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Kylie Jenner, the face of the 2015 big lip movement. Photo via Facebook

Last year was, by all accounts, the year of the butt. Specifically, it was the year that mainstream western culture embraced big butts and the many pleasures they bring with them. In many other corners of the world, booties have been big for a long time. And if big butts are soon discarded by fashionable trend-hoppers (as gross as it is to consider a body part a "trend"), they'll still be en vogue for many, many people. But 2014 was the year that "many" included the mostly white, reasonably well-off consumers catered to by North American culture.

If the first few weeks are any indication, it's not too soon to make a bold prediction: what 2014 was for butts, 2015 will be for lips.

As with butts before them, big lips are not a new phenomenon. They may be new to a culture that still idealizes waif-thin Nordic women, but there are a lot of people rolling their eyes at the newfound fascination with large, luscious lips. Worse still (but all too predictably), our new love of lips has been largely inspired by Kylie Jenner, a white girl who may well be cribbing her entire style from a black woman, rather than an actual embrace of multiethnic and multiracial beauty.

pic.twitter.com/nsYqYefp0J
— heather sanders (@_heathersanders) September 24, 2014

Heather Sanders is the woman whose style Kylie Jenner has been accused of copying.

Never a group to let genetics stop them from conforming to the fad of the day, white women have taken to lip-plumping with gusto. Products like weird, stinging lip gloss have been available for years, as have lip injections, but the recent lip-fullness trend has led to a new and lucrative trade in natural lip enhancers that don't involve plastic surgery or cayenne-filled lip gloss. Most of these are basically plastic containers you can stick your lips into, and then create an air vacuum to swell your lips.

There are a number of products like this, but none can match the surreal artistry of the Fullips videos. This seven-minute magnum opus, in which Fullips founder Linda Gomez's daughter Ashley demonstrates her mom's product, raises so many questions.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/i8YbfYL5H3w' width='560' height='315']

Why is there no time-lapse while she suctions her lips? Why is there no music, at the very least? For a video of a woman holding a red Duplo to her mouth and making odd sucking/inhaling motions, how is it so discomfortingly sexual? Is this a product demonstration, or an entry at a university art show? Prepare yourself for the most uncomfortable, confusingly sexual video you'll ever watch.

Linda Gomez is no slouch in the weird demonstration video department herself, though. Here's a much briefer video in which the Fullips matriarch shows off her product and appears to be wearing a satin wedding dress. Where her daughter's video had the off-putting quality of being accidentally sexual, Linda seems to relish in that aspect.

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Unfortunately for both Linda and Ashley Gomez, Fullips is just an amateur in the lip-enhancing-via-suction video game. They may stand to make money off their product, but YouTube user and current high school student Laura Birchard has basically blown the roof off their entire business model. Her video, which is nine minutes long, has almost 1.5 million views. She's also been into lip-plumping since at least 2013, so Birchard's trend game is on point.

The tone of her voice draws you in immediately. Why is she so quiet? Sure, some casual viewers might assume that she's in her family's house and doesn't want them to hear, or perhaps isn't even supposed to be on the computer so late at night. But I sense something else afoot: Birchard knows she's discovered a vital secret. She knows she's about to share something valuable with you. She can't risk outsiders hearing while she divulges her hard-earned knowledge with you, the worthy viewer.

Now, how does Birchard get the fabulous lips she has so long desired? After playing around with many different methods, she says, she happened upon a film canister. "I used to take a lot of photos when I was in middle school," she offers by way of (unnecessary) explanation. "Well, I'm still in high school, but." The shrug and head-tilt she employs here, as if to dismiss her young age, belies a wisdom few of us can hope to attain in our oldest years.

Birchard's method is to flatten the opening of a plastic film canister and suction one lip at a time. She cautions the viewer and prospective lip-plumper to go slowly, building up time over a few weeks, lest you bruise your lips and be forced to walk around with a pair of inflated hickey tubes on your face. Once you've acclimated your lips, and fine-tuned your timing to achieve your desired fullness, you will be as happy as Laura Birchard is. Toward the end of the video, something catches her eye off-screen. "I'm sorry, I just can't stop looking at them," she says to the camera. If only I had felt that kind of contentment with anything during my teen years.

One key to Birchard's happiness must be her interest in philanthropy. Rather than trying to monetize her genius, like Linda Gomez, Birchard has released it into the world, for all the thin-lipped despairing women (and men, and others) of the world.

"These are not $50. They're like $5 for a pack of four," Birchard says as she waves a bent film canister at the camera and compares it to the $50 contraption she almost bought before realizing the error of her ways. Indeed they aren't, high school student Laura Birchard. And thank you for showing us the light.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

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Follow Gilbert Hernandez on Twitter and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly.

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Screenshot via LiveLeak

A group of New Zealand film students got their assignment handed to them on a platter yesterday when they captured footage of a creepy masked couple near their school. The video shows a young male and female in matching white masks staring ominously into the camera.

Student Chris Muir and his friends spotted the pair in the tall grass at Parnell Railway Station in Auckland while mucking around outside the classroom. The group thought they were innocent pranksters from the school until they realized the pair were holding guns. And then the couple began following them.

"I was totally confused," Chris told VICE. "I had no clue what to think other than to back away." Chris said he saw a police chopper in the area after he and his friends ran back to the school. Police spokesperson Noreen Hegarty later confirmed that the couple were holding imitation firearms but said that police would always treat such cases as real until proven otherwise. Nobody was hurt in the incident. In a statement on its Facebook page, the Auckland police department wrote, "When police are notified of people carrying and displaying weapons in public, we respond with armed officers."

Despite the made-for-internet-virility look of the video, Hegarty said the incident was not a hoax. "The film students accidentally happened upon them," she told VICE. The masked pair had also been reported to police earlier in the week when a woman ran off in fright after seeing them in Auckland's Domain park but it wasn't until yesterday that the duo turned themselves into police. Police today are remaining tight-lipped on what exactly the couple were doing at Parnell. "I can't really go into detail about what they were doing but I doubt they'll be doing it again anytime soon," Hegarty said. "There's still a possibility that they may be charged with some offenses, but I haven't been notified of any charges that have been made so far."

What's believed to be the duo's Facebook page reemerged online today after it was taken down yesterday. The Twins of Atticus fan page, which links to a joke nudie site, has 275 fans and a smattering of low-resolution art-school photos for what looks to be a garage punk band. Our bet is that it's some young'uns getting their kicks rather than any thought-out marketing strategy. Kids these days.

Follow Emma on Twitter.

When Tommy Thompson stopped paying rent and repairman James Kennedy was told to go inspect the Vero Beach, Florida, property, he found conditions befitting a squatter: mold, mildew, and an upstairs room with TV sets just stacked in a pile. Thompson and his companion, Alison Antekeier, were gone. "There's nothing living there now but rats and cockroaches," Kennedy told the Columbus Dispatch in October, 2012.

But Kennedy also found clues pointing to to Thompson's mysterious past—and why he'd taken off. There was a trove of throwaway cellphones, a book about assuming a new identity, and five or six empty coin boxes.

That's when the handyman started to put it together: The tenant was the man who had excavated $50 million worth of gold in 1988 and famously absconded with the fortune without paying his investors.

When Thompson disappeared two years ago in hopes of escaping lawsuits over the gold, a search was launched and a US Marshall deemed him "one of the most intelligent fugitives ever sought. The saga finally came to an end on Tuesday in Boca Raton, about 90 minutes north of Miami.

This distinctly Floridian tale begins in 1857, when a sidewheel steamer called the SS Central America launched from Panama straight into a category 2 hurricane near the Carolinas. It was carrying 30,000 pounds of California gold to a bank in New York. It never arrived, which apparently factored into an economic crash known as the Panic of 1857.

In 1985, Thompson was an engineer who mined the ocean floor for minerals. But he had his eye on scoring some of that sunken treasure and smooth-talked potential investors over lunch to help him find the Central America. "Everybody knew the probability of finding gold was zero," Thompson's former mentor told Forbes in 1996. "But people still wanted to invest."

Against all odds, Thompson and his Columbus America Discovery Group of Ohio successfully sent a $10 million remotely operated vehicle to recover artifacts from the wreckage in 1987. He claimed the gold was abandoned, but 39 insurance companies begged to differ—their forebears had paid out claims for the lost gold more than a century ago, they argued, and were therefore entitled to a payout.

In 1996, Thompson finally won the right to keep 92.2 percent of the treasure in appellate court. But apparently that wasn't enough: He abandoned his Vero Beach home and went on the lam, refusing to pay either the insurance companies or the workers and investors who helped him excavate the gold.

Authorities caught up with him through Antekeier, whom they trailed for seven hours on Tuesday. The 47-year-old took a series of taxis and buses, presumably to try and shake the police. But she eventually led them to a Hilton hotel, where Thompson might have been holed up the entire time.

A two-person suite at a chain hotel in suburbia hardly seems suitable for a man with $50 million in gold. But then again, when the police are using electronic billboards to bring you in, you probably don't want to spend much time outside. And it's hard to make it rain when you're on the run; Thompson and his partner stuck to a cash-only policy, which allowed them to use fake names.

Ted Thomas, a cousin of Thompson, told the Associated Press on Thursday that the quest for glory had ended in tragedy. "If he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't do it," Thomas said. "You don't throw away your life for something that's yellow and weighs a lot."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today: An explosion kills at least two people at a Mexico City maternity hospital, Germany's anti-Islam movement may be falling apart, Uganda uses drones to protect wildlife, and 3D technology gives expecting parents in Estonia a unique view of their newborn babies.

When the opportunity to go on a three-day Princess cruise to Mexico presented itself this month, I had to say yes. Never before had I been on a cruise, and I felt it was something I needed to do, whether I liked it or not. I basically saw it as the Bat Mitzvah of vacations. Unlike my Bat Mitzvah, however, I also saw this as a monumental opportunity to get laid.

Normally this isn't the sort of thing I aim for when vacationing, but this year, circumstances changed. That's because I decided to make my first real New Year's resolution—no sex until I'm in a relationship—which I managed to break a few hours after the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve. (It was with the same guy I slept with last New Year's, so I wrote it off as a holiday tradition.) Since then, there's been no sex, and given my relationship track record, I know full well that I probably won't have sex for a very long time. This cruise, however, sounded like it could be a three-day reprieve where resolutions don't count. I'd be in international waters, after all. The official motto of international waters is, "everything's made up and the points don't matter." Actually, that's Whose Line Is It Anyway, but you get the point. With this in mind, I made the decision to unlock my metaphorical chastity belt and see where the horny took me.

When we arrived at the departure port, I surveyed everyone else waiting to board the ship. It seemed as though my friend Megan and I were the only adults under the age of 50, but I was still optimistic. Maybe a bachelor party was boarding from another side, or some college seniors decided to have an early spring break but were running late. I thought to myself, It's not possible that we're the only ones our age aboard a cruise ship filled with over 1,000 people. Then the boat left the port. Turns out, it was possible.

After a few hours on the boat, I came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to bone I would either have to drastically lower my standards, ruin a marriage, or both. I checked the ship's list of daily activities. At 7 PM, there was a "meet and greet" for singles at a bar called Crooner's. I decided to check it out, with none of my initial optimism intact. When I showed up to Crooner's, I saw a small group of much older people sitting around a table and chatting. There was only one man, surrounded by five or six women. This was absurd, and yet, I knew right away that even if I wanted to, I couldn't compete with those ladies—they were surely more eager to have sex with him than I was. They could probably listen him talk for hours about 401ks, back pain, Frank Sinatra, or whatever the hell it is older people talk about. They probably even laughed at all his horrible jokes, or worse, genuinely found them funny. I am not ready to be this person.

I left Crooner's and wandered over to another part of the ship called the Explorer's Lounge. It was there that my faith had been restored: I saw the Imperial Ostriches—a live band, comprised of one female singer and three men who looked around my age. (I've changed the band's name to save them some embarrassment, but it was something just as stupid.) The fact that they called themselves the Imperial Ostriches was immediately forgiven. The fact that they only played cover songs, most of which were horrible disco tracks, was also forgiven. The fact that they looked like extras from a Maroon 5 music video—it didn't matter. They were the only three men on this ship who were not alive when Kennedy was shot, and that was more than enough to get me going. I figured that an attempt to approach them right away would seem desperate, so I decided to play it cool and wait until the next day to offer them my body.

On day two of the cruise, I checked the newly published list of activities and took note that my new favorite band was playing at 11 PM, again at the Explorer's Lounge. It was their CBGB. The day leading up to the show consisted mostly of me eating an egregious amount of pizza and shrimp, attending trivia events, chugging seven glasses of free champagne during the "Captain's Welcome," and watching a disco-themed dance show called "Blame It on the Boogie." Say what you want about cruise ships, but I was there to make the most of it.

Not once did I interact with someone who wasn't Megan, except for when a woman accused us of cheating during the disco trivia, and I indignantly responded that we did not. (We did. Sorry.)

When 11 PM rolled around, I had mostly sobered up and headed to the Explorer's Lounge. The only other people present were three couples dancing to "Jolene." It was pretty miserable sitting there and staring at people who were genuinely in love, so I walked to the room next door called Club Fusion to watch karaoke and drink a "Beverly Hills Ice Tea"—a mixture of Grey Goose, Bacardi, Bombay Sapphire, tequila, sparkling wine, and two or three more things that I didn't bother to memorize. It tasted like melted chalk and was jam-packed with sugary liquid, which was probably added in an attempt to mask the chalk taste. This drink quickly became my favorite, though, because it got me drunk fast. I figured the Ostriches would be done by midnight, and I could head on over as they were packing up their instruments. My plan was to very casually offer my pizza, shrimp, and alcohol-filled body to whichever one of them wanted it.

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Believe it or not, I was having so much fun watching karaoke that I lost track of time. Around 12:30, I left Club Fusion and went back to the Explorer's Lounge to see if my Ostriches were still there. They were gone.

I had one last bastion of hope left, and that was to go to the so-called nightclub, Skywalker's. Where else would the Ostriches go to unwind after a rough night of telling multiple men in Tommy Bahama shirts that they don't know any Jimmy Buffett songs? I got to Skywalker's and was, yet again, severely disappointed. A sad DJ played the same sad songs he had been sadly playing all day by the sad pool (we heard "Mambo No. 5" multiple times on this trip). A handful of people happily danced. The Ostriches were not in sight.

I stumbled back to my room that night, unsure if I was too drunk or just suffering the consequences of being on a moving boat. I thought a little harder about these Imperial Ostriches and my plan, which was admittedly vague. As if I really could just walk up to one of them and say, "Let's sex." That's not me. I've never approached a man in my life. I don't make a move unless I am confident that that person is interested in me, which rarely happens because I am almost never good at gauging that sort of thing.

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Then there were the actual logistics. I was sharing a room, and I'm sure the Ostriches were too, because everyone on cruise ships shares a room. They might have even been sharing a bed, for all I know. Where the hell were we supposed to hook up—a public bathroom? A dark corner of Skywalker's? I fell asleep that night knowing my erotic cruise-ship fantasy was completely hopeless. There were too many elements working against me, including the pounds of shrimp I inhaled that were making me feel exceptionally bloated.

On the third and final day of the cruise, we finally arrived in Ensenada. Megan and I walked around for two hours, each bought a blanket, then went back to the ship to eat more food, play more trivia, and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding in our stateroom. I briefly saw the Imperial Ostriches play one last time at the Explorer's Lounge, but I was over them by that point. I opted instead to watch a comedy magician perform to a nearly sold-out crowd and thankfully, I had no intention of having sex with him either.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

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Northern lights on Frobisher Bay, 20 kilometers out of Iqaluit. All photos courtesy Sarah McNair-Landry and Erik Boomer.

We met arctic adventurers Sarah McNair Landry and Erik Boomer in Iqaluit last spring while we filmed Toronto rapper Rich Kidd playing an insane yurt party. Sarah was one of the founders and organizers of the event, and when she mentioned that she did trips out into the tundra, we didn't think too much about it because, first of all, pretty much everyone up north does outdoorsy stuff, and second, we were busy having our minds blown at her epic party.

Then we started following her and Erik on social media and came to realize that they are some of the most badass people on this planet, and that all other so-called adventurers should probably pack up their titanium crampons and throw them out of whatever ultralight aircraft they're about to jump out of and call it quits.

Growing up in Iqaluit with parents who own and operate a Polar guiding business, Sarah has the title of youngest female to go to the South Pole—she was 18. That means while you were worried about second-basing your first "real" girlfriend, she was worried about dying of exposure in sub-fuck-off temperatures. She's also also a vegetarian animal lover who owns more guns than your average redneck.

Erik Boomer is comparatively new to polar adventures, but he's no stranger to doing insane shit for kicks. A professional kayaker and photographer, when he's not living out of his car, he's dropping huge waterfalls and doing first descents of nightmarish rivers. After a chance meeting with Sarah on a kite-skiing trip filled with stories of ice, dogsledding, and fighting off polar bears, he was hooked.

His first polar adventure was a 104-day ski-and-kayak circumnavigation of Ellsmere Island that should have killed him multiple times. Instead, he survived and earned a nomination for National Geographic's "Adventurer of the Year."

In short: the most boring parts of their lives would be the most incredible parts for our lives.

Now they are about to take on a 4,000-kilometre dogsledding trip around Baffin Island, retracing the same route Sarah's parents did 25 years ago. They'll be using gear similar to what Sarah's parents used and traditional Inuit equipment. Why are they doing this adventure? Well, because they can. Oh, and also because the ice is melting more every year and soon they won't be able to do this trip.

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Sarah on a dogsled

VICE: Tell me about this trip you're going on?
Erik Boomer: Well, we're going to go on a really long dogsledding expedition around Baffin Island, which is where Sarah is from actually.

Is this the first time anyone's ever done this length of dogsledding around Baffin?
Sarah McNair-Landry: Actually, my parents, before they moved up here, came up 25 years ago and did this exact trip—the circumnavigation of Baffin. And yes, it's the 25th anniversary and nobody's redone it since, so we thought it'd be really cool to take our dog team and head out and do it.

Are you guys going to use the same gear they used in the 80s to do it?
EB: Well, pretty much everything, except Sarah's mom's pink onesie. We might opt out on that one, but we're building a lot of our own gear. It's all based on the designs they used 25 years ago. The sled is basically a replica, all hand-carved. All our jackets and mitts and pants and boots stuff is all kind of hand-sewn to the same designs really because they work the best up here.

So how long are you guys going to be on the ice for?
SM: Well, pretty much the whole season. We're leaving February 1. We didn't want to leave too much earlier because we're still waiting for the ocean to freeze up solid and for there to be good snow pack. And then we're probably expecting 100-120 days, but if we can do it faster, we will because we definitely don't want to be caught out there with 14 dogs and no snow.

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Northern lights on Frobisher Bay

Oh my god, 120 days out on the ice.
EB: Yeah, Sarah's plan if we are hitting 120 days and we're not quite there, and we run out of snow for the sled, is to just take the sled back and sew a bunch of doggy backpacks so we can load up their food and divide our gear out, and backpack all our gear, and just kind of roll with this big pack of 14 dogs crossing rivers.

That sounds so arctic-apocalyptic, to see both of you guys coming into town raggedy with a whole pack of dogs around you.
SM: [laughs] It'd be a pretty sweet ending.

Yeah, that's kind of what the summit is for a trip like this: the ending.
SM: Yeah, I think the beginning and the end. The beginning is so cold and we definitely have to set ourselves up, so hopefully we don't get ourselves in that situation. But the end, and the bigger mountains and more technical terrain in the first month, but the end, it's our longest section—it's a month. Yeah, that's going to be the one where we need to make it back before the rivers open, and the ice leaves, and the snow melts.

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Sarah on a dogsled

A lot of people here in the south don't really understand why people go on these trips. They think they're sort of to become famous or for the glory. It doesn't really seem like that's the angle you guys are going for.
SM: It's what we do; it's fun. It's a pretty amazing experience to be able to take 14 dogs and travel for 100–120 days with them. For sure there's going to be storms, really, really cold days, but if we weren't doing this, we would be here dogsledding anyway and camping with friends and doing that type of stuff. So yeah, it's what we love to do.

EB: Yeah and we're definitely not making money or anything on this trip. We had a really tough time getting any kind of financial support for the trip, in fact. We got a couple companies who think it's a cool idea and it lined up, so we've got some really great gear that's been donated. But we're paying for this thing out of our pocket and it's really the cheapest trip that we could do with dogs because it starts and ends in Sarah's hometown. We're not having to fly anywhere, we're not having to fly a dog team anywhere. We're just buying food and shipping it around and living in a tent, so it's really like the cheapest thing and we're going about it just as cheaply as you could imagine. I actually live in my car when I'm down south. I don't really have any money.

So the reason you're going on this trip is just to commemorate it?
EB: Yeah, in a way, to commemorate it. In a big way, it's just because we can—because we live in a time that we can still travel for 120 days or 4,000 kilometers by dog team. The dog driving and this type of travel in the arctic has been kind of declining for a while now. And it was 100 years ago this old explorer from Denmark named Knud Rasmussen did an epic, epic journey that's just legendary where he went from Greenland to Alaska and his quotes are just talking about how thankful and lucky he is to be born in a time where he could even do that. The fact that we can still do it now, it kind of needs to be done. It's kind of a rite of passage too for Sarah and myself being here. We've got to at least do what her parents did here.

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Frobisher Bay

Winter days are numbered, because of the melting ice.
EB: Yeah, for sure. I think Sarah was actually on the last dog team to reach the North Pole and have a ton of experience up there and she could probably tell you what's changing up there as much as anybody.

Yeah, Sarah, you've only been exploring for the last ten years, but the ice has changed that much in that amount of time.
SM: Yeah, for sure. And a lot of it is stories I've heard of people going before my experiences of what it's like there, but it's definitely changing. And you see the changes more like further north than around Baffin.

EB: Yeah, it's cool, the pictures from her dogsledding trip (which was a while ago) to the North Pole, they were definitely having to break off these ice chunks and saw them into pieces and load up these dogs, and float them across these open water sections like a life raft with these dogs just floating across. Pretty cool.

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The dogs take a rest

Are you guys going to bring some alcohol or like weed with you? Or maybe even acid since it's super light, and it would make the Northern Lights look awesome?
[both laughing]
EB: Just the other night I was out there and I got up to take a piss and check a loose dog, and I could swear I felt like I was on acid because the Northern Lights were so crazy. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to be on a drug like that. It might be a little too overwhelming. But yeah, we'll probably slip in a bit of booze. It's a little heavy to carry, but there might be something like that to sip on on the trip and keep our mind off of the dire situation when it's cold

OK, what's a bigger fear: running out of food on the trip or running out of toilet paper?
SM: Hmmm, well, toilet paper you can't really find.

EB: I bring a lot of extra socks, so I'm not too worried about the toilet paper. I'm pretty thrifty.

SM: With food, there's usually a bird or a goose flying over. You can always find something.

So, toilet paper you're more worried about running out than food.
EB: That's for Sarah and for me, I'm a little less worried about the toilet paper. My hygiene is a little lower, but she's probably a little bit better at starving. She's definitely been on a lot of long trips and doesn't require quite as much food. For me, I eat like a horse and being low on food scares me.

SM: I think Boomer is more worried about running out of gummy bears.

Now when you're going into polar bear country, are you guys bringing firearms with you?
SM: Yeah, we're bringing a bunch of bear deterrents, like flares and stuff, and then we're bringing my shotgun.

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Sarah McNair-Landry with a 12-gauge shotgun

Your shotgun, is it a 12-gauge shotgun?
SM: It's 12-guage with big slugs, but that's kind of like a last case. Pretty much one of the last things we'd want to do would be to have to shoot a bear; it's always trying to scare it away. Actually, the best way to scare a bear away is just to start swearing at it and yell at it, and kind of run towards it and just intimidate it.

So you're saying harsh language is the best way to scare a bear off?
SM: Exactly.

EB: "I'm going to fucking rip your head off" is one of my favourite ones as you take another step forward.

You make fun of the bear's mom too, you just hit it at an emotional level.
[both laughing]
SM: See, you'd be a pro.

EB: Speaking of guns, Sarah, she's a vegetarian, she's an environmentalist, but she's got a 308 rifle, and a 12-gauge shotgun with slugs, so it's pretty funny actually seeing her gun collection

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Jon Turk negotiating ice break-up on day 50 of circumnavigating Ellesmere Island

I guess, Erik, compared to your Ellesmere Island trip where it was just you and your buddy, on this trip you're going to have dogs, so they'll be kind of your security system for if bears come in?
EB: Yep.

SM: Yeah, exactly, well the dogs are the best ever because they can smell the bear coming, so they'll wake us up in the middle of the night if a bear comes to camp, which is nice to be woken up 30 seconds before the bear's in camp instead of when the bear is tearing through your tent.

EB: Yeah, I've had a couple of situations where bears have essentially came to knock on the tent to say hello or scratched open it, but Sarah has had a pretty harrowing encounter where one definitely jumped on the tent and I'll let her tell you about that.

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A polar bear came into camp on Ellesmere Island's east coast.

Sarah there was a story where a bear was attacking your brother...
SM: Yeah. Yeah, he came into the tent where we were sleeping. He came in on my side of the tent and started like pouncing on the tent, and ripped through part of the tent. We just started screaming and I started kicking as hard as I could, and he kind of backed up. Then we ran outside and I ran for the gun and my brother grabbed a shovel. He kind of came back, he sort of charged my brother who was standing out there with just a shovel. So my brother hit him over the face with a tiny, two-foot camp shovel. Anyways, they kind of had this duel-off, he was able to get a flare and throw a flare at the bear, and then the bear looped around to where I was coming out of the tent with the gun by then. Luckily, I shot just above his head and the warning shot was enough to convince him to go somewhere else.

EB: That's one thing too. A lot of people who are coming up here on trips for the first time and they have guns, they think: Oh, well if a bear comes in, you've got to shoot it. And both Sarah and I and her whole family have been around a lot of bears. It take a lot of work, it's really scary, but there's no need to shoot every bear. It would take a really strange case and a really aggressive, bad bear to really lead to that. We've definitely had a lot of success with intimidation and screaming. I feel pretty comfy having Sarah around. She's not afraid to run after a bear with something small in her hand.

That's good that Sarah is there as your protector, Erik.
EB: Yeah.

SM: And then the dogs too. The Inuit used to hunt with the dogs, so we usually leave a couple loose and sometimes they'll just chase the bear out of camp too.

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Sarah McNair-Landry

Why do you guys choose to do the overland trips instead of the big, epic summits?
SM: I don't know. It's different. I grew up here and there's something different. The summit is very short and quick. This is a lot longer, more endurance and they're both badass in their own ways, but I don't know exactly how to answer that question.

EB: I think it's being up here has been a lot about what polar stuff is about: these extended times in these elements. On some of these, you push up into those high elevations for short periods of time where you're dealing with extreme cold and you'll just put on... for that day. Out here, you're kind of dealing with it extended every day. You may not be on the verge of falling off a mountain, but you're dealing with this extreme environment and you're in this incredibly isolated place. And, for me, what I like is that that burn goes a lot longer. It's this extended deal. I just look at the chance to go on a trip that lasts 120 days and I don't know how many I can get in in my lifetime, so every chance that I can to do a long trip just makes me feel good and like I did something I will not every regret in my life. And I can't climb mountains, so.

I'm sure it wouldn't take you that long to figure it out.
SM: There's enough people climbing mountains.

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Walking along an Arctic landscape

I like how you guys try to stay keeping it traditional, sort of like your circumnavigation of Baffin using traditional kayaks.
SM: Yeah. One thing I love about, and I'm sure I'll love about this trip, when my brother and I did our Northwest Passage trip through Northwest territories and Nunavut is that it's just really cool to be travelling through these communities. Small communities in the north are amazing and the people are so awesome. It's just a really neat experience, especially travelling with the dog team. That's definitely a part of it that I'm really looking forward to.

Talking about being in the middle of nowhere out on this trip, what's the possibility of a rescue if it all goes to shit?
SM: I mean there's always a possibility of rescue, but it kind of depends where you are and how fast you need to get out. The easiest way to travel up here, by far, is by snow machine. But, you know, our longest section between communities is about 30 days by dog, so that would still take quite a while to get a snow machine out and back. They can come by plane, but you need an area for them to land.

EB: What's the longest you and your mom have waited or looked for a place to land a plane? There's been a couple of times you guys have been low on food. I've heard you tell stories and it's been a couple weeks before a plane could land and could feed you.

SM: So it's always in the back of your head, "Oh yeah, someone could come rescue us no problem!" But in reality, it's like you've got to be prepared. Obviously helicopter would be the easiest solution except there's no helicopters in Nunavut, so that would mean bringing a helicopter up probably from the south and that takes time too. It's definitely like sure, people would come get us, but how long would it take before people come in and get us?

It sounds like quite the epic winter vacation.
SM: Yeah, it'll be good.

You can follow Sarah and Erik's trip at wayofthenorth.com or track their trip in real-time at gramwire.com/expedition/wayofthenorth. On Facebook, see Pittarak Expeditions. Follow Erik's Instagram for more of his insane photos.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The number of dog-shit films that screen at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) every year could fill a book. A 348-page one, to be precise: That's the size of the festival catalog sitting by me as I type this. But the unnavigable massiveness of IFFR—which grows fatter with each iteration—means that there are indeed good films to be had, you just have to find them.

The old adage about throwing excrement at a wall holds true in this most futuristic of port cities: As much as I've enjoyed sending hashtagged plaints out into the ether here (none of which made their way to the promotional-tweets-from-attendees screen that showed before each film started), only an idiot could spend ten nights at IFFR and not see some films worth writing home about. And I'm no idiot, for the tally of good films I saw in Rotterdam this year hit double digits! Here are five in particular to look out for.

TOKYO TRIBE

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Still from "Tokyo Tribe"

Japanese director Sono Sion is perhaps best known for Love Exposure, a four-hour film that enjoyed a long run on the film festival circuit in 2008 to 2009 and which can sometimes be seen at three in the morning on Film 4. Tokyo Tribe is sure to strengthen Sono's appeal as a cult director while also allowing him to break into something resembling the mainstream.

In the movie a number of gangs in some alternate and very violent Tokyo must put their antagonisms aside in order to defend their shared territory against Mera (Suzuki Ryôhei), a bleach-blonde thug with a fondness for swords and a desperate need to have the biggest dick in all the land, and his boss Buppa (Takeuchi Riki), a hideous warlord whose eyes roll to the back of his head nearly as frequently as he masturbates using a dark green dildo.

Based on a serialized manga novel catered to late-teen males, Tokyo Tribe is as luminous as it is relentless: It's Battle Royale meets West Side Story edited like porn, and the whole thing unfolds like a foul-mouthed hip-hopera to a ceaselessly catchy beat. Part of the utter hilarity here is the feeling that Sono's at least having fun with his source material if not taking the piss out of it entirely. A UK theatrical release is set for later this year.

DREAMCATCHER

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Brenda Myers-Powell is a former prostitute and drug addict who divides her time today between various activist and outreach roles, visiting secondary schools, correctional facilities, and the rough corners of Chicago's South Side to meet with prostitutes and other vulnerable women. Hers is a selfless and tireless struggle against sex trafficking, domestic abuse, child molestation, and the criminalization of prostitution.

In Kim Longinotto's harrowing and revealing documentary, Brenda meets with a number of young women who all share a background characterized by violence, rape, and neglect. Among these young subjects are 15-year-old Temeka, who started prostituting at the age of 12, and Marie, a pregnant prostitute who has been on the streets since she was eight.

These and many others in Dreamcatcher are broken, battered people braving a world that doesn't quite accept them as victims and subsequently fails to extend them the help they so evidently need. Due for release in early March, Dreamcatcher recalls another great documentary about social intervention tactics on the streets of Chicago, The Interrupters (2011).

That Brenda's efforts are required in the first place is a terrible indictment of institutional misogyny, rape culture, and the race and class divides that have left these women in tatters, but the bottomless reserves of patience and understanding displayed here are heart-swelling.

BITTER LAKE

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Adam Curtis made Bitter Lake as an exclusive for BBC iPlayer, but its big-screen premiere in Rotterdam seems to have gone down well enough to suggest that a cinema release might also be on the cards.

The British documentarian's latest haphazard foray through the power structures of modern society focuses on Afghanistan, and the media portrayals of and militarist escalations upon it by three imperialist nations: the USSR, the US, and the UK. But that's not all: Curtis contextualizes his thesis with a wider perspective, that of the western nations' post-war relations with the Middle East, as first concretized by a 1943 meeting between President Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz.

Did we all sell our souls to the devil when we agreed to drill for Saudi oil in return for virtual immunity? According to Curtis's film, yep: By the 1940s, King Abdulaziz had already secured his throne by violently propagating the ideas of Wahhabism, the backward, ultraconservative form of Islam in which today's Islamic State is rooted.

Bitter Lake is a fascinating and revealing argument about how culpable western governments are when it comes to the rise of people like Osama bin Laden and factions like the Islamic State.

SECOND COMING

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At first sight, award-winning British playwright Debbie Tucker Green's debut feature unfolds like any other middle-of-the-road, family-oriented, and marketably issues-based drama. But there's a twist that rotates gradually as the film turns with style and confidence through its multiple ambiguities.

Somewhere in London, welfare worker Jackie (Nadine Marshall) lives with her railway repairman husband Mark (Idris Elba) and 11-year-old son Jerome (Kai Francis Lewis), after whose birth she was told she'd never conceive again. As it happens, though, Jackie is pregnant, and as it also happens, she hasn't slept with Mark in months.

Green reins in the potential melodrama here, making no other religious references beyond the film's title, to examine a close-knit domestic harmony unravelling in the wake of a pregnancy that may or may not be due to an adulterous fling.

Before anything else, Second Coming boasts some of the most nuanced and plausible interactions in a familial setting that I've seen in British cinema for some time: Marshall is excellent and enjoys a real chemistry with on-screen son Lewis, while Elba gives his finest performance since The Wire. In an age when too many British films are serving up dull-as-fuck miserablism, Second Coming is all the more refreshing for its depiction of people we might actually relate to. The film is currently set for a May 8 release.

JADE MINERS

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As its functional title suggests, Burmese-Chinese director Midi Z's first feature-length documentary is an unfussy, ground-level account of the miners who dig for jade in the mountains of Kachin State, in north Burma. Their trade is a precarious one, not only because of the absence of on-site health and safety measures as well as medical insurance, but also due to the fact that jade mining is legally prohibited due to the political clusterfuck that is the ongoing Burmese Civil War, which dates back to 1948. Still, if rich Chinese billionaires love something as much as they love jade, then the potential outweighs the risk—always.

Not much really happens in Midi Z's film, and yet in one engrossing scene after another, we observe the minute details that define life for these men: hacking doggedly away at rocks in their Kappa tracksuit bottoms and Real Madrid socks, arguing about pubic hairs in their shared bowls of rice and fatty pork, listening to the radio, and trying to get some sleep in their cramped, shared quarters.

The work's as grueling as it is boring, so why bother? The answer lies in a scene in which one worker, U Nein, calls home to his family, only to be told they haven't been able to pay their rent or kids' tuition fees for months. Make ends meet or die trying.

Follow Michael Pattison on Twitter.

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A computer, which could hypothetically be used for revenge porn. Photo via Flickr user Ryan

Craig Brittain apparently considers himself a moral crusader of sorts. His Twitter bio, for example, reads: "Good to bad and back to good. Redemption." And his old revenge porn site, IsAnybodyDown?, which has been out of operation since last year, now offers a longwinded kinda-apology. And a new mission statement.

Instead of posting nude photos of women alongside their contact information as it once did, IsAnybodyDown? now consists solely of a manifesto that claims, variously, that revenge porn is a media invention, that his site had a body-positive message, and that he has a new purpose in life.

"Iclosed the website down in 2013 because I was personally conflicted (moral concerns and the fact that 99 percent of the time I hated running the thing), and I wanted to use my skills to do something which I consider to be productive and positive in society, and that is why I contributed to GamerGate," he wrote. "I want diversity and ethical media, NOT 'revenge porn.'"

But regardless of what Brittain wants people to believe (and going from revenge porn to Gamergate is probably not the brightest PR move), he's responding to the Federal Trade Commission, which issued an order yesterday that forbids him from ever making a revenge porn site again.

It's the latest development in the war over websites devoted to sexually shaming and humiliating people—the vast majority of whom are women. The FBI indicted revenge porn pioneer Hunter Moore last January (the charges were technically related to hacking), the police arrested a California man for posting nude photos of his ex in December, and there's currently a legal battle in Arizona concerning laws that treat artistic photos as revenge porn.

This case is notable because it's the first time the FTC has stepped in. The federal agency is claiming Brittain made $12,000 from his site using deceptive—and really fucked up—tactics.

According to the FTC, Brittain would pose as a woman on Craigslist and solicit other women for nudes, which he would then post on the site. He would then advertise a removal service to them called "Takedown Lawyer," which he also owned.

But a separate accusation, which is even more disturbing, was not addressed by the FTC: In 2013, one woman told the Observer that she believed the site had hired a man whose job it was "to court women and coax them into sending him naked photos" and that she had fallen victim to that scammer.

Of course this claim is unsubstantiated, but according to the FTC, it wouldn't be totally out of character for Brittain. They say his was even worse than your run-of-the-mill revenge porn site.

"Was Brittain's the only site of its kind?" FTC attorney Lesley Fair wrote in a post. "No, but like any business trying to distinguish itself from the competition, he touted his site's unique selling point—in this case, what he characterized as a 'higher level of hatred.'"

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The backwoods of Alabama with Cambo, diamond mining in the Central African Republic, the weight gain diet with Riff Raff, and tennis with inmates. This is the latest on VICE.

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Follow Leslie Stein on Twitter. For more Stein, check out her blog and buy her book.

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Photo via Flickr user Sasha Kargaltsev

"Landmark 'Gay Gene' Study Provides Further Evidence Sexuality Is Not Chosen," crowed a headline in International Business Times last month. The study, published in Psychological Medicine, examined the DNA of 409 pairs of gay brothers and found some evidence that they shared a gene that could be linked to homosexuality. While the study isn't claiming a single gene is responsible for determining sexual orientation, Dean Hamer, a geneticist who contributed to similar research during the 1990s, believes we now know "there is a genetic basis for sexual orientation."

The idea that people are born gay, or that homosexual desire is genetic, comes up most frequently as an argument against discrimination or oppressive laws targeting LGBT people. In response to terrifying legislation like Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill, which outlawed homosexuality, gay activists and supporters have argued it's inhumane to punish LGBT people because they cannot, in fact, change. To those who believe that same-sex desire is a choice, or a deficiency, the "gay gene" theory suggests these feelings aren't our fault. If we can't help our same-sex attractions, and if we were born this way, it's certainly unfair to punish us for them—no matter how personally off-putting you find our sex lives.

For many people, however, being gay is not a biological decree. We've moved toward an understanding of queerness that embraces gray areas—relying on the gene theory steamrolls all that nuance. Plenty of self-identified gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer people don't look forward to a future in which we can be tested for a gay gene. We probably wouldn't pass anyway.

Part of the reason that a binary notion of sexual orientation—that you are born either gay or straight, rarely something in between—has gained so much political validity is that it's useful when arguing with extreme, repressive bigots. As Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist who conducted gay gene research on a smaller scale in the 1990s, made clear when we spoke on the phone, groups with "immutable" identities, based on concepts like race and gender, "have a higher level of constitutional protection than groups that are basically the product of choice."

But after reporting on the "ex-gay" movement and laws around the world that punish gay sex and relationships, I worry that relying too heavily on theories of gay genes may ultimately do a disservice to the struggle for civil rights. For many people who live and identify as gay, queer, and bisexual, the argument that people who want to have gay sex were born gay feels "incredibly crucial in the short term." Thing is, it can be "damaging" too, says Diana Roffman, a 32-year-old woman who, like so many modern queers, has moved through various phases of sexual attraction, desire, and identification before deciding, I can date whomever I want.

Future research will likely find some biological basis for certain forms of sexual desire. What is less likely, however, is that science will one day confirm the widespread belief that, despite various and changing desires, even the most sexually fluid queer people have a clear sexual orientation—the identity we truly are.

When I was younger I dated a lesbian, and then a straight guy, and later a man who called himself queer. None of these attractions felt like a choice, but I always figured that the gender and sexual orientation of the person I ended up with would resolve the question of my own identity. If it was a straight guy, well, then I was straight, but if I settled down with a lesbian, that must be who I truly was.

According to this logic, someone who has straight relationships and then ends up in a gay relationship has always been gay and all that heterosexual stuff probably happened because of social pressure or discomfort with her sexuality. I'm sure this is true in many cases. But I'm definitely not the only person with attractions that don't follow a clear binary who grew up assuming that, one day, given enough patience, their true sexual orientation would become known—settling like silt in the bottom of a glass. After identifying as queer for more than ten years, the water's not much clearer.

The problem is that our desires don't strike like lightning; they roll in like fog. "What's missing in all of this is any story of how sexual desire develops for homosexual or heterosexual people," said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a feminist biologist and Brown professor who has warned against placing too much emphasis on the theory of a "gay gene" or the idea that homosexuality can be clearly identified as innate or biologically determined.

Genes alone "don't provide us with a very sufficient explanation of how the world works," she said. They require a context—groups of cells and a set of friendly conditions—in order to express themselves. Fausto-Sterling has used the analogy of a Russian nesting doll to describe how genetic material wends its way through genes, cells, and organs and can be activated or overlooked based on conditions that include society and environment. In this way, nature and nurture are always inextricably linked.

When it comes to how our sexual desires develop, "it doesn't bother me to say different genetic makeups are part of that story, but I don't think genetic makeups determine that story," Fausto-Sterling explained. The idea of a binary sexual orientation isn't just an overly conservative idea of sexuality. It's also an overly conservative take on biology. Like our nervous systems and physiology, our gender expression and sexual orientation can change over time. From the existing research, we know that brothers who both identify as gay often have a similar gene on their X chromosomes. This doesn't say much about brothers who both identify as queer, or bisexual, or transgender, or sisters who call themselves lesbians—and so on.

There's a vast difference socially and politically between men who identify as gay and men who have casual same-sex encounters but still consider themselves straight, for example. Both Simon LeVay and Dean Hamer accept the notion that men's sexual desires are more biologically fixed than women's, though they recognize that fluid female sexuality is more socially acceptable.

But what about a man who has been in relationships with women for decades and in middle age finds himself attracted to men for the first time? Rather than assuming he has been hiding his identity, or denying his desires, it's possible that those desires have simply changed. Is a 21-year-old who calls himself straight but writes on an internet forum that he has "this urge to want to suck a cock" a latent homosexual? Or just a straight guy who wants to suck cock? Does he have the gay gene, or has a strange brew of biology, society, environment, and developmental factors led him to fantasize about giving head the same way he might deeply love football or prefer bitter foods to sweet ones?

To be fair, the current research is more complicated and less decisive than some articles have suggested. While it's clear that many people feel their desires are static and innate (and those feelings should never be discounted or dismissed), when it comes to studying the biological roots of sexuality there's a lot we still don't know.

Though the theory that gay desires are inborn has obvious political advantages, it has some less apparent, but no less significant, weaknesses. If parents-to-be started prenatally testing for this genetic predisposition it could have disastrous consequences for gay rights. And for many people fighting their same-sex attractions, the idea that these feelings are innate offers cold comfort.

Men who experience same-sex attraction and live in repressive countries with severe antigay laws or hold religious beliefs that are explicitly antigay sometimes choose to undergo what is called "gay reparative therapy." The therapy seeks to trace homosexual desire back to an early sexual or gender-based trauma or a family life with nontraditional gender roles—strong mothers and weaker fathers, for example. As one Nigerian man who called himself Albert told me, he believes he's attracted to men because his father "didn't fight for his role in my life. My mom is the de facto head of the family."

There is no convincing, research-based evidence that same-sex attraction comes from trauma, or that it can be changed. But for the men I talked with, who are also very religious and deeply afraid of antigay laws, therapy feels like the only way to survive these feelings. The theory that they were born this way is no consolation. Gay activists from countries with more progressive politics urging them to accept their feelings as natural or normal "put people like me in the middle," Albert said.

Denying same-sex attraction is deeply painful. No one should ever be forced to change. But too much faith in genetic research privileges some stories over others and could obscure the need for broader civil rights. "If you don't build up a moral and ethical and legal set of reasons for tolerance, then you can be suddenly dumped into the ocean if a finding changes the genetic point of view," Fausto-Sterling said.

Existing scientific explanations of sexuality are too weak to shoulder our human rights demands and present too few options to those living in repressive countries where same-sex desires are sinful and criminalized. They ignore the needs of people like Albert, who aren't comforted or helped by the notion that gay is "normal," and Diana Roffman, who can't see her desires or experiences reflected in a binary.

The LGBT community in the United States has made massive civil rights gains in the past 50 years without definitive proof of a gay gene. Same-sex marriage is legal in over 35 states, the federal government prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, and mainstream TV and film follow the lives of complex and sympathetic LGBT characters. All the while a relatively small amount of research on gay genes has been conducted, published, and debated.

Why wait for scientific validation when more expansive and radical frameworks exist to help us understand sexual orientation and gender? If science tells us with all possible authority that same-sex attractions (as well as queer sexualities and gender noncomformity) are genetically determined, it arguably won't change much.

Instead, what has and will continue to change people's minds, eliminate antigay laws, and increase safety for LGBT people is people coming out. As Samantha Allen pointed out in the Daily Beast in November, the number of Americans who think homosexuality is innate has only risen 11 percent since 1997, but the portion who know a gay or lesbian person went up 35 percent during the same time period. As people come out younger and in greater numbers than ever before, acceptance has increased.

If we want more people out and honest about their sexualities, we can't rely on a narrow idea of genetically determined sexual desire that perpetuates yet another exclusive notion of what's permissible. Instead, we have to leave the door open to those who aren't quite sure where or when their same-sex desires originated. To embrace and speak freely about flexible and expansive definitions of queer love and sex to allow people like Diana Roffman, Albert, that straight guy on the Internet with the inexplicable urge to suck a cock, and me to exist the way we've been born—or made.

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Photo courtesy of Chris Crocker

Even if you know only one thing about Chris Crocker, you can probably work out what "three words" he's referring to in the title of his debut album, More Than Three Words, out next week. It's the three words he tearfully wailed back in 2007, when Crocker—then a bleached blond, guy-linered androgyne—offered a Southern gay boy's histrionic defense of an embattled Southern girl: "Leave Britney Alone!" As YouTube approaches its tenth anniversary, Crocker's infamous viral sensation (49 million views and counting as of this writing) is among the platform's all-time greatest hits.

In the ensuing years, Crocker's tried his damndest to move beyond those three words. He's released two EPs and a string of dance-pop singles with titles like "Mind in the Gutter" and "Freak of Nature." He made the rounds in LA, shot a pilot for an NBC series, and starred in Me @ the Zoo, an HBO documentary about his youth as a rebellious gay kid in small-town Tennessee, who managed to turn his feral rants into internet stardom. He even shot two porn films with his ex-boyfriend, Justin Dean.

Crocker and Dean broke up a year ago, and Crocker returned home to Tennessee to reconnect with his family and get to work on some very different music. If More Than Three Words is the latest weapon in the Chris Crocker reinvention arsenal, it may be the most effective: ten homespun pop-rock tales of devotion ("Always Be"), heartache ("Did You Ever Love Me"), defiance ("All of Me"), and, yes, Britney. On the track "2007," Crocker revisits the infamous clip that put him on the map. There are folk and country touches, and the standout gem, "Keepers and Leavers," has flashes of Jenny Lewis and Death Cab for Cutie from the jump.

VICE: This is such a different record for you. It seems if not totally at peace just really heartfelt and sincere.
Chris Crocker: It all started because I went through this kind of new relationship last year, which is the first that I had felt love again since Justin. He really ignited me in a way that I hadn't felt in a long time, but he was still kind of in love with his ex. So as you can hear almost every single song is like "he still loves his ex," like that's a running thing. The song "Keepers and Leavers" was directly talking about him chasing an asshole.

That song has a great energy to it, and a great hook. I don't think anyone ever would have guessed you had a folk-pop sort of record like that in you.
I am so happy you like that one, because it's the first record I have written by myself, and I was so scared that it was gonna sound so left-field for people in terms of the genre I've stuck to up to now. Because I do like Britney-esque music, but I grew up on everything from Hole to Fiona Apple and Jewel, and even some country—and I always wanted to make music that was like this. The problem was that I didn't take myself seriously enough, and I knew that my audience didn't take me seriously enough. It's funny because all of the things I did in the beginning—whether it was funny videos or pop music—felt very freeing to me at the time, but then I started to realize it was like a trap. The very thing that I thought freed me, being flippant and crazy, just became a box after a while.

The new songs were all created via email?
That's right. My producer Christian Medice and I work that way. I would send him voice memos from my phone of the melodies and lyrics, and he would build these beautiful arrangements around them, so the whole record would not even sound the same without Christian, clearly. Also, I was really inspired at the time by Fences, the indie pop singer-songwriter from Seattle, Christopher Mansfield. From him I learned to just say what I want to say, not to complicate it.

"2007" surprised me too, if only because I feel like you've spent so much time trying to put the Britney association behind you, but you decided to revisit it here.
It would have been my pleasure to not talk about it. On so many levels, it's nauseating to talk about, but then I had to think about, What do I need to leave behind? I kept thinking, When I die, is everyone just gonna—there's no context out there. I've talked about the correlation between my mom and Britney, addictions and stuff, but there will always be that group of people that are resistant to listening to more than my Britney video, and listening to my truth. So I was kind of like, "You know, I need to kind of story tell a little bit, in the least playing-up-to-the-Britney-thing way possible." I need to give context to what's happened in my life.

It's interesting how your videos in a sense paved the way for today's gay YouTube stars like Tyler Oakley, Troye Sivan, and Lohanthony, but on the other hand what they do feels so safe compared to your early stuff.
This is an important topic, but it's really hard to talk about the new YouTube community in general, and specifically the gay community, because I will always be framed by some people as a Bitter Betty. But whether it's me, or just YouTube in general, back when I was making videos, there was no motivation to make videos for money. You were either making videos because you had something to get off of your chest, or you had something to say, or you had a bad day and you wanted to make yourself feel better, or you needed to rant and rave about something, whatever the case. Now it's become the Disney Channel to me! I don't feel anything when I go on that website. There just needs to be some grit, and I think the problem is now that it's owned by Google, even if there was a person out there that was like, "Let me set the internet on fire and fucking tell it like it is," they wouldn't even feel safe to, because now everything is so politically correct, on every level. How would you even feel safe to have a real opinion?

You said last year that you feel like the porn you did has kept you from getting other opportunities. I'm surprised that would be true in music. I feel like in the music world, who cares that you got naked on camera?
Not so much in the music world, because music is the most liberal, you know? But I mean there were disappointments that really I felt—like there was a time when I did a [Sex and the City writer/producer] Michael Patrick King pilot for NBC, and I was one of the main characters. This was in like 2010, 2011, and I don't think Michael Patrick King was privy to knowing everything that I had out there. He really believed in me. He kept saying, "I see something real in you." And I felt guilty because when it wasn't picked up, I had this huge complex of "NBC probably googled about me or something." I don't know, I just have a complex where I think the reason I did the porn was that I started to think, Well I've done everything else on camera, why not do this? And also it was liberating because to some people I was seen as this "it." This crying, lunatic thing, not a boy, not a girl. An asexual being. So it was kinda like, "OK, you made fun of me for so long? Well fuck you, now you're gonna jerk off to me."

People paid tons of attention to when cut your hair and began to look more like a boy a few years ago, even though you identify as trans. How do you feel about these responses?
It's something I think about in the back of my mind daily—transitioning—because there's a part of you that feels like if you don't that you're not fulfilling your destiny, and you don't know if you'll ever know what it feels like to be completely comfortable. But then there's another part of me that's like, "Well, I'm getting older," and the real reason I haven't is—and this is not gonna sound great to trans people—but I'm a huge family person and it's just really hard to get my family to understand certain things. They're Pentecostal. But I also don't want to wake up at 40 and go, "Oh, I lived my life for them." I am at a point where I've become very complacent. I'm at a crossroads, like Britney.

Chris Crocker's More Than Three Words is available for pre-order on iTunes.

Follow John Norris on Twitter.

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Photo by Virginie Danglades

Everyone knows Jennifer Miller—or at least that's how it seems when we're sitting on her stoop shooting the shit on an early September afternoon. Neighbors wave. The head of a queer media collective drops by to ask a few questions. The son of the owner of a deli in her old neighborhood mentions she hasn't visited in a while. So long, in fact, that the deli's now closed.

"It's the beard." She rolls her eyes and points to her chin. "They don't forget."

Though she's now a tenure-track professor at the Pratt Institute, once upon a time, Miller worked as the "woman with a beard" at Coney Island's Sideshow by the Seashore. In fact, the circus has been her life for the last 30 years. At various points she's been a clown, a juggler, and a freak; nowadays she's the slack-rope-walking, stilt-striding, shit-stirring ringleader of the free, mostly-annual political spectacle known as Circus Amok, which brings together a lot of glitter, a little klezmer, and a complex story about social justice told through puppets, juggling, and acrobatics. Every September for the last 20 years, they've performed a new show in parks all around the five boroughs—though her most recent circus may be their last, Miller tells me.

"But many people will tell you I've said this before," she sighs with a chagrined look. It's clear that she loves the circus; it's also clear that putting it on, year after year, takes a toll.

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Photo by Shehani Fernando

Circus Amok started at PS 122 in 1989 as the Stratospheric Circus Company. Miller moved from San Francisco to New York in the early 80s with a background in clowning, street theater, and postmodern dance, dating back to her childhood in Hartford, Connecticut. From the beginning, she knew she wanted to create the kind of free outdoor circus that she had worked with in California, but with a more pronounced political bent.

Why combine circus and social justice? Partly because the two are both Miller's interests, but the combination also makes some historical sense: The circus is traditionally a populist form attracting performers who have been marginalized by society. "It's a language that can speak to all kinds of people on all kinds of levels," Miller says. "And I certainly knew that postmodern dance wasn't going to hold them in the parks."

So she rented a cheap loft in Williamsburg, complete with a view of Manhattan, and started hosting informal "Circus Sundays."

"It was coffee, pastries from the Hasidic corner store, marijuana, smoked fish, cucumbers, and coffee—did I say coffee?" says choreographer and performance artist Scotty Heron, one of the Circus's original members. "Oh! And Joan Armatrading and Nina Simone on the record player."

Long-limbed and a little goofy, it's easy to imagine Heron clowning it up, but he wasn't a circus artist until he met Miller. This, it turns out, is a common refrain amongst folks who know her. Though she calls herself a "self-hating juggler" because she sees the limitations of the form, Miller is without a doubt a circus evangelist. (Full disclosure: About a decade ago, she taught me to walk a slack rope and a pair of stilts—at least as much as I was capable of learning.) She's been treading the boards so long, the activity belongs to her identity. Even the cadence of her conversation has the rhythm of a barker, drawing you in with a whisper or long pause before delivering her final words with a flourish. This energy suffuses everything she does, attracting cast members and audiences like a magnet.

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Photo by Rahav Segev

Jenny Romaine, the circus's musical director, met Miller through lesbian feminist anti-war organizing. A modern dancer by training, Romaine found the loose process of Circus Amok too different from her own to join as a performer. "But I wanted to be in the circus so bad!" she recalls with a laugh. "So I pretended to be a musician." She must be great at pretending, as she's now one of the longest-tenured active members, having participated in every circus since 1994. Romaine corrals the musicians, scores the bits with clashes and fanfares, helps write the text and build the props, and even occasionally appears on stilts. Perhaps more than anyone else, she's seen the circus, and Miller, grow and change over the years.

"She is an American artist who has been wronged," Romaine pronounces suddenly, while telling me about their last few decades of circus work. The frustration in her voice is pronounced. "She is someone, an artist, who has been deeply wronged by structural disregard of the arts," she repeats.

It's a systemic thing, she tells me. Miller is an artist working in one of America's oldest traditions, for decades, creating free, acclaimed performances and bringing them to the people of the city, both to educate and entertain—and yet she's still chasing down funding in the never-ending race that is being a nonprofit artist in America. "If she were in Montreal," Romaine sighs, "this would not happen."

The fact that Miller doesn't aspire to turn Circus Amok into Cirque du Soleil, that she actually wants to continue the circus as a popular, inexpensive, and accessible art form, paradoxically doesn't help critics understand the work. Without some high art aspirations tacked on as a kind of apologia for the form itself, critics relegate the circus to a lowbrow status few critics will engage with, making fundraising for Circus Amok difficult.

Knock another nail into the New York art scene's coffin, I think to myself. It's too hard here now, that's the refrain I hear over and over again. Miller openly discusses the realities of making free, politically engaged, widely appealing art in New York City in 2015. "It wears me out deeply," she sighs. "Raising the money, and doing the logistics, and I gotta get people and I gotta call, and and and..."

And it all shows up in the work because she makes the money problems a part of her art. "I can only make a piece if I find a way into it," she tells me. "One of the things I'm grappling with in this circus is aging."

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Photo by Virginie Danglades

The main thrust of her most recent show is a meditation on climate change. Miller plays the older of the show's two goddesses, an embittered but still hopeful nature spirit whose compatriot reminds her of the successes of various social justice movements—though that list includes things like "we're only lynching one black man a week."

This highlights a hard truth: Social justice work is often a slow shuffle, a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of dance. Climate change, police brutality, gentrification—looking back through 25 years of Circus Amok shows, certain issues come up again and again, as they have for the city itself. In the wake of last year's police killing of Eric Garner, Miller briefly considered bringing back a skit relating to the 1999 Amadou Diallo police brutality case, but decided to stick with climate change since there was so much organizing happening around the People's Climate March. There are so many battles to fight, it's difficult to choose one.

"Despair is a sin!" Miller jokes when I ask how she keeps going. Then she sighs. "It gets hard on the soul. Hard on the energy."

If there's one thing the circus requires, it's energy. From the moment they hit the stage, the cast is on—flipping, quipping, dancing, and dipping. It's the sugar that helps their social justice medicine go down. But their constant energy is also, in and of itself, a message about rejecting despair. Change is predicated on hope. It is the plan we make and the energy we use to carry it out; it picks us up when we fall and leads us when we succeed.

And Miller has so much of it. When I ask if she would move to New York now, were she young and wanting to make this kind of work, she pauses for a very long time. I've been asking this question a lot recently, plagued by my own second-guessing of this city, and I know this pause. It means, "I'm looking for the right way to say no."

But like the great ringleader she is, Miller surprises me. "I might encourage myself to stay." She has caveats—keep your overhead low, be willing to fail—and she doesn't believe any artist needs to be here. If you want it, go for it, but no matter what, do something. Take classes. Apprentice. Or grab some friends, snag a big space somewhere cheap, and do it your-effing-self.

She's not alone in her thinking. None of the members of Circus Amok that I spoke to were ready to encourage their hypothetical younger selves to decamp from the city yet. They see signs of hope everywhere, from the "solidarity economy" developing in Brooklyn to the new commissioner for the Department of Cultural Affairs appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Their work is rooted in the history of New York as much as it is in the history of the circus, and the love they hold for this city is evident in the work—and because they continue to do this, for little money, year after year.

Which begs the question: Will there be a circus this year? Miller doesn't commit one way or another, but I suspect the circus will perform again. "Sometimes I'm done with it," Miller tells me at one point, but a few seconds later she's extolling me about how lucky she is. "What a gift to bring this gorgeous, buoyant, meaningful thing free to the parks."

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Photo by Shehani Fernando

That's what keeps her going and keeps us coming to see her. Miller sees this work as a gift—not one she is giving to us, but one she has been given by us. It is the sentiment of a compulsive artist, one who cannot help but create the work she loves, and it drives her to be worthy of our attention: to create great art, with great meaning, for a great city. For as long as the parks are packed with eager audiences, I suspect Jennifer Miller will be there to meet them, in one form or another.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Rob.

Like pretty much everyone else in America, prison inmates make a big deal out of the Super Bowl. Inside the country's sprawling prison-industrial complex, men sometimes track their whole bids with the help of football season—the weekly games can make the time fly by, relatively speaking. If nothing else, when the big game hits, you know that's one less year you have left inside.

I did 21 big ones in the feds, and football was a way of life for me. From the offseason training camps to the buzz in the summer to the fantasy draft in August to the build-up to that first game all the way to the Super Bowl, football meant there was always something to look forward to. I won't be watching the big game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks in prison this year, but I reached out to a friend inside to get the scoop on this year's action.

"I'm going with Seattle. They got that mean D, they don't fuck around," says a prisoner we'll call Texas Kev who hails from Dallas and is doing ten years for armed robbery and passes a lot of his time gambling. "Man, I bet mad pushups, stamps, whatever. I'm a betting fool. The higher the stakes, the more I like it. The Super Bowl is always a good time."

I remember going with Peyton Manning and Denver last year against the Legion of Boom. When the Seahawks won, I was doing quack-quacks and straight-finger pushups right in front of the TV after the game ended as this dude JJ from Seattle cavorted and celebrated at my expense. (A "quack-quack is where you squat down like a duck, make your arms like wings, flap them, waddle around and say, "Quack, quack." It's a form of amusement for prisoners, but it's also meant to humiliate the quacker.) Prisoners bet quack-quacks and dead cockroaches and all types of other inane and ridiculous moves after the game.

For guys like Texas Kev, betting on the game helps break up the monotony of an otherwise mundane existence. It also requires some planning to make sure you get a decent viewing spot.

"Shit, I'm gonna put my chair in when they pop the doors to the TV room," Texas Kev says. "It's so loud in the TV room with all the hooping and hollering, you can hardly hear, so I want a spot right up front. Dudes know where I sit so it won't be no problem, and if there is, then I got something for them."

At most prisons, there is one big TV room—in what they call a day room—that's situated in the middle of the cell block. There might be five or six screens in that room; one for sports, one for movies, one for news, one for general viewing and one for videos. But when the Super Bowl is on, all the TVs are tuned to it. The day room becomes a big sports bar with a bunch of loud, aggressive convicts jockeying for position. I remember trying to sneak into the TV room before lockdown and putting my chair right in front of the white-boy TV (yes, like many things in prison, TVs are divided along racial lines).

Things only get crazier if alcohol is in the mix.

"I like to drink a little hooch come game time," Texas Kev says. "We got a batch brewing and if it makes it through the shakedowns [searches], we are good. We'll be getting our drink on."

Suffice it to say drunk prisoners plus the Super Bowl and dudes hating on each other's teams means chaos. I once saw a man get his head split for being drunk and loud when the Baltimore Ravens won the title in 2013. He was a 49ers fan and was calling Ray Lewis, the former star linebacker for Baltimore and current ESPN personality, a snitch. The man was vocal in his opinion and the B-More homies took offense, told him to shut up, and when he said, "You can't tell me to shut up I'm a grown-ass man," they busted his grown-ass man head.

But it's not all violence and betting. Like everyone else, prisoners take the opportunity to cook meals with their homeboys and have big spreads of food on hand—nachos, pizza, wraps, and burrito bowls are popular. Convicts get food smuggled into the units weeks ahead of time to prepare their Super Bowl meals.

"We're going to meet out on the yard in the afternoon before the game to eat," Texas Kev says. "All the homeboys come out. It's mandatory, like church. We have roll call and everything. We give out lists and everybody has to buy their share from the commissary or bring it out of the kitchen and then we got other homeboys to cook it up in the microwaves and bring the food out to the yard. We're having burrito bowls, sodas, and cheesecakes. It's our version of the Super Bowl party."

Come game time, prisoners are doing their best Stephen A. Smith impersonations. "These dudes are something else," Texas Kev says. "They really think they are on ESPN, debating each other and shit. They will go at each other, sometimes violently, about who they think is going to win the game. We always have to break up fights over stupid shit at Super Bowl time."

Prison authorities will often delay counts or do them early to accommodate the game. They let the inmates enjoy themselves, but if it gets too loud or there's too much of a disturbance, they will shut the TVs down. "I've been in spots where dudes get mad because their team is losing and when other dudes start hating on them, they can't take it," Texas Kev says. "They go put a lock in a sock and crack somebody's dome. Then it's lockdown time and we can't finish watching the game and I have to try and catch it on the radio." (That's not easy to do, as most prisons are in isolated rural areas.)

"I hope the Seahawks win, because for real I ain't trying to pay any of these bets." Texas Kev says. "Especially not pushups, because I got like 1,000 pushups on call if I lose and I know these lame-ass Boston dudes will try to get me to do them all after the game in the TV room in front of everyone and I'm not trying to do that. The stamps and the ice creams I can pay no problem, but the pushups..."

In prison, though, there is no backing down, and when someone calls your bluff or makes a bet, it's essential to uphold your pride and reputation. It's all about saving face. "I'm not going out like a sucker, so if Seattle loses I will pay what I own," Texas Kev says.

I tried to stay away from the drama of betting and all that type of action in my last couple of years. It just wasn't worth it. Some dudes just take the game way too seriously. But when I was a youngster and trying to be somebody in prison, I was always right in the thick of things. In 1995, when the 49ers played the Chargers, I was rooting big for San Diego since I grew up there and am a lifelong Charger fan. But that year I was hype and talking mad shit and when they got their asses handed to them I was getting bombarded and hazed for weeks afterward. It taught me that sometimes it pays to not open your mouth when it comes to sports. But not everyone inside agrees.

"Betting on the game just makes it that more exciting," Texas Kev says. "I don't really even follow Seattle, but there's lot of Boston dudes here and I can't stand New England. I'm not trying to cause no trouble, but if it comes, me and my homeboys are ready."

The game is just one day, but sometimes what happens in that TV room can affect your prison reputation for years. I'm just glad I can watch from home this time.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.