Magical realism, 1980s video games, and haute couture come together in This Must Be the Only Fantasy, a new film collaboration between fashion house Rodarte and filmmaker Todd Cole, produced by The Creators Project. The film stars Elijah Wood and is a VFX-driven ode to fantasy role-playing games with original music by Beach House. 

"You live your life in the every day but then in this other world—in your mind, your imagination—you get to transform into the hero, and this is the duality that we wanted to capture," Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte says about working in the fantasy genre. 

To bring this fantastical world to life Rodarte and Cole recruited the skills of VFX studio a52, who used CGI to turn the contemporary setting of Los Angeles into a magical realm where characters vanish and reappear, a unicorn carries our heroine—played by 18-year-old Sidney Williams—from place to place, faces unnaturally contort into evil glares, and magical particles are conjured from thin air. The effects also make a stylistic nod to 80s gaming, like the way the fairy—played by supermodel Guinevere van Seenus—is a glitchy projection, or how Elijah Wood's throne is stacked with gaming joysticks, consoles, wires, and bulky hardware.

Read more over at The Creators Project.

Riley Stearns was born in Austin, Texas. He used to write for Tower Prep on Cartoon Network and has made a couple other great and peculiar shorts starring his wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead called Magnificat and Casque. Riley is currently working on a feature-length movie about a young cult member in the midst of getting deprogrammed.The thing is, the expert doing the deprogramming doesn’t know who is worse: his parents or the cult. It should prove to be weird, wild, and worth checking out.

We recently sat down and had a chat about his short film The Cub, which you can watch here.

Photo by Chris Bethell

Dr. Owen Bowden-Jones is the founder of London's Club Drug Clinic, started in 2011, which aims to provide aid to people who have "begun to experience problems with their use of recreational drugs." After they were overwhelmed with users of ketamine, cocaine, ecstasy, and legal substances who wanted help, a second clinic was opened earlier this year.

Unlike heroin and crack, for which many rehabilitation and counselling services exist, party drugs often aren't associated with bad things like addiction, losing your job, losing your mind, and ruining your life. Owen hopes that in addition to helping individual users, his clinics will spread understanding of the dangers of these relatively new drugs through the medical world.

I gave Owen a call to find out what he's discovered from treating people.

VICE: Has drug use changed much in the UK in the past ten to 15 years?
Owen Bowden-Jones: What we’ve seen are relatively major reductions in heroin and crack use and an increase in a new group of drugs called "club drugs"—things like ketamine, MDMA, and mephedrone.

I'm familiar with the category. What about the ways in which people take them?
Actually, we’re finding that quite a few of these people are beginning to inject their drugs, especially mephedrone and ketamine. So all of the very real dangers that we used to see with heroin injecting, we’re now beginning to see with these newer club drugs.

Oh, dear. What are the drugs that cause the most problems?
Here at the Club Drug Clinic, the four main drugs we’ve seen have been ketamine, GBL or GHB, crystal meth, and mephedrone. You can often determine the drug someone’s using [when they come in]. It seems to split along the lines of sexuality. We’re seeing a lot of gay men using crystal meth and GBL—for sex—while we’re seeing a lot of straight clubbers and students using ketamine and mephedrone. Interestingly, we've hardly seen anybody come into the clinic saying they’ve got a problem with MDMA or ecstasy—that just hasn’t happened.

Have you seen problems with many of the newer, more underreported drugs?
PMA is the one that seems to have caught the media's attention, and we are certainly seeing plenty of it. We are also seeing people who use poppers developing "cartoon vision" [when people's field of vision appears to be two-dimensional] and a range of other visual disturbances. The visuals may also be happening with nitrous oxide, of which we have also seen many more cases.

A load of vials of ketamine. Photo via

OK, let's go over the main four drugs people use. What does ketamine do to people?
Seventy-five percent of ketamine users who see us have bladder problems, and we're seeing many more cases related to the squat scene in East London since opening our second clinic off Tottenham Court Road. "Ketamine bladder" is an ulceration of the inside lining of the bladder. First, people get a discomfort over their bladder and then, as the ulceration develops, they start peeing more often, sometimes every five or ten minutes. When it gets really bad they sometimes get pain when they pee as well. As the ulceration develops, they start peeing blood and, of course, that’s an incredibly distressing symptom for people. It’s been such a problem that we’ve had a urologist join the team to try to help us deal with all the ketamine bladder we’re seeing.

Is it common to get so serious?
Well, we’ve got one person in the clinic who’s had their bladder replaced with an artificial bladder because they’d damaged their bladder so, so badly. And, for some people, when they stop it seems to get completely better.

That sounds pretty awful. Is there anything else in regards to K?
The K-cramps is a really intense spasm on the muscles in the abdomen, which can last for sometimes just 30 seconds, but sometimes up to ten minutes. It puts people in excruciating pain and then it will just wear off. We don’t really understand why it happens but it’s definitely associated with the ketamine use.

Shit.
And the final thing we’re seeing—which we didn’t really expect to see—is people getting really addicted to ketamine. We’re seeing people use it every day, escalating amounts, grams and grams a day and really getting into terrible trouble in a way that we didn’t really think would happen with ketamine. There’s no doubt in my mind that ketamine is dependence-forming.

Anything else of note?
It's used by men and women, but we see a disproportionate number of women using it as an emotional anesthetic.

A baggie of mephedrone.

Next up: mephedrone.
Mephedrone is a synthetic amphetamine and it works on the dopamine system in the brain, giving people a euphoric high. Now, in terms of the negative effects we’ve seen here, I have to say, it’s estimated that 300,000 people a year are using mephedrone. We’re not seeing 300,000 people a year here, so there are lots of people out there using mephedrone who may not be having any problems at all. But we’re seeing a lot of paranoia—increasing amounts. Often this will actually tip over into brief periods of psychosis where people get convinced that they’re under surveillance or start hearing voices. People become very distressed and agitated. We’ve seen it particularly when people inject mephedrone.

Is it addictive?
Mephedrone hasn’t particularly been considered an addictive drug, but we’re definitely seeing people addicted to it here at the clinic who are using every day and are saying, "Well, I used to use a gram a day and now it’s crept up and I’m using grams and grams a day and it’s going up all the time." You can see that typical experience of tolerance, which is one of the really important features of dependence.

Crystal meth has a pretty bad reputation for being addictive. Why do people take it here?
It's an amphetamine-based drug. It gives people an intense high, a euphoria, and makes people very disinhibited. Typically what we’re seeing in the Club Drug Clinic is a lot of sexual disinhibition. The negative effects are, again, lots of paranoia with brief episodes of psychosis. We also see something called rebound anxiety, where after a crystal binge people will be in the grip of this very intense anxiety that they just can't find a way of stopping other than using other drugs to bring them down. The typical [drug to use] with crystal is GBL.

That's probably not a great idea in the long run, is it?
We see very severe dependence where people escalate to grams and grams a day and, you know, being really very sick with it. Of all the drugs we see here in the clinic, I think crystal meth and GBL are the two most addictive.

A rock of crystal meth. Photo via

How do people normally start taking them?
We’re seeing a lot of people who binge on crystal who would use it Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and then go back to working through the week—then Friday they’ll start the crystal binge again. Often those people will tip into daily use over time; it might be six months, it might be a year, it might even be a couple of years. But then, as they develop a tolerance to crystal, what happens is their weekend goes from a Friday to a Monday to a Thursday to a Tuesday and then the negative consequences of the use kick in so they get fired from work, their social relationships break down. Before they know it, all they do all week is take crystal. So it’s a really dangerous drug.

What is GBL? It's not as common as the others.
It’s an industrial solvent—an alloy cleaner—used to clean metals.

So what's so bad about it?
It gives people a sense of slight euphoria but generally it’s also a sedative. It’s what we call pro-sexual, so it makes people horny and it’s usually pipetted, one or two milliliters, into a drink. There are some real dangers here. The first is that the difference between the recreational dose and the toxic overdose amount is very small. Also, because people measure it in milliliters, the difference between one or two milliliters means the difference between getting the effects you want and going into a coma. So it’s a very dangerous drug in terms of what we call a "narrow therapeutic range."

Yeah, that does sound pretty bad.
The other thing about it is it’s highly addictive, so we see people setting their alarm clocks at night to wake up and dose themselves, so they dose right through a 24-hour cycle—sometimes every hour. And they walk around with little bottles—pipettes in their pockets—to make sure they’re not caught without the G. The reason for that is that once someone’s dependent, the withdrawal symptoms are really horrendous. They come on very rapidly, they’re very distressing.

What are they?
Intense anxiety, agitation, rapidly going into a delirium. One of the things we’ve been doing here is detoxifications for people who get dependent on G, and it’s a really tricky medical detox to do because if it goes wrong people get sick very quickly. It has to be managed very carefully.

So you can't just stop taking it, then?
In fact, a number of people who’ve been detoxed off G have ended up in intensive care if they’ve not been managed properly, so it’s really important if any services out there are thinking of doing GBL detoxes—or if anyone’s wanting to go and get a GBL detox—that they go and get it from somewhere that does it regularly. It would be a bad idea to go somewhere that’s never done it before.

What's next for the clinic?
There’s no doubt that lots of people out there are using club drugs with no problem whatsoever and, you know, that’s fine. As a clinic, we are making no judgement on people’s drug use. We’re here to offer help to the proportion of people for whom it goes from being something that’s recreational and fun into something that actually starts causing them harm. We need to get to a point where, if a 17-year-old using a new drug walks into their doctor's office and asks for help, their general practitioner knows how to respond to that. I think that’s the next step—trying to get the knowledge out of specialist services and into more general services.

Great. Best of luck!

Follow Chris on Twitter: @chrisoreal

Enjoy stuff about drugs? Try these:

Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor

Household Highs

How to Sell Drugs

All images courtesy of Last Gasp

A few weeks ago, I found a book at a thrift store called The Tallahassee Project. It's a collection of photos of nonviolent female federal inmates who were incarcerated as part of the war on drugs. Each photo is accompanied by a letter from the woman depicted, explaining her situation. 

The majority of the women shown in the book were charged with "conspiracy" based on the statements of informants who spoke to authorities in exchange for reduced sentences. Often, this conspiracy amounted to little more than being the girlfriend, wife, or mother of a drug dealer. 

The book was compiled in April 2001 by a guy named John Beresford from an organization called the Committee on Unjust Sentencing. I googled John to see if there was any update on how the women in the book were doing. I guess there's a part of me that likes to believe that once a horrible injustice has been brought to the attention of the public, somebody, somehow, will do something to fix it.

That's not the case here. Unfortunately, John died in 2007, and took his Committee on Unjust Sentencing with him. I checked to see if the women from the book were still in prison, and many of them still are—rotting in prison since before 9/11 because they got messed up with drugs.

Below are some of the women who haven't been released, along with the letter they wrote to John 12 years ago.

:(

Alice Jones (Inmate ID Number: 29560-004)
Sentenced to 24 years for conspiracy, drug conviction 
Estimated release date: 04-24-2015

"I am a mother of two, a 19-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son. For 25 years I owned and operated my own property rental business, which I began from the ground up. In 1992, I was arrested and subsequently convicted for a drug conspiracy of which I had no part. The government attempted to seize my home and business. A thorough investigation of my business and tax records proved my business to be legitimate. No drugs were even seized from me or my home. My criminal record was based entirely upon people with multiple arrests and lengthy police records, who were attempting to avoid further convictions. 

I did not ever imagine such an atrocious nightmare could ever occur in the United States. If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone."

Jo Ann Winter (Inmate ID Number 29397-077)
Sentenced to 23 years for conspiracy
Estimated release date: 05-19-2017

"There is a great deal of injustice in the judicial system in the US. It is a mistake to take a conspiracy case to trial. An individual becomes a number in the game of justice played by judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and co-conspirators.

For four months, beginning in September 1992, I was temporarily employed by three men who formed a partnership and opened a new business that dealt with the manufacture and repair of car hauler trailers. I was the secretary, and my duties included obtaining licenses and permits necessary for doing business and handling receivables and payables that related to said business. 

Approximately six months after that brief employment, one of the partners was arrested for a state drug delivery charge. This person was a friend of, and was involved in a relationship with my daughter. That relationship had been on-going for several years... I contacted his friends and associates who raised enough money to post bond and obtain counsel. He was arrested again later that year for failure to comply with a judge's order and again I contacted his friends and associates to request additional funds. During this period of turmoil I gave a pager subscribed in my name to my daughter. I also had a telephone installed in my name for my daughter. The relationship ended, my daughter relocated, but the pager and telephone remained in the possession of the friend. There were numerous subsequent contacts with his friends and associates, then and through the date of his trial for the state charge, which concluded in October 1995. 

One cannot imagine my surprise when I was arrested on November 6, 1996, and charged with 'Conspiracy to Possess with Intent to Distribute' and 'Distribution of Methamphetamine and Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering.' I had neither drugs nor money in my possession. I was released immediately after my arrest on a personal recognizance bond. I was no threat to society. I did not obstruct justice. I believe in justice. I went to each court appearance. I proceeded to trial with a court appointed lawyer.

At trial an indicted co-conspirator testified that I was present at a location when he was there to conduct a drug deal. This was where I worked. I saw no such transaction. He received money from the federal government and time off his sentence from a previous state case for his testimony.

Another unindicted co-conspirator said that someone made a statement to her about me. It wasn't true. She is free. Another unindicted co-conspirator said that she had never seen me, but she saw my car once or twice. She is free. Two other unindicted co-conspirators gave testimony in the trial. They already had sentences of 85 and 79 months from a related case. One will be free in 14 months. 

The jury returned a guilty verdict and I was taken into custody and have remained in custody since May 7, 1997. I was sentenced on July 30, 1997, to 276 months (23 years). Eight of the alleged co-conspirators received sentences that were much less than mine. I don't even know five of these people. 

Since being transferred to prison, I have been separated from my family. I am 900 miles from home. At age 51, I am serving a Life sentence. 

I no longer believe in justice."

Stephanie George (Inmate ID Number: 04023-017)
Sentenced to life for conspiracy/crack cocaine (Stephanie agreed to hide her boyfriend's cocaine stash.)
Estimated release date: Life

"I am mother of three, ages 11, seven, and six. They are in counseling behind me not being there. I'm first time offender and innocent of crime. Just guilty of association with child's father. I've even had a write up in Rolling Stone Magazine about how wrong my sentencing was."

Patricia Locklear (Inmate ID Number: 15627-056)
Sentenced to 24 years four months for conspiracy drug offense (nonviolent, first-time offender)
Estimated release date: 10-21-2016

"(My husband) and I have two sons, Marty and Mark ages 29 and 21. We lost everything we owned when we were convicted. We were the only two out of the whole conspiracy who received such lengthy sentences because we did not cooperate (turn someone else in) with the government. So they took everything. The bigger dealers snitched and got their sentences reduced, even though they were big time dealers. And they did not lose their possessions like we did. The system is set up so that people who turn in other people, even though they may be big dealers, receive less time than the smaller people. If you do not have someone to inform on, you are the one that will receive these lengthy prison sentences. And will receive more time than people with violent offenses. There was no violence in our case. These drug laws need to be reassessed. It does not make sense to sentence us drug dealers (where there is no violence involved) to more time than murderers, rapist, etc. Please re-evaluate these laws."

Pamela O'Hara Cooper (Inmate ID Number: 08087-021)
Sentenced to 40 years for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute a controlled substance, possession with intent to distribute cocaine and cocaine base, and using a firearm during a trafficking offense. 
Estimated release date: 11-19-2013

"My name is Pamela O'Hara Cooper. I was born in Waycross, GA. I was sentenced June 16, 1993. My only son, Benjamin Lashon Cooper, age 27, was also a first-time offender. I have two daughters, Juanita Perkins, age 26, and Alexis Cooper, age 13. When I was arrested, Alexis was 7, and now she will be 14 years old on Jan. 9th. We really don't know each other anymore. I talk to my son every 90 days. Juanita takes care of Alexis because my mother is 73. She can't take care of Alexis any more due to her age. Juanita has two kids of her own and a husband. She got married right after high school when I came to prison. My mother took care of Alexis until 3 months ago. Juanita took her because she said Alexis is the only family she has left. When I saw Alexis after five years at visitation, I didn't know who she was. I walked right past her. She had to call out to me. I've met my grand children once. This prison time has jurt my kids more than me. I missed Juanita's high school graduation, her getting married, and the birth of her two kids. Alexis is 13, the age when she needs me most. My son is growing up in prison. 

I have never sold drugs in my life. I got caught with drugs in my care because my boyfriend asked me to do him a favor. He asked me to go to Florida and pick up a package from my cousin. The gun charge is there because when I stepped off the train, the guy who picked me up was driving my car and my gun was in my glove compartment. I have never been to jail in my life until this happened. I've always carried my gun in my glove compartment and the gun was bought legal. It has never been used in my life. 

My life has little meaning... because my kids were my life. I have lost so much. What life I have left, with the length of time I have left to serve, my kids and grandchildren will be adults by the time I get out. And I wonder what will be left of my family by then?"

Evelyn Bozon Pappa (Inmate ID Number: 48576-004)
Sentenced to life for conspiracy
Estimated release date: Life 

"Mother of 4 children. In my case there was no violence and there was no money or drugs found in my possession. The main heavy duty dealers were never arrested, so I am here doing a Life sentence because the government couldn't arrest those people. My kids are having a hard time because I am not at home with them. How do you explain to a child that their mother is doing a Life sentence for drugs where there was no violence? I would like to be deported back to my country. Why should American taxpayers have to pay the cost of housing me for the rest of my life?"

Elainaise Mervil (Inmate ID Number: 20982-018)
Sentenced to 20 years for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine base and cocaine hydrochloride
Estimated release date: 08-07-2014

"I am a Haitian lady who has left 4 minor children behind to do this mandatory sentence. I have no criminal history. I am a first-time non-violent offender. It seems the government is tearing families apart and the children are the ones that are really made to suffer for this "War on Drugs." P.O.W.

I fell into the wrong crowd in Orlando, Florida. I have never had any problems with the law and only am now learning to read and write the English language. I am a native of the beautiful country of Haiti. I love America, but I believe that the judicial system needs some change and review.

Conspiracy is such an all-encompassing category that if no other charge may be brought forth, one is charged with conspiracy and subjected to the 10-year mandatory minimums which increase rapidly in direct proportion to hearsay evidence whether true or not true. It appears that a person who is found in possession of narcotics will receive less time than a person who was not found in possession of anything, since conspiracy seems like the only viable charge. Conspiracy was originally designed to target "king pins" who are usually sheltered by runners, etc. But what has happened instead is that the king pins are the ones who receive the most favorable deals since they have the most to provide to the government for substantial assistance motions as they possess many many contacts. The "little man" who does not know as much suffers since his assistance is not as valuable; hence, falling victim to the harsh treatment under the law by being required to serve a decade-plus in prison. 

Many times the information which ends up causing a person to be charged, or having to enter a plea agreement as the consequences would be tremendously worse, is unreliable and "puffed up" in an effort for the informant to receive a better deal. Quite often, the government will tell an informant: "if you give us this, etc., we will give you five years in jail, but if we can say it was 5 kilos instead of 5 grams we'll give you probation." Now, I ask you, which would be the sweeter deal?

Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated. I went to trial and lost. I received a sentence of 240 months. I had no information to provide the government and was unable to secure a deal so I was subjected to harsh sentencing guidelines.

Being away from my family has been punishment enough. If there was a lesson to be learned, I have learnt it. If one wants to know the true picture of my heart, just picture my baby being ripped from my arms as a two-month old infant. I have never seen her since. 

P.S. As I told you, I do not speak English and am just learning. When I was first interviewed, the officer testified I said certain incriminating evidence. At that time, I did not speak, read, or write English. Now you tell me how such an injustice occurred. Once the complaint states The United States of America vs. You, it is a downhill battle."

Theresa Brown (Inmate ID Number: 47478-004)
Sentence to life without parole for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine
Estimated release date: Life

"Yes, I'm incarcerated, but I think that the public should know that I've been convicted of a crime that had no supported evidence (meaning they had no crack cocaine). I've been sentence to life without parole because of co-defendants testimonies to help the government convict me so that they themselves would not receive a harsh penalty as myself. (They are called informants for the Government.) If you would like any information pertaining to my case please let me know. I'm ready to speak out, but I don't know who to contact or how to contact anyone. Thank you for yall support."

Irma Alred (Inmate ID Number: 03436-017)
Sentenced to 30 years, ten months for conspiracy to distribute marijuana
Estimated release date: 09-28-2020

"I was sentenced to 30 years and 10 months in prison to be followed by 10 years supervised release and a $25,000 fine. My charge was conspiracy to distribute marijuana along with my now ex-husband and his brother as well as some other people I didn't know who were with them when they had drug transactions. There was no evidence against me other than hearsay from people who were granted everything from immunity to 30 days home confinement for their testimony. We were all facing the same penalties under the federal sentencing guidelines. I proceeded to trial and was punished further by getting enhancements for a gun my codefendant had (which was also hearsay by the same man who admitted to being a cocaine abuser who would stand out in the pouring rain seeing things from too much drug use) and an enhancement to "king-pin" status. 

It's amazing how one can receive so much time behind bars for hearsay by people who stand to gain so much by lying. I just can't believe the government can tell somebody that you're going to jail for 30 years, but if you place blame on this other person, you'll only do 30 days on an electronic home monitoring system which you wear on your ankle. The probation officer advised against the fine because I don't have any money, but the judge assessed $25,000 anyway. Now I have to pay half of my prison wages (which began at 12 cents per hour) to the government.

The government tapped my phones and heard the word "jackets" and told the jury that jackets meant pounds of drugs. I owned a sewing business and jackets meant jackets. To make matters worse, I also owned acres of land and farmed crops and raised cattle. Any time I mentioned a vegetable or a cow, again, they told the jury it was all about drugs...

I've served six years and have to serve another 25 years. By then my children will be grandparents, if I live that long to see it happen."

@JLCT

Flying Lizards' Virgin press release photo, 1979. Photo by Richard Rayner-Canham

David Cunningham is known to many as the creator of the Flying Lizards, a band whose bizarre and wonderful cover version of "Money (That's What I Want)" became a weirdly gigantic hit in 1979. Today they remain a "post-modern" classic, and Cunningham has continued his work as a musician, artist, and producer, often turning up in unexpected places. He's performed with everyone from John Cage to Pan Sonic, produced and recorded bands as varied as This Heat, Snatch, and Jayne County and the Electric Chairs, produced music for Peter Greenaway's films and BBC television, and created simple, mind-blowing sound installations at places like the Tate Britain, ICC Tokyo, and random elevator lobbies of apartment buildings. He's conducted performances for multiple players in old London piano shops, and continues today with his behind-the-curtain, Dada/Fluxus-inspired approach.

I recently spoke with Cunningham about art, Marxism, contingency, using planks of wood to play pianos, rock bands vs. animals, how he almost launched Laurie Anderson's career, and what it's like to make "Money" by accident. 

David Cunningham playing Multispecies at the Botanical Gardens in Frankfurt, 2012. Photo by Dana Munro

Yeah, I remember Laurie Anderson's bizarre song "O Superman" went to number two on the British charts long before she was signed to Warner Brothers and was popular in the US. 
Yes, "O Superman" possibly had a similar sales pattern to "Money" in Britain, even though it's a more serious record. Curiously, "O Superman" was initially offered to me back then, for my small label Piano.

Really?
Yes, the connection was through Peter Gordon, who I knew and worked with, being friends with Laurie. One Ten Records, a small label in New York who had released her early work approached me for a UK release. I turned it down at the time because I thought it was brilliant, and couldn't have possibly coped with a massive hit on my little label. I thought "This song could be huge!" I ended up being right.

So "Money" became a big hit, which allowed you to do several albums. The Flying Lizards "group" was a kind of collective, with Robert Fripp, Viv Albertine of the Slits, Charles Hayward of This Heat, Michael Nyman, many others… were these people just your friends? It seems in late-70s London all these artists and bands just knew each other from around.
Yes, but only to some extent. For example, George from Aswad I didn't know, he was a friend of Vivien Goldman's. I remember her saying something like "You need a bit of real bass on this, your playing's rubbish, let's bring George in." And she did and he was terrific. Another way of connecting was I had begun recording for bands and producing them, and later I was helping manage This Heat and working with General Strike and hanging out with various bands, bits and bobs. Early on there was a Manchester band called Manicured Noise that I helped record. They dragged me to one of their supporting gigs and I did their live sound, which I'm not very good at but they seemed to like. The main band heard it and approached me to do their sound, and that was Marco Pirroni's band, before Adam joined them and they became Adam and the Ants. So, in a way you sort of did connect with everybody, but there were gaps. For instance I never knowingly met anyone out of The Clash, though they're good pals with Viv. 

Do you still keep in touch with the three main female vocalists from the Flying Lizards?
I don't see Patti Palladin as much as I should, I think the last time was about a year ago when I walked into a computer shop in Tottenham Court Road and I discovered her shouting at the sales guy behind the counter. She just grabbed me to help set him straight. We try and meet up occasionally. I saw Sally Peterson last year. 

Your 1977 solo album of experimental music "Grey Scale" is mostly piano-based. Your record label is called Piano. Pianos frame a lot of Flying Lizards’s songs. In 2006, you did an installation appropriately titled "A Piano In a Gallery" at Carter Presents. Last year you composed a piece titled "A Lot Of Pianos" for multiple players on old pianos laying around Markson Pianos shop in London. Do you have a fetish for Pianos?
Uh… I didn't think I did, but obviously I do. It's rather sad isn't it? [laughs]

Why?
My mother had one she rarely played. When I was five or six I loved fiddling about with the insides and realizing it could make all kinds of strange noises I'd never expected a piano could make. They're a pretty odd instrument in that all the notes are available without particularly hard work. You can't play all the notes on, say, a guitar at the same time, there's only the potential. If you had a piano keyboard and two planks of wood the right size, you could play all the notes on it with one big blast. Which, actually, is an idea I was thinking about again recently because someone asked me to play La Monte Young's "X for Henry Flynt," and I couldn't think of a way to play cluster notes "X" number of times without screwing up or cramping my fingers. I mean… I'm not a piano player.

Really?
I aspire to be. 

Patti Paladin and David Cunningham in 1981. Photo by DB Burkeman

I noticed a lot of your recorded work has an open-air, dissonant quality. I've read interviews where you talk about the open-air recording process on records like Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? and Joe Meek's Telstar. Do you think this process is still important in the age of digital recording and listening? 
Very much. Perhaps even more so now because the clarity can be better with digital recording. Hendrix’s engineer moved the overloaded microphone to the back of the studio to pick up the massive wall of amplifiers Jimi brought in, and that's how you get that wonderful sound of all that air moving about. Although, usually you can't use that type of ambient microphoning when you're recording a standard rock group, it ends up just a wash. But room sound with one instrument gives recordings a particularly idiosyncratic quality, depending on the room. For example, when recording a drum… what happens when you take the drum away? It's just the sound of the room. The unusual snare drum sound on "Money" was recorded in three different rooms. First Julian Marshall's front room, where we recorded the piano and a metronome. Then I took that up to this echo-y room where Charles Hayward's spare drum kit was sitting, and I overdubbed the drums, just hi-hat and snare. I wasn't getting a decent bass drum sound so that's actually the sound of a bass guitar being hit with a stick. Then the rest of the mixing was done at my studio, a kind of shed at the back of the artist's studio complex building in Brixton. The sound was enhanced by the air in the room really because I initially couldn't get the mic close enough to the drum. I achieved that recording quality because of a lack of cable length, and will power. 

Are accidents a large component of your work?
They must. It can't be talent. 

Ha! Can you talk a little bit about your Activated Space sound installations? They just look like empty rooms.
They consist of a microphone and various speakers in an empty gallery or indoor public space, which amplify the silence in the room and build up feedback around the standing waves of acoustic qualities of the space itself. The viewer walks through or experiences the sounds in the space, and becomes part of that situation as the sounds they cause bounces back to them. I'd always noticed the acoustic qualities of spaces, which can sometimes overpower any sound you make in them. For instance trying to speak loudly in an overly echo-y lecture hall. So, I realized there was something there to work with. It was an idea that didn’t quite happen until the right technology became available. Actually, all I did was take along a noise gate out of my studio, which controlled the feedback level. So it was something I’d always wanted to do to, a basic idea: use the sound of a space rather than imposing sound into it.  

I've always thought your Activated Space project, particularly “A Piano In a Gallery,” was the most legitimate answer I'd heard posed to the questions raised by John Cage's "4'33."
It's one answer, I don't think it's the only legitimate one. There are many answers. Like much of Cage's work, "4'33"" is a piece of philosophy, it addresses the act of listening 100 percent. Cage's music was getting quieter after 1945. I read somewhere a reference that World War II was like "a terrible noise," and I think that piece might have been a logical conclusion of that reaction. If it's true, then the generation of musicians a bit older than me, artists like La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and later with my generation and people like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, they could all start filling in that silence with something completely different. Historically, I see a real logic to the flow of all that stuff. "4'33"" is a brilliant work, but two years ago at Christmas in Britain there was record called "Cage Against the Machine" by a large group of musicians, like a Band Aid or Live Aid or something, sitting in a studio along to four minutes thirty-three seconds of amplifier hum, probably very expensively recorded in a west London studio. There was a big push to get it on the UK charts for the Christmas record, yet another novelty record. It was just a dreadful way of doing it. So, see? There are a lot of answers to Cage's "4'33"," even arsey, pose-y ones!

Do you think everyday background noise has changed in the last thirty years?
In the last thirty years? Yes, but it's hard to quantify. There was a great undertaking called the Vancouver Soundscape Project in the 1970s, later the World Soundscape Project, based in Switzerland. It came out of the work of a writer named R. Murray Schafer. They researched the everyday soundscape, for example measuring fire engine bells from two centuries ago, intermediately up to the 1960s. They noticed a logarithmic increase in the volume of fire engines, and thereby predicted by now that a fire engine would be emitting a sound beyond the threshold of pain. I think they've gotten as loud as they can so now they have to work on differentiating properties of the sound other than volume to make it stand out, otherwise everyone will just get deafened and the fire engine will still be stuck in traffic. I think as things around us get louder it becomes about practice over power.

RPM recently released remastered, deluxe versions of the first two Flying Lizards albums. Staubgold re-released your General Strike album Danger In Paradise last year, and will soon be re-releasing Ghost Dance, your band with Michael Giles and Jamie Muir. All through this you've continued with your installation pieces and your "A Lot Of Pianos" concert, and been performing with artists like Yasuaki Shimizu and Rie Nakajima, and producing acts like Martin Creed. What have you been working on most recently? 
I've been working with animals.

Really?
It's a project titled Multispecies. Two years ago the artist Paola Pivi asked me to perform at a recording studio she'd set up in a former bank building in Rotterdam, along with a library of 43 hours of animal sounds. My performance was playing along with them on my guitar using tons of delays, with the two running as parallel textures. It ended up being a four-hour performance. Since I'd just dumped the animal sounds into iTunes and they came up randomly, I had to guess a lot of the time, like Is this guitar bit going to work with a humpback whale? Or realizing that flangers work well with howler monkeys. I did an even longer version at the Botanic Gardens in Germany, and one in Edinburgh. I really liked the recordings, so back in London I edited them together and divided it into sections by animal, something like Here we have the blue whale… next up it's the red-crested sage warbler. And my guitar playing is alongside it all. It's very long. I'm talking to the Staubgold label about an online release of it.

I heard a recording of it. It’s beautiful, but also like listening to a lecture in biology class. Is this a new direction for you?
Multispecies is kind of like working with musicians again. Any of the given animal species in the series are interested only in three things: food, sex and territory. Just like a proper rock band.

Would you ever revive the Flying Lizards?
I wouldn't say no. Although it mostly feels redundant in terms of what's going on now. Then again, if something struck me I might, like if I could think of something better than that "Gangnam Style" thing from two years ago.

Do you feel there's a sense of mockery in everything you do? 
Not at all. Not from where I'm concerned. The Flying Lizards' "Summertime Blues" for instance, I was not even realizing my deficiencies as a drummer on it one bit. Also, I remember thinking, There's no way this girl is going to sound like Tina Turner, I'd better just get her to do what she does best. Then "Money" followed that formula. If there's mockery in those works it's not planned.

So accidents over mockery?
Yes, accidents and contingency. Dealing with the materials that are at hand.

Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School, Saskatchewan. via WikiCommons.

The Canadian government has stated they won’t be offering an apology to First Nations people from a number of northern communities, who were unknowingly and unwillingly the subjects of medical experiments.

Last month, Dr. Ian Mosby, a Canadian historian from the University of Guelph, published a paper that exposed and examined experiments that were conducted throughout the 40s and 50s on both adults and children throughout at least eight First Nations communities across northern Manitoba, B.C. and Ontario.

Over 1,300 subjects, most of whom were children attending residential schools—who as wards of the state had no real say on what could or could not be done to them—were put through tests that studied the malnourished human body. The experiments were headed up by medical researchers, one of which was Dr. Frederick Tisdall the co-inventor of the baby food Pablum, and were consistently funded by the federal government.

In his paper Mosby writes, “Bureaucrats, doctors, and scientists recognized the problems of hunger and malnutrition, yet increasingly came to view Aboriginal bodies as ‘experimental materials,’ and residential schools and Aboriginal communities as kinds of ‘laboratories’ that they could use to pursue a number of different political and professional interests.”

There were two angles to the study: One was to determine if nutritional supplements could replace food as sufficient fortification to starving bodies, and the other was geared towards solving that thorn-in-the side of the “Indian Problem,” hypothesizing that, maybe, if they weren’t so hungry all the time and could subsist with the help of vitamin supplements, the Indians would smarten up, get healthy and assimilate. As Mosby puts it, “Nutrition offered a new explanation for—and novel solution to—the so-called ‘Indian Problem’ of susceptibility to disease and economic dependency.”

For these studies to be done effectively, benchmarks were needed—which meant that some would receive care and others would stay neglected. There are documented cases of schools withholding milk rations so scientists could get a baseline of malnourishment. In other cases, half the student population would receive iron and iodine supplements while the other half wouldn’t. And in most instances, because studying teeth and gums was a measuring stick of nutritional health, all dental care was revoked, as it would interfere with the indicators of the study. One man who has spoken out about being subject to these experiments recalled his adult teeth falling out when he was only 11. 

One of the schools that these experiments took place at was the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora. Just last week, it came to light that at Cecilia Jeffrey not only were students subjected to nutritional experiments, but it was also the site of experimental ear-infection treatments that tried up to 14 different drugs and treatment methods on aboriginal students—including teaching students to flush their own ears out with hot water using modified enema equipment, having earwax removed with syringes, and being given nose drops to treat “mouth breathing”

Ian Mosby has stated that even at the time, these studies being conducted on unknowing and unwilling human subjects would have been perceived as all kinds of fucked up. And, the fact they took place in the same decade the Nuremberg Code was being established makes them that much more troubling.

Since these experiments have been exposed, First Nations groups are understandably outraged. However, while both the United and Presbyterian churches have been up-front and apologetic about the role their institutions played, the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Indian Affairs has treated it as old-hat, acting relatively blasé about the whole issue. "The apology itself that the Prime Minister made looked at the Indian Residential School as a dark chapter in Canada's history,” states Kenora’s Conservative MP Greg Rickford, “it included a number of activities that were regrettable, unfortunate, and for which an apology accounts for.”

But the difference between these experiments being done, and, for example, the withholding of documents related to the electric chair at St. Anne’s Residential School—is that these experiments were sanctioned by the federal government and politically reinforced as sound, rational and ethical policy.

This wasn’t an isolated, unfortunate incident of abuse suffered in one school at the hands of a few twisted nuns or priests—this was government mandate. It’s unsettling to read even more evidence of the Canadian government’s systemic attempt to solve the ‘Indian Problem,’ as we learn more about what essentially amounts to a genocide seeping through Canada’s often crisp, white table-clothed perception of our national historic identity.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @ddner

More on the residential schools issue:

The Canadian Government Is Withholding Documents Concering the Torture of Native Children

The Wildly Depressing History of Canadian Residential Schools

Select "English subtitles" in the rare event that you don't speak Korean.

"Ttongsul" is a Korean rice wine mixed with the fermented turd of a human child and has an alcoholic content of around 9 percent. Little is known about the origins of what is surely one of the world's most bizarre and gag-inducing medicines. A quick "Ttongsul" Google search will provide you with little more than internet-land hearsay and a flimsy Wikipedia page.

Intrigued, we set out to discover if the rumours were true and to our astonishment found a traditional Korean medicine doctor who claims to be one of the last people who knows how to make "faeces wine". Dr Lee Chang Soo's face was tinged with sadness when he told us of his regret that faeces is no longer widely utilised in Eastern medicine. The use of human and animal faeces for medicinal purposes can be traced back centuries in Korea. Ancient Korean medicine books claim that it heals bad bruising, cuts, broken bones and is even an effective remedy for epilepsy.

It's worth pointing out that the average person in modern-day South Korea would have have no clue what Ttongsul is. The drink is believed to have pretty much disappeared by the 1960s as South Korea began its long journey towards First World modernity and Western medicines became more popular.

Even so, old habits die hard and it's rumoured that a small number of Koreans still swear by the pungent booze. VICE Japan correspondent Yuka Uchida travelled from Tokyo to Seoul in order to sample some vintage faeces wine for herself. As far as we know, this is the first time that the making of Ttongsul has ever been documented on film.

I sense Michaella McCollum Connolly may regret deciding to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "La Vie Est Belle" as she headed towards the departures hall of Lima airport. It is very important, when ferrying drugs between countries on the orders of sinister Cockneys who’ve spent weeks grooming you, that you don’t wear any slogans or clothing that may later seem "ironic" when your family sees the looped clip of you being paraded before the cameras on Sky News. For her, it now seems that La Vie Est Terrible. Certainly the next three or four years, depending on how Peruvian justice perceives their version of events.

The girls say they met a man from London in Ibiza. They say he relieved them of their passports and handed them over to a Peruvian drugs gang, who flew them to South America and coerced them into muling £1.5 million pounds' worth of coke with guns and dossiers on their families back home in Belfast and Glasgow. But the blinding bit of T-shirt irony is the one thing that’s really remarkable about this case. Otherwise this had all the classic hallmarks of a British drug mule nabbing. We’ve seen this story so often now it has its own cinematic language. Mainly because it’s one of those stories that is always at its end by the time we get to it. It’s never a "developing" story. It has developed. It is over. They’re nabbed. Done. Now they just need to get their pictures taken and for their family to lodge a doomed appeal to the Foreign Office for repatriation.

The British-drugs-mule-nabbed pageant has many moves, but it always turns out the same in the end.

Act 1: The Watching Public's Sense of Second-Hand Terror As the Mules Realise They're Stuck in a Foreign Country and That No One There Gives a Shit About Them
Peruvian police didn't waste any time releasing footage of the pair being caught. Michaella, a native of Belfast, and her friend, Melissa Reid, 19 and Scottish, looked like they’d just been called into the headmaster’s office for burning down the school. It's a moment of stunning emotional nudity – you can almost pinpoint the exact instant where two young women suddenly become certain of the enormity of what lays ahead. “Oh yeah…” their faces decree. “We might have had a future about an hour ago...” Of course, Michaella and Melissa could not have known that the friends they were making on holiday had links to South American drug cartels. But in the same way that Herzog’s text-n-drive film will scare you into keeping the phone in the glovebox, this video should be used to convince kids that getting chummy with strange Ibiza sugar daddies is generally a bad idea.

Act 2: The Media's Inevitable Trawling of Facebook for "Background"
Michaella of all people really should have understood the dress-sense thing. The Facebook pictures the tabloids dug up all show her in a series of get-ups crafted to land somewhere between Blade Runner, manga cosplay and every Kardashian-worshipping 16-year-old’s best duckface. She’d picked out her Facebook profile pics with the sort of image-making intensity only the heroically self-involved can muster. No one can be expected to make the right fashion choices when they've got an angry South American pressing a gun to their temple, yet short of wearing a picture of Alfred E. Neuman with "What, Me, Worry?" scribbled on it in Comic Sans, she couldn’t have made a grander sartorial misstep.

Act 3: Images Are Released of the Cocaine Itself, Standing There Proudly Before the Cameras Despite All the Trouble and Misery It Has Caused
Soon, the cameras rolled through the traditional cutting-open-of-the bags ceremony. The swabbing. The weighing. The 18 packets of cocaine that border guards found in the duo's luggage were mainly wrapped in Quaker Oats packets. Despite the elaborate production values of their mule job, no one seems to have made the point that if you are taking several bags of Quaker Oats through customs, people are going to get suspicious. They will probably throw you in jail even if it just turns out to be Quaker Oats, because, well… what sort of pervert needs 18 bags of Quaker Oats for a single plane journey? It's almost as if the Peruvian cartel wanted the girls to get caught and they were just a decoy. Wait...

Act 4: The Giddying Sense of an Expanded World Suddenly Contracting
Michaella said she had been "hostessing" in Ibiza. This was clearly her summer of personal reinvention: the big life moment of liberation from childhood and rebirth in the white heat of the White Isle party season. She was being cool, doing awesomely, thanks very much. Every week going cooler places, meeting cooler people, as her friendly neighbourhood drug gangs shone the sparkly light of $$$ in her eyes. Come to another boat party. Have some more clothes. Have some more drinks. This is how things are in the adult world and she was self-evidently brilliant at the whole adulthood thing. Until…

I once interviewed a drug mule. A tiny middle-aged woman who lived in the baddest badlands of Cape Town. She’d needed some money for an emergency, a Nigerian gentleman and his friends had been there to provide it, and later, there was payback. They took her shopping. Put her in the fanciest clothes they could find. And then sent her off to Brazil. In order to deflect suspicion, they’d given her a bundle of cash, and told her to take ten days holiday before returning to consume her final meal of condoms.

I wondered how this woman who’d never left Cape Town must’ve felt in that ten-day eye of the storm. How her head must’ve expanded as she realised that there was a whole world out there, full of fabulous stuff she’d never dreamed of. I thought about her prowling round her posh hotel room at 1AM in a complimentary dressing gown, high on general over-stimulation, quietly goggling at the room service and satellite TV. Then I thought about how her world would have equally rapidly shrunk again, but this time to the size of a prison cell. All she really could find to say on the subject when I spoke to her some years later was that the holiday was "very nice". The sum for which she risked her life and spent the better part of a decade in jail? About £1,000.

Drug gangs are like evil fucking crocodiles eating popcorn the way they can afford to chew through these people.

Act 5: The National Stomach-Churn at the Prospect of a "Hellhole" Foreign Jail
At least that lady's relatives back home knew that Brazilian jails could be no worse than South African ones. Michaella and Melissa, on the other hand, are in danger of spending some time in what the British press are already insisting on calling a "hellhole". Sadly, this sort of colonial mentality seems hard to break away from. They definitely have wi-fi in Peru, and decent libraries, and a bill of rights, and food hygiene inspectors, and it’s actually possible that many of their prisons are, not twee exactly, but really kind of OK in the grander scheme of things. But for our journalists, the words "foreign prison" are surgically attached to the word "hellhole". You wonder sometimes whether, when foreigners find themselves incarcerated in British jails, their press shivers with disgust too. They force you to watch snooker on TV in there. They make you roll your own cigarettes. I tell you: some of the MPs you meet in there, brother... you don’t even wanna know what Chris Huhne’s like close-up.

Act 6: The Mortified Family Outraged at the Foreign Office's Inability to Conjure Up Fantasy Justice
We’ve already heard murmurings from the girls’ families. Naturally, they are still sure this is all one big misunderstanding that will be cleared up soon enough. (“Now listen here, Peru... I don’t know what you think you’re doing with my daughter, but it’s time for her to come home…”) We’ve yet to enter the next phase, where they do the only thing they can do, bar wait until 2040 for justice to run its course: start campaigns to get the girls re-patriated. With minor crimes, this can work. With drugs? Almost never. Yet knowing that has never stopped a Facebook group from forming. There’s presently a British grandmother on death row in Bali. Is William Hague sending a gunboat to Java to bring her back? Nope.

There are 40 Britons on death row in strung-out parts of the globe. Twelve just for drugs. It's a desperately depressing state of affairs but the HM Government seem prepared to lose a few here and there, and drugs is never a battle they feel like fighting. We all like to believe we live in an omnipotent bastion of civilisation but The Foreign Office is not every British citizen’s super-daddy. It can’t make it all better. It can’t drive 50 miles to pick you up from Luton on a Friday night because you missed the last train, no matter your excuse.

For now, Michaella and Melissa remain holed up in a maximum-security police station in Lima. You'd hope, really, that their muling story has a redemptive seventh act.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Illustration by Marta Parszeniew.

Previously – Crap Celebrities Are Pretending to 'Like' Stuff On the Internet for Money

Enjoy reading about drugs? Try these:

We Need to Talk About London's Club Drug Problem

Cyber Criminals Hate Brian Krebs So Much They're Sending Heroin and SWAT Teams to His Home

Will Laughing Gas Be the Next Casualty in the Government's War On Legal Highs?

Tommy Swerdlow Talks About Writing ‘Cool Runnings’ and ‘Snow Dogs’ While High on Heroin

Men walk by posters of Mohamed Morsi and martyrs at the Muslim Brotherhood sit-in at Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque, days before the military stormed the camp. All photos by Mat Wolf

This morning, the Egyptian Army finally followed through on threats it had been making for days and launched a full-scale assault on Muslim Brotherhood protest camps, including the main one at at Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in Cairo’s Nasr City district. For the past month, thousands of supporters of recently deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi had been holding sit-ins to protest his ouster by the military after widespread protests, and even before this latest incident, there had been clashes between government security forces and protesters that left as many as 130 dead. The Egyptian government claims 13 people have been killed in today’s violence, but that number is probably much too low. Protesters fleeing the sit-ins fought back by throwing stones and bottles and lighting fires, but obviously they are no match for the army’s machine guns, tanks, and tear gas.

In the days leading up to the brutal crackdown, Egypt’s liberals called for the military to act more aggressively on the sit-ins, and the Rabaa camp was accused of being a terrorist camp harboring foreign fighters where immoral sexual activities and child abuse took place. Though some international organizations refuted those claims, Amnesty International found evidence that the Brotherhood was torturing their political opponents. Some protesters decided to push back against these rumors by inviting anyone who was interested to come in and have a look around.

Last week, while protesters were preparing for their inevitable confrontation with the army, I went on the Rabaa Tour, a youthcentric, English-language showcase of the Brotherhood sit-in. It was an attempt to circumvent traditional media channels, which are largely controlled by the government (just after Morsi was pushed out of office, Islamist TV stations were taken off the air). The tour’s founder, Mohamed Zain, joined with about 15 other Brotherhood supporters a few weeks ago to set up the tour along with a slick Facebook page that featured videos and photos of protesters and the tagline “Heard enough? Time to see.”

A man holds a sign praising Mohamed Morsi and calling for the death of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the commander of Egypt's armed forces.

“A lot of rumors are being spread across the media, local media specifically,” Mohamed told me. “[They claim] the sit-in is armed, we have weapons inside, we’re violent, and the government right now is at war against terrorism, which is actually not true.”

Mohamed was a far cry in appearance and attitude from the stereotypical image of a long-bearded member of the Brotherhood. When I spoke to him, the 27-year-old, who’s a pharmacist by training, was dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans and never took his phone’s ear bud out. He said he’s not even that political and that he’s in favor of the sit-in because he can’t support the nondemocratic military coup that ousted Morsi. He also insists that most of the camp is like him: not so much pro-Brotherhood as anti-coup. He estimates only a quarter of those at the sit-in are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

“A lot of the people who are participating in the sit-in aren’t political, they’re not coming from a political perspective,” he said. “They’re coming from a human rights perspective, to practice democracy.”

I had the chance to walk around the encampment unaccompanied before I spoke to him, and I have to say that it seems like Mohamed was downplaying the Brotherhood presence. Not everyone with a beard belongs to the Brotherhood, but the camp was hardly populated by progressive, secular democracy advocates. Signs calling for the execution of Egyptian Army head General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi were held high, as were banners proclaiming that the coup was a plot hatched by Zionists and Americans. (These kinds of accusations and demands aren’t uncommon at other anti-Morsi protests.) 

The outskirts of the camp were being fortified with hasty barricades of brick, sandbags, and even concrete in anticipation of the coming showdown with the military. I saw many women and children, and, bizarrely, a giant bounce pit and a kiddie pool near one of the main entrances. The kids looked like they were having fun, but the inflatable playground right next to the barricades didn’t do anything to counter rumors that the women and kids are being kept here as human shields. I didn’t see any weapons though, or signs of torture rooms, and to be honest, the Brotherhood guys were actually pretty friendly and nonconfrontational. Everyone who entered was frisked for weapons, but the middle-aged bearded man conducting my pat-down apologized that it was necessary and even shook my hand when he finished. 

Except for the banners, for the most part the camp could have been a really depressing county fair. There were food and drink stand set up on the curbs, and a lot of canvas and plastic tarp tents sitting out in the midday heat, under which most of the protesters lounged. Children ran about spraying people with water bottles. Pick-up games of soccer and volleyball, along with continuous, mostly gender-segregated marches seemed to be the major activities outside of reinforcing barricades. It's hard to believe that this was an encampment full of violent terrorists as the Brotherhood’s opponents and the government alleged.

The tent that served as the Rabaa Tour's headquarters, which was covered with illustrations of martyrs.

When I originally reached out to Rabaa Tour I was told to meet Mohamed at the “big white tent covered in the faces of martyrs.” They said it would be easy to find, but this wasn’t the case—I had a lot of big white tents covered in the faces of martyrs to choose from. When I finally found the right tent I walked in to a space filled with benches lined up in front of a flatscreen TV the tour uses to show videos of military injustices. The bloated and bloodied portraits of martyrs killed and injured by government forces were hung along the sides of the tent, along with what I was told were the blood-covered sneakers one of the shooting victims.

Mohamed introduced me to Omaima Halawa, 21, and Noha El Eraki, 22, two Egyptian women who have spent much of their lives living and studying in Ireland but came back to Egypt to participate in the protests. Omaima said (in perfect, Irish-accented English) she was here of her own free will and isn’t a human shield, and added that she butted heads with her parents when she insisted on coming. For her, protesting at Rabaa al-Adawiya wasn't just a right but a duty.

“The idea is that we’ve practiced democracy in Ireland and so not being able to practice it here, I was sort of like, Oh my God, we have to wake up, this is actually serious!” she told me. “Even if we’re not political, this is about a democracy situation right now… it’s about our rights as humans.”

Noha also reinforced Mohamed’s thesis that the sit-ins weren't exclusively about supporting the Brotherhood.

“I don’t really want to say anything bad about [the Muslim Brotherhood], but I don’t always agree with them. We have small disagreements; I’m not willing to commit myself to them,” she said. “I don’t know why they go around making this about the Muslim Brotherhood—it’s so far beyond that, it’s much bigger than that.”

A display of photographs of martyrs killed and wounded by government forces inside the Rabaa Tour tent.

After we left the tent I was told I could go wherever I wanted, but I should definitely check out the medical center and the main stage area. According to the tour guide, it’s under this stage that Rabaa al-Adawiya critics claimed the camp hides its weapons and torture cells. Of course, there were no weapons there, at least not when I visited, just sleeping quarters. One of the men inside told me the weapon stories are a joke; in fact, it’s the anti-Morsi camp in Tahrir Square that’s armed, he said. I replied that I’ve been to that camp too, and didn’t see any weapons. He shrugged. Like the banners about Zionists, these kind of accusations seem to be part of the general milieu of distrust in Egypt.

I visited the makeshift field hospital next and spoke to Ahmed Abu Zeid, a British-trained doctor who told me all about the horrors of the police shootings. “The first patient I had was a 16-year-old boy shot between his eyes… that’s not an accident, that’s a sniper,” he said. He pointed to his head, then to his chest, and said that every wound he treated was in one of those places, proof that the police were aiming for “kill zones.”

“I couldn’t save him, he died,” Ahmed said of the 16-year-old. “I came back from [the operating room] and found five or six patients waiting for me, all with direct gunshots to their heads. It was far beyond our capabilities.” 

Children play on playground equipment. Some have alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood has women and children in the camp to act as human shields.

Most the other stops on the tour were innocuous, even a little goofy. Mohamed took me to one man who was raising chickens and ducks in the camp. He made a display saying even his birds are against the coup. The Egyptians surrounding the stand found this hilarious, but the humor was lost on me.

My visit coincided with the final day of Ramadan fasting, and I was invited to attend the evening’s iftar meal. I gorged on chicken and goat along with the Rabaa Tour volunteers and their friends and families. Many of them live and study in Ireland and England, and it was a friendly, young, intellectual crowd. They came across as concerned citizens who were appalled that the democracy they were promised in 2011 and the government they voted for in 2012 were both swept away in a military coup. If these were the terrorist torture mercenaries the government made them out to be, instigators so dangerous that they needed to be dealt with using the maximum amount of force available, they were hiding their true identities really well. I hope they are safe now.

Mat Wolf is an Cairo-based freelance journalist who focuses on themes of culture, conflict, religion, and politics. He hails from the American Pacific Northwest.

More on Egypt:

The Place Women Go to Get Raped

Egypt After Morsi

The VICE Podcast Show with Michael Wahid Hanna

Amanda Feilding trepanning herself.

There are plenty of ways to achieve a higher state of consciousness. Most of them involve ingesting some kind of psychoactive substance, or getting in a white tank filled with water, or sitting in front of a flashing light while listening to trance music. But as far as I know, only one requires you to drill a hole into your forehead.

Trepanation, a procedure where a small hole is drilled into the skull and left to heal naturally, can reportedly produce a prolonged positive effect on the trepanned individual's mood and overall state of well-being. There's little hard scientific evidence that doing this has any tangible benefits, but people have been doing it for tens of thousands of years, so there has to be a reason they keep coming back to the tried and true method of inserting pieces of metal into the front of their skulls.  

Amanda Feilding is the director of the Beckley Foundation, an organization that for over a decade has been carrying out research into consciousness. Her work spans the entire mind-altering spectrum, from cannabis and LSD to Buddhist meditation, and she's been looking into the physiological effects of trepanation for a long time. In the early 1970s, Amanda trepanned herself when she couldn't find a doctor to do it for her, and has since become somewhat of an authority on the practice.

I visited Amanda's home on the outskirts of Oxford, England, to talk about trepanation and how she carried out the operation on herself.

Amanda in 2012.

VICE: So Amanda, can you give me a short history of trepanation?
Amanda Feilding: Trepanation is the oldest surgical operation in the world, dating back to at least 10,000 BC, and has been carried out by independent civilizations in nearly every continent on the planet. From South America to Neolithic Europe, the practice has a rich and diverse history. Shiva, the Hindu god of altered consciousness, was trepanned; it was done by monks in Tibet and up to the modern day in Africa.

What do you mean by "modern day"?
The 20th century. I knew someone from Nigeria in the 60s who said that, when he was 13, the "hip" boys of the village went out with the shaman and got trepanned.

Did it have a legitimate medicinal purpose?
Absolutely. These civilizations couldn’t hypothesize scientifically on the physiology behind trepanation, so they gave it their own esoteric explanation. In other places it was described as "letting light in" or "letting devils out." It has been successfully used to treat chronic headaches, epilepsy, and migraines, and it was surprisingly common until the First World War, when doctors started doing lobotomies—that’s when it was suddenly seen as a primitive practice. My father’s encyclopedia from 1912 says that trepanation was being increasingly used in the treatment of mental disorders. In fact, it's still regularly used today to enter the brain for operations, but the hole is often filled.

Did it have a religious significance?
For some, trepanation was a ritualistic practice in which the shamans, the kings, and the priests were trepanned. I'd suggest this was because, particularly in South American societies, these were the ones taking psychoactive drugs. The lifting of the baseline brought about by trepanation gave them less of a distance to come down from after the drugs wore off.

You trepanned yourself. What attracted you to it?
In the 60s I was doing a lot of work on comparative religions and mysticism, and I heard of a Dutch scientist who had trepanned himself and had a theory of the underlying physiological changes brought about by it. I didn’t know him before he was trepanned, which meant I didn’t know what changes had come about. Even though I was interested in trepanation, I wasn’t particularly concerned with having it done myself.

But I had another friend who did it and I noticed a definite change in him that was very subtle—a mellowing, a lessening of the neurotic behavior that we all have. I knew him exceptionally well and did notice a difference. Later, another friend had it done who had chronic headaches that caused him to lose a day or two a week, but he hasn’t had those headaches for the last 30 years [since he was trepanned]. I started to seek out a doctor who would trepan me, including a doctor to the royal family who was very interested. In fact, he had a hole in his head from an accident as a child. After four years of unsuccessful searching, I decided to do it myself.

A trepanned skull found in Peru. Photo via

What sort of preparations did you make?
I was obviously very cautious and prepared myself very carefully. I used an electrical drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal, and tested the drill head on the membranes of my hand to see if it would damage the skin. The whole thing was carefully prepared, but more than anything I prepared myself psychologically. It’s the last thing you want to do.

Yeah, drilling a hole in your head kind of goes against every instinct.
Then I thought I’d make a film about it, being an artist. It was useful making the film, because it felt like I was separating myself from the situation and taking a step away.

So you’ve got the physical anesthetic, then the mental anesthetic of treating it as a piece of artwork.
Yeah, it was effective. After I'd performed the procedure, I wrapped up my head with a scarf, had a steak to replace iron from the lost blood, and went to a party. It doesn’t set you back at all, it doesn’t incapacitate you. It’s just a half-hour operation. But in no way am I advocating the idea of self-trepanation; it should always be carried out by members of the medical profession.

How did you feel after the procedure?
I described it at the time as feeling like the tide coming in: there was a feeling of rising, slowly and gently, to levels that felt good, very subtle. One very clear thing I noticed was the change in the dream pattern: my dreams became much less anxious—that was quite noticeable. Could all of that be described as a placebo? There is, of course, that possibility, and I am very conscious of that. I have to say I noticed enough of a change to keep me interested, and noticed it in the people who I knew well who also got trepanned. I noticed a fundamental change in all of them.

So what’s the main premise behind trepanation?
When a baby is born, the top of the skull is very soft and flexible. First, the fontanelle [the soft area on the top of the skull] closes, then the skull bones close, which inhibits the full pulsation of the heartbeat, so it is denied its full expression in the brain, so to speak. That loss of "pulse pressure" results in a change of ratio between the two fluids in the brain: blood and cerebral spinal fluid. It is blood that feeds the brain cells with what they need, such as glucose and oxygen. The cerebral spinal fluid removes some of the toxic molecules.

Trepanation works by restoring the full pulse pressure of the heartbeat. Then the capillaries slightly blow up and squeeze out an equal amount of the cerebral spinal fluid. When the circulation becomes sluggish [when not enough cerebral spinal fluid is being pumped into the brain], stagnant pools can build up and this can contribute to the onset of diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.

A 17th-century trepanation kit given to Amanda as a gift.

After setting up the Beckley Foundation, you started to work on research into the effects and possible benefits of trepanation. What things did you investigate?
The research that I’ve been doing with the Russian scientist professor [Yuri] Moskalenko involved observing patients who were being trepanned for other operations and what happened when the bone was removed and not replaced. It did provide more blood to the brain and, with those subjects who had their hole filled, [blood flow] then decreased. It's clear that making the hole increases the cerebral circulation and that closing it diminishes it. But research with a healthy population is needed.

The second piece of research we did was with people with varying stages of Alzheimer’s. It showed that these people's cerebral spinal fluid had much lower mobility than someone who had a "healthy" cerebral circulation. It wasn’t a lack of blood in the brain of these patients that was the problem, it was a lack of washing out of the toxic molecules by cerebral spinal fluid. This research contributed to the development of a device that can measure these things, possibly acting as an early warning signal for brain diseases.

Whether trepanation can act as a preventive measure to combat these diseases, and whether it has other effects, is research that I would love to conduct in the future. This is still a hypothesis, one which isn't provable at the moment because I don’t think we have the instrumentation to fully investigate it yet. But it seems that this is what trepanation has historically been used for, even if the people doing it at the time didn’t understand the reasoning behind it. The research we did on trepanation, which was only done on about 15 people, is not nearly enough to make any concrete scientific claims. We need more research with more people.

Would you be doing the research even if you weren’t trepanned?
Yes, I think so. But I suppose that my personal experience of getting trepanned—which I, of course, would not put total faith in—gave me the feeling that it is worthy of research.

How are you going about doing that research?
It’s difficult: although it’s not illegal to trepan, it’s not exactly legal, either. It’s a catch-22. You can’t get the research authorized because there’s not enough evidence to support it, but you can’t get the evidence without research. I think it's strange that people can get sex changes but not trepanation—a simple operation. We should research this simple operation that could increase consciousness.

Amanda's campaign poster for her campaigns for Parliament in 1979 and 1983.

Do you see it becoming legal in the future?
I definitely do. I see it particularly in countries that are more familiar with the idea of consciousness, like Brazil or India.

Didn't you try to make trepanation available on the UK's National Health Service?
I stood for Parliament in Chelsea on the platform "Trepanation for the National Health." I didn’t intend to get voted in; it was more of an art project. My intention was to try to get the medical profession to agree that this is an interesting subject and is worthy of research.

Over the past 40 years I’ve got used to fighting the prejudice around trepanation, and I’ve never really understood the taboo around it. I feel society is not doing itself any favors by making this a taboo, and I think the best thing that we can do is gain as much knowledge as we can about altered states of consciousness and how we can apply them for the good of mankind. In traditional societies, which are much closer to consciousness, they recognize the shamanic process, the process of changing consciousness, whether that’s fasting or dancing or the ingestion of psychoactive substances. They recognize that it’s a very important part of society and deciding which way to go with decisions.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

More experiments in consciousness:

This Woman Is Living on Water, Tea, and Light for 100 Days

New Frontiers of Sobriety

Interviews with People Who Just Smoked DMT

Nearly a thousand people showed up again to rally in response to the shooting death of Sammy Yatim, the 18-year-old who was shot nine times by Toronto Police officer, James Forcillo, then tazed by an unknown sargeant. 

It was the second rally (the first one happened two weeks ago) held in his honour. It began in Dundas Square, just blocks from where the shooting had taken place, and then proceeded to Toronto Police Headquarters.

The crowd was determined as ever to have their point heard. Popular chants carried over from the last rally, such as: “Justice For Sammy,” and “No Justice No Peace,” and “Cops are Murderers,” but some people also shouted: “Kill the Police.” (It was meant to be ‘jail’) while uniformed officers lined the streets.

A large red sign floated above the crowd that read: Disarm The Police. This sentiment was at the heart of the protest. 

Tuesday’s crowd wanted justice Sammy, but they also wanted justice for anyone else whose been victimized by police. They seemed to want, more than anything, police accountability.  

“My dad was gunned down by police on Boxing Day in 1992. Police should not be able to get away with this, but they always do and it needs to stop,” said Tony Vega who marched alongside his grandfather.

All police involved in death of Vega’s father were exonerated and his hope was that “this doesn’t happen with this case too.”

Other people who had lost loved ones to police shootings marched amongst the crowd with pictures of the deceased.

Pricilla Aldaz held up a large sign that listed nine people who had been fatally shot by police officers and who had also suffered with schizophrenia. Sammy Yatim was number nine on the list. 

“Sammy was an amazing dude,” said 23-year-old Josh Romoo who was living with Sammy at the time of his death and had had breakfast with him that morning.

“He was just getting his life started, he was eager to learn and wasn’t a rough guy at all. Hopefully we get justice.”

There were mixed ideas in the crowd on how to make police accountable. Some believed total disarmament was necessary.

 “We need to re-examine police regulations and the role they play in society. They continue to kill agitated people and get away with it. We need to take away their weapons,” said 32-year-old social worker, Patrick Clohessy.

When the crowd arrived outside police headquarters, a board meeting was just getting started.

Video by Michael Toledano for VICE Canada.

In a brief address to the small crowd inside the room a member of Toronto Police Services Board stated: “While the Board will respect and uphold the law, it will remain actively involved in efforts to improve policing services to people with mental illness, to do everything in its power to find ways to prevent death.”

Outside the chanting continued.

People wore shirts that read: Protect us from our Protectors. One man held a donut on a fishing reel and waved it in front of officers.

“Why would a cop shoot Sammy when they had the upper hand against a kid that was only 110 pounds?” asked 15-year-old student, Meryan Agtes who had come to protest with her friends.

“Police policing police isn’t right!” echoed through the sea of protestors.

“They will exonerate this cop, I guarantee it," said Robert Chinnery, whose son was fatally shot by police in 2011. 

Unfortunately for everyone, the SIU investigation is underway, but it is not likely to be concluded for months. 

Members of the Yatim family met privately with Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair in his office shortly after 2:30PM and when they emerged just after 3PM, the family asked the crowd to leave and requested that everyone show respect for the police and open the road.

For now the Yatims, Sammy’s friends, and other concerned Canadians will have to wait to see if the changes they want will happen.


Follow Angela on Twitter: @angelamaries

More on the Sammy Yatim killing:

There Have Been Some Troubling Responses to Sammy Yatim's Death

Hundreds of People Protested the Killing of Sammy Yatim

Why Did the Toronto Police Kill Sammy Yatim?

Remember all of the BBQs and day drinking you've been doing all summer? Well, it's all about to come crashing down on you like a truckload of packing snow dumped off of a condominium tower. While you try and squeeze out the last drops of sweet, sweet summer, we thought we'd round-up some of the more interesting shit we've learned on the ol' internet about summer livin'. Enjoy.

A presumably wasted Cedar Waxwing. via WikiCommons.

Cedar Waxwing Birds Are Serious Alcoholics

It’s normal to feel a tinge of shame when you realized you got blackout drunk on a weekend cottage getaway. But don’t beat yourself up over it, turns out getting wasted in the summer is completely natural; just ask a North American cedar waxwing bird.

TIL Berry eating birds get wasted by eating overripe fruit in the summer

In the heat of the summer, berries can get overripe, causing them to gain enough alcohol content to get a bird drunk. The squishy fruit is appealing to songbirds of North America like the cedar waxwing. While getting really drunk for a human typically means dealing with a bad hangover and several drunken texts to your co-workers and ex-one-night-stands, getting wasted for a bird means there’s a much higher risk of death. Drunk and disoriented birds that may fall out of trees are easy pickings for hungry street cats. But even if they do escape their natural predator, intoxicated birds have a higher risk of flying into obstructions, seriously injuring themselves. In birds, just like in humans, the naïve teens are the most likely to overindulge.

Putting weed and ice cream together is fucking genius. via Flickr.

Some Ice Cream Trucks Sell Drugs

What could be better than finding an ice cream truck on a hot summer day? How about an ice cream truck that also sold you weed! Yes! Ice cream treats and drugs, could there be a more perfect match? In Glasgow, Scotland, that actually happened, but it didn't work out too well:

TIL that rival ice cream truck drivers in Glasgow in the 80s sold drugs from their trucks, shot at each other, and committed arson in the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars.

Rival drug dealers peddled product around town using their ice cream sales as decoys. Eventually, a serious territorial dispute led to inter-gang violence. On April 16th 1984, six members of the Doyle family (including three children) were burned alive in their East-end home as reminder not to fuck with ice cream drug dealers. The deaths caused uproar in Glasgow and resulted in a 20-year court case in which Thomas "T C" Campbell and Joe Steele, were tried for the murders, convicted unanimously and sentenced to life in prison.

A photo from a series of every 7-11 in Winnipeg... Yeah, we know. via Flickr.

Winnipeg Is Still the Slurpee Capital of the World

If ice cream isn’t your thing and you happen to be near Winnipeg, maybe opt for a Slurpee instead, you may get to have your photo taken with the elusive Slurpee Capital Trophy Cup.

TIL More Slurpee's have been sold in Winnipeg, Manitoba than anywhere else in the world for 14 years running.

Winnipeg might not be winning hockey games, but they’re leagues ahead of the competition when it comes to Slurpee consumption. Last month 7-Eleven announced that Manitoba’s capital would hold the title of Slurpee Capital of the World for the 14th year running. And this year they received the first-ever Slurpee Capital Trophy Cup. People could stop by their local 7-eleven to have their photo taken with the cup alongside mascot Mr. Slurpee.

Tim Donegan, vice president for 7-Eleven Canada, said Winnipeg has come out on top despite some stiff competition. Calgary and Detroit not too far behind and could snag the title in future years. But not to fear, Donegan says he has, “faith in Manitobans and their passion for all things Slurpee. It’s a title they’re extremely proud of and it really shows how Slurpee is truly a part of our culture—it’ll take a lot to beat that.”

So, congratulations Winnipeg…I guess.

Wipe 'em out! via Flickr.

It'd Be No Big Deal if All the Mosquitos Died

Summer is a time for exploring the great outdoors. Unfortunately it’s also the time for bloody-thirsty, fun-ruining mosquitos. So what do you do when your cottage weekend has turned into a mosquito convention? Kill them! Kill them all! And don’t let your PETA loving vegan friend make you feel bad about it either:

TIL Many scientists have suggested that the complete eradication of mosquitoes would not have serious ecological consequences.

A few weeks ago, the science journal Nature published an article that claimed the eradication of mosquitoes isn’t just possible without mucking up the delicate ecosystem—it’s also in the best interest of humanity. Best news ever, right?

The article noted that Malaria (a disease commonly spread by mosquitoes) infects around 247 million people every year, and kills nearly 1 million. By squashing mosquitoes we are actually decreasing the spread of many dangerous diseases including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and West Nile virus. Not to mention we’d be rid of the annoying and itchy mosquito bite forever!

While it’s true that fish, reptile, birds, and bats feed on mosquitoes, evidence suggest there are many other insects that could supplement their diets. So the next time you see a group of mosquitoes, don’t go easy on the OFF! Murder them all instead.

Follow Monica on Twitter: @MonBlaylock

Previously on Today I Learned on TIL:

Viagra Will Give a Flower a Boner

Goddamnit Pam, stop smiling. This is serious. via WikiCommons.

"Bend the rules, you will be punished; break the law you will be charged; abuse the public trust, you will go to prison." Who said that? None other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2005.

But today’s another day, and another Canadian senator has been caught misspending taxpayer dollars. Luckily for her, she still has her job.

In May, Senators Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb were all found to be blowing Canadian taxpayer dollars on things that aren’t supposed to be expenses—and now Pamela Wallin’s name has been added to the list of senators being investigated by the RCMP. Since officially joining the Senate on New Years day 2009, she claimed $532,508 in travel expenses and is now being asked to repay $121,348 with another $20,978 that is still being investigated.

As I told you earlier this summer, the Canadian Senate is a pure waste of money.

The report released Monday points out 94 times when Wallin stopped over at her condo in Toronto for one or more nights in between Senate business in Saskatchewan—the province she represents but doesn’t actually live in—and Ottawa over a 46 month period. While sometimes the Harper-appointed senator actually did need to go to TO, she spent more of her time there than in Ottawa or Saskatchewan where she was supposed to be working.

Part of the way through the audit, Wallin tried to go back and make 400 changes to her electronic calendar about what she did over that time until she got caught. In a statement made yesterday she said she didn’t mean to mislead the investigation and that another Senator David Tkachuk—the Conservative who spearheaded making Senate expenses public in 2010—told her to only leave in ”information relevant to the actual expenses being claimed.” It’s all a big misunderstanding, according to Wallin who said the extra expenses were all either mistakes or built on the basis of “apparently some arbitrary and undefined sense of what constitutes ‘Senate business’ or ‘common Senate practice.’"

In reality, the expenses were for personal business such as flights for her work on corporate boards and as chancellor at the University of Guelph or for “partisan related activity, such as fundraising.” Her lawyer defended by claiming filing expenses for fundraising “was generally accepted practice” among all senators and that none of the expenses were of “any financial advantage to the senator.”   

So, let’s get this straight. It is common practice for senators to use Canadian taxpayer dollars for fundraising for their own party?

According to her lawyer, the fundraising wasn’t during election time, but what if it was and it was charged to the Senate instead of the party? That money could lead to disqualifications during elections and apparently everyone is doing it? Yikes.

What’s more, this misuse of the $92.5 million annually we spend to keep the Senate going is flat out cheating. A party like the NDP who has no seats in the Senate gets completely left without Senate money to help them fundraise. It’s no wonder why they want to abolish it.

At least unlike Mike Duffy who had the Prime Minister’s chief of staff cut him a $90,000 cheque to pay back his expense “mistakes,” Wallin has already begun paying the money back.

Obviously Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his party have thrown Wallin under the bus for this and essentially kicked her out of the Conservative caucus in May. But, the government is not calling for jail time. They just want her to return the money plus interest. If the RCMP lets her off the hook, or if she is given a sentence of less than two years, Wallin will have her job until 2028 when she turns 75.

The Harper government is getting absolutely reamed for all these Senate scandals and it could very well lead to their defeat in 2015. The funny part is that the only reason we know about any of these scandals is because the Senate sought out more transparency on his watch. They’ve also tried to fix it by making 11 new rules to make expense claims more clear, as opposed to the “honour system” that it used to be, but it’s too little too late.

Case in point: Former Cabinet Minister Bev Oda who resigned on July 3 admitted she spent taxpayer dollars on a $1000 limo, an expensive stay at a Five Star luxury hotel in London, and a $16 glass of orange juice.  We're not sure what we're outraged by more: the fact that she carelessly spent taxpayer money on spoiling herself, or the fact that somewhere in London they're charging 16 bucks for O.J. 

The Harper from eight years ago would be SMH-ing at 2013’s Harper for not throwing these politicians in jail while everyone under his watch seems to be sipping on baller citrus beverages and enjoying extraneous vacations.

Joel wants you to follow him, unless you're a spend-heavy senator: @JoelBalsam

Previously:

The Canadian Senate is a Waste of Money

Lambstock is a large, semilegendary, lamb-centric event held annually somewhere in Virginia. I say "somewhere" because, even after attending last weekend, I’m still not sure where it is, exactly. It’s held at Craig Rogers’ Border Springs Farm, which is near the North Carolina border, and near the Virginia border, and near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and that’s about as specific as I can get. Even Rogers himself seems to be unsure; his directions to the place are deliberately vague, and Google Earth shows only a featureless expanse where it is supposed to be. It looks something like the Tibetan Plateau, which, incidentally, would be an ideal place to hold Lambstock. I’ve heard the event called the Burning Man of lamb cookery, and I think that’s about right.

There is not much to do at Lambstock besides eat lamb, and drink, and talk, and eat more lamb. Nearly everyone there is either a chef or a chef's girlfriend, so I guess that creates another option—boning in small tents set up in the middle of a sheep meadow. I didn't have a girlfriend with me in mine, or even a temp, so I spent as little time as possible in there. (A good thing, too—I woke up the morning of the second day covered with spiders, immense Lovecraftian monsters of the sort usually seen only by schizophrenics.)

I won't get into Lambstock’s Official Beverage, except to say that it came in jars. There was also a lot of bourbon. I believe that I drank no less than seven brands over the course of 48 hours, descending in prestige over the timeline: We started with Elmer T. Lee and ended with Old Grand-Dad. The reason for being there, though, was the presence of multiple lamb carcasses, both whole and in parts, which were cooked by an ad hoc collective of Lardcore chefs. Tony Acinapura of Brasserie Beck in Washington made lamb gyros with mouthsome, crusty meatballs, each the size of a lady's fist, laid onto hot grilled pitas, lathered with fresh tzatziki, marinated feta, and a mushroom caponata of no small power, festooned with big rough leaves of the fresh mint that grows underfoot at the farm. Chef David Guas of Bayou Bakery in Washington made a fearsome pot of lamb sausage gravy, big enough to feed a battalion. Dallas McGarity of Marketplace in Louisville made lamb scrapple, which appeared at breakfast alongside the even more delicious piquant plump lamb sausages, which Rogers sells at his retail stores in Philadelphia and Washington. There was pulled mutton and posole and lamb jerky and lamb pastrami and fried lamb testicles (dba  “rocky mountain oysters”), the last of which were served at 2 AM to an appreciative public.

In fact, there were so many great lamb dishes making random cameos that even I didn't eat them all. You put 20 or 30 drunk chefs together, set out smokers and grills and fire pits, and give them all the lamb of whatever cut they want—what do you think is going to happen? At one point after eating my lamb gyro, I looked down at the cutting board and found little twined cylinders that resembled small round hams. They were warm to the touch, unaccompanied by parent or guardian, and soon revealed themselves to be “lambchettas”: diabolically clever constructions of lamb loin wrapped with crusty, soft, salty lamb belly. I was flabbergasted, and not just because I was drunk. These were two different pieces, both of which present nearly insoluble problems to even professionals: the belly is tough and greasy, and the loin perilously easy to overcook (it dries up if you look at it wrong). Some anonymous genius, who turned out to be a young cook and Zach Galifinakis lookalike named Frank Paris, had cooked it and left it there for anyone passing by to find and eat. That someone was me; and I still find myself thinking about it.

The climax of Lambstock is the appearance, on Sunday night, of a whole roasted lamb, borne ceremonially to the main pavilion, and introduced by Rogers. This was hardly the first time anybody saw the thing. The animal had been roasting only a few feet away, impaled on a cruel spike, cooking slowly and juicily over a bed of hot coals, for the previous ten hours. Still, it came at a riotous point in the evening. Lambstock has a stage for live music, and the tender alt-folk sound of the Breedlings had given way to a raucous cover band that, if memory serves, had just finished an earth-shaking version of Pink Floyd's “Time” when the dead guest of honor appeared. There was applause and yelling, and the raising of splooshing mason jars high in the air. (The lambs that weren’t on spits were penned up on a distant hill, where they couldn’t see the delicious end their brother had met.) The roast lamb—or mutton, technically, since it was a year old and the size of Emmanuel Lewis—was the best I have ever had. Brian Littell, a rangy man in a tie-dye Lambstock shirt, cut thin slices from the leg, and each trapezoidal cut from this toughest and leanest of lamb parts was as supple and soft as coppa.

Rogers is philosophical about the event he has created. “I will never go public,” he says. “I am determined to lose money every year.” Lambstock is something of a giveback to his chefs, who buy what is certainly the best lamb in the US even though it is expensive, and not as readily available as Colorado lamb, which is almost as good and a lot easier to get. It seems to have no public relations value, since I was, as far as I can tell, the only writer present, and was sworn to secrecy on 17 different subjects.

Another thing I like a lot about Lambstock is that many of the people there have nothing to do with food, and I learned things I wouldn’t have at a typical “foodie” event. A forceful man told me about the breeding of unregistered working border collies, some of whom have a baleful stare, which he called “a wolf eye,” that can discomfit sheep at 300 yards, and which require breeding with “a soft-eye bitch.” I learned about Tennessee Walking Horses and their singularly easy, syncopated gait, and that the pork farmer Adam Music, who looks like a country music star, actually is a country music star—or at least was on his way to being one before taking over his family's hog farm. I found out that a lot of young chefs from the southland are seriously into DOOM. There were other things I learned, too, but I forgot them, lost as I was in a haze of liquor, lamb fat, and Klonopin, along with whatever neurotoxins the insects that crawled over me as I slept injected.

I came on Saturday afternoon, and by Monday morning was a spent force. There is only so much lamb a person can eat, I reasoned, and freon, nobles of the noble gases, beckoned me. Still, I wondered what I was missing out on. My liver was still working, after all, and there were half a dozen species of parasites still not living in my underwear.  But no, I had to leave. Lambstock lasted one more night, and I’m told the closing dinner consisted of a dozen whole lamb heads. They were spooning up eyeballs, apparently. I feel bad at having missed it, but there will be another Lambstock next year, and I will come ready.

Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award-winning food writer. Check back tomorrow for a new episode of Munchies all about Josh.

Jack Handey—who is indeed a real person, despite common misconception—is best known for his series of hilarious faux aphorisms, Deep Thoughts. Handey is also the writer of many of SNL’s best sketches from the 80s and 90s, such as “Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car,” “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” and “Happy Fun Ball.” For the past decade, he has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section. This summer he released his first novel, The Stench of Honolulu, which begins: “When my friend Don suggested we go on a trip to the South Seas together, and offered to pay for the whole thing, I thought, Fine, but what's in it for me?”

Lincoln Michel talked to him for VICE about writing, funny grammar, and proper cowboy dance moves.  

VICE: I'm curious about the writing process for your novel, The Stench of Honolulu. Did you write most of the jokes separately, like for Deep Thoughts, and then add them to a narrative? Or did you write the jokes as you wrote the story?

Jack Handey: Some jokes were preexisting, but most were written as the story developed.

In the early 2000s, SNL ran excerpts from a fake novel of yours called My Big Thick Novel. If I'm not mistaken, one or two of those bits ended up in The Stench of Honolulu. For example, the one with a woman named Lanani (in the novel it's Leilani) who gets annoyed about being a "personal blowdart counter." Did the idea for writing an actual novel originate in the My Big Thick Novel spots?

Yes, I stole that joke from My Big Thick Novel. I think the novel did have a lot of its origins in My Big Thick Novel. I like a jungle setting, because just about anything can happen there, real or supernatural. It adds to the possibility of jokes you can use.

What is your favorite SNL sketch that you wrote? What is your favorite SNL sketch that you didn't write?

Good question. That I did write, probably a toss-up between "Anne Boleyn" and "Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car."

One I wished I'd written was an episode of "Tonto, Tarzan and Frankenstein," a sketch I created with writer Jim Downey. We flash back in time to Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein singing "California Dreamin'" in their stilted, monosyllabic style, as hippies. Then we cut to modern day, where they say, "Tonto, Tarzan, Frankenstein take many drug in 60s. We lucky. Not affect us. But maybe you not so lucky."

But there was another sketch that week that was similar, so I didn't submit it.

Another sketch I actually wrote up but never submitted was Robert Mitchum as a very frightened submarine commander—sort of a parody of the Mitchum film The Enemy Below. Mitchum, by the way, was the coolest host I ever met on the show—that sort of languid, 1940s cool. Him playing scared would have been funny.

A lot of your greatest SNL sketches, such as "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" and "Happy Fun Ball," featured the late, great Phil Hartman. What was he like to collaborate with?

Phil was the best, a total pro. I wrote a lot for him because he could play so many things so very well. I could make major changes in a sketch between Dress and Air, and go to Phil sitting there in the makeup room, and quickly tell him the changes, and he would calmly absorb them.

What are the core elements a successful "funny cowboy dance"?

You can't force it. When you're doing the dance, if you suddenly feel like flinging your hand out, do it. Don't think about it. Or if you feel like pretending you're chewing tobacco and spitting, as you dance, do that. Don't be too rigid, is what I'm trying to say.

Like the cowboy dance, the so-called friend, Don, is an element that has recurred in your writing for many years. There are Deep Thoughts about Don (“My friend Don is such a loser. But if he was here right now, he'd say I was the loser. No, Don, you're the loser. But if he was here, he'd say I was the loser. No way Don, you're the loser.”) and he appears in several of your New Yorker pieces. Now he is a central character in your novel. How did Don come about?

It's funnier if a jerk like the Deep Thoughts character is mean to a nice guy rather than another jerk. I guess that's where Don came from. He's a punching bag.

For a lot of humor writers of my generation, Army Man, which published some of your first Deep Thoughts, is a huge inspiration. Can you tell us how you got involved with Army Man and George Meyer?

George and I were officemates on a show called The New Show, a sketch show from 1984. George produced Army Man between the time he left SNL and when he joined The Simpsons. George is an amazing comedy writer. He can come up with a joke that no one else could ever come up with. For instance, I wrote a sketch called "Salmon," where spawning salmon are talking to each other, and one mentions how hard it was to get over a certain waterfall. George came up with the response, "Tell me about it! Boy! I think the key is you can't be afraid to look stupid."

A lot of your humor, in my reading at least, is bound up in the syntax and grammar. Here's an example from one of your Fuzzy Memories: "The first time I ever tried to milk a cow at Grandpa's farm, I didn't even know which end of the cow to milk! Then I guess I got even dumber, because the next time I couldn't even find the barn. Then the last time, I just went out in the woods and lived, with no clothes."

This is a hilarious premise to begin with, but the inclusion of the exclamation point in the first sentence and the dangling "with no clothes" clause in the second really seal it for me. I realize I'm dipping into English-major-nerd territory, but how do you think grammar and syntax play into written comedy? Is it comparable to timing and intonation?

Syntax and grammar are very important, not only for joke timing, but also to get a sense of the character, that he's not too bright. When I first sold some Deep Thoughts to the National Lampoon, way back when, at first they would correct the grammar, and I'd have to tell them, no, go back to the bad version.

You've said that you love the writing of George Saunders, who also blurbed your book. What other contemporary fiction writers do you read?

I don't read much fiction, but I like Maria Semple, Wells Tower, Jacqueline Carey, Ron Carlson.

How handy is Jack Handey with a hammer? Saw? Sword?

I am probably the most unmechanical person I know. I couldn't figure out how to open a door even if it was obvious that a big rock was blocking it.

You've said you are working on a book of new Deep Thoughts. Can you give us a preview?

It's never too late to start doing what you want to do. Wait, how old are you?

                                                                                   ***

Lincoln Michel’s work appears in the Believer, Electric Literature, Tin House, NOON, and elsewhere. He is a co-editor of Gigantic, a Brooklyn-based magazine of short prose and art. He can be found online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.

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

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Beware the Lizzies

We have a prison problem in North America. Privatized jails and mandatory minimums are a disturbing trend, started by the Americans and followed by us Canadians, that are causing our incarceration rates to skyrocket—while people are being locked up for petty bullshit like weed. We all know there are certain people who just need to be kept locked up in a tiny cell, but there are also a ton of questionable imprisonments (some newsworthy, most not) that really do put the whole prison system into question.

While we do our best to focus on those who are stuck behind prison bars, there’s also the largely untold story of the prison guards themselves. We spoke to a Corrections Officer who has been in the business for 27 years, including 12 years on the riot squad. “Yes, I’ve seen some crazy stuff,” said George, who works at a maximum-security prison. “You honestly wouldn’t believe how crazy it can be in here.”

Here’s some of that crazy shit he told us about.

Illustrations by Donald Clement.
 

Guy Going Nuts For a Pill 

We have to do some routine strip searches. Every unit, every month, has to be fully searched. So if you’re an inmate for longer than a month, you know it’s coming. We basically look through everything they have: sheets, books, whatever is in the cell. Then they to bend over, spread their cheeks, and cough.

If they haven’t packed their drugs right, it’s very possible the drugs are going to fall out [of their butts].  This one time a guy was looking a little off and a little high. He coughed and something popped out a bit. I told him to cough again and then a little bullet, the size of a chocolate covered almond covered in saran wrap fell out. We both looked at it and back and forth at each other. And then he quickly grabbed it and threw it in his mouth. So I had to grab him by the neck and say, “Buddy spit it out!” but he wouldn’t, so we wrestled for a bit then it pops out of his mouth and then he grabs it and tries to stick it up his ass again. I actually couldn’t believe it. So we find it. It turns out to be one pill. He fought like a bastard for one little pill of morphine. 

Barfing Up And Drinking Each Other’s Methadone

Other guys will puke up their methadone if they can. This has been going on since Christ was a cowboy, this whole idea of checking or regurgitating your drugs.  The methods that these guys come up with are ingenious. With methadone they will puke it up, it’s absolutely disgusting. Almost a quarter of the inmates are on methadone, and there is a huge demand for it inside. Today, out of 200 inmates in my prison, 50 of them are on methadone. They will take the drink (methadone comes in liquid form) and then they will barf it up in some sort of plastic they have saved, like an empty toothpaste container and then they sell it inside. Believe it or not, this happens a lot

Bring Crazy Amounts Of Drugs Inside Using Kinder Eggs

People are getting themselves put into jail to trade drugs. It’s very lucrative. Last month I found a guy with $15,000 dollars worth of street drugs on him. Hydromorphone, marijuana, and cocaine—stuffed in little kids’ Kinder eggs using the plastic container inside. He had these things wrapped in condoms and he had shoved them up his ass. You wouldn’t even think [all of those drugs stuffed inside of plastic containers] could fit, but it did.

When the cops arrived and checked it out and said [his stash of butt drugs] was worth about $80,000 dollars in jails. Just crazy. We used to worry about drugs getting distributed through the kitchen, but these days the gangs have experts who know how to really [hide] drugs well. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy. The drug trade in jails right now is crazy and it’s basically the gangs running it. There’s more crack and marijuana being smoked in jail than you could ever imagine. Imagine your thumb was a compressed piece of tobacco, that’s worth about 100 dollars in jail.

Cocaine Overload

This guy came in a couple weeks ago and needed our help, because he’d snorted half an ounce of cocaine and he was supposed to bring it in with him. There were people on the inside waiting for it. But then he snorted it all in the two days before he came in, he was crying because now he needed our help. That happens all of the time. And now we’re in a position where we have to protect him.

He ended up going over to a protective custody unit. Half the jail is now protective custody these days because inmates are scared of who's inside. It’s wild. Maybe a third of people are in there for true heinous crimes where they need protective custody—but the rest are in there because they have totally burned the wrong people, like this guy. But the protective custody guys are the worst, they are terrible, they are the creepiest guys in there—you’re better off in the regular unit. Trust me.

A Jail Guard Got Stabbed by a Pencil

The jail staff has been getting attacked lately because we’ve lost control. The jail is being run by a bunch of social workers. They didn’t like they way it was done before because they said we were too heavy handed, well now we’re getting run over by the prisoners.

Last week a buddy of mine got stabbed in the throat by an inmate who was put in regular range, which are all maximum, and he should have been in segregation. He waited until a guard moved near him and he stabbed him in the throat with a pencil. My friend was spurting blood. The inmate is schizophrenic and was shipped off to another institution.

Real Life Fight Club

Prisoners do creative things to keep themselves busy. They have what’s called “Fight Club” where they provide their own entertainment by making people fight each other and they threaten you if you don’t fight. Saying ‘no’ means you will get the shit beaten out of you. The gang guys will get the new guys. They could be anybody. I’ve taken more people than I care to imagine to the hospital. That happens all the time.

We’ve had a guy beaten so bad he died in the hospital. He was just brutally smashed in from Fight Club. We are the last people on the range to see what’s going on sometimes because we can’t be in two places at once—although our new camera system is going to help with that. But prior to this, we’d do half hour checks and while you’re checking one side, who knows what they are doing on the other side. You just can’t be everywhere.

Follow Angela on Twitter: @angelamaries

More Crazy Shit:

ER Doctors See Some Crazy Shit

Taxi Drivers See Some Crazy Shit

Our annual Photo Shows were, once again, all sorts of fun. Now they're done, and surprisingly, our wonderful VICE Canada events team isn't as brain-dead from criss-crossing the country as we figured they'd be. It's not easy to drag a bunch of beautiful photos all around the planet's second largest land mass!

Anyway, it would be hard to pick which one of these photo bangers was our favourite. Toronto went down in the middle of a record heatwave, so the whole thing was basically some kind of sexy sweat lodge fever dream with an industrial fan the size of a Hummer (go big or go home). Montreal involved rampant shotgunning and crowd-surfing, and Vancouver had one of our favourite people—Mish Way of the rockin' band White Lung—DJing for us. But let's not focus on segregating this country further, shall we? Go and flip through our favourite photos from our photo shows and hopefully you'll feel as meta about the whole thing as we do.

Seeya next year.