All photos and videos coutesy Marta Franco

At this point lucha libre, Mexico’s version of professional wrestling, is famous the world over—the superheroesque masks, the muscled men preening and acting out storylines in the ring, the acrobatic aerial maneuvers. But what’s not as well-known is that the sport isn’t exclusive to dudes. Luchadoras, masked female competitors, are becoming more and more prominent in Mexico, and not just as sexy sideshows. Journalist Marta Franco followed a handful of these women through Mexico City's pro wrestling scene and used the material she gathered to create her graduate-school thesis, "Las Luchadoras," a series of videos that documents and celebrates these women’s role in lucha libre as well as their difficulties acheiving the same recognition as men.

Mexican women have been invovled in pro wrestling since the 1940s, but they were barred from competing in the county's capital until 1986. At first, many entered the ring as eye candy (they were there to "blow kisses and show off" to the crowd, one luchadora told Marta) rather than actual competitors. It's only recently that the sport has allowed women to fight men. Yet there’s still widespread discrimination despite the efforts of luchadoras and their fans. I recently sat down with Marta in San Francisco to talk about her project and what place women occupy in lucha libre.

VICE: Where did you get the idea to do this story?
Marta Franco: I'm from Spain, and we don't have lucha libre or anything like that. Everybody knows the aesthetics—the masks—but it's not something I'd seen until I moved to San Francisco, to the Mission District, two years ago. A Mexican friend of mine told me there was a lucha libre show in the neighborhood, we went, and I loved it. At another wrestling event, I heard a woman in line telling some people about her friend, who was a wrestler and a woman. That's where I started thinking, A woman? Who are these women? Where are they? How do they fit in something that, at first sight, looks like such a macho world?'

Is it tough for women to get into lucha libre?
Women have been wrestling since the beginning of the 20th century, but female wrestling was forbidden in the capital city—it was considered immoral. So women had to tour around the country to wrestle. Then, from the 90s to the 2000s, it became more popular with women and [now] there are more girls trying to make a career in the ring. But they have to accept that no matter how hard they try, they're rarely going to be the headliner at the show. They're mostly on the independent circuit because it's hard to join the bigger companies in Mexico. There's only one all-female company and it's in Monterrey. 

An academic I talked to, Alejandro Torres, says that Mexican wrestling culture is connected to the larger Mexican culture—that what you see outside of the ring influences what you see inside the ring. Women have been fighting for more rights, for a place in society, and that has happened both in Mexican society and inside the ring. Many of [the luchadoras] train with men and there are women who fight men. Some fight exoticos—wrestlers who have a gay theme.

You find people who think women shouldn't wrestle or see them not as real wrestlers but as performers who are just there to look sexy. But at the same time you'll meet people who are totally supportive and believe they should have a bigger space in wrestling. Dark Angel is one interesting example. She's a Canadian woman who moved to Mexico to make a career in wrestling. She's a very good wrestler but she also takes good care of her image as a sexy wrestler. So that made it more attractive to girls. Women being sexy in the ring is controversial because people say they aren't real wrestlers. But there's another side to that—Dark Angel said she thinks she has more advantages than disadvantages because there are so few women. They have to compete less to find a space, so it's easier to get attention from coaches and promoters.

You chose to focus on three luchadoras in particular: Lola Gonzalez, Black Fury, and Big Mama. Why did you single them out?
I thought the stories of these three women were interesting for very different reasons. Lola Gonzalez is a superstar. She's been wrestling for decades, she's been all over the world, she's got thousands of fans, and she's a very humble person. She holds men on her shoulders and does these acrobatic jumps. And she was very sexy. She started when she was 14 and after decades she's still there. That in itself is crazy.

Black Fury is not even 18 years old, and she's already been wrestling for four years. She's a very normal girl. Her dad takes her to school and goes with her to practice and makes sure that nothing bad happens to her. He's very protective of her. But at the same time she does this super intense training and goes in the ring.

Then there’s Big Mama. She is way more overweight than any woman you'd [normally] see in a ring. You’d think she can't wrestle, that she doesn't have the body for it, but instead she's becoming famous—in part, thanks to that image.

Looking back, how has your perception of luche libre and luchadoras changed during the course of this project?
I started seeing it as a sport. People will say it's staged, everything is prepared and preplanned, but the way they perform is very physical. I mean, isn't gymnastics a sport? They hit each other really hard, they train really hard, and they suffer a lot. I didn't really appreciate that until I started this project. 

People may not be aware that they are there, but female Mexican wrestlers exist, have existed for many years, and are working very hard to see their work get taken seriously and get the same recognition men get. Women arrive at an arena with their sons and then put on their outfits and go to work. They come out of the ring sore and with bruises and then travel a couple hours back home. They do it because they love it.

@gregrthomas

More on wrestling:

Female Arm Wrestling Is the Future of Feminism

Everything You Wanted to Know About Gay Wrestling

Wrestlers of the Congo

I’ve seen a few things lately. They’re all mixed up in my mind. So I figured I should just try to get them all down on paper and share them with you:

Up until last weekend, Paul McCarthy and his son Damon had a show about Snow White called WS on display at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. It was only a portion of the McCarthys’ hostile takeover of the New York art world. Their recent oeuvre has also included a huge Koons-style dog balloon at Frieze, two shows at Hauser & Wirth—one with gorgeous sculptures continuing to mine the story of Snow White—and their portion of the Rebel show we did in 2011 at MOCA in LA in which Paul played a version of Nicholas Ray, and I played a version of James Dean (and then Paul got the porn star James Deen to play me playing James Dean, which I didn’t know about until later when I finally met James Deen at a party for the show and he told me three times that it was an honor playing my dick double… but more about him later).

While the WS at the Armory closed on Sunday, the McCarthys are never done with their work and have decided to take the massive project back to their Los Angeles studio and continue to work on it. If you didn’t get to see it, you lost out. It’s a wonderful immersion into a fantasy world of Snow White of our collective imagination, but twisted so that all the sexual and formative experiences of youth and familial upbringings are brought to the forefront with the type of grotesqueness indicative of Paul McCarthy’s work, in which Paul plays a composite character based on Walt Disney and his own father, and Snow White becomes a version of the Disney character mixed with McCarthy’s mother. The characters have parties with appropriations of the dwarves (dressed in UCLA and Yale sweatshirts), get drunk, frolic, and do strange sexual things to each other. At the center of the exhibition is the immense forest the cast performed in that is now presented as a sculpture.

The James Turrell show at the Guggenheim is a very different of exhibition but not wholly unrelated to the McCarthy’s brand of immersive experience. Turrell, along with his former teacher Bob Irwin, is one of the great sculptors of light, and he has transformed the rotunda of the museum into huge, shifting crevasse of color. This show along with the companion show at LACMA are presented in order to raise awareness about the Rodin Crater project, outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, that Turrell has been working on for decades—one of the last, unfinished works of the great land-art movement of the 60s and 70s. I went there not long ago. Like the Guggenheim and LACMA shows, it uses light and our relationship to space as a way to sculpt perception via natural light, with the sky itself becoming the piece.

There is a great one-man show at the Barrow Street Theater called Buyer and Cellar, a fictional take on the strange mall that Barbra Streisand has beneath her house in Malibu. This thing is right up my alley: Michael Urie from Ugly Betty plays both an out-of-work actor who mans the empty mall, as well as a strange version of Streisand who comes down to the mall in order to bargain with her new employee over her items in her store. The relationship (both sides played by Urie) develops into one where Babs feels her imaginary life is respected by her employee, so she can indulge her fantasies with him: they dress up, rehearse for a possible movie adaptation of Gypsy, and talk about their secret feelings—well, at least about Bab’s secret feelings. Finally, things start to fall apart when the out-of-work actor’s boyfriend (also played by Urie) deconstructs Streisand’s fantasy world in a brilliant exegesis of her films and career. Of course this has more to do with fame, fantasy, entertainment, and persona than it does with the actual Streisand, and that’s what elevates it above a witty take on the idea of the public persona.

All of the aforementioned pieces engage the audience in very direct ways. In a way, they’re all like the Mark Raommaneck video of Jay-Z rapping in a gallery to one person at a time. They are designed to pull the spectator into a private space with the work. The fourth wall is torn down, or at least blurred, the exception being that all the people in the Jay-Z video were established creative types. The McCarthy, Turrell, and the play are all designed to connect with any audience.

I also recently saw a few films. The new Woody Allen movie, his take on A Streetcar Named Desire, is off-the-charts awesome. Everyone is great, but, holy fuck Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Conavalle as different sides of Stanley Kowalski types were visions. Conavalle is the sensitive version of Stanley, actually crying when his girlfriend might leave him for a new life with her sister, and Dice Clay's playing the lug trying to make good is perfection.

I took in Frances Ha and The Canyons as a double feature—two takes on creative types trying to make it. The Baumbach film was charming and well made. It made me love New York like old Woody Allen films make you love New York. The Canyons was probably made for the same amount of money, and it made me hate LA like reality shows make me hate LA. Schrader is one of my favorite commentators on film, his book The Transcendental Style is beyond great. And as a filmmaker he is always trying to push the envelope, but The Canyons... hmmm, what to say? Not much. I guess if you’re going to cast Jean-Claude Van Damme in a film, you want him to do some martial arts. Otherwise, why cast him? And if you’re going to cast a porn star, then show us a little porn. It’s a sad film, sad on a meta level, meaning, I’m sad for the people behind the film, but I guess it wants to be sad. Still, I think Schrader comes out on top because at least he’s trying to be innovative in an age when everything is changing. 

Forty percent of Canada's petrochemical industry is packed into a 25-square-kilometre area in Sarnia, Ontario, called the Chemical Valley. Over 60 chemical plants and oil refineries operate there 24/7. As a result of the Chemical Valley's emissions, in 2011 the World Health Organization gave Sarnia the title of the "worst air" in all of Canada. To further complicate things, the Chemical Valley circles a First Nations reserve called Aamjiwnaang where just under 1,000 people live. The people there have been consistently reporting adverse health effects that they blame on their proximity to the massive industry that surrounds them, but the Canadian government has not stepped by to do a proper health study.

We went to visit Aamjiwnaang—a place where their own cemetery shares a fence with a desulphurization plant—to check out the situation for ourselves.

Part one of The Chemical Valley will air tomorrow on VICE.com.

As the world’s population hurtles toward an estimated 9 billion by 2050, global food shortages are becoming a very real problem. In no sector is this more apparent than the meat industry. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that around 70 percent of all agricultural land on Earth is currently used for meat production. It also predicts the demand for meat will increase by more than two thirds in the next 40 years as the middle classes grow in newly industrialized countries in Asia and South America.

Aside from awful humanitarian and animal cruelty issues, the meat industry is thought to have a significant effect on global warming since belching, farting livestock produce huge quantities of methane—a greenhouse gas 33 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. It’s obvious that the meat industry as we know it is unsustainable, but for the vast majority of us the prospect of turning vegetarian is pretty grim. Vegetables aren’t filling, Tofurkey tastes like wet Band-Aids, and the prospect of mass-farming insects to squish into Boca burgers makes me want to sew up my mouth and anus.

Fortunately, Professor Mark Post thinks he’s come up with a way for us to save the planet and gorge until we get the meat sweats. Unfortunately, it's not all that cost effective yet.

Professor Mark Post

By harvesting muscle tissue from a living cow, Professor Post is able to cut the tissue into individual muscle cells. Each cell can then yield up to one trillion more, which will then naturally join up to form new muscle tissue. Five years and approximately $384,000 after he started, Professor Post had created the world's most expensive burger patty, ready for an unveiling and tasting ceremony in London. As the world's media descended on the presentation in Hammersmith, I went along to see if “cultured beef” really was the savior the meat industry needs.

The tasting was taking place in Riverside Studios—the former home of Brittish shows Top of the Pops and Dr. Who. When I arrived I had to line up with the rest of the media in a corridor filled with portraits of famous comedians.

The one thing I learned from this experience is that journalists love puns. I heard, "Cultured beef? Is that beef that enjoys the opera? [relentless chortling]” about ten times before we even got into the tasting room. It was enough to make the portrait of Al Murray (perhaps the least funny man to have ever been given a TV show in England) holding a giant chicken seem like the best visual gag I’d ever seen.

The event kicked off with the above informational video, which was a sort of hybrid between the science videos you watch in school and a Shark Tank pitch. Despite that, you should probably give it a watch anyway as it explains the science of cultured beef in groovy, easy to understand graphics. Also, it means I don’t have to stretch into the depths of my tenth-grade biology knowledge to try to explain how people are growing edible meat in Petri dishes nowadays.

After the video, Professor Post took to the stage and unveiled the burger. This was it—the moment we’d all been waiting for. He pulled a burger-size Petri dish from a cooler, opened it up, and there it was: a $384,000 beef patty. I’d love to say that the true significance of this moment resonated with me, but the truth is I was sitting very far away and could barely see anything. Plus, as grand in scale as the patty's prospects might be, connecting to lab-grown mincemeat on an emotional level is pretty tough.

The tasting was presented by Nina Hossain from ITV London. Here she is interviewing Richard McGeown, the chef in charge of cooking the burger. You could tell he was a little nervous about ruining it. Which is understandable, considering the burger was—pound for pound—probably the most expensive piece of food ever cooked in the history of humanity. And burning a piece of meat that's worth the kind of money that could fund the building of 50 wells in Africa isn't going to look on your CV. 

Not that Nina did much to ease his stress levels. While he was trying to concentrate on the cooking she kept bombarding him with repetitive questions that nobody really needed to know the answers to, like, “Is it cooking like a normal burger?” and, “From a chef’s point of view, is there anything different about this burger?” (In case you do need to know the answers, they were "yes" and "no.") 

It took the burger slightly longer to cook than I was expecting. Maybe Richard was cooking it on a low heat to avoid burning it as 100 people stared intently at the frying pan in front of him. Or maybe I was just really, really hungry (I was).

Anyway, as the burger was sizzling away, we were introduced to the two special guests, who—along with Professor Post—would be eating and critiquing the first-ever cultured beef burger.

The first guest to dive in was Hanni Rutzler, a food and nutritional scientist. Hanni, while perfectly pleasant, was perhaps the worst possible candidate for this job. There were around 100 journalists hungrily waiting for quotes, and the best Hanni could come up with were, "It was hotter [temperature-wise] than I expected," and—when asked what it actually tasted like—"It's a bit like cake."  

By this stage, the assorted media weren't just hungry for words, but for a bite of the burger they were all there to write about. A writer from the Huffington Post asked if just one of the assembled journalists could try it and give their feedback, but unfortunately that notion was shot down as "unfair" to everyone else. A writer from the Times yelled, "I really don't mind!" But it was no use; the dream was over.  

It all rested on the second taster, Josh Schonwald. Josh is an author, so surely he could muster at least the beginnings of the description that the entire world’s press was gagging for. “I’d put it somewhere between Bunga Burger and McDonald's,” he said, forgetting that he was in London and nobody had a clue what Bunga Burger was. “But it’s hard because I don’t know how many burgers I’ve eaten in my life without ketchup.” 

Tasting over, it was time for the Q&A. Again, many of the questions related to a more accurate description of the taste, but all we got was, “It could use salt and pepper,” from Hanni. Meanwhile, Josh—in between shamelessly plugging his book, The Taste of Tomorrow—offered up, "I feel like the fat is missing. There's a leanness to it, but the bite is like a conventional burger."

Which, again, didn't really satisfy anyone in the audience.

After resigning ourselves to the fact that we were neither going to taste the burger nor get any real quotes on what it tasted like, the press instead started asking about the future of the science behind the patty. 

Professor Post said he could envision mass production of cultured beef within 20 years and that it should, in theory, be the same price or cheaper than regular beef. He also alleviated concerns over how safe the meat is to eat, stating that it’s genetically identical to beef found in a cow and that, yes, he would let his children eat it.

Probably the most astonishing fact of the day came when he was asked if he’d given any thought to a catchier name than “cultured beef.” He said they'd had a naming competition at Maastricht University, where the research was carried out, to see if anyone could come up with something better. Seven thousand people entered, but apparently not a single one of them was “satisfying.”

-

After the Q&A session I, along with a few others, rushed toward the stage to get an up-close look at the remainder of the burger, but by the time we got there it had already been whisked away by security goons, like Nicki Minaj being led away from a mob of paparazzi.

I may have witnessed a historical moment, but as I left the tasting room I couldn’t help but feel a little let down. The whole event was to find out if the taste of beef could be replicated in the lab, and thanks to the incompetence of the tasters that’s still something we don’t really know the answer to. If I'm honest, I was also disappointed that I hadn't been able to nab a bite of it myself. But it looks like I’ll just have to wait 20 years like everybody else.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @matthewfrancey

All photos courtesy of Maastricht University.

More fun stuff about science:

The Weird Science of North Korea

'OMNI' Magazine Will Rise Again

The US Government Is Retiring Hundreds of Chimps from Biomedical Research

Photo by Flickr User Elvez40

Here at VICE, it’s not uncommon for us to write disparagingly about the city of Los Angeles. We actually do it pretty often. Probably because most of us are sitting in the rarefied air that is the borough of Brooklyn. Not I, sir. No, I live smack in the middle of the City of Angels. I consider myself grateful for the spectacular weather, plethora of career opportunities, and crippling body image issues this town has given me. Yes, I actually like it here. Some people happen not to see things my way though.

LA Weekly, home to some of the best back-page advertisements for medical marijuana I’ve ever seen, posted a venomous screed about the “12 Most Overrated Things in Los Angeles” written by an impetuous young lad by the name of Hillel Aron. One can forgive VICE its predilection for prodding LA since it’s really just some far-off Xanadu for the vast majority of our staff. Conversely, one would assume that a publication called “LA Weekly” would be more amenable to their ever-dwindling readership that makes a home in Los Angeles.

According to his website, Hillel is actually an LA native who attended USC film school and “successfully petitioned Encyclopedia Britannica to make their entry on Los Angeles less negative.” For the foreseeable future, he’ll now be known as “the guy Dave Schilling wrote the article about.”

Wait… I mean he’ll be known as “the guy who took a huge dump on LA and got his article to go viral.” Let’s assume Mr. Aron isn’t being cynical and trolling purely for attention. I mean, that’s crazy. No internet writer does that, ever, especially not for a miniscule list spread over three pages just for the sake of extra clicks. Instead, let us suppose that he is serious about all of this so that I might indulge in a rebuttal that will end up being twice as long as the article I am referencing.

Here are the 12 most overrated things in Los Angeles, according to LA Weekly, and my well-reasoned, passionate response to each one:

Photo by Flickr User alohavictoria

12) Living downtown

Downtown Los Angeles is a wacky place where young urban professionals rub shoulders with smelly hobos, but it’s also home to the most pre-war movie houses in the world, soon to have two of the nation’s top art museums, an architecturally significant concert hall, and a Hooters. Tell me how that’s overrated.

11) Bike lanes

“Hey L.A., if you really care about cyclists, maybe pave the fucking roads once in a while?” So, does this mean you don’t want bike lanes? Are you saying they’re stupid or that you want them? I don’t follow this logic at all. Please help.

10) Tupac

Mr. Aron astutely states that Tupac is “no Biggie.” Oh, a delicious pun! It’s such a good pun that I can totally forgive him for sacrificing making a coherent point on the subject! It’s nice that we can agree on one thing though, and that’s that Tupac is, in fact, not Notorious B.I.G. They were actually two different people the whole time.

9) The Magic Castle

Apparently, it’s “a country club for nerds.” Maybe it’s time nerds had a country club! They don’t even have a fraternity anymore, so let’s cut them some slack, OK?

Photo by Flickr User Scientology Media

8) Hating on Scientologists

“But are they really that much worse than other cult members, like Christians, Jews and Mormons? Last I checked, Scientologists hadn't started any major wars, genocides or mass slaughters. Yet.” I can cite numerous reasons why Scientology deserves our scorn, and I just did.

7) "Froyo"

“Yogurt is delicious. Ice cream is delicious. Did we really need the twain to meet? Is something being gained here?” Yes, in fact much is being gained. For starters, people love froyo. I love froyo. What? Carriages were great, as were locomotives. Does that mean the personal automobile is a stupid idea? Obviously, the multi-million dollar frozen yogurt industry would beg to differ. I mean, what you said was literally moronic.

6) Pour-over coffee

“Paying six dollars for a cup of coffee? Sounds like income redistribution to me. Thank you very much, President Obama.” It’s about time we got some “topical humor” in this article. Watch out, Joel Stein, Hillel Something Something is coming for you!

Photo by Flickr User ebbandflowphotography

5) Outdoor movie screenings

“Lying on the lawn is a fundamentally uncomfortable thing to do. Chairs were invented for a reason.” People bring chairs to these screenings! Also, since when is actual human contact “overrated”? Perhaps a better path for critique could have been pointing out how these outdoor movie screenings take place in a cemetery. That’s, like, actually weirder than lying down.

4) Improv comedy

OK, he has a point here…

3) Malibu Beach

"Malibu remains the go-to beach for nearly anyone living over the poverty line." Sounds awesome, bro.

Photo by Flickr User anniemack

2) Vin Scully

Ol’ Hilly claims that the Dodgers’ play-by-play announcer, “however charming, is still only slightly more captivating than the sound of a broken humidifier.” I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite games is “Kick the 85 year-old man in the dick before he dies,” so this statement appeals to me.

1) Pink's

“Their hot dogs taste like boiled shoe leather.” Sure, maybe that’s true, but put enough ketchup, mustard, relish, and onions on shoe leather and you’ve got yourself a meal.

@dave_schilling

For more on Los Angeles being the best place ever:

Big Motherfuckin' Boobies

I Went to an Abandoned Nazi Ranch

Exploring the Interior Designs of Los Angeles Weed Clinics

Click through to the next page for more images by Margaret Durow and Brigette Bloom.

More from our 2013 Photo Issue:

Manic Botanic

Place of the Inside Out

Terram Tenebrosam

"Grab me a beer from the bar, buuudddy?”

“Sorry, I’m only 19. I can’t buy alcohol,” I mumbled without looking up from the game of Tetris I was playing on my flip-phone. “Say it’s for Pauly. Tell the bartender you’re my intern.” And so, it was 8 PM on a Sunday night after the Comedy Store’s Potluck Open Mic night in mid 2009 that a gullible and obese 19-year-old aspiring comic finally achieved the American Dream: doing Pauly Shore’s bitch work for free.

It had been a year since I had dropped out of Pierce Community College to try my hand at standup comedy and things weren’t going particularly well. The biggest comedy clubs in LA like the Comedy Store and the Laugh Factory use what’s basically a half-lottery, half-friendship system for their open mics. I would very rarely get picked. Unlike smart comedians, who would grumble off and leave looking for another place to do a set when they were rejected, I would stick around and watch the show. Partially because I wanted to learn from the performers, but mainly because I had no friends. I was having a conversation with one of the few Potluck regulars who tolerated me when the Weasel himself anointed me as his indentured servant.  

I showed up at the next morning for my first day of interning and stood around for 15 minutes, waiting for Pauly to arrive. Finally, a beat-up car pulled into the lot. Pauly stepped out wearing a worn-out T-Shirt with a drawing of his face on it and "PAULYWOOD" written underneath. “Hey duuuude!” he announced, pointing to a massive suitcase in the backseat of his car, “Carry this in for me, Intern.” 

I dragged Pauly’s stuff up the stairs to his office where I met his assistant, Mark, who was already hard at work going through contracts from comedy clubs all over the country. I snuck a peek at one of them and was, as embarrassing as this sounds, a little jealous. Even years after his glory days, Pauly still made a decent living on tour, while I still had to ask my parents permission to use their credit card when I wanted to eat at Subway. The office was a mess. There were papers and binders scattered all over the floor. Posters for Pauly’s movies littered the walls. “I love A Goofy Movie.” I told him, “I grew up on that one.” “I never saw it,” he told me, “I don’t watch cartoons.” 

Pauly never referred to be my name, I was always “Intern.” He handed me a container full of blank discs and a DVD of Son In Law. “Hey, Intern. There’s a computer with a DVD drive downstairs. I need you to make 100 of these.” So I went downstairs, got on an old PC with Windows XP installed, and spent the next 4 hours making bootlegs of a film released in 1993. After I finished that, I was done for the day.

I stuck around until 6 PM for the Monday Potluck open mic hoping to get a spot but I didn’t get called up.  

Day two started with me making 100 copies of Encino Man. Pauly, wearing the same T-shirt as the day before, then gave me access to his MySpace, where he had an absolutely insane amount of messages, the majority of which were from extraordinarily beautiful women. I was instructed to interact with the fans, but was quickly criticized for not writing in his style (i.e. I spelled too many things correctly.) “Hey there. How are you?”  turned into “hey pretty gurl, whatsup with u” and “Come to the show!” turned into “u shuld make it out to the show, buddddyyy.” I was genuinely impressed with his commitment to staying true to his act no matter how dated and shitty it was. It reminded me in a way of Captain America, a man out of his own era and lost in the new world, but with less Super Soldier Serum and more complaining about how critics didn't "understand" him and how I couldn’t find the right bed for his dog online.

Day 3 was the same mind-numbing and repetitive shit, but Day 4 was special. On day 4, Pauly called me into his office and declared that he was going to sue Sacha Baron Cohen and the producers of Bruno for stealing the idea for a mockumentary he shot in 2007 called Adopted. In the film, Pauly plays himself as he travels to Africa to adopt a child while engaging in wacky stunts like dressing up as Michael Jackson and making lots of AIDS jokes. Bruno had apparently begun production a few months after Adopted, so this was definitely a worthy use of our court system. “This will be great publicity for the film!” one of the lawyers told me.  

It had been a few days and I still hadn’t had the chance to do any standup yet, so I decided to see if I could get some stage time: “Uh, Pauly. I don’t mean to be rude, but you said I’d get to do 5 minute sets on the days I helped you out.” Pauly erupted, “Hey, what the fuck, dude! Don’t bitch at me. Don’t you wanna be part of the Store, man? Part of the family? I can make that happen, dude. Stick it out and keep working hard and maybe in a few months I can throw you a few bucks now and then.” I told him I just wanted to be able to perform in front of an audience. “The Comedy Store is the place to be for that, dude.” Then Pauly asked me to go for a coffee run. He gave me enough cash to just buy one.

On Day 5, the Monday of the next week, I got to sit in on a "joke writing session." This consisted of Pauly breathlessly ranting while his assistant transcribed. He would talk for five minutes without stopping about a million topics while still managing to say absolutely nothing of substance, then his assistant would mold what he wrote down into jokes with setups, punchlines, and tags. By the end of the hour, Pauly had 5 minutes of new material to wheeze the juice with. I asked Pauly if I could finish my shift in time to do the Potluck show, but Pauly told me he needed a burrito. 

After returning from Baja Fresh (where I'd been sent with just enough cash to buy one burrito, obviously) he informed me it was my lucky day and that he could get me on a show at midnight if I spoke to the host, a comic named Don Barris. It was 7 PM  and my parents' house was an hour away, so there I was, again, awkwardly sitting outside of the bar playing Tetris on my phone. Back to square one. 

After a few hours of waiting, I met Don, a tall and husky bald man in his 40s, and he informed me that Pauly was mistaken about me getting any stage time. The shows he hosted were the Ding Dong Show and the Barris-Kennedy Overdrive, one of which is a panel show featuring mentally ill people for the audience to make fun of, and the other was an air guitar “concert.” I reluctantly stuck around, helping set up the chairs and laughing at all the jokes because the only other member of the audience was sleeping and may or may not have been a male prostitute.

After the show, the comedians all got together to hang out in the Green Room and I was invited to join. I’m not really sure why, but Don kept getting into a boxing stance and smacking me in the shoulder, yelling “Fight me! Fight me!” Every time I would back away, he would smack me again. Eventually he slapped me in the face while his friends pointed and laughed. It was one of the most humiliating things I have ever experienced, and I totally cried in my bed that night. The next morning, I decided not to show up, ignoring Pauly’s voicemail. He did not call me back after that.

A few weeks later while standing in line for the open mic at another comedy club, I was approached by one of the Comedy Store employees I was vaguely acquainted with, “You’re Pauly’s new intern, right?” “Not anymore. It was awful," I told him. After running him through the experience and how I never managed to get a spot at the Potluck, he told me, “Oof, yeah. You know, if you wanted to do the open mic on Sunday and Monday, you should have just asked. You didn’t have to put yourself through all of that shit. Just say so next time and I’ll squeeze you in.” Lesson learned. 

@JonathanDBrown

Illustration by Sam Taylor - @SptSam

More funny from VICE:

How Not to Be a Stand-Up Comedian  

Stand-Up Comedy Is HARD  

Stand Up Comedy... On Acid!  

Tiana Miller. (Photos courtesy of Tiana Miller)

Last week, in Montego Bay, Jamaica, 16-year-old Dwayne Jones was shot and stabbed multiple times for turning up to a party in women's clothing. Jones was reportedly transgender and the murder has once again highlighted the awful reality of life for Jamaica's LGBT community. And it really is fucking awful.

In 2006, TIME magazine called Jamaica "the most homophobic place on Earth", and the anti-gay sentiment prevalent in the country's media and most popular musical genre, dancehall, has been well-documented. The Jamaica Gleaner, one of the country's largest newspapers, regularly publishes stories about the gay community with a homophobic slant. Last month, it referred to a group of men who were evicted from an abandoned house as a "gay clan" and ran an op-ed (in the year 2013) that rubbished the idea of being born gay, saying people who are attracted to the same sex actively decide to do so, in much the same way that they decide to "eat snails (like the French)" or "like the taste of jackfruit".

In the wake of Jones' death, I got in touch with Tiana Miller, a transgender Jamaican, who hopes that her openness about her gender and sexuality will inspire others to display similar levels of bravery. 

VICE: Hi Tiana. So, back to the start – at what age did you first realise that you were transgender?
Tiana Miller: It was at around age five when I first started thinking like a female. Then I gradually came to the realisation that I felt more comfortable in a female skin. It was difficult – because of the social norms of my country, I really felt as if I was doing something wrong.

Were your family and friends supportive?
Yes, they were, especially my dad.

That’s good. What about Jamaican society as a whole? Do you agree with the description of the country as, "the most homophobic place on Earth"?
Yes, I do. The challenges that we face are difficulties in surviving, as they relate to jobs, education and housing. High school was OK for me because I hadn’t transformed yet, but it’s hard now education-wise because I would love to get a college degree, but can’t because they won’t allow me in college.

That’s awful. I’d imagine gay people in Jamaica are quite economically disadvantaged if they are unable to get a decent education or find work.
Yes, they are forced to be poor. The lucky ones are those who find rich partners and dedicate their lives to them.

There have been a few high-profile cases of police brutality towards gay people in Jamaica. Do you feel that the police give transgender people the protection they deserve?
No, they definitely don’t. Homeless transgenders are on the street, and the police – who should be their protectors – have literally run them down and chased them because of their lifestyle.

A police raid on a "gay clan" in their "gay haven" in Kingston.

Is homelessness a common problem for transgender people?
Yes, and they are homeless because they have difficulties in sourcing income to rent houses or locate safe houses to live in.

Have you been physically attacked due to your gender?
Yes, I have been attacked before. I ran, so I didn’t suffer much harm. But naturally this had a traumatising effect on me.

So I take it there are a lot of areas that are out of bounds for gay and transgender people.
Naturally there are. This applies to anywhere where there are slums.

Some of the homophobic attacks over there have been horrific. I remember hearing about a gay rights activist who was killed before people celebrated over his body. Doesn’t stuff like that make you fear for your safety?
Yes, it does. I put myself out there, but I'm still aware of how vicious these homophobic homosapiens are.

Are there many people who dare to be open about their sexuality?
The gay and transgender communities aren’t united, as people fear for their lives, so not many people actually identify themselves with the communities.

So do you consider yourself brave for being so open about your gender and sexuality?
Yes, I am brave. If I wish to see a change, I myself have to inspire it. I had to put myself out there and make myself seen so that people know that transgenders do exist and see that we are normal people trying to live our everyday lives like human beings. We need people like myself who are willing to challenge this country and its government.

The media often hold dancehall culture responsible for the homophobia in Jamaica – what's your view on that?
I think the main contribution comes from the Church and their social ethics concerning what is right and wrong. It puzzles me how cruel human beings can be and how biased they are because the Church claims that we are demons and bashes us instead of trying to counsel us.

Yeah, it seems a little illogical.
I know, right? But, like, seriously – I care zero.

So I take it there isn't much of an LGBT nightlife scene where you are? 
Well, there was, but there's nothing now – just regular venues that they rent to us.

Do you think Jamaica will ever get round to changing its anti-sodomy laws and modernising its stance on homosexuality?
Well, it actually seems to be on the verge of doing this.

Because gay culture is growing or because of pressure from other countries?
Both. But time will tell, and I don’t wish to make predictions.

Where do you see yourself in that battle?
I see myself as being the first transgender to be an ambassador for the country. I want to advocate for human rights, be a feminist choreographer and also be a whole lot of other things.

Great. Thanks, Tiana.

More LGBT stuff:

I Joined a Bunch of Gay Conversion Groups

Meet 'the First and Only Gay Tour Guide in the Arab Middle East'

Homophobic Killings Won't Dampen New York's Gay Pride

Protesting Against Gay Pride Was Super Boring

Click to enlarge.

Hair and Makeup: Lee Heinemann
Costumes: Lindsey Griffith and Lee Heinemann
Props and Styling Lead by Jaimie Warren
Lighting: Kevin Schowengerdt and Zach Van Benthusen

With assistance from Matt Roche, Allison Sandoval, Sara Haug, Nathan Henry, Johanna Brooks, Erin Zona, Casey Dobbins, Ari Fish, Marie Dougherty, Cydney Ross, Rochelle Brickner-Owings, Brandon Nemeth, and Jordan Hauser

Jaimie was kind enough to stay up for 156.3 hours straight to give us a sneak peek of what, when complete, will undoubtedly be her most sprawling, awe-inspiring, and masterful work to date: the first of five panels in a photographic reinterpretation of Renaissance painter Fra Angelico’s massive San Marco Altarpiece. Appropriately, Jaimie collaborated with her mother for spiritual and artistic advice, which resulted in the inclusion of Buckwheat Zydeco, the members of Pink Floyd, Mr. Peanut, and Ghostface from the Scream movies. When it’s all finished, Jaimie tells us that there will be some sort of Stevie Wonder music video to go along with the piece. No idea what that means, but the anticipation has resulted in all sorts of business happening in our pants.

More from our 2013 Photo Issue:

The Eagle and the Rat

Place of the Inside Out

Terram Tenebrosam

NEWS

I Left My Lungs in Aamjiwnaang

Breathing the Most Polluted Air in Canada

By Patrick McGuire

One of the many unintentionally ironic signs in the Chemical Valley.

The first thing you notice about Sarnia, Ontario, is the smell: a potent mix of gasoline, melting asphalt, and the occasional trace of rotten egg. Shortly after my arrival I already felt unpleasantly high and dizzy, like I wasn’t getting enough air. Maybe this had something to do with the bouquet of smokestacks in the southern part of town that, all day every day, belch fumes and orange flares like something out of a Blade Runner-esque dystopia.

Sarnia is home to more than 60 refineries and chemical plants that produce gasoline, synthetic rubbers, and other materials that the world’s industries require to create the commercial products we know and love. The city’s most prominent and profitable attraction is an area about the size of 100 city blocks known as the Chemical Valley, where 40 percent of Canada’s chemical industry can be found packed together like a noxious megalopolis. According to a 2011 report by the World Health Organization, Sarnia’s air is the most polluted air in Canada. There are more toxic air pollutants billowing out of smokestacks here than in all of the provinces of New Brunswick or Manitoba.

Nestled inside this giant ring of chemical production, surrounded on all sides by industrial plants, sits a First Nations reservation called Aamjiwnaang where about 850 Chippewa have lived for over 300 years. Aamjiwnaang was originally a Chippewa hunting ground, but the area was turned into a First Nations reserve in 1827, after the British government snatched up an enormous amount of Native land. Today, it’s one of the most singularly poisonous locations in North America, yet neither the local nor the national government has announced any plan to launch a health study to properly investigate the side effects that are hurting the local residents, who inhale the Chemical Valley’s emissions every time they step outside. 

In 2002, the Aamjiwnaang Environmental Committee was founded. This activist group formed in response to a plan by Suncor to build what would have been Canada’s largest ethanol plant right next to the reservation. Suncor is one of Canada’s energy giants that specializes in crude-oil processing—in April of this year, they caught some heat after spilling a chemical used to blend biofuel into a British Columbian inlet. They informed the nearby First Nations people, who live on the inlet, days later. As for their ethanol plant in Aamjiwnaang, Suncor eventually halted construction on the project in response to the Environmental Committee’s protests, and instead built a desulphurization plant next to the reserve’s burial ground. 

It wasn’t until the Evironmental Committee came together that people realized how bad things had gotten. I spoke to Wilson Plain, one of the committee’s founders, about Aamjiwnaang’s communal realization that the Chemical Valley was hurting their population. “As a community we were not really aware of what was being released from the plants,” Wilson told me. “When we started having regular meetings of the Environmental Committee, people started recalling how many incidents we had.”

The committee also began commissioning studies, like the one published in 2005 that analyzed birth rates on the reservation. A healthy community should have roughly a 1:1 birth ratio of females to males, but the study found that the Chemical Valley’s ratio had reached nearly 2:1—a statistical anomaly that had never been recorded in any human population, though it has been documented in animal populations that live in extremely polluted areas. 

A protester rallying against more industry coming to the Chemical Valley.

Another study conducted between 2004 and 2005 by the environmental activist organization Ecojustice found that 39 percent of the women in Aamjiwnaang had suffered through at least one stillbirth or miscarriage. Since then, however, there have been no inquiries by federal or local authorities to discern exactly what is causing these abnormalities, let alone any attempt to reverse them. Defenders of the petrochemical industry have brushed off these findings as irrelevant, and similarly shrug at the “anecdotal evidence” offered by Aamjiwnaang residents about the foul smells or the strange ailments that are pervasive in the community. 

Here’s an example of anecdotal evidence: In January, the Shell refinery had a “spill,” meaning they accidentally leaked toxic chemicals into the air. The leaked substance included hydrogen sulfide, a highly toxic, potentially lethal substance that was used as a chemical weapon by the British in World War I. The gas floated over to Aamjiwnaang’s daycare center, where the staff and students noticed the air began to smell strongly of rotten eggs. Almost instantly, kids got sick and many were sent to the hospital with headaches, nausea, and skin irritation. For hours, doctors wrongly diagnosed the children as having ordinary flus and colds—if Shell had owned up to the leak that exposed them to hydrogen sulfide, they would almost certainly have gotten better faster.

Christine Rogers has three young girls; one of them was attending Aamjiwnaang’s daycare at the time of the leak, while the other two were riding in a school bus directly through the affected area. “As a parent, you do everything you can to make sure that your children are safe, and when something like that happens, you feel like you’ve lost control,” she told me. “It makes me want to break down and cry when I think about that. What if it had been a bigger spill? You think you’re prepared but really you’re not. It feels helpless.”

Christine went on to explain how she handled the effects of the leak with her eldest: “I told her she needed to tell me about any of the little symptoms that she was experiencing so we could get her to the doctor to see if she’s OK. She had crusted eyes at that point and her eyes were bloodshot for three days, so I had to make sure she didn’t have any infections.”

Parenting in chemical-ridden Aamjiwnaang comes with uniqu-e challenges. While we spoke about her daughters, Christine told me they used to think the Chemical Valley’s massive smokestacks were “cloud makers.” When it came time to tell her children the truth, she came up with a rhyme: “The more clouds in the sky, the more people die.”

Since the incident in January, Shell is believed to have been responsible for two other leaks of hydrogen sulfide—one of them sent three workers to hospital and was still being investigated as of press time. Spills are a regular part of life in Aamjiwnaang. In 2008, the roof of a large tank belonging to Imperial Oil that contained benzene, a well-known carcinogen, collapsed. The entire city of Sarnia was told to stay inside with all of their doors and windows shut. 

Often, the responsibility for detecting leaks falls to community members like Ada Lockridge, an Aamjiwnaang Environmental Committee member and outspoken activist who owns an air-testing kit called a Bucket Brigade. This low-tech device consists of a plastic bucket lined with a replaceable plastic bag attached to a vacuum nozzle that protrudes out of the top of the bucket. When Ada suspects the air around her is being polluted by a leak—if it smells like gas or chemicals and tar more than usual—she sucks some of that air down through the vacuum nozzle and into the plastic bag, then sends the bag to a lab in California that for a $500 processing fee will analyze the data and send her a report within two weeks. She used this bucket to detect a hydrogen sulfide leak in April after getting a whiff of a rotten-egg odor she rated as a “ten out of ten” on her personal scale.

Ada describes discovering that leak like this: “My daughter showed up at my house to bring me coffee and a bagel and said, ‘Oh, Mom, it’s terrible out there. It smells like rotten eggs.’ So I got on the phone with the Spills Action Centre [operated by the Ontario government] and told them something was leaking… A lot of times, we’re the ones that notify the companies that they’re leaking. I went outside in my housecoat [with my Bucket Brigade] and told my youngest daughter to plug her nose and run to the school bus.”

This is just part of the heavy price Sarnians have long paid for living in a perpetual boomtown. Oil was first discovered just south of Sarnia in the mid-1800s, and since the city was ideally located—on the banks of the St. Clair River, close to Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago—the petrochemical industry set up shop here. Companies bought land from the people of Aamjiwnaang in the 1940s and 50s, back when the environmental impact of chemical industries was unknown, and in 1942 the first facility in what would become the Chemical Valley opened: a plant owned by Polymer Corporation that manufactured synthetic rubber for the war effort. During the 60s and 70s, the town prospered as the local industry exploded with growth, and the Chemical Valley became such a source of national pride that for several years the smokestack-packed skyline was featured on the back of the Canadian $10 bill. 

Vanessa Gray, a protester from Aamjiwnaang, demonstrating outside an oil-industry conference.

In the decades since we’ve learned much more about the effects these industries have on the environment, and residents find no sense of pride in being surrounded by polluters. Sandy Kinart, who lives in north Sarnia, on the other side of town from Aamjiwnaang, is a lifelong resident of the city. Her husband worked for Welland Chemical as a millwright, assembling and installing machinery for years before dying of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure. In response she helped found the activist organization Victims of the Chemical Valley. Like many residents who grew up in the “golden age” of Sarnia in the 60s and 70s, she’s only lately come to realize that living near all that industry can be a curse rather than a blessing. 

“As a child, driving through Chemical Valley was part of Sunday evening,” she said. “The lights were all on, and boy, that just looked like a fairyland to us. Back in the day, those oil and chemical drums were kept pristine-looking, the gardens around the refineries and plants were beautiful, it was lovely to see. We were proud that we lived in the Chemical Valley… We don’t see that anymore. Now the flowers are dead, the trees are all dying, the drums are all grungy down there; it looks derelict. The industry doesn’t have to keep up the pretense anymore.”

I reached out to several of the petrochemical companies with plants in the Chemical Valley and, after a lot of back and forth, wound up at the desk of Dean Edwardson, general manager of the Sarnia-Lambton Environmental Association, an oil-industry-operated nonprofit. He refused to comment on specific incidents (and acted surprised when I told him about Shell’s two hydrogen-sulfide leaks). But when I pressed him on the January Shell leak that affected the daycare, he admitted that there had been a mistake somewhere along the line. “We had a communication problem,” he said. “Clearly it was unacceptable, and I think if you asked Shell, they would tell you it was unacceptable. Impacting the community is not acceptable, and they regret that incident.”

When I asked Dean how these companies handle the atmosphere of distrust that now permeates Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia due to the leaks, he replied, “I don’t think anyone’s asking anybody to trust the industry. Trust has to be earned and I think our companies are trying to earn that trust.” He also gave me an analogy that awkwardly acknowledged just how bad the situation was: “You can be a great guy, but you go murder somebody, all of a sudden, you’re a murderer.” 

Dean also pointed out that Sarnia’s air quality wasn’t helped by what he called “transboundary migration of contaminants from our friends to the south.” In other words, roughly half of Sarnia’s pollution has floated into the city from American smokestacks. Detroit lies just a few dozen miles to the south and is similarly scarred by Canadian pollution—on the banks of the Detroit River, in a poor area of town, sits a three-story-high pile of petroleum coke that stretches the length of a city block. The pile’s owner, Koch Carbon (part of the infamous megacorporation Koch Industries, run by the Koch brothers), doesn’t seem to care to do anything about it either. As a headline in the New York Times this May put it, “A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit.” 

Chemical Valley seen from a small plane.

Just across the river from the coke pile lives Jim Brophy, a scientist and health expert who has studied pollution and human health in Sarnia and Aamjiwnaang for decades. (Jim and his wife Margaret helped discover the Aamjiwnaang birth-ratio anomaly.) I visited Jim to learn more about the problem of “cumulative effects,” which works like this: one petrochemical plant is legally allowed to produce a certain amount of Pollutant A, and another plant down the road is allowed to produce a different amount of Pollutant B—but no one knows what happens when A and B meet and combine in the air above a populated area like Aamjiwnaang. The Chemical Valley’s atmosphere is full of an unsettlingly unregulated, dangerous cocktail of poisons.

“The levels of toxic exposure we have in Ontario is not safe by any stretch of the imagination,” Jim said. “The most at-risk communities are First Nations on the fence lines, the blue-collar workers in those plants, the poor working class who live in south Sarnia… It’s not the CEOs.”

The mayor of Sarnia, Mike Bradley, seems sympathetic to the concerns of some environmentalists, though he also has a politician’s habit of hedging everything he says. “You’re never going to win by advocating for the oil industry in the realm of public opinion,” he said. “The reality is you cannot function in your daily life without the plastic, chemical, and petrochemical sector.” 

The mayor did express some support for conducting a study on the people most affected by the Chemical Valley’s emissions; however, he said that there isn’t enough government funding in place to support the research needed for the study. For at least the time being, the long-term effects of living under the chemical haze of Sarnia will continue to be unknown. 

Jim thinks that the blame for this can be laid at the feet of politically influential oil companies. “In countries where petrochemical industry has substantial power, there’s a real deficit of democracy,” he said. “We live in a situation now in Canada where the oil industry has tremendous power. Some would say they literally have a lock on the federal government. So when you’re in a community like Sarnia, where they have tremendous clout, and there’s fear of plant closures and downsizing and so forth, the Department of the Environment doesn’t act as a counterweight to that industry. It falls then to the Ada Lockridges of the world to stand up to this… Where the hell is the federal government? Where the hell is the provincial government? What are we doing here? Have all the protections and the democratic rights of our society collapsed?”

Right now the task of pushing back against pollution falls to smaller organizations like Sandy Kinart’s Victims of the Chemical Valley, and they can only do so much. In 2003, the group helped erect a monument to those who died from working in the refineries and factories in beautiful waterfront Centennial Park. It was nice while it lasted, but this spring, much of the park was closed after an excessive amount of asbestos was found in the soil. When I visited, I couldn’t get in and there was no official signage explaining why the park was shuttered. 

Wandering around the exterior of the park, I found two sticky notes that had been left on the chain-link fence that blocked the entrance. On them, an anonymous Sarnian had distilled the situation quite simply in cursive handwriting: “This is a memorial for those who died and suffered because of the Chemical Valley. It’s behind a fence because the government found out that this park is also polluted by toxic chemicals.”

More from the Hot Box Issue:

It’s Good to Be the King

The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This

A Montreal street isn't a Montreal street without a giant fucking hole in it.

At rush-hour Monday morning after one of the busiest weekends of the year in Montreal with the Pride parade, Osheaga, and the Rogers Cup all happening, a construction worker was rolling down Montreal’s famous Saint-Catherine street in his truck when the road collapsed beneath him into an 8-metre long, 5-metre-wide, and 3-metre deep sinkhole. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but count on the fix-up taking a really, really long time. I mean, it took them over 30 hours to get the damn truck out of the hole.

Montreal is pretty much crumbling and all politicians are saying is that there are too many infrastructure issues to prevent everything. But in this case, the city actually knew that a sewer probably burst when the owner of the pool hall across the street called them repeatedly over the past week to complain about stinky water pouring through his bar’s underground walls, but they didn’t listen.

But this can’t be a surprise to anyone living in Montreal judging by the number of construction debacles that come up so often in this city.

Take for example, the 3-tonne steel plate that fell from a construction site and killed a 32-year-old language teacher on Monday morning or the 15-meter concrete slab that fell from a highway overpass in 2011. This isn’t even the first sinkhole in a while, as two more appeared in downtown streets in May and June of last year.

And it’s so easy to go on, like with the hole in Canada’s busiest bridge or the disaster that is the Turcot Interchange, but I think you get the picture.

During his stand-up routine at July’s Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers joked that every time he comes to Montreal the amount of scaffolding and construction makes it look more like Europe after World War II.

Sure, Montreal is pretty old and needs a lot of fixing, but the Charbonneau Commission—an investigation into the province’s dealings with corruption—has finally proven that construction and engineering firms have been bribing government officials for decades to win contracts despite doing a more than shoddy job. They also have been known to take longer to complete jobs because they know the government will keep hiring them back.

And it’s not just a few odd companies I’m talking about here. Earlier in the summer during pothole season, Montreal wanted to hire seven asphalt companies to fill the potholes—the only problem was every single company was being accused under the Charbonneau Commission. So the mayor—who ironically resigned due to corruption allegations against him—cockily asked Montrealers whether they should hire the corrupt companies who were accused of skimping on asphalt quality in the first place or leave the potholes the way they are. The people said they’d rather have the potholes, but the city didn’t listen and hired them anyway.

In its first year of a three year investigation, the Charbonneau Commission has heard hundreds of hours of testimony which led to such Boardwalk Empire-esque scandals as the resignation of two consecutive Montreal mayors, the forced trusteeship of Laval’s entire city council, video evidence of mobsters stuffing their socks with cash, and the presence of a Ziplock bag filled with $122,800 of illicit moolah given to a former city engineer.

When the Commission returns from summer break, they will take on another branch of the Quebec corruption tree when they probe the construction unions who are fresh off a summer of fun, with a two-week long strike that ended in back-to-work legislation, in addition to their annual two-week construction holiday.

Life’s good when you’re in Quebec’s construction industry, so long as you can avoid pesky anti-corruption investigators, mafia assassins, and the growing threat of death-by-sinkhole.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam

Previously:

Quebec’s Mafia Corruption is All Out in the Open

Montreal is Looking for Their New Mayor on Workopolis

Montreal is Mayorless Again

Remember Rob Rhinehart? I'm sure you do because it's hard to forget about a guy existing solely on vitamin puke. A few months ago we wrote about Soylent, an incredibly nutritious "food replacement" smoothie that Rob, a 24-year-old engineer, had been making and consuming as his only food source for almost five weeks. On one hand, it did look a bit like semen—but on the other, Rob claimed that by drinking it every day he'd never have to eat again. Given that starvation is a fairly major problem in the world at the moment and the planet's population will likely surpass 9 billion by 2050, Rob's invention seems like an important one.

Since we last talked to him, Rob and Soylent have become famous. His project has been derided as "dangerous," "ludicrous," and "a red flag for a potential eating disorder" by nutrition experts. Fortunately for Rob, the supporters of Soylent have been generous: a crowdfunding project for his fancy health goo raised almost $800,000 in under 30 days. Now Rob is the CEO of the Soylent Corporation; his hobby has officially turned into a career. His management team might look like the kind of technically minded nerds who'd want to consume most of their meals in the form of a beige, odorless powder mix, but they're also the potential forefathers of a famine cure.

With over $1 million in preorders already received for Soylent worldwide, it seems like this stuff is going to stick around. I caught up with Rob to ask how it's all going for Soylent—which some are already calling "the future of food."

VICE: Hey, Rob. So, what happened after our interview?
Rob Rhinehart: My inbox exploded. Gmail cut me off after I answered 500 emails in a single day. Achievement unlocked. Since then Soylent has become a company and people are finally rethinking the nature of food. These are exciting times.

How have you dealt with all the media attention?
At first it was very difficult. I've always been a private person and it was uncomfortable to put myself out there. However, I decided it's my job now, and I had better get good at it. On the internet everyone talks about you like you're not in the room.

You're still eating nothing but Soylent with good results, right? How long has it been?
Yes, Soylent is exactly what I was looking for. It's been roughly 90 percent of my meals for seven months now. Once we got some professional dietitians and food scientists to collaborate with us, it got much tastier and more filling. I still keep painstakingly close track of my health and body metrics, and I still run almost every day. This also makes me approximately vegan and when I do eat, I eat very well. I've developed a lot of good habits since starting Soylent, and learned a lot about the body and what's running me.

An early version of Soylent.

How did you find your beta testers? Are they enjoying their dinner?
I chose a reasonably diverse group based on a survey I conducted via my blog, which got many thousands of responses. The men loved it, but it took some tweaking to make the women happy. Today we support about 50 beta testers. I love reading their logs—you get stuff like "Day 12: Feel like the Terminator." The main criticism has been the appearance. People are pretty shallow when it comes to food.

Have you made any changes to Soylent now that it's not just you eating it?
The formula has changed, making it as nutritionally optimal as possible and improving the taste, texture, and mouthfeel. My initial version was just a prototype. We now have a men's and a women's version that should mostly cover the vast majority of people. I still recommend eating some traditional food, I just find it makes me feel tired compared to Soylent. I never liked cooking, but engineering food has been a lot of fun. At this point, it amazes me what people manage to live on.

How is Soylent different from other meal-replacement drinks on the market already?
A lot of things will give you calories, but nothing so far has been designed to be something you can live off. There are no food replacements on the market.

People have expressed concerns about the size of your sample group and the fact that you don't have a nutrition-science background. What do you say to those who think what you're doing is reckless or unsafe?
Ad hominem attacks aside, no one knows the consequences of 30 years of iPhone use but given the data we have it's probably fine. There are people that think everything new is dangerous, and some will accept new technology without testing it enough. I try to take the middle path. Soylent is perfectly safe, FDA-approved, and already seems far healthier than what the average American or Somalian is eating.

What do you think of the nutrition world in general?
People are inundated with terrible, conflicting advice. Nutrition is unfortunately a field where everyone thinks they're an expert. I am not, and I don't need to be. My goal is to provide the nutritional recommendations already developed by the IOM, WHO, and our board of nutritionists as efficiently and effectively as possible. That is an engineering problem.

A lot of people got mad when you claimed Soylent was as nutritious as fruit or vegetables.
Just because something is natural doesn't mean it's safe or healthy, and just because something is artificial doesn't mean it's unhealthy or dangerous. Look around you. Nothing we buy is natural. Everything useful is designed and manufactured, and food should be no different. People are afraid of sweeteners when it's real sugar that's killing us. They're afraid of preservatives when food waste is rampant. McDonald's is trying to engineer lower-calorie food that is more filling to fight obesity, but people are demanding natural-sounding ingredients. It's frustrating to watch. The idea of "real food" is just snobbery. Everyone has the right to be healthy, even people who don't like vegetables.

If it's all completely approved why do you think people are still afraid of it?
Fear makes a better story—fear-mongering in food is too easy for many media outlets and entertainers to resist. Part of the reason I created Soylent was to avoid the cacophony of opinions and misinformation around food and diet. I'm certainly taking less of a risk now than I was with a diet known to be unhealthy. People fear what they don't understand. By being transparent and clear we will continue to bring more people around to this important idea.

Nutritionists, foodies, and other critics seemed particularly attached to the idea of chewing, and are mad at you for taking it away. Are you dedicated to the smoothie medium or could Soylent move into bars and cereals and other solid foods?
We can make anything, but a liquid is the best for nutrient absorption. Humans started chewing in the first place because it makes food closer to a liquid.

Shit, that's a good point.
Some of our testers say they chew gum, though, so there must be some innate desire to chew even when you are not hungry.

You guys had an enormously successful crowd-funded campaign a few months ago. Who was donating?
Our backing is amazingly diverse. We have people of all ages all over the world backing Soylent. People have many reasons for donating, from better health to aid to sustainability, but most just want to save time and money. In the United States it's not "phytonutrients" people are lacking, it's time. Giving people the opportunity to catch up on some sleep or work will do more for the average person's health than fresh kale. Some will lament this fact, but I am encouraged that many people have things they would rather be doing than eating. Spending less energy on survival is progress.

Are you working anywhere else or is Soylent your full-time gig now?
I am working on Soylent full-time and then some. I'm even taking a salary, which is a first, though so far I've blown it all on decommissioned biology equipment.

Sounds pretty wild. What's next for the smoothie that Gawker said "looks just like semen"?
I see Soylent as a ubiquitous, practical, day-to-day meal that provides most of our nutrition. However, I also see people engineering new recreational foods and making novel foods more beautiful and flavorful than anything we get from nature, thus reducing the burden we place on the environment. I see a difference between "eating" and "dining," and both will be improved with science.

The name "Soylent" has annoyed some detractors online. Most of them are bummed about the whole "Soylent Green is people" connotation. Would you ever consider changing it?
We're trying to create a universal food for the masses. I think it's a pretty apt name. It also gets the point across that this is not a luxury brand. It's supposed to be practical and efficient. There are already plenty of fancy foods. This isn't one of them.

What was it like setting up the Soylent Corporation, as someone presumably pretty new to running a million-dollar business?
As an engineer and entrepreneur I have been preparing for this my entire life. Every idea I've tried has done a little better than the last. Soylent is no overnight success. I have been trying to create something useful for other people my entire life. I never imagined it would look like this, but it seems to fit the bill beautifully. It's exciting to work on something with so much potential, and I am prepared to take it all the way.

Can we reach some kind of deal wherein if you become a billionaire I get a million dollars for breaking the story? Just a fun, professional idea.
I have no desire to be a billionaire, but I want my company to be successful. In the future when Soylent is a multibillion dollar commercial, humanitarian, research empire I'll buy you something pretty, and nostalgic, like a tomato.

I see what you did there. Deal, I guess.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @monicaheisey

Previously – This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

More stuff about stuff you put in your mouth:

Watching Three People Share a $384,000 Burger Is Surprisingly Boring

Anaylizin' the death wavez.

If you could increase your life by a decade or two would you do it? Everyone has wondered what is beyond the light at the end of the tunnel, but what if you found out you wouldn't have to worry about that for quite a while because we would be practically immortal? What if you didn’t have to stress out about getting cancer or Alzheimer’s or going blind? What if you could live many lives in one and actually get all those things that you’ve always wanted to do, but never had enough time to do them? Wouldn’t that be ideal?

I called up David Gems from the Institute of Healthy Aging Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at the University of London to have a little chat about the future of the human race. David is the co-author of the newest breakthrough in health and aging advances. He and his partner Cassandra Coburn have found out what death looks like (apparently it’s blue) and are working hard to try and slow down the aging process in their lab across the pond.

VICE: For people who aren’t aware of what this is, can you give us a brief description of what you’re working on?
David Gems: We’ve been studying aging and death because we want to understand it. Aging is probably the biggest unanswered question in the science world. When people get seriously ill these days, it’s generally from aging—so aging is a disease. We study it in worms, not because we care about aging in worms particularly, but because it's too difficult to study it in people. If you can understand aging in one animal properly that’s a good start.

Specifically what we found was when worms die, there is this phenomenon—it’s a sort of ghostly burst of blue fluorescents that actually travels through the worm and it tracks death. These worms are transparent, so it means you can actually watch death as it passes through the animal, which is kind of eerie. But it’s also kind of useful because it means you can watch death. As a scientist, you can actually do experiments on it. You can try and stop it and slow it down and figure out how it’s happening.

Okay, so now that we’ve identified what death and aging looks like in worms, what does this mean for humans?
Aging in worms relates to humans in two different kinds of ways. We have to understand fundamentally what sort of thing aging is and what kind of process it is. That’s important because what’s going on now is kind of like a battleground of ideas in connection to the worm with what aging is. This is part of the process of overturning this old theory of damage causing aging and we’re working on a new theory that can replace it.

More directly though, what we see in the worm in terms of what’s more directly applicable, the big organ in the worm is the intestine. It’s this huge organ inside the worm which is also its liver and fat, and what happens is that you get one cell in the front of the intestine that dies and then the neighboring cell responds to having a dead cell next to it by dying itself. So you get a cascade, like a chain of death spreading from cell to cell. Now that sort of thing also happens in humans where you have some damaged tissue. Imagine you have a stroke, so a bunch of your brain cells died so you have these sort of dead cells surrounded by live cells. These live cells have to cope with these dead cells being right next door to them and often what happens in these dead cells trigger death in the live cells so you get this propagation of death. That turns out that the kinds of biology involved in the spreading of death through the worm and the way death spreads within the tissue in humans is actually quite similar. So by studying death in the worm we can work out ways to slow down the spread of death in humans.

Blue Death: the Movie.

Damn, that's really cool! On the video I watched on Wellcome Trust you say that this discovery has opened a lot of doors to be able to find cures for things like cancer, diabetes, blindness, and a bunch of other age related diseases, what’s going to be the next step to implement this into humans?
The thing is that studying aging in humans is very difficult—there are a lot of experiments. So the idea is that we could solve aging in very simple animals like fruit flies and worms, not because I give a damn about worms it's just because it's really easy to study. The big news in these animals is you can slow the aging down by a lot. Aging is something you can intervene in. You can't reverse it, and you can't stop it, but you can slow it down. In the worms you can double, triple or quadruple their lifespan.

How do you think expanding the human lifespan by 2, 3, or ten times change society?
Let me try and do some crystal ball gazing based on what’s currently possible. I think that it's very likely if they applied these practices to humans in nature, it would be possible to slow aging down modestly. So that might mean increases of the lifespan by a decade or two—and that's fairly optimistic—but remember if you were to cure all cancer you would only increase human lifespan by a few years, so this would involve an enormous improvement in late life health.

I don't think that at the moment there is concern about consequences of massive life extension, from what I know of aging I don't think it's very likely at all that there will ever be any silver bullet like antibiotics, where you take a pill and massively slow aging down. I think it's likely that this will be very incremental. So people shouldn't worry about human evolution, but more about resources and all that stuff for the older population. We've got to figure that out or we're finished. You can't start saying, "Oh a convenient way to deal with this problem like managing our resources and population is to ALLOW people to get Alzheimer's and cancer" because that's a simple Nazi kind of approach. Old people’s suffering is just as painful as suffering in young people and we have to do whatever possible to improve health in everybody.

More immortality and health:

The Immortality Commune of Gavdos

John Martin Fischer Is Going to Solve the Afterlife

Vintage backpack, shirt, and shorts

Photos by: Paley Fairman
Model: Lauren Fortner
Styling: Alexandra Mandelkorn

All vintage clothing provided by The Dog Show

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Vintage shorts

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Rachel B. Glaser

I can still remember where I was and what the air felt like the first time I read Rachel B. Glaser. I’d slept the night on a friend’s futon and was woken up by the sun blasting me in the face. Crumbs from the sofa were pressed into my skin. Being awake early in a strange apartment with nowhere else to go, I groggily picked up the issue of my friend’s magazine I’d somehow drunkenly acquired the night before, and turned to a story called “Pee On Water.” Although I had read an insane and fucked story of Rachel’s called “Butt Teen” years earlier, in that work she had been credited as “R.B. Glaser,” and I didn’t immediately realize the two were the same person. And yet, as soon as I began reading “Pee On Water” I knew here was someone with style and confidence to spare, who could pretty much do anything inside a sentence and not only get away with it, but have you being like, “Haha, WTF.”

Like, here’s how “Pee On Water” (which would later be reprinted in a book titled, yes, Pee On Water) describes the history of human sexual evolution: “Males try sex with females from the front. Boobs get bigger to remind males what butts felt like.” Take that, Philip Roth.

Or, like, check out her paintings of NBA players, created sometimes in MS Paint and sometimes by hand. You might not expect grand aesthetic beauty in a portrait of Russell Westbrook or Carmelo Anthony, but in the same way that she can write about boobs and eating paint and the invention of plastic in a way that makes you think about it in a new way, Glaser’s eye for the line opens wide into the grace and patience of the athlete, caught in form.

Glaser’s latest book is a collection of poems titled Moods. In it we are witness to the same sprawling catalog of bizarre beauty extracted from the mundane, and her weird ability to turn any kind of presence into something magical. The voices here shift seamlessly between God and Woody Allen, Valium and babies, accumulating fragments in some way like a cubist Mitch Hedberg in the body of a 20-something woman. The images sprawl and cut themselves short at the same time, and seem to be able to go anywhere at once, but also follow some very rigorous inner logic. You’re laughing, and then you’re struck, and then you’re struck again and slightly dizzy, and then the poem pets you on the head, then it’s kind of fondling you while pretending to help you walk straight. Within these lines there is an electric array of moods, each of which never hesitates to stop and wallow in its own colors, but in the end keeps on moving into more ideas. It’s both refreshing and challenging at the same time, which feels awesome.

Three Poems from Moods

"God is popular"

god is popular with athletes
they think about him while they practice
but rarely will he watch with one of his eyes

he has countless eyes
a hundred eyes, more
he is all eyes, but they hurt
and he can never sleep

the ocean is okay
but boats crowd it with their wakes
god can’t help but look at every bubble

it puts a strain on his eyes to watch small things and fast things
cities, streets, fingernails
dots on a die

he prefers to watch other planets
Saturn and those ones
those are graceful
more one color

watching Rushmore be built
the Great Wall
something lengthy and accumulative

he hates fireworks
but the worst is to see a needle being strung
the little end of the string struggling to fit
his eye feels like it’s been injected with iodine

he cannot rub it
he is invisible
no one can help him

---

"The BAD LOFT PARTIES"

I had sex with this boy I’m friends with. He has such a nice girlfriend. If the
parties hadn’t been so bad, we wouldn’t of, but every party was bad. One party had
baked ziti, but was still bad. The friend, he wears t-shirts that have disgusting things
silk-screened on. Like somebody eating their eyeball with a fork. Somebody who is not
real. Or a cow having sex with a car and both are dripping with slime. A bathtub filled
with blood but the blood has a smile.

My friend decided to write a love song to win back his girlfriend. I helped because I
took Poetry once, so I know how to do lyrics. We tried to make a song but it sounded
too somber. I think it’s because both our guitars are black, I said. He looked and it was
true. Shit, these are my only guitars, he said. But it was O.K. A love song is always sad.

I have never made anyone my whole world. I like taking apart bikes and putting them
back together different. There was never a guy who floored me. The ones I know,
you’d be retarded to get lost in. They live in basements and pee in bottles. They steal
everyone’s Netflix. A party that’s bad, makes me more sad than mad. That’s one of my
lines from my poems. Then it goes: A boy is a body, a butt is so bare, I ride on my bike,
no hands, eating air.

---

"Incest is lazy"

roommates are monsters
a graveyard’s relaxing
the police are pretentious
artists are wimps
jocks are blocks
babysitters are prostitutes
angels are gay
holidays are non spontaneous
moms are my slaves
dads are hard to read
homework is lame
Sundays I find mournful
gossip is energy
love is overdone
birds don’t participate
brothers are renditions
teenagers are accused
beer is filling the room
globes are spinning off their holders
boogers are extra atoms
science is sexy
history is impossible
Kathy is unholy
Sarah is hella lonely
butts are like babies
writing is like boring
boys eat power
baseball season is over
fall is like grunge music
days are alike
hell is not real
heaven is fake
homes are redundant
friends are brief masterpieces
weed is so crazy
America was immoral
humans are monsters of choice

Previously by Blake Butler - Fatty XXL Meets the Little Mermaid High on X and Texting

@blakebutler

Think back to that awkward phase when you were a "late bloomer," a.k.a. you watched TV and played video games and masturbated a lot, probably too much, and eventurally these interests combined in unhealthy ways and you were having full-blown fantasies about Cammy, the bethonged, ponytailed chick from Street Fighter II. OK, now imagine that ten years have passed and you have pretty much forgotten about that whole weird time in your life. You're at a club, and lo and behold, there's one of the girls from your high school you were too shy to talk to, dressed just like Cammy. You hope she doesn't notice you because you fear her, but she catches wind of you, walks over, and starts bullying you into "getting your dick up," which pushes you into a sexual K-hole that's equal parts nostalgia, pent-up sexual agression, and memories of video game marathons. Brooke Candy is that bitch.

Anyway, I phoned Brooke to talk about her new video.

VICE: Red Bull's Catwalk Studio produced this video. Did they give you any rules about nip slips, or was their any other red tape?
Brooke Candy: What was so amazing about working with Red Bull on this project was how open they were with my direction and how they made a point to support me in my fight against censorship. I'm pretty off the hinges and unfiltered and the fact that they weren't afraid made the entire process a lot easier. Once the video was filmed they were super supportive with every little tweak I felt I needed to make and were really all about making sure I was happy with the overall product. Working with corporate America can be difficult but the fact that they've been so supportive of me along the way gives me hope. They're really progressive.

It seems that a lot of members of the YouTube peanut gallery are constantly on the verge of trading their keyboards for pitchforks. Does criticism in the comment sections bother you?
The fact that people are vocal with their criticisms shows how much of an impact I'm having on my generation, so for that, I'm flattered. The negativity I receive is a direct reflection of my positive and steady progress as an artist. At times, like anyone would, I do feel a bit vulnerable, but at the end of the day it's just words. I'm primarily making music as a form of self-expression, so whether or not people are feeling it, I'm going to keep doing it. If I sat around all day tiptoeing around everyone's sensibilities, it would be time wasted—time that I could otherwise spend focusing on my career.

What was it like collaborating with Alex Matsson?
Collaborating with Alex Mattson was amazing. He's one of the sweetest dudes I've ever come across. The fact that he's so humble, talented, and motivated really put me at ease. We would smoke together and just talk about all kinds of weird shit and I swear he was literally the only person in all of London with weed. He just has this calming energy about him, not to mention that he doubles as a great designer. His shit is expertly tailored and super decadent yet still has that edge. I just felt really lucky. He's fucking lovely!

My inner nerd recognizes that you are wearing the same get up as Street Fighter's Cammy. Do you think that's what Alex was going for?
The actual Cammy-inspired look that I wore in the video was a collaboration between Alex and Matthew Josephs, who styled the video. I think they're both really inspired by anime and cosplay, and since the collection was militant it seemed like a natural fit to reference Street Fighter. The looks in this video are definitely my favorite thus far. I had an all-star team. Daniel Sallstrom did my makeup and contoured my face to look like an actual girl! He fucking transformed me. Charlie Le Mindu spent hours and hours braiding those crazy french braids that ended up trailing behind me a good 12 inches. I couldn't have been happier; working with them was really everything I hoped for.

If you went to Comic Con like that neck beards would have seizures. Do you have an inner dork as well?
I don't really think that there's such a thing as "dorky" but some of my inspo comes from things that are labeled that way. Up until now, I thought neck beards having seizures was cool as fuck.

Your outfit in "Genesis" was very Fifth Element. What cosplay is up next? Personally, I would heavily fuck with a Tomb Raider look, glock and all, can you make that happen?
My friend and designer Seth Pratt actually made me a red version of the Tomb Raider outfit. It's without the gun holsters, but everything else is exactly the same! That would be so dope, I would love to play that role next. I feel like I've definitely had a few Chun-Li moments, but I would definitely like to pull an all out Chun-Li look. 

More about video games:

North Korea's First Racing Video Game Is Terrible

There's a Video Game Church (and It's Totally Lame)

Why Did Video Games Start Being Pussies?

Have you heard of The Canyons? Of course you have because you are a living, breathing human who uses the internet. In case you are the creep who gets his news off the iPad of the pretty lady sitting next to him on the subway, The Canyons is a "contemporary thriller" written by Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, directed by Paul Schrader, and starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen. It was partly funded by a Kickstarter campaign, through which they ultimately raised about $200,000. The suckers, err, contributors who gave $5,000 got the chance to have Bret Easton Ellis review their novel. Here we have the first of Ellis's Kickstarter reviews, of Pablo D'Stair's novel Regard, which was published this year from (KUBOA) art house. —The VICE Reader

If I’m counting the number of titles correctly on the “Other Fiction by Pablo D’Stair” page then Regard falls among his 38 works of fiction. I’m noting this because D’Stair was born in 1981, and for someone in his early-30s this is a crazily prodigious accomplishment. Judging from Regard, I’m guessing that most of this fiction is experimental and, like Regard, carefully crafted enigmas that bury dramatic incident in reams of minutiae, which is part of a plan—the novel as puzzle. Here’s the description from its dust jacket:

“A 13-year-old girl moves through a world equal parts routine and randomness, tenderness and violence, tedium and excitement, intimacy and ambivalence, making no distinction between one state or another, her life rendered in minute physical description with only as much psychological insight offered as would be leveled at a stray cat or an insect.”

If that sounds like 275 pages of fun reading, then Regard is definitely for you. This approach might seem meek, almost a shy way of constructing a novel. As a writer who has used this device myself, I understand why another might be attracted to it, but the risk in doing so is that a reader might become too busy thinking, Why isn’t a narrative announcing itself? and then skimming through pages instead of concentrating on what’s happening. A reader might get distracted by asking, “Where is the, um, story?” There are, of course, stacks of uninteresting books with strong narratives and forceful characterizations, and a writer can be a complete hack and still write a terrific narrative. But someone needs to be a freaking genius to pull off a 300-page experimental novel. This all sounds like I’m going to complain about Regard, but I’m not because the book blithely manages to go its own way and the reader ultimately goes along with it, if not always eagerly.

Regard was written about a decade ago and only published this year by (KUBOA) press. In just the second chapter, there’s a writer (I suppose he’s a writer... Like everyone else in the book, he’s never given a name) speaking to the 13-year-old girl and offering his touching feelings about the permanence of books. This was probably written as this analog world was on its irrevocable way to becoming a digital one, where screens would ultimately replace typeset-bound objects. The speech resonates and sets up the rest of the novel as a serious literary endeavor couched in an old-fashioned avant-garde that has its roots in American modernism.

While reading Regard, it’s hard not to wonder why someone would attempt to write a book like this now—one that moves so slowly and purposefully tries your patience—and you might be annoyed at first. However, it’s not annoying enough to toss right away, and the writing flows so that it is (at times) easy reading. Despite the specificity of the prose and the “situation” (I won’t call it a “plot” exactly) you find yourself drifting in and out of Regard because the prose, while fluid, is stuck in a plan that demands it adhere to the novel’s overarching conceit, which means that the prose doesn’t really breathe and never differentiates. (I’ve tried this before in my fiction and know that if you play it right, you can achieve startling effects via the juxtaposition of the flatness of the prose with what’s lurking in the action.) Regard doesn’t always make its case but it is written by someone who cares about language. You’d be surprised at the number of novels written by people who don’t. It takes a lot of daring and ambition for a writer to tease out a book like this in such minute detail, and D’Stair is committed.

Regard reminds you that every writer has their own plan. Some are more apparent than others. With some books you can decipher that the writer is smarter than you. With others you can figure out that they simply think they are smarter than you—and didn’t fully comprehend the plan they were trying to execute. A few are just inept. With Regard you stop yourself from skimming because you start thinking you might be missing something—the book is too well written to skim. And then you’re thinking, Well, have I? And then you’re thinking, Does it matter? Somehow again and again you’re drawn in, and you eventually stop wondering if the novel would have benefited from being more ambitiously conceived. Would the situation of this girl have resonated more had the book been conventionally told? (Instead of “She wakes up, stretches and goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth” there are eight pages describing these actions complete with numerous parentheticals.) But you get used to the book’s rhythm and follow it because the work is obsessive. We finds ourselves in a languid kind of suspense bracing ourselves for something to happen—the diminishing returns and the skimming vanish—and then at a certain point something that was only alluded to early on is confirmed and the novel changes.

The girl, never named, floats through the book (like a ghost) in a nonspecific locale. We see the girl at school, with her father, going to the movies, spying on a neighbor. Pages and pages of dull incident are occasionally interrupted by jarring images: a cigarette being crushed into a hand, fireworks, urination. Did we just read about a rape? We’re not in the young girl’s consciousness; we’re in the writer’s consciousness and always aware of the disconnect. The events in the book are kept at a distance, and you start longing for the meaning of it all. But then something happens. Very early on, buried in a paragraph we think might be an incestuous sex scene between the girl and her father, what we might have thought was a rape but are not completely sure. Our suspicions are confirmed midway through the book when the girl finally confesses to her mother—who has conveniently passed out... the only way the girl could confess—that her father has been fucking her. It’s a violently sexual confession and the first time we really hear the girl’s voice. It’s in this moment that you realize the book couldn’t have been written any other way. Everything streams from this transgression. It is the book's reason for existing.

Regard is labeled “a novel,” and the more you read of it, the more you realize that a novel means many things. It’s a reminder that anyone who carries a strict set of rules about what a novel is probably loses out on a lot of literary fiction. 

                                                                     ***

The VICE Reader is a series in which we publish original fiction—mostly. We also feature the occasional poem, essay, book review, diary entry, Graham Greene-style dream-diary entry, Zemblan fable, letter to the editor, letter to a fictional character, and anything else that is so good we feel it must be shared among the literary-minded and the internet at large.

Anton Ilyushchenko is a 27-year-old blogger from Omsk, Russia. Last April, he reposted some photographs taken in a nightclub in his hometown. I guess they'd be fairly shocking to someone who's never used the internet before, and the people in them are going more HAM than the average American partygoer tends to—you don't often see people penetrating each other up against the wall in bars over here—but mostly they're just funny photos of drunk people being drunk and doing things they'll probably regret in the morning. To be honest, we've seen wilder stuff on some of our Big Nights Out.

However, it seems the Russian authorities don't share that opinion, because Anton is now facing six years in prison. Though he maintains that he didn't take them himself, the images went viral. The cops followed the hyperlinks back to Anton's blog, and are accusing him of "distributing pornography." Despite the fact that a cursory Google search shows that a hell of a lot of porn is coming out of Russia, the distribution of porn technically carries with it a sentence of two to six years in prison. Anton deleted his post, but the pictures are still easily accessible on a variety of other websites. (Which is why he doesn't mind us reposting them here.)

Last week, the police informed Anton they’d be going ahead with a criminal case after an “expert” at the Ministry of Internal Affairs ruled that three of the pictures constituted porn. The original photographer isn't under investigation and neither is the nightclub's owner—the latter of whom, it's worth mentioning, is rumored to have once worked for the Omsk police force.

I got in touch with Anton to ask how this whole shitstorm came about.

VICE: Hi, Anton. First off, can you tell me a little about Omsk? What kind of city is it?
Anton Ilyushchenko: Omsk is an ordinary provincial city with a population of a bit more than a million people.

How did you find these photos? 
I found the photographs via a link that was posted on an internet forum for the Omsk area. The link led to a group on VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social media site.

When you posted the photos on your blog, did you think they’d have this sort of impact?
No, I had no idea they’d have this sort of impact. I thought I’d just discuss the situation with the people who read my blog. And suddenly there were all these reposts across the whole country. If I’d known that the police would investigate me, then I probably wouldn't have put up the post.

Yeah, I figured that might be the case. Tell us a bit about the case against you. What happened with the cops?
I got a call and was asked to make an appearance at Lenin Police Station in Omsk. The pretext was that my name had been linked to the distribution of narcotics over the internet. I’ve never done anything like that. When I actually appeared at the station on the summons, the investigator asked me a bunch of questions about the uproar around the photos from the club. They’d never heard anything about the drugs business and simply shrugged.

What?
Yeah. I said, “Some coworker of yours called me and said I needed to appear about this drugs issue and you’re talking about another thing.” The investigator said he didn’t know anything about this. I still don’t understand why they went about it that way. I don’t hide anything. If I had been warned about what the situation really was, I’d still have come in and given a statement.

I told the police that I saw the photographs on a social networking site and that they'd been discussed on the Omsk forum. They asked me if I could define the word pornography. I answered that I couldn’t give an exact definition and refrained from answering. I said that the pictures of the drunk and naked people had shocked me. They’ve already called me into the station to give statements three times, although until now only as a witness.

Why did the Ministry of Internal Affairs start a criminal case against you, and not the guy who took the photos or the club’s owner?
The Ministry opened a criminal case due to the fact that pornography was distributed. They still don’t really understand who to blame.

Is it true that the owner of Everest is a former cop? Do you think that might have had a bearing on the decision to start a criminal case?
I had heard that the owner of the Everest Café had worked in the police before. More to the point, in the very same police station where they had started their investigation. The police denied this. I don’t know why they started a criminal investigation, but it’s possible that that was the reason.

Some people think you’ve shown Omsk in a bad light. What do you think of that?
It’s not me who’s put Omsk in bad light. I just showed the city as it is.

What do you make of the photos you uncovered? 
They’re vile and repellent.

Have you ever been to the Everest yourself?
I popped in there twice before, but I didn’t see any of the sort of anarchy [you see] in the photos.

Do you think these photos constitute porn?
No. Not at all. In all the definitions of pornography you find in decent sources, they mention the arousal of sexual desire. Personally, I don’t experience any such desire looking at these photos. And I didn’t want to incite any sort of desire in my readers. I see here only filth and people behaving like bloody animals. These photos bring up disgust, not arousal.

So what is pornography?
Porn is the depiction of sex with close-ups of the sexual organs. There’s nothing like that in these photos.

Do you think people have a right to distribute pornography?
Distributing pornography is illegal under our laws.

OK. I see from your blog that you’re in Kazakhstan now. Are you planning on coming home? Russian courts don’t have the best reputation over here.
I’m already back in Russia, actually. I don’t have the resources to stay out of the country for a long period of time.

You’re facing a pretty long sentence. Are you afraid?
I’m not afraid to fight for the truth.

What kind of support have you recieved from your fellow Russians?
I’ve gotten support from a huge number of people. They’ve said they’re even willing to take to the streets for me. I want to say a big thank-you to all the people who support me. Together we’ll achieve justice! 

Thanks for talking to me, Anton. Good luck and take care!

More stuff about nightclubs:

I Went to "the Club" for the First Time Ever

Living In a Nightclub For a Year Can Get Messy

Things That Need to Disappear from Dancefloors Forever