Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

VICE Premiere: Never Young's New Single 'Like a Version' Is Noise Rock Done Right

0
0

Noise rock has had a pretty solid run as a genre, from Scratch Acid to Slowdive to No Age to Lightning Bolt. Never Young is a band from the Bay Area that continues the tradition with music that's equal parts grunge and electronic fuckery, with occasional lapses into slow, disciplined breakdown jams reminiscent of Fugazi or Rites of Spring.

"Like a Version" fooled me when I first listened to it—I thought it was another in an endless stream of bleepy-bloopy electronic tracks that clog my inbox each day. But after a few seconds, the song blossoms into a gooey wall of guitars. Put it on and imagine yourself riding a motorcycle into a 90s sunset, like that goon James in Twin Peaks. You'll remember why guitar rock will never die.

Preorder the band's new album on Father/Daughter Records.


​Strengthening Family Bonds with Ecstasy

0
0

[body_image width='2000' height='1333' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='strengthening-family-bonds-with-ecstasy-116-body-image-1421429092.jpg' id='18810']

Annie Lalla. Photo by the author

New York City's latest Horizons Psychedelic Conference took place in a church. There were stained glass windows, columns, and marble angels. The setting matched the mood perfectly, as a series of distinguished psychedelics researchers from around the world described drug-induced mystical states of consciousness often associated with the divine.

Most of the speakers were protected in their studies by government exemptions to harsh anti-drug laws. Relationship coach Annie Lalla was not.

Lalla had read about reported successes of MDMA-aided psychotherapy, and decided to try it herself. The drug, commonly known as ecstasy or molly, instills a euphoric and empathic feeling in the user, along with diminished defensiveness. Individuals under the influence of MDMA typically display a greater desire and ability to bond. You really, really like everyone, in other words—that's what makes it so popular.

Studies are showing that therapeutic sessions with the drug can continue to help patients even years later. "MDMA gives people a template [for how] they can relate to challenging emotions," researcher Dr. Michael Mithoefer told me over the phone. "They can refer back to it after the medicine wears off."

Lalla recognized the drug's potential to help resolve her own personal and relational issues. She experimented with MDMA first on her own before embarking upon a mission to enroll her mother, father, brother, and sister in MDMA-aided family therapy. "You get a publicly-witnessed permanent record in your heart of your love for each other," she told me. "It's stored in your heart, and you can draw on it forever."

I sat down with Lalla to discuss what her experiences with MDMA have taught her about building better relationships.

VICE: Can you describe your work as a coach?
Annie Lalla: Professionally, I work with single clients and couples. The couples are often suffering recurring drama and conflict. They don't know how to move through the power struggle. That's kind of my expertise. I think 90 percent of couples never get past the power struggle.

How do you address that?
Well, for example, whenever myself and my husband are in conflict, we literally map out the conflict space. We've got our laptop out: "OK, so you're pissed about this, and I'm pissed about that. What does it have to do with sex, reproductive issues, money?" We're always tracking where we are in the conflict. I think people fight about the same things in the same ways. There are recurring motifs that I'm looking for, and that I use to help the couples I'm working with.

What do you do when you find the source of the conflict?
What I've come to realize is that it all basically boils down to, "Oh, you feel unsafe." No matter if they're yelling, screaming, crying—if I can feel a power move, I think, Oh, you're scared. So, I try to regulate my nervous system to take care of my sense of safety. Then, from that place, I think about how I can get them back to feeling safe.

No matter if they're yelling, screaming, crying—if I can feel a power move, I think, Oh, you're scared.

Is the power struggle ever resolved?
It's never resolved. The best you can do is to become aware of it, and to manage it. You can't stop wanting to arm wrestle, but you can say, "I'm arm wrestling intentionally, for something I believe in, and I'm not doing it compulsively or unconsciously." Instead of letting your animal use your cognitive functions to do whatever it wants, you align yourself with what your animal is trying to do, and what you think is serving your current and future selves. You find the overlap between those, and that alignment is the place where you operate during your power struggle.

What do you mean when you say "animal"?
We are animals, and the more unsafe we feel, the more we want to control our environment. Every animal down from the amoeba all the way up to us does it, and so I think our relationship with our partners [consists of] replaying old dance routines of unfinished power battles that we had with our first attachment figures: our parents.

Have your MDMA experiences changed the way you deal with conflict? Absolutely, yes. MDMA is egolytic [ego-dissolving] and the power struggle is between two egos. So, the more that the two egos feel separate, the more polarized the power struggle is. [With MDMA] you can empathically toggle between your perspective and theirs.

How do you use their perspective?
If you wanted to break into a house from the outside, you can, but it's way easier if you scope out the house from the inside first. Then you can create a map that you can use to infiltrate.

Very stealthy.
Stealth is important. The reason why I'm ethically comfortable with stealth is my attention. If the thing you're trying to burgle is the other person's presence and yours, I can get behind that. Most people are trying to burgle things that are not sacred. They're not operating on a sacred mission.

What other insights have you gained from MDMA?
If you pushed me metaphysically, I would have to say there's another step that I think exists in very intense psychedelic states. It's a state of communion beyond the separateness of self. Your being-ness and my being-ness ceases to be separate. We one-ify. So, I think that's possible in intense mystic states, but I don't think most people get there very often.

I think our personality is a series of defenses against unsafe childhood conditions. So we develop a defended self that then becomes our character and personality.

Are you able to use that insight to strengthen relationships?
On MDMA, in my historic private use—not necessarily with my family, but in my romantic relationships—I can taste where there is a wall [between myself and] the person that I love. And I can feel the wall is obsolete because the ego that is erecting the wall ceases to require it. It's a defense. And when the ego is more porous, it just needs less defenses.

What is it defending against?
I think our personality is a series of defenses against unsafe childhood conditions. So we develop a defended self that then becomes our character and personality. And, in some ways, I'm grateful for that. I think of a bonsai tree, which is a beautiful work of art. It's a stunted tree, but artfully stunted. So, I feel like the environmental conditions of your life are stunting you into this particular flavor of God.

How do you balance a need for defenses with a need for vulnerability?
Often your defenses are against circumstances that are no longer the case. You're often using [childhood] strategies in current situations that are obsolete, because you have more resources, intelligence, and wherewithal now. It's like moths moving towards the light. They move towards the light because when they evolved, only stars existed. It kept them alive, and now it kills them. The same strategy that once served life is now destructive.

I've been collecting dreams from around the world for a project, and I've noticed that those kinds of childhood themes come up again and again. Are dreams something you use in your work?
Dreams can be very helpful. I usually try to tell my dream to my partner or someone, because they'll see a pattern that I won't see. The dream is telling me that there's a blind spot. That's why [the issue] has to be smuggled into my dream space. The other trick I use is to identify with each character in the dream, and each item in the dream. So if I dream about a cat walking through a door and falling off a cliff, I'm the cat, I'm the door, and I'm the cliff. I climb into each one, and think, What can I learn from this?

They say there's a series of emotions; I really think there's only love and fear. And even then, I don't think there's fear. I think there is just love, and fear is in the shadow of love when you forget temporarily that love is the nature of reality.

Can you talk about some of the specific issues that you've worked on with your family?
Way back [when we began], there were a lot. My mother had a very marginalized voice in the family, and with my father, there was a subtle tyranny. And through the MDMA sessions, that was a big part of what I was trying to elucidate—the ways in which he unknowingly was perpetrating this inequity. Once it became part of his consciousness, he could see that it was inconsistent with his identity. He wasn't the typical Indian patriarch. He wouldn't let his daughters learn to cook or clean because he never wanted us to be domesticated housewives. He wanted the feminine to be powerful.

What do you mean when you say "subtle tyranny?"
The way it would show up would be like a raised voice, or he would become impenetrable in conversation. He would just repeat the same thing, and you couldn't talk to him about the issue.

How did you make him realize the effect he was having?
I remember one time, all of us got together and expressed anecdotal descriptions of moments when he had interacted with us in a way that had made us feel smaller. So him hearing that—and being under the influence of the MDMA—his ego was soft enough that he could not take it as an attack, and just hear it as reflections of behavior that was inconsistent with who we wanted to be. We even had him write out some commitments to remember. It's almost like notes to his future self—notes about how he wanted to be as a husband and a father so he could refer to them later. It was his own writing, and his own signature, so there was really strong accountability for taking on the epiphanies that came up. Over the course of five years, he has become less and less tyrannical.

It's interesting that you bring up the idea of there being two personas, the MDMA persona and the sober persona. What's the difference?
Well, the sober state defends itself more, and the MDMA state is the more real self.

What makes it more real?
It has less fear. They say there's a series of emotions; I really think there's only love and fear. And even then, I don't think there's fear. I think there is just love, and fear is in the shadow of love when you forget temporarily that love is the nature of reality. There's no such thing as a shadow in and of itself, it's just a lack of sunlight. You could argue that shadows are just as real as the tree and the sun, but there's a way in which the tree is more real. But if I had to bet my life on what's more real, I bet on the thing that inspires me. I consciously confer more reality to the things I'm inspired by.

It's to the point now where most of my friends wouldn't know whether I'm on MDMA or not.

Getting back to MDMA, I wanted to ask, what was your first time taking it like?
It was like home. My whole life up until that point, I was trying to have interactions with people that look like that. As long as I can remember, whenever I've met someone, I was looking for maximal intimacy per square inch per moment in our interaction.

What did that look like?
Sometimes I would be intrusive, or ask really intimate questions that were socially inappropriate. I just [wanted] to understand all the intricacies of the feelings and thoughts underneath the spoken statements. Shouldn't we be talking about that?

Did you expose yourself as well? Or was the exchange mostly one-directional?
When I was younger, it was more one-directional. I got alerted to that in high school. I started to realize that everyone felt very exposed around me, but no one actually knew me. Then I realized it was a defense mechanism. MDMA showed me that intimacy is the place that both of us climb into together, and we're naked together. And that felt way better than the other version that I'd been doing. When I was on MDMA, I would have an interaction with another human being I didn't know three minutes ago, and the level of fluid connection and alignment was the highest that I'd ever seen in a first encounter.

Are you able to recreate that feeling off of MDMA?
I knew from my research not to pin whatever I got from the MDMA onto the MDMA. The MDMA was just the facilitator. Say I was on MDMA right now, and I go and talk to [a nearby woman]. I would feel that I could talk to her easily without having an excuse. I know a lot of people say, "Oh, it's the MDMA. The MDMA allowed me to talk to her." Well, I knew that the MDMA wasn't doing anything that I couldn't normally do. It made me aware of what I could do. And if I took note of what I was doing on MDMA, I could become more like that person when I was off MDMA. It's to the point now where most of my friends wouldn't know whether I'm on MDMA or not.

Does your experience with the drug make normal reality less interesting?
It makes baseline reality more like a fascinating Sudoku. It's like a mystery. It's very entertaining. I love being on MDMA, but I love being off of it too. My first drug ever was LSD, which goes from six to eight hours and then it's done. It's like going on a roller coaster. Do you say, "I hate my life when I'm not on a roller coaster?" No, you enjoy the rest of the park.

Why did you choose to use MDMA with your family instead of LSD or mushrooms , for example?
I chose MDMA because it's the most likely [drug for] not having anything negative come up or to have a bad trip. It also had the most research behind it, about it being therapeutically useful.

What were some of the concerns that you had to overcome with your family about using MDMA?
My mom was worried about it being illegal and addictive. She has no knowledge about drugs. Crack, cocaine, heroin—she had them all mixed together [in her mind] with MDMA. So I had to differentiate them for her. I had to use research to help her see that there's not this thing called "drugs." There are specific drugs. First, I had to separate out addictive and not addictive. I was able to show her that alcohol was actually more dangerous—she'd be OK having a glass of wine. [But] alcohol actually has more negative physiological effects in the body and is more addictive. She was worried about MDMA being illegal. And I had to say, "Yeah, it's illegal. And, here are the reasons why it's probably illegal. It doesn't suit the status quo powers in the world."

My sister was like, "I'm going to go crazy." She thought she could get physically hurt. So again, I had to take her to websites and show how the biochemistry works. We took 5-HTP. We took all the serotonin precursors. We did as much as we could to mitigate any neurotoxicity.

What's your end goal with all of this work?
I want myself and the people around me to feel the most alive. I mean, basically I think every emotion is a messenger from the unconscious mind to deliver an important insight. Every unfelt emotion becomes a pathology, an addiction, or a neurosis. I'm trying to teach my family, my friends, and the world at large how to hold a wider range of their emotional experiences, and in order to do that, I have to keep practicing doing that myself. The extent that you feel your emotion is the extent [to which] you can develop yourself and actualize.

Follow Roc's latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

My Cat's Brush With Life-Saving Gender Reassignment Surgery

0
0

[body_image width='1200' height='770' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='my-cats-brush-with-life-saving-gender-reassignment-surgery-155-body-image-1421434906.jpeg' id='18864']

I never thought I'd find myself in the position of having to purchase my cat a $1,500 life-saving pussy, but I guess that's just the page I was on in this choose-your-own-adventure we call life.

Last Monday my cat woke up and almost died. The floor was strewn with vomit—putrid yellow, with chunks of pine bedding for added texture. The night before had been completely unremarkable. He greeted us at the door, flopped on his back to stretch out for a moment, just to show us he could, and cooed like a bird as he trotted over to his food bowl. He likes when I watch him eat. It seems to be a point of pride, like he's showing off a painstakingly crafted piece of art. He paused, admiring his work, and looked up at me.

"Get a loada this" he seemed to say. He says that a lot, whether it's prancing by with a cricket pinned between his jaws, conducting a bizarre yoga seminar on the throw blanket, or orchestrating a one-cat World Cup with the balls of foil I toss his way.

Back to Monday. Now, I am aware that Monday is, traditionally speaking, a day cats do not like. However, this violent display of guts and bile eclipsed anything I'd ever read in nationally syndicated cat literature. Even during that really weird week where Garfield thought he died, he still didn't repaint Jon's hardwood floors with his insides.

He yowled and coughed a bone-rattling wheeze of pain. Something was very, very wrong with my special boy. I knew this because I am his mom. He thinks I am his mom, and I feel like I am his mom. I know he thinks I am his mom because when he is feeling especially lovey he kneads his perfect paws into my lumps, searching for a teet to suckle. I feel like I am his mom because I was genuinely sad that he had to be alone on Christmas. This makes no sense, especially when you consider that if I am his mom it would make him a Jew.

We went to the animal hospital and they saw him immediately, which was not a good sign. At this point, I didn't know how close he was to death, but I was still worried. To a Jewish mother, everything is one step away from death. I slinked out to smoke a cigarette and saw a woman with an exposed midriff explain a situation to her boyfriend who was dressed as an Incubus song. Midriff was still unsure if their cat had "burned its bottom on the curling iron" but she didn't feel like waiting three hours to find out. Incubus Song didn't say words, but his beanie looked sad.

[body_image width='1200' height='1608' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='my-cats-brush-with-life-saving-gender-reassignment-surgery-155-body-image-1421435142.jpeg' id='18865']

Time passed. I now found myself speaking to a very professional looking vet. I don't know why but I trusted her. She carried herself like the star of a network dramady, slightly frazzled yet composed in the face of an onslaught of life-or-death scenarios. I bet she has a sassy friend who encourages her to try online dating. Things were not good with my special boy. She was talking, but I couldn't listen. I felt like that scene in the movie where the character finds out he has cancer: the fuzziness, the down-the-hallway feeling, the strange tinny echo. It was all there.

"He has a snow globe of kidney stones." Jesus Christ, she's a fucking poet. The image of a painful asteroid belt swirling toward my cat's dick made my groin seize up like it was the winning prize in God's claw machine.

"We have to put a catheter in him."

"Heh, Cat-theter."

"Your cat is dying. Please."

I'm no doctor, so I could totally be fucking this up, but she then explained that because cats' urethras are so small, it can be very hard to take out the catheter without causing permanent damage. In the event that they are unable to remove the tiny kitty piss tube, they would have to re-route his urethra to... well, an opening that looks a hell of a lot like a girl cat's vagina. They were going to give my precious boy a vagina.

At this point I should tell you that my cat's name is Murphy Brown. Murphy Brown's origin story is humble to say the least. My ex-girlfriend called me one day saying, "You've been talking a big game about getting a cat lately. It's time to put up or shut up, there's some kittens being given away right by your house." I had to check it out. I rolled up to the Food4Less on Figueroa Street to see two Latina teens and a laundry basket. By the time I got there, only two kittens remained. I picked one of them up and a wave of anxiety splashed over my big, dumb head. I've never been responsible for a life before. I held the tiny, helpless being, rolling over every potential catastrophe (heh, cat-tastrophe) before setting the kitten back down. Without a beat, a nice looking family snatched it up. One cat remained.

Pensively, I reached into the basket and lifted the last fluffball up to my chest. Memories of being picked last in everything resembling a sport flooded my mind. The miniscule, flawless being stretched out its perfect little paws and hugged me. I am a six-foot, 220-pound virile man covered in a thick mat of body hair, but I immediately melted into a pile of ooey-gooey cotton candy. Any reservations were instantly transformed into the certainty that me and this dirty little creampuff were about to spend a life together. The two teens informed me it was a girl, and I believed them. Murphy Brown had a home.

Reeling from the news of Murphy's impending downstairs switcheroo, I couldn't help but feel like it was my fault. I had, after all, misgendered him his entire fucking life. Was this his way of proving me right? To be the perfect son, was he willing to risk his life to be the daughter he must've thought I always wanted? How do you have a pronoun conversation with a cat? How much does sex really factor into gender, anyway? Too many questions.

In addition to the philosophical quandaries, I had a few logistical ones. It seemed way too soon to bring up gender reassignment, right? I mean if this were my real son, a human boy, there would be so many more options in between "his bladder is all blocked" and "let's give him a pussy!" Did these vets, unencumbered by the burden of their patients' self-awareness, I dunno, have a little fun with it? Was every vet secretly just Dr. Nick? "Hi everybody! Sorry your cat cannot do the walking no more, how about we give him wings!"

As I soon found out, this penis puzzle wasn't nearly as rare as I imagined. My social media was full of people sharing stories of their cats' and dogs' surgically useless hogs. It made me feel like I wasn't alone. Murphy would be amongst the ranks of the proudly transformed. Alive. Fine. At this point, I almost wanted him to get the surgery, just to make my special boy even more unique. Of course, in my heart, I wanted him to go through the least amount of trauma possible, but hey, who knew a urethra could become a silver lining?

"Is it weird if I like, I dunno, like come visit?" I said into the phone. I was back at home, day two of his hospital stay.

My house is small, a tiny one-bedroom bungalow tucked behind a duplex and not even visible from the street, yet it had never felt so big. A 17-pound cat really tied the place together. Every few minutes another brief reminder of the lack of his presence fluttered deep in the well of my stomach. The creak of the refrigerator door sounded like a mew, the settling of the water in our old pipes were the pitter-patter of his paws on the hardwood. A glimpse of his empty food bowl was enough to send me back to bed. I picked up my phone. I wanted to come visit.

I don't know why it seemed weird to ask, but it did, y'know? He was scared, he was alone, just like me, but he was just an animal. I wondered if he knew I missed him. The technician on the phone didn't seem too put off about my request. I imagined Murphy in a human hospital bed, watching some heavily made-up TV judge shoot a glance to her sassy bailiff, IV in his arm, ambient beeps of monitors filling out the crushing silence. I peeled myself out of bed and threw a flannel over the sleeveless David Bowie shirt I'd worn three days in a row.

I made my way through the double doors marked "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" and into the hospital... holding area, I guess? It was bare, even for a hospital. Along the wall was a caged, purgatory version of the set for Hollywood Squares. Murphy was the center-right square, not ideal placement for such a shining star. The fucking Skipper from Gilligan's Island would be fine center-right, but my boy deserved at least a corner, if not the goddamned center square. The thought of an all-animal Hollywood Squares shone a warm light through the bleak cold cloud of depression that had engulfed me over the last few days. Almost on cue, his eyes lit up, too. He recognized me and couldn't wait to brag to the less-loved pets that I belonged to him. He rubbed his face all over me, headbutting his way through my beard as though every pass would lead him one step closer to freedom.

[body_image width='1200' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='my-cats-brush-with-life-saving-gender-reassignment-surgery-155-body-image-1421435220.jpeg' id='18866']

Of course I started crying. How could I not? He was at once both needy and comforting, relieved to see me but impossibly alien in the cold starkness of the hospital. It was my first time watching a life I cared dearly for come so close to being extinguished. I have been lucky up to this point. Death and I aren't too well acquainted. While I was aware that the true stakes of this encounter with the Reaper weren't nearly as high as they could be, it still showed me sides of myself that rarely emerge. In the meat of it, when I didn't know one way or another if Murphy would survive, I was able to lay the tracks for how I would deal with loss in the future. I got a chance to glimpse at what my life would be like if a parent or girlfriend suddenly left. When put that way, the $2,000 I spent on a cat's bladder in exchange for this peek into the future was absolutely worth it.

In the end, Murphy's urethra played ball, and he did not undergo emergency vag-surgery. While it was touch and go for a bit, I never truly felt like our time together would end so abruptly. I went to the bar next to the animal hospital on karaoke night and sang him "Nobody Does It Better," certain that he could hear me, that it would let him know that even though he couldn't see me, I was always near.

No less than two hours after his triumphant return home, he was rocketing into the Christmas tree, batting at the yarn ornaments we bought at Target, snatching one from its perch. Secure between his teeth, he proudly lifted his gaze to mine, showing off his plunder. "Get a loada this," he seemed to say.

Follow Josh Androsky on Twitter.

The Future According to VICE: The Future of Religion According to VICE

0
0

[body_image width='1500' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-religion-according-to-vice-martin-robbins-238-body-image-1421421290.jpg' id='18751']

A sign at a Charlie Hebdo solidarity vigil. Photo by Pete Voelker

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

If you had to pick one word to sum up religion in 2015, it might be "fear." How else do you describe a situation where sensitive Islamist zealots gun down cartoonists in their offices? The Charlie Hebdo attack and the chaos that followed in Paris has sent ripples out into the wider world. Fox News and the UK Independence Party's Nigel Farage blathered on about Sharia no-go areas in British cities. Jewish people in France and Britain are still expressing serious concerns about anti-Semitism. An astonishing new YouGov poll showed that nearly half of Brits agree with at least one of four anti-Semitic statements put to them. For example, 13 percent agreed that "Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to get sympathy."

It feels like a dark, bewildering cloud has come down on our heads, as if generations of liberal progress are under threat, angry madmen and narcissists tugging at the loose threads. But is that really the case? Well, probably not.

In Europe at least, the links between terrorism and religion are pretty small. ThinkProgress trawled the European Union's annual "Terrorism and Terror Situation" reports for the last few years and found that only a handful of incidents were religiously motivated—about two percent over the last few years. You're more likely to be murdered by a separatist than an Islamist, and you're far more likely to be murdered by a bog-standard murderer than either of them.

As if that weren't boring enough, it turns out that most religious people in the West are cheerful moderates, more Ned Flanders than Abu Hamza. Research by Pewfound that Muslim Americans tend to be well-assimilated middle-class patriots. It's pretty much the same in Europe, too. That's not to say there aren't problems in specific communities—the 7/7 bombers and the Charlie Hebdo attackers were home-grown, remember—but we're talking about a minority of a minority here.

In the Western world, at least, religion is going out with a whimper, not a bang. Christianity is in a slow, long-term decline. About 60 percent of Brits say they're not religious at all, and in the US about a fifth of the population doesn't belong to any religion, including a third of people under 30. In other parts of the world, sure, the Muslim and Christian populations are growing, but that's mostly because populations in Asia and Africa are growing much faster than ours, not because they're persuading more people to convert.

And that trend won't continue forever. The truth is, once countries reach a certain point in their development, religion just isn't as important any more. In the more developed West most of us are better educated and far more secure in our lives than our religious ancestors. We have all kinds of social and psychological support mechanisms in place—from therapists to social security to the NHS—that have displaced a lot of the functions the Church used to provide. In some parts of the world, religion is facing extinction already. In poverty-stricken regions it's still on the rise, but progress is the enemy of religion—the stronger nations get, the less they need religion.

[body_image width='670' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-religion-according-to-vice-martin-robbins-238-body-image-1421423524.jpg' id='18774']

Jehovah's Witnesses handing out leaflets at Oxford Circus

That explains why the Church of England is struggling so badly. The ancient institution had a real chance over the last few years to set itself up as a radical force in our politics—the real opposition to austerity. The Archbishops of York and Canterbury launched a ferocious attack on political leaders just this week, slamming inequality, consumerism, and the idea that a community's value is in how much money it makes.

The trouble is, the Church of England doesn't seem relevant even when it's being relevant. It's not clear to most people what it actually does to help the poor beyond sending out press releases, and it's so disconnected from young people that most wouldn't even occur to look to it for help. Archbishops campaigning in an election look like something out of a Terry Pratchett novel.

So does that mean religion no longer matters in the UK? Maybe not. In fact, the 2015 general election may be the last hallelujah for British Christians. To understand why, you have to look at UKIP. There's an interesting new book out, Revolt on the Right, where the authors ignore all the armchair punditry about racists and lost Tories and look at actual, real data on the rise of the UKIP vote. Lurking deep within those numbers they found a huge latent pool of voters. They call them the "Left Behind."

[body_image width='640' height='509' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-religion-according-to-vice-martin-robbins-238-body-image-1421416523.jpg' id='18721']

Sally Grant and Philip Foster, members of Christian Soldiers in UKIP—a group who claim to be "Fighting through Christ for deliverance from EU tyranny." Photo by Cian Oba-Smith

The Left Behind aren't lapsed Tories. You can't easily classify them as left or right wing. They tend to be old, working class, traditional, and quite a few of them are religious. What they have in common is that the world moved on without them. After decades of multiculturalism, liberalism, and equality, the ideas and behaviors the Left Behind were brought up with aren't just out-of-date but taboo or even illegal. While the rest of us ride the crest of the wave of history, they're stuck floundering in the trough behind it, lost on the wrong side with no way back.

But in 2015 they've got a rare chance of glory. With public opinion of the mainstream parties at an all-time low, UKIP could find themselves as part of a coalition government this May. At the very least, they could wreak havoc on the main result, disrupting constituency after constituency and making the outcome probably the least predictable in my lifetime. For the religious right, this could be one last shot at relevance.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-religion-according-to-vice-martin-robbins-238-body-image-1421423734.jpg' id='18777']

An American atheist getting his point across very effectively. Photo by Flickr user Jennifer Boyer

Americans aren't quite there yet, with over half of them saying they'd be less likely to vote for someone who doesn't believe in God. That number has dropped by 10 percent in just a few years though, and if the rise of atheism continues then things can only get more secular. The US managed to elect a black president in 2008, and if Hillary Clinton gets her way there's a good chance they'll elect a woman in 2016. Who knows, perhaps in my lifetime they'll break the greatest taboo of them all—an atheist in the White House.

On either side of the pond, there's a clear trend—as moderates drift toward secularism and atheism, the religious folk left tend to be the hardcore, the more extreme. In the United States it's the hardcore religious right, and in the UK it's the rise of evangelical Anglican churches. What we end up with is a loud, angry minority... a lot like the UKIP.

[body_image width='670' height='447' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-religion-according-to-vice-martin-robbins-238-body-image-1421425883.jpg' id='18784']

A Hebrew Israelite on Oxford Street. Photo by Jake Krushell

If people are moving away from religion, is anything replacing it? Yes and no. Religion isn't hardwired into our brains—if it were, there wouldn't be atheism—but some of the tropes that made religion so successful still are.

The search for higher meaning and purpose, the need for community, the hope that death can be predictable and meaningful, the desire to see bad people punished somehow for their sins—these are all things that still form the basis of modern life. What this probably means is that even if the established religions disappeared tomorrow, we'd still have some sort of replacement, whether that means atheist "churches," Queens Park Rangers, or the Gamergate hashtag.

[body_image width='640' height='428' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-future-of-religion-according-to-vice-martin-robbins-238-body-image-1421424769.jpg' id='18779']

Guests at China's completely illegal World of Warcraft rip-off theme park. Photo by Esperino Hangie via

In fact, you can find one replacement on a computer near you. Anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck wrote a thesis in which he investigated World of Warcraft gaming communities in China and found that a number of them were basically "religious." Kids raised in grossly unfair and unequal communities found a kind of meritocratic certainty and meaning in WoW's guilds that was absent from their real lives. Another plane of existence in which good deeds are rewarded in a consistent way. "Here it is, my spiritual homeland..." one of his subjects told him. "I think I will stay here forever to see the end of the world."

You can laugh at these guys, but is this really such a bad direction for religion in 2015? Prayers to God may not be answered, but you can always find some kind of help in the in-game chat channel. Killing monsters to increase your character's level is no more a futile waste of your life than giving alms. And I'd rather gangs of players were raiding dungeons than the Holy Land.

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

Why US Democrats Can't Figure Out White Working-Class Voters

0
0

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock since Christmas, you've no doubt noticed that the 2016 American presidential race is already underway. As the political classes gear up for their two-year talkathon, the conversation inevitably turns to the demographics game that both parties will have to play to compete for the White House. Can the GOP convince Hispanic voters that a Republican president won't ship their loved ones across the border the moment he takes office? Who is winning the War on Women? Will Obama's coalition of sprightly youths and minority voters turn out when the man himself isn't on the ticket?

The real wildcard, though, is white voters, and specifically the white working class, a voting bloc that once voted solidly Democratic, but whom conventional wisdom suggests now cast their ballots for Republicans. Here's Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator whose embryonic presidential campaign is based largely on the idea that he, and not Hillary Clinton, can win back these voters for the left: "I think this is where Democrats screw up, you know?" Webb told Yahoo! News this month. "I think that they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when they react, they say they're being racist."

The National Review's Victor Davis Hanson put it more succinctly in a column last week, arguing that Democrats' "out-of-touch privilege... led to agendas — radical green politics, hyper-feminism, transgender advocacy, forced multiculturalism, open borders — that were not principle concerns of the struggling working classes."

The basic argument is this: The white working class are increasingly voting for Republicans because they like guns and God, and because Democrats are too focused on giving welfare to people who don't work. The idea has taken many forms over the years, from Vietnam-era hippie-punching construction workers to Reagan Democrats to Duck Dynasty's redneck-styled (though actually quite wealthy) right-wingers. For pundits on the right, it makes sense that these people would vote for Republican. For some on the left, it suggests that lower-income white people are being tricked into voting against their own self-interest.

The 2014 elections added more fuel to the argument, with a massive GOP landslide among non-college-educated white voters, the group generally referred to as the white working class. Republicans won this bloc 64 percent to 34 percent, while achieving a smaller 57-41 margin among white college graduates.

But the conclusion that the GOP is the new party of the white working ignores the way the demographics of the vote actually break down. And it obscures a much more serious problem that Democrats have with less affluent Americans of all races and education levels.

[body_image width='800' height='570' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-mystery-of-white-working-class-voters-116-body-image-1421439223.jpg' id='18879']

Janet Sullivan

In New Hampshire, a state of perennial political interest thanks to its first-in-the-nation presidential primaries, a lot of voters sound less like Phil Robertson than like Janet Sullivan, who lives in Grafton, a western New Hampshire town with under 2,000 residents. The daughter of a truck driver, Sullivan told me it just makes sense for her to vote Democrat. "It's a blue-collar thing, maybe," she said. "They always seem for the little guy." Technically, by the measures the media usually uses, Sullivan isn't working class—she has a college degree. But working as a high school counselor doesn't bring in the big bucks, and her family has also depended on the income of her husband, who was a union construction worker for 40 years.

"He has a pension," she said. "We've always had health care. His feeling was they wouldn't even have water on the job if it wasn't for the union."

New Hampshire is one of the whitest states in the country, and, in recent presidential elections, it's shifted from red to purple and on toward blue. The obvious explanation, if you associate the term "white Democrat" with "cultural elite," is that an influx of liberal urbanites from Boston has shifted the vote. But look at the map of the most recent election results, and that's not the picture that emerges. The blue parts of the state are mostly in the rural, less prosperous north and west. Rockingham County, where the typical household income is the highest in the state at $77,000 a year—thanks partly to doctors, lawyers and software engineers commuting into Greater Boston—tends to vote solidly Republican, and in 2014, was the strongest base for GOP Senate candidate Scott Brown. Meanwhile, in Coos County, a land of former mill towns in the far-north of New Hampshire where the typical family income is the lowest in the state at $42,000 a year, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen won nearly two-thirds of the vote, her best performance.

Jeff Woodburn, a Democratic state senator from Coos County, whose website notes his appeal to "rural values and culture" and includes a headshot of him holding a chicken, said his district has traditionally tended towards moderate Eisenhower Republicanism. People there aren't particularly receptive to Tea Party theatrics or extreme free-market rhetoric, he said, especially in the face of economic decline. "Nobody in their right mind," he said, can look at the closing of a local paper mill and say "'Let the market take care of it.' The market did take care of it... their livelihood was destroyed."

Woodburn said his constituents care about keeping their guns, and about the declining purchasing power of the wages they can find in the area. "In my areas anyway, they're getting it that there is an economic strategy to drive wages down, drive profits up, and that they're not part of that American dream," he said.

Emily Jacobs, chair of the Coos County Democratic Party and a former "navigator" hired to help people figure out the federal Affordable Care Act, said the new healthcare law seems to be a selling point for the Democratic Party. She said some "heavy-duty conservative people" sought out insurance just to avoid paying a fine, but later ended up happy that they could visit the doctor without big copays on their $50-a-month plans. "They say 'I can take my kids in for an ear infection and not have to worry.' That's huge," she said.

[body_image width='800' height='567' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-mystery-of-white-working-class-voters-116-body-image-1421439405.jpg' id='18880']

Andy Hill, a Democratic voter, at his diner in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Clearly, New Hampshire's working-class whites aren't representative of their counterparts across the country. But they do offer a sense of how much more complicated things are than the standard narrative might suggest. In a 2012 Brookings Institution paper, research fellow Elisabeth Jacobs (no relation to Emily) looked at voting patterns among working-class whites since the 1950s and found that many standard assumptions really don't hold up.

For one thing, self-identified white working-class voters don't usually vote based on "God, guns, and gays," even though they remain fairly conservative on those issues. More educated and wealthier whites are the ones most likely to look to social issues when casting their votes. And, when it comes to the economy, working-class whites are likely to say government should have a greater role in providing services and creating jobs. That shouldn't really surprise anyone, since white people in low-paid jobs or temporarily unemployed are the biggest demographic enrolled in programs like food stamps.

If more of these voters don't vote for Democrats, Jacobs said, the reason may not be that they are fed up with government interference in the market, but because they don't see the party distinguishing itself as economically progressive. "I think in many cases it's because people want to see something more aggressively different, more populist," she said.

Jacobs found that working-class whites really have shifted toward the Republican Party over the decades, but the change has come almost entirely from the South, as conservative Democrats died out in the post-Civil Rights era and were replaced by conservative Republicans. In that case, though, it wasn't the voters in the region who changed ideologies, but the parties. In fact, between 1984 and 2008, white people who call themselves working class became slightly more Democratic in the rest of the country, though the change was offset by the Republican shift in the South.

Parse things by income instead of education, and the picture shifts even more. In both the South and elsewhere, lower-income whites are much more likely to vote Democratic than their racial counterparts in the upper middle class.

That's not to say that there aren't plenty of working-class white Republicans in New Hampshire. And some, like Mike Chesanek, a retired cop who says he shifted party allegiances over the years, do fit the standard media narrative. "Democrats years ago used to be for the working people," Chesanek said. "Now I have the feeling Democrats are for the people who don't work."

Depending on how you define the white working class, you can come to a wide variety of conclusions about voting patterns. But spend too much time thinking about these details, and you miss a major piece of the puzzle: The huge number of white working-class people, and lower-income people of all races, who don't vote at all.

A recent Pew Research Center report found that 42 percent of people in the least economically secure fifth of the population preferred a Democratic candidate in 2014, while just 17 percent supported a Republican. But, among those same low-income voters, only one in five was likely to actually vote. (In contrast, the most economically secure Americans were more likely to favor Republicans, and nearly two-thirds of the group was identified as likely voters.) Looking just at the least economically secure white voters, 37 percent preferred a Democratic candidate, while 21 percent supported a Republican, but the most popular choice at 41 percent was "other/not sure."

The participation gap is evident in New Hampshire. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that only 39 percent of adults in working-class Coos County voted in the last election, compared with 51 percent who voted in wealthy Rockingham County. Emily Jacobs, the Coos County Democratic Party chair, said the biggest task for the party is not recruiting voters, but pushing them to turn out on Election Day.

"It was nothing to do with having enough support," she said. "It has to do with getting Democrats to the polls."

Elisabeth Jacobs, the researcher, said that if we want to understand how class affects voting as we look toward 2016, the gap between voters and non-voters is in some ways more important than the party breakdown. "If you're talking about the white working class versus the white working class voters, you're talking about very different universes of people," she said.

Follow Livia on Twitter

Why Do German Neo-Nazis Love Crystal Meth So Much?

0
0

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

If things were the way right-wing Germans say they should be, neo-Nazis would not consume drugs at all. Almost every radical right-wing organization in Germany strictly rejects the consumption of illegal substances. The NPD in the State of Saxony, for example, energetically demands that their members fight meth with the slogan "Keep Away from That Crystal Filth." They also claim that the drug is "cooked up in Czech kitchens and then illegally sold in Asian markets close to the border."

The NPD in Saxony thinks it's that simple: You just close all the annoying Asian supermarkets and then the "Czech death drug" will disappear. However, what they're overlooking (or keeping quiet) is that crystal isn't sold in packs of instant noodles; dealers sell it. And it looks like more than a few of these dealers are neo-Nazis.

Even if alcohol continues to dominate the thoughts and actions of right-wing circles, not all of these guys are adverse to weed, hash, or harder drugs. More and more right-wing radicals are being caught with illegal drugs, and crystal is very often what they're holding when they get busted.

[body_image width='640' height='377' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='german-neo-nazis-crystal-meth-876-body-image-1421428868.jpg' id='18807']

And that's no surprise, really. The meth high fits right-wing ideology like a black, leather glove on an outstretched hand. Meth can make you as aggressive and insensitive to pain as alcohol does, but it doesn't incapacitate you in the same way. "I get so drunk before a football game that they don't let me in. If I take a line of crystal, they don't notice a thing," an anonymous hooligan recently bragged in Die Welt.

More and more violence-prone hooligans are blaming their acts of excessive violence on the comedown from meth. Christopher R—a hooligan who was involved in the nearly deadly attack on the police officer Daniel Nivel in 1998, was arrested with nine pounds of crystal precursor, as well as 230 pounds of apaan (an amphetamine precursor) and six ounces of coke. The former "Dynamo Berlin" hooligan and ex-Hells Angel fled to the comforts of Mallorca, and it is reported that he has been running his business from there.

Meth is basically the perfect performance enhancer for a proper brawl. It's getting more and more popular with fans of Thor Steiner and Ansgar Aryan—two local apparel brands favored by German neo-Nazis and right wingers. That's probably why Daniel K., the former head of Nazi clothing label Ansgar Aryan, had to resign after being convicted of dealing meth. He wanted to preserve the brand's clean image.

Lars S., a former member of the NPD and later leader of the Freien Netz Nordsachsen cadre and administrator of a Nazi-devotional dispatch, is currently serving a multi-year prison sentence with his like-minded comrades. The radical was busted in 2012 with half a kilo of meth after his driver was caught with ten ounces. Before the bust, he was considered to be a confidant of Thüringen's NPD deputy, Maik Scheffler.

[body_image width='640' height='436' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='german-neo-nazis-crystal-meth-876-body-image-1421428835.jpg' id='18806']
Pervitin. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

One reason for their affinity to crystal could be a romanticization of "Nazi- speed" within the scene. The Germans were doping with Pervitin during World War Two, which no doubt helped drive their extermination campaign through Eastern Europe. Pervitin is methamphetamine in pill form and was actually prescribed until 1988. Seventy-five years ago, "Stuka Tablets," "Tank Chocolates," and "Hermann Göering Pills" all contained Pervitin, and were all included in the basic equipment given to German troops.

There are at least three letters from post-WWII German writer Heinrich Böll in which he asked his family for a fresh supply of drugs. "Service is stalwart, and you have to understand if I later on only write to you every two to four days. Today I'm mainly writing for Pervitin." he wrote in one of the letters.

According to Bostonian psychiatrist Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, Hitler's amphetamine consumption was responsible for aggravating his bipolar episodes. Hermann Göring's voracity for opiates and speed meanwhile, was legendary during his lifetime.

However, a single dose back then was much smaller than one a user might take today. An average line of crystal contains 40 to 50 milligrams of the active ingredient; one dose of Pervitin in Nazi times had only 2.4 milligrams of methamphetamine. If the Wehrmacht had been taking the amounts that crystal users take today, they would have quickly deteriorated into a troop of fucked-up junkies. Whether the World Cup champions of 1954 were really only injecting vitamins, we'll probably never know.

Evidence that neo-Nazis weren't just indulging in crank but were financing their activities by selling methamphetamine was alarming enough that Katharina König, a member of Thüringen's state parliament who belongs to the left-wing party Die Linke, sent an inquiry to the state government in 2012 titled, "Drug Dealing in Thüringen's Neo-Nazi Scene."

It will be exciting to see whether Die Linke will be in the position to shed some more light on the right-wing drug quagmire now that they are the governing party in Thüringen. Five right-wing dealers have been busted in Thüringen and neighboring Northern Saxony in October 2014 alone. That's not counting the 63 pounds that were found on Uwe N., a neo-Nazi from Colditz.

A minister in Saxony, Kerstin Ködlitz (also of Die Linke) recently alluded to evidence of cross-financing the right-wing scene with crystal cash there. "These aren't individual cases anymore, a suspicious cluster is looming in Saxony." Köditz would also like to present an inquiry to Saxony's government.

In front of this backdrop, the recent right-wing agitation of Thüringen's NPD about "Vietnamese drug mafias" seems even more bigoted. However, one could argue that they aren't just publishing this material for racist reasons, but that they also may have economic interests to protect.

The Canadian Government Won't Help Journalist Mohamed Fahmy Get Out of Egyptian Jail

0
0

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='why-wont-the-canadian-government-help-mohamed-fahmy-get-out-of-egyptian-jail-183-body-image-1421439971.jpg' id='18882']

Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed, and Peter Greste in court. Screencap via YouTube

It's been nearly 400 days since Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy and two of his Al Jazeera colleagues, Peter Greste and Baher Mohamed, were imprisoned while covering the aftermath of the Egyptian military's overthrow of democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi. The three have been subjected to harsh conditions in a case that Amnesty International has denounced as a "complete sham." And after a visit by Foreign Minister John Baird ended Thursday with no tangible progress on the case, Fahmy is urging his government to do more.

"I understand that the ability of the Canadian government to help me is limited by the rules of diplomacy," Fahmy said in a statement on Thursday. "But I do believe that Prime Minister Harper could do more to obtain my release if he were to directly intervene in our case."

Fahmy's plea came hours after a meeting between Baird and his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shukri in Cairo yielded no results. In vague language that avoided any direct criticism of Fahmy's ordeal, the Canadian Foreign Minister told reporters he had a "constructive and fruitful" discussion and hopes for a resolution "sooner rather than later."

Calling the issue "complex", Baird added: "I didn't leave Canada with any expectation that we would solve [it] today... I think the [Egyptian] minister has an understanding of how important this is to me, how important this is to all Canadians."

The "Al Jazeera 3" were sentenced to between seven and ten years last June after being convicted of "spreading false news" on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which former president Morsi belonged. Prosecutors failed to present any incriminating evidence during the trial.

Instead, the court was shown excerpts of the journalists' dispatches, footage of the raid on their hotel room accompanied by the soundtrack to Thor, and other videos seemingly chosen at random, including galloping horses and an Australian pop song. A retrial was ordered this month over procedural flaws, but all remain imprisoned with no court date set. Fahmy needs urgent medical care: he is suffering from Hepatitis C and a dislocated shoulder. The trio's treatment has been condemned by more than 150 rights groups and governments around the world.

Meanwhile, Canada has been conspicuously restrained. Government officials have barely raised the case in public. Foreign Minister Baird, who has previously rejected the use of "bullhorn diplomacy" to win Fahmy's freedom, said Thursday that "threats or tough talk" won't help. Baird also described the case as a "consular issue," shunning the language of counterparts like US Secretary of State John Kerry, who has called the Al Jazeera sentences "chilling, draconian," and a violation of "the essential role of civil society, a free press, and the real rule of law."

The case has come as part of a wider crackdown by the military regime of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi that includes the mass killing and imprisonment of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, collective death sentences by the hundreds, and the jailing of scores of activists and at least eight other journalists. In a joint statement as Sisi transitioned from military junta leader to President in June—just two weeks before the journalists' sentencing—Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch warned that the Egyptian authorities were "engaging in repression on a scale unprecedented in Egypt's modern history."

Baird ignored these concerns during his stop in Cairo, instead expressing "Canada's strong support for the new government of Egypt and its transition to democracy and the inclusion of human rights and rule of law." Calling Fahmy's imprisonment "the only major irritant in our bilateral relationship," Baird heaped praise on Sisi's fight against "the terrorist acts of the Muslim Brotherhood." He also unveiled $2 million in funding for Egyptian law enforcement, as well as a new program for Canadian forces to train their Egyptian counterparts in Ottawa and Cairo.

The timing of Baird's visit had raised hopes he'd leave Egypt with Fahmy at his side. The retrial in the case was ordered just two weeks ago, and President Sisi recently enacted a decree allowing him to deport jailed foreigners back to their home countries. Although he was born in Egypt, Fahmy was raised in Montreal and holds a Canadian passport.

Fahmy had such anticipation for Baird's visit that he didn't sleep the night before, and told reporters his bags were already packed. Fahmy's fiancé, Marwa Omara, said the family had "expected that the deal would be sealed during Mr. Baird's visit. However it seems that... there is no decision made or nothing will be done." Fahmy's attorneys, Amal Clooney and Lorne Waldman, also voiced their disappointment "that nothing more concrete was announced."

In fairness, the Harper government had already lowered expectations. On the eve of Baird's visit, an anonymous Canadian official suggested that the Sisi regime would appear weak if it let Fahmy go. "How does it look for Egypt," the official asked hypothetically, "if Baird rolls in there and leaves with a prisoner? It looks like they [Egypt] are under the thumb of a western country."

It's hard to argue with that perception when the specific western country's own officials are disseminating it. A better question might be why the Harper government would make such statements other than to give Sisi a pass to keep Fahmy locked up.

It's quite possible Fahmy will be released in the coming days or weeks after the Egyptian regime decides a year in prison is enough for a journalist who was just doing his job. But as Fahmy himself suggests, the Canadian government's lax response and its growing ties with the Sisi regime raise troubling questions that go far beyond his individual case.

"My situation and the ongoing legal limbo that I am enduring affects all Canadians who are in the Middle East because it shows that anyone, regardless of how innocent, can become a victim of the political turbulence here," Fahmy said in his statement. "And rest assured there will be other Canadians who will suffer like me as long as there is such injustice in this region."

Follow Aaron on Twitter.

On the Road with Britain's Leading Brothel Reviewer

0
0

*Some names, including those of brothels, have been changed.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Wearing thick-lensed glasses and a tweed flat cap, George McCoy picks me up at 9:30 AM. He has the oppressively loud voice of a horse-racing commentator.

"Before I did this, I had my business in the record industry," he tells me. "My business failed, my ex-wife died. Before she died, she divorced me and took all the money she could. I'd used prostitutes before when traveling with work, and decided to make my hobby into a business."

The heating in the car is cranked beyond 80 degrees and I already want to get out.

Born in 1948 in Malvern to two Cambridge physics graduates, George has always been entrepreneurial. Selling mail order records by the likes of Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Donna Summer, in 1990 he was turning over $3 million. By 1995, he'd lost it all. And so began his next crusade: to deliver the first comprehensive guidebooks to the UK's brothels, ranking prostitutes on a five-star scale, listing specializations, working hours, and charging policies, and inciting the fury of people who don't want to see human beings rated for how good they are at blowjobs.

[body_image width='960' height='704' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421419311.jpg' id='18738']

Sex work brought in an estimated $8 billion in the UK last year, and while statistics suggest that one in ten men have used a prostitute, George suggests that the real statistic might be as many as one in three.

"Clients include barristers, accountants... you name it. I know of a former foreign secretary who enjoys dressing up in women's clothing and having his bottom smacked. I know of another who just went for regular sex with lots of different women."

In the UK, selling your body for sex isn't a crime, but soliciting in public is. Working in a brothel isn't illegal, but running a brothel is. For customers, soliciting someone for their sexual services is illegal in public, but fine in private. Therefore, George isn't technically committing a crime—and besides, he doesn't have to actually buy the sex; because he's reviewing, he usually gets it for free.

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421411431.jpg' id='18683']

Safety is important in the brothel reviews game

"Occasionally the girls will say, 'Let me show you how good I am,' and it would be impolite of me not to let them demonstrate their prowess," George says. "If you think, That was bloody good, I'd see her again, she'd get a five-star rating. If you think, Dunno why I bothered, that would get one star. They generally do their best because they know who I am."

At 10:30 AM we reach our first appointment: *Bentley's in Dewsbury. It's set within an office block, neighboring a number of totally unsuspecting businesses. George tells me the landlords know and are happy to maintain the brothel on the premises, as long as there's no "funny business." Bentley's has been established for over 25 years and is officially licensed as a sauna. It's open seven days a week, employs six women, and averages ten to 13 clients a day. "Dangerous Love" by Fuse ODG (ft. Sean Paul) is playing on the radio as we walk in.

[body_image width='1200' height='796' path='images/content-images/2015/01/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/14/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421255844.jpg' id='18122']

Waiting room, Dewsbury brothel

*John, the owner, takes us on a tour. Bentley's is light and clean but has the kind of musty smell that makes you inhale a little lighter than normal. George had given it a four-star rating in his guidebook, noting the staff as "versatile" with "plenty of young beauties."

Here, George's celebrity status becomes more pronounced. Gray stickers reading "Recommended by George McCoy!" peel from parlor doors, assuring his seal of approval.

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421327840.jpg' id='18302']A "Recommended by George McCoy's Massage Parlor Guide" sticker at Bentley's

Anna, the manager for the past three years, greets George like an old friend. They know each other very well, judging by the four-star review he gave her, but isn't involved in that side of the business any more.

"I found it horrendous—simply because I think you need to be quite a strong person emotionally to be able to perform in that way," she tells me. "The customers were always nice to me, but on a mental and emotional level, I was unable to handle it."

Besides the physical health risks involved, 73 percent of sex workers also suffer from anxiety disorders, and 46 percent develop depression. George seems unperturbed by this.

"Why would they be suffering?" he asks. "Once you get in that position, maybe it's time to call it a day. The parlors don't want unhappy girls or girls on drugs, because you get unhappy clients and they don't come back for more business. It's bullshit when they talk about people being forced to work against their will. Is it not better that they do that than live off the state?"

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421328786.jpg' id='18319']

George with one of his guidebooks

Back in the car, we move on to another appointment in Dewsbury, this time at *Sandra's—but they fail to arrive.

"Owe me money for an advert," George grumbles.

Instead, we take a pit stop in a car park somewhere near Sheffield and pick up a salad from Morrison's.

Yes, if a lady is prepared to let me enter her anally, then so be it.

George tells me that this is a full-time job. When he isn't on the road visiting brothels two days a week, he's in his office analyzing data on the internet. He's written 32 guidebooks on British brothels, with detail so exhaustive he claims that the Home Office looked to them to tally up official UK brothel figures. He tells me that he's sold around 100,000 books online, for a tenner each. As I start to do the maths, he informs me that he's actually yet to break even. So why does he do it?

"I enjoy being given an oral session by a lady and then regular intercourse thereafter—nothing out of the ordinary," he says. "Yes, if a lady is prepared to allow me to enter her anally, then so be it. But I wouldn't ever want to insist a woman does anything."

For all George's politeness, it suddenly dawned on me that I was sat in a car park in the middle of nowhere with a man who's built his life and career upon rating women in bed. He tells me that he doesn't think women "appreciate the sexual longings that exist in men." Men view sex as an experience they enjoy, he says, "not the procreation aspects of it."

[body_image width='704' height='960' path='images/content-images/2015/01/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/14/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421255452.jpg' id='18118']

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421328173.jpg' id='18307'][body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421328193.jpg' id='18309']

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421328218.jpg' id='18310']Photos from inside a brothel, *The Retreat, visited by the author with George McCoy

Throughout the course of the afternoon, we visit a few more spots on George's itinerary. One is an immaculately clean Thai-run parlor, and another called *The Retreat. The two places were in stark contrast with one another, the latter boasting a sign warning us to "beware the trap door."

[body_image width='1200' height='815' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421413055.jpg' id='18693']

George greets the owner, a man in his late sixties with gnarly fingers and a grisly smile, and we start talking about trafficking.

"It's mass hysteria." George barks. "Politicians love to scare us, trying to paint a country which is rife with trafficking. Because if we're scared, we will vote for them to keep us safe. That's all they're fucking interested in. If it suits them to worry us, they will worry us."

He's careful to differentiate parlor workers from those working on the street, where he admits drugs and trafficking issues might be more of an issue. "I'm not saying that there's no girls in parlors who take drugs, but so does Nigella bloody Lawson!"

[body_image width='1200' height='793' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421328351.jpg' id='18315']George sits on a bed at *Infinity brothel

Our penultimate viewing of the day was *Infinity, a four-roomed parlor in the outskirts of Sheffield. Complete with a gym, pool table, and dungeon, it receives anything between eight to 38 customers in a day.

I was shown around by the owner, David, who says that his establishment is one of the only places he knows of designed to be disabled-friendly. "There's a guy coming today. He comes every week. He's only 21. His father brings him. He comes in his wheelchair and he speaks through a computer. And we've got ex-soldiers who've had their limbs blown off. They know when they come here, it's comfortable."

[body_image width='1200' height='803' path='images/content-images/2015/01/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/14/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421255491.jpg' id='18119']
Taken at George's appointment with a dominatrix

By 5 PM we're making our last stop, this one slightly different to the others: a dominatrix who works alone. George assures me she's a "bunny rabbit" compared to others as we ring the bell of her semi-detached. There's a small child peering out the bottom-floor flat, and I think about the slaves being ball-gagged and pissed on a few feet above.

Inside, George greets "Mistress Lola" with affection. He clamps his pudgy hands either side of her corset. "George!" she exclaims. The longer I stay, the more I realize that she only speaks in exclamation marks.

We are invited into the living room, which looks relatively normal apart from a huge golden throne. Two men—slaves—are occupying each sofa. One is clean cut and suited, the other was Comic Book Guy IRL. "After a good session," the latter says, "it feels to me like falling head over heels in love for the first time, again. Who wouldn't want to keep getting that feeling?"

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421328994.jpg' id='18330']

"I fell madly in love with a lady once," George says. "When I was 19, after I spent a weekend with her minding some poodles. But her parents insisted on breaking it off. After that I decided that getting involved with people is more trouble than it's worth."

George waltzes around the dungeon, gleefully demonstrating the knives and dildos. "There, you have a cross, the idea being you are tied to it spread-eagled, and you can be whipped or have your bottom smacked. Or, alternatively, you can be round the front and have some cock and ball torture," he grins. "You can be locked in that cage and left like a puppy for an hour or so. The mistress will often sit on the throne there. They've got various clips, which you can put on your nipples and other parts of your anatomy."

I was disappointed to hear that George isn't very experimental himself. "I'm quite prepared to be restrained and mistreated, so long as I don't get bruised," he stipulates. "But that's about as far as it goes with me."

[body_image width='1840' height='1232' path='images/content-images/2015/01/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/14/' filename='i-spent-a-day-with-britains-leading-prostitute-reviewer-body-image-1421255530.jpg' id='18120']

"Believe it or not, there are women who enjoy it," says George. We're back in the car now; we've finished our visits. I'm ready to end the day and hop out at the next red light.

I agree that it must be pretty exhausting for those few women happily employed in sex work to constantly feel that they need to defend their desire to sell sex. But that doesn't justify overlooking, as George seems to, the many others who are bound by financial and familial dependencies, who suffer the physical and emotional tolls of performing sex acts on upwards of three strangers a day.

George may spout about trafficking and depression being fabrications of authority, but one thing he has brought to my attention is how tolerated brothels are within British society. Every parlor we visited claimed the police knew exactly what they were doing, and let them get away with it. This does suggest current frameworks might be outdated: Implementing new perspectives or even regulation of the industry might help us to paint an honest picture of what is going on, because currently, George's guidebooks could be the most comprehensive source of information we've got.

George isn't in the right, nor is reviewing women like a product in a magazine. What has become clear from spending a day with him, though, is that his intent is not malicious. His actions seem governed by emptiness and loss, his job giving him a sense of purpose and status.

"Not all men are secure," he tells me. "But if everyone was, we wouldn't have any decent bloody literature. We need people who are a bit bizarre to be the Mr. Rochesters or Heathcliffs."

Clearly, to George, men who use prostitutes are the tortured heroes of romanticism. I revolve back into the normality of the Sheffield evening, but George slips back off into the underworld, where there, at least, he is king.


Is an LGBT School a Good Idea?

0
0

[body_image width='784' height='544' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='is-an-lgbt-school-a-good-idea-293-body-image-1421431970.png' id='18857']Photo via Geograph.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

A school for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans pupils could be open in Manchester, England, within three years. "This is about saving lives," Amelia Lee, strategic director for LGBT Youth North West, the youth work charity behind the plans told the Guardian. "Despite the laws that claim to protect gay people from homophobic bullying, the truth is that in schools especially, bullying is still incredibly common and causes young people to feel isolated and alienated, which often leads to truanting and, in the worst-case scenarios, to suicide."

But is this a solution to the issues that young people who don't fit into traditional heterosexual identity face? Or is it one that pushes the issue into a safe zone, behind protective walls that might, actually, do little to address the real issues of homophobia?

Personally, I'm ambivalent about the plans. On the one hand, yes, it's better that a teenager who only sees suicide as the possible recourse to incessant homophobic bullying can find comfort in an environment that encourages and celebrates individuality. On the other, what message does the existence of a dedicated LGBT school send out, firstly, to the bully who needs educating, and may not change their ways simply because you remove an LGBT pupil from a difficult situation? What would an LGBT school say to other closeted young people who may now second guess coming out for fear that they may also be placed outside of the company of their peers and into "special care"?

Stonewall's bold advertising campaign told us that it gets better, but it doesn't always get better. The world doesn't become less homophobic overnight just because you have come to terms with your sexuality.

When I was 13 and at secondary school in Lambeth, a guy I knew from primary school was removed and taken to a "special needs" school that could care for his mental health issues. I knew he was gay, but that wasn't the reason he was removed. However, his obvious sexuality did set him apart from the lads in his year and magnified the problems in his mind. I put distance between him and myself because, while he had his own troubles, I didn't relate to the way he identified as gay and was on my own difficult path to discovering myself. If he had been removed and placed in an LGBT school, I think I would have hidden myself even deeper in the closet. Today, I'm ashamed how I felt toward him. But, as a boy, I hadn't developed the confidence to be as outwardly supportive of difference as I would be now.

Growing up is rarely an easy process. Life is filled with all the inherent worries of fitting in, exacerbated by the pressures piled on you by friends and other classmates. We need to solve these problems from the perspective of both young LGBT people and the bullies—not self-assertive adults.

We live in a world that recognizes legal equality for LGBT people, but the government appears to have little interest in protecting the rights of future generations, still refusing to understand the importance of teaching tolerance and understanding of all lifestyles with decent Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education (PSHE) that includes age-appropriate Sex and Relationship Education (SRE), which should also be LGBT inclusive.

It's a terrible state of affairs when we seriously need to start debating the pros and cons of creating safe zones for young people within the education environment.

Stonewall's bold advertising campaign told us that it gets better, but it doesn't always get better. The world doesn't become less homophobic overnight just because you have come to terms with your sexuality. But you start to live with more confidence and find the strength to self-acceptance and the right to design life in your own way, despite it following a different path to your other straight mates. It's a tough and testing road that, until the government changes its attitudes towards the education system, is not going to transform into a world that is immediately encouraging and tolerant of diversity any time soon.

Instead of removing young, struggling LGBT people from schools, why aren't the bullies being given special treatment to educate them on their intolerances? To help them understand why their behavior is damaging? Because they may not understand why. They may not have a home life that encourages or celebrated tolerance. This is where the intervention needs to happen. Not to sharply counteract whatever their parents are teaching them, but to provide a strong, non-judgmental education that offers an alternative, that says, "You don't have to think that way. Gay people are not 'other,' they're just people."

According to the Guardian report, the LGBT school "will be specifically designed for LGBT young people who are struggling in mainstream schools, but will be open to other children, including young carers, young parents, and those with mental health problems." Lee added that "It will be LGBT-inclusive, but not exclusive."

It's an honorable and worthy idea because not everyone can find their way on their own—some people do need support and a different care system to the existing, rigid framework that has barely changed in 50 years. So, yes, let this school open and operate and welcome those people that need its help. Let those people find a nurturing environment that the current system doesn't allow for. But for the sake of every other LGBT young person who is on the journey to self-discovery and inner peace, let's not call it an LGBT school.

Follow Cliff Joannou on Twitter.

A Drunk Man in England Tried to Have Sex with a Mailbox

0
0

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='a-drunk-man-in-manchester-tried-to-have-sex-with-a-postbox-975-body-image-1421423037.jpg' id='18760']Photo via Flickr user Paul Wilkinson

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Listen: Have we not all gone on a bit of a mad one and tried to fuck a mailbox? I will be the first to put my hand up and say, "Absolutely not, no, I have never tried to put my dick in a mailbox and I'm not even sure where the nearest mailbox is should I get the inhuman urge to fuck it."

But then, I am not Wigan native Paul Bennett, who appeared in court today to face charges of mailbox-fucking for the first time in recorded human history. Nobody has ever been arrested for trying to fuck a mailbox before, which when you actually think about it means: As a human race, we are breaking new ground.

But in a practical sense, you're probably wondering: How do I romance a mailbox? And that is a good question, because you cannot just walk up to a mailbox and straight up fuck it. That's rude. Here's what Paul Bennett did to get the mailbox in the mood, as witnesses report: He approached the mailbox with those laser-beam sex eyes on and his trousers around his ankles while making "sexual advances" towards it. Try that one while you're out on the pull next!

As the Manchester Evening News reports: "He then rubbed himself against the mailbox while holding his hands in the air and shouting, 'Wow!'"

[body_image width='1024' height='1570' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='a-drunk-man-in-manchester-tried-to-have-sex-with-a-postbox-975-body-image-1421423097.jpg' id='18761']This one sort of looks like it's crying. Photo via Flickr user Sarah

No one's quite certain whether, well, you know— it's not exactly clear if he jizzed or not. But the whole "trying to fuck a mailbox in broad daylight" thing was enough for witnesses to call the police, who soon arrived and promptly arrested Mr. Bennett for indecent exposure.

"After completing the act... Bennett pulled his pants up then swung on a lamppost before looking at a reflection of himself in a window," the report says. Proud of yourself were you, mate? "He was arrested and launched into a foul-mouthed tirade as he was led away by officers."

Bennett appeared in court today to face two counts of indecent exposure and one count of using threatening and abusive words, and abusive behavior, towards the two police officers who forcibly stopped him from posting his dick to Santa. The mailbox in question did not appear in court, but the alarmed eyewitness who called the police did.

"The lady watched for some time and was ashamed, disgusted, and upset, and my client accepts that," Martin Jones said for the defense.

"Clearly there are issues that need to be addressed," he then added, presumably before high-fiving everyone in the courtroom for that nothing-but-net postal pun. Maybe this sort of thing needs to be STAMPED OUT! He treated that mailbox as though it was SECOND CLASS! I'd like to fuck a mailbox BUT I'D HAVE TO STAND IN A DESOLATE LINE FOR OVER AN HOUR BEFORE I COULD DO IT!

This isn't the first time someone has been arrested for having some sort of monstrous parody of sex with a static object. In 2013, Daniel Cooper was arrested after having sex with a Land Rover parked outside a kebab shop. In less fueled-by-alcohol news, Erika Eiffel recently ended her relationship with the Eiffel Tower and took up with a crane instead. These things happen.

Anyway, in case you're wondering what the legal ramifications of fucking a mailbox are, 12-month community order with an alcohol treatment requirement, $75 compensation to the (human) victim, $230 court costs, and pride of place on the Sex Offender Registry.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

The Communist Food of East Germany

0
0
The Communist Food of East Germany

Austerity is Killing British Culture and Creativity

0
0

[body_image width='418' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-failure-of-creative-britain-robert-hewison-922-body-image-1421410968.jpg' id='18681']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

From Paul Weller saying that David Cameron isn't allowed to enjoy "Eton Rifles," to Irvine Welsh telling VICE that George Osborne is a "fucking twat" for ripping off Trainspotting in a speech, to John Prescott getting bodied by Chumbawumba's bucket of water at the Brit awards, art and politics have always had an awkward relationship.

But like it or not, the arts have been in a relationship with the British government since 1946, when a Royal Charter established the committee that would become the Arts Council of Great Britain. During the 1990s, under prime John Major and Tony Blair, they went official and the arts became a mainstream concern of the government with their own department. It was the era of Cool Britannia: Damien Hirst filleting sharks and Noel Gallagher snorting chang in the Queen's personal Downing Street toilet (something David Cameron probably isn't as worried about, surrounded by Gary Barlow and Kirstie Allsopp). It was an era of increased investment, physically manifested in the opening of the Tate Modern. But with that came the taint of target setting and commercialization. As relationships go, it was complicated.

And now, the thing that built art up is taking it back down. The headline of course, is the £83 million [$125 million] worth of funding cuts that the current government have committed to which Labor have matched. Beyond this, however, there are more corrosive shifts in principles, many set in motion by the New Labor government. Working class talent is being priced out, our education secretary thinks arts subjects hold students back, and creativity is increasingly being viewed as an individualistic, profiteering endeavor. And D:Ream told us things would only better.

So, the current generation of artists and creative is struggling to operate with little time and resources, under a government seemingly bent on stripping culture of any civil significance. Robert Hewison, academic and author of Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, has called our era "The Age of Lead"—the crappy follow up to a golden era. A passage of time defined by the abandonment of functioning interaction between politics and culture. I read his book and asked him some questions about this cultural mess, both how we got here, and how best we can climb out.

VICE: Arts are not seen by all as a legitimate focus of public spending. How would you justify its importance?
Robert Hewison: Since public spending on the arts in the UK has never been even as a much as one per cent of total government expenditure, it is hard to argue that they have ever been a "focus" of public spending. That said, without such public support for the arts and heritage as we do get, we would be in a far worse state than we already are. There is cultural health, just as there is a physical health, and both are public responsibilities. The arts and heritage tell us who we are, they are a way of celebrating what we are, but they also create a space where we can challenge the way we are, or are expected to be. I have absolutely nothing against commercial culture, but there has to be a free space that isn't governed by the bottom line. It is that shared space that I call in the book the public realm. Public funding for the arts is one of the ways to guarantee its continued existence, and of giving everyone the opportunity to explore and contribute to it.

Your book casts an image of Tony Blair that is pretty complicated, shallowly engaging with art he didn't really care about, and you also impress his Thatcherite tendencies: backing the "arts that pay" not the "arts that cost"? Given that his government spear-headed what we now know as arts funding, how harmful do you think New Labor's approach was?
The book explores the paradox that while Blair's government did indeed substantially increase funding for culture—albeit from a low base—it did so not because it thought that the arts and heritage were especially important in themselves, but rather because it thought culture would serve the government's social and economic agenda. This was what I call the "Faustian bargain" that tied culture into a regime of measures and targets that destroyed the trust on which creativity depends. Culture does bring social and economic benefits, but it does so on its own terms.

You describe the golden era of Cool Britannia and the years that followed it as making art a pretty exclusive affair. Is this class-divide still a problem in how we view the arts?
Cool Britannia was an attempt to say that all forms of culture, both popular and "high" culture, were "cool." As you will know, to claim to be cool is the uncoolest thing you can do, and the pop world was the first to claim betrayal by the New Labor government. The problem is that to enjoy most forms of culture—including pop music—you need some kind of knowledge and experience. Education is the portal to cultural enjoyment, and in Britain cultural education tends to be a matter of class education. Everyone should have access to culture and they don't. But to offer people cultural experiences you also have to offer them the means to enjoy those experiences, and our class-ridden culture doesn't do that. That is why I have a rather nerdy chapter devoted to showing that the [class] make-up of the audience for the arts, as defined by the government, has hardly changed.

You've talk about the problem with centralized government, how important are local authorities in creating culture?
They are absolutely vital. They maintain the cultural infrastructure of the country—libraries, museums, theaters, concert halls, arts centers—and until the recession they spent as much or more than the Arts Council on supporting cultural activity. Regional differences are essential if you are going to have a fruitful and diverse cultural ecology. Everyone pays a tiny fraction of their taxes to support the arts and heritage, and everyone should have access to culture, wherever they live. The Coalition is in the process of destroying the capacity of local authorities to support local culture. It is cutting culture at the roots.

Do you see London's role changing?
London is becoming, not just a world city, but a City State. That is great for Londoners, and for London's creativity, but I think we are reaching a tipping point after which few creatives will actually be able to live in the city. London will become a giant international restaurant—great for cultural consumption, but production will dry up or be imported.

Broadly speaking, how harmful has this coalition government been for arts and culture in this country?
It has been as damaging for the arts as it has been for every aspect of civil society. And it hasn't even achieved what it set out to do in economic terms. That's why I call this the Age of Lead.

[body_image width='640' height='349' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='the-failure-of-creative-britain-robert-hewison-922-body-image-1421411161.jpg' id='18682']

Robert Hewison debates future care of our nation's heritage. Photo by Kirsty Pitkin

Could it be said that art benefits from individualism and lack of state involvement? While you don't celebrate Thatcherism, your book does seem to acknowledge that a reliance on the state does not foster ideal conditions for art.
There is very little to celebrate about Thatcher, in fact nothing at all, since her regime brought in the neoliberal free-for-all that we are now having to pay for. She began the privatization of the public realm. It is true that under Thatcher and Major a new generation of artists—notably Saatchi's Young British Artists, such as Damien Hirst—learned to duck and dive, but it was the increase in state funding and facilities [that came later]—think of Tate Modern—that gave them the platform and the possibilities to profit.

In his talk for BAFTA a couple of years ago, Armando Iannucci tackled James Murdoch's statement that "the only reliable, durable, guarantor of independence is profit," and suggested that this is completely counter-intuitive to both art and business. Iannucci instead proposed that we should perceive the only reliable, durable, guarantee of profit as independence. This idea returned to me throughout your book. Is it possible to create culture without a bottom line?
It would be nice to think we could have a non-capitalist culture in a capitalist society, but don't hold your breath. What I do believe is that culture and commerce are separate, but overlapping, spheres. Neoliberalism treats us as solitary, mutually competitive, profit-seeking individuals. While it is true that art is often made by exceptional, and competitive individuals, culture is a collective, and essentially non-competitive experience. Economic value is individual, cultural value is collective. Yes, culture has economic value, but the mistake of both New Labor and the Coalition has been to see it in only economic terms—and setting targets for some theoretical bottom line. The economic benefits will come—look at the way the Creative Industries have been growing—but not if you put profit first. Iannucci is right, creativity needs independence, and it also needs trust.

What needs to change to enable people to afford to produce culture? How can people who aren't being bankrolled by a trust-fund become artists?
We could start by putting the arts back into public education, especially in schools. We should stop our universities—and especially art schools—behaving like corporations. We should stop internships being branches of the Bank of Mum and Dad. Above all, we should realize that this country depends on its creativity, and that the way we are treating the rising generation is putting our creative future at risk.

Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain by Robert Hewison is published by Verso

Follow Angus on Twitter.

Weediquette's T. Kid Raps Now and He's Dope

0
0
Weediquette's T. Kid Raps Now and He's Dope

The Supreme Court Will Finally Make a Decision on Gay Marriage

0
0

On Friday, the Supreme Court finally agreed to decide once-and-for-all if gay marriage will become law across all 50 states, in a ruling that is expected to finally end the lower courts wrangling over one of the key civil rights issues of the century.

Back in November, the same-sex marriage movement took a big hit when the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld gay marriage bans in four states. In that ruling, federal judge Jeffrey Sutton said that lawyers shouldn't implement social change, leaving hopeful gay couples in Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee and Kentucky understandably bummed.

But the decision meant the lower courts were split on the issue, forcing SCOTUS to step in to figure things out. Based on the Supreme Court's previous action on the marriage issue, including its 2013 rulings on California's Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, most people expect the justices to rule in favor of establishing a constitutional right to gay marriage.

This is kind of the pattern, actually. The movement will take a huge hit from the courts that will ultimately help propel it forward. Back in October, the Supreme Court passed on the chance to hear appeals from lower court rulings that legalized gay marriage in five states. Both sides were bummed, mostly because they just wanted the justices to get it over with already. But it was hard for gay marriage activists to complain too much—thanks to the court's indecision, the number of states allowing gay marriage jumped from 19 to 24.

That number has since catapulted to 36, which means, right now, 70 percent of Americans live in a place where same-sex marriage is legal. And SCOTUS ducking out on the chance to weigh in last October gave everyone a little breathing room to let the idea of nationwide legalization percolate. Social opinions of gay marriage have changed more rapidly than on any other issue in America ever, so that extra six months could only help.

In the upcoming case, which will be argued in April, the court will consider two questions: Whether the 14 th Amendment—which guarantees equal protection under the Constitution—requires states to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, and whether it requires states to recognize those marriage licenses issued in other states. With the lower courts highly in favor of legalization, and Attorney General Holder just announcing he'll be filing a brief in favor of equality, gay marriage will most likely be a reality across the country in June. Cheers, queers.

Follow Allie on Twitter

A Universal Flu Vaccine Is Headed to Clinical Trials

0
0
A Universal Flu Vaccine Is Headed to Clinical Trials

VICE Premiere: And And And's 'Drink for Free' Should Be Number One on Every Bar Jukebox

0
0

And And And has been one of Portland's biggest bands since 2009, but they've waited until last week to drop their official full-length debut. Their tunes are equal parts Northwest indie rock and frontier desert twang, and most of the songs make me want to buy an old van on Craigslist and traverse the western half of I-40 for a while.

Speaking of vans, the band tours in a graffitied-up utility van with a basketball hoop mounted on the back. Every year, they park it in front of strip clubs and in cul-de-sacs around Portland and host a giant basketball tournament for Portland bands called Rigsketball. Fucking Portland.

"Drink for Free" is an exclusive, unreleased track recorded during the sessions for their new album, The Failure. It's the type of song that'll make you want to see the band live, as it encompasses a benign and fun energy that translates beautifully into a raucous show. If you dig the song, check out the rest of the album below.

Male Couple Told They're 'Insane,' Can't Wed in Baja California, Mexico

0
0
Male Couple Told They're 'Insane,' Can't Wed in Baja California, Mexico

VICE News: VICE News Capsule

0
0

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today: Protests break out in Boston and Washington, DC, fighting escalates between the Libyan government and opposition forces in Benghazi, medical workers in Guinea go door-to-door to check on people who may have been exposed to the Ebola virus, and Indian parents in the eastern state of Jharkhand use an age-old tribal tradition of marking children with hot iron rods to cure disease.

Friday Night In...: Friday Night in the Bakken Oilfield

0
0

[body_image width='1000' height='1294' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421357448.jpg' id='18553']Rose Darrell, a roustabout in the Bakken Oilfield, enjoys her Friday night in Williston, North Dakota

On Friday nights, people around the world leave their offices to fill their innards with cheese fries and booze to put the pain of the working week behind them. This makes for plenty of photo-worthy moments, so we've decided to send photographers to the planet's finest cities and towns to capture Friday night as it unfolds.

For this week's installment, our photo editor Matthew Leifheit went to Williston, North Dakota, to see how workers in its booming local oil industry blow off steam.

"At sunset the town seemed bleak and creepy. But I was told by a local there were only a few places left to hang out in Williston, since both of the town's strip clubs were recently closed," he said of his time there. "One of those places is Walmart. Another is a family friendly bar called J Dubs, where a Johnny Cash cover sometimes plays. Then there's DK's Lounge, where cameras are not allowed after some recent bad press from local media outlets concerning a rise in prostitution in the area. Finally, there are some bars near Main Street, like Bill's Back 40, that stay open later. In all of these places, you'll find very few women. 'We get drunk and think about how Williston used to be, then go home and dream about how it could be,' some guy in a bar told me after last call."

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421357359.jpg' id='18552']Aerial view of the landscape surrounding Williston

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356057.jpg' id='18518']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356078.jpg' id='18519']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356092.jpg' id='18520']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356100.jpg' id='18522']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356122.jpg' id='18523']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356183.jpg' id='18524']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356197.jpg' id='18525']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356209.jpg' id='18526']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356226.jpg' id='18527']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356236.jpg' id='18528']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356252.jpg' id='18529']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356273.jpg' id='18530']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356288.jpg' id='18531']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356318.jpg' id='18532']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356338.jpg' id='18533']Johnny Cash of the Dakotas: Merle Travis Peterson, frontman of The Cold Hard Cash Show

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356387.jpg' id='18534']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356410.jpg' id='18535']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356424.jpg' id='18536']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356470.jpg' id='18538']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356487.jpg' id='18539']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356505.jpg' id='18540']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356532.jpg' id='18541']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356570.jpg' id='18542']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356582.jpg' id='18543']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356621.jpg' id='18546']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356650.jpg' id='18547']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356665.jpg' id='18548']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356678.jpg' id='18549']

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356692.jpg' id='18550']

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='friday-night-in-williston-north-dakota-405-body-image-1421356705.jpg' id='18551']

Follow Matthew Leifheit on Twitter or Instagram.

This Week in Racism: Is It Possible to Make the Academy Awards More Diverse?

0
0

[body_image width='640' height='258' path='images/content-images/2015/01/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/16/' filename='maybe-its-time-for-black-people-to-have-their-own-academy-awards-165-body-image-1421443740.jpg' id='18884']

Every year, as though there is some divine hand guiding the proceedings, the announcement of the Oscar nominations sparks an epic outcry over the lack of minority representation. These lamentations grow louder and louder as the sophistication of global communication increases. A thinkpiece must be written, a snub list must be compiled, and an army of bitter Twitterers absolutely has to berate those they deem unworthy of their nominations. Where are the women, the blacks, the Latinos, the Asians? Where's the diversity? they scream. And they continue screaming, even as it becomes obvious that no one is really listening.

Sure, there are years here and there where a breakthrough or five occurs. Last year's awards season was full of all sorts of nods to movies featuring predominantly black casts. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, The Butler, Fruitvale Station, and 12 Years a Slave were both critically acclaimed and popular with people who like critically acclaimed movies. More importantly, they were black stories made by black filmmakers. Not all of those movies received Oscar attention, but 12 Years a Slave did end up winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Before that, The Help, Precious, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Hustle and Flow snuck into the cinematic consciousness enough to get recognition in the early part of the calendar year. And, of course, who can forget Halle Berry winning an Oscar for bravely getting naked in front of Billy Bob Thornton?

In the years where a "black movie" (and I use that term very sparingly, since movies should be for everyone) gets Oscar nominations, the overwhelming consensus is that "finally, we made it!" That optimism is as short-lived as the euphoria that followed the election of Barack Obama. If no minorities are nominated, the doom and gloom comes back with a vengeance. In a lean year like this one, people fall over themselves proclaiming the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be a racist institution that purposely doesn't honor minorities or women. I've been gnawing on this old chestnut for decades now, and it's starting to taste funny. I would love to see this situation actually improve in the future rather than be fodder for the bloviating pundit class. Everyone complains, but no one offers solutions. We've tried creating alternative award shows like the BET Awards, the GLAAD Awards, the ALMA Awards, the NAACP Image Awards, and countless others. All of them lack the prestige of the Oscars, so there's only one solution left: It's time to change the Oscars.

I get that the Academy Awards are an "institution," but so is the United States Postal Service and you don't see me sending my boss vacation requests through the mail. This is the 21st century! I send him a photo of me with crutches (or a thermometer in my frowning mouth) with an iPhone! He buys it hook, line, and sinker every time, which allows me to do what I really want to do with my day: sneak off to go see movies with predominantly black casts. What a rube! It's time for the Academy to modernize too, and the best way to do that is to create awards categories just for minorities. That will ensure that they'll get their time to shine next to their white male colleagues no matter what.

At first, I thought, "create a Best Minority Actor" category, but changed my mind when I realized we wouldn't be able to recognize everyone. What if one year they nominated three black guys, a Korean, and a Pakistani? No Latinos and no Native Americans? What would the Indians think if there was a Pakistani nominee, but no one from Bollywood? Do you see where I'm going? Every minority group (including those with physical and mental disabilities) is going to need their own category. Yes, the show will run for 12 hours and they'll have to install beds in the Dolby Theater and make the attendees wear diapers so they aren't getting up every hour to pee, but absolutely no one would be upset. The Separate but Equal Academy Awards would be a huge hit. So, now that we've figured out how to award each and every minority group there is, let's look at who would be eligible for these brand new categories. First up, "Best Black Director." Here's a list of all the major Hollywood studio films from 2014 that were directed by black people:

  • Selma, Ava DuVernay
  • Think Like a Man, Too, Tim Story
  • Tyler Perry's the Single Mom's Club, Tyler Perry
  • Addicted, Bille Woodruff
  • The Equalizer, Antoine Fuqua

Ummm... that's it? Only one of those movies is actually good, and I'm not talking about Think Like a Man, Too. I'm talking about Addicted, of course. OK, let's move on to the "Best Asian Actor" category.

Was John Cho in a movie this year? No? Shit. I tried to think of a movie that was starring or directed by a Native American, but I ended up remembering The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp came out last year and started crying by the side of the road.

It's almost like there's a massive dearth of minorities starring in and directing studio movies, but we only talk about these problems for a few weeks every year when they start handing out statues. The film industry talks a lot about diversity, especially when it comes to awkward stunts like making the titular character in Annie black, but the faces behind the camera and the ones greenlighting the films all look suspiciously alike. We're all mad that Ava DuVernay was "snubbed" by the Academy, but aspiring minority filmmakers are snubbed before they even get to the point where they can work. Moviemaking is a straight white male's game, and until the movie industry can get better at cultivating minority voices, it will remain so for years to come.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images