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We Asked a Bunch of Artists to Interpret Director John Carpenter's First Album

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Illustration by Nick Gazin

Although director John Carpenter will talk at length about his iconic horror films like Halloween or The Thing, he's pretty terse when it comes to describing his debut album, Lost Themes.

When I asked the 67-year-old over the phone if it was his longtime goal to release a proper LP—the album is out today on Sacred Bones—he was as straightforward as could be: "It's pretty simple. My son and I regularly hang out and jam in our basement, occasionally recording what we make. I've been known for making music, so I think the label thought it would be fun to put out an album by me."

When I asked whether individual songs have specific meaning, or if producing this record satisfied a creative itch (he hasn't made a movie since 2010's The Ward), Carpenter said, "Not really, I just like hanging with my son and son-in-law and making music." This surprised me, as the record is composed of ominous electronic soundscapes with a seriously cinematic vibe.

After a few more failed attempts to get one of my creative heroes to expand on his most recent work, he finally got frustrated and said, "There was no plan. I didn't plan to release an album. There was no conceptual goal or bigger meaning—and you don't seem to believe me. Trust me, you'd be the first person I'd tell."

Feeling defeated, I said it was my job to put him on the dissection table and get that oblique reference or weird answer to make our interview stand out from the inevitable others. He replied, "Here's what you can do to make it special: Take photos of yourself naked and put those next to this interview."

Even after a follow-up, the best I got from Carpenter is that this album stands out from his directing process and the scores he composed for many of his most well-known films in that he didn't have a movie or images in mind while he was creating it. "I'm letting you do that work. You provide the images. I'll provide the music," he told me. "I think albums like these are themes or open-ended scores for people who imagine stories in their heads. It would be great if people made their own movies and used my album as the score. I would love to see that—but you have to pay me!"

So rather than try to make sense of how Lost Themes came to fruition, I decided to reach out to a variety of artists, musicians, and writers who look up to the director, including members of the bands Parquet Courts, the Soft Moon, and Weekend. I asked them to listen to "Vortex," the first song on the album, and then create an illustration, photo, or piece of microfiction inspired by the song. Below is the track, followed by the responses I got about the horror legend's music.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/3YZ60mQA4Q8' width='640' height='360']

Sean Yeaton, bassist of Parquet Courts (and former Motherboard editor):
Scornful Inventory. Day one at my factory for employee number 572. I'm at the Florida Welcome Center on I-75 picking up some free OJs for everyone, when my pocket buzzes. Even though I've dreaded this moment since I opened my factory four years ago, I never mentally prepared myself for what would ultimately become the period at the end of a long, protracted sentence, or maybe an ellipsis if I fucked up beyond repair. Not since employee number 388 have I even come close to having to "deal with" an employee questioning my product, its production, and even when 388 seemed, from behind the one-way mirrors, to be nearing the precipice of epiphany, his tortured embrace of ignorance was palpable. But 572, on the other hand...

[body_image width='1000' height='1018' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='john-carpenter-wouldnt-explain-his-new-album-so-we-asked-a-bunch-of-artists-to-interpret-it-for-him-666-body-image-1422913005.jpg' id='23516']

Shaun Durkin, member of the band Weekend:

[body_image width='1000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='john-carpenter-wouldnt-explain-his-new-album-so-we-asked-a-bunch-of-artists-to-interpret-it-for-him-666-body-image-1422912130.jpg' id='23506']

Luis Vasquez, singer and multi-instrumentalist of the Soft Moon:
In slow motion. A reverse vacuum-like effect from macrocosm to microcosm revealing abstract hallucinogenic imagery accelerates growing more and more intense until the ultimate breaking point when... a man bursts back into reality. There's a brief moment of lingering euphoria from what he just experienced before realizing he is now back to where he has always been. A dystopian world full of chaos but not the sort of chaos one would think. For the last 200 years humans have learned to become immortal with no way of reversing the effect. As a reaction to this, most of the population has become obsessed with death. The closest thing to death is achieving unconsciousness by inflicting as much agonizing pain as possible to the point of blackout. It's the only escape from this world. The more pain inflicted, the longer the trip into each ones own personal inner or outside journey. Sixty percent of humans roaming this world are disfigured, partially dissected, or have amputated themselves in search of a more peaceful euphoric realm. Death is the only true happiness. The only hope would be for infection to spread, causing a virus reversing immortality to set them free from an anguished existence.

Michael Bailey Gates, artist:

[body_image width='1000' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='john-carpenter-wouldnt-explain-his-new-album-so-we-asked-a-bunch-of-artists-to-interpret-it-for-him-666-body-image-1422912151.jpg' id='23507']

Brian Anderson, editor and producer at Motherboard:
1: The rest of your life is in the Future, but you are being assisted to death. So tell me something that's true! It must be exhausting, being such a smug prick. Be better. Be more. Find a bug. Inspect the bug. Behold it, eat it.

0: That thing when you and the schlub next to you grab drinks, drink, and set down drinks in unison, unplanned, no words exchanged? That. Just that. And then horrible, terrible drilling noises. The sound of melting machinery. Fatigue, fatigue everywhere. We are all on the conveyor belt, now.

Claire Christerson, artist:

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Pauly Shore, actor and comedian:
I see Bo Derek running down the beach with her braids flowing. Some black dudes are standing on the dunes looking down at her weirdly. Everyone thinks they want to have sex with her, but it's not like that. It's not like, Let's hook up with this chick. It's more like, Let's go talk to this girl because she'd make a good assistant for our rap label. She's got it going on . Every time someone has a hot assistant, it makes dudes go crazy. When you go to see an executive and you see a hot assistant, it makes you think, I wanna do biz with these people.

She sees them and thinks, Oh shit. But they say, "No, we want you to work for us." It's this long drawn-out thing where the audience thinks one thing and another happens. The label would be called "The Bombs Stop Dropping." She's beyond excited because cause she loves the label, and says yes. It's a happy ending.

Ben Morsberger, guitarist of Blood Orange and Cable:

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Fred Pessaro, editor-in-chief of Noisey:
She's fucking dead now, so quit crying and pull yourself together. It's time for you to go for the self. The feds are everywhere, but this is war, and you need to end it. You'll need a car, stolen, and a change of clothes. You stink from hiding in that dumpster all day. And weapons. There is no such thing as too many. Until then, wrap a cloth around the handle because it might be hard to hold a knife when the grip is slick with blood.

Matthew Leifheit, photo editor of VICE:

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Charlie Ambler, VICE contributor:
Reginald Schwartz tossed a half-lit cigarette out the window of his '84 Camaro as a light mist attempted halfheartedly to envelop Mulholland Drive. A man can be both stark-raving mad and introspective, can't he? This, among an overwhelmingly diverse range of other reflections and recollections, began to barrage Reginald Schwartz's one-track mind. The Camaro carried on at a cool and near-invariable 60 miles per hour—twists and turns have never phased Reginald Schwartz, a man of one gear and one gear only. A half-hashed sense of nostalgia washed over him as he recalled nights past, nights like this. Though no night had ended quite like this. No night had ever ended with Reginald's booty baby, his sweet honey sugar doll of the evening, fast approaching him in her own vehicle. I may be mad, Reginald thought, but not as mad as this cold bitch. He'd lived the life of a modern day mythical dragon-slaying knight of dishonor, plowing his way through highfalutin antics, coke deals gone bloody, and attempts on his life—though never at the hand of his own boo boo, his downtown sexyface sweetie pie. Now she was on his tail. He never faltered, though he secretly wondered if she may just in fact be the first success of many previously unsuccessful assassins

Jane Moseley, artist:

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Lost Themes is out now on Sacred Bones. There's also a retrospective of John Carpenter on view at BAM from February 5 to February 22. Find more information here.

Follow Zach on Twitter.


This British Versus American Sniper Debate Is a Bizarre Form of Patriotic Dick-Swinging

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[body_image width='800' height='550' path='images/content-images/2015/02/02/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/02/' filename='this-british-vs-american-sniper-debate-is-just-patriotic-dick-swinging-309-body-image-1422900373.jpg' id='23429']A brave British sniper poses for a publicity shot. Photo via UK Ministry of Defense

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Clint Eastwood's American Sniper has provoked a lot of powerful reactions both positive and negative. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi called it "almost too dumb to criticize," the Village Voice said that "we're watching a drama about an idealized soldier, a patriot beyond reproach, which bolsters Kyle's [the sniper's] legend while gutting the man," and Roger Ebert's website said it was "one of the more tough-minded and effective war pictures of post-American-Century American cinema." But yesterday, the Sun managed to trump all the on-screen absurdity of the film by turning it into an international dick-swinging competition. The thing is, they claim, a UK marine is actually the World's Best Sniper, not Cooper's real-life counterpart, Chris Kyle.

"BRITISH SNIPER" screams the Partridge-esque Sun headline: "World's deadliest marksman with 173 kills is Royal Marine. That beats the 160 of American Sniper marksman Chris Kyle. A source said of the unnamed marine: 'He's not the sort of man to brag. He's very professional and humble, but with a gun in his hands this bloke is deadlier than the plague. He's a legend. A unique breed.'"

And, more important, he's bloody British.

Don't know about you, but I'm packing this day job shit in to go and stand outside Buckingham Palace and protect the fuck out of the Queen. It warms the heart of this Briton, readers, to learn that one of our brave boys sniped more enemy soldiers than the next-best American. Makes me want to pin poppies to all of my clothing and shave my head and get a St. George's cross skull tattoo and buy a big, hard English dog. Makes me want to put on a size-too-small football shirt and eat some fucking chips. Pizza? None of that foreign muck for me, pal; I'm as British as pie and eels and binge drinking. Best in the world at sniping, us. So proud about it that I've just popped a big, hard British erection.

Weirdly, the really quite uncomfortable information that a Royal Marine is one of the sharpest trained killers in the world has been met with more nationalistic tub-thumping than you might expect. Over at UniLad (SingleBulletStraightThroughTheHeartLAD), amid some spectacularly shit banter about their respective Call of Duty kill:death ratios, comments (all sic) beneath the headline "The World's Deadliest Sniper Is Actually a British Royal Marine" include:

"Trust the yanks to try and take all the glory lol British Military is the best"

"Longest confirmed kill shot was by a british sniper.. fact"

"so lets make a movie out of this gentleman, and rip apart his integrity saying he wasnt hero and hes a coward etc..... congrats to this man, chris kyle was a hero and this royale marine is a hero no doubt about it.... congrats from america!"

From the Daily Mail, who led with "Deadlier than American sniper Chris Kyle: Royal Marine has 173 confirmed kills including 90 in just one day and most came during a six-month tour of Afghanistan," the comments shitshow included:

"We're better than the yanks at everything."

"The L115 A3, an excellent piece of equipment, designed and made in the UK by a British company."

"Now that's the type of person who SHOULD be included in the honors list!"

"To all the idiots saying snipers are murderers and cowards. You fools!"

And from the esteemed Sun Online comments section (all sic):

"PRIDE of CHURCHILL'S & THATCHERS x BRITAIN"

"Then tell him to 'get' Jihad John !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"He would be great at those fun fairs, the ones where you shoot a target and get a stuffed toy. (or he has been banned from them for winning all the time)." 1

It's all a bit odd, isn't it? Maybe it's just me, but I'm not big into gigantic, sustained bouts of murder. Maybe I'm just a square who's not all that keen on illegal wars, a limp-wristed lefty who doesn't support the Lads. Bet you'd like me to say this to their faces, eh?

"You know what, I don't reckon shooting 90 people dead in one day from an alcove a mile away is especially morally just or a great source of national pride," I'd say, seconds before getting kicked to within an inch of my life in a pub parking lot.

Anyway, this is all moot. The deadliest sniper is generally considered to be Finn Simo Häyhä, credited with 542 career kills, 500 of which occurred during a 100-day period in the Winter War with the Soviet Union. But still: Rule Britannia!

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

1. This is actually a very good point. Is the unnamed sniper banned from all funfairs? Do funfairs have a union—or at least an interconnected database—where they can share mugshots and pertinent details of trained snipers who might scam them for oversized teddybears or Teletubbies stuffed with heroin needles? Or would that database be a national security risk, in case it fell into terrorist hands? To be safe, it's probably best if carnies just take this hit.

Life Amid the Ruins of Donetsk

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All photos by Larry Towell/MAGNUM Photos

Eastern Ukraine has heated up again lately: Peace talks have faltered, and a pro-Russia separatist leader has vowed to put together 100,000 troops to fight the Kiev government. Meanwhile, civilians are increasingly at risk of being squeezed between the sides—a VICE News look at conditions in the "so-called Donetsk and Luhansk 'People's Republics'" found nothing good to report.

"Crossing from government-controlled to rebel-held areas in Ukraine's war-torn east is a process that can now take days," wrote Harriet Salem last week. "With a fresh round of fighting flaring all along the frontier, the roads in and out are often sealed for hours at a time; earlier this month a public bus was hit by grad rocket fire at a checkpoint in Volnovakha killing 12 people onboard."

Dealing with such grim circumstances has sadly become routine for many residents of Donetsk, where rebels have been clashing with government troops for months. Magnum photographer Larry Towell, a Canadian who has covered conflict from Nicaragua to Israel, was there in November and December documenting how everyday people in the area are dealing with war and the suffering and destruction it causes.

[body_image width='1100' height='409' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422987940.jpg' id='23882']A resident of Donetsk's Petrovskiy neighborhood walks past the smoldering remains of a house that had been shelled the night before by the Ukrainian army

[body_image width='1100' height='407' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422987956.jpg' id='23884']
A welder repairs freight trains damaged by the separatist shelling of a train yard

[body_image width='1100' height='403' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422987966.jpg' id='23885']A dog surveys damage from Ukrainian rockets fired on separatist-controlled Petrovsky neighborhood

[body_image width='1100' height='407' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422987979.jpg' id='23886']Residents of a village near Luhansk collect water from a passing water truck. The water tower had been destroyed by a separatist attack during a summer effort to drive out the Ukrainian army.

[body_image width='1100' height='404' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988005.jpg' id='23887']Graves of recently killed pro-Russian separatists at Saur-Mogila. The strategic area was the scene of fighting between German and Russian forces in World War II and later became home to a memorial for Russian war dead. That memorial was destroyed, however, during a battle in the summer of 2014.

[body_image width='1100' height='411' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988019.jpg' id='23888']Graves of recently killed pro-Russian separatists at Saur-Mogila

[body_image width='1100' height='413' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988030.jpg' id='23889']Zenoida Lanouva, a 75-year-old whose pension has been cut off by the Kiev government, cries on a staircase at Hospital 21 in the Petrovsky neighborhood

[body_image width='1100' height='407' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988040.jpg' id='23890']A Pro-Russian separatist maintains his post behind a cement barricade in an area being shelled by Ukrainian army

[body_image width='1100' height='411' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988057.jpg' id='23892']Tatyana Oborotov in her home, which was destroyed by Ukrainian shelling the night before

[body_image width='1100' height='410' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988075.jpg' id='23893'] Ruins at Saur-Mogila

[body_image width='1100' height='413' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988084.jpg' id='23894']A tank destroyed during the shelling of civilian neighborhood by Russian-backed separatists

[body_image width='1100' height='410' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988095.jpg' id='23895']Ruins at Saur-Mogila

[body_image width='1100' height='411' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988108.jpg' id='23896']A highway bridge destroyed by a Ukrainian airstrike

[body_image width='1100' height='406' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988118.jpg' id='23897']The bed of Gregory Palienko, a 65-year-old former coal miner, lies empty in a house destroyed by Ukrainian army shelling

[body_image width='1100' height='406' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988128.jpg' id='23898']A bride and groom leave the a Russian Orthodox Church after their wedding ceremony

[body_image width='1100' height='407' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988139.jpg' id='23899']Pensioners stand in line all day hoping to receive their government check in spite of the fact that the central government had cut all bank transfers to the region earlier in the month. The pensioners became suspicious of the photographer, who they thought he could be a spy for the Ukrainians. That morning, while standing in line, one pensioner had died of a heart attack in the snow.

[body_image width='1100' height='410' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988147.jpg' id='23900']A young pro-Russian Cossack fighter greets an 86-year old Cossack woman whose home, at the front line, had recently been destroyed by Ukrainian army shelling

[body_image width='1100' height='408' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988157.jpg' id='23901']Cossack separatists patrol the front lines with a German shepherd

[body_image width='1100' height='409' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988180.jpg' id='23902']A child plays with a sled in the Petrovsky neighborhood

[body_image width='1100' height='441' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='life-amongst-the-ruins-larry-towells-photos-from-ukraine-405-body-image-1422988192.jpg' id='23903']A memorial to protester killed during the February uprising against the government of Viktor Yanukovych

More Alleged Ottawa ISIS Jihadists Are Charged

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John "Yahiya" Maguire. Screencap via YouTube video

The same Canadian jihadist, John "Yahiya" Maguire, who appears in an Islamic State recruitment video amid the bombed out wreckage of Syria, is the subject of new charges in Ottawa.

Today, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced fresh charges against three individuals—including Maguire—in connection with a suspected Islamic State terror cell. Officers say this cell is operating in Ottawa and bent on international recruitment efforts for ISIS, which is now active in a war in Syria and Iraq.

Two Ottawa natives—Maguire, 24, believed to be dead after various ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts claimed his death last month, and Khadar Khalib, 23, another suspected fighter among the ranks of the Islamic State—were charged in absentia with their whereabouts unknown.

[body_image width='551' height='589' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='more-ottawa-isis-jihadists-are-charged-823-body-image-1422999404.jpg' id='23926']

Khadar Khalib. Photo courtesy RCMP

Khalib faces charges of leaving Canada to participate in the activities of a terrorist group and with counselling a person to participate in the activity of a terrorist group, while Maguire received charges for facilitating the activity for a terrorist group.

Awso Peshdary, 26, also from Ottawa, was taken into custody earlier today on charges of participating in the activity of a terrorist group and facilitating an activity for a terrorist group.

A CBC report cites police sources in Ottawa claiming Peshdary radicalized Maguire, then paid for his flight abroad, while he convincing Khalib to make the same trip in March 2014.

[body_image width='472' height='1009' path='images/content-images/2015/02/03/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/03/' filename='more-ottawa-isis-jihadists-are-charged-823-body-image-1422999346.jpg' id='23924']

Awso Peshdary. Photo courtesy RCMP

The RCMP says it has issued arrest warrants for both Khalib and Maguire and obtained an Interpol Red Notice for their arrest, alerting international authorities to the fugitives. The Canadian federal policing agency has yet to conclusively verify Maguire's death.

In the summer, online reports emerged claiming the death of Farah Shirdon of Calgary, who infamously burned his passport during an Islamic State recruitment video. Months later, Shirdon appeared via Skype in an exclusive interview with VICE News, alive and well.

"The RCMP continues to work actively with its domestic and international partners to bring them back to Canada so they can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," said the RCMP release.

According to the release, the RCMP maintains the ISIS-affiliated cell was recruiting potential western fighters and funnelling them to the brigades of ISIS in Syria and Iraq "for the benefit of this terrorist group."

"Through collaborative efforts with our partners, we were able to disrupt an organized network associated with ISIS," said Assistant Commissioner James Malizia, the officer in charge of the RCMP's Federal Policing Operations.

This is the third time in as many months that homegrown individuals have been arrested on terror-related charges in Ottawa. The January and December arrests of alleged domestic terrorists also came in the months following a high-profile attack on Parliament.

Those cases similarly involved men in their 20s—twins Ashton and Carlos Larmond and Suliman Mohamed—allegedly looking to fight for the Islamic State in Syria. Today's charges bring the total number of alleged Ottawa jihadists to six.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

Comics: Dingball - 'Dingball and TB Draw Their Feelings'

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Follow Patrick Kyle on Twitter, check out his blog, and get his books from Koyama Press.

The Résumé Fakers

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The Résumé Fakers

This Artist Turned Herself into a Corporation to Sell Her Data

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This Artist Turned Herself into a Corporation to Sell Her Data

Americans Watched a Lot of Porn After the Super Bowl

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To celebrate the New England Patriots' victory in Super Bowl XLIX against the Seattle Seahawks, Boston masturbated a lot. According to Pornhub Insights, the smut giant's data department, traffic rose by 33 percent overall in New England after the game.

As you can see from the graph above, pretty much everyone decided to relieve the tension from one of the most entertaining Super Bowls in history with a bit of self-pleasuring—residents of Seattle and Phoenix, the host of the game, also visited the porn site. The Seahawks' loss inspired a 14 percent spike in traffic between 10 and 11 PM as Seattleites scrambled to lose themselves in an orgasm, while Phoenicians waited until the middle of the night to get off at rates 31 percent higher than normal.

What caused the mass influx to pornland after the Super Bowl ended? Maybe alcohol made users horny, or maybe viewers needed a pick-me-up after watching dark, intense ads about domestic violence, a dad in a terrible car accident, and Nationwide's little kid who "couldn't grow up because I died from an accident."

Sadly, Pornhub's data technicians will never know why the Super Bowl caused viewers to log on and jack off, but the stats show football makes Americans hornier than soccer. During the 2014 World Cup, only New Jersey and California showed significant traffic spikes of 10 to 15 percent.

Here are some more graphs that break down the masturbation habits of Americans on Super Bowl Sunday:

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Follow Mary Emily O'Hara on Twitter.


The Power Team Was the Bloody, Evangelical Freakshow That Ruled the 80s

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In the beginning was the Word, and that's all well and good for awhile. But sometimes, you got to break some shit.

The hulking members of the Power Team—veins budged, muscles swollen, eyes lit from radiant fire within—knew this. They'd come to this realization through years of practice, performing, and proselytizing. And so, in 1991, when they took the stage in front of a stadium of post-Perestroika'd Russians, the Americans didn't waste time with preaching about the glory of Jesus. The translator could sit this part out. Instead, they broke through the language barrier with noodling guitar riffs, pyrotechnics, and incredible feats of strength.

With their bare hands, they broke handcuffs and tore phone books in half. They bent steel and smashed concrete with their skulls. They rammed flesh and bone against ice walls and burning timber, and the Lord let them pass through, relatively unscathed. And the Russians—all 70,000 or so of them—stood up, shouted, and accepted God into their hearts.

If reaching people is the goal of any ministry, the Power Team fulfilled it. They encircled the globe, Bible Belt missions interspersed with passport stamps from South Africa, New Zealand, and Israel. They hosted a weekly show on TBN, the world's largest Christian television network, and they released VHSs and CDs. Nirvana's Krist Novoselic wore their T-shirts during Bleach-era shows. Chuck Norris even put them in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. They were an $11 million a year industry.

The Power Team, at their height, were the Christian superstars of the 80s who would reportedly preach to over a million teenagers in a calendar year. And, in 2002, they filed for bankruptcy.

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The story of the Power Team began, as most things do, with a problem. As a Christian evangelist in prison ministry, John Jacobs's job was simple: Spread the Word to as many inmates as possible. But Jacobs—a six-foot-three, 275-pound bodybuilder with a broad 54-inch chest—had a logistical conundrum. No one was showing.

"There were five or six people," said James L. Reid, producer of Born Again: The Power Team Story, a documentary scheduled to be released later this year. "He didn't feel like he was achieving his goal."

A sheriff took pity on the young brute and taught him a secret: To break handcuffs, all you need is force, torque, and knowing where the structural weaknesses are. So, the next time he preached, Jacobs spoke about "breaking the chains of the devil," the metaphor particularly resonating with this group. And he brought out a pair of handcuffs, held them to his chest, closed his eyes, flexed his massive biceps, and called for the Lord's support. The chains broke in two. Word spread of his feat and his congregation grew.

After the prison epiphany, Jacobs expanded. He recruited a motley bunch of similarly chiseled God-fearing souls to perform their own "feats of strength." They were former athletes mostly, guys used to the rigors of a physically demanding lifestyle. One tore phone books in half, another ran through blocks of ice, another caved in bricks with his forearms. Some dude thought it was wise to light those bricks on fire, why the hell not? The bigger the spectacle, the bigger the crowd. Then he took his act on the road.

"We're not trying to spiritualize the feats," said Jacobs in a 1988 interview with People. "It's just a platform to share the word of God. It's the bait."

Pastors saw the advantage of more asses in their pews and booked Jacobs's team to preach at their churches. The barnstorming sessions took on some semblance of a structure: The Power Team would arrive in town on a Wednesday for five nights of shows. During the day, they'd lock up their Bibles and tuck in their crucifix necklaces, morphing into secular doppelgängers and speaking to high schoolers about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, premarital sex and gangs. (This was at the height of the D.A.R.E. campaign.) Leaving God out of the speeches was dictated by the law separating church and state, but the team didn't mind.

"I don't care what faith you are," said Todd Keene, who joined in the early 90s. "If you're sharing a positive message to young people, does it matter what my faith is?" And when these macho men spoke, kids listened.

"We would get bullets in letters, we'd get razor blades," said Eddie Dalcour, a member since the early 90s, who now leads a Christian apologetic ministry. (He also played the first incarnation of Reed Rothchild in Paul Thomas Anderson's short film precursor to Boogie Nights.) "Kids getting ready to commit suicide wanted to change their lives because we came into their schools."

But the afternoon messages came with a pitch: Enjoy what we're doing here, tell your folks about the night shows. That's where the real action happened. "We're on the stage of a church, breaking bricks, lighting things on fire, running through two-by-fours," said Keene. "You can imagine, that's jarring to a church. Or anyone."

But in the 80s and 90s, it was also, oddly, the norm. This was the era of Schwarzenegger and Stallone, of Wrestlemania and American Gladiators, of monster trucks, of "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" Body oil was sold by the gallon, hairspray by the keg, silicone and steroids filled every syringe. But that high-octane entertainment hadn't yet extended into church services.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/KnLcby1Rc_o' width='100%' height='315']

"I thought Christians were little guys with little pencil protectors in their pocket," said Keene. "Then all of a sudden here comes the Power Team, smashing bricks, saying it's OK to be manly, to be what God called you to be."

In Sharon Mazer's fantastic 1988 profile of the group, she writes, "In the vernacular of the Power Team, the male body, as it is recognized and defined by its muscularity, literally enacts a promise to Christian men that their bodies can be likewise powerful at the same time that it acts as a manifestations of the Spirit which would otherwise remain invisible." Nowadays, if you focus exclusively on the male physique—particularly, the bulgy end of the spectrum—as being evidence of God's power, you'd find yourself on the business end of heavy ridicule. But this was not an unpopular conceit back then.

"Christians don't have to be dorks," was how Keene summed it up.

To establish their non-nerd bonafides, they broke things. Injuries were part of the deal. If you walked away with only bruises and cuts, you were lucky. It was rarely a question of if someone needed stitches, but rather how many. Keene estimates they've had close to 20 broken arms over the years, as well as seven full knee reconstructions. But despite the theatrics of smashing bricks and snapping cuffs, there was one feat every member dreaded.

"The hot water bottle," said Dalcour, "We'd blow this hot water bottle up until it exploded."

Hot water bottles are those rubber containers that, back in the day, your grandparents put at their feet while they slept. The density and thickness of the rubber keeps the hot liquid from scalding skin—but that attribute also makes them rather difficult to, say, blow up with your mouth. "When they break, they slap against faces, tear skin, leave cuts under the eyes," said Reid, who's watched his fair share of footage of this nasty feat.

The video also provides a glimpse into the other draw of the shows, since this was the one stunt they performed on the stage together as a team. The camaraderie is evident, the vulnerability present. These were men, after all, who, between acts of bodily harm, took the microphone and shared heartfelt testimonials with the crowd about God coming into their lives, how turning to Him made them change their evil ways.

"Many have gone through crazy life experiences," said Reid, before telling the story of Russ Clear, a former Hells Angel and white supremacist who spent 15 years in San Quentin before joining the team. "He found Jesus in prison and Jacobs paid to have his Nazi propaganda tattoos taken off."

The impact of watching these near-superhuman creatures bare their emotions was nearly as powerful as the feats that preceded. If breaking objects was bait, breaking down was the hook.

"You have the pressure of being successful in terms of breaking the bricks and doing the feats of strength, and if you have 10,000 people watching you fail, you feel pretty lousy," said Dalcour. "But the most important part for us was to present the gospel."

After the testimonials, the team closed with their grand finale: The altar call. They'd ask audiences to give themselves up to the Lord, close their eyes, come forward, and be saved. And the hundreds or thousands who came to watch that evening surely would. They'd raise their hands to grab the raft in the lake of fire, choose Jesus as the one true path into heaven. Then and only then had the guys, standing in a pile of broken concrete and melting ice, achieved their goal.

The end also came with a plea: "Another town sent us here," someone would announce. "Please give us enough to send us to the next town with this message." They collected the donations and off they went.

Not everyone was pleased about this approach to worship, but it didn't matter to the church pastors. Numbers were numbers. The demand grew, membership expanded, feats were exaggerated, calendar dates filled. Soon, the Power Team had built the largest evangelic organization in the world.

And then, it all collapsed.

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"Our leader fell," said Keene. "He was doing things that were un-Christian. Too much drinking, too many naughty behaviors."

In 2000, Jacobs and his wife of 16 years, Ruthanne, divorced, citing the ever-popular "irreconcilable differences." Watery rumors of infidelity coagulated when he remarried in 2001 and got an annulment shortly thereafter. While playing around with marriage certificates may not seem like the biggest scandal in the secular world, muddying those waters as an evangelical minister is a cardinal offense. Locked away in confidentiality agreements, surely, is a story of debauchery and excess. But the details will likely never come out.

"That's between him and his God and his wife," said Keene.

Regardless of specifics, Jacobs and his Power Team were spoiled. What pastor wants to open his pulpit to such negative press? Soon the team began to disband. Twenty-four members splintered off and formed a similar "strength ministry" under the name Team Impact to cleanse themselves of Jacobs's rep. "Do you want your reputation attached to Jacobs?" asked Keene. "I don't blame them [for leaving]."

This exodus didn't sit well with the falling leader. In 2001, Jacobs was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery against a Team Impact member named Jeff Audas after allegedly slamming him against a wall. Responding to the charges, Jacobs called members of Team Impact "troublemakers, disloyal, antagonizers and womanizers." He tried to shift the narrative, claiming that these scabs were fired by him, rather than quit on their own. They were "pruned," he claimed, so the Power Team "could go the next level." For a company relying exclusively on donations and pastors and principals choosing to bring them into their churches and schools, infighting isn't good for business. Soon the TV deals were gone. So were the bookings. Jacobs's next level was a mirage.

Jacobs filed personal and ministry bankruptcy claims in August of 2002. The following May, the court swatted the former, saying he "exhibited a reckless disregard for the truth" while disclosing his personal finances. (While allegations of Jacobs stealing money from the team's coffers were never proven, going from having a supposed $11 million a year in revenue to being broke in such a short stretch of time is fishy, to say the least.)

That was the last straw for the remaining members. Days later, the team released a statement saying it was parting ways with its founder. After 27 years, Jacobs was now free to "go on with his own life" which, at that time, meant "living in an apartment, driving a Ford Taurus," and a third marriage. Meanwhile, an "apostolic board of spiritual leaders" were to take over the team's day-to-day operations. The parties involved concluded the statement by asking for everyone's prayers.

On May 14, 2003, then, the Power Team officially died.

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This being a Christian story, it's fitting to end on a note of resurrection.

Soon after the parties split, Keene took over the logistics of the company, a role Jacobs had inadvertently been priming him for over the years. "Power Team was never about a man," said Keene. "But I'm the guy in the room who had the keys and knew what to do next."

Keene paid back debtors, clearing the name financially. "He transformed the team into a rag-tag group of guys trying to rebuild their name," said Reid. (Another part of Keene's clearing-of-the-slate mission was allowing Reid and company—an outside, secular group of filmmakers—access into the group.) With that out of the way, Keene worked the phones, "grinding it out," telling church leaders that the hearts of the Power Team was in the right place, their purposes true.

"It's an ongoing process," said Keene. "I had a pastor tell me last year that it usually takes ten years for people to really reset and go forward." Luckily, the true power of time is its ability to erode. "There's a new generation of pastors who don't know who [Jacobs] was."

In the end, Keene kept the name, but rebranded it as Power Team 2.0. Their events feature more multimedia presentations, extra costumes, even a legit fight scene. "This isn't your dad's Power Team," is how Keene sells it. Other former Power Teamers are still at it as well. Team Impact is going strong, and a few members splintered off to form Strength Team. "Some went more conservative, others went more radical with the feats," said Dalcour. But they all follow the same tried-and-true method of showmanship. "Keep it tight, keep it simply, keep the feats dynamic, keep the energy high."

(Jacobs attempted his own resurrection with a group dubbed The Next Generation Power Force, though a now-squatted upon website and the infrequency of Facebook posts suggests a less than successful path.)

While they're no longer selling out arenas or on TV, the members of the Power Team are still touring the country, waging war against the devil. They're shouting and crying and steering kids from drugs, and now also trying to end bullying. And they are they still breaking shit. When they come to your town, you'll know. If not that night, then the morning after, by the trail of broken chains and popped rubber bottles they've left in their wake.

Follow Rick on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The Urban Legend That Inspired Fans to Dig the 'Worst Video Game Ever' Out of the New Mexico Desert

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In December of 1982, E.T the Extra-Terrestrial came out for the Atari 2600. Howard Scott Warshaw was given the job of designing it after huge success with Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, he was only given five and a half weeks to do it in. The result was critically panned, with E.T. known as one of the worst games of all time and partly blamed for the North American games industry crash of 1983. Atari printed way too many copies, and it was believed that millions of these cartridges were buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

It became something of an urban legend in the industry. Last year, Joe Lewandowski led an excavation to see what, if anything, was buried down there. Sure enough, E.T. cartridges were found early on, along with many other Atari games. It turns out that the whole thing wasn't such a myth after all, and that this was just an excess stock dump. E.T. certainly wasn't the sole cause of the destruction of Atari and the video games industry; it was just a small part of a wealth of other problems going on in the early 1980s. Looking back, the game and Warshaw were unfairly treated during the period.

Atari: Game Over is a documentary about the excavation, featuring Warshaw, Lewandowski and interviews with many others from around the industry and the dig. I talked to the director, Zak Penn—who has worked on a number of Hollywood films and has a co-writing credit on The Avengers—about terrible games and toxic pigs.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/rIaWAyHIqok' width='640' height='360']

The trailer for 'Atari: Game Over'

VICE: What is actually the worst game of all time?
Zak Penn: I think Desert Bus has to be up there, certainly in terms of effort. I think it was created by Penn and Teller. It was a real-time driving simulation between Phoenix and Las Vegas. I think it takes eight hours to get from point to point. I think we're in a golden age of terrible games right now. There are so many games that are designed to be simple and suck you in so you have to pay in order to get better.

Do you remember playing E.T. when it came out?
I vaguely remember it, but it was a long time ago. I remember not loving it.

But it wasn't the worst game?
No! So many games don't even work. Less so today, but back then you'd sometimes put a game in and you couldn't even figure out what was going on. E.T. had a lot more playability than that.

If it was so bad, why go and dig it up? Was it just the "worst game ever" and "it killed Atari" myths that made E.T. interesting?
What I would say about the people that organized this, primarily Joe Lewandowski, to them and a lot of people it had grown into this enormous urban legend. I think whenever you've got something with a hint of mystery, and particularly when burial is involved, people want to dig it up. There are all these references to Raiders of the Lost Ark in the movie because that's how we learn about the past: we dig it up. It seems like an absurd excavation, but actual archaeologists showed up and wanted to do it. It was a very unusual situation to have a company bury working product.

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All screen-shots via the "Atari: Game Over" trailer

Do you think if it were just some run-of-the-mill game, no one would care as much?
I think they definitely would not. It's the confluence of the three different strands. It was a bad game based on a beloved movie, it was credited with destroying Atari and the video game industry, and the third is it was buried. And by the way, they happened out of order, which is interesting. It didn't start being called the worst game ever until long after it was buried. Take any of those elements out, and the whole myth collapses.

Is there a precedent for this kind of excavation? They had a very smart way of doing it—so does this happen a lot?
No, I don't think there is [a precedent]. Normally when you dig up a landfill it's to find a dead body. No one had ever dug up that landfill, and certainly not for this purpose. I didn't realize the level of archaeological and scientific research that Joe Lewandowski did. There's a bunch of extras in the movie about the tremendous amount of very complicated research he did. Years of sifting through records, trying to account for shifts in the landscape, roads that were there that were taken away. Figuring out depth, and the right way to get to that depth, which isn't as easy as it seems. There was a lot of work, and still the probability that we would hit the games was not in our favor. Also, with the wind storm that came in, if we hadn't found it when we did, it would've been over. I thought everyone was just messing around, but no, no: there was very serious discussion about what we were doing there and why it was different. Some of the stuff we found is in the Smithsonian now.

Was there actually a danger of unearthing "toxic pigs," like you mentioned in the documentary, or was it just the guys making the decisions covering for a worst case scenario?
The mercury-laced pigs is actually a true story, but what seemed unlikely were the scenarios that some people were proposing. But there is actually a very horrible story about mercury poisoning that happened in that town involving pigs. But Joe said, "We know where those are buried, and that's not where we're digging."

How confident were you of finding anything, going into the excavation?
I naively trusted what Joe was telling me, and up until I got there for the dig I was fairly confident that people wouldn't spend all this time and money on it if they weren't going to find it. Once I actually got out there I thought that if we didn't find it we would just keep digging. I didn't realize how expensive it was on a day-to-day basis, and the environmental permits only lasted three days. I said to him, "Can we dig the whole place up?" He said, "No, not even close." So I stood out there and asked, "What if we're off by three feet?" "Then we won't find anything."

Were there more cartridges deeper down that you weren't allowed to dig up?
Yeah, definitely. That's another thing I found out: when you do an archaeological dig, you don't take all of it out of the ground. I naively thought, Oh, we'll take a million games out of the ground and I can have 50 of them. But you take a representative sample, and you can extrapolate from there. Because there were photographs of the actual burial, they know there were 750,000 games down there, minus however many were stolen the night of the burial, which is not insignificant—many, many thousands were stolen that night.

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Did the people on site share your feelings? Or were they just there for a day out?
I interviewed a lot of them. I was definitely surprised by the number of people who showed up. I was not expecting hundreds of people lined up early in the morning who loved Atari—and loved Howard, particularly... they'd brought stuff for him to sign. I didn't know he had groupies, and I don't think he did either. I don't think any of us expected the actual emotion from the people. They had an attachment; it was like, "We need some place to go to celebrate this thing we love." I think there was a lot of uncertainty. It smelt bad, and the weather really became apocalyptic, and it felt a little too convenient, like something from a Spielberg movie. The winds were 80 miles an hour and the dust storm nearly blew over the excavator. A lot of people were driven out by the weather, and there was a lot of nervousness that people had driven 20 hours to see nothing.

Howard Warshaw was obviously very emotional in the documentary. Do you think that was just down to memories flooding back?
I think it's partly that, but a lot of it is down to what had happened that day. Howard had compartmentalized the whole thing as "this is a thing I did, and people think it's bad, and I know why it's bad so it's not that big a deal." When he got out there and saw there were actually people who liked the game, and loved his other games, I think it went from, "Haha, I'll put my demons to rest," to, "Oh my God, this is actually putting my demons to rest." I think that's what the tears were.

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Were any of the cartridges playable?
They actually were—a number of them were playable. They just needed to be cleaned off. The way they were buried, they were kind of protected. Someone said, "People think when you throw something in a dump you're getting rid of it. But the truth is you're preserving it forever and covering it with concrete." Some of those things were in a better condition than if they'd been sitting in someone's garage. Some of them were factory sealed—the Centipedes were in packs of nine, vacuum-sealed.

Did you find anything else cool down there?
There were some weird moments. On the first day, one of the guys who was operating some machinery dug something up. It was a newspaper from 1982, and he was in it. He was on the back cover as the quarterback of the football team. There was some strange stuff down there: a bowling ball, a fully functional toilet, but no dead bodies... that would've made it even more interesting. You don't just get to sift through the garbage. They're pretty careful, and it's pretty disgusting, too.

Thanks for your time, Zak.

Atari: Game Over is available digitally starting February 2.

Follow Matt Porter on Twitter.

Iceland to Build a Pagan Temple—Followers of Odin, Freya, and Thor, Rejoice​

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Odin, straight lampin'. Image via Wikicommons

After floating their intentions in January, a group of pagans in Iceland earlier this week announced that they would break ground on a new temple to the old Nordic gods within the month. It will be the first such religious site built on the island since the nation's legendary conversion to Christianity around 1000 AD.

The structure will be built into Öskjuhlíð Hill in Reykjavik. A half-buried dome sinking 13 feet into the slope, the circular temple will measure in at 3,767 square feet and accommodate up to 250 people. Designed by Magnús Jensson, a local architect, the temple will align with the sun and incorporate the golden ratio as well as the numbers 9 and 432,000, sacred in this pagan group's rites. Its price tag will be around $975,000.

Rather than a space for any old schmoe with an interest in Viking deities via Chris Hemsworth's Thor or Nordic death metal, the temple will be a headquarters for a particular set of pagans: the Ásatrúarfélagið.

People tend to lump all pagans together, but there are a vast array of groups and ideologies across the world, from druids to neo-shamans to Wiccans, with all sorts of idiosyncratic individual practitioners, spiritualists, and splinter groups in between. Some focus on paganism as a vehicle for new age beliefs, some for environmentalism, some for an escape from Christian mores, and some for rabid, far-right return-to-purity nationalism, but all have been increasing in numbers over the past century or so. Some groups literally believe in the old gods and practice ancient rituals, while others see them as metaphors. And despite their hippy-dippy reputation, some avowedly non-dogmatic groups deny others their pagan identity because they refuse to share the same conception of nature or order, or worship the wrong metaphorical gods.

Here's how Ásatrúarfélagið fits into the squidgy mass of paganisms: They are reconstructionists, using ancient texts like the Icelandic Edda poems to rebuild lost traditions and worldviews rather than inventing new and nebulous mythologies piecemeal. Within reconstructionism, they practice heathenry, the belief in pre-Christian Northern European myths, worldviews, and rites, along with sects like Northern Tradition, Odinism, Forn Sed, and Germanic Pagan Reconstruction.

Technically Ásatrúarfélagið is just the Icelandic branch of the larger Ásatrú brand of heathenry. But after their founding in 1972 (and recognition by the Icelandic government in 1973 as an official faith), they broke off in the 1980s, believing that in many nations the ideology was being used as a backdoor for far-right, neo-Nazi activities, which they wanted nothing to do with.

As to their own beliefs, according to the group's fourth Allsherjargoði (high priest—since 2003) and Sigur Rós collaborator Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, who joined the movement at its inception when he was just 16, they're a little bit of everything. They're partially an attempt to purge Christian influence and revive a romantic-yet-progressive nationalist identity, partially anti-modern, counterculture environmentalists, and partially the living continuation of a series of ideas and beliefs they say never really died out as an undercurrent within Icelandic society. This identity revolves around fairly progressive politics and a healthy dose of pantheistic environmentalism—respecting one's place as part of but not the master over the earth and finding some divinity within everything.

"I don't believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet," Business Insider quoted Hilmarsson as saying of the actual deities involved. "We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology."

However, some members of Ásatrúarfélagið do honestly believe in the gods, and others are agnostic—which is OK, because their movement is non-dogmatic. Beyond acknowledging some manner of hidden force in nature and respecting Icelandic culture, you can do whatever the hell you want.

For years they've organized religious ceremonies (as of 2006, the Icelandic government allows five pagan priests to officiate legally binding marriages, burials, and so on), like feasting days (sans the old animal sacrifices) and name-givings, without their own base. They've even managed to organize campaigns against environmentally unfriendly developments and for marriage equality and the separation of religion and state. But as the faith has grown to 2,400 active members (out of a nationwide population of 330,000), tripling their ranks over the past decade, the need for a long-desired central temple at which to perform rites and hold meetings has grown dire. The group applied for state land in 2006, received their hillside plot in 2008, and have since been working on drawing up plans, working through procedure, and raising the money to make the creation of a home for their bourgeoning and active community a reality.

Ásatrúarfélagið's temple is one of the biggest jumps in legitimacy and visibility for European paganism in recent memory. In 2008, the Hellenic Reconstructionists of Greece drew national attention for hosting a prayer to Athena on the Acropolis (to protest the creation of a new museum on the site), but their gathering was a onetime affair of just 200 people. For Iceland's pagans to have regular meetings of about that size in a prominent location in a dedicated space in a European capital is a true sign of the growth and broad acceptance of pagan traditions.

Yet as pagan groups grow, their newfound exposure has in the past invited some nasty backlash. In America, where as of 2004 we had between 200,000 and 400,000 pagans of one type or another (by one conservative estimate), there have been several underreported hate crimes against believers and their holy spaces. In 2010, someone put a giant cross on a pagan worship space at the US Air Force Academy (yes, the US government recognizes paganism) in El Paso County, Colorado. In 2013, a pagan family in New Port Rickey, Florida, suffered drive-by acid bombings by people who shouted "fucking witch" as they rolled down the street. And most recently, much closer to Iceland, in Northern Ireland, some folks stole a statue of the Irish pagan sea deity Manannán Mac Lir, replacing it with a cross inscribed with the words "You shall have no other gods before me." Although the statue was installed by the Game of Thrones set designer as one of five tourist-promoting statues in 2013, the founder and leader of the Order of the Golden River (the local pagan big noise) Patrick Carberry still views the theft as a hate crime.

It's unclear whether there's any risk of Ásatrúarfélagið's newfound visibility bringing them any trouble. But given the group's friction with and attempts to end the constitutional special status of the National Church of Iceland and the clear risk of the growing faith poaching off some of the Christians' members, there's always a chance that their high profile will inspire some ire.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

An earlier version of this article said that Christianity came to Iceland around 1000 BC. It was, of course, 1000 AD.

A Peace Deal with Colombia's Marxist Guerrillas Won't Fix Latin America's Cocaine Problem

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At last year's United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos asked the world to imagine his country "without coca," the plant precursor to crystal cocaine. This "dream," which would have been unthinkable a decade ago, is now at least plausible, with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's largest rebel group, signing a preliminary peace agreement and partnering with the government to implement programs to replace coca crops with other plants.

But coca production has never been the focal point of the Colombian drug trade, and the FARC has only ever played a marginal role in moving cocaine to foreign markets. Colombia's broader drug problem is, and always has been, that drugs are illegal elsewhere, and the global drug war does not seem nearly as close to ending as the FARC's guerrilla insurgency. There's just too much money left on the table.

It was an accident of geography that brought cocaine to Colombia in the first place. Vast territories with little to no state presence and coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans made the country a prime maritime shipping hub. Nestled between traditional growing regions to the south and Central American smuggling routes to the north, Colombia stood—and, thanks to Brazil's rise as a top consumer, remains—at the key crossroads of international supply and demand. Pablo Escobar, who has become as synonymous with cocaine as cocaine has with Colombia, built his empire as a middleman, not a producer.

The right-wing paramilitary groups funded, and in some cases even founded, by Escobar and other drug lords looking to mask their activities under the guise of Cold War counterinsurgency have played a far greater role in international trafficking than the FARC ever has. Indeed, the rebels' initial foray into the drug business was facilitated by the very groups whose mission, ostensibly, was to eliminate them.

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All illustrations by Giulia Sagramola

Financed by the exorbitant profits of the 1980s and early 90s drug boom, in the early part of this century paramilitary death squads embarked on the largest land grab in national history, a campaign that has saddled Colombia with the second-highest internally displaced population in the world. Many refugees fled to the cities, overwhelming an already porous social net and fostering the permanent urban underclass that provides today's narco networks with a steady supply of foot soldiers and growing domestic drug market.

At the same time, a separate migration pressed deep into the sparsely populated jungles and grassland plains that had been effectively ceded to the guerrillas, just as plague and international crackdowns were pushing coca production up the spine of the Andes. Coca, a resilient, high-demand cash crop, converged on ideal cultivation areas alongside an influx of settlers in desperate need of a livelihood. By 1999, over 160,000 hectares of Colombian countryside had been converted to coca fields, making this region the largest cocaine producer in the world and transforming the FARC from a band of peasant highway thieves to a potent terrorist army and legitimate existential threat to the Colombian state.

"This revolutionary movement wasn't dependent on Cuba or the Soviet Union," Todd Howland, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights' representative in Colombia, told VICE. "[The FARC] lasted so much beyond the fall of the Easten Bloc, because they were self-sustaining."

Coca, however, did not represent a decisive strategic advantage for the rebels. Rather, the advent of large-scale domestic cultivation served to insulate the Colombian armed conflict as a whole. As Adam Isacson, the senior Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told me, "The FARC's involvement has largely been upstream, in taxing and protecting coca growing... Now that's small money in comparison to transshipment, and the FARC have never been as involved in transshipment as the cartels and paramilitaries."

To understand the dynamic, it's useful to look at how profits distribute across the production chain. A coca farmer in Colombia might see around $1.30 per kilo of leaf, or as much as $780 per kilo of paste, the precursor to cocaine. Once that base has been refined, but before it's left Colombia, the same kilo is worth anywhere from $2,200 to $7,000, depending on how far it's traveled. By the time it's reached, say, the United States, it's worth $24,000 or more.

By skimming a percentage off purchases, or buying and wholesaling paste, the FARC came to occupy the role Peruvian and Bolivian cultivators played in the early reign of Escobar. The paramilitaries, having worked in conjunction with US intelligence to hunt and kill "El Patrón," took over the cartels' connections to transshipment. The FARC have gotten the short end of the arrangement when compared to their nominal enemies, but there is still enough money to go around for everyone. (Estimates of how much the FARC actually make through trafficking vary wildly, but the figure is believed to be in the high hundreds of millions, at least.)

In that way, the extreme left and right of Colombia's armed conflict came to share what Howland the UN rep calls "perverse incentives" to ensure the violence continued. But so too, for that matter, did the state, which has received billions in international aid to fight the world's war on drugs for it, on top of the untold millions more funneled to officials in the form of select payoffs. In 1994, research commissioned by the US military found that medical treatment was ten times more effective, per dollar spent, than interdiction—en route seizures—at reducing cocaine abuse domestically, and 23 times more effective than an international supply-side drug war. That same year, a classified DEA report concluded that the FARC "will never be major players in Colombia's drug trade."

Even so, five years later, US President Bill Clinton went ahead with Plan Colombia, the biggest supply-side anti-drug initiative in history. The roughly $9 billion in mostly military aid that has flowed to Colombia since has been directed primarily to the government's war with the FARC. Whether the facts on the ground supported the approach or not, fighting drug use in the United States became fighting drug production in Colombia, and fighting drug production in Colombia became fighting the "narco-guerrilla."

Where Plan Colombia has predictably failed to impact the price or availability of cocaine in the Untied States, it has succeeded in casting a sordid shadow of human rights abuse over the country. The Colombian military executed almost 6,000 civilians during the height of US involvement, a practice that has since been correlated with US aid and, in a statistically insignificant but nonetheless telling sample, training. Because of the Colombian government's extensive ties to paramilitary groups, an aid package sold under the auspices of the war on drugs and later repackaged into the war on terror largely ignored—and even benefited—the most prominent drug lords in Colombia, who are also its most heinous terrorists.

Nothing embodies the futility and wanton disregard of Plan Colombia, however, quite like aerial coca fumigation, which persecuted impoverished growers in Colombia perhaps even more zealously than domestic policing has impoverished Americans. (It should perhaps come as little surprise that the impacted communities in Colombia are disproportionately Afro-descendent and indigenous.) Since 1999, US-supplied aircraft, often piloted by American contractors, have dumped tons of weaponized, Monsanto-derived herbicide on the Colombian countryside, with no apparent concern for the disturbing environmental, social, or public health consequences.

Whatever ground Plan Colombia gained with respect to coca production—whether through fumigation or manual eradication, its more effective but more dangerous sister policy—has been more than offset by corresponding surges in nearby countries like Peru. This so-called "balloon effect"—squeeze one end and the air goes elsewhere—has also seen the violence typically associated with the Colombian drug trade pushed up into Central America and Mexico, where it has since reached crisis levels, and down into Brazil and Argentina.

Meanwhile, the alternative development incentives originally slated to precede fumigation were either poorly planned or never put into practice. Farmers who voluntarily accepted substitute crops from the government watched as their fields were sprayed regardless. In one infamous case, chickens were turned over to farmers in Putumayo, the area where fumigation has been most heavily concentrated. Because the chickens, whose beaks had been removed for industrial purposes, could only eat special feed, the farmers were forced to slaughter them almost immediately.

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As part of the preliminary peace deal, the FARC has agreed to help encourage crop substitution this time around. But Jule Anzueta, the leader of a (not exclusively) coca-growing community I visited in the Putumayo region last year, is skeptical, especially considering the government's unwillingness to reform agrarian policy or renegotiate Colombia's free trade agreements with the United States and others, which pit the almost feudal agricultural sector against the subsidized might of foreign markets.

"If they don't solve the underlying problem, then what's going to happen is that people who might stop growing it for a time will have to take a machete to their yucca, plantain, and bean harvests and go back to coca," Anzueta told VICE.

Insofar as it acknowledges that "conditions of poverty, marginalization, [and] weak institutional presence" have all contributed to the coca-growing phenomenon, the preliminary peace agreement tacitly concedes not only that supply-side drug policy has failed, but that it was reckless and overly punitive to start with. And yet fumigation continues to be the extent of the state's anti-drug efforts in many regions, and the peace agreement leaves open the possibility that it will be in the future, as well.

"If the communities aren't complying with the plan and it's too dangerous to do manual eradication, then they're just going to spray like they used to," said Isacson, the Latin America expert. Isacson is more optimistic than Anzueta that alternative development can be a success, but as he readily acknowledges, that only deals with the issue of production. Where drugs have bred the most violence and corruption in Colombian society is in that downstream part of the trade where the real profits accumulate.

The fish swimming in those waters are direct descendants of the sharks that once dominated it. The national crime syndicates (or bacrim) currently warring for the Pacific port of Buenaventura and other strategic territories are in fact neo-paramilitary groups that emerged following the sham paramilitary demobilization of the 2000s. They're every bit as disciplined as the cartels that preceded them, and perhaps even more ruthless. There's good reason to fear that, should the FARC demobilize as planned, disenchanted members will simply integrate into these groups, with whom they already enjoy business partnerships.

What's certain is that, barring dramatic economic and social progress in Colombia's neglected periphery, someone will step in, somewhere, to fill the void left by the rebels. As Isacson explains, "There'll still be labs, there'll still be on-go fast boats, and there'll still be semi-submersibles, and there'll still be deals with Mexico, and all that's not going to change, even if the leaves are grown somewhere else."

If history has taught us anything about the drug war, it's that nature abhors a vacuum. Since Escobar's fall, dozens of high-level traffickers have been captured or killed, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of cocaine have been seized. But the drug trade has not relinquished its hold on much of Colombian society, and there's little reason to believe that disarming the FARC will change that.

"As long as there is demand, there will be supply," writes Robin Kirk in More Terrible Than Death, an account of her 15 years on the ground in Colombia with the Human Rights Watch. "It's a truth as immutable as addiction itself or the human thirst for pleasure and escape, impossible to fumigate from our beings."

Steven Cohen is a freelance journalist based out of Colombia and former editor of Colombia Reports.

The Zoophile Advocate Who Had Sex with a Dolphin Is Now the Star of a New Documentary

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Dolly the dolphin died of a broken heart. At least that's how Malcolm Brenner sees it.

Some would call Brenner, who had sex with Dolly more than four decades ago, a pervert or an animal abuser or, at the very least, a damaged man. But to this day, Brenner, who is now the subject of a documentary, describes the encounter as a beautiful, almost spiritual experience.

The two met in 1970 when the New College of Florida student was on his first freelance photography assignment. He was supposed to take pictures for a book about Sarasota's Floridaland—one of those hokey roadside attractions that populated the Sunshine State before multimillion-dollar theme parks pushed them out. Soon, however, he was sidetracked by the dolphin.

Dolly swam to the other side of the tank when the unfamiliar human with horn-rimmed glasses and shoulder-length curls first jumped in. She eventually came around, says Brenner, who photographed the dolphin for nine months. Once, as he was rubbing her back, Dolly flipped over to present her genital slit. Later, she started rubbing her teeth on the photographer's arm in what he describes as an erotic way. When he wouldn't give her what she wanted, Dolly would retaliate by pushing him 12 feet underwater.

"Female dolphins are very assertive about their sexuality," Brenner told me. "They don't have any inhibitions about expressing it, whereas other animals are passive, or at least just receptive."

In his telling, Brenner has always been attracted to animals. As a child, he says, he was molested by his psychologist. Around the same time, his dad took him to see a Disney film called The Shaggy Dog. He got an erection even though he was only five, which he now calls a defining moment of his life. His zoophilia started in earnest a few years later; when he was 11 or 12, Brenner had sex with the family poodle, although he says he felt dirty afterward.

But it was his second and final encounter with an animal—the one that took place with Dolly at Floridaland—that ended up making Brenner the unofficial spokesperson for the people who think animals can consent to sex. And for the first time, he's telling his story on screen with the help of Miami filmmakers Joey Daoud and Kareem Tabsch. Dolphin Lover, their 15-minute short, just premiered at Slamdance on January 25.

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Dolly the dolphin was trained to ride along this boat and jump for fish. Photo courtesy of Joey Daoud

Tabsch first became interested in Brenner when he was in San Francisco in 2013 looking for entertainment options and an alt weekly story about the dolphin lover grabbed his eye. "I stopped looking for things to do and started reading the story," he told me. "I was taken aback equally by what had happened and by his willingness to talk about it."

Soon he and Daoud met up with Brenner on Florida's west coast and conducted an extensive four-hour interview that covered essentially his entire life. "His only stipulation was that we didn't use the Flipper theme song in the movie," Daoud told me.

Although Brenner had written a fictional version of his and Dolly's relationship in 2009, he'd never openly talked about how exactly he did the deed. According to his account in the documentary, Dolly was alone in the pool with another male dolphin but voluntarily came to a different area to have privacy with her suitor. After about 30 minutes of foreplay, Brenner penetrated the animal's vaginal cavity, which he described as a series of complicated valves.

It was a difficult act to perform (he had to position himself vertically, while the dolphin was horizontal), but Brenner describes the experience as both gentle and erotic. "I felt this intense verging with her on every level," he says in the movie. "It's really like we stopped being two individual creatures and became one creature that became one with itself." He claims both he and the dolphin came.

After their encounter, Brenner moved to Olympia, Washington, and Dolly was shipped off to a different park in Mississippi. He was informed later that she committed suicide, and to this day, Brenner thinks it's because he "abandoned her," as he puts it in the film.

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Malcolm Brenner photographed Dolly for nine months and still considers her the love of his life. Courtesy of Malcolm Brenner/Coffee & Celluloid.

He's not the only person to fall in love with a dolphin. There was also Margaret Lovatt, who ended up having sex with an animal named Peter during a NASA-funded experiment in the 60s. That animal also committed suicide after its relationship with a human ended.

One aspect that's notably missing from Dolphin Lover is input from a psychologist, who might explain whether dolphins can consent to sex, experience orgasms, or feel sad enough over a "breakup" that they'd end their lives.

Originally, the filmmakers planned to splice in interviews with animals rights activists and other people, but decided against it. "The story we wanted to tell was the experience as he recalls it," Daoud told me. "What [experts] were going to say was the norm for the average viewer. I hope what the movie shows is that behind acts we may not agree upon are human beings."


[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/bwu1XfqlTgE' width='560' height='315']

Today, Brenner lives in West Florida, and even though he's most famous for fucking a dolphin, he managed to marry twice after "training" himself to like women. He even has a grown daughter.

He says he's not in a relationship and hasn't had sex with an animal since Dolly. He's waiting for the day the zoophiles will be as accepted as gays, although he thinks it will take a long time. He also claims not to understand why people have a problem with his proclivities when they can accept the character Brian from Family Guy. "The same people who are calling me a monster are laughing at Seth McFarlane's jokes about a dog sleeping with women," he told me.

But Brenner is undeterred by public perception and claims to be active on a number of dating sites.

He says he's not worried about the documentary, or for being recognized as the public face of animal fucking. Apparently, there are other obstacles to meeting and courting women.

"I don't find a lot of women who are atheists down here," he says. "But I just signed up for an atheist dating service, so hopefully that will change."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The Harper Government Still Thinks CSE Is Acting Legally

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Surveillance cameras. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Canadian Government says that, despite conclusive evidence supplied by Edward Snowden, CSE is not breaking the rules.

News broke on Jan. 28 that Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) was running a bulk data collection program targeting users of file sharing sites like Megaupload and Rapidshare, according to Snowden documents from 2012.

That program caught Canadians in its web, according to the documents, which is something that CSE is forbidden from doing.

But Rob Nicholson, the Minister for National Defence, says that as the minister in charge of CSE, he's not worried about it.

"CSE has to abide, of course, by the rules, and the commissioner that has a look at this has confirmed that they have acted within Canadian law," Nicholson said the next day.

When VICE pointed out that the documents, which were reported by CBC and The Intercept, appear to directly contradict that they were abiding by the rules, Nicholson was unfazed.

"They [the CBC] may report, but all the information from the Privacy Commissioner is that they comply, and they have to comply with it."

Nicholson likely meant the CSE Commissioner, who oversees the agency, not his privacy counterpart. But the agency has already allegedly broke its mandate in a questionable spying operation. In 2014 it was revealed the CSE ran an airport wifi spying operation that allegedly collected the data of Canadians who passed through the as-yet-unnamed airport.

Moreover, in last year's report, the CSE Commissioner said interception of Canadians' data only happened 66 times. In each of them, Plouffe said he was confident that the data was obtained unintentionally and that they each contained such critical information that thought ought to be sent on to other agencies', albeit with the personal information of the individual protected.

Justice Minister Peter MacKay maintained the same innocent tract when asked about the CSE's ongoing operations.

"In accordance with the law CSE is involved in data collection of foreign entities to do so in the interest of protecting Canadians' privacy, guarding against cyber attacks, and, as we know, there have been occurrences of radicalization online that is of real concern," MacKay said outside the House of Commons, adding that the Commissioner—ex-judge Jean-Pierre Plouffe—keeps watch over CSE and has, thus far, not found any wide-spread abuse of the process.

Associate Minister of Defence Julian Fantino, who appears to be the new political chief for CSE, repeated roughly the same lies as the other two ministers. Apart from installing Fantino into the job, the Prime Minister also appointed bureaucrat Greta Bossenmaier as the new head of CSE. That appointment was much to the surprise, ironically, of the intelligence-gatherers at CSE.

As one CSE source told me, it was my tweet that alerted the signals intelligence spooks to their new boss. In other words, the musical chairs of CSE high command was a surprise to its employees.

CSE's mandate explicitly forbids them from capturing Canadians in their bulk surveillance programs. The law explicitly says that CSE cannot target Canadians, and it must take steps to ensure that Canadians' privacy is respected.

Evidently, that's not happening.

In theory, the CSE Commissioner—the one person with authority to oversee the agency's activities—can single out those instances where the agency does capture Canadians' data, and ask the agency to do better in the future.

A spokesperson for the Commissioner's office said that CSEC's activities are reviewed to ensure that they are targeted only at foreign individuals, and that they don't scoop up Canadians' information in the process.

When VICE asked how he Commissioner could be confident in that, given that sites like Megaupload would be used by thousands of Canadians, the spokesperson cited a section of last year's report.

"I examined a number of new automated processes of CSE, with privacy protections being built into them," writes Plouffe in the report. "I verified CSE's use of technology to diminish the possibilities of human errors or privacy violations."

He does not expand on what processes those are.

However, The Intercept reported that two of the IP addresses mentioned in the Powerpoint presentation were Canadian.

NDP leader Thomas Mulcair says the news underscores the need for a Parliamentary review process for CSE. "What we really need in Canada is a system of oversight like they have in the United States," he said.

There is NSA oversight reports that are issued to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board showing some unlawful activity. Even so, Congress is still woefully unaware of the extent the NSA spies on American citizens.

VICE asked what can be done in the short term to combat the apparent overreach. Mulcair shrugged. "We're in an election year, and the only thing that's going to change this type of behaviour is a change of government."

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau echoed the need for a better review process.

"We continue to believe that strong oversight, like all of our Five Eyes partners have, is going to be important in this area," Trudeau said, referring to the top secret intelligence sharing collective between France, Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.

OpenMedia echoed the call, launching a campaign to the Prime Minister: stop spying on us.

VICE asked MacKay whether a Parliamentary review is in order.

"The CSE Commissioner's report indicates that they have been operating inside the law, and that's what your question was."

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

ISIS Is Rebranding Stolen UN Food Rations with Its Own Logo

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ISIS Is Rebranding Stolen UN Food Rations with Its Own Logo

A Brief History of the Glorious Intersection of Music and Professional Wrestling

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A Brief History of the Glorious Intersection of Music and Professional Wrestling

Comics: Fashion Cat in 'High School'

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Look at Alex Schubert's Instagram, blog, and buy his books.

Video Shows TransAsia Flight Crashing into River, Killing At Least 16

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Video Shows TransAsia Flight Crashing into River, Killing At Least 16

The Unplumbed Depths of Government Data

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The Unplumbed Depths of Government Data

We Talked to the Guy Behind 'Every 90s TV Commercial Ever'

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[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/W7Hoz2ZHYZM' width='640' height='360']

When Every 90s Commercial Ever went online yesterday, it immediately drew comparisons to last year's Too Many Cooks. This new video though, is—spoiler—way more fun about its use of gore, and it's more of a direct parody than Cooks, going after the bizarre tropes advertisers used to appeal to kids in the 90s, particularly a surreal series of commercials for Capri Sun (remember those?).

I didn't know I needed this to exist, but when I found out it did, I had no choice but to track down Dez Dolly, the horror fanatic who made it, so I could find out how it came to be.

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VICE: So I just watched Every 90s TV Commercial Ever and it was hilarious.
Dez Dolly: Thank you very much.

What do you think of Too Many Cooks?
I'm honestly embarrassed to say I haven't seen it.

When did this idea come about?
We've got this big board on a wall with all these weird, crazy ideas that are more for our amusement; we don't think they'll ever get made. And we found ourselves in this really rare situation where someone came to us and asked us to make a video to promote a thing, and told us we could do whatever we wanted, which never really happens. We said, "Are you sure? Anything?"

So technically it's branded content?
It started that way—and I can't say much about it—but when we delivered the final cut to this particular brand, it scared the living shit out of them. They asked us to remove all of their branding and never mention our association with them whatsoever. So it started off as an original idea, then got funded as a piece of branded content, and in the end, it just turned out to be what it was.

And they completely relinquished any rights to it that they had to it?
Absolutely.

So what are those weird old Capri Sun commercials going for?
What they're going for is to get kids to ask their parents to go buy that crap. I don't understand how kids turning into liquid metal and throwing basketballs around is going to get that to happen, but I'd like to see the brand studies on that. I would love to go back and meet those people. Just be in the room when they're thinking up those ideas.

Why'd you go to the trouble of technically matching the appearance of the original?
It would've been easy to just rip that kind of thing apart, but there was this fine line of approaching those spots both lovingly and ironically, simultaneously.

Can you talk to me about getting those kids to act like that?
We actually have this really interesting behind-the-scenes video that one of our people put together and you see that we had to sort of take them through "90s Commercial Camp," where we showed them hours of these spots, [and] we were all exemplifying that accent, that affectation, that rad, excellent, extreme 'tude. They just absorbed it and picked up on it. We just created this really radical mood on set and everyone kind of lived in that.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/9cbKpCsd2pk' width='640' height='360']

"Creating a radical mood" sounds like an awesome party.
It was pretty fun.

Tell me a little about the process of creating Downtown Darius Jackson.
I was reminded, when we were talking about the script and working in the room, of those old Charles Barkley spots or those old Michael Jordan pieces, where these guys were just out of their element. It's just hilarious. Now that you go back and look at it, they're all wooden.

The name itself—we probably spent more time trying to come up with the line "Downtown Darius Jackson" than anything other line in that script. "Neon Deion Sanders" was the inspiration for that.

Where'd your monster come from?
My favorite flicks as a kid were Ghostbusters, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and also The Thing, if that says anything about my particular style. I was a child of the 80s. I originally wanted to be a makeup special effects guy, so I sort of really connect with pieces like this where you get to play with the lost art, if you will. We just found these guys, and they did really amazing stuff. The Thing type stuff, specifically. We just wanted to get them to make something really horrific and funny. But definitely The Thing was the main influence. Like, take a look at these Capri Sun spots, and let's go The Thing with it.

How'd the video do yesterday?
I think we were top spot on Reddit for a short period of time. We might still be there. It was a good day.

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