.T. Leroy's book of short stories, Asia Argento returns with her most accomplished and ravishing film, a semi-autobiographical work based on her own turbulent childhood as the daughter of the famous Italian horror director Dario Argento and his actress wife Daria Nicolodi. Working wonders with child actors, Argento makes a big step forward with this beautifully made, emotionally vivid film about a young girl surviving in a complicated adult world.

An Interview with a Guy Who Lived Underwater for 31 Days for Science

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Fabien Cousteau in Aquarius. Photo by Kip Evans

We all watched The Little Mermaid as kids and prayed that one day we'd sprout a tail and fins so we could join the magical world at the bottom of the ocean. In reality, for a human, spending extended periods of time at the bottom of the ocean means living in a claustrophobic pressurized box, chowing down on some freeze-dried food, and trying to stave off infection because of all the moisture in the air.

In June this year, as part of his project Mission 31, Fabien Cousteau and his team of six went to live in an undersea laboratory called Aquarius for 31 days, breaking a world record. Aquarius is the world's only underwater marine laboratory. It's located nine miles off the coast of the Florida Keys, and 63 feet beneath the sea.

Living underwater allowed the team to squeeze three years' worth of science into just over a month. The project illuminated some amazing new revelations about life underwater, soon to be published in a series of 12 scientific papers. Fabien thinks the ocean may hold the answers we've been looking for—cures for diseases like cancer and Ebola, and a whole realm of different species and resources we've never even imagined.

The ocean runs in Fabien's blood. His grandfather was the famous scientific explorer Jacques Cousteau, and Fabien believes that one day humans may be able to spend long periods of time comfortably living at the bottom of the sea. I called him up for a chat about his underwater adventures.

VICE: Your first scuba dive was when you were just four years old. Your grandfather strapped a custom-made scuba tank to your back and sent you off into the Mediterranean. That's pretty crazy.
Fabien Cousteau: Not as a four-year-old. It felt quite natural, actually. We feel it's crazy when we're older, but when you're a child you haven't learned fear yet. It all started one day before my fourth birthday. My parents' friend was sitting at the bottom of the pool with a scuba tank, reading the newspaper—we have some crazy family friends. I was curious as to what he was doing, so I put on a mask and my little fin and went down to the bottom of the pool, just breath-holding. He gave me his regulator and we started buddy-breathing. We sat down there for 20 minutes practicing [breathing techniques], and it just felt normal.

It caught my parents' attention, and so a week later off we went to Catalina Island, where I went scuba-diving in the ocean for the first time. It was on my fourth birthday. That was really how it started—it started very organically.

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Fabien getting into Troy. Photo courtesy of Fabien Cousteau

Let's talk about your project before Mission 31. Can you tell us a little bit about Troy, the shark-shaped submarine?
I remembered that a childhood comic book series that I loved, Tintin, had this brilliant idea: to disguise oneself as a shark. So I thought why not bring my childhood fantasy to life? Also, on a scientific and observation level I thought, How cool is that?—to be able to camouflage oneself and quite literally mingle with the planet's most feared creature and see what they do when we're not around.

How did you make it?
I wanted the submarine to be flexible because I wanted to be able to swim like a fish, which, technologically and engineering-wise, is a difficult thing to mimic. Second, it had to be stealthy. It had to look exactly like a shark and move like a shark, and it had to be camouflaged in a way that other sharks would potentially see as one of them. We ended up using materials that aren't built for submarines. Lexan is a kind of plastic bulletproof resistant substance that is flexible enough that we could build a spine out of it, and then we used stainless steel ribs for shape and protection and then finally a sheath around it that was made of Inflex, which is a material that people use for prosthetic limbs to mimic skin. I spent three and a half years and four months on site diving every single day with the submarine.

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A young Fabien and his grandfather, Jacques Costeau. Photo by Anne-Marie Cousteau

You had a couple of hairy moments, right?
It was more than a couple. One of the most difficult scenarios happened at night. I wanted to see what sharks did late at night when we aren't around. I went out in the submarine and had—in theory—connections to the surface, to my team. The reality was that it didn't work so well, so not only did I lose contact with my team, but I lost it at the worst possible moment: during feeding time in a shark-feeding zone a mile away from the ship. And then the submarine's propulsion went out. I was alone in the dark at about 80 feet below the surface and 200 miles from shore. I had two choices: to either anchor the submarine and get out—mind you, this is a wet sub, so I'm in scuba gear, in a re-breather—and scuba dive, or swim to an island, probably about 200 yards away, or float it to the surface and hope that I wouldn't get swept away into the Pacific forever.

None of the options was really all that great, but the first was probably the better one, so that's what I chose to do. I anchored the submarine to the bottom and swum along the bottom of the ocean to the island. That was probably the least confident I had ever been scuba-diving. As I was swimming, trying to get to shore as quickly as possible without raising any alarm bells to the predators at large, I came nose to nose with a giant bull elephant seal—there was only about ten feet of visibility in the murky water. It was a very scary moment. These animals are huge, probably several thousand pounds. He and I spooked the hell out of each other. That was probably a moment we are both going to remember for the rest of our lives.

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Aquarius. Photo by Kip Evans

Let's get on to Mission 31. What were the main physical effects and challenges of living underwater for so long?
When you first get into the habitat, which is the only one of its kind in the world, you notice that the air is thicker, heavier to breathe. We were at three atmospheres of pressure, so the air is kind of syrupy. You're in a small enclosed environment, something about the size of a school bus, about 43 feet long and nine feet wide, and it's packed full of equipment, so the hallways are about two feet wide. And you're there with six people for 31 days. Between the psychological effects of the small environment and the physical effects of the air, it's not a place you would want to be claustrophobic in.

The pressure at that depth does play with your senses. You lose your sense of smell and taste. You still feel pressure waves from the surface, so when there's a big storm it's almost like a plunger, because a habitat, as opposed to a submarine, is open to the environment. Imagine a submarine is like an airplane: it's one atmosphere of pressure; no matter what depth you're at, you're in a capsule, segregated from the environment. The whole point of being in a habitat is that you're immersed in the environment, and to be able to do that you have to create an atmospheric pressure inside the habitat that is the same as the atmospheric pressure outside. Meaning that anything outside, for example swells or a storm or what have you, you're going to feel at the bottom of the ocean.

What are the benefits of a habitat opposed to a submarine?
It meant that any time we wanted to commute to work we just had to don our scuba gear and walk down the stairs into the water and swim off. The most valuable asset is the luxury of time. As a saturated diver [your body has already taken on the different pressures and you're at total equilibrium with the bottom] we can go off to our jobs in our aquatic backyard for as long as we want. I could go out and dive for 12 hours if I wanted to, which isn't feasible from the surface.

That's really the point of Mission 31, being able to go longer, deeper, and farther. We did three and half years of science in 31 days. We also had modern technology, which allowed us to communicate in real time through Skype from the bottom of the ocean directly into the classroom. In fact I had better Wi-Fi at the bottom of the ocean than I do in New York City. We were able to reach more than 70,000 students on all six continents. We even talked to a scientist in Antarctica at one point.

At the moment Aquarius is the only underwater marine habitat and lab in the world. In the future could we colonize the ocean floor? Could people live for long stretches, or even permanently, at the bottom of the sea?
That was my grandfather's dream. Could we build the real life Atlantis? Could we do a network of those? I, for one, believe that we can, technologically speaking. Physiologically, we can certainly spend an extended amount of time underwater, but the challenges aren't dissimilar to space travel and exploration: missing family and friends and being in an environment that our species isn't familiar with.

Something I haven't mentioned before is the problem of infection underwater. Because of the humidity and atmospheric pressures, infection does tend to run rampant and is faster-acting on our bodies, so we have to keep them in check. With that in mind, provided that those challenges are taken into consideration and dealt with, I do think that we could—not indefinitely, but for extended periods of time—live under water. That could be for six months or even a year, maybe more.

Without letting the cat out the bag, I'm actually working with a couple of universities to envision and maybe even build the first underwater city or village. Aquarius is old. It's a legacy and it's a dinosaur because it's the only one of its time. What I envision the next underwater habitat to be is something akin to a self-sustaining village. An underwater platform where you have vehicles, where you grow your own food, where you harvest your own energy at the bottom of the sea.

Could you have underwater bars?
Well, exactly. Joking aside, you're actually right. It's important to create something that we're familiar with, because the more familiar we are with our surroundings, the more comfortable we are and the longer we could stay there.

What did you miss the most?
My dog and the wine. I think that being French might have had something to do with it, but also food. It is nice to have fresh food again. Morning noon and night we were eating freeze-dried foods. Because of the partial pressures of oxygen, cooking with open flame was not an option. The only way we could feed ourselves was through hot water or the microwave.

Could people grow fresh food under the sea?
Oh, certainly. Aquaponics for one. Growing vegetables in a no-earth atmosphere, where they grow just simply from having their roots suspended in a water solution. You can grow lettuce... you can grow all sorts of vegetables.

And ceviche?
Well, yeah, if done sustainably, there is a possibility to harvest local animals and sea life, absolutely.

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Scientific testing and research. Photo by Kip Evans

What did you discover that you didn't know before? Did you add to our knowledge about the ocean?
Absolutely. There are going to be 12 new science papers based on climate-related issues. I can't divulge any information as the papers haven't come out yet. I wish I could, but my scientists would be very upset with me so I have to say stay tuned, unfortunately. But we can promise some exciting revelations to come: some things that no one has ever seen, thought of, or understood until now—whether it be from the dynamics of the cold water upwellings, to the depletion of predators, to pollution issues that have infiltrated certain animals in the coral reefs that we depend on for food. There are some very profound repercussions we've discovered that we've never known before. It's very exciting.

The underwater world represents over 99 percent of the planet's living space, where 93 percent of biodiversity lives. We have explored less than 5 percent of it. What else could there be out there?
Oh my gosh. New resources, new cures for diseases that we're facing including Ebola or cancer, new species... the list goes on and on. Just imagine what we dream of when we look into space exploration, the kinds of things that we are expecting to be discovered. I would that say that, in the short term anyway, the ocean will offer more than that. It's mind blowing. I think there are discoveries for the next several generations out there.

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Fires on Manitoba’s First Nations Reserves Underscore a Serious Housing Crisis

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St. Theresa Point First Nation in Manitoba. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

An ongoing inquest into the deaths of three children and one adult in house fires on northern reserves in 2011 exposed disturbing details about the housing crisis many Manitoba First Nations are faced with to this day.

Chief David McDougall told the inquest that not only is St. Theresa Point First Nation unable to afford fire inspections for the homes on the reserve, but even if they could, "to inspect those units would mean removing everyone from their homes. We don't have the money to accommodate them."

In St. Theresa Point First Nation, in January 2011, two-month-old Errabella Harper died in a house fire that started in a chimney. In God's Lake First Nation two months later, Demus James and his grandchildren, three-year-old Kayleigh Okemow and two-year-old Throne Kirkness, died after a space heater set fire to their home.

As if the tragic situation weren't dire enough, the inquest was told that neither First Nation was equipped to properly fight the fires in the first place. At the time of the fires in 2011, St. Theresa Point's fire truck was broken, and God's Lake didn't even have a fire truck.

Instead, the Canadian Press reported that "neighbours fought the flames in vain with buckets of water they carried from the community's fire trucks and low-pressure hoses similar to garden hoses." And apparently these two situations are actually quite common, with almost one third of Manitoba First Nations without fire trucks and 39 percent without a fire-hall. It was also reported that "although fires on reserves make up less than five percent of all fires in Manitoba, they account for up to half the fatalities."

Perhaps most disturbing of all is that for those following the housing crisis plaguing many First Nations, these "revelations" are old news.

The housing crisis on Manitoba First Nations has been making headlines for years. In 2011, 300 families in Sandy Bay First Nation, a community of 3,200, were on a waiting list for housing. That same year, the Winnipeg Free Press ran a special investigation titled "No Running Water" that exposed many southern Manitobans to the obstacles many northern First Nations face daily—which included lack of potable water, black mould infestations, poor sanitation and overcrowded housing, among others—for the first time. And yet, since then, not much has changed for many communities.

"This is a completely typical situation," Niigaanwewidam Sinclair, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, told VICE over an evening coffee in downtown Winnipeg. "Why is it that First Nations don't have a fire truck for a community of 4,000 people? Why were people sitting with a garden hose from their house trying to put out this fire?

"We currently exist in a country where there are so many emergency situations on First Nations," Sinclair continued. "When you have situations like St. Theresa Point, Lake St. Martin, Chemawawin Cree at Easterville, Sayise Dene, my own community of Peguis is flooded every year, Sagkeeng's flooded every year. And I'm just talking Manitoba! It is abhorrent."

Funding for First Nations comes by way of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, a department of the federal government. AANDC provides annual funding to the Aboriginal Firefighters' Association of Canada to the tune of $215,000 annually.

"First Nation communities are responsible for developing fire management plans and determining their priorities for fire protection services such as purchasing equipment," a representative for AANDC's Manitoba Region wrote VICE in a statement. "We know that education and awareness play an integral role in fire safety. We will continue to work with First Nation communities and organizations like the Aboriginal Firefighters Association of Canada to support fire protection on reserve."

"I'd say the responsibility for this lands pretty squarely on the federal government," Peter Kulchyski, head of the department of Native Studies, told VICE. "They've underfunded reserves for year and years and year, and housing is the place where push has come to shove."

"If there's one universal problem on First Nations, it's housing," Sinclair agreed. "First Nations put aside money for education, money for health, then they're left with money to build, say, seven homes. But it turns out they need 104."

"Reserves have limited budgets, and long waiting lists for housing," Kulchyski explained. "They make the budget stretch as far as they can, and sometimes that means buying trailers, or 'mobile modular units.'"

It should be noted that trailers, built in the south and transported thousands of kilometers on Manitoba highways and secondary roads. While these trailers may be "the most cost effective housing units" available to First Nations, often they not built or properly insulated to withstand northern winters, and can be damaged during transportation.

"Every community make choices," Sinclair said. "Choices come from opportunity. It's the opportunity, really, that's lacking. A lot of First Nations know what they want, but don't have the resources to fill that need. As a result, they're making tough choices, like not doing fire inspections on their homes."

David Schafter, Manitoba's fire chief, was the inquest's final witness Thursday. According to CTV, he told the inquest that "regular, informal inspections" could be done on northern reserves, which would highlight fire hazards and other "easy fixes," as opposed to "official" inspections that he feared would lead to mass evictions.

With the results of the inquest expected by the end of the week, will its final report be just another heartbreaking account of hardships faced by Manitoba First Nations? Or will it lead to positive change?

"This thing is just so sick, and so indicative of a chronically broken system," Sinclair told VICE. "This relationship cannot be fixed overnight. But committing to a truly equitable relationship with First Nations means a radical overhaul to the country. The very fabric of the country is broken."

"Canada is a house, it's not an apartment building," Sinclair concluded. "And the thing about a house, if you have one room that's infested with whatever, broken down, has mould, it's the entire house that's condemned, not just that room. And that's the situation we find ourselves in now. Canada is a condemnable state."

Follow Sheldon on Twitter.

A Marketing Executive Paid Me to Run His Online Dating Profiles

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Illustrations by Adam Waito.

The first job I ever had in my adult life was boring as shit. In my early twenties, I decided that my future career would be in the wild world of marketing, so I got a job doing SEO and writing copy for a Canadian company worth billions of dollars. Their money came from providing a specific type of software to very niche industries for tens of thousands of dollars. The job was lucrative, but frustratingly tedious. To break up the monotony, I would often take small breaks and walk around the office, getting acquainted with the flurry of executives that populated the sprawling workspace.

One of the executives, whose office I wandered into one day, worked in sales. His name was Tim. After some time, the conversation between us turned to one of the three most popular subjects in office life: women, sports, and weather. Tim confided that he was having trouble in the romance department, and how difficult it was for him to meet potential partners since he worked almost constantly. Since he was in his late 40s, Tim was out of touch with the internet and the solutions it afforded men like him. He had never heard of online dating, and was hesitant about the idea of meeting strangers off the internet. He still thought of the process as similar to answering an ad in a newspaper, where he would have to read a block of text a person posted online, and then correspond with the anonymous stranger until they agreed to meet in real life with the hopes that neither of them was grossly disfigured, or a psychopath.

Tim had never heard of OKCupid, the free online dating site that matched you with potential dates based on your answer to fun personality quizzes. I explained the concept to him, and while he was interested, he said that this sounded like too much to manage in addition to all of his important business work. A lightbulb went off inside my head: I told Tim that I had a solution, offering to act as his own personal, online Cyrano de Bergerac.

We agreed that I would create and run his account, corresponding with whichever women we managed to charm and setting up the dates for him. I would act as a sort of personal assistant, scheduling his nights in his calendar and providing what was essentially a cue card with all the most pertinent information: like where these women worked, what they did for fun, and a few random facts for him to sprinkle through the conversation so it would look like he was paying attention to their online banter. We agreed on a standard rate for each plateau he achieved with a date: I'd received $25 for every completed date, $100 if they ended up having sex, $200 if it led to a real relationship, $5,000 for an engagement, and $10,000 for marriage.

Tim was not attractive by any means. His nickname around the office was Shrek, and it was one that he embraced regularly. He was short, bald, lumpy, and didn't know how to dress. The task of creating an online profile for him was gargantuan, so the only possible solution I could come up with was to frame the focus in the truth: he had a lot of money, and not a lot of time. He was a very important man who didn't have time for a social life, and was now looking for someone to share his time and riches with. I must have used the word "executive" over a dozen times in his profile. After a few hours of writing and re-writing, and uploading the only three pictures that existed of Tim in a suit, the profile was complete.

[body_image width='1280' height='787' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='a-marketing-executive-paid-me-to-run-his-online-dating-profiles-924-body-image-1419022993.jpeg' id='12978']Anyone who has used OKCupid knows that the brunt of your success hinges on how compatible your score is with the other party. Your score is calculated as a result of personality quizzes that suss out your true intentions and character traits. I completed this as best I could, using the knowledge I gleaned from conversations I had with Tim and what I observed him doing in the office. I knew that he was looking for a long-term relationship (that would hopefully, for my sake, result in marriage) and that he was allergic to most pets, because those things came up in conversation.

I answered the questions to reflect that he was spiritual but pragmatic, as a Jewish Kabbalah practitioner who still believed in cold calling at random to sell thousands of dollars in software. He was charitable but reserved, something that I observed when he would come into the office on random days with breakfast for the staff of 50 before retreating into his office, not to be seen again until 5 o'clock when he waved goodbye for the night. Slowly, I pieced together a comprehensive portrait of a man who I spoke to for less than an hour in a professional setting.

It was easier than I expected to successfully start conversations with women online as Tim. Although he was objectively cosmetically challenged, women seemed to respect the fact that he was looking for something serious and was ready to settle down. Most of the women were in their late 30s and were receptive to Tim's purposefully corny messages, and the majority of women who engaged with Tim online accepted Tim's request for a date within five to six back and forth messages. After the first day, Tim's calendar had four appointments spanning the rest of the week and the weekend.

The first date was apparently terrible. She was a substitute teacher that was looking for someone to help her parent her six-year old, a fact that I mistakenly forgot to ask about and include in Tim's notes. He wasn't happy, giving me an earful when he called me at 10 PM after he dropped her off at home. The second date went better, as they went out for an expensive steak dinner before visiting a strip club to get each other lapdances, before going home separately. Tim had fun, but it was apparent that she had simply used him for a night out, courtesy of his American Express. The third date proved to be the best one. She was an art collector in her early 40s who turned out to own a sex swing in her downtown condominium, a fact that Tim regaled to me as he proudly filled me in on Monday morning.

Eventually, I would go on to get another job, but when I met with Tim two years later, he told me the good news. He had apparently gotten engaged with Ms. Sex Swing, and would be tying the knot the following year. I congratulated him and casually reminded him about the deal we had made almost three years prior. Red faced at his forgetfulness, Tim apologized and wrote me a cheque for $5,000 on the spot, proving that I managed to get the "charitable" part right when it came to those quizzes. The marriage never ended up happening for reasons that are unknown to me, but as far as I see it, it's for the best. If Tim could go on to get engaged at least two more times before finally getting married, I might be able to afford a down payment for a downtown condominium of my own, albeit without a sex swing.

Whenever I tell this story to my friends, they always jokingly refer to me as being some sort of e-pimp. I never saw it like that. The women on the other end didn't know they weren't talking to Tim, but as long as I wasn't grossly misrepresenting his character, why did it matter? On the internet nobody knows you're a dog. Or a cat. Or a potato. Or a young marketer looking to make a few extra dollars.

Follow Slava on Twitter.

Are You Totally Screwed If Your Parents Aren’t Married?

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The world's most famous unconventional family—a mother, her son, and a man who decided to raise her kid as his own. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

It's really easy to blame things on your parents. Your widow's peak, passive-aggressive tendencies, weirdly shaped eyebrows—are all things you probably inherited from mom and dad. (Thanks, guys!) It's also easy to blame them for your psychological failings, especially if your parents aren't together. There's been a whole slew of research this year about how unmarried parents fuck up their children: Kids raised by non-married parents have been found to make less money, they have emotional and behavioral problems twice as often, they're even supposedly more likely to be fat.

This month a new study from Princeton and Harvard, which explored "what happens to children of unmarried mothers," found that more than half of all children would live with a single mom at some point. "The absence of a biological father increases the likelihood that a child will exhibit antisocial behaviors like aggression, rule-breaking and delinquency,"summarized a press release. "This finding—which holds true regardless of a child's race—is especially prevalent among young boys. As a result, these children are 40 percent less likely to finish high school or attend college." Well, that's not very good! Should we get all these women married off?

Dr. Paula Fomby, who studies family instability at the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center, confirms that children whose biological parents are married do see benefits in health, school performance, social behavior, and even wealth. "But if you star to unpack that," Fomby added, "you'll find that there are some pretty systematic explanations for why those patterns occur."

It works like this: Children do better in households where their parents are wealthier and more loving, and those households happen to be correlated with married people. Marriage today is a self-selecting institution, Fomby explained—people who get married tend to be older, better educated, and have higher incomes than those who decide not to tie the knot. So if your parents are married, then you're also more likely to be in a family unit that has more resources, which obviously helps your mental wellbeing as a kid. Family structure doesn't really have anything to do with it.

OK, so marital status doesn't really matter. But I wondered if there was some truth to the idea that single parenting, specifically, screws kids up. Fomby explained that living in a two-income household makes it easier to afford things that contribute to childhood success (like education, for example), and other resources—time, parental involvement, love—are also more plentiful when there are two people raising a child. But you don't have to be married, or even in a romantic relationship, to reap that two-person benefit; having grandparents, aunts, uncles, or even older siblings around helps, too. (Not that anyone needs a professor to tell them that.)

Another thing that positively affects childhood outcomes is family stability—basically, whether or not your family structure changes, and how many times. If your parents divorce, then remarry, then divorce again, that's a lot of instability, which can contribute to things like developmental delays. But if your parents were never married and they stay single throughout your childhood, that's considered extremely stable.

What's interesting about that is that it debunks the idea that single parenting is always worse. "It's not to say that there isn't some effect of residing with a single parent," cautioned Fomby, "but that we should question the assumption that if you're with a single parent, the best thing to do would be to get out of that and get into a coupled relationship, since that transition may come at some cost to a child."

So why don't headlines—and the studies that generate them—focus on stability rather than a crude thing like marital status? Fomby says it's due to the kind of data that's available. Most of these studies lean on large, national surveys—like the Census—to make their analyses. The problem is, that data is pretty simplistic. The Census Bureau asks people if they're "married," "divorced," or "single, never married," which doesn't leave a whole lot of room to explain things like "unmarried by cohabiting," or "married but polyamorous," or "single, but with a whole community of relatives helping to raise my kids." The marriage question gives a pretty narrow picture of what relationships, and families, look like. And we're not even sure if these categories matter—right now, the Census Bureau is debating eliminating the questions about marriage and divorce altogether, since it isn't convinced that the question is "relevant."

Maybe there's something to that. The modern American family is, if nothing else, complicated: More than 40 percent of kids today grow up with a step-sibling, same-sex parenting is on the rise, and there are a million ways to have a kid without a partner at all. (Pretty soon, you may be able to have a baby with yourself.) It's nice to know that not all of those kids are going to grow up warped simply because they don't have an official mother and father.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

The Reindeer Farmer Congressman Who Thinks He Might Be Santa Claus

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Holiday season is in full swing in Washington, DC, which means Justin Bieber's Christmas album is back in rotation, inebriated bros think it's OK to run through Capitol Hill in red polyester onesies, and the 113th Congress has come to a close. For legislators that managed to win reelection this fall, that doesn't mean much—they'll be back whiling away the gridlock in January. But for those who weren't so lucky, last week was their final chance to breathe deep in the halls of power. Their illustrious careers in the nation's most hated legislative body will soon be forgotten, the word "former" forever tagged on to their once prestigious titles.

So what's next for these former masters of the universe? Some will start hedge funds or join think tanks. Others will return to their past lives as small-town podiatrists and stay-at-home moms. Most will fade into obscurity. Heads we've gotten accustomed to seeing bobbing around on cable news will suddenly disappear.

Michigan Congressman Kerry Bentivolio is one of those fading stars—but unlike most of his colleagues, he managed to go out with with a holiday bang. The one-term congressman gave his Republican colleagues a special Christmas gift last week when he changed his vote from a "no" to "yes," saving the omnibus spending bill and stopping a potential government shutdown. Yes, Congress's only former reindeer farmer and part-time Santa-for-hire actually saved Christmas.

[body_image width='900' height='767' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='the-reindeer-farmer-congressman-who-thinks-he-might-be-santa-claus-1219-body-image-1419023066.jpg' id='12981']Bentivolio and fellow outgoing congressperson Michele Bachmann have one last hurrah. Photo via Facebook

If you're not familiar with Bentivolio, the Michigan Tea Party congressman has had a long and weird career, both in and out of Congress, most of it colored by failure. A veteran of three wars, Bentivolio used to be a housing contractor, but was forced to declare bankruptcy after failing to sell his development. He was also a schoolteacher, but resigned over behavioral issues that included intimidating children, grabbing desks, and, according to his FOIAed personnel file, telling his students they were "just a paycheck." In 2011, a year before getting elected to Congress, he made a cameo in a low-budget 9/11 truther film, The President Goes to Heaven.

But through all this, it's the Santa gig that has really stuck. It started in the late 1980s, when Bentivolio donned a Father Christmas costume—green robes, garland crown, fake beard—gathered up some reindeer, and jingled his way around downtown Milford, Michigan. The stunt was aimed at drawing shoppers to the town's quaint Main Street shopping district, but Bentivolio-as-Santa was such a hit, that he started getting attention from other people in the area. When someone asked for a follow-up appearance—and agreed to pay Bentivolio's $2,000 asking price—the future congressman realized he had stumbled on a business opportunity. And so he founded Old Fashion Santa & Company, to rent out himself and his reindeer for the holidays. He took the role so seriously that he even sought clearance from a Michigan Air National Guard base to fly his sleigh in US airspace on Christmas Eve.

"I don't see him as a congressman," said Chuck Rivet a stocky barber in Milford who claims Bentivolio used to call him an "elf." "He was a carpenter, he was a teacher here in the area, he was with the military. But I know Kerry as Santa."

Since arriving in Congress—the surprise winner of a fluke election in which the five-term Republican incumbent was forced to drop out of the primary after his staff forged ballot petition signatures—Bentivolio has had a hard time escaping his past life. Some of that is self-inflicted: It's hard to shake your Santa image when you take a shirtless photo kissing a reindeer, or give Michele Bachmann her own giant set of antlers for Christmas. But when I approached Bentivolio and his staff for this story, they seemed averse to talking about Santa, or really about anything at all. During a visit to the congressman's Commerce, Michigan, headquarters earlier this month, district office manager Calvin Matle explained that his boss had been burned before.

Matle may be referring to the time Bentivolio sued the Detroit Free Press and the Spinal Column newspapers for slander and libel, back before he was elected to Congress. The incident occurred in 1993 at the beginning of Bentivolio's Santa Era, when the budding Christmas entrepreneur penned a letter to then-president George W. Bush asking if he could make a Santa appearance at the White House. When the Oval Office extended an invitation, Bentivolio called a press conference in Milford's downtown. Unfortunately, the opportunity was overshadowed, and eventually cancelled, after a disgruntled former business partner informed local media about Bentivolio's checkered legal history.

Depositions from the Free Press lawsuit reveal the depths of Bentivolio's Santa complex. "I have a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio," he said at the time. "All my life I have been told I'm Kerry Bentivolio, and now, I am a Santa Claus, so now I prefer to be Santa Claus."

This is obviously still a touchy subject in the Bentivolio camp. While pressing Matle for more details about the congressman, I offhandedly referred to Bentivolio as a "Santa impersonator." To say the words didn't sit well would be an understatement.

"Impersonator? Woah, he plays Santa. I don't know about impersonator. When you take kids to the mall to see Santa do you say, 'There's the Santa impersonator?' No you say there is the guy playing Santa," Matle said, avoiding eye contact. "You don't call an actor an impersonator, you say they are playing someone. When I was a kid my parents would take me to Hudson in downtown Detroit and it was always to see Santa, the guy playing Santa. Not an impersonator. The people who say that are trying to imply something else—"

He cut himself off. Within a matter of minutes I was shown the door.

[body_image width='900' height='675' path='images/content-images/2014/12/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/19/' filename='the-reindeer-farmer-congressman-who-thinks-he-might-be-santa-claus-1219-body-image-1419022161.jpg' id='12973']Chuck Rivet trims Bentivolio's fake whiskers during an early Santa appearance. The image hangs on the wall in Rivet's barber shop. Photo by author

Before Matle's diatribe, I was somewhat on the fence as to whether or not Bentivolio's past hobby was all that weird. OK, so the guy sometimes plays Santa. There are definitely worse predilections to find in a member of Congress. And it's also not the most incendiary thing about Bentivolio himself. This is a congressman who spent most of his time in office trying to get a hearing on chemtrails, and who once said it would be a "dream come true" to see President Obama impeached. Not to mention that 9/11 truther movie, in which Bentivolio played the chief doctor in a hospital where the president, who suspiciously resembles George W. Bush, is forced to account for his role in the "1/11 attacks" and then convert to Islam before he can go to heaven.

All of which is to say, Congress is going to be a lot less interesting without a tea party reindeer wrangler there to make sure Big Government isn't poisoning us through airplane exhaust. And Bentivolio was nearly as excited about playing a congressman as he was about being Santa, missing just six of the 1,204 roll calls held while he was in office.

Unfortunately, not everyone appreciated this gumption. Establishment Republicans have had it out for Bentivolio almost since he took office, and spent lots of money to defeat him in the Republican primary this August. And in a neat final twist, Congressman Santa lost to real-life Scrooge David Trott, a Michigan lawyer whose law firm, Trott & Trott, has made a fortune helping banks kick people out of foreclosed homes.

"The people had a part-time Santa impersonator," Bentivolio told Bloomberg Politics' David Weigel last week, "and then they got a Wall Street foreclosure king. Well, I'm still a reindeer farmer. I still impersonate Santa. Although I guess I haven't for five years."

Bentivolio's staff wouldn't say whether the congressman plans to restart his Christmas farm now that he has left office. But people in his hometown would definitely be pleased to have their Santa back. Milford put on its 27 th annual Santa Parade earlier this month, and despite the new costumes and beards, Bentivolio still stands out as the town original.

Sitting high on the wall of Dick's Barber Shop, amongst dozens of framed pictures and knickknacks is a tiny black and white newspaper clipping of Bentivolio getting his fake beard trimmed in his early Santa days. Rivet, the shop's owner, is doing the trimming. "When he did this picture here it was great for me," he chuckles. "I think I cut every kid in town that year."

The New 'Annie' Movie Broke My Heart

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Listen: I saw the new Annie. On purpose. I paid for it. I know. But here's why. From my infancy to the day I left home, I lived in an attic. It was a long room with with floorboards that creaked with every step you took, and a slanted ceiling so low you had to duck in some corners. It was tucked away in a nook in my pastel pirate ship of a house; essentially the closest you can be to a boxcar and still technically be called a bedroom. So, of course, as soon as I gained consciousness, I wanted nothing more than to go whole hog with this hobo kid thing and just be Annie already.

You know, Annie—the precocious star of the old-timey comic strip Little Orphan Annie, which got turned into a radio show, a couple of 1930s movies, a 1977 musical, Annie, which in turn got made into a beautifully cartoonish 1982 film. I saw that movie so many times I knew the story backward and forward: How she lives in poverty and fear of her orphanage's headmistress, how she goes on a quest to find her birth parents, ho she winds up winning the heart of a billionaire and even inspires a wheelchair-bound FDR.

I used to mimic the film's opening shot, sitting with my knees bent in the windowsill of my own little shadowy orphanage, directing myself to appear as "orphanly and determined" as possible before bursting into a pensive version of "Maybe." If I messed up, I would start over and do it again. I remember thinking that if there was a God, he was surely screening my tour de force performance in heaven. Yes, I believed that of all the infinitely provocative moments occurring on earth at any one time, my pitchy turn at "Maybe" was the number-one attraction.

I don't know, guys. What can I say? I grew up in an attic. An attic in a house with no cable—which is why my VHS copy of Annie was so threadbare. It wasn't even an official copy. It was recorded from a TV broadcast; I watched it so often that I still remember where the commercial breaks are. Putting on Annie was like getting to be one of the girls in the orphanage, to live in a world where every night was a giant sleepover with all of your friends, and yeah, you had to do shitty chores, but at least you got to sing an awesome song about it and do cartwheels and sneak out on your own in laundry baskets. The orphanage in Annie is exactly what every little kid dreams of—a lawless land where you're at once autonomous and still a child. The orphanage is Never Never Land for girls. And Miss Hannigan is Captain Hook.

Miss Fucking Hannigan. Carol Burnett as Miss Fucking Hannigan. She walked with a swift and saucy gait and sent chills down your spine. She had a face like rubber that tagged every hiccough and off-color remark. She was the fear of adults incarnate, the boogieman in a boa, but she was also a raw nerve, a woman at the very end of her rope. She is so good in that movie that it seems all of the song and dance, all of the messages about hope and love and optimism are simply incidental framework designed to tell the story of a nihilistic hedonist who's been lonely for so long she has no option but to pretend she's forgotten how to love.

Around sixth grade, I changed my dream role from Annie to Miss Hannigan. I had outgrown the fantasy of being a poverty stricken warden of the state and perpetually dreamed of being that broken-hearted lush. She was intimidating and vulnerable and cartoonish and the first of many fierce bitches that would act as signposts in my life's path. Unbelievably, my fantasy of playing her came true when the coolest teacher at our school directed a production of Annie. He wore jeans with blazers and wrote original musicals about the future and had a parrot in his classroom. He had called me in for a meeting to discuss what part I would play and we sat across from each other, sipping sodas. I hadn't been able to concentrate since my audition at lunch, having been singularly focused on whether I would get to play that perfect, beautiful, slutty raging alcoholic or not. I tried to gauge his facial expression.

"I want you to play Miss Hannigan," he finally said, and my heart immediately started racing. "But, I think you're too prissy," he concluded, and leaned back in his chair, like a broker who's just put a deal on the table. "This part can't be prissy." Still amped up on the adrenaline of having the role nearly in my grasp, I stood up. "Prissy? I'm not gonna be prissy. You really think I would do it prissy?" I scoffed. He took a beat before answering, "If you want the part, it's yours."

Oh, I wanted it. And it was mine. My mom sewed me a dress out of the tackiest fabric she could find. I got my first pair of high heels at the Salvation Army and practiced swaying in them as I creaked across that attic floor. My dad gave me a flask.

The first time we performed the show for adults is the first time I remember having control of a crowd. I got a laugh as soon as I stumbled onstage and remember holding for more before dropping my first line: "Did I hear happiness?" And it just kept rolling from there. The more they laughed, the more I hammed it up and so on and so on, and when I came out for curtain call that night, a room full of strangers yelled and whistled at me. It was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life and I had earned absolutely none of it, because I had stolen my entire performance—beat by beat, intonation by intonation—from Carol Burnett.

And I was right to do this, because she is the Queen. Her razor sharp physicality and percussive physical timing are so dead on that she has become synonymous with the part of Miss Hannigan. We expect everyone to meet the gold standard that she set for this role, and feel angry and cheated when actresses who are not Carol Burnett turn out not to be Carol Burnett.

And no one, in all of the Annie productions in all the towns that I have ever been in or seen, has ever been so good at not being Carol Burnett as Cameron Diaz in the new film.

She's not as bad as you think she would be. She's worse. She delivers her lines in a rush of run-on sentences, as if they were handed to her on Post-Its five minutes before filming. Her rendition of "Little Girls" is painful and passionless. She vacillates at times between a SoCal and a Jersey accent. The entire movie is the kind of unwatchable train wreck that musical theater people live for, but she stands out as memorably, memorably awful.

It starts out with Annie giving an impassioned speech about FDR to her classmates, (get it?! FDR was in the original) and then we never see Annie in school again, despite the fact that she wears a backpack for the entire film. Daddy Warbucks is a man named "Stacks" who is as famous as Batman because he runs a cellphone company and is also running for mayor. There is no orphanage. It's just three girls sharing a condo with Miss Hannigan, who is a former member of C&C Music Factory—a fact that is referenced much more often than any other major plot point. Every other scene contains a tweet or a YouTube video, and the original "songs" have been quartered, skinned, and auto-tuned beyond recognition. I hated, hated, hated it, and I'll probably watch it again.

Cameron Diaz does stand out as the cherry on this shit sundae, but why am I so offended by this? A million roles have been recycled and ruined in the annals of musical theater. In fact, that's part of the fun of musicals—watching your favorite things be destroyed. There's only one Miss Hannigan though. Really, only one. There's only one woman who could define a role so precisely and brilliantly that I could blatantly plagiarize it and walk into my sixth grade classroom, to be surprised by my teacher—who usually only paid attention to me when she was telling me to be quiet—leading the entire class, in unison, to say, "We love you Miss Hannigan," And instead of harping on what this new Annie was, perhaps we should focus on what the old Annie will always be.

Follow Tess Barker on Twitter.

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